Monday, November 15, 2021 – Dove translated natural forms, sounds, and musical motifs into powerfully expressive paintings.

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MONDAY,  NOVEMBER 15, 2021



The   520th Edition

ARTHUR DOVE

ABSTRACT ARTIST

FROM
THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM

Arthur Dove, Sun, 1943, wax emulsion on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Suzanne M. Smith, 1989.83.3, © 1976, Suzanne Mullett Smith

Born in New York. A pioneering abstract painter known for expressing natural forms, sounds, and musical motifs in his paintings.

Nora Panzer, ed. Celebrate America in Poetry and Art (New York and Washington, D.C.: Hyperion Paperbacks for Children in association with the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1994)

Arthur Dove, one of the pioneering abstract painters of the early twentieth century, graduated from Cornell in 1903 and worked for a period as a magazine illustrator. His discovery, in Paris in 1908, of Matisse, the Fauves, and the Cubists, as well as his encounter with aesthetic theories that stressed spiritual expression, had a crucial effect on his subsequent work. He spent much of his year abroad in southern France with Alfred Maurer, who provided Dove’s introduction to his lifelong friend and dealer, Alfred Stieglitz. Throughout Dove’s work, from the early ​“Nature Symbolized” series, in which houses, sails, and landscape elements are at times almost unrecognizable, to his later abstractions, Dove translated natural forms, sounds, and musical motifs into powerfully expressive paintings. Although during the 1920s Dove’s sense of humor emerged in a group of witty and formally inventive assemblages, his watercolors of the 1930s and 1940s, in which he wove imagery ​“into a sequence of formations” analogous to musical harmonies, are among his most distinctive works.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987

Arthur Dove, Untitled (Landscape), ca. 1938, ink and watercolor on paper mounted on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1993.22.1

Arthur Dove began creating small watercolors as studies for larger paintings, but he came to appreciate them as stand-alone works and by the 1930s began to include them in exhibitions. Lyrical color and freely sketched forms reveal Dove’s impulsive, of-the-moment response to nature and his surroundings. Although celebrated as one of the country’s most accomplished abstract artists, Dove captures the American landscape through gestural lines and washes of color.

Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection, 2014

Arthur Dove, Car across the Street, 1940, pen and ink and watercolor on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1986.6.24

Dove suffered from various illnesses that kept him housebound for weeks at a time. Nevertheless he painted the world that was visible from his glass-enclosed front porch. For a painter inspired by nature, this confinement was frustrating, but Dove transformed the nearby activity into imaginative compositions. In this watercolor, he created a colorful, visually exciting scene from an otherwise banal subject, the neighbor’s car. Defined by only two black lines, the car seems to merge with the surrounding environment.

Graphic Masters II: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2009

Arthur Dove, Black and White, 1940, gouache on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1986.6.23

Arthur Dove, Oil Tanker II, 1932, watercolor and conte crayon on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1986.6.25

Arthur Dove, Untitled (Centerport), 1941, watercolor, gouache, ink and pencil on paper mounted on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1993.22.2

Arthur Dove, The Court Room Scene, ca. 1904-1907, pencil and crayon on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Paul M. Dove, 1978.79

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SOURCES

SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM

Text by Judith Berdy

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