For years it seemed that the American abstractionist Arthur Dove was nearly forgotten. This book, compiled to accompany the first major exhibition of his work since the early 1970s, is a worthy tribute to his legacy. Dove's small, vibrant, enigmatic abstractions, like those of his good friend Georgia O'Keeffe, were tied to his observations of the world around him. There were always a few of his works on view at the Washington, D.C., Phillips Collection, which sponsored the exhibition in conjunction with the Addison Gallery of American Art. However, Dove's work rarely turned up in print--except for the witty yet uncharacteristic collage The Critic--a monocle on roller skates. This collection, long overdue, is chock-a-block with color plates of paintings, collages, drawings, family photographs, and other biographical material, all woven together by the exhibition's curators in three graceful essays.


Book Description
in collaboration with William C. Agee and Elizabeth Hutton Turner The American artist Arthur Dove (1880-1946), purportedly the first artist to have produced an abstract painting, has always occupied a central place in writings on early American modernism. This book accompanies the first major exhibition on Dove since 1974. The exhibition, organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art and the Phillips Collection, covers the period from 1908, the year after Dove took up painting, through 1946, the year of his death. It is comprised of approximately eighty paintings, collages, pastels, and charcoal drawings. Along with Georgia O'Keeffe and John Marin, Dove was touted for more than three decades by photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz as an American original, one whose work was prescient in its opposition to the materialism of a newly industrialized America. Essays by Balken, Agee, and Turner discuss Dove's interactions with Stieglitz and others in his circle, including O'Keeffe, Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Paul Strand, and re-examine Dove in the context of early twentieth-century intellectual and cultural history. The book contains color plates of all the works in the exhibition; the essays are profusely illustrated with black-and-white images not included in the exhibition. Apart from an out-of-print catalogue raisonné, this book is the largest and most comprehensive publication to date on Dove's work. Copublished with the Addison Gallery of American Art in association with the Phillips Collection More information is available at our book-of-the-month site.


About the Author
Debra Bricker Balken, an independent curator and writer, teaches at Brown University. William C. Agee is Professor of Art History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Elizabeth Hutton Turner is a curator at the Phillips Collection.

FROM THE PUBLISHER