Art: Growth of an Abstractionist

The exhibition that belatedly introduced Van Gogh, Cezanne, Matisse, Rouault, Braque and Picasso to the U.S. public—Manhattan’s Armory Show in 1913 —also inspired a young U.S. artist named Stuart Davis to change his ways. Today Stuart Davis, who looks somewhat like a shy bulldog, is among the few painters to translate Paris abstractionism into a jazzy U.S. idiom.

His first (1913) look at the French moderns, says Davis, “gave me the same excitement I got from the numerical precision of the Negro piano players in the Newark saloons. I resolved that I would quite definitely have to become a ‘modern’ artist. It took an awful long time. I soon learned to think of color more or less objectively so that I could paint a green tree red without batting an eye. Purple or green faces didn’t bother me at all, and I even learned to sew buttons and glue excelsior on the canvas without feeling any sense of guilt.”

No More Optical Truths. What did trouble him was a haunting conviction that trees, red or green, should have leaves and grow out of the ground. It took him many years to learn to paint pictures without worrying about what they represented. The big moment came in 1927 when he got interested in an eggbeater and nailed it to a table in his bedroom. He painted the eggbeater steadily for twelve months.

“Gradually through this concentration I focused on the logical elements,” he explains. “The result was the elimination of a number of particularized optical truths which I had formerly concerned myself with.” By the time he got to Eggbeater No. 5 (see cut), he had freed himself pretty well. It still contained some “optical truths”—but nobody could ever beat an egg with the kind of beater he painted. Davis was well on his way to abstractionism.

But Davis doesn’t consider himself an abstractionist; he tags himself as just a painter who has finally learned what not to paint. His father was Edward Wyatt Davis, art director of the Philadelphia Press (TIME, Oct. 29). His first teacher was Robert Henri, leader of the “Ash Can School” of painting, who scorned pastoral prettiness in art. In his teens Davis obediently wandered the streets of New York, sketching what he saw. He learned to love the rattling, ironwork kaleidoscope of city life, the eye-catching colors of chain-store fronts, gasoline pumps and taxicabs; the bright blinking of electric signs, and the hot beat and glare of Negro jazz. John Sloan, one of the Philadelphia Press artists, chose Davis’ early work for the magazine The Masses, the bible of “Ash Can” art.

The Price of Persistence. As Davis got more & more abstract, he found his paintings harder to sell. For five years he earned $21 a week on a WPA art project. Today, at 50, his persistence is beginning to pay off. Critics have come to consider him one of the most powerful pioneers of modern art in the U.S. Last week Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art was showing the first retrospective exhibition of Stuart Davis’ paintings since 1926.

Enthusiasts say that Davis’ patchwork interpretations of the American scene have a warmth and vitality rare in U.S. art. They even go for his latter-day curlicues which have the hard, mirthless gaiety of a Broadway shooting gallery. The most recent painting in the show is also one of the most abstract. A busy hodge-podge of what Davis calls “colors and the shapes they inhabit,” it is titled For Internal Use Only (see cut). With a shy, sly smile, Davis describes the title as “a pun, or slight witticism.”