Stuart Davis

[upbeat music] Before anyone even thought there was an abstract art movement in the United States, before that was even a possibility, she was among a group of maybe 10 people.

You know, all of them we know now, de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, you know, those kind of people, Stuart Davis, who were hanging around with each other.

I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

One of the major museum events of the fall is called Krasner and Pollock: A Past Continuous at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

1908, right.

And she, you know, at the beginning before anyone even thought there was an abstract art movement in the United States, before that was even a possibility, she was among a group of maybe 10 people.

You know, all of them we know now, de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, you know, those kind of people, Stuart Davis, who were hanging around with each other and basically just there as sounding boards to each other, offering moral support in an absolute void because there was no one else paying attention to them.

There was no one helping them.

Fine art was not outside this change.

Painters such as Tamara de Lempicka, Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella, Stuart Davis, they translated the same machine age faith into bodies, factories, bridges, cities, signs, and polished surfaces.

Their work was not aerodynamic engineering, but it shared streamlining's deeper instinct.

Simplify form, harden edges, polish surfaces, make modern life appear fast, controlled, metallic, and inevitable.