LANDSCAPE WITH CLAY PIPE (1941) by Stewart Davis, Oil on Canvas. This painting is a variation of the Radio City Music Hall mural.
“Stuart Davis: In Full Swing”
Artist Stuart Davis (1892 – 1964), was an early American modernist painter who spent time living in Paris as well as in New York City. He is remembered for his bright and colorful paintings of the 1940s and 1950s that were influenced by jazz and were considered to be an early inspiration for the Pop artists of the 1960s.
Stuart Davis is one of the preeminent figures of American modernism. With a long career that stretched from the early twentieth century well into the postwar era, he brought a distinctively American accent to international modernism. Faced with the choice between realism and pure abstraction early in his career, Davis invented a vocabulary that harnessed the grammar of abstraction to the speed and simultaneity of modern America. By merging the bold, hard-edged style of advertising with the conventions of European avant-garde painting, he created an art endowed with the vitality and dynamic rhythms that he saw as uniquely modern and American. In the process, he achieved a rare synthesis: an art that is resolutely abstract, yet at the same time exudes the spirit of popular culture.
The exhibition is unusual in its focus on Davis’s mature career and on his working method of using preexisting motifs as springboards for new compositions. From 1939 on, Davis rarely painted a work that did not make reference, however hidden, to one or more of his earlier compositions. Such “appropriation” is a distinctive aspect of his mature art. This presentation is the first major exhibition to consistently hang Davis’s later works side by side with the earlier ones that inspired them. With approximately one hundred works, from his paintings of consumer products in the early 1920s to the work left on his easel at his death in 1964, the exhibition highlight Davis’s unique ability to transform the chaos of everyday life into a structured yet spontaneous order that communicates the wonder and joy that can be derived from the color and spatial relationships of everyday things.
——————
“Stuart Davis: In Full Swing” was at Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC & Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark.
(Source: Text Whitney Museum of art press dept., Photos were taken with permission, by ARTS & FOOD staff, at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.)
VIDEO
James Kalm takes a tour of the exhibition “Stuart Davis In Full Swing!” at the Whitney Museum of American Art – the whole video runs approx 40 minutes.
==============
AUDIO
To listen to the Whitney Audio Guides for this exhibition click this link:
https://whitney.org/WatchAndListen/AudioGuides/32?stop=2
==============
EXHIBITION CATALOG
This book pays tribute to the mature work of Stuart Davis, a distinctly American artist who adapted European modernism to reflect the sights, sounds, and rhythms of popular culture.
FIN
Stuart Davis’ signature.
