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Stuart Davis In Full Swing
This catalog accompanies the exhibition Stuart In Full Swing at the National Gallery of Art. Color illustrations. 288p. Measures 10x12 inches. This book pays tribute to the mature work of Stuart Davis (1892-1964), an early American modernist painter. He was well known for his jazz-influenced, proto-pop art paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, bold, brash, and colorful, as well as his Ashcan School pictures in the early years of the 20th century.
- GenresArt
Paperback
Published January 1, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 25, 2023
Terrific book of terrific art by my favorite artist since encountering him when I was in high school.
June 30, 2017
Davis is a big-name painter who I found myself wondering why his isn't an even bigger name. Well-known to museum regulars, his work should, I think, rank him with such house-hold names as Pollock and Warhol, both of whom he paved the way for.
Arriving on the tail end of cubism, Davis studied his contemporary European masters and decided to make their obscure aesthetic distinctively American. His parents were artists of the realist, Ash-Can school and he felt a moral obligation to tie his art to every-day life. What, Stuart seems to ask, could be more American than the bill-board- the corporation logo that is bigger than human life?
Presaging Pop, Davis's post-cubist paintings depict one object from an unmistakably single perspective: that of advertisements. The rest is movement, the swirling contingency of modernity.
As his career progressed, Davis's paintings became increasingly radical, rejecting the last traces of conventional, centralized framing found in Picasso and Braque's cubist works for one in which every part of the frame was equally dynamic. This negation of centrality predicts abstract expressionism, although Davis's work, to the last, remains, just barely, representational.
Arriving on the tail end of cubism, Davis studied his contemporary European masters and decided to make their obscure aesthetic distinctively American. His parents were artists of the realist, Ash-Can school and he felt a moral obligation to tie his art to every-day life. What, Stuart seems to ask, could be more American than the bill-board- the corporation logo that is bigger than human life?
Presaging Pop, Davis's post-cubist paintings depict one object from an unmistakably single perspective: that of advertisements. The rest is movement, the swirling contingency of modernity.
As his career progressed, Davis's paintings became increasingly radical, rejecting the last traces of conventional, centralized framing found in Picasso and Braque's cubist works for one in which every part of the frame was equally dynamic. This negation of centrality predicts abstract expressionism, although Davis's work, to the last, remains, just barely, representational.
December 30, 2021
An extensive overview of the life, work and thoughts behind the work of Stuart Davis. A much forgotten artist in these post-post modern times.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews