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Stuart Davis' Taste for Modern American Culture
The following is a revised version of the original article. The revised version was posted online on Friday, April 25, 2008.
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What was Stuart Davis' response to and opinion of modern American popular culture? The existing scholarship on Davis, being mostly formalist criticism, hardly says. Davis has entered the canon of American modernism because of his talent for pictorial composition and mastery of European modernist styles which he brilliantly Americanized.This basis for his canonical status fails to account for Davis'exploration through painting and drawing of modern American life as manifest in everyday household objects and the mass-produced imagery of advertising, package design, and the media. It is possible, by utilizing twentieth-century cultural theory, to discern Davis' attitude toward the commodity capitalism that fueled enormous prosperity in the United States during his lifetime and which appear often in his oeuvre. Davis was able
to think of painting in terms of formal and non-formal content simultaneously,
a fact which the mostly formalist approaches to him has obscured.
In his 1935 essay "Abstract Painting in America," Davis wrote that
a painting is "a two-dimensional plane surface and the process
of making a painting is the act of defining two-dimensional space
on that surface."1 He was very concerned with
visually satisfying and engaging forms, colors, and compositions,
but he never distanced his art from non-formal expression; quite
to the contrary, he wholeheartedly embraced social and ideological
content in his art. Davis became an artist under the influence
of Robert Henri and the Ash Can School, and the sociological perspective
of this modern urban realism stayed with him his entire life.
In the 1930s, Davis was active in Marxist politicsBhe read Marx,
Lenin, and related political thinkersand was a supporter of the
poor and the working classes in their struggle to improve their
lives during the Great Depression.2
Davis considered art to have a vital role in society, as he explained in great detail in his 1940 essay Abstract Painting Today: The sociological theorist says that art is a social expression and changes as society changes, and so it does.... . [The sociological theory of art] conceives [of] art as a social function changed and molded by the social forces in its environment merely in a passive way.... . This viewpoint fails to see that the work of art itself changes the emotions and ideas of people.3 He wrote in Abstract Art in the American Scene that modern art has not changed the social function of art but has kept it alive by using as its subject matter the new and interesting relationships of form and color which are everywhere apparent in our environment."4 Davis believed art could change people's lives, that it could affect the emotions and thinking of people, that it reflected social changes but could also produce them.Davis believed modern art in general, and of course his art in particular, was inextricably related in style and subject to modern life, particularly in the tangible manifestations of modernity such as the wide variety of industrially mass-produced commodities that transformed everyday life and made possible many new experienceslights, sounds, spaces, and speedsthat were all quintessentially modern and American. Davis discussed the closeness between modern art and modern life often in his essays. His thoughts are close in spirit, more than in style, to the ideas on modern technology and how it should manifest itself in modern art espoused by the Cubist Fernand Leger and the Futurists. Davis wrote in "The Cube Root" that "modern pictures deal with contemporary subject matter in terms of art. The artist does not exercise his freedom in a non-material world. Science has created a new environment, in which new forms, lights, speeds and spaces, are a reality."5 In Is There a Revolution in the Arts he wrote that "we [modern artists] prefer the modern works because they are closer to our daily experience. They were painted by men who lived, and who still live, in the revolutionary lights, speeds, and spaces of today, which science and art have made possible."6 Leger and the Futurists were excited by the advances in technology and industry that they had witnessed or anticipated in the early twentieth century.7 They believed everyday life would be easier and more enjoyable because these technological developments would filter into industry, commerce, and private life. The exalting attitude toward modern technology of the Futurists is clearly declared in "The Manifesto of the Futurist Painters," a joint effort of 1910 by Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Giacomo Severini, when they wrote:
Davis offered
an explanation of the relationship between modern art and modern
technology in Is There a Revolution in the Arts that essentially
summarizes the ideas of Leger and the various Futurists in declaring
that modern art is largely an impassioned response to everyday life
and that the relationship between modern art and life is so fluid
that the two are inseparable. He wrote that:
In "The Cube
Root" Davis enumerated some of the tangible, visible aspects of
everyday modern life which inspired his own work:
Some of the things which have made me want to paint, outside of art, are: American wood and iron work of the past; Civil War and skyscraper architecture; the brilliant colors on gasoline stations; chain-store fronts; and taxi-cabs; the music of Bach; synthetic chemistry; the poetry of Rimbeau; fast travel by train, auto, and aeroplane [sic] which brought new and multiple perspectives; electric signs, the landscape and boats of Gloucester, Massachusetts; five and ten cent store kitchen utensils; movies and radio; Earl Hines hot piano and negro jazz music in general, etc. In one way or another, the quality of these things plays a role in determining the character of my paintings. Not in the sense of describing them in graphic images, but by predetermining an analogous dynamics in the design, which becomes a new part of the American environment....just Color-Space Compositions [sic] celebrating the resolution of stresses set up by some aspects of the American scene.10 In "Modernism
and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts," his groundbreaking essay of
1981, Thomas Crow writes that avant-garde art has repeatedly been
inspired, influenced, and renewed by mass culture and everyday life.
