Arthur Dove: Always Connect

Arthur Dove

Arthur Dove

Always Connect

Rachael Z. DeLue

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Rachael Z. DeLue is associate professor of art history and archaeology at Princeton University. She is the author of George Inness and the Science of Landscape, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and coeditor of Landscape Theory.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in China

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-14219-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-28123-0 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226281230.001.0001

This publication is made possible in part by a grant from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

All works by Arthur Dove are courtesy of and copyright The Estate of Arthur G. Dove / Courtesy Terry Dintenfass, Inc.

Frontispiece: see fig. 1, p. 2, for more information.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

DeLue, Rachael Ziady, author.

Arthur Dove : always connect / Rachael Z. DeLue.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-14219-7 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-28123-0 (e-book). 1. Dove, Arthur Garfield, 1880–1946—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

ND237.D67D45 2016

759.13—dc23

2015004315

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my parents

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Circles

2 Weather

3 Sound

4 Things

Epilogue

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Fig. 1 Alfred Stieglitz, Arthur G. Dove, 1923

Fig. 2 Arthur G. Dove, Sun Drawing Water, 1933

Fig. 3 Arthur G. Dove, Seagull Motif (Violet and Green), 1928

Fig. 4 Arthur G. Dove, Fog Horns, 1929

Fig. 5 Arthur G. Dove, Moon, 1935

Fig. 6 Arthur G. Dove, Silver Sun, 1929

Fig. 7 Arthur G. Dove, Sunrise III, 1936–1937

Fig. 8 Arthur G. Dove, Sunrise, Northport Harbor, 1929

Fig. 9 Arthur G. Dove, Golden Sun, 1937

Fig. 10 Arthur G. Dove, Naples Yellow Morning, 1935

Fig. 11 Arthur G. Dove, Pozzuoli Red, 1941

Fig. 12 Structure of the Radium Atom, in H. A. Kramers and Helge Holst, The Atom and the Bohr Theory of Its Structure (1923)

Fig. 13 Page 3 of an Arthur G. Dove letter to Helen Torr Dove, Nov. 10, 1933

Fig. 14 Page 4 of an Arthur G. Dove letter to Helen Torr Dove, Nov. 22, 1934

Fig. 15 Page 9 of an Arthur G. Dove letter to Helen Torr Dove, Nov. 10, 1933 or 1934

Fig. 16 Essay by Arthur G. Dove, Dec. 13, 1928

Fig. 17 Arthur G. Dove, Telegraph Pole, 1929

Fig. 18 Arthur G. Dove diary pages, Mar. 19 and 20, 1942

Fig. 19 Word Drill, in John Robert Gregg, Gregg Shorthand (1930)

Fig. 20 Arthur G. Dove, R 25-A, 1942

Fig. 21 Arthur G. Dove, A Reasonable Facsimile, 1942

Fig. 22 Arthur G. Dove, Lake Afternoon, 1935

Fig. 23 Arthur G. Dove, Rose and Locust Stump, 1943

Fig. 24 Arthur G. Dove, Sea II, 1925

Fig. 25 Arthur G. Dove, Rain, 1924

Fig. 26 Arthur G. Dove, Untitled, 1942

Fig. 27 Arthur G. Dove, No Feather Pillow, 1940

Fig. 28 Arthur G. Dove, No Feather Pillow, 1940

Fig. 29 Arthur G. Dove, Sun, 1943

Fig. 30 Arthur G. Dove, Sun, 1943

Fig. 31 Detail from Arthur G. Dove, Sun, 1943

Fig. 32 Arthur G. Dove, Summer, 1935

Fig. 33 Detail from Arthur G. Dove, Telegraph Pole, 1929

Fig. 34 Arthur G. Dove, Young Old Master, 1946

Fig. 35 Detail from Arthur G. Dove, Young Old Master, 1946

Fig. 36 Detail from Arthur G. Dove, Pozzuoli Red, 1941

Fig. 37 Arthur G. Dove, Thunder Shower, 1940

Fig. 38 Detail from Arthur G. Dove, Thunder Shower, 1940

Fig. 39 Arthur G. Dove, Another Arrangement, 1944

Fig. 40 Detail from Arthur G. Dove, Another Arrangement, 1944

Fig. 41 Arthur G. Dove, Red, Olive and Yellow, 1941

Fig. 42 Detail from Arthur G. Dove, Red, Olive and Yellow, 1941

Fig. 43 Arthur G. Dove, Ferry Boat Wreck, 1931

Fig. 44 Detail from Arthur G. Dove, Ferry Boat Wreck, 1931

Fig. 45 Arthur G. Dove, Dawn III, 1932

Fig. 46 Alfred Stieglitz, Music—A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs, No. X, 1922

Fig. 47 Arthur G. Dove, Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz, 1924

Fig. 48 Arthur G. Dove, Untitled (Portrait of Rebecca and Paul Strand), ca. 1925

Fig. 49 Arthur G. Dove, Silver Tanks, 1929

Fig. 50 Arthur G. Dove, Silver Tanks and Moon, 1930

Fig. 51 Arthur G. Dove, City Moon, 1938

Fig. 52 Arthur G. Dove, Me and the Moon, 1937

Fig. 53 Lee Lawrie, Sound, 1934

Fig. 54 Sears, Roebuck and Co., Radio Headquarters catalog, 1924

Fig. 55 Vincent Lopez and Owen Murphy, On the Radio (1924)

Fig. 56 Arthur G. Dove, Me and the Moon, n.d.

Fig. 57 Arthur G. Dove, Penetration, 1924

Fig. 58 Arthur G. Dove, River Bottom, Silver, Ochre, Carmine, Green, 1923

Fig. 59 Arthur G. Dove, Sea Gull Motive (Sea Thunder or The Wave), 1928

Fig. 60 Florine Stettheimer, Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz, 1928

Fig. 61 Drawing on the back of a letter from Edward Alden Jewell to Arthur G. Dove, Jan. 25, 19–

Fig. 62 Page from Arthur G. Dove’s Abstraction essay, n.d.

