MWW Artwork of the Day (7/28/17) Stuart Davis (American, 1892-1964) Edison Mazda (1924) Oil on canvas, 62.2 x 47.3 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Mr. & Mrs. Clarence Y. Palitz Jr. Gift)
Painters before him had taken the traditional subjects of still life and rendered them in modernist styles, but not until Stuart Davis in the 1920s did any dare compose one with the new products of the modern age.
Davis' "proto-pop" period -- his painted everything from egg-beaters to Lucky Strike packages -- was only one phase in a long and productive career. This famously extroverted and colorful artist was, like so many before him, Philadelphia-born. Like Hopper, he first learnt his art at the feet of the Ashcan School guru, Robert Henri, and even exhibited with the Ashcan painters at the 1913 Armory Show. Impressed by the Picassos he saw there, his work slowly gravitated towards a cubist style, partly evident in this work and more so in his still-lifes of the late 1920s. The paintings for which he is best-known today started coming out in the late 1930s in a new style variously called "Op Art" or "Hard-Edge," and characterized by abrupt transitions between sharply delineated areas of bright color. If Kandinsky's paintings sought to capture the movement of symphonic music on canvas, then these works of Davis, a confessed jazz addict, resemble jazz improvisations frozen in a moment of time.
Here, he juxtaposes traditional still-life elements (a drinking glass on a table) with a more modern-day object (a seventy-five watt light bulb), and adds a few autobiographical references (an artist's portfolio and the reflections of his studio windows in the blue bulb).
Davis is one of the featured artists in the MWW exhibit/gallery: * American Moderns I: Stuart Davis & The Steiglitz Gang of Four
