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.