Brooklyn Museum: American Art: The Mellow Pad

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The Mellow Pad

This painting, which preoccupied Stuart Davis for over half a decade, is one of the most sophisticated expressions of the artist's signature style of a lively network of flat, boldly colored shapes and graphics. The two potent buzzwords of the painting's title appear in the composition and signal Davis's desire to express visually the hip sensibility of the American jazz he loved. "Pad" (a beat word for "place to live") refers to one of his earlier paintings (House and Street of 1931), as well as to an artist's sketchpad.

Like many American modernists of his generation, Davis was influenced by French Cubism, but he wanted to adapt it to an American context. He found his inspiration in the music, urban landscape, and consumer products of this country; as one critic observed in 1957, "his art relates to jazz, to movie marquees, to the streamlined decor and brutal colors of gasoline stations, to the glare of neon lights … to the big bright words that are shouted at us from bill-boards."

Artist: Stuart Davis, American, 1894-1964
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dates: 1945-1951
Dimensions: 26 1/4 x 42 1/8 in. (66.7 x 107 cm)
Signature: Signed lower right: "Stuart Davis"
Inscriptions: Signed, dated, and inscribed on discarded original stretcher verso: "THE MELLOW PAD STUART DAVIS 1945-1950-1"
Collections: American Art
Museum Location: This item is on view in American Identities: A New Look, Modern Life, 5th Floor
Accession Number: 1992.11.6
Credit Line: Bequest of Edith and Milton Lowenthal
Image: Overall, 1992.11.6_SL1.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph

Collections: American Art: The Mellow Pad