Stuart Davis: In Full Swing

Davis's finances, which were always precarious, plummeted after the 1929 stock market crash. Like many others in similar circumstances, he turned to collective action, throwing himself into political activism on behalf of artists' economic rights and freedom of expression. Between 1934 and 1940, he served as a leading member of the Unemployed Artists Group and the Artists' Committee of Action, vice president of the Artists Union, editor of the left-wing journal Art Front, and vice president and ultimately president of the American Artists' Congress. Combined with his prolific writing, his activism left little time for painting. He later described the period as "meetings, articles, picket lines, internal squabbles. Everything was hectic. Lots of work done but little painting."

Davis's aesthetic output during this period was primarily murals, an art form that enjoyed widespread popularity during the Great Depression thanks to the various government agencies established under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to provide financial support to artists by commissioning murals for public buildings. Working against the realistic depictions of daily life and historical events that characterized most government-funded murals, Davis pushed toward greater abstraction in the five murals he made in the 1930s. By treating the space between objects as flat planes of vibrant color and overlapping the forms in his compositions so that they became fragmented shapes, he channeled the kaleidoscopic sensations of modern life into an animated equilibrium.

Below is a selection of works from The 1930s.