A Formidable Painting

Editor
Aug 30
2 min read

Swing Landscape (1938) by Stuart Davis at the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University.

Face to face with Stuart Davis’s Swing Landscape sets you on a path of reconsidering things that you take for granted: the hierarchy of ideas you understand; the order of the natural world. At least, this was one of the profound effect the mural had on me.

A formidable painting.

Much to my chagrin, I had not heard of Stuart Davis, or Swing Landscape, until my recent visit to the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art in the Indiana University Campus in Bloomington IN.

The explanatory notes in the museum provide a good context of the history around the painting, also summarized in this 2021 Yale University press article.

I found the following line from the museum summary useful: “Embedded within Swing Landscape’s abstracted composition - influenced by the cadences of Jazz and swing music - are stylized images of oil derricks, rigging and buoys.”

While commentaries around the painting are helpful—much like a needle pointing north on a compass dial—they do not address the upheaval the painting is likely to cause visitors such as myself. It felt as if I had a had lock on the bearing—north is north in any form of art—but I still could not make my way out of a dense forrest.

I’ll cope with the aftermath to my visit in Indiana as best as I can, reading articles from Bogdan Luca— trying to find solace there for the shaky ground where Swing Landscape has left me.

More from the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University: