Art: The Alchemist

Alchemists turned out to be an un appreciated and neglected lot, because they failed to make gold. Arthur Dove (1880-1946) was an alchemist in art. He too was unappreciated, and perhaps he too failed ever to achieve his goal. But Dove’s devoted experiments make an intriguing chapter in U.S. art. The liveliness and evanescent loveliness of Dove’s efforts are demonstrated this week by a retrospective show at Cornell University’s White Museum of Art in Ithaca, N.Y. The exhibition proves him to have been an early source of the abstract expressionism which has now engulfed the nation. Dove was painting emotion-charged abstractions as early as 1910.

The son of a Geneva, N.Y. brickmaker, Dove became a fashionable magazine illustrator while still in his 20s. A trip to Paris in 1907 dizzied, delighted and diverted him from the ranks of dull respectability. Sparked by the ideas of the cubists and the fauves, he came home to join the circle of young pioneers around the great photographer and art impresario, Alfred Stieglitz. Already in Stieglitz’ stable were Alfred Maurer, Arthur Carles, John Marin, Marsden Hartley and Max Weber. They all knew they were good, though the public had no inkling of it.

That made life exciting, but altogether unlucrative. Dove met the problem by retiring to a Connecticut farm, where living was cheap. There he could fish for his dinner, and count on a small income from his crops. Later on, his pictures began to sell a little, but rural seclusion remained Dove’s choice. Landscape, he had decided, was the proper subject of his art. With pantheistic fervor he poured his feelings about nature into half-recognizable abstractions, trying always to dissolve what he saw into what he felt. Pure feeling was the gold Dove sought to distill from the dross of his materials.

When paint failed his purpose, Dove would turn to collage (pasting oddly assorted things together to make a picture). He portrayed his grandmother by superimposing a bit of her needlepoint, a page from her Bible and some pressed flowers, upon old shingles. To depict willow trees in the rain he mounted twigs, flecked with gelatine, on glass. Wild and precise at once, he would try anything, and always with exquisite craftsmanship. Until his death, Dove’s painted patterns of blobby color and flickering line gained steadily in emotional refinement, but their refinement resulted in a kind of fragility. Seen with the utmost sympathy, some of his best works are poignant as bird cries; looked at in a less receptive mood, they lose their point.