Composition with Coffee Pot (Untitled - E.A.T.)

In this highly abstract, vaguely lettered composition, Davis combined a rigorous study of Cubism with an interest in typography and American advertising. The space is dominated by three irregularly shaped flat planes of color that can be read alternatively as design elements, as the letters E, A, and T, or as the components of a still life: a coffeepot in the center, a black chair at right, and curvilinear lines suggesting coffee aroma to the left. In a notebook from the period the artist wrote, “The abstract relations of spaces come first, and local phenomena are added afterward to give the character if required.”