This Is America

The ebullient paintings of Stuart Davis, surveyed in a retrospective aptly titled “In Full Swing,” at the Whitney Museum, rank either at the peak of American modern art or a bit to the side of it, depending on how you construe “American” and “modern.” (And perhaps throw in “abstract,” a touch-and-go qualifier for an artist who insisted on the essential realism of even his most abstruse forms.) Davis, who died in 1964, at the age of seventy-one, laid heavy stress on both terms. The beginning of his career overlapped with the first generation of American modernists—Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe—and the end of it with Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. He was a polemicist and a happy warrior for modernity as the heart’s blood of what he called, invoking the nation’s definitive poet, “the thing Whitman felt—and I too will express it in pictures—America—the wonderful place we live in.” In the Whitney catalogue, the art historian Harry Cooper, the show’s co-curator, quotes a previously unpublished list of self-exhortations that Davis wrote down in 1938. The first item: “Be liked by French artists.” The second: “Be distinctly American.”