Embracing such disparate influences as popular advertising illustration and European avant-garde art, Stuart Davis’s Super Table presents a still-life arrangement flattened and distorted to the point of caricature. The wooden table, draped fabric, goblet, and notebook (opened to a gridded drawing of a female nude) are all outlined in simple black or white in the facile manner of cartoon drawing and described in bland colors that bear no relationship to expectation. The smooth, seemingly brushless application of paint imitates the mechanical perfection of commercially printed imagery; Stuart abstracts the essence of such textures as wood and brick in stark outline but eschews any attempt to imitate those effects in his own brushwork. Traditionally, the still life is an intimately scaled work that invites close inspection to appreciate the painter’s illusionistic artistry, but the monumental size of Super Table recalls the intrusiveness and anonymity of posters and billboards. Through such means Davis not only subverts the illusion of three-dimensional space on the flat canvas but deliberately questions the nature of artistic individuality and originality.

Super Table is a distillation of Davis’s four still lifes of 1922 on the theme of the table. It marks the culmination of his experiments in synthetic cubism, whereby everyday objects are abstracted into series of flat, planar forms for decorative effect. Although he would not travel to Europe until 1928, Davis was familiar with the work of the movement’s leaders. Indeed, Super Table seems to have been inspired directly by a work of 1919 by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) published in the American magazine The Arts in 1925. From magazine reproductions, Davis also may have been familiar with the series of large-scale images by Georges Braque (1882–1963) that feature tables. Davis also admired the work of French modernist Fernand Léger (1881–1955), whose influence is clear in the American artist’s clean-edged, pristine forms. Davis’s painting reveals his American background in its monumental size, its insistent linearity, and its evocation of popular graphic imagery.

In his search for compositional purity, Davis was influenced by the ancient theory of design known as the “Golden Section,” which postulated specific proportions and angles between lines and forms that would yield a harmonious whole. This theory was influential among European artists, but gained particular currency in the United States as reinterpreted by American artist Jay Hambidge (1867–1924), whose theory of “dynamic symmetry” emphasized the diagonal and the importance of the rectangle. The playful layering of perspectives in Super Table and resultant defiance of the right angle in the series of skewed rectangles seem less a deliberate application of theory, however, than another example of Davis’s staged confrontation between the high art of painting and modern life.