ARTHUR DOVE, ABSTRACT ARTIST
by Libby Clay
Was Arthur Dove (1880-1946) inspired by an Upstate New York winter when he painted Cars in a Sleet Storm (51.4)? He was certainly familiar with them, for he was born in Canandaigua and grew up in Geneva. The elder son of William and Anna Dove, Arthur Garfield Dove attended Geneva High School and Hobart College, which his contractor father helped to build.
The man who has been called "America's first abstract artist" was introduced to drawing and painting by a Geneva neighbor, Newton Weatherly. An artist and naturalist, Weatherly provided young Dove with instruction and art supplies. He also taught him to love nature, taking him on camping trips and showing him how to hunt and fish. Art and nature would be the twin beacons of Dove's life.
Dove transferred from Hobart to Cornell, where he studied art with Charles Wellington Furlong. Dove's drawings were witty and humorous, and Furlong encouraged him to become an illustrator. After graduation from Cornell in 1903, Dove went to New York and sold illustrations to magazines such as Harper's and Collier's. He also married a Geneva Girl, Florence Dorsey.
Illustrating soon became too mechanical for Dove, and he began to explore painting. With a borrowed $4,000, the Doves left New York for France; there he could study painting at the cutting edge of the art scene. He met most of the American artists who had flocked to France, and Alfred Maurer was especially helpful to him. When Dove returned to New York, he carried with him a letter of introduction from Maurer to Alfred Stieglitz.
Stieglitz was impressed with Dove's work and arranged a one-man show for him. However, the country was not ready for Dove. He was the only American artist to develop his own non-representational style before the 1913 Armory show, and became the symbol of "deranged modernism" in the eyes of the American public. One acerbic critic wrote, "To paint the pigeon would not do/And so he simply paints the coo...."
Dove's work did not sell. His family now included an infant son, William, and he needed money desperately. His father refused to support his son's "madness," so Dove tried farming and then lobstering. The long hours of toil left him little time to paint, and their arduous life was too much for Florence. She left him and returned to Geneva.
Helen Torr (Reds) Weed, a fellow artist, became Dove's second wife. They had a succession of unusual residences, the most famous being a 42-foot yawl, the Mona. For a decade they cruised and painted, and Dove had all he needed—time to paint and proximity to nature.
He and Reds also lived on an island off Connecticut, in a former post office, and on the top floor of a commercial building erected by Dove's father in Geneva. Dove always tried to make the best of everything, and he painted the one windowless wall of the Geneva residence white, hung his paintings there, and created a private art gallery. (A 1938 photograph shows Cars in a Sleet Storm hanging there.) The life of Geneva paraded by below them, and Dove wrote to Stieglitz, "We see and hear everything, even the Salvation Army band concerts every evening. Have listened all winter and not saved yet."
Arthur Dove thought of his paintings as "extractions" rather than abstractions. Whereas European abstractionists tried to convey the mood evoked by a motif, Dove sought, through color and form, to find the essence. He believed that color could describe and recall sensations. Thus the cold blue-green base of Cars in a Sleet Storm evokes in us a shivery chill. Auras and vibrations recall the distortion of light seen through a windshield glazed with ice. Headlights glow like pairs of eyes in a surreal world where distances and shapes are ambiguous. Dove extracts the sensation of a northern winter.
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