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Born in Washington, D.C., Gene Davis (1920–1985) was an American Abstract painter, known for his multicoloured vertical stripes. Davis was a major contributor in the Color Field and Post-Painterly Abstraction movements, and a prominent figure of the Washington Color School.

Davis worked as a sportswriter, reporter, poet, and novelist before he started his artistic career. He was the White House correspondent for Transradio Press from 1945 to 1949, before becoming the editor for American Automobile Association a year later.

Influenced by the works of Paul Klee and Abstract Expressionism, Davis began to paint in 1949. His first solo exhibition of drawings was at the Dupont Theater Gallery in 1952, and his first exhibition of paintings was at Catholic University in 1953.

In the 1960s, Davis participated in notable exhibitions, such as “Washington Color Painters” at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art that toured across the United States, including the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN. He was also included in “Two Decades of American Painting” organized by The Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY, and “Colorists: 1950-1965” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, CA.

Davis taught at The Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in 1966, where he became a permanent member of the faculty. In 1972, Davis created Franklin's Footpath, where he painted colourful stripes on the street in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Franklin's Footpath was the largest artwork at the time. He also painted the largest painting, Niagara (43,680 square feet), in a parking lot in Lewiston, NY. For a public work, Davis designed the colour patterns of the Solar Wall, a set of tubes filled with dyed water and backlit by fluorescent lights, at the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

His works are in the collections of major public institutions, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN, The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, NY, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.