Swing Landscape: Stuart Davis and the Modernist Mural

An insightful study of the progressive politics animating a great work of modernist mural painting

In 1936 the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project commissioned Stuart Davis (1892–1964) to paint a mural for the Williamsburg Houses, a New York City housing project. Though the mural, Swing Landscape, was never installed in its intended location, it survives as an impressive testament to Davis’s energetic, colorful brand of abstraction and the progressive politics that animated ...