Color-Space Cube Diagram 1941

Curator: This small sketch on paper is Stuart Davis’s “Color-Space Cube Diagram.” It's held in the Harvard Art Museums. Editor: It feels provisional, like a note hastily jotted down—almost architectural in its bare-bones construction. Curator: Indeed. Look closely at the lines, the cube within a cube. Davis seems to be working through ideas of space and color theory. The inscription at the top reads, "Therefore its point-positions must represent not abstract..." Editor: And the rest of the note seems to suggest a radical proposition that color itself exists as a cube composed of all possible point-positions, a visual metaphor for how we perceive color. Curator: Precisely. You can see Davis grappling with the translation of abstract thought into concrete visual form. Editor: It is almost as if the sketch itself embodies Davis’s project, a framework to understand how we give form to experience. Curator: It gives us insight into the artist's process. Editor: I find it an evocative reminder that even the most abstract concepts can have profound social implications in how we perceive the world.