Lot 64 : l - ARTHUR DOVE 1880-1946
Auction Location: United States of America - 2003
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Title:
SNOWSTORM
Date:
Painted in 1935.
Description:
SIGNED AND DATED (MAKER'S MARKS)
signed Dove, l.c.
Medium:
oil on canvas
Dimensions:
14 by 20 in. (35.6 by 50.8 cm)
Provenance:
Alfred Stieglitz Gallery, New York
The Downtown Gallery, New York
Joseph L. Tucker, St. Louis, Missouri (sold: Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, April 11, 1962, lot 99, illustrated)
Edith G. Halpert, New York (acquired at the above sale; sold: Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, March 14, 1973, lot 52, illustrated in color)
David Rockefeller, New York (acquired at the above sale)
Private Collection, New England
Exhibited:
New York, An American Place, Arthur G. Dove: Exhibition of Paintings (1934-1935), April-May 1935, no. 6
St. Louis, Missouri, City Art Museum, Collector's Choice IV, December 1960
San Francisco, California, San Francisco Museum of Art; Buffalo, New York, Albright-Knox Art Gallery; St. Louis, Missouri, The St. Louis Art Museum; Chicago, Illinois, The Art Institute of Chicago; Des Moines, Iowa, Des Moines Art Center; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Arthur Dove, November 1974-January 1976, illustrated in color p. 89
Published:
Ann Lee Morgan, Arthur Dove: Life and Work, With a Catalogue Raisonné, Newark, Delaware, 1984, no. 35.18, pp. 55, 226, illustrated p. 227
Notes:
Dr. Gail Levin writes: "The quest for a modern American art united Arthur G. Dove (1880-1946) with Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), who encouraged the artistic calling that Dove's own father repudiated in his son, showed Dove's work in successive New York galleries, and inspired it with his own photographic experiments, especially his almost abstract images of clouds. Weather and its effects as well as other natural phenomena interested Dove from the start of his career, when he felt the influence of the Impressionists in France. As early as 1914 he produced his Nature Symbolized pastels and near the end of his life he was painting abstractions such as Rain or Snow of 1943-1944 (wax emulsion and metallic leaf on canvas, 35 by 25 in., The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.). But Dove's response to weather was much more conceptual than literal, reflecting both the intellectual and spiritual sides of his character. When he painted the stars, the sun, the moon, clouds, and various bodies of water, he worked in consciousness of both scientific and mystical writings that he had perused. This duality of interests also led Dove to work with diverse botanical subjects, such as trees, corn, and willows, as well as fauna (usually farm and domestic animals such as calves, cows, goats, cats, and hounds, but also sea gulls and other wild birds).
"While Stieglitz and other artists in his circle, such as John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O'Keeffe, all produced images from the natural world, Dove for much of his career actually inhabited natural settings that were exposed to the forces of nature. He early attempted to make a living on a Connecticut farm. He sought refuge from a failing marriage with a houseboat on the Harlem River in New York. He and a new companion retreated to a forty-two foot yawl cruising Long Island Sound. He acted as the caretaker of an island off Connecticut. He also lived for a few difficult years on a farm belonging to his family in upstate New York. Through it all, Dove developed keen powers of observation, finding poetry in nature's most ordinary incidents. He never grew bored with the simple pleasures of the world around him although he transmuted them through rigorous discipline in his work.
"Born in upstate Canandaigua in 1880, Dove moved to New York City in 1904 and began working as a commercial illustrator. Between 1907 and 1909, he spent eighteen months traveling in Europe, stopping in Italy and the south of France, and incidentally making the encounter that would lead to his life-long collaboration with Stieglitz. After the birth of his son in 1910, Dove took his family to the Connecticut farm where he struggled to support them by illustrating and farming. That year when Stieglitz at his first gallery known as '291' organized a group show of 'Younger American Painters,' he invited Dove, along with such artists as Hartley and Marin. Although Dove's relationship with his dealer would remain close for the rest of their lives, his marriage with a girl from back home deteriorated. By 1920, he had gone to live on the Harlem River houseboat with the artist Helen Torr, who became his second wife in 1930.
