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Stuart Davis, American Modernist
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# : |
19878 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1992 |
1,974 Words |
| Author
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Jason Edward Kaufman
Jason Edward Kaufman is an art historian and critic based in
New York. |
Art historians deem Stuart Davis (1892-1964) one of the great artists of twentieth-century America. In the twenties and thirties, when most of his contemporaries were using nineteenth-century techniques to depict America, Davis--like Sheeler, Demuth, Marin, and Weber--delved into Modernism, and with it helped portray the country as it sped off the farm and into the city. Today, his easy to recognize mature canvases, with their letters, shapes, and wavy lines laid out in blaring colors, occupy a place o honor in museums across the country.
Davis experimented freely enroute to his signature style. He brought the latest European styles, most notably cubism, to such American subjects as Gloucester harbor, New York City advertising, automobiles, and jazz music. He modified Cubism so that it differed from the French by throwing in English words and American product logos and by using hard-edged shapes and high-keyed, solid colors, giving the whole a jumpy, rhythmic design on making-size scale. His bending of European Cubism into a native idiom was an early step on modern art's voyage from Paris to New York.
Davis' Cubist-inspired advances provide an important link to later developments in American art. His espousal of Modernism helped set the stage for the hegemony of abstraction in postwar America. Because he borrowed mortifs from popular culture, he is rightly regarded as the progenitor of Pop Art. And the simple, hard-edged geometry of his late work looks forward to Minimalism in the formalist era. More generally, his stylistic consistency is cited as a model of integrity in American art.
All this sounds like a formidable achievement, but ultimately Davis is of greater historical than aesthetic interest. Were it not for his having been born in the United States, art historians would dismiss Davis as a second- or third-tier offshoot of French Cubism. But he was an American, and on the one hundredth anniversary of his birth no less an institution than the Metropolitan Museum of Art has meticulously assembled an exhaustive survey. The 175 pictures in Stuart Davis: American Painter present the alpha through the omega of the painter's fifty-year career.
Davis entered the profession almost by default and, to judge from his earliest work, despite negligible talent. His father was art director for the daily Philadelphia Press, and young Davis was drawn into the orbit of the newspaper's illustrators. Among them were four members of "the Eight"--William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan. As soon as
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