After Strife

Davies employed loose, gestural strokes in charcoal and soft pastel, allowing pigment to smudge and blend unevenly across the textured paper. Forms are suggested rather than defined, with edges dissolving into the gray substrate. The limited palette of browns and blacks enhances the somber mood, while the rough handling conveys urgency, as if the image were sketched in a single, unbroken flow of thought.

The work emerged during Davies’s final years, a period marked by his leadership in American modernist circles and his role in organizing the 1913 Armory Show. *After Strife* was likely made in private, away from public exhibitions, reflecting a personal shift toward introspective imagery. Its survival in near-original condition indicates careful preservation, though its provenance prior to institutional acquisition remains undocumented.

In the early 1920s, Davies increasingly turned from representational subjects toward abstracted human forms, influenced by European modernism and spiritualist thought. *After Strife* aligns with contemporaneous explorations by artists like Brancusi and Modigliani, who sought emotional depth through simplified, sculptural bodies. The drawing resists clear categorization, existing between figuration and abstraction, reflecting the fluid boundaries of American modernism at the time.

Though not widely exhibited, *After Strife* exemplifies Davies’s late artistic trajectory: a retreat from public spectacle into private, tactile expression. Its rawness and intimacy contrast with his earlier, more polished works, offering insight into his evolving sensibility. The piece contributes to understanding how American modernists used drawing not as preparation, but as a complete, personal language.