Arthur Dove: Always Connect 9780226281230

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Arthur Dove

Arthur Dove Always Connect

Rachael Z. DeLue

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Rachael Z. DeLue is associate professor of art history and archaeology at Princeton University. She is the author of George Inness and the Science of Landscape, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and coeditor of Landscape Theory. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in China 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­14219-­7 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­28123-­0 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226281230.001.0001 This publication is made possible in part by a grant from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. All works by Arthur Dove are courtesy of and copyright The Estate of Arthur G. Dove / Courtesy Terry Dintenfass, Inc. Frontispiece: see fig. 1, p. 2, for more information. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data DeLue, Rachael Ziady, author. Arthur Dove : always connect / Rachael Z. DeLue. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-14219-7 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-22628123-0 (e-book). 1. Dove, Arthur Garfield, 1880–1946—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. ND237.D67D45 2016 759.13—dc23 2015004315 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my parents

Contents

ix

List of Illustrations

xv Acknowledgments 1 Introduction

1 Circles

11

2 Weather

83

3 Sound

147

4 Things

191

251 Epilogue 255 Notes 287

Selected Bibliography

303 Index

vii

Illustrations

Fig. 1 Alfred Stieglitz, Arthur G. Dove, 1923   2 Fig. 2 Arthur G. Dove, Sun Drawing Water, 1933   10 Fig. 3 Arthur G. Dove, Seagull Motif (Violet and Green), 1928   13 Fig. 4 Arthur G. Dove, Fog Horns, 1929   14 Fig. 5 Arthur G. Dove, Moon, 1935   15 Fig. 6 Arthur G. Dove, Silver Sun, 1929   16 Fig. 7 Arthur G. Dove, Sunrise III, 1936–­1937   17 Fig. 8 Arthur G. Dove, Sunrise, Northport Harbor, 1929   18 Fig. 9 Arthur G. Dove, Golden Sun, 1937   19 Fig. 10 Arthur G. Dove, Naples Yellow Morning, 1935   20 Fig. 11 Arthur G. Dove, Pozzuoli Red, 1941   21 Fig. 12

“ Structure of the Radium Atom,” in H. A. Kramers and Helge Holst, The Atom and the Bohr Theory of Its Structure (1923)   21

Fig. 13 Page 3 of an Arthur G. Dove letter to Helen Torr Dove, Nov. 10, 1933   23 Fig. 14 Page 4 of an Arthur G. Dove letter to Helen Torr Dove, Nov. 22, 1934   24 Fig. 15 Page 9 of an Arthur G. Dove letter to Helen Torr Dove, Nov. 10, 1933 or 1934  24 Fig. 16 Essay by Arthur G. Dove, Dec. 13, 1928   26 Fig. 17 Arthur G. Dove, Telegraph Pole, 1929   32 Fig. 18 Arthur G. Dove diary pages, Mar. 19 and 20, 1942   33 Fig. 19

“Word Drill,” in John Robert Gregg, Gregg Shorthand (1930)   34 ix

Fig. 20 Arthur G. Dove, R 25-­A, 1942   35 Fig. 21 Arthur G. Dove, A Reasonable Facsimile, 1942   36 Fig. 22 Arthur G. Dove, Lake Afternoon, 1935   36 Fig. 23 Arthur G. Dove, Rose and Locust Stump, 1943   37 Fig. 24 Arthur G. Dove, Sea II, 1925   37 Fig. 25 Arthur G. Dove, Rain, 1924   38 Fig. 26 Arthur G. Dove, Untitled, 1942   40 Fig. 27 Arthur G. Dove, No Feather Pillow, 1940   41 Fig. 28 Arthur G. Dove, No Feather Pillow, 1940   42 Fig. 29 Arthur G. Dove, Sun, 1943   43 Fig. 30 Arthur G. Dove, Sun, 1943   43 Fig. 31 Detail from Arthur G. Dove, Sun, 1943   44 Fig. 32 Arthur G. Dove, Summer, 1935   45 Fig. 33 Detail from Arthur G. Dove, Telegraph Pole, 1929   45 Fig. 34 Arthur G. Dove, Young Old Master, 1946   46 Fig. 35 Detail from Arthur G. Dove, Young Old Master, 1946   46 Fig. 36 Detail from Arthur G. Dove, Pozzuoli Red, 1941   46 Fig. 37 Arthur G. Dove, Thunder Shower, 1940   47 Fig. 38 Detail from Arthur G. Dove, Thunder Shower, 1940   47 Fig. 39 Arthur G. Dove, Another Arrangement, 1944   48 Fig. 40 Detail from Arthur G. Dove, Another Arrangement, 1944   48 Fig. 41 Arthur G. Dove, Red, Olive and Yellow, 1941   49 Fig. 42 Detail from Arthur G. Dove, Red, Olive and Yellow, 1941   49 Fig. 43 Arthur G. Dove, Ferry Boat Wreck, 1931   50 Fig. 44 Detail from Arthur G. Dove, Ferry Boat Wreck, 1931   50 Fig. 45 Arthur G. Dove, Dawn III, 1932   55 Fig. 46 Alfred Stieglitz, Music—­A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs, No. X, 1922  56 Fig. 47 Arthur G. Dove, Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz, 1924   58 Fig. 48 Arthur G. Dove, Untitled (Portrait of Rebecca and Paul Strand), ca. 1925   59 Fig. 49 Arthur G. Dove, Silver Tanks, 1929   61 Fig. 50 Arthur G. Dove, Silver Tanks and Moon, 1930   61 Fig. 51 Arthur G. Dove, City Moon, 1938   62 Fig. 52 Arthur G. Dove, Me and the Moon, 1937   63 Fig. 53 Lee Lawrie, Sound, 1934   64 Fig. 54 Sears, Roebuck and Co., Radio Headquarters catalog, 1924   64 Fig. 55 Vincent Lopez and Owen Murphy, On the Radio (1924)   64 Fig. 56 Arthur G. Dove, Me and the Moon, n.d.   66 Fig. 57 Arthur G. Dove, Penetration, 1924   67 Fig. 58 Arthur G. Dove, River Bottom, Silver, Ochre, Carmine, Green, 1923   70 Fig. 59 Arthur G. Dove, Sea Gull Motive (Sea Thunder or The Wave), 1928   71 Fig. 60 Florine Stettheimer, Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz, 1928   76