Fig. 63 Arthur G. Dove diary pages, Mar. 31 and Apr. 1, 1942

Fig. 64 Arthur G. Dove, Formation I, 1943

Fig. 65 Arthur G. Dove, Formation III (Green Landscape), ca. 1942

Fig. 66 Arthur G. Dove, Notes, annotated page of E. C. Andrews, Color and Its Application to Printing (1911)

Fig. 67 Arthur G. Dove, Sails, 1911–1912

Fig. 68 Arthur G. Dove, Team of Horses, 1911 or 1912

Fig. 69 Arthur G. Dove, Nature Symbolized No. 2, ca. 1911

Fig. 70 Arthur G. Dove, Cows in Pasture, 1935

Fig. 71 Arthur G. Dove, Thunderstorm, 1921

Fig. 72 Arthur G. Dove, After the Storm, Silver and Green (Vault Sky), ca. 1923

Fig. 73 Arthur G. Dove, Golden Storm, 1925

Fig. 74 Arthur G. Dove, Storm Clouds, 1935

Fig. 75 Arthur G. Dove, Electric Peach Orchard, 1935

Fig. 76 Arthur G. Dove, Partly Cloudy, 1942

Fig. 77 Arthur G. Dove, Rain or Snow, 1943

Fig. 78 Helen Torr Dove and Arthur G. Dove diary pages, Sept. 28 and 29, 1936

Fig. 79 Two pages from the Log for the Mona, May 31–June 3, 1924

Fig. 80 Two pages from the Log for the Mona, May 27–30, 1924

Fig. 81 Page from an accounting ledger that details the personal and business expenses, 1923–1927, of Arthur G. Dove and Helen Torr Dove

Fig. 82 Page from an accounting ledger that details the personal and business expenses, 1923–1927, of Arthur G. Dove and Helen Torr Dove

Fig. 83 Arthur G. Dove diary pages, Jan. 18 and 19, 1942

Fig. 84 Arthur G. Dove diary pages, Nov. 10–16, 1941

Fig. 85 Daily Weather Map, Jan. 22, 1922, US Weather Bureau

Fig. 86 Daily Weather Map, Oct. 6, 1941, US Weather Bureau

Fig. 87 Arthur G. Dove, Sand and Sea, 1943

Fig. 88 Arthur G. Dove, Flight, 1943

Fig. 89 Arthur G. Dove, Clouds, 1927

Fig. 90 Tableau physique des Andes et pays voisins, in Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Essai sur la géographie des plantes (1807)

Fig. 91 Arthur G. Dove, Your Baby, 1942

Fig. 92 Arthur G. Dove, War, 1939

Fig. 93 Arthur G. Dove, U.S., 1940

Fig. 94 Arthur G. Dove, 1941, 1941

Fig. 95 Arthur G. Dove diary pages, Oct. 11 and 12, 1939

Fig. 96 Air Circulation in a Sea Breeze, in Charles F. Brooks, Why the Weather? (1924)

Fig. 97 Structure of the Atmosphere, in Richard Whatham, Meteorology for Aviator and Layman (1930)

Fig. 98 Relation of the Local Isobars to Those of the General Circulation, in Willis Luther Moore, Descriptive Meteorology (1910)

Fig. 99 Variation with Altitude of Cyclonic Vectors and Components, in Willis Luther Moore, Descriptive Meteorology (1910)

Fig. 100 Arthur G. Dove, George Gershwin—Rhapsody in Blue, Part I, 1927

Fig. 101 Arthur G. Dove, George Gershwin—Rhapsody in Blue, Part II, 1927

Fig. 102 Arthur G. Dove, Orange Grove in California, by Irving Berlin, 1927

Fig. 103 Arthur G. Dove, George Gershwin—I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise, 1927

Fig. 104 Arthur G. Dove, Improvision, 1927

Fig. 105 Theme 2 translated into points, in Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane (1926)

Fig. 106 Arthur G. Dove, Sentimental Music, ca. 1913

Fig. 107 Arthur G. Dove, Movement No. I, 1911

Fig. 108 Arthur G. Dove, Primitive Music, 1944

Fig. 109 Arthur G. Dove, Chinese Music, 1923

Fig. 110 Page 2 of an Arthur G. Dove letter to Helen Torr Dove, Aug. 23, 1936

Fig. 111 Arthur G. Dove, The Moon Was Laughing at Me, 1937

Fig. 112 Page 2 of an Arthur G. Dove letter to Helen Torr Dove, Sept. 26, 1936

Fig. 113 Arthur G. Dove, Study for Me and the Moon, between 1935 and 1938

Fig. 114 Arthur G. Dove, Swing Music (Louis Armstrong), 1938

Fig. 115 Arthur G. Dove, Neighborly Attempt at Murder, 1941

Fig. 116 Arthur G. Dove, Fire in the Sauerkraut Factory, 1936–1941

Fig. 117 Arthur G. Dove, Long Island, 1925

Fig. 118 Arthur G. Dove, The Critic, 1925

Fig. 119 Arthur G. Dove, Portrait of Ralph Dusenberry, 1924

Fig. 120 Arthur G. Dove, Hand Sewing Machine, 1927

Fig. 121 Arthur G. Dove, [Landscape], ca. 1941–1946

Fig. 122 Arthur G. Dove, Barn Next Door, 1934

Fig. 123 Arthur G. Dove, Over Seneca Lake, 1935

Fig. 124 Arthur G. Dove, Barn IV, 1935

Fig. 125 Arthur G. Dove, Trees on the Pond, 1941

Fig. 126 Arthur G. Dove, A Barn Here and a Tree There, 1940

Fig. 127 Arthur G. Dove, The Hand Sewing Machine, 1941

Fig. 128 Arthur G. Dove, The Intellectual, 1925

Fig. 129 Arthur G. Dove, Cross and Weather Vane, 1935

Fig. 130 Arthur G. Dove, A Walk: Poplars, 1912–1913

Fig. 131 Arthur G. Dove, Tree Forms, 1932

Fig. 132 Arthur G. Dove, The Sea I, 1925

Fig. 133 Arthur G. Dove, Starry Heavens, 1924

Fig. 134 Star chart in Popular Astronomy (1917)

