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拍品专文
Arthur Dove’s primary patron Duncan Phillips once poetically described the artist as “expressing unashamed worship of sun and moon. He looked right into the glow of the morning sun or into the face of the full moon as it rose above the haunted hills.” (as quoted in P. Carter-Birken, Duncan and Marjorie Phillips and America’s First Museum of Modern Art, Wilmington, Delaware, 2021, p. 80) Indeed, Dove was drawn to the celestial orbs of the sun and moon throughout his career, balancing inspiration from the landscape with his innovative artistic spirit to develop trailblazing abstractions. Painted in 1941, Through a Frosty Moon represents the pinnacle of Dove’s exploration of this motif—utilizing the glowing circular form of the moon as a central grounding force for abstraction that would prove influential for generations of artists to come.
In the spring of 1938, Dove and his wife, Helen ‘Reds’ Torr, left his isolated hometown of Geneva, New York, after five years. They returned to the North Shore of Long Island, where they had previously lived, and settled in the small town of Centerport for the remainder of Dove’s life. Here Dove found a new creative drive that brought his artwork the closest it had been to the edge of pure abstraction since his earliest endeavors three decades prior. In his diary entry for August 12, 1939, Dove described his goal in painting as “…not form but formation. To set planes in motion.” Dove scholar Debra Bricker Balken explains, “From this we may gather that Dove sought…a type of art in which shapes would flow together with a sense of constant motion and fuse into a single, whole, and centered composition.” (Arthur Dove: A Retrospective, Andover, Massachusetts, 1997, p. 139)
Through a Frosty Moon remains in that special liminal space where, as Dove described, “abstraction and reality meet” (diary entry, August 20, 1942) because of the recognizable lunar form at the center of the complex curves. Balken writes of the present work, “the painting is structured around a dominant anchoring circle directly at center…the sun and moon provided an inherent, cosmic structure within the curvilinear paintings.” (Arthur Dove: A Retrospective, p. 141) Rachael Z. DeLue furthers, “Dove frequently employed such a concentric circle motif to render the motion and mechanics of light or celestial bodies…the sun and its rays take on a concentric cast, while the curving lines and biomorphic forms amplify the rotational force of the composition.” (Arthur Dove: Always Connect, Chicago, Illinois, 2016, p. 17) With this motif, Through a Frosty Moon shares interesting parallels with the work of Robert Delaunay, who was also drawn to cosmic themes as in his abstract Sun and Moon series.
Balken traces the development of the spiraling curvilinear forms in Through a Frosty Moon back to their earliest inception in Movement No. I of 1911-12 (Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio), one of Dove’s Ten Commandments pastels which are widely acknowledged to be the first exhibit of pure abstraction in America. More specifically, the concentric circles of his 1936-37 Sunrise series, and particularly the spiraling forms of Summer Orchard (1937, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, New York) and Out the Window (1939, St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri), led to the allover expansion of the schema in A Few Shapes (1940, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts). Balken concludes, “The sequence was completed in 1940 or 1941 by an even more abstract painting, simply titled Shapes [The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.], composed of a series of flowing and intersecting circles, half-circles, and ovoids” and then “the development of a more complex series of eliding and intersecting curves in Through a Frosty Moon, an accomplished update of the 1940/41 Shapes.” (Arthur Dove: A Retrospective, pp. 139-41) The present work can therefore be seen as the full realization of Dove’s career-long pursuit to capture a sense of planar movement within his painting practice.
