Collection
/
American Art

The Mellow Pad

Stuart Davis

Brooklyn Museum photograph

Object Label

The starting point for this lively patterned abstraction was an earlier canvas by Stuart Davis entitled House and Street, 1931. Treating each subsequent version as a riff on a jazz theme, Davis moved further and further away from his original composition to establish independent, rhythmic color patterns that retained only a few direct visual cues to the original composition. Davis theorized that abstract compositions could communicate to the viewer something of the subject from which they were derived. This composition embodies the “mellow pad”—jazz lingo for the “cool” place to be. Jazz rhythms were a potent inspiration for Davis, and their presence added a distinctly American component to his abstractions.

Caption

Stuart Davis (American, 1892–1964). The Mellow Pad, 1945–1951. Oil on canvas, 26 1/4 x 42 1/8 in. (66.7 x 107 cm) frame: 32 1/2 × 49 1/2 × 3 11/16 in. (82.6 × 125.7 × 9.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Edith and Milton Lowenthal, 1992.11.6. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Gallery

Not on view

Collection

American Art

Title

The Mellow Pad

Date

1945–1951

Medium

Oil on canvas

Classification

Painting

Dimensions

26 1/4 x 42 1/8 in. (66.7 x 107 cm) frame: 32 1/2 × 49 1/2 × 3 11/16 in. (82.6 × 125.7 × 9.4 cm)

Signatures

Signed lower right: "Stuart Davis"

Inscriptions

Signed, dated, and inscribed on discarded original stretcher verso: "THE MELLOW PAD STUART DAVIS 1945-1950-1"

Credit Line

Bequest of Edith and Milton Lowenthal

Accession Number

1992.11.6

Frequent Art Questions

  • Tell me more.

    The composition's complex layering of bold shapes and colors in a kinetic pattern invokes the energetic movement of the jazz music Davis loved. This painting is also a riff on previous and subsequent similar compositions which Davis continually played with - again like a Jazz musician.
    If you look closely, you can see that each field of color appears to be walled off. Davis used a type of masking tape, that was later removed, to create these shapes!

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Artists and makers

Stuart Davis

11 works in the collection

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