Arthur Dove (1880-1946)

Arthur Dove was one of the 20th century’s most original creators of abstract form. Dove painted his first totally not-objective image in 1910–11 and may be counted among the earliest Western artists to have arrived at such a conceptualization of experience. Dove declared that his art derived from his emotional responses to plant and animal shapes, textures, and colors; from the sensations of motion in the wind and water, the radiant energy of the sun; and from the temperature and tenor of sounds and smells. Throughout his career Dove sought to express his intimate conception of nature in a personal symbolic language, sometimes referring to recognizable object sources and in other phases of his work holding to pure abstraction. (Wichita Art Museum, https://wam.org/our-collection/collection/forms-against-the-sun/)