"The Postwar Work of American Modernism"

THE ENORMITY OF THE POSSIBLE THE ENORMITY OF THE POSSIBLE C U R AT E D B Y P R I S C I L L A VA I L C A L D W E L L SEPTEMBER 7 — OCTOBER 28, 2017 PA U L K A S M I N G A L L E R Y 2 9 7 T E N T H AV E N U E , N E W Y O R K 2 INTRODUCTION THE ENORMITY OF THE POSSIBLE THE ENORMITY OF THE POSSIBLE explores the work of a select group of American painters and sculptors. They include Milton Avery, Oscar Bluemner, Charles Burchfield, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Lee Krasner, Gaston Lachaise, John Marin, Elie Nadelman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Helen Torr, whose revolutionary approach to art making and experimental strategies earned many of them the label Modernist, a fluid term that refers to a specific state of mind. All diverged from convention in their search for the truth in art. Determined to forge new practices, they strove to develop an artistic language for their time, one that captured the newly fractured world they lived in. Having witnessed the traumatic results of the First World War, these artists embraced the spirit of innovation and renewal born out of it. Distinctly provocative and rebellious, they were united in their search for an American voice. The very same voice that would launch the United States from the periphery of global discourse to its very center. To be Modern was to embrace the avant-garde, to consider oneself outside the social order and to push the needle forward. Brave and adventuresome, artists such as Avery, Davis, Lachaise and Nadelman moved to New York, immersing themselves in art circles, while Burchfield, Dove and Torr sought solitary lives outside of the urban environment. Regardless of their locations, these artists shared a collective impulse to inaugurate a new American vernacular. Though on the surface their works do not appear particularly political, the methods and meanings imbued in each realized piece underscores how these artists undermined traditional canons. Marin’s fragmented compositions suggest a new way of relating to time, while Nadelman’s experiments with common materials reveal a yearning for access to the masses. Davis’ appropriation of popular imagery mixes high and low culture, implying the unraveling of a recently-discredited class system. These were artists in search of change—profound social upheaval. Others, part of the next generation—among them, Krasner, Pollock and Rothko—would continue the evolution and ignite a visual revolution with what would become a purer, gestural abstraction. The sentiment of their time reflects our own, and so it is pertinent to revisit this historic material and to reconsider Modernism’s influence on the art world of today. The ethos of the movement—its deviation from convention and its politics of expression—resonates with the contemporary and similarly strong urge to disavow old paradigms and move forward. In this sense, the urgency of Modernism is alive today. The past, inextricably linked to the present, offers endless and compelling opportunities for reflection. I would like to thank Paul Kasmin for inviting me to curate this show and to express my gratitude to all the private lenders to the exhibition, to my friends and colleagues who supported the idea of bringing this material to a venue in Chelsea, and to everyone at Paul Kasmin Gallery—in particular Laura Lester, Michal Patchefsky, Jody Egolf, Eric Gleason, Michelle Hickey, Madeline Lieberberg, Mark Markin, Serena Moodie and Tim Shrider; and finally, to Dr. Katherine Markoski for her thoughtful essay. Priscilla Vail Caldwell, September 2017 1. John Marin, New Mexico, 1930. © Aperture Foundation, Inc., Paul Strand Archive. 2. Stuart Davis, Untitled (Black and White Variation on “Pochade”), 1956 - 1958, casein on canvas, 45 x 56 inches, 114.3 x 142.2 cm. Courtesy of Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, NY. Photo Eric Baumgartner. © Estate of Stuart Davis/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. T H E P O S T WA R W O R K O F AMERICAN MODERNISM BY KATHERINE MARKOSKI “There should be applause,” begins artist Donald Judd’s enthusiastic review of Stuart Davis’ 1962 exhibition at the Downtown Gallery. “Davis, at sixty-seven, is still a hot shot.”1 At first glance, Judd’s assessment can seem surprising. Born in 1892, Davis may well strike us today less as a hot shot of the American sixties—the heyday of Pop, Minimalism, and more— than as a creature of the early twentieth century. This likelihood is symptomatic of long-standing tendencies to understand 1945 as the start of an entirely new chapter within the history of American art, one inaugurated