x

Illustrations

Fig. 61 Drawing on the back of a letter from Edward Alden Jewell to Arthur G. Dove, Jan. 25, 19–­   77 Fig. 62 Page from Arthur G. Dove’s “Abstraction” essay, n.d.   77 Fig. 63 Arthur G. Dove diary pages, Mar. 31 and Apr. 1, 1942   78 Fig. 64 Arthur G. Dove, Formation I, 1943   86 Fig. 65 Arthur G. Dove, Formation III (Green Landscape), ca. 1942   87 Fig. 66 Arthur G. Dove, “Notes,” annotated page of E. C. Andrews, Color and Its Application to Printing (1911)   90 Fig. 67 Arthur G. Dove, Sails, 1911–­1912   92 Fig. 68 Arthur G. Dove, Team of Horses, 1911 or 1912   93 Fig. 69 Arthur G. Dove, Nature Symbolized No. 2, ca. 1911   94 Fig. 70 Arthur G. Dove, Cows in Pasture, 1935   95 Fig. 71 Arthur G. Dove, Thunderstorm, 1921   101 Fig. 72 Arthur G. Dove, After the Storm, Silver and Green (Vault Sky), ca. 1923   102 Fig. 73 Arthur G. Dove, Golden Storm, 1925   103 Fig. 74 Arthur G. Dove, Storm Clouds, 1935   104 Fig. 75 Arthur G. Dove, Electric Peach Orchard, 1935   104 Fig. 76 Arthur G. Dove, Partly Cloudy, 1942   106 Fig. 77 Arthur G. Dove, Rain or Snow, 1943   107 Fig. 78 Helen Torr Dove and Arthur G. Dove diary pages, Sept. 28 and 29, 1936  109 Fig. 79 Two pages from the “Log for the Mona,” May 31–­June 3, 1924   110 Fig. 80 Two pages from the “Log for the Mona,” May 27–­30, 1924   111 Fig. 81 Page from an accounting ledger that details the personal and business expenses, 1923–­1927, of Arthur G. Dove and Helen Torr Dove   112 Fig. 82 Page from an accounting ledger that details the personal and business expenses, 1923–­1927, of Arthur G. Dove and Helen Torr Dove   113 Fig. 83 Arthur G. Dove diary pages, Jan. 18 and 19, 1942   114 Fig. 84 Arthur G. Dove diary pages, Nov. 10–­16, 1941   115 Fig. 85 Daily Weather Map, Jan. 22, 1922, US Weather Bureau   118 Fig. 86 Daily Weather Map, Oct. 6, 1941, US Weather Bureau   128 Fig. 87 Arthur G. Dove, Sand and Sea, 1943   130 Fig. 88 Arthur G. Dove, Flight, 1943   130 Fig. 89 Arthur G. Dove, Clouds, 1927   132 Fig. 90

“ Tableau physique des Andes et pays voisins,” in Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Essai sur la géographie des plantes (1807)   132

Fig. 91 Arthur G. Dove, Your Baby, 1942   138 Fig. 92 Arthur G. Dove, War, 1939   139 Fig. 93 Arthur G. Dove, U.S., 1940   139 Fig. 94 Arthur G. Dove, 1941, 1941   140 Fig. 95 Arthur G. Dove diary pages, Oct. 11 and 12, 1939   141 Fig. 96

“ Air Circulation in a Sea Breeze,” in Charles F. Brooks, Why the Weather? (1924)  143

Illustrations

xi

Fig. 97

“ Structure of the Atmosphere,” in Richard Whatham, Meteorology for Aviator and Layman (1930)   143

Fig. 98

“ Relation of the Local Isobars to Those of the General Circulation,” in Willis Luther Moore, Descriptive Meteorology (1910)   143

Fig. 99

“ Variation with Altitude of Cyclonic Vectors and Components,” in Willis Luther Moore, Descriptive Meteorology (1910)   143

Fig. 100 Arthur G. Dove, George Gershwin—­Rhapsody in Blue, Part I, 1927   150 Fig. 101 Arthur G. Dove, George Gershwin—­Rhapsody in Blue, Part II, 1927   151 Fig. 102 Arthur G. Dove, Orange Grove in California, by Irving Berlin, 1927   152 Fig. 103 Arthur G. Dove, George Gershwin—­I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise, 1927   153 Fig. 104 Arthur G. Dove, Improvision, 1927   154 Fig. 105

“ Theme 2 translated into points,” in Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane (1926)   160

Fig. 106 Arthur G. Dove, Sentimental Music, ca. 1913   167 Fig. 107 Arthur G. Dove, Movement No. I, 1911   167 Fig. 108 Arthur G. Dove, Primitive Music, 1944   168 Fig. 109 Arthur G. Dove, Chinese Music, 1923   169 Fig. 110 Page 2 of an Arthur G. Dove letter to Helen Torr Dove, Aug. 23, 1936   172 Fig. 111 Arthur G. Dove, The Moon Was Laughing at Me, 1937   173 Fig. 112 Page 2 of an Arthur G. Dove letter to Helen Torr Dove, Sept. 26, 1936   175 Fig. 113 Arthur G. Dove, Study for Me and the Moon, between 1935 and 1938   178 Fig. 114 Arthur G. Dove, Swing Music (Louis Armstrong), 1938   183 Fig. 115 Arthur G. Dove, Neighborly Attempt at Murder, 1941   186 Fig. 116 Arthur G. Dove, Fire in the Sauerkraut Factory, 1936–­1941   187 Fig. 117 Arthur G. Dove, Long Island, 1925   190 Fig. 118 Arthur G. Dove, The Critic, 1925   192 Fig. 119 Arthur G. Dove, Portrait of Ralph Dusenberry, 1924   193 Fig. 120 Arthur G. Dove, Hand Sewing Machine, 1927   196 Fig. 121 Arthur G. Dove, [Landscape], ca. 1941–­1946   207 Fig. 122 Arthur G. Dove, Barn Next Door, 1934   208 Fig. 123 Arthur G. Dove, Over Seneca Lake, 1935   208 Fig. 124 Arthur G. Dove, Barn IV, 1935   209 Fig. 125 Arthur G. Dove, Trees on the Pond, 1941   210 Fig. 126 Arthur G. Dove, A Barn Here and a Tree There, 1940   211 Fig. 127 Arthur G. Dove, The Hand Sewing Machine, 1941   212 Fig. 128 Arthur G. Dove, The Intellectual, 1925   213 Fig. 129 Arthur G. Dove, Cross and Weather Vane, 1935   223 Fig. 130 Arthur G. Dove, A Walk: Poplars, 1912–­1913   224 Fig. 131 Arthur G. Dove, Tree Forms, 1932   225 Fig. 132 Arthur G. Dove, The Sea I, 1925   227 Fig. 133 Arthur G. Dove, Starry Heavens, 1924   228 Fig. 134 Star chart in Popular Astronomy (1917)   229

xii

Illustrations

Fig. 135

“ Star Clouds and Black Holes in Sagittarius,” in David Peck Todd, Astronomy (1922)   229

