This Is America

The ebullient paintings of Stuart Davis, surveyed in a retrospective aptly titled "In Full Swing," at the Whitney Museum, rank either at the peak of American modern art or a bit to the side of it, depending on how you construe "American" and "modern." (And perhaps throw in "abstract," a touch-and-go qualifier for an artist who insisted on the essential realism of even his most abstruse forms.) Davis, who died in 1964, at the age of seventy-one, laid heavy stress on both terms. The beginning of h...