A Tearless World

U.S. painting divides into two epochs: before and after the Armory Show of 1913. That year, from the vaulted bastion of Manhattan's 69th Regiment, Marcel Duchamp's stroboscopic Nude Descending a Staircase strode jerkily into public awareness; Tin Pan Alley came up with That Futuristic Rag; and the nation was swept up in a fever of excitement over something called Modern Art. Of the many artists who rallied behind this great debut of modernism, one stands as the prime mover: Arthur Bowen Davies.

Davies was an odd choice for commander in chief in the modernists' battle against the academics. Though Davies was friendly with the original members of the realist Ashcan School,*his own paintings pictured a vernal never-never land of cavorting nymphs and nice little girls, a tearless world where Purity and Joy joined in allegorical dances and virgins herded unicorns beside an unruffled sea. His work had become vastly popular with the public, and Davies' support for the Armory Show was proportionately influential. He rallied a group of wealthy, art-minded New Yorkers (including his own patronesses. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan and Miss Lizzie P. Bliss), organized a foraging trip to Europe to bring back the best of modern art.

Non-Cubists Were Square. The Armory Show made its point, and it made movements like cubism so popular with collectors that those who failed to embrace it were thought to be square. Even Davies experimented with angular nudes, but they turned out more prismatic than cubistic. Soon Davies found not only his style but also his life altered, for he grew weary of backing a movement with which he had no basic affinity. Always a mystic, he withdrew increasingly into seclusion.

Within a few years he was dabbling in a curious pseudo science called the "lift of inhalation," which maintained that Greek art owed its excellence to the fact that the thorax, not the brain, was the center of the emotions and that all Greek figures were shown consciously inhaling rather than exhaling. After painting the murals for International House at Columbia University in 1924. he suffered a heart attack, went alone to Europe to recuperate. While painting in Florence in 1928, he died. So deeply had he drawn the veil of mystery over his last years that his wife had difficulty in locating his body.

Rhythmic Tranquillity. In Utica, N.Y., where Davies was born 100 years ago, a retrospective collection of his art is now on show. The 98 works at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute include oils, watercolors, two tapestries, and some small bronzes. Some of the oils, like Crescendo (see color), are filled with the slender nudes which Davies used not so much to people his landscapes as to punctuate his rhythmic compositions. And the tranquil quiet of Our River Hudson seems removed by much more than half a century from the birth of the brash modern movement that Davies supported so willingly if not so understandingly.

*John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks, Robert Henri, Everett Shinn.

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