Stuart Davis: In Full Swing
June 10–Sept 25, 2016
The 1930s
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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.
Swing Landscape, 1938
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Stuart Davis, Swing Landscape, 1938
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Stuart Davis: I must say that in the major part of my career, when I wanted inspiration from American art, I went to jazz music.
Narrator: In Swing Landscape, Davis openly declared one of his greatest loves, jazz. The composition is vibrant and rhythmic, patterns seeming to dance across its surface. Davis did depict some identifiable objects, most of them inspired by the fishing boats around Gloucester, Massachusetts—one of his favorite subjects. But he painted the spaces between the objects using equally intense hues. As a result, the individual parts play into the whole like instruments in big band jazz.
If you’d like to hear more of what Davis had to say about jazz, please tap the button on your screen.
Burgoyne Diller, the abstract painter who headed the New York mural division of the WPA’s Federal Art Project, convinced officials in charge of a low-income housing project in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to commission abstract murals for twelve of the complex’s basement meeting rooms. Swing Landscape was Davis’s contribution. Using sketches he made of the waterfront in Gloucester, Massachusetts, he transformed masts, rigging, lobster traps, ladders, and striped poles into a vocabulary of overlapping, brightly colored shapes, all of equal intensity. To Davis, the result portrayed the “new materials, new spaces, new speeds, new time relations, new lights, and new colors” of modern America. The work garnered an enthusiastic response from critics and other artists, one of whom, John Graham, called it the “greatest American painting.” But as with several other abstract murals commissioned for the housing project, Swing Landscape was never installed. Instead, it was put in storage until 1942, when the government transferred its ownership to Indiana University.