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This book examines Davis's life and art in the context of their colorful, disturbed times. Thirty-six color plates mark his development from social realist to cosmopolitan Parisian expatriate and sophisticated distiller of the American spirit. In the 1920s and 1930s Davis welded the discoveries of the avant-garde school of Paris to the slangy realism of the Yankee Ashcan painters. The resulting style (which he called---with tongue in cheek---?Colonial Cubism?) embodied the rhythm, sass, and ebullience of that most original art form, jazz. Davis made the sound of jazz visible in compositions of hard staccato lines and crisp colors.