Stuart Davis: In Full Swing
June 10–Sept 25, 2016
Product Still Lifes,
1921–25
1
The 1920s saw an unprecedented proliferation of advertisements, mass-market products, and commercial packaging. Convinced that these elements of popular culture were expressions of modern America, Davis used them as subject matter, replacing traditional still-life props with imagery derived from consumer goods: packages of brand-name cigarette paper and loose tobacco, Odol mouthwash, and Edison Mazda electric bulbs. By exploiting the conventions of both advertising graphics and vanguard European art to depict mass-produced items associated with America, Davis created art that conveyed a distinctly national and modern experience. He likened these paintings to the exuberant poetry of Walt Whitman: "I too feel the thing Whitman felt and I too will express it in pictures America the wonderful place we live in." Davis's still lifes of consumer products were prescient; not until the 1960s would other artists so enthusiastically embrace the imagery of popular culture.
Below is a selection of works from Product Still Lifes, 1921-25.
Lucky Strike, 1921
Stuart Davis, Lucky Strike, 1921. Oil on canvas, 33 1/4 x 18 in. (84.5 x 45.7 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of the American Tobacco Company, Inc., 1951. © Estate of Stuart Davis/Licensed by VAGA, New York
At first glance, Lucky Strike looks like one of the Cubist paper collages that Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque introduced in Europe in the 1910s. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that rather than pasting pieces of paper on canvas, Davis illusionistically painted the two-dimensional design of a flattened package of loose tobacco. The widespread distribution of packaged tobacco to U.S. soldiers fighting overseas in World War I had made cigarettes a potent symbol of America, and by 1920, smoking had become pervasive. By using a vocabulary of flat geometric shapes to depict an American product, Davis created a Cubist painting that communicated a distinctly national experience.