Karen Wilkin reviews Stuart Davis: In Full Swing at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on view through September 25, 2016.

Wilkin writes: "Strangely, the catalog essays ignore the importance of drawing to Davis’s repetitions, but the paintings with recycled motifs, which he likened to his beloved jazz musicians’ fluid improvisations on familiar tunes, illustrate the point. We can see how a sedate 1927 'portrait' of a percolator is transformed into the full-throttle 'Owh! In San Pao' (1951), with its teasing words, floating shapes and offbeat rhythms."