Arthur Dove (1880-1946)

Sound plays the starring role in Dove’s Fog Horns. Here the artist melds color and shape—soft mauve-brown concentric rings—to suggest the moody sonority of horns that are heard, rather than seen, through layers of damp fog. In this, the most overtly synesthetic of his paintings, Dove insists that the overlapping rings of sound be experienced aurally and designs them accordingly: dark, concentrated in the center, they amplify, then fade as they spread outward in space, softening time into lazy shapes that seem to hang suspended, hovering before dissolving into air. Dove’s slow, languid bands of outwardly diminishing color pulse like the slow rhythm of nature itself. Rarely, outside cubist space-time experiments, has a painting so artfully represented the element of time or so fully embraced the possibilities of sensory crossover. Fog Horns is Dove’s synesthetic masterpiece.

— Sharyn Udall (2010)