Arthur Garfield Dove 1880 - 1946

An American Place, New York
The Downtown Gallery, New York, by 1961
Private Collection, California, 1969 (acquired from the above)
By descent in the family to the present owner

New York, An American Place, Arthur Dove; Paintings-1942-43, February-March 1943, no. 11
New York, The Downtown Gallery, Arthur G. Dove (1880-1946): Paintings, April-May 1952, no. 24 (dated 1944)
Huntington, New York, Heckscher Museum, Arthur G. Dove of Long Island Sound, August-September 1967, no. 13

Ann Lee Morgan, Arthur Dove: His Life and Work, With a Catalogue Raisonné, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1984, no. 43.12, p. 300
William C. Agee, "New Directions: The Late Work," Arthur Dove: A Retrospective, Andover, Massachusetts, 1997, fig. 68, p. 149, illustrated p. 148

This painting is in very good condition. Unlined. Under UV: there are a few very minor spots of inpainting in the yellow area at center right, one spot in the green at upper center, and a few small dots in the pale yellow at upper left. For a more detailed condition report prepared by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc., please contact the American Art department.
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A native of Canandaigua, New York, Arthur Dove returned home to the United States in 1909 after a 15-month stay in Europe, and was soon introduced to the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. The two artists quickly forged an intimate personal and professional bond, through which Dove grew acquainted with the artists orbiting Stieglitz’s circle including Marsden Hartley, John Marin and Max Weber. This coterie of young painters shared a desire to establish new standards for a uniquely American aesthetic and to produce innovative pictures of a new and dynamic modern world. Dove’s work thus transformed remarkably soon after his return home, as he began to derive a personal style of abstraction that expressed the exuberance and admiration with which he viewed his surroundings. By repeating and interlocking shapes, color and texture throughout his compositions, Dove sought to record his personal interpretation of his environment by reducing its elements to their purest essence of form and color. After 1935, however, Dove moved increasingly away from representational imagery and began to experiment with more purely abstract compositions. Illustrative of the artist at the height of his technical maturity, Rectangles is a dynamic and vibrant painting executed during this remarkably innovative period, and rightfully identifies Dove as a master American colorist.

While he retained his preference for distinctly defined yet overlapping shapes, in the late 1930s Dove began to largely eschew the undulating contours and organic imagery that characterized his earlier work. Instead, his new interest in applying areas of flat, monochromatic color led Dove to develop a strikingly more geometric and abstract manner. Dove’s trajectory along the path towards pure abstraction is confirmed in his December 30, 1942 diary entry, in which the artist proclaimed that his new work was “free from all motifs etc just put down one color after another” (quoted in William C. Agee, “New Directions: The Late Work, 1938-1946,” Arthur Dove: A Retrospective, Andover, Massachusetts, 1997, p. 145). Dove referred to the aesthetic transition in his work as moving towards “pure painting.” Adopting a crispness and precision absent from his earlier work, he sought to render shape and color as directly as possible, thus enabling himself to observe and understand the relationships between the two more clearly. Free from all representative associations, color and form become the subject of the work itself.

As the title implies, Rectangles lacks any hint of representation and thus becomes a work that showcases these experiments to the fullest extent. In the present work, Dove composes an arrangement of overlapping shapes and contrasting colors that imbues the canvas with a sense of constant, shifting movement; indeed it nearly pulsates with an intangible yet undoubtedly palpable visual energy. The placement of high-keyed swatches of color, created by intricately weaving together successive gradations of primarily red, blue and yellow hues, reveals Dove’s sophisticated understanding of the expressive power of color. Perhaps even more significantly, however, this increasing interest in liberating color from all objective contexts ultimately situates him as an important precursor to the work and interests of the Color Field painters such as Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler in the following decade.