7 June - 5 October 1997
Opening June 7, 1997, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, will present an exhibition of over fifty paintings covering the entire career of American painter Stuart Davis (1892-1964). This is the first retrospective exhibition in Europe of an artist who is highly respected in the United States as perhaps the greatest American Modernist painter in the generation before the American Abstract Expressionists; but Davis is little known in Europe.
Davis’s career spanned more than fifty years. At an early age (17) he left High School to study painting with Rober Henri, figurehead of the Ashcan school. Like his friend and contemporary, John Sloan, he painted realistic scenes of the colorful working class streets and jazz saloons of Newark and New York, with a precocious attention to formal issues. In 1913 he contributed to the Armory Show, and was overwhelmed by the revelation of the European Avant-Garde that he saw there. After a gestation period lasting in the early 1920s in which he assimilated the post-impressionism of artists like Munch, Gauguin and Van Gogh and more especially the Synthetic Cubism of Picasso and Braque, his first dazzlingly original paintings were the so-called Tobacco Still Lives, that employed motifs from cigarette packaging. Later in the same decade, he moved closer to abstraction with the Egg Beater series, in which he reworked a still life from a kitchen table with bright colors, simplified shapes and the compressed, airless space of Synthetic Cubism. In 1928, supported by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, he traveled to Paris – a trip that strengthened his resolve to find a way to transform his artist’s perception of his environment into paintings expressing the syntax of Modernism. Davis’s perception of his environment was sharply inflected by his love of the American urban and rural scene, by his passion for jazz music, and by his adoption of up-to-date commercial packaging and advertising, shop and saloon front décor, as well as the new mass transport systems, as his iconography.
In the hard years of the Depression from the end of 1929 onwards, Davis was an activist in artisitc causes and a participant in Federal schemes for artists’ employment. In 1932 he was commissioned to make a mural for Radio City Music Hall, New York – the first of several murals in his career. Meanwhile his painting matured into a distinctive ‘jazzy’ style, with an upbeat palette and a repertoire of shapes and forms, often including words, whose wit was also conveyed by the titles of the paintings. Enjoying as much success as any Modernist painter of his time, Davis was included in 1948 among America’s ten best living artists by a jury of critics and museum directors. Davis continued unwaveringly to paint in this manner – an abstract style predicated on the visual stimuli of his environment, often reworking images developed in his early career (thus testifying to what he called ‘the Amazing Continuity’) – throughout the 50s and early 60s. This was the period of masterpieces such as The Mellow Pad (1945-51, The Brooklyn Museum), Little Giant Still Life (1950, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts), Rapt as Rappaport’s (1952, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC), all of which are included in the exhibition. The fact that post-war American painting was dominated by the very different, introspective abstraction of the New York school painters, such a de Kooning and Pollock, and that this avant-garde has since dominated the European perception of American art, helps to explain the wrongful neglect of Start Davis in European culture in the late 20th century. Davis was also a brilliant thinker and leader whose contributions were instrumental in elevating American art from its provinical status. At his death in 1964, Brian O’Doherty praised him as “one of the limited company of major painters America has produced […] he was never out of date. Whatever happened in the world of art already seemed to have a precedent in his painting.”
Paintings have been loaned by the artists’s estates, by 27 museums (including 25 American public collections) and by several private collections.
The exhibition catalog, in English and Italian language editions, is published by Electa (Milan), and includes essays by authoritative scholars of Davis’s life and art: Lewis Kachur (“Start Davis’s Word Pictures”), Wayne Roosa (“Underwriting the ‘Amazing Continuity’: The Journals of Stuart Davis”) and Karen Wilkin (“Stuart Davis American Painter”). Essays are contributed by Rudi Fuchs (“Stuart Davis. A European Memoir”), and by Federica Pirani (“An American in Venice. Stuart Davis at the XXVIth Biennale) while music critic Ben Sidran writes on “The Jazz of Stuart Davis”. The catalog includes an unpublished television interview with Stuart Davis (1956), an interview with Piero Dorazio, and a selection of Davis’s writings by Diane Kelder. Diane Kelder has provided the catalog entries.
Following its presentation in Venice, the exhibition will travel to Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni: October 22, 1997 – January 12, 1998; Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum: February1 – April 11, 1998, Washington, DC, National Museum of American Art: May 22 – September 7, 1998.
The exhibition is being organized in collaboration with the Stuart Davis Estate, the Commune di Roma, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the National Museum of American Art (Smithsonian Institution), Washington, DC, and the Salander O’Reilly Galleries, New York.
The official carrier of the exhibitions is Alitalia.
Additional support for the exhibition has been provided by Ammirati Puris Lintas, Milan.
The exhibition of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection are made possible by the support of the Regione Veneto and Intrapresæ Collezione Guggenheim: Aermec, Arclinea, Barbero 1891, Bisazza Mosaico, Cartiere Miliani Fabriano, DLW AG, Gruppo 3M Italia, Gruppo Imation Italia, Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Luciano Marcato, Rex Built-In, Sàfilo Group, Swatch, Wella.