The Arthur Dove Studio Wall

Power Plant 1, 1938. Oil on canvas, 25 x 35 in. Reproduction courtesy of the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA

Flour Mill II, 1938. Oil on wax emulsion on canvas, 26 1/8 x 16 1/8 in. Reproduction courtesy of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

Building Moving Past a Sky, c.1938. Reproduction courtesy of the Collection of the Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ

Shore Front, 1938. Wax emulsion on canvas, 22 x 36 in. Reproduction courtesy of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

Power Plant II, 1938. Oil on canvas, 25 x 35 in. Reproduction courtesy of the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL

Town Scraper, 1933. Oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in. Reproduction courtesy of a private collection

When the artist Arthur Dove moved back to the Finger Lakes region in 1933 to settle his family’s estate, he took up residence on the Dove family farm in Geneva and tried to make a go as a farmer. He and his partner, the artist Helen Torr, whom he married in 1932, moved into a small house without electricity on the 180-acre property. In a letter to his friend and patron, the photographer and New York gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, Dove described his first, rather unsuccessful attempt at using a tractor to plow a barley field, writing that he could barely stay seated on the machine for all its shaking and rattling. He stuck with farming for sever years, however,moving in 1934 to a larger house on the property. He cultivated wheat, oats, and hay and planted a vergetable garden with help from his son, Bill Dove, from his marriage to Florence Dorsey, whom he left in 1921 for Torr. Farming wound up beinga a bust, but Dove thrived as a painter during this period, even finding beauty in farm equipment, like the wheeled grader featured in Town Scraper (1933). The earth-moving machine, which Dove would have hitched to his tractor, appears more natural than hand-mace, its sinuous steel limbs blending harmoniously with the rolling green fields in the distance. Clearly, Dove Appreciate teh form of farming more than the function!

Rachael Z. DeLue, Princeton University

Sea Gulls, 1938. Oil on canvas, 16 x 26 in. Reproduction courtesy of The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY

Sun on the Lake, 1938. Oil, wax, and resin on canvas, 22 1/8 x 36 in. Reproduction courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

In 1933, the modern artist Arthur Dove (1880-1946), celebrated for his strikingly innovative images of nature and his pioneering work in abstraction, moved to Geneva, New York, with his partner, the artist Helen Torr Dove was born in Canandaigua and grew up in Geneva. After graduating from Cornell University in 1903, he headed to Europe and then New York to pursue a career as a painter. He returned to his hometown in the Finger Lakes region in 1933 to help his brother, Paul, settle the family estate. Dove created some of his most compelling work during this time, despite the difficulties present by his family’s debts, his failed attempt at farming, and his ill health. He painted Sun on the Lake during his final year in Geneva, in 1938, while living and working on the third floor of the Dove Block building. Built in 1878 by his father, William G. Dove, a brick-maker and contractor, the Dove Block is currently undergoing a major restoration and now houses the Dove Block Project Community Arts Center.

Sun on the Lake takes as its subject Seneca Lake, the inspiration for many of the most beautiful paintings Dove made during his time in Geneva. The painting conveys the radiant warmth of a summer’s day and the myriad shades of blue conjured by the reflection of the brilliant yellow sun and the bright blue sky on the waters of the lake. When looking at this picture, one can imagine Dove standing on the lake’s shore, transfixed by the beauty of nature and by the sheet power and profundity of nature’s physical forces: light, heat, wind, and gravity. In this way, Sun on the Lake embodies one of Dove’s chief aims as an artist, to render not the external appearance of the natural world but, instead, the idea or essence of nature along with his own, subjective experience of nature’s phenomena.

Rachael DeLue, Princeton University

Old Boat Works, 1938. Oil on canvas, 12 x 17 in. Unknown collection

Flour Mill I, 1938. Oil on canvas, 18 x 12 in. Reproduction courtesy of a private collection

Motor Boat, 1938. Oil, wax, and resin on canvas, 25 x 35 in. Reproduction courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

Cars in a Sleet Storm, 1938. Oil on canvas, 15 x 21 in. Reproduction courtesy of the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY

Holbrook’s Bridge to the Northwest, 1938. Oil on canvas, 25 x 35 in. Reproduction courtesy of the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY

Willow Tree, 1937. Oil on canvas, 20 x 28 in. Reproduction courtesy of the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL

