Stuart Davis: In Full Swing
June 10–Sept 25, 2016
Paris, New York, and Gloucester
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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.
House and Street, 1931
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Stuart Davis, House and Street, 1931
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Barbara Haskell: Stuart Davis in House and Street is presenting two simultaneous views of the same scene, the intersection between Front Street and Coenties Slip.
Mark Joshua Epstein: Stuart Davis gives us two distinct zones in this painting, but he’s really careful to put them inside these very obvious borders. We get the black border, and then outside of the black border, the red border with the blue on the left side. To me, that’s his way of saying, “This is the city. We encounter these things together all of the time. And I as an artist want to contain them all in one picture plane.” So on the left we have something that’s right in front of us, something we would walk by on the street, a fire escape that we can see right up close, and on the right side we have something else in the distance that’s a little more elusive. We don’t exactly know what’s around that curve, or what’s in that gridded building in the back.
Barbara Haskell: In this piece, Davis is presenting his idea that the experience of modernity has to do with simultaneity. And that we're bombarded by images and see multiple images all of the time. Davis returned from Paris in 1929 and was originally horrified by the enormity of New York. He said, "How can anyone make art in the face of this enormous city?" And then as he become more acclimated, he came to see that that, in fact, was the quality of modernity, that speed and simultaneity that were exactly what characterized modern urban life. He embraced that notion.
House and Street depicts an intersection in lower Manhattan. In the painting, which Davis based on a 1926 sketch, the artist juxtaposed the facade of a building on Front Street with the Third Avenue elevated-train tracks turning from Front Street onto Coenties Slip to suggest the simultaneity of perceptions that he felt characterized modern urban life. Fascinated with the graphic language of advertising, he included a reference to Alfred Smith’s 1926 reelection campaign for governor of New York along with a sign for Front Street and the logo of the Bell Telephone Company.