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But what turned Davis into a complete original was his perception of and enthusiasm for the city. Nothing in French art, other than Leger, resembled Davis' syncopated images of urban life. The blaring posterish color— yellows, scarlets, blacks, emerald greens, a high obtrusive fuchsia — and the writhing knots of line, the words blinking like neon signs, the beat and pulsation of the space: this was visual jazz, American-style, and in deed some of Davis' titles, like The Mellow Pad, 1945-51, were couched in the musicians' argot of the day.
He cleaved, in Baudelaire's phrase, to "the heroism of modern life"; even nature, as in Arboretum by Flashbulb, 1942, acquired a sharp inorganic speediness under Davis' city eye. Toughness, aggression, careful construction were as characteristic of his art as of the New York it celebrated. The aims of constructivism — an ideal system, beyond dialectics — meant little to him. Reality, for Davis, was dialectic and it expressed itself in strain. His paintings are all about unstable energy, and in this too he was a most "American" artist. No matter how firmly Davis insisted on their abstract basis, all his images feed back into the world: he never seems to have doubted his subject or lost touch with it, so that his best works are triumphs of candor. — Robert Hughes