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.
Rapt at Rappaport’s, 1951–52
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Stuart Davis, Rapt at Rappaport’s, 1951-52
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Narrator: Davis called this painting Rapt at Rappaport’s. It’s based on an earlier work called Landscape with Saw. The saw is barely recognizable, with its red-and-white polka-dotted handle and patterned blade. But as abstract as this painting may appear, it was important to Davis that it, like all his paintings, was rooted in reality.
Stuart Davis: I have never regarded myself as an abstract artist. Personally I felt that talking about “abstract” art had many dangerous and misleading implications. That it cut off the real fact that what is interesting in any painting is its specific references, which however they may differ with different people that look at the painting, are nevertheless specific. And to call those specific things abstract always worked the wrong way with me. And as to the content of it, I regard the fact that I give importance to simple things that give me pleasure, I think that is the content that has validity with me.
Davis based this painting on his Landscape with Saw (1922), which hangs nearby. The alliterative title evokes the snappy rhythms of “jive” talk that was popular among his jazz-musician friends. Davis’s parents had frequented a store named Rappaport’s Toy Bazaar, whose wrapping paper and delivery trucks had a distinctive polka-dot theme—making the “rapt” of the painting’s title a wordplay on “wrapped.”