Captain America, the artist: Crystal Bridges exhibit features work by Stuart Davis

BENTONVILLE -- It's not good form to start out a piece about an exemplary and important museum show by talking about its omissions, but I wish "Stuart Davis: In Full Swing" -- the latest major do to arrive at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art -- had included a few more examples of the artist's very early work.

I'm talking about the Ashcan School paintings Davis completed before he began incorporating the principles of European abstract art into his work following the first major exhibition of modern art in America, the International Exhibition of Modern Art organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors in 1913 (better known as the Armory Show because it was originally hung in New York's 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th streets).

I understand why more of these works aren't included. "In Full Swing" isn't meant to be a career retrospective and the two pre-Armory Show examples provided in the example do the job. There's an intricate pencil drawing Davis did as a Philadelphia teenager that establishes his credibility as a draftsman, and the fine 1912 Self-Portrait (one of eight of the exhibit's paintings that is part of Crystal Bridges' permanent collection) is representative of Davis' pre-Armory Show style.

Given the way his career played out, these early works seem like a footnote and are rightfully viewed by most critics -- some of whom argue that Davis didn't really hit his stride until after World War II -- as part of his apprenticeship. Still, I find melancholy realist works such as City Snow Scene (1911), Tenement Scene, Chinatown and especially Bleecker Street (all finished in 1912) moving, especially when you realize the artist wasn't yet 21 years old.

These paintings betray something of the loneliness and excitement of being young and poor and bohemian in the big city, but also reveal the confident looseness of young Davis' line and the sense of color breaking through in the red laundry sign in Tenement Scene. What you might get from these absent paintings, aside from the assurance that Davis had a craftsman's near absolute control over his facility, is a sense of boyish ambition -- the idea that he was looking for a way to distinguish himself as a great painter.

And not just a great painter -- but a great American painter....

Davis was identified as an up-and-comer early; his father, Ed, was a Philadelphia newspaper illustrator friendly with Robert Henri, the illustrator-turned-painter who believed that art could work as muckraking journalism or like the naturalistic novels of Stephen Crane, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser. (Henri sometimes carried small wood panels and a kit of oils and brushes in his pocket like a reporter's notebook in order that he might catch urban scenes spontaneously, akin to the way social documentarian Jacob Riis used his camera.)

At 16, Davis quit school to study with Henri at his Manhattan art academy, where he met John Sloan, who was to become his early mentor. Based in Greenwich Village, Davis soon began to frequent bars where blues and nascent jazz were played. He quickly became a connoisseur of the form, traveling to Hoboken and Newark to clubs where black musicians turned "the blues, or Tin Pan Alley tunes ... into real music, for the cost of a 5-cent beer."

Davis hadn't studied with Henri six months before he began to show his work alongside Sloan's and other members of the Ashcan cadre. By 1912 he was illustrating the socialist magazine The Masses. Five of his watercolors were selected to be exhibited alongside the Europeans in the Armory Show.

It was at this show where Davis experienced what critic Robert Hughes called "the shock of the new" as he took in the primitivism of Paul Gauguin's Parau na te Varua ino (Words of the Devil) and Henri Matisse's polarizing post-fauvist Blue Nude as well as the analytic cubism of Picasso's Standing Female Nude and Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase.

Seeing his teacher Henri's Figure in Motion, a realistically rendered (but proudly defiant) standing female nude meant as an American riposte to French-style Modernism as well as his own accomplished but modest Servant Girls contrasted with these bold, startling works might have broken something loose in Davis. He later told a curator at the Museum of Modern Art the Armory Show was "the greatest single influence I have experienced."

And it wasn't long before his work reflected the lessons he learned during the show. It wasn't long before Davis was fusing his own American answer to Modernism.

This is where "In Full Swing" truly begins, with Lucky Strike (1921), a Lucky Strike tobacco package, flattened and deconstructed, the trademark and brand signifiers identifiable but rearranged, yet still lined out as precisely as a blueprint. Gone is the artful dithering and sweet mournful quality of Davis' Ashcan paintings; here is color and composition and the first glimpse of a certain upbeat sense of constrained playfulness and joy that would mark Davis' work for the rest of his life.

Davis has moved off the street and shifted his gaze to ordinary household objects of modern still life. As he regards a bottle of Odol mouthwash -- the label claims "it purifies" -- it's easy to see the artist working to reconcile the abstraction which has enraptured him and the realism he considers his heritage. You might look at Odol (1924) and see it as a precursor to Warholian pop art as Davis begins to move away from Henri's journalistic realism into his own world of shape, symbol and color.

