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Arthur Dove
1880–1946
BirthplaceCanandaigua, New York, United States of America
Death placeHuntington, New York, United States of America
BiographyOne of the first American artists to abandon imitative representation of the visible world in his art, Arthur Dove was an experimentalist who drew on the inspiration of nature as felt and experienced rather than seen. Dove was raised in Geneva, in western New York State, and graduated from Cornell University. Defying his father’s plans for him to be a lawyer, Dove worked as a freelance magazine illustrator in New York City. Eager to become a painter, in 1908 Dove departed for fifteen months in Europe for further study. Although he spent most of that time working in the French countryside, he also interacted with a small group of progressive American expatriate artists and collectors. Dove’s earliest works were landscapes and still lifes indebted stylistically to the expressive paint manipulation and strong color of the movement known as post-impressionism.
On his return to the United States, Dove met pioneering New York City gallery owner and photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), who became his lifelong friend and supporter. Dove purchased a farm in Westport, Connecticut, and tried to support his young family by farming as his art underwent a transformation. Characterizing his approach as “extraction” rather than abstraction, he created compositions in oil and in pastel in which dynamic shapes, curving lines, and subtle colors evoke the essence of forms to express the artist’s subjective, emotional experience of nature.
Dove was among a small group of American artists, several championed by Stieglitz at his gallery known simply as 291, who experimented in the 1910s with various forms of abstraction. He never again lived in the art center of New York, however, and although his work was often exhibited there and elsewhere, Dove developed his artistic expression somewhat independently both of his American avant-garde colleagues and of European influences. In 1920, Dove left his first wife for artist Helen (“Reds”) Torr, with whom he began a nomadic existence. For several years they lived aboard a 42-foot sailboat alternately based on Long Island, New York, and the Connecticut shore; in the 1930s, they took up residence in Geneva, New York, as Dove tried to settle his parents’ encumbered estate. Between 1938 and his death, Dove and Torr lived on the Long Island shore at Centerport, New York.
Nature remained Dove’s primary inspiration, but between 1924 and 1930, he turned to assembling works by attaching various found objects to a flat surface; several of these collages were ironic “portraits” of critics and colleagues. In the late 1920s Dove returned to painting with new energy and stronger color. Modernist collector Duncan Phillips, his enthusiastic patron, began paying Dove a monthly stipend in exchange for first choice of Dove’s work from his annual exhibitions at Stieglitz’s gallery, and Dove finally gave up illustration work to devote himself to fine art. Despite Phillips’s support and some critical recognition of his art, Dove’s last years were beset by financial hardship and health concerns. Even before his death at age sixty-six, however, Dove was acknowledged as one of America’s most important and original early modernist artists.
On his return to the United States, Dove met pioneering New York City gallery owner and photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), who became his lifelong friend and supporter. Dove purchased a farm in Westport, Connecticut, and tried to support his young family by farming as his art underwent a transformation. Characterizing his approach as “extraction” rather than abstraction, he created compositions in oil and in pastel in which dynamic shapes, curving lines, and subtle colors evoke the essence of forms to express the artist’s subjective, emotional experience of nature.
Dove was among a small group of American artists, several championed by Stieglitz at his gallery known simply as 291, who experimented in the 1910s with various forms of abstraction. He never again lived in the art center of New York, however, and although his work was often exhibited there and elsewhere, Dove developed his artistic expression somewhat independently both of his American avant-garde colleagues and of European influences. In 1920, Dove left his first wife for artist Helen (“Reds”) Torr, with whom he began a nomadic existence. For several years they lived aboard a 42-foot sailboat alternately based on Long Island, New York, and the Connecticut shore; in the 1930s, they took up residence in Geneva, New York, as Dove tried to settle his parents’ encumbered estate. Between 1938 and his death, Dove and Torr lived on the Long Island shore at Centerport, New York.
Nature remained Dove’s primary inspiration, but between 1924 and 1930, he turned to assembling works by attaching various found objects to a flat surface; several of these collages were ironic “portraits” of critics and colleagues. In the late 1920s Dove returned to painting with new energy and stronger color. Modernist collector Duncan Phillips, his enthusiastic patron, began paying Dove a monthly stipend in exchange for first choice of Dove’s work from his annual exhibitions at Stieglitz’s gallery, and Dove finally gave up illustration work to devote himself to fine art. Despite Phillips’s support and some critical recognition of his art, Dove’s last years were beset by financial hardship and health concerns. Even before his death at age sixty-six, however, Dove was acknowledged as one of America’s most important and original early modernist artists.