Fig. 136 Arthur G. Dove, Moth Dance, 1929   235 Fig. 137 Arthur G. Dove, From a Wasp, ca. 1914   235 Fig. 138 Arthur G. Dove, Tree Forms II, 1935   236 Fig. 139 Arthur G. Dove, Car in Garage, 1934   236 Fig. 140 Arthur G. Dove, Composition in Green and Gray (Untitled), ca. 1930   238 Fig. 141 Arthur G. Dove, The Barn Next Door, 1934   239 Fig. 142 Arthur G. Dove, Barnyard Fantasy, 1935   239 Fig. 143 Arthur G. Dove, Reminiscence, 1937   241 Fig. 144 Arthur G. Dove, Monkey Fur, 1926   242 Fig. 145 Arthur G. Dove, Cinder Barge and Derrick, 1931   248

Illustrations

xiii

Acknowledgments

This book took shape over many years, and its existence depends on the assistance and generosity of scores of individuals and institutions, including, I am sure, some I have neglected to mention in the following paragraphs. For all omissions I offer my sincerest apologies, and to those persons omitted I offer assurance of my gratitude. To my colleagues in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton I owe a large debt, for supporting my ongoing work and for helping to advance my thinking about Dove. Particular thanks go to Bridget Alsdorf, Yve-­Alain Bois, Hal Foster, and John Wilmerding. Anne McCauley provided key feedback on Dove and photography, and Irene Small’s work on Hélio Oiticica inspired unexpected insights on Dove’s zoomorphism. Trudy Jacoby and David Connelly provided expert assistance with illustrations. At the Princeton University Art Museum, Kelly Baum, Calvin Brown, and Karl Kusserow made it possible for me to study work by Dove and his contemporaries in the collection, and their enthusiasm for my project has been heartening. Throughout my research and writing, Andrew and Ann Dintenfass of the Terry Dintenfass Gallery have provided essential support. I am truly grateful for their patience, collegiality, and commitment to new Dove scholarship. I can only hope that this book provides adequate recompense for their generosity and gracious assistance. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to Ann Lee Morgan, author of the Dove cataxv

xvi

logue raisonné, who has so generously shared her

ico; Berhman Faculty Fellows in the Humanities,

knowledge, wisdom, and good humor with me, and

Princeton University; Center for Advanced Study

with whom I have had many stimulating conver-

in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; Centre

sations. No one knows more about Dove than she

Culturel International de Cerisy, Cerisy-­ la-­ Salle,

does, and I am truly grateful for her vital feedback,

France; Colby College Museum of Art; Committee

which has been unfailingly diplomatic and always

for Interdisciplinary Science Studies, Center for

spot-­on. In addition, I am indebted to the Phillips

the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center, New York;

Collection and its Center for the Study of Modern

Harvard University Graduate School of Design;

Art. A fellowship at the center provided five months

Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; McGill

of uninterrupted research, aided by Karen Schnei-

University; Montgomery College; New-­ York His-

der, head librarian at the Phillips, whose energy,

torical Society; Newark Museum; The Old Guard,

expertise, collegiality, and wit proved indispens-

Princeton; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts;

able, and who shared my pleasure in “listening” to

Petr Konchalovsky Foundation, Moscow; Philadel-

works of art. My library research was facilitated as

phia Museum of Art; Present Day Club, Princeton;

well by the intelligence and efficiency of Sarah Os-

Princeton Club of Los Angeles; Princeton Club of

borne Bender. The presence of Terri Weissman, also

Vero Beach; Smithsonian American Art Museum;

a center fellow (and my tablemate in the library),

Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, Princeton

made my time at the Phillips all the more valuable

University; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Insti-

and rich. Also at the Phillips, curator Renée Maurer,

tute; Swarthmore College; Trinity University, San

chief registrar Joe Holbach, and associate registrar

Antonio; Tulane University; University of Dela-

Trish Waters deserve thanks for making it possible

ware; University of North Carolina; University of

for me to study at length every work by Dove in the

Richmond; University of Wisconsin Center for the

collection and to illustrate this book with images

Humanities; Vero Beach Museum of Art; and Yale

of many of those works. I am grateful too for the

University.

support of Ruth Perlin and Jonathan Fineberg, who

A seminar on Alfred Stieglitz and his milieu

helped make my time at the center possible. In ad-

at the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy, in

dition to the Phillips fellowship, an Arthur H. Scrib-

Cerisy-­ la-­ Salle, France, organized in 2010 by Jay

ner Bicentennial Preceptorship, generously granted

Bochner and Jean-­Pierre Montier and supported by

by Princeton University, supported this project and

the Terra Foundation for American Art, provided a

afforded me among other things a year’s leave to

week’s worth of rich discussion that vitally shaped

research and write. I also extend my gratitude to

my thinking about Dove. The Wyeth Foundation

the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications,

for American Art generously made possible my

Princeton University, for its support of this publi-

participation in the 2011 conference “Landscape

cation.

in American Art, 1940–­2000” at the Center for Ad-

Designating a sole author obscures how depen-

vanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery

dent any text is on its many interlocutors, yet a list

of Art, where I presented material from chapter 2

of the individuals whose comments and suggestions

and had the opportunity to test-­run preliminary

over the years contributed to the evolution of my

thoughts on Dove’s late paintings. Equally produc-

ideas would take up more space than available here.