...

In 1927, Davis (allegedly) nails an eggbeater, a pair of rubber gloves and an electric fan to a table and proceeds to paint them for a year, turning out canvases that distill the objects into abstract forms, rearranging them into unrecogizability, exploring their relationship to one another and their environment until he arrived at Egg Beater, No. 4, his first true abstract painting.

"My aim," he writes, "was ... to strip a subject down to the real physical source of its stimulus."

What he's doing is improvising, playing with planes and borders and blaring colors in the way jazz players turn melodies inside out, playing with rhythm and tone and space. In Eggbeater No. 2 and No. 3 you might discover a suggestion of a table or a fan's blade, but by No. 4 everything is ambiguous.

Davis goes to Paris in 1928, sponsored by Gertrude Whitney, and the street scenes he paints there look nothing like the grimy New York streets he painted 15 years before. They present as flat planes of color, with whimsical lines scripting off into the air like jazz solos. In Rue de l'Echaude (1928) -- another painting that's part of the Crystal Bridges permanent collection -- French words, rendered backward as seen from inside a cafe, appear.

Again, while the Paris paintings are charming, they're widely considered minor by most critics. They incorporate some of the lessons gleaned from the Eggbeater experiment, they reflect back to his days as a magazine illustrator. These lovely works could serve as stage backdrops, or as pages in a children's book.

What you don't really get from Davis' work after his Ashcan apprenticeship is any sense of turmoil in what was a checkered private life that included bouts of depression and alcoholism and the death of his first wife after a botched back alley abortion. Moving through In Full Swing, there's a sense of Davis' maturation as his work becomes simultaneously bolder and more intricate, punctuated by gnomic, punchy words like "pad," but you rarely feel any intimation of pain.

He incorporates the Duke Ellington catchphrase "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing" into 1932's American Painting, the rare post-Armory show work that includes human figures, including an image of four male figures that represent artists Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, John Graham and Davis himself. (Davis revised the painting in 1942 and again in 1954 when after Gorky's death he painted an "X" on the figure representing the artist.)

Davis' work hits the height of its complexity with the vivid The Mellow Pad (1945-1951), a wild and lively construction that looks as though it could be a collaboration between Matisse and Jackson Pollock, a dense study of rhythm and atonal harmony that somehow psychically resolves into the musician's quarters suggested by the title. And just as he has it all wadded up into something frenetic and swinging as a Django Reinhardt solo, Davis begins to relax and chill.

He got sober in 1949. He was happily married; in 1952 they'd have their first and only child, a son named George Earl after the jazz musicians George Wettling and Earl "Fatha" Hines.

His palette begins to simplify. His ideas are strong, the execution sure -- Davis' signature more and more becomes integral to his compositions. His later works embrace and wrestle with popular culture, consumerism and media. He revisits his old work, recasting it in witty ways. He pretty much invents a kind of proto-Pop Art, though it lacks the cynicism that would attach to the genre over the next few decades.

Rapt at Rappaport's (1951-1952) features the pared-down palette and the use of numbers and symbols as Davis explores the visual language of advertising.

"My painting ... Rapt at Rappaport's [is a] statement in a visual proprioceptive idiom as simple as a Tabloid headline," Davis wrote in a 1952 artist statement. "Anyone with enough coordination to decipher a traffic beacon, granted they accept the premise of its function, can handle their communicative potential with ease. There are no mathematics of Abstract or Naturalist Expressionistic Idealism to befuddle here, and the Department of Philosophical Displacement Relativisms is on the floor below."

The paintings are what they are -- "unfeeling canvases" coded with color and symbol. Davis has found his final metier, something fresh yet impersonal and removed by more than decades from those gritty street scenes that aren't included in this exhibition. He started out admiring Walt Whitman and Frank Norris and wound up influencing Warhol and David Hockney.

The exhibit ends on one of those almost too-apt notes with Fin (1962-64) a canvas Davis was working on at the time of his death. It's a large canvas, still striped with masking tape that provides a small insight into the artist's process. The night before he died, Davis had stayed up late, watching a French movie on television. Before he retired for the evening, he lettered the French word signifying "the end" in the upper left quadrant of the canvas.

In 1938, Davis had listed among his goals to "Be liked by French artists" and to "Be distinctly American." He achieved both of those goals as he moved from a restless but determinedly 19th-century sensibility into a fresh way of seeing, presenting his new and improved, unrepentant American brand.

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pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Style on 10/01/2017