Stuart Davis

Owh! in San Pao
1951

A vibrant abstract painting featuring geometric shapes and bold colors on a yellow background. The composition includes overlapping forms in red, blue, green, pink, and black, with elements of text and patterns, such as polka dots. Words and phrases like "else," "free," "word," and "now" are interspersed throughout the artwork. The artist's signature, "Stuart Davis," is in the lower right corner.

Not on view

Date
1951

Classification
Paintings

Medium
Oil on canvas

Dimensions
Overall: 52 3/16 × 42in. (132.6 × 106.7 cm)

Accession number
52.2

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase

Rights and reproductions
© Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

API
artworks/856

The quintessential painter of the modern urban scene, Stuart Davis found inspiration in billboards, signs, storefronts, and jazz rhythms. Translating developments in vanguard European art into an American vernacular, he also anticipated the pictorial concerns of Pop art, especially its appropriation of imagery from consumer culture. Owh! In San Paõ, a frenetic mix of everyday objects, words, and chromatic energy, was based on a painting of a coffee pot Davis made over twenty years earlier. In this later variation, he retained the original subject, reducing the coffee pot to a cylinder, and added the words “else,” “used to be,” and “now,” referring perhaps to the temporal gap between the two pictures.

Audio

Stuart Davis, Owh! In San Pao, 1951

In Stuart Davis: In Full Swing

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Stuart Davis, Owh! In San Pao, 1951

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Ben Sidran: When you look at something like Owh! In San Pao, first you see these incredibly bright-key colors.
Narrator: Ben Sidran is a jazz piano player and author of a two-volume oral history called Talking Jazz.
Ben Sidran: And there’s an analogue in jazz to the advanced harmonies that jazz players used, kind of like shining, shining harmonies, bright flashy harmonies. And similarly, he loved the rhythmic thrust of barrelhouse piano players. And when you look at the planar surfaces in Owh! In San Pao, you get the sense of a rhythm of a kind of almost floating or a tumbling feeling. There’s sort of a freedom in it that kind of feels like jazz feels. And you can also look for example in the use of little cryptic phrases, “else” and “now,” I like to think of that as sort of how a jazz fans in a bar would shout out to musicians, you know, like “get it!” “do it!”
Barrelhouse piano was this kind of free-swinging piano that was played in these saloons. You’d go into these rough bars and there’d be a piano player there, and sometimes, you know, Davis reported that the piano would be covered in barbed wire, so that people wouldn’t lean against it, or bother the piano player. Barrelhouse was a kind of dance music where the piano player’s left hand was like taking the place of the drum beating the rhythm, and the right hand was the melody and kind of the flashing entertainment part of it.
Stuart Davis, Owh! In San Pao, 1951

In Stuart Davis: In Full Swing (Kids)

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Stuart Davis, Owh! In San Pao, 1951

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Narrator: Davis called this painting Owh! In San Pao. The name doesn’t mean anything very specific—Davis said he just made it up. But like the painting itself, the rhyme is fun and playful—Owh! In San Pao!
Take a look at the painting next to it. Davis painted it more than twenty years earlier, and called it Percolator. A percolator is a kind of old-fashioned coffee pot. This work is pretty abstract too, but maybe you can find shapes that could hold or pour coffee.
Now take a moment to compare the two paintings. Notice anything? They’re different versions of the same subject. As Davis got older, he really liked to recycle—returning to earlier works that he liked, and seeing what new ideas he could find in them. Often, the later versions would be really abstract. But Davis liked all of his paintings to have some roots in the real world—he felt it made them more meaningful.