Stuart Davis and American Abstraction: A Masterpiece in Focus

Stuart Davis was born in Philadelphia into an artistic family on December 7, 1892. His mother was a sculptor, and his father, most notably, was the art editor of the now defunct Philadelphia Press, a newspaper that included among its employees several of the artist-reporters now known as "The Eight" (e.g., Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, and William Glackens). Through this connection, Stuart Davis became a close friend of Sloan and moved to New York in 1909 to attend Henri's school, where he studied until 1912. One year later, the artist included five watercolors in the International Exhibition of Modern Art, also known as the Armory Show, and became one of its youngest exhibitors. This exhibition introduced European avant-garde art to many Americans for the first time, and Davis later described his response to the Armory Show in New York as being "the greatest shock to me—the greatest single influence I have experienced in my work."

By the early 1920s, the artist began to utilize the vocabulary of Synthetic Cubism to capture what he viewed as the American scene: jazz, radio, film, and consumer products. His use of strong, simplified forms and bold, vibrant colors expressed his interest in abstract content and two-dimensional design as the basis of what he viewed as the new American art. Jazz and swing music, which Davis saw as a musical counterpart to abstract art, were especially significant factors in his artistic development. He explained later in life that: "For me at that time jazz was the only thing that corresponded to an authentic art in America . . . I think all my paintings, at least in part, come from this influence."

In the 1930s, the artist enlarged his canvases to fulfill the ever-growing requirements of mural painting. Besides the Williamsburg Housing Project commission, which led to the creation of Swing Landscape, Davis also painted murals for Radio City Music Hall (1932) and the New York World's Fair (1939), to name a few. The subject matter of the Williamsburg mural, the Gloucester waterfront, was not new for Davis. In fact, the artist had spent numerous summers at this locale, and had already amassed a significant body of work on this subject. He found this particular Massachusetts fishing village to be "the place I had been looking for. It had the brilliant light of Provincetown, but with the important additions of topographical severity and the architectural beauties of the Gloucester schooner." In Swing Landscape, we see his interest in the nautical details of this waterfront area through the juxtaposition of sails, masts, and girders, which gyrate back and forth with a rhythmic tempo comparable to the syncopated beat of jazz music.