Art Theory Text with Color-Space Field Diagrams 1941

Curator: Looking at this unassuming sheet, “Art Theory Text with Color-Space Field Diagrams” by Stuart Davis, I get a sense of controlled chaos, like a brilliant mind trying to map its own internal landscape. Editor: It reminds me of early 20th-century spatial theory, a very modernist and masculine attempt to codify visual experience, to create a universal language of color and form. The handwritten notes particularly emphasize the artist's authority. Curator: Authority? Or maybe just vulnerability. The scrawled diagrams feel less like pronouncements and more like whispers from an artist wrestling with the unseen forces of composition. It’s like he's talking to himself. Editor: But isn't that the privilege of art? To externalize these inner worlds and then impose that vision on the rest of us? Curator: Perhaps. Or perhaps he's just sharing his joy of finding the rhythm in the chaos and helping us see that rhythm too. Editor: I suppose that's one way to put it.