1988.59 Stuart Davis, Electric Bulb | DMA Staging Content Management System

GENERAL DESCRIPTION

In 1923 and 1924, Stuart Davis painted a series of images based on common artifacts of modern life-- an eggbeater, a saw, and in Electric Bulb, a light bulb and its cardboard sleeve. His use of oversized objects, portrayed with hard-edged clarity, foreshadowed what Davis would continue to achieve later in his career. Davis developed and expanded upon a unique analysis of the modern idiom. As noted by former Dallas Museum of Art Director Richard Brettell at the time of its accession into the collection, "Electric Bulb is a painting about power, packaging, and advertising. It makes of the 5 watt bulb a sort of awkward icon of modernity, representing it almost pitilessly against a white ground. The bulb and its folded paper wrapper are "outlined" in black in a manner that owes as much to popular advertising graphics as it does to the modernist geometric abstraction of [Piet] Mondrian or [Fernand] Léger." [1]

Electric Bulb is an expression of the American scene, fragmented and recombined as a vividly colored geometric structure. Davis exaggerated the forms of these industrial objects and colored them brilliantly, creating visual counterparts to the rhythms of the Jazz Age. These works represent a clean break with traditional still-life painting, and Davis later described them as, "a generalization of form in which the subject was conceived as a series of planes and the planes as geometrical shapes... arranged in direct relationship to the canvas as a flat surface." [2] Ordinary objects of modern life became tools for Davis's artistic exploration and would serve as mainstays of his work throughout his career.

[1] Richard R. Brettell to Jerry Allen, 15 November 1988, Correspondence in the DMA collection records object file (1988.59).

[2] James Johnson Sweeney, Stuart Davis, exh. cat. (NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1945), 17.

Adapted from

William Keyse Rudolph, DMA label copy (1988.59), July 2005.
DMA Acquisition proposal (1988.59), 1988.

NOTES

1992 form- title is Green Yellow Galss and Electric Bulb; credit line- Fine Arts Collectible Fund; The title, Green Yellow Glass and Electric Bulb came from William Agee, co-curator of Stuart Davis exhibition at Met, 1990.

1926: "Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings by Stuart Davis," The Whitney Studio Club, New York, December 8-22, 1926

1928: "Paintings and Watercolors: Glenn O. Coleman and Stuart Davis," April 23- May 12, 1928

1979: "Stuart Davis Paintings, Early Twenties," Esther-Robles Gallery, April 6- May 31, 1979

1986: "Gallery Selections," Salander O'Reilly Galleries, Inc., New York, October 3-25, 1986

1987: "Stuart Davis: The Breakthrough Years," Salander O'Reilly Galleries, Inc., New York, November 4- December 26, 1987, no. 26.

Fixed misspelling of William (Rudolph) in Label Text.

Catalogue essays

Artist/designers

Davis, Stuart

Cultures

Geography

Place of origin- NYC

Process/materials

oil paint

board

Historical periods

1924

Individuals

Robert Henri

Subject terms

light bulbs

corrugated cardboard

packaging

advertisements

white

blue

green

geometric abstraction

outlines

planes

geometric shapes

flat

still-life

industrial design

RELATED OBJECTS

PROVENANCE

As of 1978: Earl Davis [1]

Until 1988: Estate of the artist (Salander-O'Reilly Galleries Inc., New York) [2]

From 1988: Dallas Museum of Art, purchased from the above

[1] Listed as the owner in John R. Lane, Stuart Davis: Art and Art Theory, exh. cat. (NY: Brooklyn Museum, 1978). Unpaginated photocopies in Collections Records Object File.

[2] Appears in documentation from "Stuart Davis: The Breakthrough Years," Salander O'Reilly Galleries, Inc., New York, November 4- December 26, 1987, no. 26.

AUDIO ASSETS

VIDEO ASSETS

IMAGE ASSETS

WEB RESOURCES

Stuart Davis, Egg Beater No. 1, 1927~See the first of Davis's abstract examinations of an egg beater in the Whitney Museum of American Art's collection. (Gift of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 31.169)
Stuart Davis, Apples and Jug, 1923~Read about Davis's departure from traditional still life painting through the Boston Museum of Fine Arts online collection. (Gift of the William H. Lane Foundation, 1990.390)
Stuart Davis, Edison Mazda, 1924~Check out another Davis painting featuring a light bulb in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection. (Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Y. Palitz Gift, in memory of her father, Nathan Dobson, 1982.10)

ARCHIVAL RESOURCES

FUN FACTS

TEACHING IDEAS

TI Davis, Electric Bulb

RULES

Apply to objects where number equals 1988.59

General Description

In 1923 and 1924, Stuart Davis painted a series of images based on common artifacts of modern life-- an eggbeater, a saw, and in Electric Bulb, a light bulb and its cardboard sleeve. His use of oversized objects, portrayed with hard-edged clarity, foreshadowed what Davis would continue to achieve later in his career. Davis developed and expanded upon a unique analysis of the modern idiom. As noted by former Dallas Museum of Art Director Richard Brettell at the time of its accession into the collection, "Electric Bulb is a painting about power, packaging, and advertising. It makes of the 5 watt bulb a sort of awkward icon of modernity, representing it almost pitilessly against a white ground. The bulb and its folded paper wrapper are "outlined" in black in a manner that owes as much to popular advertising graphics as it does to the modernist geometric abstraction of [Piet] Mondrian or [Fernand] Léger." [1]

Electric Bulb is an expression of the American scene, fragmented and recombined as a vividly colored geometric structure. Davis exaggerated the forms of these industrial objects and colored them brilliantly, creating visual counterparts to the rhythms of the Jazz Age. These works represent a clean break with traditional still-life painting, and Davis later described them as, "a generalization of form in which the subject was conceived as a series of planes and the planes as geometrical shapes... arranged in direct relationship to the canvas as a flat surface." [2] Ordinary objects of modern life became tools for Davis's artistic exploration and would serve as mainstays of his work throughout his career.