Stuart Davis: In Full Swing

In the 1920s, Paris was the center of the art world. So many Americans lived there during the decade that one journal humorously called it the "capital of America." By 1928, Davis was one of the few artists in the inner circle of the Whitney Studio Club who had not made the pilgrimage. To support his trip to Paris that year, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney purchased several of his paintings. Davis remained in the French capital for thirteen months, depicting the city's streets with the same angled geometries he had used in his egg-beater still lifes, while softening the severity of those earlier paintings with a confectionary palette and whimsical calligraphy. The sojourn solidified his commitment to angular geometry as a vocabulary. Its most significant contribution to his development, however, was dispelling any lingering sense of inferiority he had in relation to European artists. He would later characterize his time in Paris as the most seminal event of his artistic life.

When he returned to the United States in 1929, Davis was struck by the country's modernity. Technological advances in communication and transportation such as the telephone, cinema, radio, and air travel had made it possible to experience seemingly countless events taking place around the world almost simultaneously. To capture this insight, he juxtaposed multiple views of a scene within single paintings and distilled his subjects into sequences of small triangles that visually oscillated between two and three dimensions.

Below is a selection of works from Paris, New York, and Gloucester.