Stuart Davis Exhibit, SFMOMA, San Francisco

This was a very fun exhibit of a pioneer of pop art.  As you move through the show, you’re moving through time. And change, over time, becomes one of the exhibition’s main themes.

It starts with Davis the fresh-minted Modernist, painting meticulous, trompe-l’oeil versions of Cubist collages that have local materials — Lucky Strike tobacco packaging, comic strips — as content. In these tiny pictures from the early 1920s, he defines the lasting tension in his art between American-derived realism and European-derived abstraction, between populism and classicism.

There is a lot about his work that echoes Matisse before him, and he certainly started the trends that other modernists followed.
What Davis got right was belief: the belief that he was doing the one sure, positive thing he could do, and that he would keep doing it, no matter what, in failure or success, sickness or health. That’s the lesson young artists can take away from his show, along with an experience of painting that’s conceptually razor-sharp and completely worked through, with all fat trimmed off, all air squeezed out: an art of truly honest weight.