Color-Size-Space Diagrams 1940

Curator: Let’s turn our attention to Stuart Davis’s "Color-Size-Space Diagrams," from 1940. It is currently housed here at the Harvard Art Museums. Editor: At first glance, it feels like a blueprint, but imbued with a strangely personal and almost coded language. Curator: Absolutely. Davis is dissecting pictorial space, reducing it to numbered axes and labeled color blocks. Note how he's broken down "movement in space" into units. Editor: His diagrams suggest a pursuit to understand the underpinnings of visual experience itself, and how to codify this process in his work. This feels very relevant to the industrial aesthetic of the time. Curator: Precisely, it is an interesting exploration of the elemental components of abstraction. Editor: Examining this piece, one cannot help but think of the cultural drive toward breaking down complex systems into more simple, more easily controlled, parts. Curator: A most astute observation. It all comes together in this intriguing little diagram. Editor: It makes you consider the cultural influences that prompted Davis to conceptualize space, color, and size in such a manner.