tive was my participation on a panel on American

So to those collaborators and audience members at

art and sound co-­organized by Leo G. Mazow and

the following institutions and venues with whom I

Asma Naeem at the 2010 College Art Association

had the good fortune to discuss my work, and who

Annual Meeting, during which I presented mate-

took seriously and listened carefully to my musings

rial that would become part of chapter 3. I thank

on Dove, I extend my gratitude: ­XXXVII Coloquio

Leo and Asma for the opportunity to air publicly

Internacional de Historia del Arte, Querétaro, Mex-

my ideas about Dove and recorded sound for the

Acknowledgments

first time and for providing such a stimulating con-

material in their collections, including works of

text in which to do so. Leo has been an essential

art, papers, and related documents, with whom I

interlocutor and friend for almost two decades,

have interacted have been unfailingly generous in

unstintingly willing to entertain my intellectual

allowing me access and sharing information. This

fascinations and follies. Other colleagues who have

includes the many people who assisted me with im-

contributed decisively to the development of my

ages and permissions at the dozens of institutions

ideas and from whom I continue to learn include

that hold Dove works (as reflected in the captions),

Wendy Bellion, Todd Cronan, Michael Gaudio, Marc

and who helped make the process far less arduous

Gotlieb, Erica Hirshler, Suzanne Hudson, Matthew

than it could have been. It goes without saying that

Hunter, Elizabeth Hutchinson, Robin Kelsey, Mi-

without such cooperation this book would not ex-

chael Leja, Alexander Nemerov, Charles Palermo,

ist, and I am immensely grateful for the kind will-

Kirstin Ringelberg, Jennifer Roberts, Michael

ingness shown in assisting my endeavor at every

Schreyach, Tanya Sheehan, and Jason Weems. John

step. Thus I extend my most heartfelt thanks to

Ott must be singled out not only for his incisive

Steve Davis, Barney A. Ebsworth, J. R. and Barbara

comments on Dove and the question of the social

Hyde, Elizabeth Moore, Christine Roussel, Michael

but also for his winning bird puns, so welcome amid

Scharf, Jan T. and Marica Vilcek, Michael Ward, and

the terribly serious business of academic writing.

Charles K. Williams II. An equally sincere thank-­

No scholar thinks apart from her students.

you goes to the following museums and institu-

My undergraduate and graduate students at the

tions that I visited and consulted for my research,

University of Illinois, Urbana-­Champaign, and

as well as to the many personnel at each who kindly

at Princeton have steadily expanded my view of

offered their assistance, often above and beyond

Dove and his world, and I am particularly grate-

the call of duty: Ackland Art Museum, University

ful to the students who participated in my gradu-

of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Addison Art Gallery;

ate seminars on the Stieglitz circle and American

Alexandre Gallery; Amon Carter Museum; Archives

modernism in 2003 (UIUC), 2007 (Princeton), and

of American Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Art Re-

2013 (Princeton). I want all of them to know that I

source; Artist’s Rights Society; Beinecke Rare Book

appreciate their contributions very much. A special

and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library;

thank-you goes to Amanda Bock, for her thoughts

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Christie’s;

about photography and pedagogy as well as her

Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center; Columbus Mu-

steady supply of Dove and Paul Strand anecdotes;

seum of Art; Crystal Bridges Museum of American

Allan Doyle, for his work on the idea of translation

Art; Denver Art Museum; Fine Arts Museums of San

in the French context; Nicole Elder, for her ideas

Francisco; Firestone Library and Firestone’s Graphic

about the objects of still life and her tireless work

Arts Collection, Princeton University; Fisk Univer-

as my research assistant; Miri Kim, for sharing and

sity; Heckscher Museum of Art; Herbert F. Johnson

abetting my fascination with the history of sound;

Museum of Art, Cornell University; Hirshhorn Mu-

Ashley Lazevnick, who made me think twice about

seum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institu-

Precisionism and line; Abra Levenson, for helping

tion; Kemper Art Museum, Washington University,

me to reflect more pointedly on portraiture in the

St. Louis; Kew Royal Botanic Gardens Library; Lewis

twentieth century; Jessica Maxwell, who shared

Library, Princeton University; Lilly Library, Univer-

with me her eloquent reading of Paul Strand; Julia

sity of Indiana, Bloomington; Marquand Library,

Sienkewicz, with whom I have productively been

Princeton University; McNay Art Museum, San

conversing about landscape for many years; and

Antonio; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art; Metro-

Elizabeth Zundo, whose work on cartography and

politan Museum of Art, New York; Montclair Art

visual culture continues to prompt my own.

Museum; Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute;

Those institutions and individuals with Dove

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Acknowledgments

xvii

Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washing-

a cemetery. “Mom,” he asked from the back seat,

ton, DC; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Ad-

“is that where Arthur Dove is buried?” Perhaps

ministration (NOAA); New Jersey State Museum

innocent, perhaps not—­either way, his question

Collection; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts;

suggested that he thought it was high time for his

Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Phillips Collec-

mother to put Dove to rest. I have finally done so,

tion; Princeton University Art Museum; Rockefeller

many years later, an accomplishment unthinkable

Center Archives; San Diego Museum of Art; Smith-

without the love and support of my family and the

sonian American Art Museum; Sotheby’s; Terra

assistance of everyone else mentioned in these

Foundation for American Art; Thyssen-­Bornemisza

pages. Finally, Erik—­I thank him for everything.

Collection, Madrid; University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson; University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses; The Vilcek Foundation; Whitney Museum of American Art; Yale University Art Gallery; and the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University. For their wisdom and insight, and for their extraordinary patience as my writing outpaced deadline after deadline, I offer my sincere gratitude to Susan Bielstein and Anthony Burton at the University of Chicago Press. It has been a true pleasure and privilege to work with them. Just as there are artists’ artists (Dove among them), Susan and Anthony are writers’ editors. Sincere thanks also go to James Whitman Toftness and Kelly Finefrock-­Creed for their essential and generous work during the publication process. I should add here that I am also grateful to have had at my disposal exceptionally thorough and attentive anonymous readers’ reports for use in revising my manuscript. My deepest gratitude goes to my family, Erik, Asher, and Zane DeLue; my parents, Jon and Merrie Ziady; and my brother and his family, Josh, Ana, and June Hadar Ziady, all of whom have lived through far too many “summers of Dove.” My daughter Zane, being the youngest, has seen the least of it, but she is owed my thanks for all the times she makes me laugh out loud, Dove trouble be damned, and for abidingly sleeping through the night. My son Asher, whose existence coincides exactly with the years I devoted to this project, deserves especial gratitude for his patience and good soul, and for the perspective he brought to the mix. I recall with fondness and not a small amount of wonder the day, about midway through the trajectory of my work on the book, when a drive to the grocery store took us past xviii

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Arthur Dove My first serious encounter with the work of the American painter Arthur Garfield Dove (1880–­1946) (fig. 1) occurred in 1997 at a major exhibition of his art at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. As a graduate student working on a dissertation about another American painter, George Inness (1825–­1894), I had come to the Phillips to see the Inness paintings on view. My visit to the Dove galleries served as a diversion—­some pleasant, no-­strings-­attached looking in the midst of intense scholarly study, or so I thought. Instead, what I saw captivated me: canvas after canvas teeming with quasi-­abstract, vividly colored, and vibrantly motile forms, some of them downright odd, as well as an array of sculptural assemblages utterly catholic in their collection of material components, including paint, wood, and glass but also animal hide and bones, human hair, metal springs, ladies’ stockings, seashells, a camera lens, chiffon, and sand.1 Prior to my visit to the Phillips, I had seen the occasional Dove painting, but something about walking through a series of rooms filled with his work filled me with a sense of wonder. The experience also left me feeling perplexed, mainly because I had a hard time imagining from where the motivation to create such enchanting and eccentric pictures might have come. Works like Sun Drawing Water (1933) and Moon (1935) left me breathless, and they stuck with me over the years (figs. 2, 5). When I finally had a chance to dig deeper into Dove’s art and life I liked 1

