Accompanying the only American showing of an exhibition devoted to the painter Stuart Davis (1892-1964) at Washington's National Museum of American Art during the summer of 1998, this publication offers a fresh look at the quintessential American painter of the early modern period.

An aficionado of jazz who experimented with improvisational composition, Davis created, in the 1920s and 1930s, a spirited American variant of Picasso's and Braque's synthetic cubism and anticipated key elements of pop art. Essayists include leading American scholars of Davis's work and jazz critic Ben Sidran.