Art in CONTEXT

In 1935, Stuart Davis was serving as president of the Artist Union and executing covers for its magazine Art Front, a publication for which Davis also served as editor. These two duties were just a sample of Davis' political and social commitments. During the 1930s, Davis, an avowed Marxist, was attempting to persuade the public that artists should be considered like other workers, and as such should be entitled to the same privileges of unions and collective action.

This political and social activism was complemented by Davis' whole-hearted dedication to abstract aesthetics. By the middle of the 1930s, he was positing that the real subject matter of art was not the object, figure, or scene depicted but rather the formal elements. Line became a primary agent for expression within his work. This disavowal of representation can be interpreted as a direct attack on the "sentimental" (as Davis named it) and the traditional aesthetic of the American Scene painters Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Curry. Moreover, Davis' indefatigable support of Modernism can be seen as a rebuke of the desire by Soviet Communists for art that, by its very purpose as propaganda, must be representational.

Looking at Landscape with Broken Machine, most viewers would be hard pressed to detect or experience a political message, despite the fact that by 1935 Davis was strongly connected with the major leftist international political movements. The inability to recognize Socialist symbols within the painting does not, however, preclude a political reading of the work. For Davis, Modernism (and its accompanying abstracted aesthetic) could serve the cause of revolution in greater leagues than representational art, for the former emerged out of a struggle against the traditions of "bourgeois academic traditions." And such a struggle, at least in the years of the Popular Front, found a larger home in the international Marxist political movement.

Todd D. Smith

SUGGESTED READINGS:

Arnason, H. H. Stuart Davis Memorial Exhibition. Washington, D.C.: National Collection of Fine Arts, 1965.

Sims, Lowrey Stokes, et al. Stuart Davis: American Painter. Exhibition catalogue. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991.

Wilkin, Karen. Stuart Davis. New York: Abbeville Press, 1987.

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