Size-Color-Interval Series Diagram 1930

Curator: This is Stuart Davis' "Size-Color-Interval Series Diagram," currently housed at the Harvard Art Museums. Editor: My first thought? It’s like a jazzy blueprint, all angles and scribbled notes. Feels like I'm looking into the artist's mind, seeing how he breaks down a scene into its most basic parts. Curator: Precisely. Davis, born in 1892, was deeply interested in the mechanics of perception and the act of painting. Notice the focus here—it's about structuring space through color relationships and intervals, the time it takes for your eye to move from one element to another. Editor: So it's not just what he's painting, but how he's painting it? Like he's showing us the scaffolding. Curator: Exactly. And this connects to the broader social context. Mass production, advertising, and the accelerated pace of modern life fueled his investigation into the very building blocks of visual experience. Editor: It’s fascinating to see how Davis dissects the everyday world, then reassembles it with this playful energy. Makes you wonder what he was listening to while he was sketching this. Curator: Indeed. It highlights the labor and intellectual work behind what seems simple, making us reconsider our assumptions about art making. Editor: Thinking about it now, this piece is like a reminder that even the most abstract forms have roots in the real world, and that the process is just as important as the final product. Curator: I agree. It allows us to examine the artistic labor and its social implications.