Arthur Dove
American Artist and Early Abstract Painter
Born on August 2, 1880, as a boy Arthur Garfield Dove was encouraged by a neighbor to draw and paint and appreciate the natural beauty of his upstate New York surroundings. Dove attended Cornell University, then married and supported his family as an illustrator in Manhattan. In 1907, he made a trip to Paris with friend and fellow painter Alfred Maurer that would have a profound effect on his career. Here Dove encountered the work of the Fauves, with their distinct style of simplified shapes and enhanced color. The Fauve artist who fascinated Dove the most was Henri Matisse.
Dove stayed in Paris and exhibited at the 1908 Salon d’Automne, then returned to the United States two years later. By this time his painting had taken on an impressionistic edge, but Dove was already beginning to push that influence towards abstraction. He would dub this personal style “extraction,” meaning the purest essence of what he was trying to express.
Much To Be Done
By now part of photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s famed circle which included painters Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Stieglitz’s soon to be wife Georgia O’Keeffe, Dove had his own show at Stieglitz’s Manhattan 291 Gallery in 1912, exhibiting a series of pastels. These pastels included abstract depictions of The Ten Commandments and were a bit too unusual for even open-minded art lovers of the time.
Dove often lived in rural settings, running a farm while producing art. His collages include such elements as roof shingles, tools, flags, fishing poles and scraps of denim and metal, and his paintings reflect the singular beauty of nature yet in a style that focused more on universal rhythm or shape as opposed to pictorial representation. As Dove himself wrote in 1925:
We have not yet made shoes that fit like sand
Nor clothes that fit like water
Nor thoughts that fit like air,
There is much to be done--
Works of nature are abstract,
They do not lean on other things for meaning.
The Simple Life
Though he kept in touch with Alfred Stieglitz and continued to exhibit at Stieglitz’s new gallery known as An American Place, Dove was something of a recluse and did not interact extensively with his peers. He preferred solitude to maintain the unique perception he had toward his environment, and he wanted to avoid the growing materialistic trends of American society. Dove was also fond of water and lived on a houseboat with his second wife, painter Helen Torr, for several years.
Dove was fortunate in finding a patron in philanthropist Duncan Phillips, who supported Dove so that Dove did not have to continue working as a magazine illustrator. Although Dove’s work was not very commercially successful, Phillips could see that Dove was a groundbreaking artist in his own quiet way. Phillips even considered Dove to be like Walt Whitman or Henry David Thoreau, two other American freethinkers closely in tune with nature.
Legacy
In his later years, Arthur Dove was plagued by poor health and grew even more withdrawn from society. He continued to paint, however, for as long as he was physically able. He died in 1946 in a small Long Island town. Throughout the years following his passing, Dove has been acknowledged as an artist who not so much broke the mold but rather dismantled and changed it, then put it back together again with his usual customary precision.
Dove’s work can be seen in numerous museums, notably The Metropolitan and The Whitney in New York, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago and, of course, The Phillips Collection of Washington, D.C.
Sources
- The Phillips Collection: Arthur Dove
- Arthur Dove - Answers.com
- Hollis Taggart Gallery: Arthur Dove
- ArtsNet Minnesota: Inner Worlds – Arthur Dove
Nature Symbolized, Arthur Dove, 1911
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