Fig. 135 Star Clouds and Black Holes in Sagittarius, in David Peck Todd, Astronomy (1922)

Fig. 136 Arthur G. Dove, Moth Dance, 1929

Fig. 137 Arthur G. Dove, From a Wasp, ca. 1914

Fig. 138 Arthur G. Dove, Tree Forms II, 1935

Fig. 139 Arthur G. Dove, Car in Garage, 1934

Fig. 140 Arthur G. Dove, Composition in Green and Gray (Untitled), ca. 1930

Fig. 141 Arthur G. Dove, The Barn Next Door, 1934

Fig. 142 Arthur G. Dove, Barnyard Fantasy, 1935

Fig. 143 Arthur G. Dove, Reminiscence, 1937

Fig. 144 Arthur G. Dove, Monkey Fur, 1926

Fig. 145 Arthur G. Dove, Cinder Barge and Derrick, 1931

Acknowledgments

This book took shape over many years, and its existence depends on the assistance and generosity of scores of individuals and institutions, including, I am sure, some I have neglected to mention in the following paragraphs. For all omissions I offer my sincerest apologies, and to those persons omitted I offer assurance of my gratitude.

To my colleagues in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton I owe a large debt, for supporting my ongoing work and for helping to advance my thinking about Dove. Particular thanks go to Bridget Alsdorf, Yve-Alain Bois, Hal Foster, and John Wilmerding. Anne McCauley provided key feedback on Dove and photography, and Irene Small’s work on Hélio Oiticica inspired unexpected insights on Dove’s zoomorphism. Trudy Jacoby and David Connelly provided expert assistance with illustrations. At the Princeton University Art Museum, Kelly Baum, Calvin Brown, and Karl Kusserow made it possible for me to study work by Dove and his contemporaries in the collection, and their enthusiasm for my project has been heartening.

Throughout my research and writing, Andrew and Ann Dintenfass of the Terry Dintenfass Gallery have provided essential support. I am truly grateful for their patience, collegiality, and commitment to new Dove scholarship. I can only hope that this book provides adequate recompense for their generosity and gracious assistance. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to Ann Lee Morgan, author of the Dove catalogue raisonné, who has so generously shared her knowledge, wisdom, and good humor with me, and with whom I have had many stimulating conversations. No one knows more about Dove than she does, and I am truly grateful for her vital feedback, which has been unfailingly diplomatic and always spot-on. In addition, I am indebted to the Phillips Collection and its Center for the Study of Modern Art. A fellowship at the center provided five months of uninterrupted research, aided by Karen Schneider, head librarian at the Phillips, whose energy, expertise, collegiality, and wit proved indispensable, and who shared my pleasure in listening to works of art. My library research was facilitated as well by the intelligence and efficiency of Sarah Osborne Bender. The presence of Terri Weissman, also a center fellow (and my tablemate in the library), made my time at the Phillips all the more valuable and rich. Also at the Phillips, curator Renée Maurer, chief registrar Joe Holbach, and associate registrar Trish Waters deserve thanks for making it possible for me to study at length every work by Dove in the collection and to illustrate this book with images of many of those works. I am grateful too for the support of Ruth Perlin and Jonathan Fineberg, who helped make my time at the center possible. In addition to the Phillips fellowship, an Arthur H. Scribner Bicentennial Preceptorship, generously granted by Princeton University, supported this project and afforded me among other things a year’s leave to research and write. I also extend my gratitude to the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Princeton University, for its support of this publication.

Designating a sole author obscures how dependent any text is on its many interlocutors, yet a list of the individuals whose comments and suggestions over the years contributed to the evolution of my ideas would take up more space than available here. So to those collaborators and audience members at the following institutions and venues with whom I had the good fortune to discuss my work, and who took seriously and listened carefully to my musings on Dove, I extend my gratitude: XXXVII Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte, Querétaro, Mexico; Berhman Faculty Fellows in the Humanities, Princeton University; Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; Centre Culturel International de Cerisy, Cerisy-la-Salle, France; Colby College Museum of Art; Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies, Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center, New York; Harvard University Graduate School of Design; Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; McGill University; Montgomery College; New-York Historical Society; Newark Museum; The Old Guard, Princeton; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Petr Konchalovsky Foundation, Moscow; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Present Day Club, Princeton; Princeton Club of Los Angeles; Princeton Club of Vero Beach; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, Princeton University; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute; Swarthmore College; Trinity University, San Antonio; Tulane University; University of Delaware; University of North Carolina; University of Richmond; University of Wisconsin Center for the Humanities; Vero Beach Museum of Art; and Yale University.

