Definitively abstract

Standing in front of Stuart Davis’ monumental Swing Landscape, now on loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, one can see and feel a number of sensations.

One is of the seaport of Gloucester on Cape Ann, the second is a highly colored saturated energy and the third is something of a family portrait.

The 1938 mural, with dimensions a bit more than 7 by 14 feet, is the granddaddy of Jackson Pollock’s massive Autumn Rhythm, measuring 8 by 17 feet.

While Landscape features sharp-edged definitive shapes drawing upon the Gloucester port with its fishing ships, processing sheds and jumble of architectural forms, the Pollock Rhythm is a famous "drip painting" in which energy, space and form are created with pure dribbling paint. Both, however, are full of an American energy, wild about saturated color and disdainful of light with the exception of how it can influence color.

Landscape is the centerpiece of "Stuart Davis and American Abstraction: A Masterpiece in Focus," which runs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through April 17. The exhibition owes its heart to the Indiana University Art Museum, which lent the mural.

The huge work, painted under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration for the Williamsburg Housing Project in Brooklyn, was never installed because it was considered over the top at the time. Since then, it has been housed in the Midwest and rarely lent. Davis also executed large-scale murals for Radio City Music Hall and the New York World’s Fair. Landscape was in storage until 194l and borrowed by Cincinnati for a local show. It was there that sharp-eyed curators for the university got a long-term loan.

In addition to the mural, the show comprises some 15 other prints, drawings and paintings by Davis, including a number of nautical themes. The museum also has assembled some work by Davis’ contemporary "modernists" such as Arshile Gorky, Ad Reinhardt and Francis Criss. The overall effect is to explore what some might call the high point of American modernist abstraction, a painting style that was imported into the United States for the 1913 Armory show and to this day continues to impact our sensibilities.

Davis can be located directly at the epicenter of the shift in American art. He was born in Philadelphia to a sculptor mother and a father who was the art director for the old Philadelphia Press. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, artists’ services were in high demand. Some prestigious artists who would come to be called The Eight (or the Ashcan School) included Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks and William Glackens.

After the Davis family moved to East Orange, N.J., Davis attended Henri’s school, thereby falling under the spell of an urban gritty realism that was overtaking American art. He studied at the school until 1912 and, by 1913, was accomplished enough to have several works selected for the American section of the Armory show. Whatever satisfaction that might have given him was dashed under the tidal wave of the European modernists, especially the works of Cubist Picasso and Braque. It wasn’t just Davis who was so impressed; much of the American art world veered away from realism and began to work completely in abstraction.

A year later, Sloan invited Davis to share a summer home in Gloucester and over the next 19 summers, Davis would find the raw materials to turn his inspirations into a distinctively American form of Cubism. Even later, when he no longer summered in Gloucester, many of the images and forms he found there inspired his work. He no longer considered The Eight to be purely American and felt the only true American art form was jazz.

"For me, at that time jazz was the only thing that corresponded to an authentic art in America," he wrote. "I think all my paintings, at least in part, come from this influence."

Several years ago, the Delaware Art Museum mounted a show of Davis’ work in Gloucester, which was well received. However, in Philadelphia, Swing Landscape provides not just the doughnut but also the hole.

Stuart Davis and American Abstraction: A Masterpiece in Focus
through April 17
Philadelphia Museum of Art
26th Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway
215-684-7500
www.philamuseum.org
Adults, $10; seniors (62+), $7; students with valid ID, $7; ages 13-18, $7; 12 and under, free; Sundays, pay what you wish