Stuart DavisStuart Davis's contribution to the development of art has yet to be rightfully celebrated. Our perspective in considering the art of this country in the first half of this century, has been completely distorted by the impact of Abstract Expressionism. This movement ripped the focus and historic precedent from Europe to NYC and deservedly brought glory to its practitioners. Unfortunately, this has tended to obscure the vast achievements of American artists who preceded them and has kept these earlier paintings hidden from a public who, no doubt, are more ready than ever to appreciate them. Ready because these paintings reflect an optimistic time before world wars made their shockwaves felt and put us all under imminent clouds. A time when the simple pleasure of interpreting a scene, imbuing it with a stirred emotional reaction, was an opportunity to celebrate a view. When the artist's role was to be the great noticer and highlighter of details in the immediate surroundings. This is where Davis emerged from, but he didn't stop at the idyllic. His treatments were a bridge into a newer, jazzier time. His early paintings and sketches, which make up this splendid and revelatory show, are a lesson in absorption of styles, mastery of vocabularies, and development into unexplored territory. His fascination and appropriation of Van Gogh is obvious in Path Between Boulders (1919) and Church Forms (ca. 1916); of Munch in Man on Beach (ca. 1913) and Giles Char (1916); of Gauguin and Cezanne in Gloucester Terrace (1916). But, it's also clear that these influences are necessary steps in a progression and a synthesizing. As William C. Agee (who's working on the catalogue raisonne) says in his introduction: "Davis was very good at a very early age." What he's good at, so young, is using the newest styles in his forging for his own style. And that path would eventually move away from pure representation and the bold colors and brushstrokes of Impressionism and solid forms and emotional lines of Post-Impressionism. Early on we're given glimpses of the flattened surfaces, the depth of field all pressed to the picture plane, that we associate with the later Davis. Early canvases like Giles Char and Backyard View (both 1916, Davis was 24) already are saturated with that almost feverish perspective in which background details swim to the same focus as foreground; illusionistic effects eliminated, or lessened, in a fervor of details. In Multiple Views (1918) there's no pretense of depth as we're given a series of American views that blend into each other to form an almost mystical collage. This group of paintings, done while he was in his twenties, are good and delightful if not earth-shatteringly original. The paint is thick, the texturing is tremendously active yet the landscapes are seen and dimension still restrains the composition from becoming an arrangement of brushstrokes and color. The compositions are solid. Painterly effects are beginning to push natural order to a more personally imagined vision but, hanging on to all the history that's preceded them, they retain their grounding in sensible appearance and image. Metamorphosizing through the 1920s, we get a few minor canvases that use the new Cubism to free the image from the tyranny of accurate representation. Yet, it seems, his heart isn't in these works. It is when we jump to the early 1930s, still on the coast of Massachusetts, as are all the pieces in this show, that we arrive at the familiar, mature Davis. This is the assured artist who argues with Cezanne, in his sketchbook, that: ". . . Nature is not modeled on any geometric concept. Man's understanding of nature is . . ." He's developed his ideas of space relationships to reduce the visible to the utter crux, dispensing with that which is not fundamental: planes can go, "the angle alone is fundamental." This is the flattened Davis we know: where scenes are presented as if they'd just been pressed by a compactor so that the distinction between near and far, depth, is suddenly archaic. It is a marvelously artificial world where store signs and numbers are jumbled into the surface vacuum. The thirty or so pieces on display from this time, mostly pages from his sketchbooks, are all accomplished samples of his theories, or rather, they are the proofs brought into being. The thoughts and ideas he was recording in his sketchbooks at this time (a facsimile edition of three of them, called The Stuart Davis Sketchbooks has just been published by Grace Borgenicht Gallery and The Arts Publisher, Inc., $45) reveal a committed investigator and serious developer of new artistic principles. His writings in these pages could serve as notes for lectures. The doctrines are substantiated by the exquisite drawings. When he notes: "never color & form/always direction" and then later "a palette of directions/not colors" this is all aptly practiced in the artworks which show how to give motion to a formerly sedentary scene. At once playful for what we still recognize of nature and striking for their almost scientific wrangling to strip the familiar of its boundaries, these pieces are the crystallization of an entirely new consciousness and an entirely new way of perceiving. Davis wasn't interested in reproducing what had always been seen. He wanted to reveal new ways of seeing. To do this he rearranged reality on his canvas so that it was still recognizable but transformed to a state where the viewer must participate in a process of reorientation. Post-Impressionism and Cubism had taught him that the sovereignty of the scene, of form, must be violated to be brought up to date. Jazz was an obvious influence with its spontaneity and the risks taken in improvisation, leaving the home base for explorations into total joy and expression. Having apprenticed so long with the modern masters, he was now equipped with the necessary visual vocabulary and, fortified by the skeleton of a worked-out theoretical foundation, he could now take unprecedented forays. The show-stopper of the exhibit, Composition with Garage Lights (ca. 1931–32), is a culmination of these ideas and principles. The artist's reaction to the majesty of a detail of dailiness has been transformed away from the sentiment and emotional attachment implicit in all painting before him. This isn't a romantic version of some heart-warming piece of nature. He's not displaying his emotions and passions. He's playing with his intellect. But this isn't to imply that it's cold. In fact, it's all about fun. Achieving a psychological distance from the subject frees the responses from the obligation of past associations and this detachment allows invention. Specifically, in this masterpiece, nature is switched from a "series of accidental combinations" to a series of interlocking elements in a fruity juxtaposition. Blocks of color are "the Means by which ideal space relations are made visible," that is, the sky's not blue and the trees not necessarily green; color is an element in the composition not the landscape. Stripped of their dimension, images are collaged on the surface. This is a long way from the soft focus views of Impressionism. He can use whatever colors delight him since he's not attempting to reproduce nature. His combinations are still dazzling. This is an ideal realm where nature is used as a springboard to extend the limits of creation. (Arts, Summer 1986) |