
I only just caught Stuart Davis: In Full Swing at the De Young before it closed. It meant a special trip to SF; it was worth it. SD’s paintings have to be seen in person. They’re thick, impasto-y, 3-D constructions. Textures vary and are significant. The planes of color fit together like marquetry, with a satisfying snap. Pictures that fizz with explosions of confetti have a physical heft and well-crafted solidity.
And reproductions don’t do justice to his eye-popping hot colors.
And then the installation was significant. At first I was put out how it played fast and loose with chronology. But one of the themes of the exhibit—elaborated in the catalog—was how Davis returned to the same motif, again and again, over decades. It was not obvious when you saw the pictures individually, but the light dawned when the related works were lined up together. Riffs on the same theme.
This habit of working in series is just one of the eye-opening lessons of the exhibit, suggesting more exploring needs to be done. Davis’s work is so accessible and fun that its been taken for granted.
For instance, one of the things that stuck me was the sameness of mood of his work. When I first arrived, I was beside myself with delight at the sassy cheerfulness. It was like a gust of fresh air. How wonderful to escape from art that creeps and moans. But later, I started to wonder about the absence of darker moods. Cheerfulness is great, but was this too cheerful? Was it shallow?
The plot thickens when you read the Chronology in the catalog, which is really a biography of SD’s life and times. What becomes clear is that the work came out of a self-destructive bohemian milieu of Crime and Punishment-quality grimness. After helping him get started as an artist, his parents, for example, turned into Marmeladov and Katerina Ivanovna, creating havoc for the rest of their lives.
But nothing of the chronology’s grim litany of poverty, domestic discord, falling-down-and-breaking-limbs drunkenness appears anywhere in the work. He never tried to express pain—his pain, anybody’s pain.
When it got to be too much, rather than try to express it, he stopped working. It’s hard not to see his wife Bessie’s horrible death in 1932 as the start of a slough in his life. Then his family falls apart in 1933. Between Red Cart and Landscape (both 1932) there’s nothing that’s uniquely his till 10 years later, Arboretum by flashbulb (1942). Some touching experiments, but irrelevant eddies. He got involved in politics, Popular Front activism. When the Stalinists take over, he withdraws.
After Arboretum he never flags. It’s crazy. 23 years of him banging it out. His 1950s are an exhilarating traffic jam of “honking” pure tones (Glenn O’Brian’s apt adjective). Taking a cue from Matisse’s cut-outs, after Mellow Pad (1951) the work just gets bigger and bolder.
Some other themes ...
Abstracting, but not really abstract. Few, if any, of his paintings are 100% abstract. There’s always the hint of a motif, in the foundation. As DNA, seed, grit. It should be awful. His method seems to be the worst cliché of modernism: deriving geometric forms from realistic studies of places and things.
American scene. Ash Can Swing. Electronics, household gear, gas stations, posters, …. American scene without despair and without sentimentality. He’s giving the finger to the Yahoos who reject capital-M Modernism as anti-American, Communist, European, academic, and elitist. Is confetti American?
Big, simple shapes (clearly defined)
Bold, animated lines, richocheting around the picture plane like a billard ball.
Bright, hot colors. Intense, jolting combinations. No shading, no chiaroscuro.
Cartoonist/caricaturist. He never quite dropped his first career. Like Gris, Fenninger, …. Contrast with the infinitely less gifted Valerio Adami.
Clean, spotless surfaces. No light, no atmosphere, no fugitive effects.
Dancing. Graceful, vigorous, athletic motion.
Decorative, not sublime.
Entertainer. SD is an entertainer, not a prophet, not a social critic, not a seer.
Episodic, anecdotal.
Extroverted. Completely and exclusively. Razzing high-dungeon abstract expressionists, their gloomy introspection, their rhetoric of tragedy, Greek mythology and existential angst. SD has absolutely nothing to do with that.
Idealizing. A better world, with the dirt and suffering refined away. The flimsy, shoddy stuff transmuted to permanently interacting forces and forms. Living it up is the best revenge.
In sync. The optimistic vision of all heterogeneous events and things encountered fitting together. Where noise and disorder are a source of fun rather than terror. Idealized, classicized, ….
Irreverent. The scene is not mocked, but it’s not taken in sober seriousness.
Flowing, floating, fizzing up.
Graphic. The paintings are born in drawing. He never lost his cartoonist skills. He makes the forms withdraw and pop up.
Introspection that’s ironic, tongue-in-cheek, rather than grave.
Levity not gravity, lightness, animation, fizz.
No autobiography. No intimacy. Really?
No portraits, no psychology, no Rembrandt, no Goya.
No satire, exposés, or outrage.
No sorrow, melancholy, or pathos.
No suffering, decay, or infirmity.
Object portraits.
Playful. Chaos and conflict without harm. Harmony, an improbable, cacophonous harmony. E pluribus unum.
Swing. OED: “a flowing but strongly compelling rhythm”
Townscapes, Towns rather more than big city. A townscape of non-specific planes, colors, textures. The kind of industrialized landscape that Hopper and Demuth presented as nightmares, SD presents as a gas: Summer landscape (1930), Landscape with garage lights (1931-2), Red cart (1932), ….
Variations on a motif. Reworking older work. Boulez. SD a classicist, returning to a motif, over and over, refining and producing variations?
Music is a key. Popular music. Hot, swinging Jazz. Not Mozart quartets (Rothko), and also not Billie Holiday, Monk, Morton Feldman or the Velvet Underground ...
- “The Charleston (piano roll)” (James P. Johnson, 1925) Overplayed as background music to the point that it’s hard to hear as music, rather than as a sign indicating The Roaring Twenties. Non-stop pep and irrepressible fun. Exceedingly physical.
- “Fifty Seven Varieties” (Earl Hines, 1928) Syncopated, fragmented, but unified by a unmissable beat.
- “No. 29” (Wesley Wallace, 1929) Sassy, naughty boogie-woogie.
- “Frankie’s Jump” (Frankie Newton & His Cafe Society Orchestra, 1939) Exactly the kind of music in Fred & Ginger danced to. Swing
- “It Don’t Mean a Thing” (Duke Ellington, 1943)
- “Love Nest” (Max Kaminsky, James P. Johnson & Eddie Condon, 1944) A trio, chamber swing. Dixieland plus stride/boogie woogie.
- “Rocket Boogie” (Pete Johnson, 1949?)
- “Study for Player Piano #37” (Conlon Nancarrow, 1960s)
Making pictures of the street, that can hold their own against the street.
[Image: The Paris Bit (1959)]