A seminar on Alfred Stieglitz and his milieu at the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy, in Cerisy-la-Salle, France, organized in 2010 by Jay Bochner and Jean-Pierre Montier and supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, provided a week’s worth of rich discussion that vitally shaped my thinking about Dove. The Wyeth Foundation for American Art generously made possible my participation in the 2011 conference Landscape in American Art, 1940–2000 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, where I presented material from chapter 2 and had the opportunity to test-run preliminary thoughts on Dove’s late paintings. Equally productive was my participation on a panel on American art and sound co-organized by Leo G. Mazow and Asma Naeem at the 2010 College Art Association Annual Meeting, during which I presented material that would become part of chapter 3. I thank Leo and Asma for the opportunity to air publicly my ideas about Dove and recorded sound for the first time and for providing such a stimulating context in which to do so. Leo has been an essential interlocutor and friend for almost two decades, unstintingly willing to entertain my intellectual fascinations and follies. Other colleagues who have contributed decisively to the development of my ideas and from whom I continue to learn include Wendy Bellion, Todd Cronan, Michael Gaudio, Marc Gotlieb, Erica Hirshler, Suzanne Hudson, Matthew Hunter, Elizabeth Hutchinson, Robin Kelsey, Michael Leja, Alexander Nemerov, Charles Palermo, Kirstin Ringelberg, Jennifer Roberts, Michael Schreyach, Tanya Sheehan, and Jason Weems. John Ott must be singled out not only for his incisive comments on Dove and the question of the social but also for his winning bird puns, so welcome amid the terribly serious business of academic writing.

No scholar thinks apart from her students. My undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and at Princeton have steadily expanded my view of Dove and his world, and I am particularly grateful to the students who participated in my graduate seminars on the Stieglitz circle and American modernism in 2003 (UIUC), 2007 (Princeton), and 2013 (Princeton). I want all of them to know that I appreciate their contributions very much. A special thank-you goes to Amanda Bock, for her thoughts about photography and pedagogy as well as her steady supply of Dove and Paul Strand anecdotes; Allan Doyle, for his work on the idea of translation in the French context; Nicole Elder, for her ideas about the objects of still life and her tireless work as my research assistant; Miri Kim, for sharing and abetting my fascination with the history of sound; Ashley Lazevnick, who made me think twice about Precisionism and line; Abra Levenson, for helping me to reflect more pointedly on portraiture in the twentieth century; Jessica Maxwell, who shared with me her eloquent reading of Paul Strand; Julia Sienkewicz, with whom I have productively been conversing about landscape for many years; and Elizabeth Zundo, whose work on cartography and visual culture continues to prompt my own.

Those institutions and individuals with Dove material in their collections, including works of art, papers, and related documents, with whom I have interacted have been unfailingly generous in allowing me access and sharing information. This includes the many people who assisted me with images and permissions at the dozens of institutions that hold Dove works (as reflected in the captions), and who helped make the process far less arduous than it could have been. It goes without saying that without such cooperation this book would not exist, and I am immensely grateful for the kind willingness shown in assisting my endeavor at every step. Thus I extend my most heartfelt thanks to Steve Davis, Barney A. Ebsworth, J. R. and Barbara Hyde, Elizabeth Moore, Christine Roussel, Michael Scharf, Jan T. and Marica Vilcek, Michael Ward, and Charles K. Williams II. An equally sincere thank-you goes to the following museums and institutions that I visited and consulted for my research, as well as to the many personnel at each who kindly offered their assistance, often above and beyond the call of duty: Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Addison Art Gallery; Alexandre Gallery; Amon Carter Museum; Archives of American Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Art Resource; Artist’s Rights Society; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Christie’s; Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center; Columbus Museum of Art; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Denver Art Museum; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Firestone Library and Firestone’s Graphic Arts Collection, Princeton University; Fisk University; Heckscher Museum of Art; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis; Kew Royal Botanic Gardens Library; Lewis Library, Princeton University; Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington; Marquand Library, Princeton University; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Montclair Art Museum; Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); New Jersey State Museum Collection; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Phillips Collection; Princeton University Art Museum; Rockefeller Center Archives; San Diego Museum of Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Sotheby’s; Terra Foundation for American Art; Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid; University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson; University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses; The Vilcek Foundation; Whitney Museum of American Art; Yale University Art Gallery; and the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University.

For their wisdom and insight, and for their extraordinary patience as my writing outpaced deadline after deadline, I offer my sincere gratitude to Susan Bielstein and Anthony Burton at the University of Chicago Press. It has been a true pleasure and privilege to work with them. Just as there are artists’ artists (Dove among them), Susan and Anthony are writers’ editors. Sincere thanks also go to James Whitman Toftness and Kelly Finefrock-Creed for their essential and generous work during the publication process. I should add here that I am also grateful to have had at my disposal exceptionally thorough and attentive anonymous readers’ reports for use in revising my manuscript.

My deepest gratitude goes to my family, Erik, Asher, and Zane DeLue; my parents, Jon and Merrie Ziady; and my brother and his family, Josh, Ana, and June Hadar Ziady, all of whom have lived through far too many summers of Dove. My daughter Zane, being the youngest, has seen the least of it, but she is owed my thanks for all the times she makes me laugh out loud, Dove trouble be damned, and for abidingly sleeping through the night. My son Asher, whose existence coincides exactly with the years I devoted to this project, deserves especial gratitude for his patience and good soul, and for the perspective he brought to the mix. I recall with fondness and not a small amount of wonder the day, about midway through the trajectory of my work on the book, when a drive to the grocery store took us past a cemetery. Mom, he asked from the back seat, is that where Arthur Dove is buried? Perhaps innocent, perhaps not—either way, his question suggested that he thought it was high time for his mother to put Dove to rest. I have finally done so, many years later, an accomplishment unthinkable without the love and support of my family and the assistance of everyone else mentioned in these pages. Finally, Erik—I thank him for everything.

