Stuart Davis: In Full Swing
June 10–Sept 25, 2016
The 1950s
6
Davis's early paintings had often included words and phrases as product names and signage. In 1950, he began incorporating words into his art as independent design elements. Doing so allowed him to infuse his paintings with the bold energy and ebullience of advertising and popular culture without resorting to illusionistic realism. Sometimes the words he included referenced objects he observed in the world, as in Little Giant Still Life (1950), based on a matchbook cover advertising Champion spark plugs. In other paintings, the words refer to aesthetic concepts he was writing about in his journals. In neither case did he intend the words to be clues to a painting's meaning, which he insisted rested exclusively in the work's formal properties.
Davis's reliance on words as major design elements coincided with his introduction of a new vocabulary of expansive shapes whose increased scale heightened the impact of their color. By controlling the spatial properties of color to advance and recede, Davis ensured that the forms in his paintings visually moved forward and backward at equal speeds. The effect was of a fast-moving surface, perceived simultaneously as a single impression that seemed to push into the viewer's space with enormous force an impression one critic approvingly likened to a "good sock on the jaw."
Below is a selection of works from The 1950s.
Little Giant Still Life, 1950
0:00
Stuart Davis, Little Giant Still Life, 1950
0:00
Stuart Davis: Well this first “Champion,” called Little Giant Still Life, that was made from a—I just had a package of paper matches on the table alongside of me. And I made a drawing without any intention of doing anything with it; I just drew, looking at this package of matches. It had the word “champion” on it. And it seemed interesting, so I just drew it on a canvas and made, developed it from there on, without reference to any matches or anything like that.
Barbara Haskell: It was the first time he had really elevated words to a position of prominence.
He begins to invest color with spatial properties, so he very much controls the properties of color to advance and recede so that there's a back and forth motion in all of his pictures, but they nevertheless stay very much on the surface, so that the paintings are perceived in a single glance, and he was very conscious that a single impression painting was what he wanted to create which, of course, is what advertising does.
He's very much considered the father of Pop art, but was always very different. Pop artists generally, Pop painters use two dimensional media images. Davis never did that. He was not concerned about commenting on culture or consumer society.