EMBEDDED IN NATURE

By ROBERT HUGHES

If there was ever an artist in the American grain, it was Arthur Dove (1880-1946), with his obstinate home-made lyricism, his complete authenticity and his desire to be modern on local--not Euro-imitative--terms. In the beautiful Dove retrospective now at the Phillips Collection in Washington--which will move on to New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art in January--one sees all this and more. It has been a long time since the last museum survey of Dove's work, and Debra Bricker Balken, who curated this one, has done an exceptional artist full justice. And of course the Phillips Collection is the right place to start it, since Duncan Phillips was the only steady collector Dove had in his whole career and the relationship between the two men was one of the finer examples of mutual nurturing in the annals of American patronage. Phillips kept the wolf from Dove's door, but Dove opened Phillips to what was exclusively visual, not literary, in art.

Dove, along with Marsden Hartley, was one of the finest talents of the early years of American modernism, part of the circle of painters whose hearth was the little 291 gallery in New York City and whose tireless promoter, supporter and voice in the desert was Alfred Stieglitz. Dove's father, a well-off Geneva, N.Y., brick manufacturer, expected his son to be a lawyer and never wholly forgave him for becoming an artist. To Dove, as to the more conflicted Hartley, Stieglitz was mentor, friend and (virtually) a second father. Starting before World War I, Dove's slow-maturing, thoughtful and deeply felt art gathered up the strands of American nature worship and braided them in a way that linked back to Emerson and, through abstraction, sideways to European artists like Wassily Kandinsky.

Dove was the first American, and possibly the first artist of any nationality, to paint a nonrepresentational picture. He did a set of five tiny Abstractions in 1910-11, perhaps a little before Kandinsky's first abstract compositions. Daringly radical for their time, today some of these look not so abstract after all: Abstraction No. 1 reads like a landscape, with sky at top, hills and what appears to be a tower pierced by a window. When Dove talked and wrote about abstraction, what did he mean? Not pure abstract form, certainly. Nature was of absolutely paramount importance to him: in hills, rocks, sea, sky, trees, moon and sun, he saw a richness and variety of shape that inspired him throughout his working life. His project was to "liberate" forms from them, losing or blurring their descriptive qualities while trying to keep the sense of energy and continuous change--of life itself--that animated them.

His painting always had an organic basis. Sometimes he called it extraction rather than abstraction. He described the process to a friend in 1913: "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 on the object... 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...began...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."

The sense of this rather convoluted explanation becomes clear when one sees the paintings, or rather large pastels, on which Dove worked in the early 1910s. Done in rapid, stippled strokes that evoke what Dove called the "condition of light" in objects, they are both abstract and not. There are no recognizable nags in Team of Horses, 1911-12, but the dark, serrated curves suggest the animals' manes, and the heavy rhythmical movement heading right to left across the surface conveys muscular effort, a flow of energy in a dense world. And this act of symbolizing rhythm and force was, essentially, what the word abstraction meant to Dove.

He couldn't disengage it from its natural context, landscape, nor would he have wanted to. Dove felt happiest and his images flowed best when he was embedded in nature, whether rural or marine. He did have a jokey and urban side, which occasionally connected him to New York Dadaism. An example of this is The Critic, 1925, a sardonic portrait of the archconservative writer Royal Cortissoz, nemesis of the Armory Show and of modernism in general, seen as a faceless newspaper doll with a monocle for staring at art, a vacuum for purifying culture and a pair of rollerskates for getting quickly around the galleries. But the real ground of Dove's imagination lay outside Manhattan. He tried to survive as a farmer in Connecticut but failed; and for some years in the 1920s, having left his wife for a fellow artist named Helen Torr, he lived on a yawl, the Mona, in the waters of Long Island Sound.

Despite his continuous money problems--for the 1920s and '30s were not, to put it mildly, a time in which an avant-garde artist could get rich in suspicious America--Dove was able, through continuous immersion in nature, to forge a style that was both idiosyncratic and grand: abstract but (as Duncan Phillips wrote to him in 1935) "thoroughly alive, robust, close to the soil...not atrophied with the slow death of faddism and insincerity." The idiosyncrasies belonged to the drawing, which was full of quirks and crotchets (just like naturally occurring things in the real world, Dove would have argued), the grandeur to the color, which for expressiveness and sonority had no equal in American painting at the time.

Dove believed in the long reach of painting. It could encompass cosmic events, as in the exquisite Golden Storm, 1925, his rendition of the turning vortices of a cyclone. The master image of Dove's later work, in fact, is the sun, giver of light and life, guarantor of fertility and energy. The problem is that to paint the solar disk, even 50 years ago, was to risk utter banality. What image, since Van Gogh painted its flakes of fire shed as from a pinwheel onto the earth of Provence, has been so overworked? Yet Dove was able to go at it straight, with unforced intensity.

The summation of his sun images was a late work, done in 1944, two years before his death, and laconically titled That Red One. Its architecture is majestic: two pillars of red, whose origin is in a view of trees near his studio at Mill Pond on Long Island, N.Y., with the sun rising through them--an ocher sun haloed in black. Behind this motif are clear-cut zones of ultramarine blue, lemon yellow and orange. Clear and ringing with color, it's an extraordinarily predictive painting, full of proleptic traces of artists who would come later, in the 1950s and '60s, and who have never been thought to be much in debt to Dove: Robert Motherwell, for instance, and color-field painters like Kenneth Noland.

Influence or coincidence? It hardly matters. In the end, an artist is to be judged by his work, not by its effect on others. And, as this show makes clear, Dove's visionary abstraction was of such strength, originality and integrity that it deserves its special place in the history of American art.