July 8, 2016

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Published by The Bee Publishing Company, Newtown, Connecticut

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PAGES 36 & 37

Stuart Davis: In Full Swing

Whitney Museum Of American Art
By James D. Balestrieri
NEW YORK CITY It was the date that did it.
1939.
The thesis of the new survey at the Whitney, Stuart Davis: In Full Swing that, beginning in 1939,
Stuart Davis began to mine his earlier paintings,
which are generally Cubist in inflection, for visual
material that he would transform into what would
become his major, mature, utterly original paintings
sent me racing back to Raymond Chandlers detective fiction.
Chandlers pulp fiction stories for Black Mask, stories like The Curtain were, he believed, formulaic. But when he began writing novels starting in
1939, with The Big Sleep he, as he put it, cannibalized his pulps for material, even while insisting
that they never be collected and republished in his
lifetime. You can hear Stuart Davis echoing what
Chandler often said of his early work that it could
have been better, but if it had been better, it wouldnt
have been published, not in the pulps, anyway.
Curator and head of Modern art at the National
Gallery of Art Harry Coopers outstanding catalog
essay, Unfinished Business: Davis and the Dialect-X of Recursion defines what Davis and, in
my view, Chandler was doing, a practice he describes as recursive, running a course again, not in
order to repeat or vary it, but to appropriate what is
useful and transform it into something else.
Davis and Chandler, two jazz age giants, one a
painter, the other a novelist, take some of the same
aesthetic streets in the very same year in order to
free themselves from their wardens and bust out of
the penitentiaries of their own pasts its a thread
worth pursuing.
According to Cooper, Davis did not engage in the
Modernist habit of painting a series over weeks
or months, as Claude Monet did with his poplars
along the Epte, although that is a related practice,
one that produced some of Daviss major work
the tobacco paintings and the eggbeater still lifes.
Nor is it the actual reworking of older canvases, as
Jackson Pollock did with the 1947 Galaxy, pouring
paint over an earlier brushed painting, although Lucky Strike, 1921. Oil on canvas, 33 by
repainting was not unknown to Davis either, the 18 inches. The Museum of Modern Art, New
most dramatic example being American Painting of York City

Colonial Cubism, 1954. Oil on canvas, 451/8 by 60 inches. Walker Art

Center

1932/4254. Nor is it the phenomenon of a motif

cropping up repeatedly in an artists oeuvre as if of
its own volition... No, what concerns us here is not
an uncannily recurrent image, but a deliberately
recursive artist, one who reached back way back
in order to move forward.
Where Davis saw Picasso on his shoulder, Chandler saw Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain,
whose novels had propelled them from the pulps to
literary fame and legitimacy. In adopting a recursive strategy, Chandler and Davis see themselves,
younger selves, instead of masters who came before. Younger selves sit lightly on the shoulder.
Transcending younger selves is possible, imaginable. As Cooper writes, citing the artists own writings and interviews he did in his later years, Davis
embraced the repetitive quest as the means to confront and conquer his early attachment to Cubism,
to have his chance alone. What made his approach
original is that rather than return to the attachment itself, he returned to himself returning to it.
By defining himself rather than Picasso as predecessor, he put Picasso at a remove, kept him at bay.
Something in Daviss hard edges matches the
hard boiled prose in Chandler. Daviss very personal vision, as it makes itself manifest in his mature
works, runs alongside Philip Marlowes first person
narration. Because we see and read through a single set of eyes, we see only what Davis and Marlowe see. There are loose ends in prose and paint. I
challenge anyone to explain who did what to whom
in Chandlers The Little Sister or to define in any
convincing way the meaning of the twisted ribbonlike form that reoccurs (recurses?) in Daviss later
masterworks.
Is it a circle that doesnt meet, whose ends cross?
is it infinity broken? Is it a loop of line around a
mooring bollard, adapted from one of Daviss early
nautical works? A distillation of the early Christian
fish symbol? The letter O becoming X? X becoming
O? X and O together? All of these? Something else
entirely? Or is it nothing other than what it is? A
signifier without a signified. An unsolved, perhaps
unsolvable mystery.
( continued on page 30 )

