Red Witch 1966

Gene Davis created 'Red Witch,' a large acrylic painting on canvas, sometime during his career as a Washington Color School painter. Davis and his contemporaries moved away from the emotionality of abstract expressionism by focusing on flat fields of pure color. You could say that 'Red Witch' is about art’s institutional role, to be simply about itself, a painting of stripes for the sake of stripes. But it also suggests a utopian possibility in post-war America, one in which the aesthetic experience of art, through vibrant and harmonious colors, could offer respite from the everyday social world. For Davis, the stripe was a radical visual device. Art historians have pointed to the ways that stripes refuse any sense of hierarchy, foreground or background, and can create a sense of limitless extension. It is only through a close look at the social history of the American art world that we can truly appreciate these artistic innovations.