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Text File | 1992-10-19 | 8KB | 174 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 60

Seeing Life In Jazz Tempo


A major show gives the neglected Stuart Davis his due as a great,
brash chronicler of the urban American scene

By ROBERT HUGHES


    To understand the career of Stuart Davis (1892-1964), the
great American Modernist whose centenary show is on view at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City through Feb. 16, you
have to imagine a time when American painting hardly mattered
to Europe, and when the idea of an avant-garde scarcely mattered
to Americans -- except as a source of laughs.

    That time is far back, of course. America, in its eager
embrace of the new, industrialized and academized the idea of
avant-garde production so long ago that the notion of an
unpopular, provincial Modernism seems remote. But 60 years ago
it was very much a fact. In 1932 a New York critic urged the
Metropolitan to buy a Davis, suggesting that it should hang on
"the landings of the stairways, or possibly the Tea Room" --
obviously not in the main galleries, where the main art was.

    Davis' rise from the stairway is achieved now, but it was
slow. When American Modernism triumphed, from about 1960 on, it
did so largely without Davis: its beneficiaries were the
Abstract Expressionists, and later the Pop artists. Davis'
pragmatism, the empirical and logical qualities of his work that
seem so admirable now and connect him back to the best strain
in 19th century American art -- Audubon through Homer and Eakins
to the Ashcan School -- actually counted against him. What the
postwar art world liked was "spirituality" and "sublimity," the
tincture of melancholy elevation. But Davis had always liked the
American vernacular, the look of the street, the jostle and
visual punch of signs, life imagined in jazz tempo, hard-edged,
Cubist-based and infused with optimism. So that left him on the
margin.

    And then, when Pop came along, his reputation was only a
little enhanced by it. Davis had delved images from the
commercial culture of America before the Pop artists were even
born. The classic one is Odol, 1924, in which the bent-neck
bottle of a mouth disinfectant is presented, plain and planar
-- name brand, slogan and all -- as its own icon, the ancestor
of Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes. But Davis' work was grounded in
Cubism, as that of the later artists was not; the Cubist scheme
of fragments of media culture and packaging (newspaper
headlines, labels and so on), absorbed into a painterly matrix,
gave Davis his way of handling the American cityscape. It was
brasher than Cubism but far more attached to deliberate
aesthetic construction than Pop -- and with none of the new
movement's camp flavor.

    So he was shrugged off as a distant relative, at best, of
whom the expanded art audience of the '60s and '70s knew
little. In fact, the Met's show is the first Davis retrospective
in a quarter of a century. For the younger half of the museum
public, it should be an eye opener, because Davis' work
testifies -- as art historian Diane Kelder says in her catalog
introduction -- to an "aesthetic continuity and intellectual
integrity . . . sadly absent from the cynical eclecticism and
self-aggrandizement that has characterized much American
painting in recent years."

    Davis' father was a journalist and cartoonist, and the son
would later describe his own role as "a cool Spectator-Reporter
at an Arena of Hot Events." His art teacher from 1909 to 1912
was Robert Henri, realist and member of the Ashcan School, who
confirmed Davis in the populist social conscience that had been
embedded in his work from the beginning, when he drew for the
radical monthly the Masses. The early work shows Davis chewing
through a mass of influences (Munch, Van Gogh, Matisse),
absorbing the first impact of Modernism that came with the
Armory Show in 1913. But even when trying on the jackets of
style, Davis comes across as a virile, decisive young painter.
There is nothing hesitant about the broad, sour-colored
patterning of clouds and their reflections on shallow waters in
Ebb Tide -- Provincetown, 1913.

    He went to Europe only once -- a stay of nine months in
Paris, in 1928-29, which was just long enough to dispel the
inferiority complex of the provincial. Not for Davis the
dilettante expatriate's habit of looking back home with
contempt: Paris "allowed me to observe the enormous vitality of
the American atmosphere as compared to Europe and made me regard
the necessity of working in New York as a positive advantage."
But it is inconceivable that he would have developed his
rigorous belief in the integrity of pictorial form without
European models.

    He loved the workaday world, the pragmatic scene: traffic
lights and building sites and egg beaters, the bright primary
colors of ships' gear in Gloucester, Mass., anchors and buoys
and coils of hawser. Antismokers will be displeased to find that
Davis also exalted smoking as a proper activity in a man's
world. Cigarette papers and Bull Durham tobacco turn up in his
still lifes, and one of his best murals -- he loved to work on
the mural scale -- was commissioned in 1932 for the men's
lounge of Radio City Music Hall. Originally given the
Hemingwayesque title Men Without Women, it features the biggest
Havana cigar in the history of Western art and is now much
embrowned by real tobacco smoke, its whites dulled to ivory.

    Walt Whitman, Davis saw, was "our one big artist," and no
American painter had rivaled his achievement as a celebrant of
American identity. He wrote: "I too feel the thing Whitman felt
and I too will express it in pictures -- America -- the
wonderful place we live in." You see him enumerating the objects
of work like Whitman making poetry from the litany of their
names:

    The shapes arise!
    Shapes of factories, arsenals,
    foundries, markets,
    Shapes of the two-threaded tracks of
    railroads,

    Shapes of the sleepers of bridges,
    vast frameworks, girders, arches,
    Shapes of the fleets of barges, tows,
    lake and canal craft . . .

    He adored jazz -- "It don't mean a thing/If it ain't got
that swing," he wrote in the margin of one of his paintings,
quoting Duke Ellington. His obsession with syncopation and
variations on a melodic figure winds into works like the great
housing-project mural of 1938, Swing Landscape, in which
familiar Davis signs for bridge, cable, girder, mast and wall
jive and flicker in a matrix of apoplectically energetic color.
In the last decade of Davis' career the signs take over
completely, as in Schwitzki's Syntax, 1961, dominated by the
single name of a spark plug: CHAMPION.

    It may be that this word was also a gesture of defiance
toward younger artists. Davis continued to develop as an artist
right up to his death, but from the '40s on, he had troubles.
Intimations of old-fashionedness began to rub him the wrong way.
As he passed 50, a new generation of artists was treading on his
tail. And, like many other left-leaning liberals of the time,
he was devastated by the pact between Hitler and Stalin, and by
Russia's invasion of Finland in 1939.

    Davis' reaction to this brutal display of Stalinist
tyranny was to sheer away from all connection with the artistic
left. He gave up on his dream of a politically didactic
avant-gardism -- the hope that had haunted American art in the
'30s, as it has come to haunt it again, more weakly, today.
There was, he announced, "nothing like a good solid ivory tower
for the production of art." When the Abstract Expressionists
emerged, he rejected them crustily. "Art is not a Subjective
Expression to me," he wrote in his usual flurry of capitals,
"whether it be called Dadaism, Surrealism, Non-Objectivism . . .
But when paintings live up to these Advance Agent Press
Releases, I turn on the Ball Game." Outpublicized by the new
direction of American art, Davis took up a defensive stance on
the periphery. This exhibition should return him to the center,
where