'The Haunting Talent of Noah Davis' by Zachary Fine
2026
Noah Davis died when he was thirty-two. It’s a strange, in-between age in the history of painting. Basquiat and Schiele left us in their twenties; Kahlo made it to forty-seven; O’Keeffe to ninety-eight. I didn’t think much of the difference until I saw the survey of Davis’s work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where all his best paintings seem to sit somewhere in the middle of life and in the middle of everything. The work is light and dark, solid and liquid, empty and busy, earnest and tongue in cheek. At times, Davis is a masterly nocturne painter, in the vein of Whistler and Henry Ossawa Tanner; at others, his world is medicinally clear and well lit, like that of a Thomas Eakins. Don’t be surprised if you leave the show feeling both healed and brokenhearted. Read more.
