Painting a theoretical world : Stuart Davis and the politics of common experience in the 1930s

Abstract

(cont.) relationship with American Scene painting. His engagement with these themes suggests that the pictorial reorganization of spatial experience that anchored his practice as a socially engaged artist is inextricably bound to the politics of place.

This dissertation examines Stuart Davis's paintings of the 1930s in relation to his conviction that art could transform reality by extending and reordering the spatial dimensions of common experience. While Davis's enthusiastic involvement with Marxism had a significant impact upon the development of his ideas during the thirties, his reception of liberal aesthetic theory, as exemplified in the writings of the philosopher John Dewey, played a more fundamental role in his understanding of the social function of art. By situating Davis's activities within the context of other artists and intellectuals who sought to rebuild public life through the aesthetic organization of common experience, Davis's strong political convictions are brought together with his abstract art within an integrated interpretive framework. He described cubism as an extension of the realist tradition that could express his reactions to the modem environment and in so doing offer a conceptual model to guide future action. Through a complex and not always consistent theoretical rationale, he related the formal structure of his paintings to their ability to communicate his vision of common experience to a broad audience without violating the logic of two-dimensional design. The social and political value of aesthetically reordering common experience was understood by many between the World Wars to reside in art's capacity to facilitate the formation of a shared national identity and cultural discourse. The profound geographic and spatial transformations associated with modernity played a crucial role in this conception of identity. Davis's contributions to these issues is examined in relation to his understanding of the internationalism of his modernist art and his complex