Spotlight Review - Massachusetts

Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute • Williamstown, MA • www.clarkart.edu • Through September 7, 2009

Arthur Dove believed that making art should be a delightful adventure. As this idea implies, creating new work requires a leap of faith, a willingness to explore new territories and ideas. In looking at the work of Dove and his friend, fellow artist Georgia O’Keeffe, these beliefs and ambitions become palpable.

O’Keeffe’s early watercolor, Blue I, with its spiraling trajectory, appears to be a precursor to the artist’s iconic flowers, bones, and landscapes. Shades of blue accentuate light and darkness. The curled plant or shell remains more of an abstraction than a solid object.

O’Keeffe’s oil New York with Moon, painted in 1925, plays more confidently with abstract and representational images than her earlier work. This piece is more austere and its lines more forceful. The painting itself is pared down to just architecture, moon, and lamp. While not a pure abstraction, O’Keeffe reacts confidently in how much representation she needs. In 1928, she created Wave, Night, which offers a slightly stark and simple work that evokes emotion. Deep, saturated colors—blues, plum, and grays—suggest the ocean. These glimmers of place and perspective remind the viewer of the challenges in discerning shapes and place in the near-dark.

While this exhibition, Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence, accentuates the influences and inspirations between Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe, it also gives viewers the chance to see the parallel development of these two artists and their work. Dove’s drawing, Sunrise II, with all its darkness and clustered brown clouds, is in no way a representational landscape or skyline. Yet it offers more structural imagery than in much of his later work.

In Dove’s 1924 oil painting, Sunrise, no sun is rising. Instead, this painting appears to be constructed from distinct shapes, and the colors meld into a blur. For this painting, Dove selected a palette of greens, blues, red, orange, and black—not the usual sunrise colors. The shapes are curved. In spite of this, they remain geometric in feel, like puzzle pieces of abstraction. The bright round ball of sun above these curved shapes gives a nod to a more traditional landscape. The sense that Dove was moving toward abstraction, especially considering the color choices he made, seems clear.

By 1939, Dove created War, a gouache and aluminum-leaf work on paper. Here Dove moved further into abstraction. A study of the painting gives the viewer the sensation that a chasm has opened up, unleashing a geyser. This is not a painterly work. Its plain colors—blue, gray, red and black—lay flat rather than exploring dimension or texture. Many interpretations could be made of this painting.

Dove’s career was established before Keeffe’s, and he influenced her. However, later on, her influence upon him became the stronger force. O’Keeffe painted Abstraction in 1919, a series of ivory-curved shapes, curled beside one another, with dark shadowing. Dove acquired the piece in 1923 and hung it on his sailboat. In 1925, he created Rain, a piece formed out of twigs and rubber cement on metal and glass, with shapes so similar to O’Keeffe’s Abstraction that the influence is unmistakable. Dove’s curves nearly mirror O’Keeffe’s. The opportunity to see how each artist evolved in consort with the other, serves as a powerful reminder that creative development does not occur in a vacuum.

—Sarah Buttenwieser