Introduction

Arthur Dove

My first serious encounter with the work of the American painter Arthur Garfield Dove (1880–1946) (fig. 1) occurred in 1997 at a major exhibition of his art at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. As a graduate student working on a dissertation about another American painter, George Inness (1825–1894), I had come to the Phillips to see the Inness paintings on view. My visit to the Dove galleries served as a diversion—some pleasant, no-strings-attached looking in the midst of intense scholarly study, or so I thought. Instead, what I saw captivated me: canvas after canvas teeming with quasi-abstract, vividly colored, and vibrantly motile forms, some of them downright odd, as well as an array of sculptural assemblages utterly catholic in their collection of material components, including paint, wood, and glass but also animal hide and bones, human hair, metal springs, ladies’ stockings, seashells, a camera lens, chiffon, and sand.¹ Prior to my visit to the Phillips, I had seen the occasional Dove painting, but something about walking through a series of rooms filled with his work filled me with a sense of wonder. The experience also left me feeling perplexed, mainly because I had a hard time imagining from where the motivation to create such enchanting and eccentric pictures might have come. Works like Sun Drawing Water (1933) and Moon (1935) left me breathless, and they stuck with me over the years (figs. 2, 5). When I finally had a chance to dig deeper into Dove’s art and life I liked him even more. For as a person he turned out to be as captivating and unexpected as his work—not outlandish in any way or beyond any conventional pale, just idiosyncratic and quirky enough that when I considered his life in combination with his art the total package demanded that I take a serious and extended look.

Fig. 1 Alfred Stieglitz, Arthur G. Dove, 1923, gelatin silver print, 24.1 × 19.1 cm, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.717, The Art Institute of Chicago. © 2015 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Among the things that piqued my interest: Dove lived on a boat for a spell and created some of his most interesting works, including his assemblages, while shipboard. He also made a home in a defunct roller-skating rink and, later, in an abandoned post office building, painting all the while. His personal pantheon consisted of Albert Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Alfred Stieglitz, Shakespeare, James Joyce, and his childhood mentor Newton Weatherly. He wrote an essay that half-quoted, half-rewrote sections of Wassily Kandinsky’s Point and Line to Plane (1926). He counted Georgia O’Keeffe among his dearest friends. He suspected that Stieglitz might be telepathic. He kept a daily, detailed record of the weather, noting the temperature, barometric pressure, and prevailing conditions, and whenever his wife, the artist Helen Torr, was sick, he recorded her temperature at regular intervals as well. He was an amateur drummer, played music with his friends, liked going to the movies and vaudeville shows, and loved jazz. He made a series of fully abstract paintings while listening to records on a phonograph on his boat, naming each canvas after the tune that inspired it; to the surface of one of these paintings he attached a metal clock spring. He fixed cars and designed textiles. He singled out geometry, and the conic sections especially, as potentially able to express the essence and fundamental forces of nature, a mathematical dream as he put it. He befriended a botanist named Bernard Rudolf Nebel who let him use his pantograph to transfer his sketches onto canvas and helped him photograph his paintings. He patented a recipe for chocolate-covered popcorn. He wrote a poem called Self Portraits by Others and one titled A Way to Look at Things. He studied shorthand and corresponded with the inventor of Bakelite. He named one of his assemblages Monkey Fur—it featured a strip of monkey hide—and titled a painting Neighborly Attempt at Murder (figs. 144, 115). He insisted that what he did was not abstraction but, rather, extraction. He also declared that what he set out to do as an artist was impossible.

Dove’s Life

This book consists of an attempt to address my initial query of all those many years ago. From whence did Dove’s paintings and assemblages come and what did he expect them to express or to achieve? The basic facts of Dove’s biography have been well documented and widely published, but they are worth rehearsing here because they bear on my argument about the nature and meaning of his artistic practice. More so than it has in my previous work, biography serves in this study as a significant form of evidence. This, needless to say, came as something of a surprise to me as my research and writing progressed. What resulted is a series of experiments with the biographical method that expand the idea of a life of an artist to include the exceedingly mundane (Dove watched the weather, Dove lived on a boat) alongside the conventionally noteworthy or momentous.² Born in 1880 in Canandaigua, New York, Dove moved with his family in 1885 to Geneva, New York, where his father ran a profitable brick manufacturing and contracting business. After graduating from high school, Dove enrolled at Hobart College, in Geneva, before transferring to Cornell University; while at Cornell, he studied prelaw but also took a few art classes. After graduating in 1903, he moved to New York City and took up work as a magazine illustrator; a year later, in 1904, he married Florence Dorsey. Around 1906, Dove turned his attention to painting, and in 1908, he and his wife departed for France, returning to New York in 1909, the same year one of Dove’s paintings, The Lobster (1908), appeared in the Salon d’Automne at the Grand Palais, in Paris.³ Dove spent some of his French sojourn in Paris, but he painted mainly in the surrounding countryside. While abroad, he met the artist Alfred Maurer, who would become a dear friend.

Back in New York, Dove returned to his work as an illustrator, but making the acquaintance of the photographer and gallery proprietor Alfred Stieglitz in late 1909 or early 1910 helped encourage his pursuit of painting. During this time, the Doves moved to Westport, Connecticut, to make a go at farming; while there, they socialized (and played baseball) with other Westport residents and visitors, including Maurer and other artists such as John Marin, Abraham Walkowitz, and Paul Strand, the critics Van Wyck Brooks and Paul Rosenfeld, and the writer Sherwood Anderson. Stieglitz had included The Lobster in a 1910 group exhibition at his gallery 291, originally the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession but by 1908 referred to by the street number of the building on Fifth Avenue that had housed the first iteration of the gallery.⁴ Yet it was not until a few years later that Dove’s work began appearing more regularly in exhibitions. In 1912, he had his first one-man show at 291; the exhibition included the now well-known suite of quasi-Cubistic pastel abstractions usually referred to as The Ten Commandments, also on view a few weeks later at the W. Scott Thurber Galleries in Chicago.