(1926). He counted Georgia O’Keeffe among his dearest friends. He suspected that Stieglitz might be telepathic. He kept a daily, detailed record of the weather, noting the temperature, barometric pressure, and prevailing conditions, and whenever his wife, the artist Helen Torr, was sick, he recorded her temperature at regular intervals as well. He was an amateur drummer, played music with his friends, liked going to the movies and vaudeville shows, and loved jazz. He made a series of fully abstract paintings while listening to records on a phonograph on his boat, naming each canvas after the tune that inspired it; to the surface of one of these paintings he attached a metal clock spring. He fixed cars and designed textiles. He singled out geometry, and the conic sections especially, as potentially able to express the essence and fundamental forces of nature, a “mathematical dream” as he put it. He befriended a botanist named Bernard Rudolf Nebel who let him use his pantograph to transfer his sketches onto canvas and helped him photograph his paintFig. 1  Alfred Stieglitz, Arthur G. Dove, 1923, gelatin silver print, 24.1 × 19.1 cm, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.717, The Art Institute of Chicago. © 2015 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

ings. He patented a recipe for chocolate-­covered popcorn. He wrote a poem called “Self Portraits by Others” and one titled “A Way to Look at Things.” He studied shorthand and corresponded with the inventor of Bakelite. He named one of his assemblages Monkey Fur—­it featured a strip of monkey

him even more. For as a person he turned out to

hide—­and titled a painting Neighborly Attempt at

be as captivating and unexpected as his work—­not

Murder (figs. 144, 115). He insisted that what he did

outlandish in any way or beyond any conventional

was not abstraction but, rather, “extraction.” He

pale, just idiosyncratic and quirky enough that

also declared that what he set out to do as an artist

when I considered his life in combination with his

was impossible.

art the total package demanded that I take a serious and extended look. Among the things that piqued my interest: Dove

2

Dove’s Life

lived on a boat for a spell and created some of his

This book consists of an attempt to address my ini-

most interesting works, including his assemblages,

tial query of all those many years ago. From whence

while shipboard. He also made a home in a defunct

did Dove’s paintings and assemblages come and

roller-­skating rink and, later, in an abandoned post

what did he expect them to express or to achieve?

office building, painting all the while. His personal

The basic facts of Dove’s biography have been well

pantheon consisted of Albert Einstein, Gertrude

documented and widely published, but they are

Stein, Alfred Stieglitz, Shakespeare, James Joyce,

worth rehearsing here because they bear on my ar-

and his childhood mentor Newton Weatherly. He

gument about the nature and meaning of his ar-

wrote an essay that half-­quoted, half-­rewrote sec-

tistic practice. More so than it has in my previous

tions of Wassily Kandinsky’s Point and Line to Plane

work, biography serves in this study as a signifi-

Introduction

cant form of evidence. This, needless to say, came

appearing more regularly in exhibitions. In 1912, he

as something of a surprise to me as my research

had his first one-­man show at 291; the exhibition in-

and writing progressed. What resulted is a series

cluded the now well-­known suite of quasi-­Cubistic

of experiments with the biographical method that

pastel abstractions usually referred to as “The Ten

expand the idea of a life of an artist to include the

Commandments,” also on view a few weeks later at

exceedingly mundane (Dove watched the weather,

the W. Scott Thurber Galleries in Chicago.

Dove lived on a boat) alongside the conventionally 2

By 1917, Dove had stopped painting, resuming in

noteworthy or momentous. Born in 1880 in Canan-

1921, shortly after his father passed away. That same

daigua, New York, Dove moved with his family in

year, he left Florence for the artist Helen Torr, who

1885 to Geneva, New York, where his father ran a

was also married at the time, and moved with her to

profitable brick manufacturing and contracting

a houseboat on the Harlem River. In 1922, Dove and

business. After graduating from high school, Dove

Torr bought a yawl, the 42-­foot Mona, which they

enrolled at Hobart College, in Geneva, before trans-

sailed on local rivers and in Long Island Sound until

ferring to Cornell University; while at Cornell, he

mooring it at Halesite, on Long Island, in 1924. For

studied prelaw but also took a few art classes. Af-

many years thereafter, until 1933, the Mona served

ter graduating in 1903, he moved to New York City

as their primary residence. When they moved

and took up work as a magazine illustrator; a year

aboard the Mona, Dove and Torr began keeping a

later, in 1904, he married Florence Dorsey. Around

daily diary, recording the events of their day-­to-­day

1906, Dove turned his attention to painting, and in

existence and describing Dove’s work in progress

1908, he and his wife departed for France, returning

and, less frequently, Torr’s. The first diary consisted

to New York in 1909, the same year one of Dove’s

of a ship’s log kept by Dove in 1924; Torr took over

paintings, The Lobster (1908), appeared in the Salon

in 1925 and made the majority of the entries for the

3

d’Automne at the Grand Palais, in Paris. Dove spent

next ten years. The 1936 and 1937 diaries contain

some of his French sojourn in Paris, but he painted

entries written by both of them, and from 1939 to

mainly in the surrounding countryside. While

1945 Dove handled the task. Shortly after the move

abroad, he met the artist Alfred Maurer, who would

onto the Mona, Dove’s work appeared in the 1925

become a dear friend.

Seven Americans exhibition organized by Stieglitz at

Back in New York, Dove returned to his work

the Anderson Galleries in New York, and starting

as an illustrator, but making the acquaintance of

in 1926, he had a one-­man show under Stieglitz’s

the photographer and gallery proprietor Alfred

watch almost every year for the rest of his career.

