Stuart Davis, Swing Landscape, 1938

Stuart Davis: I must say that in the major part of my career, when I wanted inspiration from American art, I went to jazz music.

Narrator: In Swing Landscape, Davis openly declared one of his greatest loves, jazz. The composition is vibrant and rhythmic, patterns seeming to dance across its surface. Davis did depict some identifiable objects, most of them inspired by the fishing boats around Gloucester, Massachusetts—one of his favorite subjects. But he painted the spaces between the objects using equally intense hues. As a result, the individual parts play into the whole like instruments in big band jazz.

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