The Mellow Pad
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. No known copyright restrictions (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 1992.11.6_PS9.jpg)
Gallery
Not on view
Collection
Gallery
Not on view
Collection
Artist
Title
The Mellow Pad
Date
1945–1951
Medium
Oil on canvas
Classification
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
Rights
No known copyright restrictions
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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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