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.
Colonial Cubism, 1954
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Stuart Davis, Colonial Cubism, 1954
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Narrator: In the 1950s, Davis began to make abstract paintings on a grand scale. In part, he was influenced by his experience painting murals. But after a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1945, he was also commercially and critically successful for the first time. And with the rise of Abstract Expressionism, abstraction moved to the center stage in American art. Davis’s status shifted from outsider to trailblazer. He also began reacting to the work of younger artists.
Sarah Humphreville: I think one of the things that really impacts him in the '50s is seeing paintings by Abstract Expressionists. A lot of the history that's written about Davis talks about him as having an antagonistic relationship with these artists. But it's actually much more complicated than that. He didn't agree with the idea that art should only be about art, or that art should be this really emotional experience and about the inner psyche of the artist. But he didn't think that that meant they had bad painting.
He knew a lot of these artists personally. And he also exhibited with them in group shows. One of the things I think that particularly he notes in these group shows is that if he's going to compete with them and look to be an equivalent or better artist, that he needs to compete with their monumental scale. It's not like he sees a Pollock painting and says, "Oh, I'm going to make it big now." It's not that direct. It's this continuous process of not only looking but also making his own, and figuring out what he can pull out from there and collage into his own voice. You see that here, that it's this painted collage in a way with all these different layers.