ARTHUR DOVE, Arrangement in Form I

Arthur Dove painted Arrangement in Form I in 1944, two years before the end of his life. Often housebound and plagued by his failing health, Dove’s work from the period of the forties was uniquely diverse and forward thinking. The artist was resolutely committed to abstraction throughout his career, but these late works are purer in this regard than anything he had produced previously. According to Ann Lee Morgan: “The period of the forties, which was so limited in other respects for Dove, was a time of great variety in his painting. The diversity in his work makes all the more remarkable the level of his achievement, for in the forties, there is a higher percentage of fully realized successes than ever before….. Dove saw almost no new art firsthand after the spring of 1938. What and how much he saw or read about in art magazines and newspapers is not clear in the documentary evidence from the forties. However, he seems always to have had good antennae for new ideas in the art climate, to which he was perhaps responding once again” (Arthur Dove: Life and Work with a Catalogue Raisonné, Newark, New Jersey, 1984, p. 61).

Dove experimented with spatial effects during the early forties and the result was a group of new paintings which are comprised of sculptural, three-dimensional, overlapping shapes. “Announced by The Inn (1942) and fully developed in Arrangements in Form I and II, these paintings recall some earlier Picasso paintings of abstracted, sculptural figures and suggest also actual sculptures by artists such as Seymour Lipton and David Hare" (Arthur Dove: Life and Work with a Catalogue Raisonné, p.64). Arrangements in Form I, 1944, exemplifies Dove’s developing interest in pure abstraction. It reflects a kinship with the work of the young abstract expressionists whose painting would dominate American art for the next decade, a phenomenon Dove would not live to see.