Crow reminds us of the many instances in which modern art borrows
certain visual forms or aspects of content from mass culture, sometimes
in very profound ways and other times in very subtle ways, beginning
in Cubist collages and continuing through Dada and Constructivism,
even affecting such purist abstraction as the late work of Mondrian,
and becoming the central element in Pop and much postmodern art.
Crow thinks the issue of quality remains the exclusive domain of
high art, an opinion Davis might have held, but he believes that
modern (high) art is greatly influenced and conditioned by mass
culture, that mass culture is "prior and determining, modernism
is its effect" in that "mass culture has determined the form high
culture must assume."11It is in perceiving mass culture
as the source and inspiration for avant-garde, modern art that Crow
and Davis so obviously agree. Davis' closeness to Crow's thinking
is clearly indicated in his enumeration of his inspirations outside
of art in "The Cube Root." Davis does not seem to have been preoccupied
with distinctions between high and low in art, although he was surely
aware of them.Davis was not totally uncritical of mass culture and
capitalism. In "What About Modern Art and Democracy?,"
Davis criticized capitalism for its tendency to manipulate the public
in its search for huge profits. In this article, Davis wrote
that capitalists use their wealth and influence to glorify the representational
art that depicts distinctly American subjects (the people, landscapes,
and buildings of the United States) in ways which emphasize their
American identity and values in order to exploit a reactionary,
provincial perspective of life that serves their hunger for profits.
He placed some of the blame for this exploitation on the public
itself, which he considers eager for advances in industrial commodities
but in favor of old-fashioned values in art and culture. Davis
wrote:
Lucky Strike
of 1921 [Fig. 1] features an array of fragmented motifs abstracted
from the packaging for that cigarette brand which have been juxtaposed
in bold, contrasting patterns. This painting captures the
effect of abrupt opposition and deformation found in Cubist collage,
but does so artificially, since it is entirely executed in oil.
The arrangement of forms loosely simulates what a cigarette
package would look like if dismantled and flattened.13
Davis seems to be using Cubism to analyze the visual logic and psychological
effects of commercial packaging. Lucky Strike engages
Crows claim that mass culture and high art are on parallel paths
in the search for greater understanding of life, except that the
relationship between mass culture and art in Davis painting is not
parallel: mass culture is drawn into art in the search for understanding.
Davis' works should not be taken as slavish, uncritical acceptance
or celebration of mass-media imagery and industrially-produced goods,
as they often are. In fact, skepticism may be imbued in many
of Davis' works. Perhaps the abrupt, confusing arrangement
of fragmented forms refers to the artificiality and deception of
clever package design and advertising, which is directed at consumers
and is intended to lure them into desiring and then purchasing an
item. Davis admitted in his essay on his 1951 painting Visa
[Fig. 2] that the painting was inspired by an advertisement in a
matchbook cover which he found boring and hoped to make interesting
in his series of paintings based on it. As with his paintings
of commercial products from the 1920s, Visa and the other
"Champion" paintings were initiated by contact with mass culture.
He said his use of the word "else," as in "something else" or "somewhere
else," indicated his belief that all subject matter was equivalent,
but that even though certain words would automatically convey specific
meanings, he chose to avoid conveying them, being more concerned
with formal issues.14 However, considering the
continuity of Davis' theories, it is difficult to believe that "else"
is without any meanings other than purely formal effects.
Instead, the vagueness of "else" may refer to the monotony and simplicity
of mass-media imagery, that one image inspired by mass-media imagery
but then reconceptualized by the modern artist is nothing more or
less than something "else".
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