At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism
May 7, 2022–Feb 26, 2023
Arthur Dove
12
Born 1880 in Canandaigua, NY
Died 1946 in Centerport, NY
In 1912 Arthur Dove became one of the first American artists to publicly embrace modernist abstraction, exhibiting a radical series of pastel drawings, including this one, at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery in New York. With a vocabulary of overlapping and interlocking organic forms, these works portray the universal rhythms Dove sensed in nature. Calling his technique “extraction,” he sought to distill the inner essence of his subjects rather than analyze their outer physical form. “I would rather look at nature than to try to imitate it,” he remarked.
Plant Forms, c. 1912
Arthur Dove, Plant Forms, c. 1912. Pastel on canvas, 17 1/4 × 23 7/8 × 1 1/4 in. (43.8 × 60.6 × 3.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Roy R. Neuberger 51.20
Artists
- Richmond Barthé
- Ben Benn
- Albert Bloch
- Oscar Bluemner
- Patrick Henry Bruce
- Charles Burchfield
- Arthur B. Carles
- John Covert
- E.E. Cummings
- Imogen Cunningham
- James Daugherty
- Arthur B. Davies
- Stuart Davis
- Manierre Dawson
- Charles Demuth
- Isami Doi
- Aaron Douglas
- Arthur Dove
- Charles Duncan
- Yun Gee
- Marsden Hartley
- Rebecca Salsbury James
- Loïs Mailou Jones
- Taizo Kato
- Gaston Lachaise
- Blanche Lazzell
- Stanton Macdonald-Wright
- Man Ray
- John Marin
- Elie Nadelman
- Louise Nevelson
- Carl Newman
- Isamu Noguchi
- Chiura Obata
- Georgia O'Keeffe
- Walter Pach
- Agnes Pelton
- Nancy Elizabeth Prophet
- Henry Lyman Sayen
- Charles G. Shaw
- Harry Shigeta
- Henrietta Shore
- Pamela Colman Smith
- Joseph Stella
- Florine Stettheimer
- John Storrs
- Henry Fitch Taylor
- Helen Torr
- Jay Van Everen
- Adele Watson
- Max Weber
- Edith Clifford Williams
- Marguerite Zorach
- William Zorach