To understand the career of Stuart Davis (1892-1964), the great American Modernist whose centenary show is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City through Feb. 16, you have to imagine a time when American painting hardly mattered to Europe, and when the idea of an avant-garde scarcely mattered to Americans -- except as a source of laughs.
That time is far back, of course. America, in its eager embrace of the new, industrialized and academized the idea of avant-garde production so long ago that the notion of an unpopular, provincial Modernism seems remote. But 60 years...
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