Summary of Arthur Dove
America in the 1910s and 1920s experienced rapid industrialization and urban growth. Arthur Dove sought refuge from the quickened pace of historical change by translating nature into an abstract and distinctly modern vocabulary of color, shape, and line. This retreat into the slow, sustained rhythms of the natural world, its annual renewal, and its visual, spiritual, and auditory sensations define his career. Dove, who was an ardent amateur musician, was also deeply inspired by the parallels between the visual arts and music, and created many works inspired by the popular songs he listened to on the radio. Dove can be seen, simultaneously, as an heir to 19th-century Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, as well as an influence on such later Abstract Expressionists as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner.
Accomplishments
- In the age of machines and materialism, Dove's work instead concentrated on nature as an something to experience, rather than a commodity to own. He stressed the interconnection of humans and the environment, and painted emotionally charged and brilliantly colored scenes of natural wonder.
- Dove was attracted to the timelessness of nature, which he interpreted into a modern abstract vocabulary of color, shape, line, and scale. Simultaneously, Dove was both the heir to 19th-century American landscape painting, and the practitioner of new forms of modern painting.
- Despite the evident influence of French Modernism, Dove's artwork is firmly located within cultural and artistic traditions of reverence for the American land, considering nature as the nation's living past.
- Dove was a central member of Alfred Stieglitz's group who were the first moderns in American art. The collective broke away from representational and narrative art, created works that were innovative and often abstract in terms of their style, color, composition, and forms.
Biography of Arthur Dove
Arthur Dove was born on August 2, 1880, in Canandaigua, New York, to parents of English descent; his father, a successful businessman, was a building contractor and brick manufacturer. As a child, Dove became friends with a neighbor, naturalist Newton Weatherby, who took him along on hunting, fishing, and camping excursions and encouraged Dove's lifelong fascination with nature. Weatherby was also an amateur artist who gave assorted scraps of canvas to Dove to paint on.