by Abstract Expressionism. Figures associated with that movement have in ways encouraged this view: Jackson Pollock remarked in 1944, “American painters have generally missed the point of modern painting from beginning to end”; Barnett Newman spoke of the need circa 1940 to “paint as if painting never existed before.”2 Though such claims served key rhetorical purposes, taken at face value they occlude what Judd’s text begins to reveal: the potent contemporaneity of early American modernists during the postwar years. Indeed, as the present exhibition makes clear, many modernists who came to prominence in the teens and twenties continued to develop and exhibit well beyond that period, proving vital touchstones and interlocutors for subsequent generations of artists. 3. Charles Burchfield, Dark Tree, Gloomy Tree [detail], 1917, watercolor on paper, 14 x 10 ¾ inches, 35.6 x 27.3 cm. Private Collection. © Reproduced with permission of the Charles E. Burchfield Foundation. Around midcentury, American artists held in common a recent experience of war and its attending traumas. Among those operating in acute awareness of historical circumstances were the Abstract Expressionists. Mark Rothko, for one, increasingly turned to ancient mythology as he sought a way forward in his present moment, viewing myths as eternal “symbols of man’s primitive fears and motivations” and, consequently, able to express “something real and existing in ourselves;”3 related themes of creation or renewal also often informed his works of the 1940s, such as Primeval Landscape (1945). Newman similarly joined the primordial and the present in a painting like Pagan Void (1946), an object that can bring to mind at once a big bang-like and nuclear explosion.4 For these figures, engagements with the past proved a vital way to grapple with a new (atomic) reality. Registrations of recent history were hardly exclusive to this group, however. The year the United States entered World War I, Charles Burchfield made Dark Tree, Gloomy Tree (1917) [detail, fig. 3, and page 17]. The solitary, forlorn tree at the watercolor’s center—with the striking heaviness of its constitutive coloring and brush strokes— seems a marker of that moment’s weight. Following suit, Burchfield’s first exhibition after World War II then featured a return just as poignant 4. Charles Burchfield, Sun and Rocks [detail], 1950 - 1953, ink, conte crayon and watercolor on buff wove paper, 12 x 16 ½ inches, 30.5 x 41.9 cm. Private Collection. © Reproduced with permission of the Charles E. Burchfield Foundation. 5 as those invoked by Rothko and Newman: struck by a seemingly consonant imperative to view the past through the lens of the present, in 1946 Burchfield showed five smaller watercolors from 1917 and 1918 (perhaps not incidentally the moment of Dark Tree, Gloomy Tree) reworked into larger-scale double-dated pictures. Burchfield’s Sun and Rocks (1950-1953) [detail, fig. 4, and page 91]—a 1918/1950 version involving such modification—also conjures a rebirth akin to that valued by Rothko and Newman: the eponymous sun seems to crack open the sky, outpacing its scale as according to the artist it “heal[s] the wounds of earth and bring[s] forth new life” to the depicted “primeval times.”5 Crucially underpinning such varied works is their (frequently unremarked) shared moment. Shared, too, was the 1950 Venice Biennale, to which Museum of Modern Art curator Alfred Barr sent a John Marin retrospective along with works by Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and Pollock, among others. In part, this grouping was designed to position the older artist as a prescient connector between earlier engagements with Cubism and a rising Abstract Expressionism — the same sort of lineage-building at stake when in 1948 critic Clement Greenberg placed Pollock in competition with Marin for “greatest American painter of the twentieth century.”6 Yet, Marin was also a vital contemporary of these figures, sharing key concerns — even at age eighty. According to Marin, paintings he executed in 1947 gave “paint a chance to show itself entirely as paint,” and accordingly were called “‘Movements in Paint’ and not movements of boat, sea, or sky.”7 The corporeal subtext of those “movements” was illustrated in 1949 when Art News reprinted select Marin writings — some on his body’s physical connection to painting — with a photograph of the spry artist lunging energetically towards his canvas [fig. 1].8 In the late 1940s, Pollock similarly stressed his focus on both the capabilities of (less traditional, in his case) materials and his own bodily connection to now-on-the-floor canvases. Hans Namuth’s