BLOOMINGTON, IN (NWPR) – On view through May 22, 2022 in the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, “Swing Landscape: Stuart Davis and the Modernist Mural” exhibition centers on “Swing Landscape” which is a 1938 mural by American modernist painter Stuart Davis and a highlight of the museum’s permanent collection.
Considered by many art historians to be one of the most important American paintings of the twentieth century, the work is also one of the first abstract murals of that century, however the painting has received little focused scholarly attention until now.
Commissioned through the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, the mural was originally slated for installation in the Williamsburg Housing Project in Brooklyn, New York. Ultimately rejected from this site, it instead came to Indiana University in early 1942.
Featuring more than forty works of art by Davis and his contemporaries, the exhibit offers a comprehensive examination of this modernist masterpiece such as, new insights into the painting’s aesthetic, political and social significance as well as within the broader context of abstract murals from the Depression era.
“Scholars have long argued that Stuart Davis stringently separated his political and artistic interests and activities. The overriding goal of this exhibition is to argue that Swing Landscape, despite its abstract aesthetic, embodies Davis’s socially and politically progressive values and to show that resituating the mural in its original context, as a commission for a public housing project, is a key to understanding its multivalent meanings,” expressed Curator of European and American Art Jenny McComas.
For more at www.artmuseum.indiana.edu.