Lines broad and narrow, rectangles, trapezoids, triangles,
parallelograms, columns, circles, planes, and words; shapes named
and eccentric, lines as shapes, words as shapes, words as lines;
simple, unmodulated reds, yellows, blues, greens, oranges, and
pinks; black. Cool, unemotional, and concerned with the
objectivity—the universal appeal—of these most basic elements of
pictorial space, the painter Stuart Davis (1892–1964) reminds me
less of other painters than of T. S. Eliot.
Both were intellectually formalist and temperamentally possessed
of a reticence animated in their work by bursts of a sort of
vaudevillian mania. Along with other modern contemporaries, both
men reveled in the poetry of signage, jazz dissonance, the
fecund appositions of sedate, old-world craft and the
speedy, electrified innovations of the mechanical age. Both were
cosmopolitans, at home with European ideas and art. And, in
contrast to so many visual artists, Davis was verbally
articulate, capable of an epigrammatic felicity and humor worthy
of a poet: “A degree of sentimentality can be tolerated in
people, but in painting the words bathetic and emetic are
synonymous.”
To see the sixteen “major late paintings” together in
Salander-O’Reilly’s typically marvelous show was to realize how
underrated this nevertheless highly esteemed artist still is.
His work stands apart from that of other early American
modernists in, among other things, the specificity of its look—no
one, I think, could mistake a Davis for someone else’s painting.
He managed to transcend the impersonality of his means to create
wholly original works, personal as a profile. Yet,