Stuart Davis: In Full Swing
June 10–Sept 25, 2016
The 1930s
4
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.
New York Mural, 1932
0:00
Stuart Davis, New York Mural, 1932
0:00
Barbara Haskell: Davis made New York Mural in response to a call from the Museum of Modern Art for a show they were doing of murals by painters and sculptors. So it was the largest painting he'd made to date. It shows New York City, but in a sense it's also an object portrait of Al Smith who was the four term governor of New York who had lost the bid for the presidency in 1928.
Narrator: Davis with a big fan of Smith, a populist who—crucially, from Davis’s perspective—opposed the Prohibition. Davis pictures objects associated with the governor: derby hats and the Empire State Building, for example. In the upper left corner, the moon throws back a glass of champagne. And a tiger with a serpent’s tail alludes to Tamany Hall, the Democratic political machine that dominated New York City Politics.
Murals were perhaps the definitive art form of the Great Depression, as government agencies hired artists to adorn public buildings and inspire a downtrodden public. Most of them portrayed grand figures in a classical style. Modernist works like this one were out of favor. Davis painted relatively little through much of the 30s. During this time he became very active in left-wing politics, especially labor organizing for artists.