Artwork: Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Visa, 1951. Oil on canvas, 40 × 52 in. (101.6 × 132.1 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of Mrs. Gertrud A. Mellon, 1953.
“I paint what I see in America, in other words I paint the American scene,” revealed Stuart Davis (1892–1964). An early American modernist painter, Davis was best known for his Proto-pop paintings of the mid-twentieth century that were infused with the spirit of jazz and its vibrant energies. As a child of the Progressive Era, Davis came of age during a period when social activism and political reform were integral to one’s identity as an American. With a deep seeded faith in the fundamental “greatness” of the nation, Progressives dedicated themselves to revitalizing the country in the wake of the corruption that fed the Gilded Age.
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Davis embraced this position, observing, ““[Modern art] is a reflection of the positive progressive fact of modern industrial technology.” Throughout his career, he maintained the belief that his work had the power to influence the sociopolitical climate of the country, and with this in mind, he maintained his commit to art as a form of activism. He began to develop a style that combined the European trend toward abstraction with American influences like product packaging and advertisements, infusing a proto-Pop energy into his work. The result was unlike anything the world had seen before, a visual phenomenon that thundered and crackled like a lightening storm.
Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Report from Rockport, 1940. Oil on canvas, 24 × 30 in. (61 × 76.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Edith and Milton Lowenthal Collection, bequest of Edith Abrahamson Lowenthal, 1991.
Now the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, pays homage to the twentieth-century master with Stuart Davis: In Full Swing, now on view through September 25, 2016. The exhibition is co-organized by Barbara Haskell, Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Harry Cooper, Curator and Head of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, with Sarah Humphreville, Curatorial Assistant, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
The exhibition features 100 artworks spanning the breadth of his career, highlighting Davis’s ability to transform the chaos of modern life into a dynamic symphony of color and form in paint. The exhibition focuses on Davis’s mature work, from from his paintings of tobacco packages of the early 1920s, the abstract Egg Beater series, and the WPA murals of the 1930s, to the majestic works of his last two decades and the work left on his easel at his death in 1964.
Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Place Pasdeloup, 1928. Oil on canvas, 36 3/8 × 29 in. (92.4 × 73.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney 31.170.
Barbara Haskell, Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, observes, “Stuart Davis has been called one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century and the best American artist of his generation, his art hailed as a precursor of the rival styles of pop and geometric color abstraction. Faced with the choice early in his career between realism and pure abstraction, he invented a vocabulary that harnessed the grammar of abstraction to the speed and simultaneity of modern America….In the process, Davis achieved a rare synthesis: an art that is resolutely abstract yet at the same time exudes the spirit of popular culture.”
Stuart Davis (1892–1964), The Paris Bit, 1959. Oil on canvas, 46 1/8 × 60 1/16 in. (117.2 × 152.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art 59.38.
Reflecting on his legacy, we can consider the ways in which Davis was a pivotal figure in American art, casting off the ideology of Europe, which had reached its breaking point. Davis understood that necessity is the mother of invention, and that the United States needed to develop an art form that was entirely its own, as revealed in his words, “I don’t want people to copy Matisse or Picasso, although it is entirely proper to admit their influence. I don’t make paintings like theirs. I make paintings like mine.”
Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Owh! in San Pao, 1951. Oil on canvas, 52 3/16 × 42 in. (132.6 × 106.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase 52.2.
The exhibition will tour as follows:
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.: November 20, 2016–March 5, 2017
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young, Legion of Honor: April 8, 2017–August 6, 2017
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR: September 16, 2017–January 8, 2017
All artwork: © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