subsequent photographs of an agile Pollock at work almost seem answers to Marin, a “competitor” whose work the younger artist was likely by that point tracking.9 Moreover, the “energy and immediacy” and “explosive vitality” critics saw in Marin’s work — evidenced by the build-up of quick, forceful dabs of paint constituting Movement VI (1946) [page 79, detail, pages 80-81] — could likewise be identified in Pollock’s poured paintings.10 And the “clash” or “jolly good fight” controlled by “Blessed Equilibrium” that Marin welcomed — see Movement VI ’s solid blue rectangle and the staccato marks to its left —also characterize de Kooning’s slashing gestures in his paintings of female figures, works that brought to one critic’s mind “bloody hand-to-hand combat.”11 That painterly physicality was such common currency seems inextricable from the complexity of its idiosyncratic manifestations. 6 Critic James Fitzsimmons remarked on another commonality in reviewing a 1952 exhibition of work by the recently deceased Arthur Dove. Deeming the artist “prophetic,” Fitzsimmons observed that some of Dove’s early landscapes could “hardly be distinguished — except by their modest size — from the work of some of our youngest abstract expressionists.”12 The next year Robert Goldwater considered those landscapes at length in his suggestively titled “Arthur Dove: A pioneer of abstract expressionism in American Art,” emphasizing the significance of Dove’s “deep feeling for nature” and “desire to translate not so much its aspect or its analyzed structure, but its mood and impact.”13 What Goldwater meant is apparent in both Oscar Bluemner’s New Hampshire Town (1931) [page 51] and Gaston Lachaise’s Mountain (1924) [page 31]. In the former, the play of light and dark across the boldly colored town and landscape lend a sense not of the place’s topographical specificity but rather its energy, while the latter embodies a related slippage between landscape and abstraction, with figuration now added to the mix. The 1940s saw a diverse range of emerging Abstract Expressionists similarly take the natural world as a starting point as they moved towards abstraction: there was, for instance, Gorky’s Waterfall (1943), Pollock’s Shimmering Substance (1946), Theodoros Stamos’ Moon Chalice (1949). Like their seniors, this group seemed above all interested in something like “mood and impact,” a representative 1943 statement claiming: “It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way — not his way.”14 Significantly, it was against the backdrop of this next generation’s rise that Dove’s own work took its perhaps most abstract turn; in 1943, the artist wrote that he sought “to make something that is real in itself, that does not remind anyone of any other thing.”15 Untitled (1945) [page 77] testifies to this ambition: its forms are singular and stolidly planar, interlocking as self-sufficient material entities, even if traces of the organic persist. Something much the same might be said of Helen Torr’s Abstract Flowers (1927) [page 37, detail, page 38] especially of its central white and neighboring deep maroon forms, which seem to cleave apart from one another—the floral reference hardly the only thing lending the composition life. This central passage also looks ahead to the jagged planes of material color in Clyfford Still; Still’s work, like that of many in his cohort, productively engaged in Torr’s (and Dove’s and Bluemner’s and Lachaise’s) titular balance of abstraction and the natural.16 More material relations existed between generations of artists as well: “The instruction, the example, the nearness in the flesh of this marvelous man — all this was a significant fact,” wrote Rothko on Milton Avery’s death in 1965.17 While Avery was indeed a mentor and 5. Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952, oil and charcoal on unsized, unprimed canvas, 86 × 117 ¼ inches, 219.4 × 297. 8 cm. © 2017 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY. On extended loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. friend to Rothko, along with Adolph Gottlieb and Newman, the older artist also made some of his most fully realized paintings alongside this group. Avery’s Figures on a Beach (1948) [page 89] possesses features important to the younger generation: zones of thinned color not wholly bound to reality; flattened forms; stripped-down design; (again) attention to landscape. It is almost possible to glimpse in Avery’s figures Newman’s zips; in his composition, the liquidity then tripartite division of Rothko’s contemporaneous canvases. At the same time, a work like Mountain and Lake (1962) [page 103, detail, front cover] appears to attend to Abstract Expressionism (Rothko and Gottlieb had been in close proximity to Avery during the summers of 1957- 1960). Beginning in the 1950s, Avery increasingly doubled down on a strain of abstraction that had been running through his work for at least the last decade, making nearly dematerialized color ever more central as his compositions became increasingly devoid of anecdotal detail, and often larger.18 These mutual resonances highlight the value of active exchange to artists often painted as isolated beings; their give-and-take crucially opening not onto redundancies but rather renewed singularity for each figure. 