"In 1933, the death of Dove's mother forced him to return to Geneva in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, where he had grown up, but had not lived for nearly thirty years and where his father, while hostile to the son's artistic ambitions, had been a successful brickmaker and builder. Dove, attempting to salvage what was left of the family fortune in the midst of the Great Depression, approached the move with great trepidation. He settled in a dilapidated house on a family farm (figure 1). The circumstances forced him to remain upstate for several years, where he had to endure the dark, cold winters, when he would have preferred the more temperate north shore of Long Island. All the while he pressed on with his explorations in art.
"To compensate for his isolation from the art world in New York City, Dove kept up a correspondence with Stieglitz, telling him on December 27, 1934, about 'A terrible wind blizzard last night.--Froze everything but the plumbing...' (Ann Lee Morgan, ed., Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, Newark, Delaware, 1988, p. 324). By March 2, 1935, he wrote: 'hope this winter is over.--While not as bad as last, it has been strenuous.' At the same time, Dove informed Stieglitz that he had completed seventeen pictures.
"One of these was Snowstorm, which Stieglitz showed that spring at his current gallery, An American Place. The shapes in this elegant composition appear to be purely abstract, albeit adopted from the organic world. Even the perspective appears to be ambiguous: a large biomorphic shape with jagged points seems to emerge like a powerful gust of wind, exploding from the middle ground, growing larger as it reaches out toward the right corner of the composition. The physical embodiment of a howling blizzard, this form stalks across the landscape, creating the visual equivalent of a freezing blast. Edged in heavy black lines, the irregular shape, which is dark brown with white highlights, appears like some primordial creature emerging from the deep. Beneath the momentous form, the ground has a white snow cover, but there are yellow shadows and blue areas that suggest water or ice. Another organic shape, perhaps a cumulus cloud, hangs low in the sky in the upper left corner of the painting and cradles a disk that suggests the moon. In the middleground left, below the cloud form and a hint of hilly horizon line, squats a rounded bluish structure that suggests the ruins of the former flourishing brickyard ovens, reported to have been on the farm by a Rochester journalist who visited Dove there in 1934 (Emment N. O'Brien, "Leader of Modern Artists Paints in Geneva Farmhouse," Rochester Democrat and Cronicle, January 14, 1934, Dove scrapbook). In front of the blue dome straggle what look like remnants of an old wooden fence.
"Often, however, it is not possible or even necessary to read Dove literally. Snowstorm recalls some of his other, earlier, abstract works. Already by 1926, he had painted Golden Storm (figure 2) in metallic paint on a wood panel in a composition that utilized similar jagged shapes and also conveyed an implied sense of movement in a weather disturbance. But by the time that Dove was working on Snowstorm in Geneva, he had long since rejected such untraditional modern materials as well as his previous use of diverse objects for collage in favor of grinding his own pigments and experimenting with a traditional oil medium on canvas.
"A closer precedent is Approaching Snow Storm of 1934 (figure 3). Dove painted this canvas during the harsh winter that preceded the year of Snowstorm. For this earlier rendition of a blizzard, we have a more naturalistic watercolor study that reveals how he arrived at seemingly abstract forms by simplifying trees in the landscape.
"Dove's show in 1935 at An American Place was well received. The critic Elizabeth McCausland saw him as an authentic American with a link to Surrealism. In a painting such as Snowstorm, we see that element of fantasy that made her think of the European artists. But Dove's image is much more reflective of the direct inspiration he found in the natural world. He had long since articulated this philosophy for the collector Arthur Jerome Eddy who quoted him in his 1914 book, Cubists and Post-Impressionism: 'The first step was to choose from nature a motif in color and with that motif to paint from nature, the form still being objective. The second step was to apply this same principle to form, the actual dependence upon the object (representation) disappearing, and the means of expression becoming purely subjective. After working for some time in this way, I no longer observed in the old way, and, not only began to think subjectively but also to remember certain sensations purely through their form and color, that is, by certain shapes, planes of light, or character lines determined by the meeting of such planes.'"
