Word: doves
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...would like to make something that is real in itself, that does not remind anyone of any other thing, and that does not have to be explained-like the letter A for instance." Thus one of America's first abstract painters, Arthur Dove, set up his version of the modernist hope. To visit the traveling retrospective show of 70 Dove paintings and collages that Art Historian Barbara Haskell organized for the San Francisco Museum of Art (it opens this week at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo) is to sense how difficult that ambition must have been...
...problem for artists who did not want to follow the usual pattern of expatriation was how to be both modern and at the same time American. Most modern American art from the teens and '20s had a homemade, do-it-yourself, rule-of-thumb look. Arthur Dove's was no exception, and some of his paintings, particularly in the mid-'30s, poignantly suggest an imagination hobbled by its lack of prototypes. But a certain naiveté and brusqueness were, in any case, bound up with Dove's sense of aesthetic probity. It was part of what...
...Dove was, after all, a wealthy brickmaker's boy from Geneva, N.Y., a square-jawed pragmatist, proud of his skills as farmer and sailor, who had tossed in an income of $12,000 a year illustrating for several magazines, including the Saturday Evening Post-no mean sum, in 1907 -and impoverished himself by making serious art at a time when Americans drew little distinction between "fine" and "commercial" work. Dove went to Europe and stayed for two years looking at the work of les Fauves: Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck. He came back in 1909, and never left America again...
...artists-the group around the "291" Gallery, including John Marin and Marsden Hartley, presided over by Photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who was, in Sherwood Anderson's words, "father to so many puzzled, wistful children of the arts in the big, noisy, growing and groping America." Like other "291" artists, Dove was a nature poet: he never contemplated going to the extreme of "pure" abstraction. "I can claim no background," he once reflected, "except perhaps the woods, running streams, hunting, fishing, camping...
...extract "essences" from nature-shapes that symbolized different kinds of force, growth and élan vital, and that constituted the inner structure of reality. This belief, which owed as much to Mme. Blavatsky and her ilk as to Henri Bergson, was common among early abstract artists. Its embodiment, for Dove, was in works like Team of Horses (1911), one of the first abstract paintings ever made in the U.S.: the curling shapes, fringed with sawtooth edges and inset between thick dark lines, are like a premonitory flicker of art deco, but Dove's intent was to convey a sense...