Visa, 1951. Oil on canvas, 40 by 52 inches. The Museum of Modern

Art, New York City

30 Antiques and The Arts Weekly July 8, 2016

Stuart Davis: In Full Swing

Whitney Museum Of American Art

Town Square, circa 1929. Watercolor, gouache,

ink and pencil on paper, 15 by 227/8 inches. The
Newark Museum

Report from Rockport, 1940. Oil on canvas, 24

by 30 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Blips and Ifs, 196364. Oil on canvas, 711/8 by 531/8

inches. Amon Carter Museum of American Art

Tropes de Teens, 1956. Oil on canvas, 45 by

60 inches. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington,
D.C. Cathy Carver photo

Place Pasdeloup, 1928. Oil on canvas, 363/8 by

29 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art
( continued from page 1C )
By 1939, Stuart Davis was deep in the throes of
disillusion. The world had been slouching inexorably
toward another war for some years, but the slouch
was becoming a sprint. Stalins nonaggression pact
with Hitler had shaken Daviss left-wing activism
and he began to remove himself and his art from politics. He was painting little and selling less. He was
drinking. Chandler was drinking, too. And making
little money. Artistically, both men had exhausted
the forms they were working in.
As Chandlers pulp fictions become literary novels,
Stuart Daviss Cubist works become something new,
original, exciting.
Side by side, pairs of paintings in the exhibition
present themselves; their recursiveness meets the
eye even as Davis unmoors things we believe we
know from their shapes, leaving only their shapes,
transmuted and mute as to their meaning. Play the
old childs matching game, and Daviss process, and
progress, reveals itself.
The oblique chalkboard black wall with the drawing of a house on it at left in Town Square, 1929,
becomes a uniformly black Perylene Black, perhaps rhombus at left in the 1940 painting Re-

The Paris Bit, 1959. Oil on canvas, 461/8 by 601/16

inches. Whitney Museum of American Art

Swing Landscape, 1938. Oil on canvas, 86 by 1731/8 inches. Indiana University Art Museum
port from Rockport. The outline of the house is still
there, albeit almost unrecognizable as a house without prior comparison with Town Square. Words,
pieces of words, calligraphic lines and squiggles
whose meanings, if they have any, must be grappled
with in terms of the painting rather than according
to external standards.
Garage, which appears in both works, is no longer
merely a sign in Report From Rockport, or, if it is, it
is a sign here of Daviss artistic choice. Indeed, the G is
repeated, varied, scrawled across the canvas, almost a
treble clef in one place, almost in lower case script
a figure eight or symbol of infinity in another.
You can interact with a Stuart Davis painting or a
Philip Marlowe novel on a number of levels. You can
simply enjoy them as beautiful objects, page-turners,
summer viewing and reading. You can try to situate
them in relation to schools, genres, styles where
does Sem fit in relation to Abstract Expressionism
or Pop Art?; where do the Marlowe novels stand in
relation to, say, Ellery Queen or Mike Hammer? Or
you can experience them with what Aaron Copland
called exalted pleasure, watching the narrative and
characters in Chandler or the shapes and colors in
Davis as they provide and deny perspective, as they
dance around one another, morphing and riffing end-

lessly, beyond the confines of the canvas or page.

Parenthetically, it should be noted that the recursive drive in both Davis and Chandler led to success, but not immediate success, nor, for some time,
happiness. Chandler labored miserably in Hollywood for a number of years, while Davis, though he
began to sell again, and was highly respected by his
peers, suffered somewhat in the shadow of postwar
stars like Pollock and de Kooning.
In the interview Cooper delves into, Davis seems to
accept the inevitability of the recursive drive itself,
which he expresses in an appropriately Gertrude
Steinian syntax: I was going to do it over again, and
I did it over again. The over again, twice repeated,
reminds us of his fascination not with pure return
or repetition (anathema to Davis) but with return as
the exploration of other possibilities, untried variations, the else. Daviss recursions are permutations
carried out in time as well as space. A chess player projects the game forward and back again, many
times, before making a move.
Marlowes game is chess. Theres always a classic
chess problem laid out on his board, one with many
solutions or none. As in Daviss paintings, the
who done it? might be solved, but the why remains a
mystery hidden in the heart.

