Stuart Davis—Art Drop #15

Imagine if you could paint the life of America as if it were the jazz music that comes from it. Today's artist did more than imagine that possibility. He created it.

Stuart Davis: Garage No.1, 1917. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Today’s Art Drop is indebted to novelist Amor Towles. It’s because of his gem of a first novel The Rules of Civility that I began to pay attention to Stuart Davis, whose paintings play an important role in the story.

I love that novel. And I also love how the Kids Edition of Encyclopedia Brittanica describes Davis. It calls him a “progressive and experimental painter, who adapted the techniques of Cubism, expressionism, surrealism, and various other movements in modern art to create his own individual style.” ¹

In the novel, which is set in 1938, what’s important about Davis is that he is an American painter who paints in a distinctly American style. While other artists of his generation were following impressionists and other European trends, Davis set his gaze elsewhere.

“I paint what I see in America,” he said. “In other words, I paint the American scene.”

It’s no wonder then that Davis’s work is associated with jazz, which he loved. He liked to use vibrant colors and flat, graphic shapes to produce lively canvases that conveyed the tempo of modern city life. ²

Jazz also plays a significant role in The Rules of Civility. And from the way Towles writes about that music, it’s easy to tell he loves it too.

But just as jazz is a kind of paradox, springing from American roots but appreciated more widely in Europe and Japan, Davis’s paintings are a kind of paradox in the novel. On one hand, they represent the gritty reality of American life. But in 1938 when the novel is set, a Stuart Davis painting represents wealth and privilege. (Today, some of his work can put a hole in your bank account ranging anywhere from one to six million smackeroos). ³

When I look at Garage No. 1, which I’ve selected for today’s Art Drop, I don’t see the price of the paintings. Even though Davis completed this painting in 1917, five years before the setting of The Great Gatsby, I see George Wilson filling the tank of Tom Buchanan’s car, unaware that this wealthy man is having an affair with his wife.

I look at Stuart’s painting, and I see Wilson’s wife Myrtle running out to flag down Gatsby’s yellow convertible, thinking Tom is behind the wheel. Having gotten that far, it’s not hard for me to see the billboard eyes of Dr. T. J. Ekleburg watching everything in this beautiful sooty tragedy of American life.

Gatsby is a novel of the Jazz Age. And though it is set 16 years later in post-Depression New York, The Rules of Civility uses the work of Stuart Davis and jazz itself to evoke a similar theme. The upper classes and lower classes may rub shoulders from time to time, but in a game that’s weighted in favor of the rich, it is integrity that matters most in the end.

During a life that spanned 71 years between 1892 and 1964, Stuart Davis did just that. When others were following the trends, he remained true to his own vision and had a lot of fun while doing it.

I leave you today with a delightful and appropriately jazzy tour of the artist’s work from a 2018 exhibit at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas, courtesy of the Hutch House Family Vlog on YouTube. You’ll find it below, just above the footnotes.

Thanks for stopping by! I enjoyed sharing today’s Art Drop with you.

©2024 Andrew Jazprose Hill

1. From kids.brittanica.com. Davis, Stuart.

2. Ibid.

3. From Invaluable.com.