By 1917, Dove had stopped painting, resuming in 1921, shortly after his father passed away. That same year, he left Florence for the artist Helen Torr, who was also married at the time, and moved with her to a houseboat on the Harlem River. In 1922, Dove and Torr bought a yawl, the 42-foot Mona, which they sailed on local rivers and in Long Island Sound until mooring it at Halesite, on Long Island, in 1924. For many years thereafter, until 1933, the Mona served as their primary residence. When they moved aboard the Mona, Dove and Torr began keeping a daily diary, recording the events of their day-to-day existence and describing Dove’s work in progress and, less frequently, Torr’s. The first diary consisted of a ship’s log kept by Dove in 1924; Torr took over in 1925 and made the majority of the entries for the next ten years. The 1936 and 1937 diaries contain entries written by both of them, and from 1939 to 1945 Dove handled the task. Shortly after the move onto the Mona, Dove’s work appeared in the 1925 Seven Americans exhibition organized by Stieglitz at the Anderson Galleries in New York, and starting in 1926, he had a one-man show under Stieglitz’s watch almost every year for the rest of his career. Dove and Torr married in 1932 and, following the death of Dove’s mother in 1933, they moved to the Dove family home in Geneva. It was during this time that Dove met Duncan Phillips, who, like Stieglitz, became a major advocate and patron; Phillips regularly exhibited Dove’s work at his gallery in Washington, DC, and supported Dove with a stipend in exchange for first pick of works from each annual exhibition. Dove and Torr remained in Geneva until 1938, at which point they moved to Centerport, Long Island, near Huntington, where they set up shop in a converted post office. Dove had a heart attack in 1939 and was in ill health for much of the remainder of his life, although he continued to paint. He died in 1946.

Dove’s Art

Often heralded as the first American artist to try his hand at abstraction, Dove is perhaps best known for his nature-based abstract paintings, most of which stop short of total nonobjectivity. He was one of several American artists actively championed by Stieglitz, chiefly in the 1920s and 1930s, a group that included John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Stieglitz and the circle of critics associated with him, including the effusive but sharp Paul Rosenfeld, posited the work of these artists as exemplary of an advanced, homegrown American art. It thus comes as no surprise that most accounts of Dove’s practice tend to analyze his work under the sign of Stieglitz, interpreting it as exemplary of Stieglitz’s mission and consequently representative within the standard story of American modernism in the first half of the twentieth century. The tales of Dove thus told can be divided roughly into three categories, each representing a typical approach to his art: (1) biographical, where Dove’s very interesting life takes precedence over his paintings, the idea being that Dove’s pictures require only abbreviated explanation because they exemplify Stieglitz’s well-defined and vigorously studied ideas about art; (2) genealogical, where Dove is claimed as the first American abstract painter and thus the progenitor, in combination with the European avant-garde, of American abstraction to come, his career primarily a matter of ingesting and expressing a variety of external sources and influences while setting the stage for Abstract Expressionism in the postwar period; and (3) romantic, where Dove is imagined as an urban-shy antimodern who retreated to the countryside in order to commune with nature and render his subjective response to the natural world, this individual, emotive, of-the-soil painting being the sort advocated by Stieglitz.⁵

None of these accounts get Dove fully wrong, but by the same token, none of them get him altogether right. Opting for the necessary and important task of describing Dove’s place in the history of American art has meant, with a few notable exceptions, that the particular nature of Dove’s practice—both the material characteristics of his paintings and the specific constellation of ideas that these characteristics engaged—remains less than fully addressed. My account of Dove does not intend to refute or supersede any of the aforementioned strains of interpretation, all of them interesting and vital. One could even say that, on its own, my story is itself full of holes, for it relies on the other tales alongside which it sits, their telling affording me a perspective from which to fathom Dove anew, to step directly into the thick mess of his art rather than bypass it for a neater, if equally interesting narrative about Dove and modernism, Dove and abstraction, or Dove and Stieglitz. But I am not alone in my belief that the time is right for a radical retelling of Dove’s story. This new tale acknowledges the captivating complexity and the challenge of his pictures, taking their complicatedness to be partly the point, and makes the description and study of Dove’s larger milieu at times secondary but never incidental to a methodical and deep exploration of his art.

This book focuses on Dove’s practice after 1921, the year that marked his full return to painting after a multiyear hiatus, and considers this practice through 1946, the last year of his life. Although my analysis necessarily engages Dove’s output prior to 1921, my interest lies in a style of painting that emerged in the 1920s, was predominant between 1925 and 1940, and persisted in somewhat altered form during the final years of Dove’s life. My interest lies also in the group of sculptural assemblages that Dove created between the years 1924 and 1930, which he called things and that I see as directly related to the concerns of his two-dimensional practice. I make no argument for the specialness of this cohort of paintings and sculptures, but I do insist on its distinctiveness as a strain within Dove’s entire body of work and on the prevalence of this strain in the aforementioned years. As such, my study does not claim to be a comprehensive survey of Dove’s art. Rather, it zeroes in on what I take to be certain of the abiding preoccupations of his practice, on a set of concerns that could easily be described as governing or presiding, but, importantly, not single-minded. During the period under discussion, this cluster of concerns manifested across the entirety of Dove’s activity, from his painting, sculpting, and sketching to his diary keeping, poetry writing, weather watching, and music listening—hence my concentrated focus.

By referring to the thick mess of Dove’s art, I indicate my intention to provide a thick description of Dove, one that hews to the late anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s injunction to listen carefully and closely to one’s object of study. As Geertz insisted, the stories told by the person or group under scrutiny are as valuable as description and interpretation as are the arguments fashioned by the scholar; likewise, the terms used by those being studied provide an analytical vocabulary equal in viability to the terminology native to a scholarly discipline.⁶ Following this, my approach to Dove involves attending primarily to three things: what Dove made, said, and read. I take this approach in order to develop a new and rigorously historical vocabulary for describing Dove’s practice and also to formulate an idea of what Dove himself might have imagined he was doing when he painted a picture or created an assemblage, with archival and documentary evidence (the said and the read) illuminating the salient material characteristics of his work. In combination with an attention to the critical reception of his art and a thorough study of the fields or domains that art engaged—the history of sound technology, for instance, or the visual and material culture of meteorology—my listening to Dove constructs an argument about what it was historically possible for him to have imagined his art to be about, that is, what he could have intended when he created his works, even if what resulted does not to our eyes appear to match this intention. In so doing, I pay attention to what Dove thought about and took interest in, as well as what his historical moment would have allowed him to think about and find compelling. Such an approach may strike the reader as terribly old fashioned, and it is. But the fact remains that this sort of interpretation of Dove, this thick reading of his art—alongside Stieglitz, perhaps, but not in terms of him—has yet to be undertaken, a remarkable enough fact given that Dove’s pictures are not only acknowledged as highly important within the history of modern American art but are on their own just plain stunning, absorbing in a manner that insists that they be studied closely and deeply, thickly rather than thinly.

