Music of the Eye

But Mr. Dove is much too keen To let a single bird be seen; To show the pigeons would not do And so he simply paints the coo.

Thus, in 1912, the Chicago Tribune's Bert Leston Taylor lampooned an extraordinary show by a 31-year-old painter. Except for its jeering tone, the jingle was an accurate enough statement of the creed of Painter Arthur G. Dove (1880-1946), who avowedly intended to paint such things as the sensation of the wind blowing on a hill, without necessarily showing either wind or hill. Chicago was as unconvinced by Dove's works as Manhattan had been a few weeks earlier. ("They were over the heads of the people," admitted pioneer Art Dealer-Photographer Alfred Stieglitz.) Broke but not discouraged, Dove borrowed the train fare back to New York.

How far he traveled on his lonely way is shown by the largest-ever collection of Dove's work now starting a crosscountry tour at Manhattan's Whitney Museum, and a new book by Art Critic Frederick S. Wight (Arthur G. Dove; University of California; $2). Together they go far to establish Dove's status as the U.S.'s first abstract painter and a pivotal figure in contemporary art.

Much as Maine Painter John Marin (another Stieglitz protege) chose the sky as his province, Dove made the earth and sea his domain. To get closer to both, he moved out of Manhattan, where he had been a successful illustrator, and bought a farm in Westport, Conn., began raising chickens. When that venture failed, he tried his hand at being a lobsterman. Art, he decided, should not depend so much on natural forms as on substituting equivalent images for them. He was searching for a means of expression that would not depend on representation, that "should have order, size, intensity, spirit, nearer to the music of the eye."

At the age of 40, Dove left his wife and son, went to live on a scow on Manhattan's Harlem River. Finally he managed to scrape together enough money to buy an old 42-ft. yawl from his friend and benefactor, William S. Hart, oldtime cowboy star of the silent movies. With his second wife, he cruised Long Island Sound for the next eleven years. Wind, water and sand became the essence of some of Dove's best work. Ferry Boat Wreck--Oyster Bay (1931) catches the essence of a lurking hulk beneath the sound's green water and the fiery color of rusting iron; Fog Horns (1929) is an abstraction of sound any sailor becalmed in a fog would recognize.

Toward the end of his life, as he lay dying in an abandoned post office in Centerport, L.I. that he had bought as a studio-home, he watched the sea gulls flying past his window. "Their beaks," he wrote, "look like ivory thrown slowly through space." In words, it was the quality and response to nature Dove had spent all his life attempting to capture in paint.

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