Fox Hunt, 1970, Alan Davie (Scottish, 1920-2014), Lithograph, Gift of Paul Feldman, 1979.12.1.
As the son of a painter and engraver, Scottish artist Alan Davie became interested in arts and culture early on in his youth. Inspired by jazz music, and the poetry of those akin to Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, Davie was a prolific printmaker, painter, and musician. In 1948, Peggy Guggenheim, an art collector and founder of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, exposed Davie to the works of American artist, Jackson Pollock. From that point on, Davie would embrace a new visual language influenced by ancient signs which he would study at various ethnographic museums as well as other modernist artists like Henri Matisse. In Fox Hunt, Davie displays his knowledge of the modern art movement in the flattened two-dimensional appearance of the signs and broad passages of primary colors.