Few American painters have been more articulate than Stuart Davis (1892-1964) about the purposes of their art, yet throughout a long and distinguished career as a champion of American modernism Davis was clearly troubled about the way he should best define his relation to the aesthetic issue that was paramount in his own work and that would become increasingly crucial to the modernist movement in this country—the issue of abstraction. There were moments in his later years—the period in which abstraction came to dominate American painting —when he simply disavowed all connection with abstract art. “I regret that I have long been ‘type-cast’ as ‘Abstract,’” he wrote in 1951, “because my interest in Abstractions is practically zero. Real Abstract art exists only in Academic painting, or in the minds of Art critics, historians and iconographers.”¹ Such assertions were plainly contradicted by his own painting, for as anyone can see in the splendid retrospective exhibition of his paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Davis was in and out and around abstraction—but mostly smack in the middle of it—in a good deal of the art he produced in the last half of his career.² Such denials are also contradicted by his many earlier statements in defense of abstraction. In 1940, for example, he wrote that “Abstract art, in the most broad use of the term, is the actual progressive force in the art of our epoch.” Moreover, the terms he most consistently used in describing his own