An early American modernist, Arthur Garfield Dove is often considered the first American abstract painter. Dove used a wide range of media, sometimes in unconventional combinations, to produce his abstractions and his abstract landscapes. He also experimented with techniques, combining paints like hand mixed oil or tempera over a wax emulsion.

Arthur Garfield Dove spent his early years in Geneva, New York, where his father was a building contractor and brick manufacturer. He attended Hobart College before transferring to Cornell University, from which he graduated in 1903. He then moved to New York City, where he worked as an illustrator for various popular periodicals for several years. In 1908–9, Dove and his wife Florence traveled to France; in Paris, Dove associated with other young American artists such as Alfred Maurer and Max Weber, and his work was included in group exhibitions. Returning to New York, Dove met Alfred Stieglitz, who invited him to submit work to the Younger American Painters exhibition, which also included work by John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Edward J. Steichen, and was held at his gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue in 1910. Dove’s first one-person show was held at 291 in 1912; by then, his place in the artistic avant-garde of the Stieglitz circle was assured.

In 1910 and 1911, Dove created a number of inventive works of art that used stylized, abstract forms at a remarkably early date in American art; he is considered the first American artist to have created such purely nonrepresentational imagery. As the decade progressed, he was further influenced by Cubism, by the Expressionist work of Vasily Kandinsky, and by the writings of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who stressed the importance of a mystical, rather than analytical, understanding of the world. Bergson proposed the existence of an “élan vital,” a spirit or energy that constantly animates all living things in their fight for existence. This idea appealed to Dove, who himself was fascinated with natural cycles of growth and renewal and sought to make those universal harmonies visible in his work. He was also frequently inspired by the parallel between the visual arts and music. In 1933, Dove moved to his family estate in Geneva, NY with his second wife Reds and lived on his family’s property while settling the debt-ridden estate. Despite his reluctance to relocate to Geneva, which he considered provincial, Dove remained there with Reds through 1938. Geneva provided him with new subject matter for his art, including the family farm, the local barnyard animals, and nearby lakes, as well as the city’s more industrial downtown area of warehouses and railroad tracks. Dove made only one trip to New York City during these years, although he maintained a close correspondence with Stieglitz, who would remain a lifelong friend and supporter. In the relative isolation of Geneva, he concentrated more than ever on themes of interdependence between living creatures and their environments, and on the purely formal appeal of natural objects’ shapes and lines, which he emphasized to the point of abstraction with organic shapes and unexpected color schemes.

In 1938, Dove and Reds returned to Long Island and rented a small house, a former post office that stood directly on the shore of a mill pond in Centerport. Forced to live a sedentary life after a heart attack and a diagnosis of severe kidney disease, Dove found his view confined to the immediate neighborhood around his home. However, he transformed this limitation into a period of experimentation with form and medium. Dove continued to work into the last year of his life; he died after suffering a heart attack in 1946, only a few months after Stieglitz had passed away. Until his final days, his diary entries recorded his artistic goals alongside observations of the natural surroundings. His reputation continued to grow after his death, and he has been credited with exercising an indirect influence on the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, who placed similar emphasis on the artist’s subjective experience of his surroundings and on the intrinsic emotional power of color and line.