A bridge between New York and Paris: on Stuart Davis at the Whitney Museum

Stuart Davis (1892-1964) is known, perhaps more than any other American artist, for his ability to combine the formal inventions of the avant-garde with the political spirit of the American scene. The drama of his paintings (which are the subject of a survey titled In Full Swing at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York) were deepened by the early Modernist debates of out of which they were borndebates in which abstraction and realism came to loggerheads at a defining moment for America