Stuart Davis: In Full Swing

by Barbara Haskell, Harry Cooper, Stuart Davis (Artist)

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. Beginning in 1921, a series of creative breakthroughs led Davis away from figurative painting and toward a more abstract expression of the world he inhabited. Drawing upon his admiration for Cezanne, Leger, Picasso, and Seurat, Davis developed a style that would evolve over the next four decades to become a dominant force in postwar art. His visionary responses to modern life and culture both high and low remain relevant more than 50 years after his death. Focusing on the images and motifs that became hallmarks of his career, this book features approximately 100 works--from his paintings of tobacco packages of the early 1920s, the abstract Egg Beater series, and the WPA murals of the 1930s, to the majestic works of his last two decades. The authors take a critical approach to the development of Davis's art and theory, paying special attention to the impact his earlier work had upon his later masterpieces. They also discuss Davis's unique ability to assimilate the lessons of Cubism as well as the imagery of popular culture, the aesthetics of advertising, and the sounds and rhythms of jazz--his great musical passion. Informed by previously unpublished primary documents, the detailed chronology is, in effect, the first Davis biography. Together, these elements create a vital portrait of an artist whose works hum with intelligence and energy.

Genres: Art

288 pages, Hardcover

Published June 10, 2016

Reviews

[Ambrose Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific book of terrific art by my favorite artist since encountering him when I was in high school.

[William West · Rating 5 out of 5]

Davis is a big-name painter who I found myself wondering why his isn't an even bigger name. Well-known to museum regulars, his work should, I think, rank him with such house-hold names as Pollock and Warhol, both of whom he paved the way for.

Arriving on the tail end of cubism, Davis studied his contemporary European masters and decided to make their obscure aesthetic distinctively American. His parents were artists of the realist, Ash-Can school and he felt a moral obligation to tie his art to every-day life. What, Stuart seems to ask, could be more American than the bill-board- the corporation logo that is bigger than human life?

Presaging Pop, Davis's post-cubist paintings depict one object from an unmistakably single perspective: that of advertisements. The rest is movement, the swirling contingency of modernity.

As his career progressed, Davis's paintings became increasingly radical, rejecting the last traces of conventional, centralized framing found in Picasso and Braque's cubist works for one in which every part of the frame was equally dynamic. This negation of centrality predicts abstract expressionism, although Davis's work, to the last, remains, just barely, representational.

[Kevin Casto · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extensive overview of the life, work and thoughts behind the work of Stuart Davis. A much forgotten artist in these post-post modern times.