American autoscapes: Stuart Davis and the view from the road, 1920-194

With the advent of the automobile the appearance of the American landscape was transformed, and so was the way of viewing it. In terms of perception and its physiology, the automobile put people into new viewing positions and altered the sense of time and space. I argue that "automobilized vision" was a new mode of viewing the landscape from the moving car, and it included optical effects as well as a view of an emerging automobile landscape or "autoscape." The automobile mediated the relationship between a person and the actual landscape, simultaneously providing access and creating distance from the landscape. As a result of automobilized vision, artists represented landscape in new ways. Speed, movement, and the framing of views were responsible for most of the visual implications of automobile travel. Automobility provided easier access to more places, and artists often relied upon it to find subject matter. Often an artist's stimuli or conception of the landscape relies on the automobile as an essential part of the creative process, although this may not be immediately apparent.;The artist Stuart Davis lived during the transition to automobile travel, and he is my case study for automobilized vision. Davis explained that an artist who has "driven an automobile...doesn't feel the same way about form and space as one who has not." He manipulated modernist artistic style to convey not just what was seen, but also how it was seen. I divide his development into three periods between the years 1916 and 1932, culminating with his painting Windshield Mirror (1932), which conveys the essential components of automobilized vision; an altered sense of time and space and the sequential appearance of framed views. A new episode in automobilized vision began with the building of high-speed freeways after World War II, and I conclude with examples from the 1950s through the present day.