“Stuart
Davis: In Full Swing”
Whitney
Museum of American Art
Stuart
Davis (1892–1964) 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 will be 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 will 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 is co-organized by Barbara Haskell, Curator, Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York, and Harry Cooper, Curator and Head of Modern
Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, with Sarah Humphreville,
Curatorial Assistant, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
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