Study for Radio City Music Hall Mural
Stuart Davis
American, 1892–1964
1932
An ink-on-paper preparatory sketch in which Stuart Davis translates the energy of modern urban life and popular entertainment into a rhythmic, abstract composition for a Radio City Music Hall mural.
A single, continuous network of bold, looping lines and overlapping flattened shapes clangs into view like a drawn musical score—suggesting instruments, signage, and architectural fragments arranged with improvisatory momentum across the page.
The study shows Davis’s contribution to American modernism by fusing Cubist fragmentation, commercial-art vocabulary, and jazz-like rhythm to invent a public, homegrown abstract language for murals and mass culture.
Medium
Ink on paper
Dimensions
7 3/8 x 9 3/4" (18.9 x 24.7 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of Gertrud A. Mellon
Accession
11.1977
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
