The Dawning

Painted in the years immediately following the 1913 Armory Show, The Dawning marks Davies's turn away from his earlier lyrical, figurative style toward a Cubist-influenced idiom of geometric, decorative forms. Beginning in 1914, Davies adapted this new aesthetic to large-scale canvases like this one, where the essentially decorative character of his version of modernism becomes apparent. Rendered on a monumental, nearly square canvas that suggests a mural or fresco, the work fuses his earlier dreamlike, allegorical sensibility with a newfound structural, fragmented geometry absorbed from European modernism. A contemporary writer in 1917 observed that Davies had allied his new grasp of art's geometric side with the older, visionary knowledge of his imaginative mind, calling the resulting composition a disturbing and compelling "fresco" that grew more compelling with repeated viewing and argued it belonged in a public museum. Collector Lillie P. Bliss evidently agreed, and her bequest brought the painting to the Brooklyn Museum, where it remains today (though currently not on view)