Stieglitz in late 1909 or early 1910 helped encour-

Dove and Torr married in 1932 and, following the

age his pursuit of painting. During this time, the

death of Dove’s mother in 1933, they moved to the

Doves moved to Westport, Connecticut, to make

Dove family home in Geneva. It was during this

a go at farming; while there, they socialized (and

time that Dove met Duncan Phillips, who, like

played baseball) with other Westport residents and

Stieglitz, became a major advocate and patron; Phil-

visitors, including Maurer and other artists such as

lips regularly exhibited Dove’s work at his gallery

John Marin, Abraham Walkowitz, and Paul Strand,

in Washington, DC, and supported Dove with a sti-

the critics Van Wyck Brooks and Paul Rosenfeld,

pend in exchange for first pick of works from each

and the writer Sherwood Anderson. Stieglitz had

annual exhibition. Dove and Torr remained in Ge-

included The Lobster in a 1910 group exhibition at

neva until 1938, at which point they moved to Cen-

his gallery 291, originally the Little Galleries of the

terport, Long Island, near Huntington, where they

Photo-­Secession but by 1908 referred to by the street

set up shop in a converted post office. Dove had a

number of the building on Fifth Avenue that had

heart attack in 1939 and was in ill health for much

4

housed the first iteration of the gallery. Yet it was

of the remainder of his life, although he continued

not until a few years later that Dove’s work began

to paint. He died in 1946. Introduction

3

Dove’s Art Often heralded as the first American artist to try his

4

tions, that the particular nature of Dove’s practice—­ both the material characteristics of his paintings and the specific constellation of ideas that these

hand at abstraction, Dove is perhaps best known

characteristics engaged—­ remains less than fully

for his nature-­based abstract paintings, most of

addressed. My account of Dove does not intend

which stop short of total nonobjectivity. He was

to refute or supersede any of the aforementioned

one of several American artists actively champi-

strains of interpretation, all of them interesting

oned by Stieglitz, chiefly in the 1920s and 1930s, a

and vital. One could even say that, on its own, my

group that included John Marin, Marsden Hartley,

story is itself full of holes, for it relies on the other

Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

tales alongside which it sits, their telling affording

Stieglitz and the circle of critics associated with

me a perspective from which to fathom Dove anew,

him, including the effusive but sharp Paul Rosen-

to step directly into the thick mess of his art rather

feld, posited the work of these artists as exemplary

than bypass it for a neater, if equally interesting

of an advanced, homegrown American art. It thus

narrative about Dove and modernism, Dove and ab-

comes as no surprise that most accounts of Dove’s

straction, or Dove and Stieglitz. But I am not alone

practice tend to analyze his work under the sign of

in my belief that the time is right for a radical re-

Stieglitz, interpreting it as exemplary of Stieglitz’s

telling of Dove’s story. This new tale acknowledges

mission and consequently representative within

the captivating complexity and the challenge of his

the standard story of American modernism in the

pictures, taking their complicatedness to be partly

first half of the twentieth century. The tales of Dove

the point, and makes the description and study of

thus told can be divided roughly into three cate-

Dove’s larger milieu at times secondary but never

gories, each representing a typical approach to his

incidental to a methodical and deep exploration of

art: (1) biographical, where Dove’s very interesting

his art.

life takes precedence over his paintings, the idea

This book focuses on Dove’s practice after 1921,

being that Dove’s pictures require only abbrevi-

the year that marked his full return to painting af-

ated explanation because they exemplify Stieglitz’s

ter a multiyear hiatus, and considers this practice

well-­defined and vigorously studied ideas about art;

through 1946, the last year of his life. Although my

(2) genealogical, where Dove is claimed as the first

analysis necessarily engages Dove’s output prior

American abstract painter and thus the progenitor,

to 1921, my interest lies in a style of painting that

in combination with the European avant-­garde, of

emerged in the 1920s, was predominant between

American abstraction to come, his career primarily

1925 and 1940, and persisted in somewhat altered

a matter of ingesting and expressing a variety of

form during the final years of Dove’s life. My inter-

external sources and influences while setting the

est lies also in the group of sculptural assemblages

stage for Abstract Expressionism in the postwar

that Dove created between the years 1924 and 1930,

period; and (3) romantic, where Dove is imagined

which he called “things” and that I see as directly

as an urban-­shy antimodern who retreated to the

dimensional related to the concerns of his two-­

countryside in order to commune with nature and

practice. I make no argument for the specialness

render his subjective response to the natural world,

of this cohort of paintings and sculptures, but I

this individual, emotive, of-­the-­soil painting being

do insist on its distinctiveness as a strain within

the sort advocated by Stieglitz.5

Dove’s entire body of work and on the prevalence

None of these accounts get Dove fully wrong,

of this strain in the aforementioned years. As such,

but by the same token, none of them get him alto-

my study does not claim to be a comprehensive

gether right. Opting for the necessary and import-

survey of Dove’s art. Rather, it zeroes in on what I

ant task of describing Dove’s place in the history of

take to be certain of the abiding preoccupations of

American art has meant, with a few notable excep-

his practice, on a set of concerns that could easily

Introduction

be described as governing or presiding, but, im-

Stieglitz, perhaps, but not in terms of him—­has yet

portantly, not single-­minded. During the period

to be undertaken, a remarkable enough fact given

under discussion, this cluster of concerns mani-

that Dove’s pictures are not only acknowledged

fested across the entirety of Dove’s activity, from

as highly important within the history of mod-

his painting, sculpting, and sketching to his diary

ern American art but are on their own just plain

keeping, poetry writing, weather watching, and

stunning, absorbing in a manner that insists that

music listening—­hence my concentrated focus.

they be studied closely and deeply, thickly rather

By referring to the “thick mess” of Dove’s art, I

than thinly.

indicate my intention to provide a thick descrip-

Throughout the book, I do my best to define

tion of Dove, one that hews to the late anthropol-

the terms I employ to elucidate Dove’s practice. But

ogist Clifford Geertz’s injunction to listen care-

because they are so prominent within my analysis,

fully and closely to one’s object of study. As Geertz

three of these terms—­language, translation, and

insisted, the stories told by the person or group

intersubjectivity—­demand explication at the out-

under scrutiny are as valuable as description and

set. All three emerged as a result of my search for

interpretation as are the arguments fashioned by

a vocabulary for use in characterizing what I saw

the scholar; likewise, the terms used by those be-

in Dove’s work as well as from the concepts and

ing studied provide an analytical vocabulary equal

themes that rose to the surface as I plumbed the

in viability to the terminology native to a scholarly

depths of his artistic practice and the historical

6

discipline. Following this, my approach to Dove

record. They are my terms, then, not Dove’s, but

involves attending primarily to three things: what

Dove and the historical fabric of which he was a

Dove made, said, and read. I take this approach in

part compelled my selection of them. Thus, while

order to develop a new and rigorously historical

deeply embedded in the history and cultural for-

vocabulary for describing Dove’s practice and also

mations of Dove’s moment, these particular terms,

to formulate an idea of what Dove himself might

unlike the bulk of those I employ throughout this

have imagined he was doing when he painted a

study, do not appropriate specific locutions from

picture or created an assemblage, with archival and

period discourse.

documentary evidence (the “said” and the “read”)

