ART REVIEW : Davis Retrospective Challenges Mind, Eye

When “Stuart Davis: American Painter” had its debut at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art last November, it took a lot of people by surprise. In short order, the retrospective became the sleeper hit of the fall season.

It’s easy to see why. No full-scale retrospective had been mounted since 1966, two short years after the painter’s death at 71. Davis’ position as a forerunner to Pop art, then noisily ascendant in the public eye, became firmly fixed in art-world consciousness as his principal significance. With his regard for the purely modern imagery of packaging, as well as his commitment to the relationships between picture-making and contemporary music, Davis had found a comfortable place in history--and that was that.

At least, it seemed to be. Even in its somewhat truncated, but no less compelling version at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which opened Thursday and continues through June 7, “Stuart Davis: American Painter” effortlessly shakes up that narrow view.

Sometimes the show goes awry, as in unpersuasive claims for Davis’ position relative to the cataclysm of Abstract Expressionist painting in the 1950s. (Even when he worked on the scale of murals, Davis remained an easel painter at heart; in this, he’s fundamentally different from the Abstract Expressionists.) But, the show does offer a far more resonant and expansive picture of the artist than we had before, a picture that has been traditionally limited to his nebulous status of “precursor.” Davis, who picked up on a radically important implication of European Cubism, is shown to have been a significant agent in the growing significance of language as a model for art.

There’s a certain poetic justice to the exhibition’s presentation at the San Francisco Museum, too. Director John R. Lane organized an important Davis survey at the Brooklyn Museum in 1978, and his catalogue for that show has since become the standard reference on the artist. Metropolitan curator Lowery Stokes Sims and her collaborator, William C. Agee, have built their wonderful retrospective on the firm foundation of Lane’s prior scholarship.

The exhibition covers every facet of Davis’ work as a painter, and it features a number of pivotal works: the breakthrough “tobacco paintings” of 1921, such as “Lucky Strike” and “Cigarette Papers”; four of the so-called “egg beater paintings” of 1927-28, together with their working drawings and gouache studies, with which Davis whipped up the flat surface of the canvas into an airy array of shifting planes; the monumental 1938 mural “Swing Landscape,” a jazzy commission by the Federal Art Project and politically daring for its day, given the conservative complaint against federal monies being spent on abstract, rather than realist, art; and several versions of the “Little Giant Still Life,” which Davis famously developed from an advertisement for Champion spark plugs found on a matchbook-cover, and to which he returned several times over the course of a decade.

There are also delightful surprises. Chief among them is a wall of five, stripped-down still lifes from 1923-24. These paintings of light bulbs, wine glasses, jugs and fruits are startling in the graphic simplicity and veiled eroticism of their forms, and their sophisticated play with visual transparency turns away from traditional conceptions of painting as either window or mirror, as if to focus on the glassy surface itself. Painting becomes a blank field on which pure invention can be inscribed.

Davis’ painting is representational, but it’s also purely abstract. The well-known painting of a bottle of household disinfectant called Odol, seen through a transparent, boxy form that looks rather like a skewed picture frame, declares as much in its prominent quotation of the product’s advertising slogan: “It Purifies.” Nothing in this still life--from the stylized bottle to the assorted decorative patterns to the blocky words written across its surface--is the least bit natural.

That quality of modern invention is made palpable through the Odol label, where the letters of the product’s poetically “meaningless” name are rendered as if they are three-dimensional objects. The perspective of these letters recedes in sharp counterpoint to the transparent, boxy “frame” through which the word is read, opening up a crystalline visual space in a painting composed solely-- purely --of flat shapes and colors. It purifies, but it complicates as well.

The subjects Davis tended to choose for his visually syncopated paintings seem peculiar but are rarely arbitrary. Odol is a wry testament to claims being made for purity in modern abstract art. Champion spark plugs obliquely recall Francis Picabia’s machine imagery early in the century, while the painting’s focus on the triumphal name of the product--to the virtual exclusion of the object’s form--creates an image of sudden revelation: the spark of an idea. So does the repeated appearance of light bulbs, which drags the Old Master iconography of the candle into the modern era.

Vision itself is at the core of Davis’ elaboration of Cubist syntax into a visual equivalent for the aural rhythms of jazz. And words--printed, calligraphic, stylized into decorative patterns or wittily clipped off in contradictory fashion (in one, the incomplete complet gets finished off in your mind)--everywhere address as equals both your mind and your eye.

For Davis, painting’s pleasures were both visual and conceptual, and his elaborate use of painted words was a principal means for asserting that position. In “The Mellow Pad” (1945-51), a small canvas that carries the visual weight of a huge mural, as well as in a series of “Pad” paintings from the 1940s, the artist restated his conviction that modern visual form should speak with the verve and energy of modern life, as embodied in the American idiom of jazz. His use of the word pad , deftly worked into the compositions, acknowledged the slang term for a place where one lived; it also conjured a pad of paper, a traditional place for writing.

It’s likely that Davis’ dual commitment to imagery and to language grew from his youthful work as an illustrator for magazines (his father had been a newspaper art director). It’s also likely that it was a feature of his particular take on Americanism, which began to come into sharp focus with his first major paintings to leave illustrational realism behind.

In part, Davis’ marvelous “tobacco paintings” of 1921 were a breakthrough because of the radical degree of their abstraction. Unfolding a Lucky Strike cigarette package (Davis was a smoker), he painted an extraordinarily beautiful composition of red, green, black and gold squares, bars, arcs and rectangles.

Still, form alone does not carry these smallish canvases. For Davis was also painting a package in which was wrapped a deeply American subject: Cultivation and export of the addictive drug had been the reason European profiteers had settled the first colony in the United States in Jamestown, Va., three centuries before. You could call tobacco the original American product.

Davis loved jazz and consumer advertising because both were quintessentially American--and in ways that completely bypassed the nativist bombast of a mean-spirited provincial like Thomas Hart Benton. It isn’t just that he borrowed European Modernist styles, adapted from Picasso, Braque, Leger, Miro and countless others, in order to render American subjects. It’s that he recognized them all, from cigarette packages to Cubist canvases, as a wondrously inventive cacophony of contemporaneous languages. Like a visual entertainer, his job was to make their music swing.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 401 Van Ness Ave., (415) 252-4000, through June 7. Closed Sunday and Monday.