EARL A. POWELL:
Hello, and welcome to Stuart Davis: In Full Swing. I’m Earl Powell, Director of the National Gallery.
Davis began his career as an urban realist, studying with Robert Henri in New York. He exhibited at the famed Armory exhibition in New York in 1913, where he encountered the wild colors of van Gogh and Matisse and the radical geometric compositions of the cubists. Keenly aware of artistic currents, yet indebted to none, he was one of the first to harness popular art forms like jazz and commercial design, deftly translating the raw, pulsating life of early 20th-century America into highly original works of art.
Throughout his career, Davis continuously reinvented himself, recycling and transforming earlier ideas into startling new compositions.
HARRY COOPER:
The recycling was kind of an effort to pull himself up by his own bootstraps, if you will. It took a while, but by the time he got through the '40s, he was acknowledged as one of the masters of American art.
EARL A. POWELL:
That’s Harry Cooper, Curator and Head of Modern Art here at the National Gallery. He and Barbara Haskell, Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, organized this exhibition. Together they will guide you through the show.
You’ll also hear from Stuart Davis himself, from a 1957 interview conducted at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. I hope you’ll enjoy this exhibition.
