Stuart Davis: In Full Swing
June 10–Sept 25, 2016
The 1950s
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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.
Owh! in San Pao, 1951
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Stuart Davis, Owh! In San Pao, 1951
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Ben Sidran: When you look at something like Owh! In San Pao, first you see these incredibly bright-key colors.
Narrator: Ben Sidran is a jazz piano player and author of a two-volume oral history called Talking Jazz.
Ben Sidran: And there’s an analogue in jazz to the advanced harmonies that jazz players used, kind of like shining, shining harmonies, bright flashy harmonies. And similarly, he loved the rhythmic thrust of barrelhouse piano players. And when you look at the planar surfaces in Owh! In San Pao, you get the sense of a rhythm of a kind of almost floating or a tumbling feeling. There’s sort of a freedom in it that kind of feels like jazz feels. And you can also look for example in the use of little cryptic phrases, “else” and “now,” I like to think of that as sort of how a jazz fans in a bar would shout out to musicians, you know, like “get it!” “do it!”
Barrelhouse piano was this kind of free-swinging piano that was played in these saloons. You’d go into these rough bars and there’d be a piano player there, and sometimes, you know, Davis reported that the piano would be covered in barbed wire, so that people wouldn’t lean against it, or bother the piano player. Barrelhouse was a kind of dance music where the piano player’s left hand was like taking the place of the drum beating the rhythm, and the right hand was the melody and kind of the flashing entertainment part of it.
Davis based this work on his geometric abstraction Percolator (1927), which hangs nearby. Here he electrified the palette of the original work, incorporated a dynamic swath of red polka dots, and included the words “else” and “used to be—now.” In the process, he changed the identity of the percolator from a kitchen appliance to a dynamic arrangement of abstract forms and colors. Davis intended for the painting to be included in the prestigious 1951 Bienal de São Paulo at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Brazil. Unable to finish the canvas in time for the exhibition’s opening, he titled it Owh! in San Pao, changing “ouch!” to “owh!” to create a rhythmic rhyme.