Ready-to-Wear

"Ready-to-Wear" is a 1955 oil on canvas by Stuart Davis that captures the American modernist painter in his most brilliantly graphic and coloristically bold mature mode, the image showing an abstract composition in the artist's signature style of flat, unmodulated color and dynamic geometric forms that made him the defining American painter of the Pop Art era before Pop Art even existed. The composition is a large canvas—142.6 × 106.7 centimeters—showing an abstract composition with the oil on canvas creating a surface of extraordinary graphic energy and chromatic confidence. "Ready-to-Wear" suggests the world of commercial fashion and consumer culture, the title becoming a meditation on the relationship between art, commerce, and the everyday. The 1955 date places this work in the period of Davis's most mature and influential production, when he was producing the paintings that anticipated the Pop Art movement and established his reputation as the leading American modernist of the mid-twentieth century. Art historians have connected this painting to the broader tradition of the commercial subject in modern art, from the paintings of Leger to the works of the contemporary period, noting that Davis's treatment is more focused on the graphic energy and the coloristic boldness, the transformation of commercial culture into visual jazz, than the ironic commentary or the social critique of these other traditions.

This 1955 oil canvas made commercial culture graphically bold through large 142cm flat unmodulated chromatic confidence and dynamic geometric energy, using mature production to transform ready-to-wear consumer world into American modernist visual jazz beyond Leger ironic social critique.

It matters because Davis painted the color of shopping and made the canvas feel like it was dancing to a jazz tune that only he could hear—proving that even a store sign could be a symphony if the paint was groovy enough.