7 6. Kenneth Noland, Heat, 1958, acrylic on canvas, 63 x 65 inches, 160 x 165 cm. © Estate of Kenneth Noland/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. 7. Stuart Davis, Standard Brand No. 2, 1960 - 1961, casein and pencil on paper, 12 ¾ x 10 inches, 32.4 x 25.4 cm. Courtesy of Menconi & Schoelkopf, New York © Estate of Stuart Davis/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. 8 With this in mind, we might additionally recognize in Figures on a Beach something like mountains and sea. As is frequently noted, Helen Frankenthaler’s 1952 breakthrough work Mountains and Sea (1952) [fig. 5] had roots in a sideways glance, but, significantly, there was more in its view than Abstract Expressionism. Avery’s thin washes of paint along with Marin’s liquid handling of medium in his late oils were surely relevant to her staining operations; so, too, was the landscape paradigm of Dove, among others.19 It was also likely owing to Frankenthaler and those working through her achievements, like Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, that the roughly forty-year-old watercolors Georgia O’Keeffe exhibited in 1958 surprised one critic with their “freshness” and the way they “predate styles that are currently being taken as up-to-the-minute modern.”20 that seeming freshness was of course owed in part to the example of O’Keeffe herself, and to watercolors like Light Coming off the Plains No. 1 (1917) that saw the artist enter into a more immediate relationship with her surface, now an active compositional component and completely fused with her richly tinted medium. Such precedents may well have mattered to Louis’ movement from veils and florals to unfurling adjacent bands of color. Likewise, Noland’s concentric circles (1958-1963) [fig. 6] can seem inheritors of the color-driven orbs within O’Keeffe’s oeuvre as well as that of Dove —those artists’ lingering connection to the material and natural world productively reread by the younger man as an allegiance to the stuff of painting. In addition to continued engagements with its natural terrain, the postwar years saw artistic attention paid to America “as seen on a walk down Broadway,” in Elaine de Kooning’s words, “as man-made.”21 That de Kooning used such phrases in describing Stuart Davis’ subject matter in 1957 makes it no real surprise that five years later Andy Warhol was asked if the former was “one of the fathers” of Pop.22 While apparently “bugged” by such suggestions, owing in part to his distinctive conception of subject matter, it is nonetheless striking that already in Open Book and Fruit (1922) [page 27] Davis was building his composition through commonplace forms — Jasper Johns’ Ballatine Ale cans, or Warhol’s of soup, perhaps not far removed from the older artist’s brew.23 The planes of color in Open Book and Fruit became even bolder and more pronounced in postwar works like Standard Brand No. 2. (1960 -1961) [fig. 7 and page 101], with critics describing Davis’ painting as possessing “hot and electric visual tension” and having the “effect of a good sock on the jaw.”24 Younger artists productively mobilized similar effects and zones of crackling colors in their meditations on a growing consumer culture — think of Lichtenstein’s “POW!” or Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe silkscreens. Before Warhol’s painted women, however, were also the painted figures of Elie Nadelman, another potential father. 