- Stuart Davis: In Full Swing
- November 20, 2016 – March 5, 2017
- West Building, Main Floor
Stuart Davis, Arch Hotel, 1929, oil on canvas, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust. Photo © Sheldon Museum of Art.
This exhibition is no longer on view at the National Gallery.
Stuart Davis (1892–1964) was an American original. Born in Philadelphia to artists and raised in East Orange, New Jersey, he dropped out of high school to study painting in Manhattan with Robert Henri, the legendary teacher who urged his students to sketch daily life, read widely, ignore convention, and above all to find their own voices. Davis fell in love with the poetry of Walt Whitman, “our one big artist,” and hoped to capture “the thing Whitman felt—America.” And like Whitman, he gravitated to the bustling life of ports and docks, streets and taverns. Another formative influence, indeed “a complete bombshell,” was the 1913 Armory Show in New York, which introduced him to the expressive colors and forms of modernists like Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri Matisse. From then on Davis devoted himself to painting, surviving years of poverty to become one of the deans of American painting, aware of all movements yet beholden to none. Embracing “high” and “low” culture, abstraction and realism, image and text, Davis’s vision is remarkable for its breadth and inventiveness.
Stuart Davis: In Full Swing passes over the artist’s earliest efforts to begin in 1921 with his breakthrough paintings of tobacco packages. Moving ahead through five decades to his final canvas, the exhibition often strays from chronology to explore Davis’s habit of recycling earlier work for new compositions. With more than one hundred of his most important, visually complex compositions on view, the exhibition highlights Davis's ability to assimilate the imagery of popular culture, the aesthetics of advertising, the lessons of cubism, and the sounds and rhythms of jazz into works that hum with intelligence and energy.
Organization: Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Sponsors: This exhibition is made possible by Altria Group in celebration of the 75th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art.
Major support is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation.
The Terra Foundation for American Art also provided generous support.
The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
Passes: Admission is always free and passes are not required
Other venues: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, June 30–October 10, 2016
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, April 8–August 6, 2017
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, September 16, 2017–January 8, 2018
Audio Tour
Access this free audio tour directly from the browser on your mobile device. Narrated by Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art, the tour includes commentary from exhibition curators Harry Cooper, National Gallery of Art, and Barbara Haskell, Whitney Museum of American Art.
A limited number of headphones are available at the Acoustiguide desk near the Rotunda. As a courtesy to fellow visitors, the use of headphones is required within the exhibition space.
Related Resources
Related Programs
Lectures Freedom Sound/Do You Hear Me?
Gallery Talk Stuart Davis: In Full Swing
Teacher WorkshopIn Full Swing: The Art of Stuart Davis
More on the Artist
- Davis, Stuart
- American
- , 1892 - 1964
Exhibition Shop
Audio and Video
- Stuart Davis: In Full Swing
- Video, Released: November 21, 2016, (30:00 minutes)
