Stuart Davis: The City Boy's Eye

By ROBERT HUGHES

In Brooklyn, afresh view of a major American painter

"Stuart Davis: Art and Art Theory," which finishes its run at the Brooklyn Museum this week and will open on April 15 at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Mass., is an exhilarating show. Davis died 14 years ago, but he is still a quintessentially American artist--the hero of the struggle to be both modernist and American that pervaded the art world in the '20s and '30s. No exhibition of his work has ever done as well by him as this one, organized by Art Historian John R. Lane: 113 paintings and drawings, an excellent catalogue text and, for the first time, a full view of the relationships between theory and practice that lay at the core of Davis' work and enabled him to transcend his provinciality.

Davis loathed American regionalism --Thomas Hart Benton with his buckeye Michelangelo plowboys, Grant Wood's Midwestern Arcadias. "The only corn-fed art that was ever successful was the pre-Columbian," Davis snapped in 1934. His own vision of America as subject was much broader. It took in "wood-and ironwork of the past; Civil War and skyscraper architecture; the brilliant colors on gasoline stations, chain store fronts and taxicabs," as well as "Earl Hines' hot piano and Negro jazz music in general." His desire, he wrote, "is to construct formal souvenirs which are an agreeable emblem" of the "speeds and spaces of the American environment." In its voracious inclusiveness (admitting, as subject, anything American from landscape to 5 and 10-c- store kitchen utensils), Davis' imagination cast long shadows--toward abstract expressionism on one hand, toward Pop and its neon-lit landscape of signs and artifacts on the other.

His work had a categorical, no-nonsense air to it. Davis was a man of marked intellectual energy, and all his transactions as an artist--with subject matter, sources, influences and his constantly explored ideas on the use of art in the real world--were unwobbling and straightforward. He wanted clear configurations, in theory as in art. His career was almost as long as modernism itself. As a 19-year-old tyro from Philadelphia, he exhibited in the Armory Show in 1913; and he outlived Jackson Pollock by eight years. His early model was cubism--though he did not visit Paris until 1928--and the sight of Davis grappling with the diction of Picasso and Gris, working his way through the lessons with the persistence of a man taking a correspondence course, remains very moving. For a whole year, he painted and repainted an eggbeater, a rubber glove and an electric fan. His Eggbeater No. 4, 1927-28, with its cool interlocking planes of methodically laid color, is one of the robust documents of what Davis himself called, with his usual deadpan wit, "colonial cubism."

But what turned Davis into a complete original was his perception of and enthusiasm for the city. Nothing in French art, other than Leger, resembled Davis' syncopated images of urban life. The blaring posterish color-- yellows, scarlets, blacks, emerald greens, a high obtrusive fuchsia -- and the writhing knots of line, the words blinking like neon signs, the beat and pulsation of the space: this was visual jazz, American-style, and in deed some of Davis' titles, like The Mellow Pad, 1945-51, were couched in the musicians' argot of the day.

He cleaved, in Baudelaire's phrase, to "the heroism of modern life"; even nature, as in Arboretum by Flashbulb, 1942, acquired a sharp inorganic speediness under Davis' city eye. Toughness, aggression, careful construction were as characteristic of his art as of the New York it celebrated. The aims of constructivism -- an ideal system, beyond dialectics -- meant little to him. Reality, for Davis, was dialectic and it expressed itself in strain. His paintings are all about unstable energy, and in this too he was a most "American" artist. No matter how firmly Davis insisted on their abstract basis, all his images feed back into the world: he never seems to have doubted his subject or lost touch with it, so that his best works are triumphs of candor. -- Robert Hughes

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