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Pad No. 4 | musefully
Davis, Stuart. Pad No. 4, 1947. Oil on canvas, 14 x 18 in. (35.6 x 45.7 cm)
Frame: 21 1/4 x 25 1/4 x 1 3/4 in. (54 x 64.1 x 4.4 cm). Bequest of Edith and Milton Lowenthal, 1992.11.5. No known copyright restrictions.
Pad No. 4 is one of a series of four related pictures that Stuart Davis made while working on The Mellow Pad, a painting in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. In all of these works, the word pad appears—here, sideways in green at the upper left (and a 4 is in white at the lower right).
This title reveals the artist’s fondness for wordplay: pad refers both to an artist’s sketchbook and to the jazz slang term for “home.” A lifelong aficionado of jazz, Davis regularly drew analogies between the visual patterns of his pictures and the syncopated rhythms of this modern form of American music.