Untitled 1940 - 1946

Arthur Dove made this small, untitled painting with wax crayons, sometime in his career, but we don't know when. Dove was part of a group of early 20th-century artists who were interested in abstraction, in reducing the forms of nature to simple shapes and colors. In many ways, this approach chimed with ideas about the essence of the ‘primitive’ that were circulating in literary and artistic circles at the time. In its reduction to the simplest elements, the artwork seems to reject the values of academic art, which required painstaking representation and historical subject matter. But what did this turn to abstraction really mean? Was it a rejection of the institutions of art or a response to the changing social and economic conditions of America at the beginning of the twentieth century? To answer these questions, we can turn to the artist’s biographies, exhibition histories, and period writings. In doing so, the role of art as something embedded in its social and institutional context becomes clear.