Jean Davidson  was born in New York  and spend almost her entire live living in New York City which has ramifications for her art, which is jaunty and confident in its sparseness. In her early years she was experimenting with form and color. Her career began as a colorist using objects from life, marking shifts in time.  

Later her "Orbiting Forms" series explores the movement of time as large canvasses graded off into squares. Progressively  color became paler and in late 1970s she arrived at the "White Series". From representational to abstraction, from vivid color to virtually no color at all. This is the course taken in her career of some 50 years.

Within her self-imposed limits Jean Davidson finds a wealth of variety. One of her major heroes and influence was the Suprematist Kazimir Malevich, whose white square on a white background painted in 1918, was envisioned as the painting to end all abstract painting.  
 

She was dreaming to see "white on white" works by Kazimir Malevich and as gratitude for her uneasy but persistent  efforts , her dream came through.  In the August of 2000 she went to Saint Petersburg's  State  Russian Museum for her solo exhibition, that was arranged by Gregory Gallery, where she exhibited her works. The State Russian Museum curators were very receptive to the American artist wishes and took her to the Museum repository and showed her the famous paintings by K. Malevich and other suprematists . 

During the few last years of her life she always was talking about her trip, how important it was for her to make this trip, show her paintings and see all this masterpieces. 

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Selected Collections

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Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC           

Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WI.

Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC

Pace University Collection, New York, NY

Historical Society of Woodstock, Woodstock, NY

Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN

           

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Selected Works