This work by Stuart Davis is one of the largest paintings in the museum and one of the highlights of the Western art floor. Called Swing Landscape, this is the first painting that the museum owned.
(Swing Landscape, 1938. Thanks to iub.edu for the image!)Stuart Davis (1892-1964) was raised in an art-focused Philadelphia family, and at an early age came under the tutelage of Robert Henri, becoming the youngest member of the Ashcan School. (I did a Henri painting for "art of the week" awhile ago--see here.) Swing Landscape is an abstract landscape of Gloucester, MA, a smallish city which seems vibrant, alive, and interesting in this painting. You don't really need to know which city this is, although knowing it is Gloucester, a fishing town, helps explain the water and piers on the left. What is so great about this work in person is how bright and bold it is. You do get a sense of the jazz music that Davis liked, as the buildings and shapes are slightly off-kilter. You can pick out things that might be monuments, or just sections of line, color, and movement that grab you in a certain way.
One reason why I like looking at modern art (which I think this would count as) is that I know so little about it. Often when I'm looking at Western art (especially European, especially from 1550-1700), my brain goes into academic mode, and while I might "get more" out of them, I'm not surprised by what I see, usually. With Swing Landscape, I didn't know anything about Stuart Davis before viewing it for the first time, and that is okay. Sometimes art just needs to be looked at. Perhaps not a profound statement for someone in an art history graduate program, but I stand by it.
But, here is something really cool that I found out. Originally, Swing Landscape was commissioned by the FAP (Federal Art Project), a subsection of the WPA (Works Progress Administration), during the 1930s, and a good way to keep artists a little funded during the Great Depression. Swing Landscape was meant to be hung in the Williamsburg Housing Project in Brooklyn, but for some reason it was sold instead, and we bought it! The Brooklyn Museum has quite a few of the murals which were installed at the Williamsburg Housing Project--I used to walk by them daily to get to my office. (They're in a glass encased corridor on the first floor, back by the sculpture garden, heading to the elevators, in case you're looking for them.) From what I have seen of these murals, they are also abstract, but not based on a specific place, and the colors tend to be more subtle and muted--part of that could be from hanging not in a museum for years, but in a presumably brightly light housing project. Perhaps Davis's was different in style and so was rejected. Want to know more about the murals? Check out the Brooklyn Museum's works here. Want to know about the FAP and Williamsburg, with better images from the Museum's first show of the works? See here.
And thanks to Stuart Davis, for making a grey and snowy week a little less grey for me.
OH, and important blog housekeeping announcement--one of my art history friends has started a blog on ART, where she'll spend the year writing about whatever art strikes her fancy. Check it out here! Like me, she is enamored of the 17th century (although she leans Spanish Baroque while I lean Italian). We both took an Islamic class last semester and also loved that a lot--her post on the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul is especially good. Her blog is now linked in my sidebar. Hooray for art and art historians!
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