Red Baron,

1972

Gene Davis, a painter based in Washington, DC, achieved national prominence through his pioneering use of an overall stripe format inspired by the work of Barnett Newman, Jasper Johns, and Paul Klee. The year 1972 marked a shift in Davis’s oeuvre as he moved from single-color stained backgrounds to the use of unprimed canvas, from free floating stripes to edge-banded stripes. Although Davis is called a color field painter, his primary interest was in spatial intervals. The number of stripes ranged from eighteen in one work to eight hundred in another. As seen in Red Baron, Davis began with a matrix of vertical pencil lines, creating spaces to be filled, or not, at his discretion. For Davis, color served to complete and unify the composition.