A PERFECT FIT: Stuart Davis’s exhibition exemplifies the Whitney’s mission to encourage
American art. Photo by Maggie Berkvist.
“In order to make a visual image you
have to have something going on.”
—Stuart Davis
By Martica Sawin
There could not be a more perfect fit, historically and esthetically, than that of the exhibition “Stuart Davis in Full Swing” and its host this summer, the Whitney Museum. Historically, the whole body of Davis’s work is a justification of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s mission to encourage American art; his career was also furthered by financial support through museum purchases.
While the purpose of the Whitney is necessarily different today, its original aim to elevate the status of American art played a vital role in strengthening the independence of American artists vis-à-vis Europe. Davis’s art is the ideal embodiment of the brashness, pace, and commercialism of industrialized America. These are the qualities that contribute to an esthetic match with the building. The compatibility of Renzo Piano’s Whitney with the surrounding industrial architecture, its recycled factory floors, its expansive loft-like spaces, and the impression it gives of a work in progress all reflect an open-ended American-ness.
Davis came to New York from Philadelphia to study with Robert Henri and lived much of his life in Greenwich Village near his friends, John Sloan and Arshile Gorky; he taught at that Village institution, The New School for Social Research. His first retrospective was at the Whitney on Eighth Street in 1926; he was also a leader in the Village-based artists’ community as President of the Artists Union and a Founder of the Artists’ Congress. After visiting France in 1929, he wrote, “The enormous vitality of America in contrast to Europe made me regard the necessity of New York as a positive advantage.”
The following are two brief recollections of Stuart Davis during his Village years:
In 1951, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) tried to make up for past neglect with the exhibition “Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America,” accompanied by ”What Abstract Art Means to Me.” A panel of six artists representing different approaches to abstraction: Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Davis, Fritz Glarner, George L.K. Morris, and Robert Motherwell.
The moderator, Alfred Barr, decided at the last minute that he wanted an advance look at the artists’ talks. As an employee of the Museum’s Junior Council, sponsor of the event, I went downtown to pick up Davis’s talk at his 4th floor walk-up on Seventh Avenue at 14th Street. He invited me to come in and meet his wife, Roselle, and listen to the ball game. The place was heated with a coal stove and a block of ice cooled the icebox; coal and ice were carried up three flights by the man who was one of the country’s best-known artists. Back at MoMA, Alfred Barr was in a temper over my long absence, but the panel went well and has become a piece of history.
The audience included Kendall Shaw who had come from New Orleans to study with Davis, urged by social surrealist painter, Louis Guglielmi. Shaw recalls that de Kooning felt unable to read his talk so Barr read it. Ken’s notes on Davis:
“I met Stuart at Guglielmi’s apartment one Saturday night in August, 1951. I soon registered for his New School class. Stuart usually arrived a bit late for class from the New School cafeteria. His assistant had arranged Stuart’s huge still life of many objects on the model stand according to Stuart’s pencil-sketched plan. The pile included two colorful child’s spinning tops, and a square-holed blanket web of ropes, as one sees in Stuart’s seaport paintings from Gloucester….Stuart loved jazz. Roselle told me that she met Stuart through their mutual love of jazz. They would cross the Hudson to Hoboken to a jazz bar where a glass of gin with a maraschino cherry cost twenty-five cents. Stuart’s rhythmic paintings of the 1940s are visual jazz.
In his crowded New School class, Stuart told us to draw from the wide still life, but first to draw the rectangle that we were going to make alive with adjacent shapes of color. We added color to the shapes in the rectangle, then we painted from the color drawing. We painted as Stuart did on unprimed canvas with thin turpentine washes of color on sharp-edged shapes. Stuart’s landscapes were urban and included large commercial signs, bright multi-colored taxicabs with flat, intense colors. His three televisions that played without sound brought the outside into his studio and into his paintings.
One night when we were leaving Guglielmi’s, we hurried to find a copy of the New York Times. Stuart and fifty other artists had signed a letter protesting Herald Tribune art critic Emily Genaur’s review calling Arshile Gorky a “second-rate artist.”[This was very likely a review of the 1951 Gorky show at the Whitney.]”
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