Arts and Letters

It is startling to realize that before Stuart Davis there was no American painting which was, in subject motivation at least, indigenous. All of our previous painting had sprung from sources in our colonial past—specifically from Europe. Unencumbered by nostalgia (which he loathed) Davis perceived with stunning clarity the visual phenomenon of twentieth-century America, and in so doing, revealed it to all of us in a metaphor which seemed especially invented for the purpose. He nailed down in colors of the wildest intensity the clanging vulgarity, the energy, the mechanized, the dehumanized statement of our civilization's shrill heartbeat, all in the hard rhythms of jazz which he loved obsessively.

Stuart died on June twenty-fourth in an ambulance en route to Roosevelt Hospital. I cannot help speculating on how this curiously apt circumstance would have appealed to his sense of irony—this fast-moving vehicle, siren blaring, dashing through crowded streets festooned with neon lights—and not making it. Being a rationalist with a particularly skeptical attitude towards the medical profession, he would have understood failures in the improvisations characteristic of our life, without questioning their authenticity.

The biographical facts of Stuart Davis's life will never lend themselves to fictional treatment. They have a strangely astringent matter-of-factness which was so characteristic of the man who looked like a horse-player, led a life of domestic tranquility with his wife Roselle and son Earl, who spoke esoteric jive while contemplating ideas of the greatest subtlety, expressed frequently in tidy prose (which I hope some day to see published).

Success (that is, the success that can be measured in material terms) came late to Stuart, although the highest assessments granted by his peers, the critics, and the art world in general were of long standing, and he was widely recognized as one of the great forces of twentieth-century art.

He was born in Philadelphia in 1894, the son of artist parents who had met while students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His father, art editor of the old Philadelphia Press, was a friend of the "Eight," most of whom were working with him at the time—Sloan, Glackens, Luks, Shinn, Henri, etc. When the Davis family moved to Newark, Stuart studied with Henri, who by then (1910) had established a school in New York.

"The school," said Stuart in later years, "was regarded as radical and revolutionary in its methods, and it was." Here he was encouraged to explore the metropolitan environment—in Stuart's words, "Enthusiasm for running around and drawing things in the raw ran high." And again, "The Henri School took art off the academic pedestal and by affirming its origins in the life of the day, developed a critical sense toward social values in the student." Obviously this was the beginning of a commitment which he never abandoned, although his supreme impatience with the doctrinaire was widely publicized.

The Armory Show of 1913 initiated that dazzling moment of awareness in the United States when the existence of the modern movement was unfolded. This exposure to experimental and abstract art Stuart found profoundly invigorating, and it was the beginning of his involvement in the color-space synthesis from which his ultimate aesthetic vocabulary evolved. A trip to France in 1928 offered a congenial working climate for a year. He left with regret, for France in the twenties was the undisputed Nirvana of the artist. However, expatriation for Davis was out of the question. He is quoted as saying, "As an American I had need for the impersonal dynamics of New York City." He never again left the city except for summer visits to Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the last of these was in 1934. This certainly was not cultural jingoism—it was a man's declaration of faith in the soil which nourished the roots of his creativity.

To gain further insight into what kind of a man Stuart Davis was, I have been studying what I knew of his culture-heroes, searching for a pattern into which they might all fit. Here is a list of some of them: Earl (Father) Hines, pianist; Dan Parker, sports reporter; Loren Eiseley, anthropologist; Sammy Baugh, football player; Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician; Louis Armstrong, trumpeter—all notably fine performers, and perhaps the only thing they have in common is excellence in fields that were relevant to Davis's fastidious and complex exploration of the American soil.

I never learned whether or not there were any painters in Stuart Davis's personal pantheon. In writing about the Armory Show, he mentioned that he respected particularly Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Matisse. In his old studio on Seventh Avenue, I remember a single photograph clipped from an art magazine hanging among his own paintings on wall space where there was little to spare. This was a photograph of Seurat working in his Paris studio. Perhaps it was the superb quality of the photograph which he found compelling enough to claim a place on those crowded walls—or maybe it was admiration of Seurat, who, like Davis, was a master of clarity and order.