Synopsis
One of America's first modern artists and a forefather of Pop art, Stuart Davis began his artistic career with the Ashcan School before embracing European modernism following the Armory Show. The artist's abstract paintings, infused with jazz rhythm and bold, colorful abstractions of New York's urban landscape or household objects, offer a taste of European Cubism with an American twist. Whether painting in the style of realism or Post-cubist abstraction, Davis's determination to convey something of American political and consumer culture was unwavering.
Key Ideas
Most Important Art
Chinatown (1912)
Chinatown is distinctly different from much of Davis's mature work, which is known for its bright colors and abstract forms. Here, Davis offers an honest, objective view of the metropolis's seedy underbelly in the style of the Ashcan School. His expressive brushwork hints at the painting's hasty completion - something Robert Henri encouraged in his students. As an Ashcan artist, Davis was among the first American painters to express an interest in enlightening and educating viewers on the populist reality.
Lucky Strike (1921)
Davis began incorporating modern art principles into his work following the 1913 Armory Show. He described the exhibition of European abstract art as "the greatest shock to me - the greatest single influence I have experienced in my work." Still, it took several years before his work evolved into the heavily abstract, brightly colored compositions for which he is best known.
Lucky Strike is a testament to Davis's success applying European modern painting techniques to a distinctly American subject, thereby offering viewers an Americanized Cubist style. Like his contemporaries Charles Demuth and Gerald Murphy, Davis created modern masterpieces that call attention to American consumerism. In this case, Davis painted a newly mass-produced product - cigarettes - which by 1930 had replaced loose leaf tobacco and rolling papers. His use of a widely known brand as a subject for art anticipates the Pop art movement of the 1960s.
House and Street (1931)
This rendition of lower Manhattan is a far cry from the gritty urban landscapes of Davis's paintings in the Ashcan tradition. Here, Davis seems less interested in the occupants of the tenement buildings, instead embracing the modern energy and innovations. The artist was intrigued by that manner in which technological advancements altered American life. Like many of his peers, Davis also felt that artistic style and subject matter should change to reflect that. He adored the cinema. It is possible that he deliberately designed House and Street to evoke the frames in a strip of 35mm film.
This forward-looking optimism and embrace of progress typified American modernism in the works of many of Davis's contemporaries, among them Joseph Stella and Charles Demuth. While this painting is less abstract than Davis' Cubist-inspired works of the 1920s, it retains the Cubist interest in depicting multiple perspectives of the same image. House and Street also anticipates the artist's reliance on bold color and simplified shapes to articulate energy and rhythm in his mature work.
Egg Beater, No. 4 (1928)
Choosing to focus on unrelated objects enabled the artist to disengage with their utilitarian functions and focus on relationships between color, shapes, and space. "My aim," Davis wrote, "was... to strip a subject down to the real physical source of its stimulus." In No. 4, objects are completely disassembled and distilled into basic shapes and planes so that their forms become virtually unrecognizable. Overlapping planes and jolting colors call to mind the improvisation and rhythm of jazz music. Contrary to earlier paintings in the series, wherein the arrangement of shapes and planes suggests a depth of space, in this final work, space is ambiguous. Here, Davis offers a more cerebral approach to still-life painting - one that engages the intellect rather than the senses.
The artist never considered himself a pure abstractionist, and shortly after completing this series he began reincorporating signs, text, and recognizable urban landmarks into his work. Still, he insisted that the Egg Beater series represented a breakthrough in his artistic development. He later recalled that it "enabled me to realize certain structural principals [sic] that I have continued to use ever since."
Swing Landscape (1938)
Swing Landscape was initially commissioned by the WPA for display at a housing project in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. But it was ultimately rejected, likely because its jarring colors, seemingly chaotic jumble of forms, and fracturing of space into multiple perspectives were inconsistent with the more realist aesthetic expected of public art. Today the mural is celebrated as the most important American painting of the 1930s precisely because it challenged the stylistic preference of the public arts initiative. Instead of the Ashcan style that offered an unsentimental view of urban life, here Davis offers the experience of urban living. The mural brings together abstraction and realism by intermingling forms and spaces in a riotous kaleidoscope of bright, vivid color. Although it was not shown in a public space as originally intended, Swing Landscape is a quintessential example of his paintings from this period that influenced the development of both the Abstract Expressionist and Pop art movements.
Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors - 7th Avenue Style (1940)
The painting's unusual title also offers a physical location: Davis's studio on 7th Avenue in the West Village, an area known for its outstanding jazz clubs. Davis's invented term, "still-scape," is a portmanteau combining the terms still-life and landscape. Indeed, in this painting, the artist brings together forms and colors from still-lifes and landscapes of his earlier work and adds new shapes. Bright, bold lines evoke the stripes on the cement of a city street or the letters of neon signs. Round shapes suggest headlights and street signs; their vibrating colors alluding to the noisy, bustling atmosphere of New York City. Upon completing the painting, Davis commented: "It is the product of everyday experience in the new lights, speeds, and spaces of the American environment."
Here, as in Swing Landscape, Davis presents a unique post-cubist concept of pictorial space by foregoing the traditional method of organizing intersecting planes and shapes around the center of the composition and instead dispersing forms throughout the picture in a manner that denies any single identifiable focal point. Colors, though bold and strongly contrasting, are balanced so that no one color dominates. In this way, the painting becomes a loosely ordered, continuous, and decorative surface with serial centers of focus. The objective coherence of the picture means that all parts are equal, contrary to the Cubist gravitation toward the center of the picture plane. Soon many younger artists, including Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, also began tinkering with their own departures from Cubism's established spatial order.
Owh! In San Paõ (1951)
Later in life, Davis began revisiting earlier works and favorites motifs as bases for new images. This practice exemplifies the "continuity of pictorial themes and painting techniques" within the artist's oeuvre. This painting, for example, was initially inspired by Percolator, a painting of a coffee pot Davis created in 1927. The words "else," "used to be," and "now" could refer to the passage of time between the creation of the two paintings. Almost 25 years later, Owh! In San Paõ presents the coffee pot now reduced to a mere cylinder amidst other shapes painted in intense, lively colors. Davis had planned to exhibit the canvas at the Sao Paulo Biennial, but the work was rejected, which may help explain its title.