Davis Cone

Davis Cone was born on November 2, 1950, in Augusta, Georgia. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, in 1972, followed by a year of postgraduate study in photography and design at the University of Georgia in 1972 to 1973. That grounding in photography shaped the working method he became known for: painting from his own photographs of movie palaces and theater marquees, rendered in a tightly controlled Photorealist style.

Cone's first solo exhibitions were held at O.K. Harris Works of Art in New York from 1979 to 1998, the gallery long associated with the founding generation of American Photorealists. He then showed for over a decade with Forum Gallery in New York and Los Angeles, from 1998 to 2014, including a 2013 exhibition, Davis Cone: Recent Works, that gathered everything he had completed since his previous New York show in 2005. His paintings of theaters such as the Radio City and other Art Deco landmarks have been the subject of two dedicated monographs, Popcorn Palaces: The Art Deco Movie Theatre Paintings of Davis Cone and Hollywood on Main Street. As of 2026 he continues to exhibit actively, including recent and upcoming shows at Forum Gallery; his own biography lists Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, as representing him since 2014. Available biographical sources place him living and working between Los Angeles and Miami; no obituary, gallery statement, or press notice indicates that he has died.

Cone is consistently described by his galleries as one of the masters of twentieth-century Photorealism, and his inclusion in the movement's major surveys supports that framing. His work appeared in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Autoscape: The Automobile in the American Landscape in 1984, and in later Photorealism retrospectives including The Shock of the Real: Photorealism Revisited at the Boca Raton Museum of Art (2008 to 2009), From Lens to Eye to Hand: Photorealism 1969 to Today at the Flint Institute of Arts and the Parrish Art Museum (2017 to 2018), and Beyond the Lens at the Asheville Art Museum (2023 to 2024). The available dossier did not surface a verbatim, attributable critical quotation that could be reproduced exactly, so none is included here. No formal prizes, fellowships, or named awards for Cone were confirmed in available sources; his recognition rests instead on sustained museum and survey-exhibition inclusion rather than on prize history.

Cone's market is small and specialized, consistent with an artist who has worked in a narrow subject and shown primarily through two New York galleries rather than broad auction distribution. The highest price reported for a work by Cone is USD 206,250 for Radio City, sold at Sotheby's New York on November 12, 2015; this figure and date come from a single located auction-database source and have not been independently cross-verified against a second database, so it should be treated as a reported record rather than a fully corroborated one. Auction-tracking services list roughly two dozen works by Cone that have come to market, indicating a thin but active secondary market rather than a deep one.

Cone's output is narrow by subject and modest in volume, so individual sale results should be read as data points from a thin market rather than as a smooth trend line, and the reported auction high above should be treated as provisional pending broader confirmation. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and verification rest on the two galleries that have represented him, Miles McEnery Gallery and Forum Gallery, along with the two published monographs devoted to his work. Because his subject matter is so specific and his gallery history so long and consistent, continuity of representation is itself one of the more useful signals available to a prospective buyer.