A Walk: Poplars

Arthur Dove’s A Walk: Poplars is a composition of irregular, subtly modeled, layered shapes that, with the help of the work’s title, resolve themselves into suggestions of a landscape of bulging blue and black masses bifurcated by a golden central form that might be a path. In defiance of traditional rules of perspectival illusion, the path rises upward rather than receding into space. Dotting the path, the rounded, lighter-colored shapes, outlined in black, suggest both crude footprints and the marks of branches on a stalk, thus identifying the yellow “path” of the walk with the trunks of the poplars seen on that walk. At the lower right, frond-like tentacles of blue reinforce the organic reference. Tantalizing the viewer with suggestions of the forms of objectively observed nature and the conventions of landscape art, A Walk: Poplars is subtly moody and mysterious. In this intimately scaled work, Dove’s use of pastel, a crayon of dense ground pigment that creates a velvety texture and matte surface, draws the viewer into a natural world defined by essences rather than appearances.

This undated work appears to belong to an early period in Dove’s career in which he first experimented with what he described as “extraction,” the creation of art simultaneously inspired by and liberated from objective reality.  In 1911 and 1912, Dove created ten pastel drawings, including Sails (TF 1993.10), also in the Terra Foundation collection, that are among the first abstract works created in the United States. The titles of these works may have been assigned by the artist’s dealer and supporter, Alfred Stieglitz, when he exhibited them in his gallery known as 291, but they appropriately highlight the central inspiration of nature in Dove’s art. A Walk: Poplars shares with the other pastels not only medium but the bold abstracting of natural forms and references to pure geometry to create a composition that toys with the boundaries between flat, two-dimensional decoration and the traditional representation of landscape with illusionistic recession into space. This work departs from the 1911–12 series, however, in its relatively bolder colors and static composition. Its reference to poplars, trees especially characteristic of rural France, recalls the artist’s fifteen-month stay there in 1909–10, during which he worked in the countryside painting mostly landscapes.

In the early twentieth century, when Dove was developing his personal brand of abstract art, advances in the biological sciences stimulated scientists and art theorists alike to explore correspondences between nature and geometry, organic form and mathematics, in an effort to find purposive order in nature. Like Charles Sheeler’s Flower Forms (TF 1987.33), another early modernist work in the Terra Foundation collection, A Walk: Poplars suggests perceptions of nature from the inside out. Dove’s pastel transcends scientific scrutiny for an emotional expression that draws on the artist’s personal experience of nature.

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Arthur G. Dove-A Retrospective Exhibition, White Art Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, November 1954. [exh. cat.]

Arthur G. Dove-A Retrospective Exhibition, University of California Los Angeles Art Galleries, Los Angeles, California (organizer). Venues: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, October 1–November 16, 1958; Phillips Gallery, Washington, D.C., December 1, 1958–January 5, 1959; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, January 25–February 28, 1959; Marian Koogler McNay Art Institute, San Antonio, Texas, March 18–April 18, 1959; University of California Los Angeles Art Galleries, Los Angeles, California, May 1–June 15, 1959; Art Center, La Jolla, California, June 20–July 30, 1959; San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, California, August 15–September 30, 1959. [exh. cat.]

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American Pioneer Artists, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, 1962.

The Decade of the Armory Show, 1910–1920, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York (organizer). Venues: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, February 27–April 14, 1963; City Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri, June 1–July 14, 1963; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, August 6–September 15, 1963; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, September 30–October 30, 1963; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, November 15–December 29, 1963; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York, January 20–February 23, 1964. [exh. cat.]

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20th Century Painting and Sculpture, Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Washington, D.C.; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, September 17–October 24, 1965.

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Arthur Dove, San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, California (organizer). Venues: San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, California, November 21, 1974–January 5, 1975; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, January 27–March 2, 1975; The St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri, April 3–May 25, 1975; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, July 12–August 31, 1975; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa, September 22–November 2, 1975; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, November 24, 1975–January 18, 1976. [exh. cat.]

Twentieth-Century American Drawing: Three Avant-Garde Generations, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York (organizer). Venues: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York, January 23–March 23, 1976; Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, Germany, May 27–July 11, 1976; Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen, Germany, July 18–August 29, 1976. [exh. cat.]

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Collection Cameo companion piece, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, April 1997.

Collection Cameo, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, November 2002.

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American Modernism: The First Wave, Painting from 1903 to 1933. (exh. cat. Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University). Waltham, MA: Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 1963. Text (checklist), cat. no. 3.

Arthur Dove: The Years of Collage. (exh. cat. J. Millard Tawes Fine Arts Center, University of Maryland Art Gallery). College Park, MD: University of Maryland Art Gallery, 1967. Text p. 49 (checklist), cat. no. 1.

Edith Gregor Halpert Memorial Exhibition. (exh. cat., National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution). Washington, DC: National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, 1973. Text (checklist), cat. no. 5.

Highly Important 19th and 20th Century American Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors, and Sculpture from the Estate of the Late Edith Gregor Halpert (The Downtown Gallery). New York: Sotheby's Parke Bernet, Inc, 1973. Ill. lot 48 (color).

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Haskell, Barbara. Arthur Dove. (exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Art). Boston, Massachusetts: New York Graphic Society, 1974. Ill. p. 26 (color).

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A Walk: Poplars, Arthur G. Dove. Collection Cameo sheet, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, February 1990. Ill. (black & white).

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