Stuart Davis: In Full Swing | Art & Artists

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.

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.  

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.

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. 

Barbara Haskell: Davis based Première on a gouache that he'd made in 1956 in response to a commission by Fortune Magazine to create a painting on the glamour of packaging. He was one of seven artists who was hired by Fortune. He chose to go into a grocery store, bought a package of groceries and laid them all out on his studio and began to work with the images.

What he ended up doing was not creating an image of the packages themselves. He extracted words to stand for the products so that you have in this painting bag, cow, pad, free, any, cat, hundred percent, new, juice. Again, this is very unlike Pop art. A Pop artist might have replicated the product itself. Davis chose to be much more abstract, and in a sense more universal that by taking words, which he believed introduced the human element into pictures, he created something very familiar but at the same time very abstract.