Take “language,” to start. My account of Dove

illuminating the salient material characteristics of

hinges on the claim that he was preoccupied with

his work. In combination with an attention to the

the nature, properties, and effects of language, and

critical reception of his art and a thorough study

by “language” I mean most basically the spoken or

of the fields or domains that art engaged—­the his-

written words and signs used by humans to com-

tory of sound technology, for instance, or the visual

municate. This includes text and speech but also

and material culture of meteorology—­my listening

systems of communication that employ symbols,

to Dove constructs an argument about what it was

such as those used in mathematics, musical nota-

historically possible for him to have imagined his

tion, or cartography, or sounds, such as the taps of

art to be about, that is, what he could have intended

Morse code or timed foghorn blasts. Hence I also

when he created his works, even if what resulted

make use of the phrase “notational system” when

does not to our eyes appear to match this intention.

referring to certain forms of language in order to

In so doing, I pay attention to what Dove thought

imply the inclusiveness of the term for me and,

about and took interest in, as well as what his his-

more specifically, to signal that I use it to refer both

torical moment would have allowed him to think

to language as it is used and language as a system of

about and find compelling. Such an approach may

words, marks, or sounds governed by conventions or

strike the reader as terribly old fashioned, and it is.

rules. This follows in part from the example of the

But the fact remains that this sort of interpretation

philosopher Nelson Goodman. Although my sense

of Dove, this “thick” reading of his art—­alongside

of language in Dove shares almost nothing with Introduction

5

Goodman’s exacting typological and functional

at here. According to Benjamin, translation, rather

analysis of linguistic forms and modes, Goodman’s

than simply an entity or an act, consists of a “mode,”

preference for the idea of “symbol systems” over

and its primary effect entails more than a transfer

the descriptor “language”—­because, as he says, the

of information through reproduction. Constitut-

former more adequately posits language as a mech-

ing the original’s afterlife, translation is an entity

anism of cognition and because it registers the

vitally connected to its antecedent. Yet translation

linguistic and nonlinguistic character of symbols—­

ultimately transpires as different than and no lon-

accords with my sense of Dove’s approach to the

ger in need of this precursor, producing an under-

language of both art and ordinary life.7 “Language”

standing that transcends the specific content of

as I use it also encompasses signs or sounds with

the texts involved in the transfer. For, according

extrahuman origins, such as the graphic record of

to Benjamin, translation’s ultimate purpose is the

a nonseeable phenomenon produced by a register-

expression of the essentially reciprocal relationship

ing instrument; so-­called natural signs, including

among languages, their natural convergence and

cloud formations, rainbows, wind, or the coloring

interrelation, a suprahistorical kinship and comple-

of a stormy sky; or the machine-­based noises pro-

mentariness of intentions or modes that the act of

duced by a technology like phonography that anno-

translation yields as a “pure language,” or the “one

tate and supplement the musical sound generated

true” language latent in all tongues.9

by that device. Finally, I configure language not as

Following Benjamin, I understand translation

a closed system but as a medium, because Dove did

in relation to Dove as at once a transformation

so, approaching it as a fundamental linking agent

or a transmutation that produces a new form, di-

among subjects and objects, as has been theorized

vergent from the original, and an operation that

by philosophers such as Hegel and Hans-­ Georg

hinges on similarity or sameness and, in particu-

Gadamer, who called language “the preliminary

lar, on correspondences that take the shape of re-

8

6

medium that encompasses all beings.” While Ga-

lationships established among multiple entities.

damer’s assertion applied only to things expressed

Put another way, my sense of translation entails

in words, his sense of language as a motile, fluid

attributing to it metamorphosis but also a quality

entity—­as an operation or process more so than an

or condition of exchange: the translation of some-

inert collection of signs—­aptly expresses what I ar-

thing draws on the original while the status of the

gue language was for Dove.

original undergoes reshaping and recalibration ac-

The second term, “translation,” might be de-

cording to its afterlife in translation. Dove did not

scribed as a property or a capacity of the first and

share Benjamin’s interest in pure or true language,

relates closely to the idea of language as a medium.

but the critic’s characterization of translation as

Most often used to describe the conversion of a

a relational and interconnecting mode provides a

word, phrase, or passage in one language into an-

productive framework for charting what I will de-

other language or to refer to the product of that

scribe as Dove’s preoccupation with translation, not

conversion, translation also refers more generally

least because Dove’s sense of the task of translation

to a change in form, condition, or state, or to the

equaled Benjamin’s in its utopianism, its fixation

transfer of an entity or idea from one place or sphere

on gathering parts into a sum or a whole, and its

to another. As a keyword within my study of Dove,

insistence on the special power of translation as a

“translation” embodies both senses of the term, and

based, relational, and, ultimately, intelanguage-­

in using it I mean to retain its ties to language even

grating operation.10 In this way, the term “trans-

as I employ it to characterize a whole host of other

lation” in my analysis also draws on its definition

transforming and transmuting operations. Walter

and usage within sociology and, more specifically,

Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” (1923)

within what has been labeled actor-­network theory,

offers one avenue into explaining what I am getting

an approach developed within science studies to

Introduction

describing the nature of the relations that consti-

comes (translation) of communication. “Communi-

tute social systems or networks, especially scientific

cation” is itself a key term here, one that figures sig-

11

or technological ones. “Translation” as a term here

nificantly in my account of Dove, for it describes the

characterizes the congealing of persons, things, and

operations and effects of both language and trans-

concepts into a group as compelled initially by an

lation, including connection, transmission, and ex-

intention or a problem and subsequently driven by

change, all of which characterize the condition of

the collecting and accumulation of additional en-

intersubjectivity.13 In its most basic sense, intersub-

tities and ideas into a temporary network or sys-

jectivity connotes agreement between two or more

tem for use in fulfilling the intention or solving the

parties or a commonality of belief within a group as

problem. For example, a scientist poses a question

arising from human interaction. More complexly,

and crafts a hypothesis; in order to test this hypoth-

within the domains of psychoanalysis and philos-

esis, he or she devises an experiment; in order to

ophy, phenomenology in particular, the term indi-

conduct the experiment, he or she gathers mate-

cates shared cognition and the constitution of net-

rials and instruments for use in doing so along with

works of cognitive and psychic interchange among

fellow scientists to assist in the process. The con-

multiple interrelating subjects and/or objects. Here,

gealed group counts as a bonded system because all

intersubjectivity is understood as the coconstitu-

parts, human and nonhuman alike, behave accord-

tion and sharing of subjective states that transpires

ing to or substantively affect the original charge,

within a network of relations (psychoanalysis) or as

which transfers from one entity to the next in the

the product of empathy or identification compelled

process of the group’s formation and interaction,

by the perception of or interaction with other ob-

but also, and importantly, translates along the way,

jects, human or nonhuman (phenomenology). In

each jump of that charge between transmitter and

both cases, intersubjectivity as a concept addresses

receptor (between one scientist and another, say, or

the problem of knowing other minds or entities and

between a scientist and a piece of technology used

encompasses the processes by which others become

in the experiment) serving to transform the labor

present to a perceiving subject as well as the mecha-

and outcomes of that network as well as the net-

nisms by which meaning and relationships are cre-

12

work’s very nature. Understood in this manner,

ated among multiple subjects and/or objects so as

translation as an operation establishes relations but

to create an animated system of interrelations and

also forges substantive bonds, interweaving dispa-

interchanges, with emphasis on the idea of a system,

rate entities into a single complex, a self-­contained

over and against the concepts of unity or gestalt.

entity composed of essentially interrelated parts.

