Prophet and Poet of the Abstract

By ROBERT HUGHES

"I would like to make something that is real in itself, that does not remind anyone of any other thing, and that does not have to be explained--like the letter A for instance." Thus one of America's first abstract painters, Arthur Dove, set up his version of the modernist hope. To visit the traveling retrospective show of 70 Dove paintings and collages that Art Historian Barbara Haskell organized for the San Francisco Museum of Art (it opens this week at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo) is to sense how difficult that ambition must have been for an American of his generation.

To be a modern artist in Europe was not the same thing. There, at least in Paris, one had an accessible field of new art. However poor, however rejected or unsuccessful he might be, the Parisian artist could afford to feel that he was part of a continuum known as the avantgarde. In America this was not so; the way to a modernist aesthetic lay through nearly impassable thickets of provincialism, with a very meager supply of information as a guide.

The big problem for artists who did not want to follow the usual pattern of expatriation was how to be both modern and at the same time American. Most modern American art from the teens and '20s had a homemade, do-it-yourself, rule-of-thumb look. Arthur Dove's was no exception, and some of his paintings, particularly in the mid-'30s, poignantly suggest an imagination hobbled by its lack of prototypes. But a certain naivete and brusqueness were, in any case, bound up with Dove's sense of aesthetic probity. It was part of what he called "going native." Dove was a very American painter: not only did he value his Americanism as such, but he equated it with dynamism, the very principle of modernity. "What do we call 'America' outside of painting?" he asked a friend. "Inventiveness, restlessness, speed, change. Well, a painter may put all these qualities in a still life or an abstraction, and be going more native than another who sits quietly copying a skyscraper."

Dove was, after all, a wealthy brickmaker's boy from Geneva, N.Y., a square-jawed pragmatist, proud of his skills as farmer and sailor, who had tossed in an income of $12,000 a year illustrating for several magazines, including the Saturday Evening Post--no mean sum, in 1907 --and impoverished himself by making serious art at a time when Americans drew little distinction between "fine" and "commercial" work. Dove went to Europe and stayed for two years looking at the work of les Fauves: Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck. He came back in 1909, and never left America again. He could not afford a second trip.

Nature Poet. This meant that his sense of sharing a project with others, crucial to any experimenter, had to be found at home. The only audience was other artists--the group around the "291" Gallery, including John Marin and Marsden Hartley, presided over by Photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who was, in Sherwood Anderson's words, "father to so many puzzled, wistful children of the arts in the big, noisy, growing and groping America." Like other "291" artists, Dove was a nature poet: he never contemplated going to the extreme of "pure" abstraction. "I can claim no background," he once reflected, "except perhaps the woods, running streams, hunting, fishing, camping, the sky."

But he did believe that one could extract "essences" from nature--shapes that symbolized different kinds of force, growth and elan vital, and that constituted the inner structure of reality. This belief, which owed as much to Mme. Blavatsky and her ilk as to Henri Bergson, was common among early abstract artists. Its embodiment, for Dove, was in works like Team of Horses (1911), one of the first abstract paintings ever made in the U.S.: the curling shapes, fringed with sawtooth edges and inset between thick dark lines, are like a premonitory flicker of art deco, but Dove's intent was to convey a sense of sullen, humped energy moving across a landscape.

A Gruff Joke. Like many artists of the time, Dove also pursued the idea that colors could have symbolic meanings, that they could "stand for" specific sounds. A testament to Dove's interest in synesthesia was Fog Horns (1929), in which the sound of the signals is symbolized by concentric rings of paint growing in lightening tones of grayed pink from a dark center: the bell mouths of the horns, their peculiar resonance and the color of the fog are fused in one image.

Perhaps the most interesting of Dove's early works was a series of about 25 assemblages he did between 1924 and 1930, including Portrait of Ralph Dusenberry (1924). It owes something to Picabia (who, some years before, had done a number of "object-portraits"--Stieglitz as a camera and so forth), but the fascinating aspect today is how prophetic this small image is. No doubt Dove meant the folding inch-rule that runs round the portrait like a frame to be a gruff joke--how do you measure the fictional space of a painting? But that joke, 35 years later, would become one of the "issues" of American art and Jasper Johns would obsessively return to it. Of course, Portrait of Ralph Dusenberry is not necessarily a better assemblage because it predicts some part of Johns any more than the strong totemic architecture of Dove's last and most expansive color paintings, like That Red One (1944), is necessarily made more relevant because it seems to anticipate Robert Motherwell. Although Dove could fall to an almost barbaric level of buckeye clumsiness when off form (as this faithfully assembled show abundantly proves), the best of his work survives not as prediction but as experience. The dogged probity and sensuality of his reactions to nature were uncommon in advanced art; yet it was Dove, more than any other early abstract artist, who set what would become a motive of American painting down to the present day: the constant intrusion of epic landscape as the armature, the secret image, of abstract art. Robert Hughes

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