8. Elie Nadelman, Untitled (Group of five plaster figurines) c. 1938 - 1946, plaster, 5 parts: variable dimensions, from 5 ½ to 8 ½ inches, 14 to 21.6 cm. Private Collection. © Estate of Elie Nadelman. The popular entertainers of Untitled (Two Circus Women) (1930 -1935) [page 49] evidence the sculptor’s own early attunement to the America of Broadway. His blending of populist subject matter with classically inflected forms — present as well in Gaston Lachaise’s contemporaneous Acrobat Woman (1934) [page 63] — might even be taken as a precursor to Warhol’s mass-media derived portraiture. The last decade of Nadelman’s life saw him turning from marble and bronze to less durable plaster as he produced more than four-hundred, often visibly worked, figurines Untitled (Group of five plaster figurines), c. 1940 -1946 [fig. 8 and page 69]. The impermanence of his material and multiplicity of his forms are redolent of the mass production evoked at Warhol’s Factory or Claes Oldenburg’s Store.25 Though fundamentally distinct undertakings, these projects were conceived with an eye to a shared, if evolving, capitalism. Nadelman’s late figurines, and particularly their repetition, might also conjure a phrase used by the sculptor with whom we began, Donald Judd, in describing an emergent Minimalism’s approach to composition: “one thing after another.”26 More pointedly relevant to those associated with Minimalism than Nadelman, however, is Davis — Judd’s hot shot. By midcentury, it was important to Davis that in his paintings “You see things as a unit at the same time,” and this desideratum found an echo in Robert Morris’ gestalts as in Frank Stella’s claim of his work that “you can see the whole idea without any confusion…What you see is what you see.”27 Moreover, Davis’ ongoing balance of abstraction and subject matter (objects) offered solutions inventively redeployed within minimalist sculpture.28 What Judd himself was perhaps most struck by in Davis was his “hot” color, as the former put it in his Downtown Gallery review; the sculptor, like the painter, in a sense a colorist above all else despite an acute interest in form [fig. 9]. Illustrating that same 1962 review is Davis’ Unfinished Business (1962). The title offers an apt point of entry to Judd’s text, which applauds Davis’ ability to continue responding meaningfully without ever conforming to the onslaught of new ideas he confronted during his career. It also suggests productive terms for thinking about American Modernism in the postwar era: in more ways than one, its transactions are not yet complete. 1 Donald Judd, “Stuart Davis,” Arts Magazine 36 (September 1962): p. 44. 2 9. Donald Judd, Untitled, galvanized iron, ten units: 9 x 40 x 31 inches, 23 x 101.6 x 78.7 cm each, with 9 inches, 23 cm inter vals. © 2017 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY. Jackson Pollock in “Jackson Pollock: A Questionnaire,” Arts & Architecture 61 (Februar y 1944), reprinted in Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique, ed. Ellen G. Landau (New Haven, 2005), p. 133; Barnett Newman in “Jackson Pollock: An Artists’ Symposium,” Art News 66 (April 1967), reprinted in Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Inter views, ed. John P. O’Neill (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), p. 192. 9 3 Mark Rothko in Adolph Gottlieb and Rothko, “Excerpt from ‘Art in New York’” (1943), reprinted in Reading Abstract Expressionism, pp. 127-28. 16 4 For an incisive account of this painting, among others, see Jeffrey Weiss’ “Science and Primitivism: A Fear ful Symmetr y in the New York School,” Arts Magazine 57 (March 1983): pp. 81-87. 17 5 Charles Burchfield in John I. H. Baur, Charles Burchfield exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1956), n.p. 6 Clement Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Worden Day, Carl Holty, and Jackson Pollock,” The Nation (24 January 1948), reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago, 1986), p. 203. On this positioning of Marin see, e.g., Marcia Brennan, Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), esp. pp. 241-50; Debra Bricken Balken, “John Marin and Midcentury American Modernism,” in John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury, exh. cat. (Andover, Mass.: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, 2011), pp. 21-25. 7 That the hard edges of the Dove and Torr also conjure Ellsworth Kelly is only further evidence of the multiplicity of these Modernists’ impact. Mark Rothko, “Tribute to Milton Aver y, Januar y 7, 1965” in Mark Rothko, Writings on Art, ed. Miguel López- Remiro (New Haven and London, 2005), p. 149. 18 For more complete discussions of the relationship between Aver y and these younger artists see, e.g., E.A. Carmean, Jr., Coming to Light: Aver y, Gottlieb, Rothko, Provincetown Summers 1957-1961, exh. cat. (Knoedler & Company, 2002); Barbara Haskell, “Milton Aver y,” in Milton Aver y, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1982), esp. pp. 140-56. 