Epitaph in Jazz

"What inspired me most in the area of art and culture in America was jazz music," Stuart Davis once said. It was hot jazz, city jazz, that Davis painted, right up until his death at the age of 69 last week. He was rooted in the American soil, but that soil was concrete. He loathed the country and loved the city, specifically Manhattan, and his abstract but objective works are syncopations of urban life.

To see his paintings is to hear them. They screech and honk with the aggressive dissonance of city traffic. They have the staccato beat of a pneumatic drill. The strident reds, blues, and yellows blare with neon. And the stray words that seem squiggled from a toothpaste tube onto his paintings are like the hip, harsh expletives that slum kids spew into the summer air. Davis had violence without anger, gaiety without abandon, and his paintings swing and jump with such durable joy that it is as if he had dipped his brush in some eternal fountain of youth.

What first fired his imagination was the famed Armory Show of 1913. Then and there, he decided to be a modern painter. But to train his hand to follow his esthetic vision required enormous feats of selfdiscipline. Davis told how in 1927 he "nailed a rubber glove, an electric fan and an egg beater to a table and, like Monet with his haystack, stuck with that single subject for a whole year." What he learned was how to explore, distort and transform the objects into endless arrangements on the canvas. His aim was abstraction, but his eye was riveted to the real. And what fascinated his eye was everyday America--gas pumps, factories, skyscrapers, movies, kitchen utensils, and "fast travel by train, auto, and airplane, which brought new and multiple perspectives." This very nearly makes him the legitimate father of pop art.

Unlike some pop artists, Davis was a meticulous craftsman who worked the hard way with paint out of the tube and small brushes. The jazz improvisations in his pictures are in the mood, never in the planning and execution. He took a razzle-dazzle man-made world of cities, honky-tonks and brightly packaged products, a confection of vulgarities, and out of their impermanence made something arrestingly permanent.

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