Throughout the book, I do my best to define the terms I employ to elucidate Dove’s practice. But because they are so prominent within my analysis, three of these terms—language, translation, and intersubjectivity—demand explication at the outset. All three emerged as a result of my search for a vocabulary for use in characterizing what I saw in Dove’s work as well as from the concepts and themes that rose to the surface as I plumbed the depths of his artistic practice and the historical record. They are my terms, then, not Dove’s, but Dove and the historical fabric of which he was a part compelled my selection of them. Thus, while deeply embedded in the history and cultural formations of Dove’s moment, these particular terms, unlike the bulk of those I employ throughout this study, do not appropriate specific locutions from period discourse.

Take language, to start. My account of Dove hinges on the claim that he was preoccupied with the nature, properties, and effects of language, and by language I mean most basically the spoken or written words and signs used by humans to communicate. This includes text and speech but also systems of communication that employ symbols, such as those used in mathematics, musical notation, or cartography, or sounds, such as the taps of Morse code or timed foghorn blasts. Hence I also make use of the phrase notational system when referring to certain forms of language in order to imply the inclusiveness of the term for me and, more specifically, to signal that I use it to refer both to language as it is used and language as a system of words, marks, or sounds governed by conventions or rules. This follows in part from the example of the philosopher Nelson Goodman. Although my sense of language in Dove shares almost nothing with Goodman’s exacting typological and functional analysis of linguistic forms and modes, Goodman’s preference for the idea of symbol systems over the descriptor language—because, as he says, the former more adequately posits language as a mechanism of cognition and because it registers the linguistic and nonlinguistic character of symbols—accords with my sense of Dove’s approach to the language of both art and ordinary life.⁷ Language as I use it also encompasses signs or sounds with extrahuman origins, such as the graphic record of a nonseeable phenomenon produced by a registering instrument; so-called natural signs, including cloud formations, rainbows, wind, or the coloring of a stormy sky; or the machine-based noises produced by a technology like phonography that annotate and supplement the musical sound generated by that device. Finally, I configure language not as a closed system but as a medium, because Dove did so, approaching it as a fundamental linking agent among subjects and objects, as has been theorized by philosophers such as Hegel and Hans-Georg Gadamer, who called language the preliminary medium that encompasses all beings.⁸ While Gadamer’s assertion applied only to things expressed in words, his sense of language as a motile, fluid entity—as an operation or process more so than an inert collection of signs—aptly expresses what I argue language was for Dove.

The second term, translation, might be described as a property or a capacity of the first and relates closely to the idea of language as a medium. Most often used to describe the conversion of a word, phrase, or passage in one language into another language or to refer to the product of that conversion, translation also refers more generally to a change in form, condition, or state, or to the transfer of an entity or idea from one place or sphere to another. As a keyword within my study of Dove, translation embodies both senses of the term, and in using it I mean to retain its ties to language even as I employ it to characterize a whole host of other transforming and transmuting operations. Walter Benjamin’s essay The Task of the Translator (1923) offers one avenue into explaining what I am getting at here. According to Benjamin, translation, rather than simply an entity or an act, consists of a mode, and its primary effect entails more than a transfer of information through reproduction. Constituting the original’s afterlife, translation is an entity vitally connected to its antecedent. Yet translation ultimately transpires as different than and no longer in need of this precursor, producing an understanding that transcends the specific content of the texts involved in the transfer. For, according to Benjamin, translation’s ultimate purpose is the expression of the essentially reciprocal relationship among languages, their natural convergence and interrelation, a suprahistorical kinship and complementariness of intentions or modes that the act of translation yields as a pure language, or the one true language latent in all tongues.⁹

Following Benjamin, I understand translation in relation to Dove as at once a transformation or a transmutation that produces a new form, divergent from the original, and an operation that hinges on similarity or sameness and, in particular, on correspondences that take the shape of relationships established among multiple entities. Put another way, my sense of translation entails attributing to it metamorphosis but also a quality or condition of exchange: the translation of something draws on the original while the status of the original undergoes reshaping and recalibration according to its afterlife in translation. Dove did not share Benjamin’s interest in pure or true language, but the critic’s characterization of translation as a relational and interconnecting mode provides a productive framework for charting what I will describe as Dove’s preoccupation with translation, not least because Dove’s sense of the task of translation equaled Benjamin’s in its utopianism, its fixation on gathering parts into a sum or a whole, and its insistence on the special power of translation as a language-based, relational, and, ultimately, integrating operation.¹⁰ In this way, the term translation in my analysis also draws on its definition and usage within sociology and, more specifically, within what has been labeled actor-network theory, an approach developed within science studies to describing the nature of the relations that constitute social systems or networks, especially scientific or technological ones.¹¹ Translation as a term here characterizes the congealing of persons, things, and concepts into a group as compelled initially by an intention or a problem and subsequently driven by the collecting and accumulation of additional entities and ideas into a temporary network or system for use in fulfilling the intention or solving the problem. For example, a scientist poses a question and crafts a hypothesis; in order to test this hypothesis, he or she devises an experiment; in order to conduct the experiment, he or she gathers materials and instruments for use in doing so along with fellow scientists to assist in the process. The congealed group counts as a bonded system because all parts, human and nonhuman alike, behave according to or substantively affect the original charge, which transfers from one entity to the next in the process of the group’s formation and interaction, but also, and importantly, translates along the way, each jump of that charge between transmitter and receptor (between one scientist and another, say, or between a scientist and a piece of technology used in the experiment) serving to transform the labor and outcomes of that network as well as the network’s very nature.¹² Understood in this manner, translation as an operation establishes relations but also forges substantive bonds, interweaving disparate entities into a single complex, a self-contained entity composed of essentially interrelated parts. Experimentation with just such a suturing capacity transpired throughout Dove’s practice, and Dove explored in his work the adjoined character and transmitting capacity of networks and systems of various sorts. Translation thus serves for me as a historically appropriate and conceptually dynamic term for use in elucidating these preoccupations as they were expressed in Dove’s art.