A stroll along Seneca Lake in Geneva in the late 1930s, in what is now Seneca Lake State Park, would have taken Dove past dozens of beautiful willow trees lining the shore. Willows held special significance for Dove. He made numerous paintings and watercolors featuring willows, and after he and his wife, the artist Helen Torr, moved in 1938 from Geneva to Centerport, Long Island, he recorded in his diary every spring the first appearance of leaves on the willow tree just outside his window. Willow Tree (1937) departs significantly from visible reality and instead offers a vision of a tree as a living, breathing being, animated by sun, air, and soil. Dove evokes in this painting the sway and sweep of the tree’s branches through a swirling spiral of black, brown, gray, and green. Streaks of white radiate from the willow’s limbs and leaves, suggesting a powerful force emanation from the tree and signaling the power and profundity of the natural world, as embodied by the sturdy willow. Perhaps the painting also evokes Dove’s experience standing beneath one of Geneva’s magnificent trees and looking up, bits of sky peeking through the leaves, the branches encircling him in a verdant embrace. Dove and Torr moved from the Dove family farm to the Dove Block in downtown Geneva in May 1937, which means Willow Tree could be one of the first works Dove Created in his new studio space on the third floor.

Rachael DeLue, Princeton University

Seneca Lake, 1938. Oil on canvas, 6 x 8 in. Reproduction courtesy of the collection of Otto and Lydia Leinsdorf

Foot of Lake, 1938. Oil on canvas, 6 x 8 in. Reproduction courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

Tanks, 1938. Oil and wax on canvas, 25 x 35 in. Reproduction courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

Tree and Covered Boat, 1932-33. Oil on canvas, 20 x 28 in. Reproduction courtesy of the Robert P. and Arlene R. Kogod Family Foundation

The artist Arthur Dove spent a lot of time on the water. In 1921, he moved with his partner, the artist Helen Torr, to a houseboat on the Harlem River. The following year, the two bought a yawl, the Mona, which they sailed on local rivers and in Long Island Sound until mooring it at Halesite, Long Island, in 1924. The Mona served as their primary residence until 1933, when they relocated to Geneva, Dove’s hometown, following the death of Dove’s mother in January of that year, and where they would stay until 1938. Dove created Tree and Covered Boat during the period he made the move from boat to shore. The tossed and swaying forms of the painting evoke the experience of being shipboard, rising and falling with the waves, while the tarp-covered boat, a bulging form rendered in light blue, pale yellow, and white, may allude to Dove’s transition from a waterborne existence to the terra firma of Geneva and the Dove family farm. The water, however, was never far away, and Seneca Lake inspired many of the paintings and sketches Dove made during his time in Geneva. The reaching, wave-like forms at the bottom of Tree and Covered Boat transmit their driving energy to the rest of the composition, suggesting water as a fundamental element for Dove, its ever-changing aspect serving as a template for the fluid vitality of his art.

Rachael DeLue, Princeton University

City Moon, 1938. Oil and wax emulsion on canvas, 34 7/8 x 25 in. Reproduction courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC

Green, Black, and White, c.1938. Oil on canvas, 18 x 26 in. Reproduction courtesy of J. R. and Barbra Hyde

Wood Pile, c. 1938. Oil on canvas, 10 x 14 in. Unknown. collection

Swing Music (Louis Armstrong), c.1938. Emulsion, oil, and wax on canvas, 17 5/8 x 25 7/8 in. Reproduction courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL

Freight Car, 1937. Oil on canvas, 20 x 28 in. Reproduction courtesy of a private collection

The artist Arthur Dove spent hours wandering in and around Geneva, where he lived form 1933 to 1938, making small watercolor sketches of things he encountered along the way. He called these sketches his “ideas,” some of which he turned into paintings, including Freight Car (1937). Based on a watercolor sketch called Study for Fall Brook Freight Car, one of several he made of the Fall Brook railroad and station buildings, the painting depicts a coal car sitting idle, a bright red mass against a backdrop of rich greens. The Fall Brook Railway was a fixture of the Finger Lakes region. In 1859, John Magee, a businessman and two-term member of congress form the state of New York, founded the Fall Brook Coal Company, after coal was discovered in Fall Brook, Tioga County, Pennsylvania. Magee’s company went on the establish a network of railways for transporting coal between points in Pennsylvania and New York, including Geneva. By the time Dove came to paint one of the Fall Brook Railway Company’s freight cars in 1937, the approximately 250 miles of track operated by the company had been absorbed by the New York Central Railroad. Dove’s coal car, while idle, sits within a composition that crackles with life: swaying trees, rolling gray clouds, zigzagging lines of green, wooden telegraph poles that appear to bend in response to the electrical charge they carry, and flashes of bright orange and red on either side that seem more about the very idea of energy, coal-fired or electric, than they do anything that might have been present at the scene.

Rachael DeLue, Princeton University