Arthur Dove, an early American Modernist, was an essential precursor to Abstract Expressionism; he was the first American artist to paint a completely abstract picture, though he maintained an essential relationship to natural forms. Dove was stimulated by European painting styles, in particular the Fauvist works of Henri Matisse, which was characterized by seemingly wild brush work, strident colors, and simplified, abstracted forms. Many of Dove's abstractions also show clear Asian influence, with calligraphic line emphasizing energetic force and subject matter derived from landscape scenes. Dove remained extremely responsive to artistic influences both domestic and international throughout his career and was himself a fundamental influence on later Abstract Expressionist painters.

• Dove referred to his type of abstraction as "extraction," bringing out the essential forms of objects. He sought to represent the unseen rhythms of his environment and to express a personal interpretation of nature by reducing objects to their purest essence.
• Dove's abstraction is organic and poetic and stems from sentiment rather than through design or theory. He was interested in recording a sensation or a feeling rather than in speculating about style.

Arthur Dove was born on August 2, 1880 in Canandaigua to parents of English descent. He was the son of a building contractor and brick manufacturer. As a child, he became friends with a neighbor, naturalist Newton Weatherby, who took Dove along on hunting, fishing and camping excursions and encouraged Dove's fascination with nature.

Dove attended Cornell University, where he majored in art and pre-law. There, he was chosen to illustrate the Cornell University yearbook. After graduation, he became a popular commercial illustrator in New York. In 1907, Dove and his wife went to Paris, the heart of the art world at the time. While in Europe, Dove was drawn to the Fauvist works of Henri Matisse. Dove met American painter Alfred Maurer and gained entry into art circles that included Matisse, Picasso, and Cézanne. Dove's style at that time was Impressionistic, but he, as well as Maurer, strove to reduce Impressionism to larger areas of pure color in the Fauvist manner.

In 1910, Dove sought to project the essence of objects by emphasizing structure and ridding the composition of all superfluous detail; he replaced bulk with pattern, heightened and modified color and simplified contours. At this point, Dove was moving steadily toward abstraction. In 1910, Dove had been the first to abandon any suggestion of narrative and to discard any semblance of figure, setting, or even titles. He did so because he thought "the forms should tell their own story."

Between 1910 and 1911, Dove created a collection of works, referred to as Abstractions Number 1 - 6, which had little resemblance to real-life objects. In these paintings, as well as in later works, Dove articulated meaning and sensation through line, shape, and color. From 1907 to 1917, Alfred Stieglitz's gallery 291 in New York was at the center of a community of artists and critics. Having gravitated to 291 where he was exposed to European avant-garde art, Dove became convinced of the independent merits of color and form, a discovery critical to the development of American Modernism. Dove executed a series of experimental collage works in the 1920s, and also experimented with emerging paint materials, such as hand mixed pigment over a wax emulsion. Using these techniques, Dove produced about twenty-five assemblages between 1924 and 1930. He was also interested in synesthesia, a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color, a belief present in French Symbolist circles. For example, his 1929 painting Foghorns depicts the warning sirens in the Long Island mist as concentric rings of paint growing in lightening tones of grayed pink emanating outward from a dark center.

Arthur Dove's tendency to observe his immediate surroundings and integrate their abstracted forms into his art prompted him to layer undulating forms and to work with a reduced palette, creating a sensuous, brushy surface. His works of the late 1930s and 1940s are principally composed of flat or convex forms. The compositions show, in part, the turbulent coastal environment as an abiding source of inspiration.

Although Dove has always occupied a central place in early American Modernism, he was also among the first twentieth-century American artists to produce purely abstract paintings, and he continued this to varying degrees throughout his career. His reputation continued to grow after his death and he has been credited with exercising an indirect influence on the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, who placed similar emphasis on the artist's subjective experience of his surroundings and on the intrinsic emotional power of color and line.
Below are Max Ernst's major influences, and the people and ideas that he influenced in turn.



"I would like to make something that is real in itself that does not remind anyone of any other things, and that does not have to be explained like the letter A, for instance."

"I can claim no background except perhaps the woods, running streams, hunting, fishing, camping, the sky."