In 1937, Stuart Davis received a commission from the WPA Federal Art Project to paint a mural for a low-income public housing development in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (Then, the neighborhood was a down-market blue-collar enclave, rather than today’s hotbed of trendy, aspiring young artists). Hiring Davis, a radical modernist who spoke a slangy American dialect of Cubism, was a daring move on the part of Burgoyne Diller, the head of the WPA’s Mural Division in New York. The American Scene painters’ idealized farm workers and factory hands were more or less the nation’s official public art of the time, but Diller—who also awarded commissions to vanguardists such as Balcomb Greene, Ilya Bolotowsky, George McNeil, and Willem de Kooning—believed that the Williamsburg tenants, many of them factory workers, “would find painted images of more machines and factories neither interesting nor stimulating.” What would please them, Diller felt, were “abstract patterns painted in strong vibrant colors.”

Davis shared Diller’s distaste for the American Scene, dismissing their work as sentimental and formally reactionary, but he almost certainly resented the implication that he would produce “abstract patterns” for the commission. Davis (who later quarreled with Diller) always denied that he was an abstract artist, insisting that his paintings, no matter how free, inventive, or apparently fragmented, were always rooted in real experience and real perceptions. Still, a major WPAproject in the troubled 1930s was a major project, and Davis seems to have been willing, temporarily, at least, to overlook the wording