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Created: February 23, 2003
Latest Update: February 23, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Stuart Davis, Artist

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, February 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

The Masses Socialist journal "founded in New York in 1911 by Piet Vlag. Organised like a co-operative, artists and writers who contributed to the journal shared in its management. Vlag edited the socialist journal for a year but in 1912 appointed Max Eastman, a Marxist, to carry out this task. Articles and poems were written by people such as . . . Louis Untermeyer, . . . Dorothy Day, Helen Keller, . . . Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, . . . Amy Lowell. . . . "

Stuart Davis, Cover for The Masses November, 1913.

As near as I can tell, there are blacks seated at the table in the forefront, and non-blacks seated near the rear. Stuart Davis had a long standing competitiveness with Thomas Hart Benton. When Thomas Hart Benton made the cover of Time Magazine in 1935, Stuart Davis wrote in a critique in Art Front:

"Are the gross caricatures of Negroes by Benton to be passed off as 'direct interpretation'? The only thing they represent directly is a third-rate vaudeville character cliche with the humor omitted.

"Davis had reference to Benton's somewhat caricature-like style. In touch times a painting like Benton's Romancecould be taken as a visual racial slur, but anyone with the slightest reflection would notice that Benton exaggerated the features of all his subjects equally. Davis' innuendos have a built-in boomerang effect, causing us to remember that he himslef drew images of blacks in his Ashcan periios that are open to the same distorted interpretations."

Stuart Davis' Abstract Argot, by William Wilson, at p. xiii, in the Introductory Essay.