As generally understood, the history of 20th-century art in America is treated like a Superman epic in which a mild-mannered provincial backwater transforms itself into the heroic art capital of the world. There is some truth to this: Thanks to its overwhelming triumph in 1945, the United States became the world’s most powerful nation—and, as we all know, history is written by the victors, and that includes art history. But this story, like so many, tends to miss the nuances that drove developments. With its survey of Stuart Davis (1892–1964), the Whitney fills in an important blank.
Davis was born into an artistic family: His father was art editor of The Philadelphia Press and his mother a sculptor. Both were personally acquainted with the painters of the Ashcan School, and Davis’s childhood exposure to their stylistic mix of Impressionism and Social Realism led him to study with Robert Henri, one of the movement’s key figures.
Two developments, however, altered the course of Davis’s career. The first was the famed Armory Show of 1913, where the young Davis encountered Fauvism and Cubism. The second was the rise of the first true consumer economy after World War I. The former provided him a stylistic template, while the latter, in the form of advertising, household products and other Jazz Age enticements, served as inspiration. Davis Americanized European modernism by combining it with the syncopated cultural rhythms and nascent pop culture of the Roaring ’20s.
Cubism contained the seeds of Davis’s new direction, as both Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque depicted or incorporated collaged bits of signage and newsprint into their work. But Davis understood the power of branding, and so, for example, a 1924 still life of a glass paired with a lightbulb is titled Edison Mazda, after the bulb’s manufacturer. Even an abstracted version of a similar arrangement is careful to maintain a semblance of the bulb’s logo. Likewise, one of Davis’s best-known images—a bottle of Odol mouthwash (still being sold today) against a green-and-white checkered background—comes this close to Andy Warhol without quite matching him. Nonetheless, these and other works mark Davis as a progenitor of 1960s Pop Art and even, arguably, 1980s appropriation and commodity fetish art.
The pleasures of Davis’s work, though, aren’t limited to what his paintings may or may not have anticipated. The spirited Swing Landscape from 1938, for instance, is a riotous jumble of color and form that distills Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger into a delirious paean to New York City. As the decades passed and Davis neared the end of his life, his painting became looser, simpler and more all-over in composition, a jubilant mix of textual fragments and bold shapes that nodded to both Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.
Davis’s work differed from the latter because he saw no irony in the melding of high and low culture. He didn’t use mouthwash and lightbulbs to storm the ramparts of good taste. They were, rather, signposts in a landscape of optimism: a place where native ingenuity was busy building the future.