Blue jeans, jazz, 1930s America; sailors and signage in New York’s Times Square, the stench of fish rolling off the river, and the plaintive sound of a trumpet snaking through the air. Stuart Davis, of course, was at the center of it all. But the artist’s pictures here aren’t the exuberant, hot canvases of his retrospective that took place at the Whitney Museum in 2016. This exhibition of spare, mostly black-and-white drawings and paintings, hung against smoky blue walls, features almost no color at all. Bebop drummer Art Blakey comes to mind—he said that “jazz washes away the dust of everyday life.” I think of legendary saxophonist John Coltrane, too, who once said, “I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.”
November 1, 2018
