Art: Seeing Life In Jazz Tempo

To understand the career of Stuart Davis (1892-1964), the great American Modernist whose centenary show is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City through Feb. 16, you have to imagine a time when American painting hardly mattered to Europe, and when the idea of an avant-garde scarcely mattered to Americans -- except as a source of laughs.

That time is far back, of course. America, in its eager embrace of the new, industrialized and academized the idea of avant-garde production so long ago that the notion of an unpopular, provincial Modernism seems remote. But 60 years ago it was very much a fact. In 1932 a New York critic urged the Metropolitan to buy a Davis, suggesting that it should hang on "the landings of the stairways, or possibly the Tea Room" -- obviously not in the main galleries, where the main art was.

Davis' rise from the stairway is achieved now, but it was slow. When American Modernism triumphed, from about 1960 on, it did so largely without Davis: its beneficiaries were the Abstract Expressionists, and later the Pop artists. Davis' pragmatism, the empirical and logical qualities of his work that seem so admirable now and connect him back to the best strain in 19th century American art -- Audubon through Homer and Eakins to the Ashcan School -- actually counted against him. What the postwar art world liked was "spirituality" and "sublimity," the tincture of melancholy elevation. But Davis had always liked the American vernacular, the look of the street, the jostle and visual punch of signs, life imagined in jazz tempo, hard-edged, Cubist-based and infused with optimism. So that left him on the margin.

And then, when Pop came along, his reputation was only a little enhanced by it. Davis had delved images from the commercial culture of America before the Pop artists were even born. The classic one is Odol, 1924, in which the bent- neck bottle of a mouth disinfectant is presented, plain and planar -- name brand, slogan and all -- as its own icon, the ancestor of Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes. But Davis' work was grounded in Cubism, as that of the later artists was not; the Cubist scheme of fragments of media culture and packaging (newspaper headlines, labels and so on), absorbed into a painterly matrix, gave Davis his way of handling the American cityscape. It was brasher than Cubism but far more attached to deliberate aesthetic construction than Pop -- and with none of the new movement's camp flavor.

So he was shrugged off as a distant relative, at best, of whom the expanded art audience of the '60s and '70s knew little. In fact, the Met's show is the first Davis retrospective in a quarter of a century. For the younger half of the museum public, it should be an eye opener, because Davis' work testifies -- as art historian Diane Kelder says in her catalog introduction -- to an "aesthetic continuity and intellectual integrity . . . sadly absent from the cynical eclecticism and self-aggrandizement that has characterized much American painting in recent years."