July 8, 2016 Antiques and The Arts Weekly 31

The Mellow Pad, 194551. Oil on canvas, 26 by 421/8 inches. Brooklyn Museum

Owh! in San Pao, 1951. Oil on canvas, 523/16 by 42 inches.

Whitney Museum of American Art

Egg Beater No. 2, 1928. Oil on canvas, 29

by 36 inches. Amon Carter Museum of
American Art

Sem, 1953. Oil on canvas, 52 by 40 inches.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

American Painting, 1932/4254. Oil on canvas, 40 by 50 inches. Joslyn Art Museum,

on extended loan from the University of Nebraska at Omaha Collection.

Percolator, 1927. Oil on canvas, 36 by 29

inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York City

Remakes and reboots are arteries of our culture,

an essential aspect since perhaps the 1930s, for example, when sound displaced silent film. Hollywood
invested in remakes, seeing new potential in old
material. Twenty years later, Technicolor versions of
black and white films became a staple in the industry. Radio hosted Philip Marlowe, Chandler never
wrote. Television filmed Stuart Davis in his studio,
where he spoke of beat up subjects.
Collage, Pop Art, found art, these spring quite naturally out of this milieu, mining popular culture and
the cultural products of the past, made by others.
Artists will reboot advertising, comic books, posters,
photography, anything and everything.
What is particularly interesting about Stuart Davis and, by extension, Raymond Chandler, is how
each mined his own previous work, seeking, in a way,
to abnegate their earlier work and selves and
reboot themselves for larger scales and stages.
The first time I ever saw Larry Batzel he was drunk
outside Sardis in a secondhand Rolls-Royce. Raymond Chandler, The Curtain, 1936

The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was
drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the

Fin, 196264. Casein and masking tape on canvas, 537/8 by

39 inches. Private collection.
All images are estate of Stuart Davis/Licensed by VAGA,
New York.

terrace of The Dancers. Raymond Chandler, The

Long Goodbye, 1953
Saw becomes laid eyes on. Adding Wraith to
Rolls-Royce adds the sense of ghostliness to the
moment. Terry Lennox is pale, clad in white and prematurely white-haired after an incident in the war,
a haunting presence that recurs (recurses? curses
again?) throughout the novel.
1951. Davis, in Owh! In Sao Pao, reboots the arrangement of elements in his 1927 painting Percolator, deconstructing his own Cubist (de)construction. Color in Owh! In Sao Pao denies the illusion
of depth and a third dimension that dominates
Percolator. The words: Else, Et (summer, or is it
Eve, or Exe?) Now, Used and the almost word, the
near word beneath Used are like a teachers notes
on a students composition, exhortations to reject the
past and strive for something else, something new,
something now. Percolator, now that its Owh! In
Sao Pao points a finger at the artist and the viewer
and shouts, Percolate!
Stuart Davis. Raymond Chandler. Both wanted to
be highbrow and lowbrow, to appeal to broad audiences without sacrificing their own personal visions.
To achieve this, they dove into themselves, into their

own works, treating all they had already done as

grist for new mills, as raw materials and media for
the work they really wanted to do. I wonder who else
waits out there: on museum walls, in the waxes of
studio demos, in the stacks of libraries and sides of
old scripts, waiting, in their recursiveness, to be rebooted and rediscovered?
Stuart Davis: In Full Swing is on view at the
Whitney until September 25. It is co-organized
by Barbara Haskell, curator, Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York, and Harry Cooper, curator and head of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C., with Sarah Humphreville, curatorial assistant, Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York.
After its run at the Whitney, it travels to the National Gallery of Art from November 20March 5,
2017. An exhibition catalog by Haskell and Cooper
is available from the Whitney museum shop for $60.
The Whitney Museum of American Art is at 99
Gansevoort Street. For information, www.whitney.
org or 212-570-3600.
Jim Balestrieri is director of J.N. Bartfield Galleries in New York City. A playwright and author, he
writes frequently about the arts.