Seeing Life In Jazz Tempo

By ROBERT HUGHES

To understand the career of Stuart Davis (1892-1964), the great American Modernist whose centenary show is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City through Feb. 16, you have to imagine a time when American painting hardly mattered to Europe, and when the idea of an avant-garde scarcely mattered to Americans -- except as a source of laughs.

That time is far back, of course. America, in its eager embrace of the new, industrialized and academized the idea of avant-garde production so long ago that the notion of an unpopular, provincial Modernism seems remote. But 60 years ago it was very much a fact. In 1932 a New York critic urged the Metropolitan to buy a Davis, suggesting that it should hang on "the landings of the stairways, or possibly the Tea Room" -- obviously not in the main galleries, where the main art was.

Davis' rise from the stairway is achieved now, but it was slow. When American Modernism triumphed, from about 1960 on, it did so largely without Davis: its beneficiaries were the Abstract Expressionists, and later the Pop artists. Davis' pragmatism, the empirical and logical qualities of his work that seem so admirable now and connect him back to the best strain in 19th century American art -- Audubon through Homer and Eakins to the Ashcan School -- actually counted against him. What the postwar art world liked was "spirituality" and "sublimity," the tincture of melancholy elevation. But Davis had always liked the American vernacular, the look of the street, the jostle and visual punch of signs, life imagined in jazz tempo, hard-edged, Cubist-based and infused with optimism. So that left him on the margin.

And then, when Pop came along, his reputation was only a little enhanced by it. Davis had delved images from the commercial culture of America before the Pop artists were even born. The classic one is Odol, 1924, in which the bent- neck bottle of a mouth disinfectant is presented, plain and planar -- name brand, slogan and all -- as its own icon, the ancestor of Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes. But Davis' work was grounded in Cubism, as that of the later artists was not; the Cubist scheme of fragments of media culture and packaging (newspaper headlines, labels and so on), absorbed into a painterly matrix, gave Davis his way of handling the American cityscape. It was brasher than Cubism but far more attached to deliberate aesthetic construction than Pop -- and with none of the new movement's camp flavor.

So he was shrugged off as a distant relative, at best, of whom the expanded art audience of the '60s and '70s knew little. In fact, the Met's show is the first Davis retrospective in a quarter of a century. For the younger half of the museum public, it should be an eye opener, because Davis' work testifies -- as art historian Diane Kelder says in her catalog introduction -- to an "aesthetic continuity and intellectual integrity . . . sadly absent from the cynical eclecticism and self-aggrandizement that has characterized much American painting in recent years."

Davis' father was a journalist and cartoonist, and the son would later describe his own role as "a cool Spectator-Reporter at an Arena of Hot Events." His art teacher from 1909 to 1912 was Robert Henri, realist and member of the Ashcan School, who confirmed Davis in the populist social conscience that had been embedded in his work from the beginning, when he drew for the radical monthly the Masses. The early work shows Davis chewing through a mass of influences (Munch, Van Gogh, Matisse), absorbing the first impact of Modernism that came with the Armory Show in 1913. But even when trying on the jackets of style, Davis comes across as a virile, decisive young painter. There is nothing hesitant about the broad, sour-colored patterning of clouds and their reflections on shallow waters in Ebb Tide -- Provincetown, 1913.

He went to Europe only once -- a stay of nine months in Paris, in 1928-29, which was just long enough to dispel the inferiority complex of the provincial. Not for Davis the dilettante expatriate's habit of looking back home with contempt: Paris "allowed me to observe the enormous vitality of the American atmosphere as compared to Europe and made me regard the necessity of working in New York as a positive advantage." But it is inconceivable that he would have developed his rigorous belief in the integrity of pictorial form without European models.

He loved the workaday world, the pragmatic scene: traffic lights and building sites and egg beaters, the bright primary colors of ships' gear in Gloucester, Mass., anchors and buoys and coils of hawser. Antismokers will be displeased to find that Davis also exalted smoking as a proper activity in a man's world. Cigarette papers and Bull Durham tobacco turn up in his still lifes, and one of his best murals -- he loved to work on the mural scale -- was commissioned in 1932 for the men's lounge of Radio City Music Hall. Originally given the Hemingwayesque title Men Without Women, it features the biggest Havana cigar in the history of Western art and is now much embrowned by real tobacco smoke, its whites dulled to ivory.

Walt Whitman, Davis saw, was "our one big artist," and no American painter had rivaled his achievement as a celebrant of American identity. He wrote: "I too feel the thing Whitman felt and I too will express it in pictures -- America -- the wonderful place we live in." You see him enumerating the objects of work like Whitman making poetry from the litany of their names:

The shapes arise!

Shapes of factories, arsenals,

foundries, markets,

Shapes of the two-threaded tracks of

railroads,

Shapes of the sleepers of bridges,

vast frameworks, girders, arches,

Shapes of the fleets of barges, tows,

lake and canal craft . . .

He adored jazz -- "It don't mean a thing/If it ain't got that swing," he wrote in the margin of one of his paintings, quoting Duke Ellington. His obsession with syncopation and variations on a melodic figure winds into works like the great housing-project mural of 1938, Swing Landscape, in which familiar Davis signs for bridge, cable, girder, mast and wall jive and flicker in a matrix of apoplectically energetic color. In the last decade of Davis' career the signs take over completely, as in Schwitzki's Syntax, 1961, dominated by the single name of a spark plug: CHAMPION.

It may be that this word was also a gesture of defiance toward younger artists. Davis continued to develop as an artist right up to his death, but from the '40s on, he had troubles. Intimations of old-fashionedness began to rub him the wrong way. As he passed 50, a new generation of artists was treading on his tail. And, like many other left-leaning liberals of the time, he was devastated by the pact between Hitler and Stalin, and by Russia's invasion of Finland in 1939.

Davis' reaction to this brutal display of Stalinist tyranny was to sheer away from all connection with the artistic left. He gave up on his dream of a politically didactic avant-gardism -- the hope that had haunted American art in the '30s, as it has come to haunt it again, more weakly, today. There was, he announced, "nothing like a good solid ivory tower for the production of art." When the Abstract Expressionists emerged, he rejected them crustily. "Art is not a Subjective Expression to me," he wrote in his usual flurry of capitals, "whether it be called Dadaism, Surrealism, Non-Objectivism . . . But when paintings live up to these Advance Agent Press Releases, I turn on the Ball Game." Outpublicized by the new direction of American art, Davis took up a defensive stance on the periphery. This exhibition should return him to the center, where he truly belongs.