This post is part of an ongoing series here on Eye Level: The Best of Ask Joan of Art. Begun in 1993, Ask Joan of Art is the longest running arts-based electronic reference service in the country. The "real" Joan is Kathleen Adrian or one of her co-workers from the museum’s Research and Scholar's Center; these experts answer the public's questions about art. Earlier this year Kathleen began posting questions on Twitter and made the answers to these questions available on our Web site.
Question: What do the paintings of Stuart Davis reveal about trends or themes in America?
Answer: Stuart Davis (1892-1964) was proud of his American heritage. Like many of the early modernists, he rejected only the academic traditions of America, not its culture. Davis was born in Philadelphia, where his father was art director of The Press—the newspaper that employed the illustrators George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan and William Glackens, all future members of the Ashcan school of painting. In 1910, at the age of sixteen, he entered Robert Henri's school. There he was taught to seek his subject matter in the real life he saw in the city around him.
Davis remembered well the lessons learned from Henri that he should paint what he saw around him, and he accordingly responded to the contemporary American scene. Stuart's earliest works, which chronicle urban life in the streets, saloons and theaters, are painted with the dark palette and thickly applied brushstrokes typical of the Ashcan school style inspired by Henri. In the following years Davis abandoned his Ashcan realist style and experimented with a variety of modern European styles, including Post-Impressionism and Cubism. Davis continued to think of himself as a realist, for he painted the real America as a result of experiences that were real to him. Now, however, his "realism" was one of abstraction rather than of illusion.
In the 1920s Davis began to develop the themes and artistic style that characterize his mature work. He painted images of American commercial products in a style loosely derived from Synthetic Cubism. Davis's works of the late 1930s, which continue to celebrate the urban and technological environment, are increasingly complex and frequently recall Léger's brightly coloured geometric forms. They also reveal the strong influence of jazz, which Davis considered to be the musical counterpart to abstract art. In 1942-3 Davis produced several paintings abstracted from nature, but after World War II he returned for inspiration to the urban environment, maintaining a continuity with the imagery of works of the 1930s. (excerpts from Wayne Craven's American Art: History and Culture)
There are twenty works by Stuart Davis in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. One of them, Composition, is used in the design of our blog, Eye Level. For further information about the artist and his work, you might want to look for the following books: Patricia Hills's Stuart Davis and Lowery Stokes Sims's Stuart Davis: American Painter.
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