Stuart Davis: In Full Swing
June 10–Sept 25, 2016
The 1940s
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Davis's political activism ended abruptly on April 4, 1940, when the American Artists' Congress, the organization he had presided over since 1937, voted to support the Soviet Union's invasion of Finland four months earlier. To Davis, the vote signaled that the congress had been overtaken by Stalinist sympathizers, and he resigned. Returning to making art full-time, he created canvases such as those on the left side of this gallery whose densely packed, brightly colored shapes of equal size and intensity distributed evenly across the surface kept the viewer's eye in constant motion. "Instead of a center focus...all parts of the field of observation are centers of focus, serial centers," Davis explained. The format was radical: not until Jackson Pollock created his first drip painting in 1947 would another American painter jettison Cubism's centralized format in favor of nonhierarchical, all-over paintings.
In 1939, Davis began the practice of creating groups or “families” of related paintings, often based on the compositions of his own much earlier works. His intention was not to create duplicates of previous paintings or to replicate their moods, but rather to use their configurations as springboards for new aesthetic ideas and interests. Previously, he had used his sketches as sources for paintings, often executed years later. Now, he began to do the same with works in oil, frequently creating multiple paintings based on the same configuration. He likened this recycling of motifs to jazz improvisations, explaining, “It’s the same thing as when a musician takes a sequence of notes and makes many variations on them.”
Below is a selection of works from The 1940s.
The Mellow Pad, 1945–51
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Stuart Davis, The Mellow Pad, 1945-51
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Narrator: Stuart Davis worked on The Mellow Pad for six years.
Stuart Davis: I was learning things and doing things that I hadn’t done before. I don’t like to use the word “trouble,” but if you want to be factual, I did have trouble with it. But the main point about it is that I kept at it until all the trouble had disappeared.
Sarah Humphreville: He’s treating each individual shape as an individual. You don't see as many repeated colors weaving in and out. Everything is just right on the surface and humming.
Narrator: Sarah Humphreville is a Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney.
Sarah Humphreville: He had this idea of serial centers, that there wouldn't be one center focus as in a typical painting but instead these serials of centers. So when you're looking at it, your eye really has that vibrating—it's almost chaotic to look at. You don't really know where to pause or how to understand it.
And this is a radical breakthrough in not just American art but in painting as a whole, it's really not until 1947 when Pollock was doing his drip paintings that you get this kind of bam in your face. This is everything all at once.