Stuart Davis, Egg Beater No. 4, 1928

Narrator: Have you ever said a word so many times that it started to sound like nonsense? That’s kind of what Stuart Davis did to make this painting and the ones nearby, only he used his sense of sight, not sound. He spent a full year looking really closely at three things—an eggbeater, a rubber glove, and a fan. After a while, he stopped seeing them as tools that had been made to do certain jobs. To him, they just looked like shapes. He painted those shapes over and over again, turning them this way and that, trying to find all of the interesting ways to arrange them on the canvas. 

In this gallery, there are four Egg Beater paintings. Take a moment to find them all. Do you see any shapes that repeat from one painting to the next? Think about the ways those shapes change as Davis puts them in new arrangements. How do you think those changes affect the mood of the paintings?