Arthur Dove
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AS EARLY AS 1906 Arthur Dove was a successful illustrator, earning the then comfortable income of $4,000 a year. Six years later he had put illustrating behind him to devote his full energies to those mysteriously evocative graphs of sun and moon power, of farm and sea shapes, which have finally won him recognition as perhaps the most individual of our pioneer abstractionists. Unfortunately that recognition did not become general soon enough to bring much comfort to a life of hardship that ended at Centerport, Long Island, in 1946.
Dove was born at Canandaigua, N. Y., in 1880 and was brought up in nearby Geneva. At Cornell, from which he graduated in 1903, he did some painting under Charles Furlong of the art department, then went to New York, married, had a son and was soon established in commercial art. The turning point in his career was an eighteen-month trip to France in 190708, a time when the modern fauve and cubist movements were just making their first stir. Dove was deeply influenced and soon began a series of semiabstract pastels symbolizing growth patterns in nature or "the creak and strain," as one critic put it, of a Team of Horses. In 1912 a group of these pictures were shown by Alfred Stieglitz in Dove's first one-man exhibition, which also travelled to Chicago, causing a fist fight among visiting art students.
Dove's decision to give up commercial work caused a long rift with his father, who refused to give him even a small allowance. For the next six years Dove ran a chicken farm at Westport, Connecticut, lobstering on the side and working from four in the morning till midnight. In 1918 he gave up the farm, acquired a boat and lived up and down the Hudson River and the Long Island coast, spending some of his later years ashore at Port Washington, Lloyd's Harbor and Huntington. After his mother's death in 1933, he sold the boat and returned to Geneva to help salvage what he could of the family's dwindling finances. There the Doves (he had remarried in 1923 after his first wife's death) lived four years on an old farm and two more in an abandoned rollerskating rink. There, too, he was stricken with the heart ailment that made him a semiinvalid for the rest of his life. His last years were spent on Long Island, first at Halesite then at Centerport where he remodelled an old post office, its rear supported on piers over the salt water which he loved.
Through this harried life, Dove's art developed slowly but with remarkable consistency. Soon he abandoned the almost geometrical forms of his early abstractions, moving in the 1920's towards more fluid, sweeping lines. Perhaps the rhythm of these seemed a little obvious, for he went on in his mature work to a style of strange, ragged shapes, each one carefully wrought to express the essence of his subjects. They are entirely original. Who but Dove would have visualized the sound of fog horns in wavering, expanding circles or have perched the moon like a female symbol above a phallic tree? In his late work he evolved more abstract forms, which have had a strong influence on several of our younger painters, but he never surpassed his haunting nature poetry of the 'thirties.
Dove : As I see from one point in space to another, from the top of the tree to the top of the sun, from right or left, or up, or down, these are drawn as any line around a thing to give the colored stuff of it, to weave the whole into a sequence of formations rather than to form an arrangement of facts.
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