Stuart Davis's "World of Tomorrow"

Abstract

Helen A. Harrison When Stuart Davis accepted a commission from Harper's Bazaar to depict his impression of the 1939 New York World's Fair, the exposition, billed as the World of Tomorrow, was literally still in the future. Davis's gouache (fig. 1) appeared in the magazine's February 1939 issue, two months before the fair opened to the public. Like much of the extensive prepublicity for the extravaganza, designed to lift the nation out of the Depression doldrums, Davis's interpretation was optimistically upbeat. Indeed the nation had been looking forward to the fair's economic and cultural benefits since 1935, when the Fair of the Future Committee announced the intention of topping Chicago's successful 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition. America's next world's fair, the planners promised, would show us where we were going and how we would get there. Among the painters of his generation, Davis (1894-1964) was better equipped than most to deal with such a visionary subject. Already well established as one of the country's foremost modernists, Davis had assimilated the tenets of the European avant-garde during the 1920s and had evolved a personal version of synthetic cubism that responded to the dynamics of the contemporary environment, which embodied the concept of progress as a human endeavor. The fair's fundamental philosophical purpose-to demonstrate that people could work together to shape their destiny in positive and progressive ways-was a notion that Davis embraced.