Arthur Dove (August 2, 1880 – November 23, 1946) was an American artist. An to the front American modernist, he is often considered the first American abstract painter. Dove used a broad range of media, sometimes in well ahead combinations, to develop his abstractions and his abstract landscapes.
Me and the Moon from 1937 is a good example of an Arthur Dove abstract landscape and has been referred to as one of the culminating works of his career. Dove did a series of experimental collage works in the 1920s. He experimented later with techniques, combining paints with oil or tempera higher than a wax emulsion as exemplified in Dove’s 1938 painting Tanks, in the accrual of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Trying to find information on Arthur Dove hasn’t been easy! There is hardly anything about him on https://wikipedia.com
I did, however find a bit more information on https://www.theartstory.org/artist/dove-arthur/
Arthur Dove returned to New York City in 1909, and took up illustration again for a short time, but, due to his association with Alfred Steiglitz, displayed with the avant-garde artists at the Steiglitz 291 Gallery. In 1909, Arthur G. Dove returned to the United States, met the photographer Alfred Steiglitz, and–alongside John Marin and Georgia OKeeffe–became the artist that Stieglitz favored in his 291 Gallery, his gallery in New York. Soon after Dove returned to the United States, he met Alfred Stieglitz, who invited the artist to take part in the exhibition “The Younger American Artists” at Stieglitzs Gallery 291, in 1910.
Arthur Garfield Dove displayed his works in Alfred Stieglitzs gallery 291 in 1910, as part of a Younger American Painters show that also included Doves old friend Mauer. With the encouragement of Alfred Stieglitz, Arthur Garfield Dove produced Americas first pure abstractions. Arthur Garfield Dove entered Alfred Stieglitzs (American, 1864-1946) circle, and in 1912, displayed a series of non-objective pastels in the Alfred Stieglitz Gallery (291 U.S.). Thereby becoming the first 20th-century American painter to make purely abstract paintings, a practice that he continued for his entire career. Arthur Dove, born in Canandaigua, New York state, was one of the first 20th-century American artists to make purely abstract, or nonobjective, paintings–a practice that Arthur Dove continued in various degrees over his career.
The American painter Arthur Dove (1880-1946), purportedly the first painter to create abstract paintings, has always held a central position in works about early American Modernism. Arthur Dove is the first American artist known to have painted an abstract work of art, in 1910. In 1912. Dove had the Dove Only solo exhibition, the first public exhibition of an abstract work by an American artist. In the years 1910 and 1911, Dove painted a number of groundbreaking works, characterised by strongly abstract, sharply demarcated forms, compressed spaces, rhythmic compositions, and earthy colors.
Dove worked in oils, crayons, and water colors, and his paintings frequently focused on nature, transitivity, and light. Dove was exposed to new styles of painting in Europe, including the works of Matisse. Doves paintings are based on organic forms, and Dove calls his style extraction, as he takes forms from nature. The painter later moved to France in 1907, where he saw Henri Matisses Fauvist works for the first time.
Arthur G. Dove became ill in the late 1930s, but continued painting, producing work that most critics considered to be his best in the 1940s. Married life had broken down by 1920, and following the death of Florence Dorsey in 1929, Arthur Garfield Dove married his longtime partner, the painter Helen Reds Torr, whom he lived with for seven years aboard a 42-foot sailing yawl on Long Island Sound. Arthur Dove was nominated as a candidate for president and vice president in 1880. He was raised in an upper-middle-class, normal home in Geneva, New York, where his father was a brick maker and a New York City contractor.
Today, his work is represented in major private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York ; Brooklyn Museum, New York ; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. ; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania ; Yale University Art Gallery, Connecticut, and Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, Virginia. The show, organized by Addison Gallery for the American Art, covers a time frame spanning from 1908, the year Dove took up painting, to 1946, the year he died.
Arthur Dove, one of the early abstract artists of the early 20th century, graduated from Cornell University in 1903 and worked as a magazine illustrator for a time. Like so many, Dove became an illustrator upon moving to New York City in 1903, and was fortunate not to struggle for employment. Dove went on to spend seven years living in a houseboat with Helen Torr, the artist known as the Red.
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