The Primary Figure Of the Color School

Gene Davis was uneven. His best stripe paintings by far are the eight- or 15-footers, the ones fueled by different colors. Not many, but enough, of these engulfing objects are now on exhibition in "Gene Davis: Interval" at the Kreeger Museum. They take a special way of seeing. You don't exactly look at them. Static though they are, you watch them like a movie -- a spacey self-directed film whose action swells and flows.

What drives them is their colors, their tall, performing colors, some of which step forward as if to take a solo, while others, less assertive, appear to retreat. These colors work in teams, joining with their neighbor stripes, or colleagues far away, to form ever-rearranging chords.

Oranges and pinks, the baby greens of spring, the heavy greens of summer, chocolate browns and midnight blues. It's like looking through a window whose tall bars, far vistas and atmospheric middle grounds all partake of one another.

In his best works, Davis (1920-1985) opens pulsing color spaces that are entirely his own. I can't say how he does it. He couldn't explain it either. It has something to do with peripheral perception. At the edges of your vision even brilliant colors dim. Each time you choose to focus on a single stripe of color, the hues to either side of it inevitably change. Davis was able to arrange the unexpected dance of unexpected colors. That was his great gift -- grays as soft as fog, yellows bold as brass, pink again, then green.

Still, every time that watchful, bald, thin-shouldered man steps into my memory he shows up in black and white.

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He was like a guy from a noir movie. Not the private eye, but the hard-boiled reporter, cold-eyed, in a trench coat, another lone outsider watching from the edge and drinking it all in.

The Kreeger's exhibition is part of ColorField.remix, a 30-venue, citywide, spring-and-summer celebration of the Washington Color School painters whose big, hard-edged abstractions put this city on the map, or so we like to think. Throughout the 1970s -- with Morris Louis dead, Kenneth Noland in Manhattan and spiritual Thomas Downing a fairly private man -- Davis was that local style's premier local star.

All the artists knew him, especially the younger ones. Many had been his students at the Corcoran School of Art. He attended all their openings, where he scrutinized their work as if looking for a trend, or dreading a competitor. The whiteness of his head above the blackness of his turtleneck made him hard to miss.

He'd never gone to art school, or to college for that matter. He'd come up through the press.

He knew the banter of the locker room, the smell of sweat and liniment. He'd interviewed washed-up fighters. Davis, as a cub reporter, had started out in sports, covering the Redskins for the old Washington Daily News.

He'd also covered cops in Florida, in the steamy heat of Jacksonville, where, he'd let you know, he sometimes packed a gat.