19 Though in a 1968 inter view, Frankenthaler claimed that the Dove and Marin references irritated her, such connections have been productively explored. For a recent example see Robert Hobbs’ “Krasner, Mitchell, and Frankenthaler: Nature as Metonym,” which complicates Frankenthaler’s connection to nature (Oral history interview with Helen Frankenthaler, 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Women of Abstract Expressionism, exh. cat. [Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2016], pp. 58-67). Marin quoted in MacKinley Helm, John Marin (New York, 1948), p. 101. 20 8 “The Writings of Marin,” compiled by Dorothy Norman, Ar t News 48 (October 1949): pp. 41- 43. In this compilation, Marin reflects on “Weight balances,” stating: “As my body exer ts a downward pressure on the floor, the floor in turn exer ts an upward pressure on my body. Too, the presence of the air against my body, my body against the air, all this I have to recognize when building the picture” (ibid, p. 42). 9 See, e.g., Jackson Pollock, “My Painting,” Possibilities 1 (Winter 1947-1948), reprinted in Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, ed. Pepe Karmel (New York, 1999), pp. 17-18. 10 Belle Krasne, “Watercolorist Marin’s Oil Undercurrent,” Art Digest 24 (April 15, 1950): 14; Dore Ashton, “Avast!” Art Digest 26 (January 15, 1952): p. 15. For an insightful discussion of Marin and Pollock’s considerations of the body’s relation to painting see Brennan, Painting Gender, Constructing Theor y: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics, pp. 263-69. 11 “The Writings of Marin,” Art News 48 (October 1949): p. 42; James Fitzsimmons, “Art,” Arts and Architecture 70 (May 1953): pp. 7- 8. 12 James Fitzsimmons, “Dove’s Abstract Nature,” Art Digest 26 (May 1, 1952): p. 16. J.R.M., “Georgia O’Keeffe,” Arts 32 (March 1958): p. 60. Louis, for instance, had a New York show in November 1957, Frankenthaler in Januar y 1958. 21 Elaine de Kooning, “Stuart Davis: true to life,” Art News 56 (April 1957): p. 42. 22 “Warhol Interviews Bourdon” (1962-1963) in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, 1962-1987, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York, 2004), pp. 11-13. 23 On Davis’ reaction to this lineage see Brian O’Doherty, “Stuart Davis: A Memoir,” Evergreen Review 10 (February 1966): p. 25. Davis’ connection to Abstract Expressionism— and to a figure like, say, Ad Reinhardt, whose studio was once next to that of the older artist—also deser ves further mining. 24 Brian O’Doherty, “Art: Paintings of the Honk and Jiggle,” New York Times, 1 May 1962; de Kooning, “Stuart Davis: true to life,” p. 41. A related precedent for such works might be found in the sun of Burchfield’s Sun and Rocks, an orb that pops even as it heals. 25 Artist Arlene Shechet once remarked that seeing the works in Nadelman’s house was on first view “like seeing something in a pastry shop” (“Arlene Schechet and Kiki Smith in Conversation,” in Elie Nadelman: The Late Work, exh. cat. (New York: Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, 1999), p. 13. For more on Nadelman’s late work see ibid. 13 Robert Goldwater, “Arthur Dove: A pioneer of abstract expressionism in American Art,” Perspectives USA 2 (Winter 1953): p. 78. 26 Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook, no. 8 (1965), reprinted in Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959 -1975 (Halifax, 1975), p. 184. 14 Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko (with the assistance of Barnett Newman), “Letter to Edward Alden Jewell, Art Editor,” The New York Times, 13 June 1943; reprinted in Jewell, excerpt from “The Real of Art: A New Platform; ‘Globalism’ Pops into View” in Reading Abstract Expressionism, p. 149. 27 Stuart Davis quoted in Frederick S. Wight, “Profile of Stuart Davis,” Art Digest 27 (May 15, 1953): 23; Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 1,” Artforum 4 (Februar y 1966): 42-44; Frank Stella in Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” Art News 65 (September 1966), reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregor y Battcock (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995), p. 158. 15 Arthur Dove in Arthur G. Dove: Paintings, 1942-1943, exh. brochure (New York: An American Place, 1943). On this turn in Dove’s late work see William C. Agee, “New Directions: The Late Work, 1938 -1946,” in Arthur Dove: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (Andover, Mass.: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy; in association with the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1997), pp. 133 -53. 10 28 This aspect of Davis’ work is central to Barbara Haskell’s thoughtful “Quotidian Truth: Stuart Davis’ Idiosyncratic Modernism” (Stuart Davis: In Full Swing, exh. cat. [New York and Washington, DC: Whitney Museum of American Art and National Galler y of Art, 2016], pp. 1-21).