Stuart Davis: In Full Swing
June 10–Sept 25, 2016
Product Still Lifes,
1921–25
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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, 1924
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Stuart Davis, Lucky Strike, 1924
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Narrator: The cigarettes, pipe, matches, and newspaper in this still life all angle subtly away from the picture plane. The resulting space feels very shallow—almost flat, but with just enough sense of depth to create a sense of visual energy. Davis first discovered this kind of space in Cubist works on view at the 1913 Armory Show—the exhibition where most American artists first encountered European Modernism.
Davis spent much of the next decade exploring this visual vocabulary, finally making it his own in the 1920s—in part by focusing on elements of American popular culture, like Lucky Strike cigarettes. And even when he drew on some of the Cubists’ favorite subjects—like the newspaper—Davis gave them his own spin.
Mark Joshua Epstein: We know that Davis worked for a couple of years for a leftwing magazine called The Masses in the early 1910s, and that he was responsible for doing illustrations.
Narrator: Mark Joshua Epstein is a painter and an Educator at the Whitney.
Mark Joshua Epstein: And we also hear that he bristled against having people write captions for his illustrations. So in this painting what’s hilarious to me is that he’s taken on the role of both the illustrator and the caption writer, but the captions have become these abstract brush strokes.