In February 1918 Stuart Davis was invited to participate in the Exhibition of Indigenous Painting at Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s Whitney Studio Club at 8 West Eighth Street in New York. The participating artists were asked to draw lots for canvases, and then to spend three days painting them on-site. Davis’s contribution to the event was Multiple Views, an unusual composite of paintings and sketches that he had made while working in the historic fishing town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and that he apparently managed to recall or consult while working on the painting. The images include a car at a gas pump, a garage, a churchyard, and bits of seascape, all anchored by two women in green, one standing and one seated, looking into the distance.

In 1953 Davis recalled that Multiple Views was “made out of things I had been painting recently and had in my mind. . . . I had done that kind of composition before that time . . . composing things that you don’t usually see at one time. I have drawings done in that manner.” Combining vignettes to create a single image was a common practice in cartooning, and Davis had employed it in ink drawings the previous year. It is also possible that Davis used Multiple Views to explore cubist ideas about simultaneity, discontinuous space, and shifting viewpoints, while retaining naturalistic imagery. However problematic and complex, Multiple Views is an important early work whose insistent two-dimensionality and prominent use of words and signage (in the garage at right) make it a harbinger of Davis’s mature work.