Pad No. 4

Pad No. 4 is one of a series of four related pictures that Stuart Davis made while working on The Mellow Pad, a painting in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. In all of these works, the word pad appears—here, sideways in green at the upper left (and a 4 is in white at the lower right).

This title reveals the artist’s fondness for wordplay: pad refers both to an artist’s sketchbook and to the jazz slang term for “home.” A lifelong aficionado of jazz, Davis regularly drew analogies between the visual patterns of his pictures and the syncopated rhythms of this modern form of American music.