Study for A Reasonable Facsimile

Arthur DoveWW-1942-132890

1942·Watercolor, gouache, and brush and black ink, with scraping, on cream wove paper·Sight: 12.5 × 17.5 cm (4 15/16 × 6 15/16 in.)

<p>Although he began his career as a commercial illustrator, Arthur Dove became one of America’s first abstract artists following his travels in Europe, where he was particularly taken with the work of Henri Matisse and the Fauves. Here he created what he felt was “a reasonable facsimile” of a landscape, with references to the sun above and the earth below; this study for the painting of the same name exemplifies Dove’s late-career investigation of the line between representation and abstraction. The painting is accompanied by a poem: “There is much to be done— / Works of nature are abstract. / They do not lean on other things for meanings.”</p>

Catalogue

Year: 1942
Medium: Watercolor, gouache, and brush and black ink, with scraping, on cream wove paper
Dimensions: Sight: 12.5 × 17.5 cm (4 15/16 × 6 15/16 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Arthur Dove

Artist

Arthur Dove

Painting

Arthur Garfield Dove was an American artist. An early American modernist, he 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. Me and the Moon from 1937 is a good example of an Arthur Dove abstract landscape and has been referred to as one of the culminating works of his career. Dove made a series of experimental collages in the 1920s. He also experimented with techniques, combining paints like hand mixed oil or tempera over a wax emulsion as exemplified in Dove's 1938 painting Tanks, in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

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