Size-Tone Series Diagrams 1930

Editor: This drawing, "Size-Tone Series Diagrams," is by Stuart Davis. It looks like a sketch, maybe a study for a larger work. I find it intriguing, almost like a secret language. What do you see in this piece? Curator: I see a visual language being born, a precursor to the pop art Davis would later embrace. Note the repeated shapes and the artist's notations—they suggest a search for objective relations. What memories, cultural echoes, do you think these "size-tones" might evoke? Editor: Perhaps a cityscape, or maybe musical notes? The diagrams seem to hint at something beyond pure abstraction. Curator: Precisely. Davis is tapping into a shared visual vocabulary, but he's also reshaping it, giving us a new symbolic order. It's a fascinating glimpse into an artist's thought process. Editor: I hadn't thought of it as a new symbolic order, that's a great point. It's like seeing the origins of something bigger.