The third and final term on my list, intersubjectivity, relates closely to the first two, language and translation, for it refers to the sharing of a subjective experience or state among two or more individuals, a condition potentially facilitated by the materials (language) and operations or outcomes (translation) of communication. Communication is itself a key term here, one that figures significantly in my account of Dove, for it describes the operations and effects of both language and translation, including connection, transmission, and exchange, all of which characterize the condition of intersubjectivity.¹³ In its most basic sense, intersubjectivity connotes agreement between two or more parties or a commonality of belief within a group as arising from human interaction. More complexly, within the domains of psychoanalysis and philosophy, phenomenology in particular, the term indicates shared cognition and the constitution of networks of cognitive and psychic interchange among multiple interrelating subjects and/or objects. Here, intersubjectivity is understood as the coconstitution and sharing of subjective states that transpires within a network of relations (psychoanalysis) or as the product of empathy or identification compelled by the perception of or interaction with other objects, human or nonhuman (phenomenology). In both cases, intersubjectivity as a concept addresses the problem of knowing other minds or entities and encompasses the processes by which others become present to a perceiving subject as well as the mechanisms by which meaning and relationships are created among multiple subjects and/or objects so as to create an animated system of interrelations and interchanges, with emphasis on the idea of a system, over and against the concepts of unity or gestalt. And, variously defined within multiple disciplines or fields of inquiry including psychoanalysis and philosophy but also, for example, anthropology and neuroscience, intersubjectivity as a concept allows for multiple kinds of intersubject/interobject relations and exchanges: literal or figurative, optical or corporeal, cognitive or material, natural or occult.¹⁴ In this way, intersubjectivity embodies terminological and conceptual specificity and frank openness simultaneously. It concerns subject/object relations in particular but allows for consideration of all manner of relations among all manner of things. As a result, the term has proved immensely useful in my accounting of Dove’s art, precisely because that art was notably preoccupied with questions of rapport, connection, and interrelation yet explored and expressed these concerns and conditions from myriad points of view and through wide-ranging, eclectic means.

This brings me to a series of points I would like to make regarding Dove as I portray him in this book. In the course of analyzing his practice, I call on a diversity of disciplines, including philosophy, the history of science, sociology, literature, meteorology, geography, and natural history. I also evoke a multitude of concepts other than language, translation, and intersubjectivity, among them invisibility, objecthood, network, the multisensory, and agency. In some instances, the ideas or methods of a discipline that I reference or the particular conceptual paradigm that I invoke were contemporaneous with Dove. The portion of my analysis that concerns Dove and meteorology, for example, focuses on period weather science, and the section on Dove’s poetry considers it in relation to his own literary contexts. In other instances, I make use of more recently developed methodologies or concepts to aid me in coming to terms with Dove’s art. In either case, and between the two, I run the risk of painting Dove as, among other things, a fervent and encyclopedic reader, a serious and dedicated student of science, a philosopher in training, a literary savant, a poststructuralist, an audiophile, a jazz aficionado, an expert engineer, and an all-around brilliant mind. He was none of these. Smart, yes, intellectually curious, to be sure, but he was neither erudite nor was he especially scholarly in disposition. He read, but not constantly or systematically, and he learned a fair amount by listening to Torr, who was a real reader.¹⁵ Dove knew a fair amount about a lot of things, but only as it suited him—a little theosophy here, a little theoretical physics there, a bit of jazz added to the mix, and perhaps a dollop of weather wisdom and a pinch of Dada to finish it off. Certain ideas Dove bungled in translation or got plain wrong, sometimes on purpose. His was not at all a textbook theosophy, for instance, and the claims he made for weather science might have struck a meteorologist as a bit off the mark, while the mash-up of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Albert Einstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sherwood Anderson, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Stieglitz, O’Keeffe, and Menaechmus (the ancient Greek mathematician) that served to inspire what one might call his artistic philosophy (a charitable designation, to say the least) would drive a pedant to distraction. As another example, his paintings and assemblages without a doubt demand to be considered in light of contemporaneous science, but they do things that are not in the least scientific and they take great license with science’s ideas and tools. Put another way, when one tries to match up Dove’s practice with the science of his day, the two wind up looking not a whole lot like one another and, as a result, the initial connection can appear specious or forced. But if one abandons the quest for a perfect match, and accepts the fact that Dove did whatever he wanted with the tools, concepts, and materials he culled from the ideas and imagery of various fields, always with a specific and thoroughly if not painstakingly considered purpose in mind, the problem of concordance disappears. This is not to say that in the way of interpretation anything goes. Rather, it is to suggest that one must remain attuned to the openness and unprejudiced curiosity with which Dove faced the world as a source of material for his art in order to understand what happened to that material when he got his hands on it. It is also to insist that, methodologically speaking, any one piece of evidence must be considered in relation to the whole archival mass, works of art included. A reference to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in Dove’s daily diary or in one of his letters, for example, could mean a great deal or perhaps not very much, but we may only become aware of its significance or lack thereof by attempting to see Melville through Dove’s eyes (or Torr’s, for she likely read portions of Moby-Dick aloud to him, as she did a number of the texts