`Made in U.S.A.'

In 1943, the American painter Stuart Davis published an essay, “The Cube Root,” in the journal Art News. In it he cobbled together an informal and very American artistic credo, one that echoes at least as far back as Emerson and Whitman:

“Some of the things which have made me want to paint, outside of other paintings, are: American wood and iron work of the past; Civil War and skyscraper architecture; the brilliant colors on gasoline stations; chain-store fronts, and taxi-cabs; the music of Bach; the poetry of Rimbeau [sic]; fast travel by train, auto and aeroplane which brought new and multiple perspectives; electric signs; the landscape and boats of Gloucester, Mass.; 5 & 10 cent store kitchen utensils; movies and radio; Earl Hines hot piano and Negro jazz music in general, etc. In one way or another the quality of these things plays a role in determining the character of my paintings. Not in the sense of describing them in graphic images, but by predetermining an analogous dynamics in the design, which becomes a new part of the American environment. Paris School, Abstraction, Escapism? Nope, just Color-Space Composition celebrating the resolution in art of stresses set up by some aspects of the American scene…”

The critical word here is “celebrating.” Davis (1892-1964) [Thanks to Earl Davis for correcting his father's year of birth. See comment below.] looked at the mid-century American landscape and exulted in what he saw. His mature paintings are playful, vibrant and colorful, without the cagey nihilism of his superficially similar successors, Johns and Warhol. They are also accessible, a dirty word in some quarters: People enjoy them, and as Hilton Kramer wrote of Fairfield Porter’s paintings, they were “too agreeable to be important.” Davis’ closest analog among his contemporaries was Walker Evans. In The Art of Celebration, after pointing out the advertising signs in a Russell Lee photograph, Alfred Appel Jr. writes:

“In a Stuart Davis painting, such bright words definitely speak for the artist, who, with [Saul] Steinberg, [William Carlos] Williams [who used a Davis drawing in the first edition of Kora in Hell], and Nabokov, among others, kept his proverbial democratic eye open through the 1950s and 1960s as the visual culture of the highway got worse and, as the chaste superhighways appeared, was supplanted by the commercial strip….”

Appel rightly calls Davis the “premier American democratic modernist,” a phrase in which all four words are crucial. In “The Cube Root,” Davis explicitly acknowledges his debt to Europe by claiming Bach and “Rimbeau” as influences, and less explicitly with “other paintings” – surely Picasso and Braque. Five of Davis’ watercolors, after all, were included in the fabled Armory Show of 1913. Davis titled a 1954 painting “Colonial Cubism,” playfully acknowledging his dual inheritance. A few years later he characterized his brand of modernism as “uniquely American, in that it accepts the blatant tones of American life, and tunes it to the historical elegances of Art.”

Like Whitman, that enthusiast of opera, Tennyson, the Vedas and phrenology, Davis defines an American aesthetic of artful inclusiveness. Walker Evans, in the catalogue for his 1971 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, uses as an epigraph these lines from Whitman’s “Assurances”:

“I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the world…

“I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities, insects, vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds, rejected refuse, than I have supposed…”

ADDENDUM: From Terry Teachout’s “The Return of Beauty”:

“…today no one needs to be persuaded of the significance of those modernists who spoke in the crisply empirical, immediately accessible tone of voice now acknowledged by the whole world as all-American. Louis Armstrong, Fred Astaire, Willa Cather, Aaron Copland, Stuart Davis, Duke Ellington, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, John Ford, George Gershwin, Howard Hawks, Edward Hopper, Flannery O'Connor, Jerome Robbins, Frank Lloyd Wright: Surely these and others like them rank high among our exemplary figures, the ones whose work is indelibly stamped `Made in U.S.A.’”

I might substitute Faulkner for Fitzgerald, but otherwise it’s a pleasure to quote Terry on the eve of the Fourth of July.