Through a Frosty Moon also joins a broader exploration of the celestial circular form by American Modernists, including Georgia O’Keeffe and Oscar Bluemner, which would exert a significant influence on the abstract artists of following generations, such as Arshile Gorky and Robert Motherwell. For example, Alex J. Taylor writes, “[Kenneth] Noland was also influenced by the kinds of art he could see at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.…the glowing abstracted landscapes of Arthur Dove (for instance Me and the Moon 1937) or the radiating bands in Georgia O’Keeffe’s Red Hills, Lake George 1927 suggest further sources for Noland’s circle paintings.” ("The Painting," in Gift 1961–2 by Kenneth Noland, Tate Research Publication, 2017) Furthermore, Robert Rosenblum notes "The lunar fantasies of Arthur Dove…provide prototypes for Gottlieb’s luminous orbs." (Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko, New York, 1975, pp. 207-209)
The importance of Dove’s pioneering abstractions is underscored by Through a Frosty Moon’s inclusion in the seminal 1946 exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London of American Painting: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day. Presented in the aftermath of World War II to over 100,000 visitors, including King George VI, the show placed the present work in context beside masterworks from Winslow Homer’s Breezing Up (1873-76, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) to Edward Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning (1930, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). This recognition of Through a Frosty Moon on the international stage at the advent of the post-War period highlights the influence Dove would have on the artists of the second half of the twentieth century. As Ann Lee Morgan has written, “The work of the forties…constitutes the fruition of pure abstraction in his work. Beyond its intrinsic quality, it is particularly significant for the connections it makes with the burgeoning abstract tendencies of the forties and fifties. It anticipated both the gesturalism…and the color field interests of the upcoming generation.” (Arthur Dove: Life and Work, With a Catalogue Raisonné, Newark, 1984, pp. 59-60, 64)
In the spring of 1938, Dove and his wife, Helen ‘Reds’ Torr, left his isolated hometown of Geneva, New York, after five years. They returned to the North Shore of Long Island, where they had previously lived, and settled in the small town of Centerport for the remainder of Dove’s life. Here Dove found a new creative drive that brought his artwork the closest it had been to the edge of pure abstraction since his earliest endeavors three decades prior. In his diary entry for August 12, 1939, Dove described his goal in painting as “…not form but formation. To set planes in motion.” Dove scholar Debra Bricker Balken explains, “From this we may gather that Dove sought…a type of art in which shapes would flow together with a sense of constant motion and fuse into a single, whole, and centered composition.” (Arthur Dove: A Retrospective, Andover, Massachusetts, 1997, p. 139)
Through a Frosty Moon remains in that special liminal space where, as Dove described, “abstraction and reality meet” (diary entry, August 20, 1942) because of the recognizable lunar form at the center of the complex curves. Balken writes of the present work, “the painting is structured around a dominant anchoring circle directly at center…the sun and moon provided an inherent, cosmic structure within the curvilinear paintings.” (Arthur Dove: A Retrospective, p. 141) Rachael Z. DeLue furthers, “Dove frequently employed such a concentric circle motif to render the motion and mechanics of light or celestial bodies…the sun and its rays take on a concentric cast, while the curving lines and biomorphic forms amplify the rotational force of the composition.” (Arthur Dove: Always Connect, Chicago, Illinois, 2016, p. 17) With this motif, Through a Frosty Moon shares interesting parallels with the work of Robert Delaunay, who was also drawn to cosmic themes as in his abstract Sun and Moon series.
Balken traces the development of the spiraling curvilinear forms in Through a Frosty Moon back to their earliest inception in Movement No. I of 1911-12 (Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio), one of Dove’s Ten Commandments pastels which are widely acknowledged to be the first exhibit of pure abstraction in America. More specifically, the concentric circles of his 1936-37 Sunrise series, and particularly the spiraling forms of Summer Orchard (1937, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, New York) and Out the Window (1939, St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri), led to the allover expansion of the schema in A Few Shapes (1940, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts). Balken concludes, “The sequence was completed in 1940 or 1941 by an even more abstract painting, simply titled Shapes [The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.], composed of a series of flowing and intersecting circles, half-circles, and ovoids” and then “the development of a more complex series of eliding and intersecting curves in Through a Frosty Moon, an accomplished update of the 1940/41 Shapes.” (Arthur Dove: A Retrospective, pp. 139-41) The present work can therefore be seen as the full realization of Dove’s career-long pursuit to capture a sense of planar movement within his painting practice.
Through a Frosty Moon also joins a broader exploration of the celestial circular form by American Modernists, including Georgia O’Keeffe and Oscar Bluemner, which would exert a significant influence on the abstract artists of following generations, such as Arshile Gorky and Robert Motherwell. For example, Alex J. Taylor writes, “[Kenneth] Noland was also influenced by the kinds of art he could see at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.…the glowing abstracted landscapes of Arthur Dove (for instance Me and the Moon 1937) or the radiating bands in Georgia O’Keeffe’s Red Hills, Lake George 1927 suggest further sources for Noland’s circle paintings.” ("The Painting," in Gift 1961–2 by Kenneth Noland, Tate Research Publication, 2017) Furthermore, Robert Rosenblum notes "The lunar fantasies of Arthur Dove…provide prototypes for Gottlieb’s luminous orbs." (Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko, New York, 1975, pp. 207-209)
The importance of Dove’s pioneering abstractions is underscored by Through a Frosty Moon’s inclusion in the seminal 1946 exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London of American Painting: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day. Presented in the aftermath of World War II to over 100,000 visitors, including King George VI, the show placed the present work in context beside masterworks from Winslow Homer’s Breezing Up (1873-76, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) to Edward Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning (1930, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). This recognition of Through a Frosty Moon on the international stage at the advent of the post-War period highlights the influence Dove would have on the artists of the second half of the twentieth century. As Ann Lee Morgan has written, “The work of the forties…constitutes the fruition of pure abstraction in his work. Beyond its intrinsic quality, it is particularly significant for the connections it makes with the burgeoning abstract tendencies of the forties and fifties. It anticipated both the gesturalism…and the color field interests of the upcoming generation.” (Arthur Dove: Life and Work, With a Catalogue Raisonné, Newark, 1984, pp. 59-60, 64)