Stuart Davis, Egg Beater No. 4, 1928

Narrator: On this wall, you’ll see four works with very similar compositions. Davis made them all during one very intense year. A stipend from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney—the founder of the Whitney Museum—allowed him to focus on nothing but painting. He narrowed in on three objects: an egg beater, a rubber glove, and a fan. 

Barbara Haskell: The Eggbeater Series is based really on the cubist idea of fragmentation and that one can see an object from different points of view, different aspects of an object. 

Narrator: Davis used his limited subject to rich effect. Take a moment to compare this painting to the one Davis made right before it, Egg Beater No. 3. It’s to the left. 

Mark Joshua Epstein: If you let your eye go back and forth between Egg Beater No. 3 and Egg Beater No. 4, you realize that the structures of the paintings are distinctly similar, but there are a bunch of differences. If we focus in on this kind of ochre-gold shape that is on the bottom right of both paintings, in Egg Beater No. 3, the horizontals are actually horizontals. We are led to a corner that makes more or less sense. And if we look at No. 4, we’re led up and out. 

For me, Egg Beater No. 3 is lighter; it’s more open. But at the same time, it’s less vibrant. He’s desaturated a bunch of the colors by adding a little bit of gray, and a little bit of the complement to them. On the right, because we get these pops against the darker blue and the darker green, everything is singing a little bit more shrilly.