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Stuart Davis: In Full Swing at Whitney Museum of American Art, June 10 – September 25, 2016

Photographs by Corrado Serra.

“Stuart Davis has been called one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century and the best American artist of his generation, his art hailed as a precursor of the rival styles of pop and geometric color abstraction,” remarks Barbara Haskell. “Faced with the choice early in his career between realism and pure abstraction, he invented a vocabulary that harnessed the grammar of abstraction to the speed and simultaneity of modern America. By merging the bold, hard-edged style of adverstising with the conventions of avant-garde painting, he created an art endowed with the vitality and dynamic rhythms that he saw as uniquely modern and American. In the process, Davis achieved a rare synthesis: an art that is resolutely abstract yet at the same time exudes the spirit of popular culture.”

Exhibition entrance

Exhibition entrance and Gallery 1

Left to right: Odol, 1924; Electric Bulb, 1924; Edison Mazda, 1924; Odol, 1924

Left: Gallery 2. Egg Beater No. 2, 1928. Right: Gallery 3. New York Mural, 1932

Gallery 3. Right: New York Mural, 1932. Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida

Installation view of Gallery 2

Gallery 3. Center: Swing Landscape, 1938. Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, Bloomington; allocated by the U.S. Government, commissioned through the New Deal Art Projects

Installation view of Gallery 3

Gallery 3. Left: Mural for Studio B, WNYC, Municipal Broadcasting Company, 1939. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; lent by the City of New York, 1965

Gallery 4. Left to right: For Internal Use Only, 1944-45; Shapes of Landscape #3, 1940; Report from Rockport, 1940

Gallery 5. Left to right: Switchski’s Syntax, 1961; Little Giant Still Life (Black and White Version), 1953; Little Giant Still Life, 1950

Installation view of Gallery 5

Gallery 5. Left to right: Memo #2, 1956; Landscape Gloucester, 1922/1951/1957; Colonial Cubism, 1954

Installation view of galleries

Gallery 6. Center left to right: Percolator, 1927; Owh! in San Pao, 1951

Installation view of Gallery 6

Left to right: Memo, 1956; Tournos, 1954, Shapes of Landscape Space, 1939; Landscape, 1932/1935

Installation view of Gallery 6

Gallery 6. Left to right: Something on the 8 Ball, 1953-54; Tropes de Teens, 1956; Première, 1957

Gallery 6. Left to right: Cliché; 1955; Detail Study for “Cliché”; 1955; Ready-to-Wear, 1955; American Painting, 1932/1942–54

Gallery 7. Left: Pochade, 1956-58. Right: Study for “The Paris Bit”, 1951/1957-60

Gallery 7. Left to right: Contranuities, 1963; Unfinished Business, 1962; Fin, 1962–64

Co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.. The exhibition will be on view at the Whitney, June 10 – September 25, 2016, at the National Gallery of Art, November 20, 2016 – March 5, 2017, at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, April 8 –  August 6, 2017, and at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas,  September 16, 2017 – January 8, 2018.

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