And, variously defined within multiple disciplines

Experimentation with just such a suturing capac-

or fields of inquiry including psychoanalysis and

ity transpired throughout Dove’s practice, and Dove

philosophy but also, for example, anthropology and

explored in his work the adjoined character and

neuroscience, intersubjectivity as a concept allows

transmitting capacity of networks and systems of

for multiple kinds of intersubject/interobject rela-

various sorts. Translation thus serves for me as a

tions and exchanges: literal or figurative, optical or

historically appropriate and conceptually dynamic

corporeal, cognitive or material, natural or occult.14

term for use in elucidating these preoccupations as

In this way, intersubjectivity embodies terminolog-

they were expressed in Dove’s art.

ical and conceptual specificity and frank openness

The third and final term on my list, “intersub-

simultaneously. It concerns subject/object rela-

jectivity,” relates closely to the first two, “language”

tions in particular but allows for consideration of

and “translation,” for it refers to the sharing of a

all manner of relations among all manner of things.

subjective experience or state among two or more

As a result, the term has proved immensely useful

individuals, a condition potentially facilitated by

in my accounting of Dove’s art, precisely because

the materials (language) and operations or out-

that art was notably preoccupied with questions of Introduction

7

rapport, connection, and interrelation yet explored

Einstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sherwood Anderson,

and expressed these concerns and conditions from

Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Stieglitz, O’Keeffe, and

myriad points of view and through wide-­ranging,

Menaechmus (the ancient Greek mathematician)

eclectic means.

that served to inspire what one might call his ar-

This brings me to a series of points I would like

tistic philosophy (a charitable designation, to say

to make regarding Dove as I portray him in this

the least) would drive a pedant to distraction. As

book. In the course of analyzing his practice, I call

another example, his paintings and assemblages

on a diversity of disciplines, including philosophy,

without a doubt demand to be considered in light of

the history of science, sociology, literature, meteo-

contemporaneous science, but they do things that

rology, geography, and natural history. I also evoke a

are not in the least scientific and they take great

multitude of concepts other than language, transla-

license with science’s ideas and tools. Put another

tion, and intersubjectivity, among them invisibility,

way, when one tries to match up Dove’s practice

objecthood, network, the multisensory, and agency.

with the science of his day, the two wind up looking

In some instances, the ideas or methods of a disci-

not a whole lot like one another and, as a result, the

pline that I reference or the particular conceptual

initial connection can appear specious or forced.

paradigm that I invoke were contemporaneous with

But if one abandons the quest for a perfect match,

Dove. The portion of my analysis that concerns

and accepts the fact that Dove did whatever he

Dove and meteorology, for example, focuses on

wanted with the tools, concepts, and materials he

period weather science, and the section on Dove’s

culled from the ideas and imagery of various fields,

poetry considers it in relation to his own literary

always with a specific and thoroughly if not pains-

contexts. In other instances, I make use of more re-

takingly considered purpose in mind, the problem

cently developed methodologies or concepts to aid

of concordance disappears. This is not to say that in

me in coming to terms with Dove’s art. In either

the way of interpretation anything goes. Rather, it

case, and between the two, I run the risk of painting

is to suggest that one must remain attuned to the

Dove as, among other things, a fervent and ency-

openness and unprejudiced curiosity with which

clopedic reader, a serious and dedicated student of

Dove faced the world as a source of material for

science, a philosopher in training, a literary savant,

his art in order to understand what happened to

a poststructuralist, an audiophile, a jazz aficionado,

that material when he got his hands on it. It is also

around brilliant an expert engineer, and an all-­

to insist that, methodologically speaking, any one

mind. He was none of these. Smart, yes, intellec-

piece of evidence must be considered in relation to

tually curious, to be sure, but he was neither eru-

the whole archival mass, works of art included. A

dite nor was he especially scholarly in disposition.

reference to Herman Melville’s Moby-­Dick in Dove’s

He read, but not constantly or systematically, and

daily diary or in one of his letters, for example,

he learned a fair amount by listening to Torr, who

could mean a great deal or perhaps not very much,

15

8

was a real reader. Dove knew a fair amount about

but we may only become aware of its significance or

a lot of things, but only as it suited him—­a little

lack thereof by attempting to see Melville through

theosophy here, a little theoretical physics there, a

Dove’s eyes (or Torr’s, for she likely read portions of

bit of jazz added to the mix, and perhaps a dollop

Moby-­Dick aloud to him, as she did a number of the

of weather wisdom and a pinch of Dada to finish

texts mentioned in the diaries). By the same token,

it off. Certain ideas Dove bungled in translation or

Dove’s interest in language does not mean he was

got plain wrong, sometimes on purpose. His was

immersed, deeply or at all, in period linguistic the-

not at all a textbook theosophy, for instance, and

ory, nor does a scattering of references to séances,

the claims he made for weather science might have

Swami Nikhilananda, or astrology in his diaries or

struck a meteorologist as a bit off the mark, while

letters necessarily certify him as a fully committed,

the mash-­up of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Albert

card-­carrying occultist.

Introduction

Two final points. First, Dove created abstract

what I offer here aims to revise previous interpre-

paintings and assemblages, some of them retain-

tations of Dove, which by and large have posited

ing a pictorial link to objective appearance, some

him as an artist interested in communing with

of them not. For this reason, any interpretation of

nature and sharing the personal, subjective result

Dove must acknowledge that questions regarding

by plumbing nature’s depths for its essences and

abstraction are at issue in his work. Yet I am less

first principles and rendering these things visible in

interested here in the fact of Dove’s abstraction—­

pictures, have I as a consequence evacuated a fun-

whether he was the first to do it, why he did it so

damental aspect of Dove’s practice or, even worse,

early in the game, and what theories of representa-

blinded myself to the chief characteristic of his very

tion or philosophies of being underpinned his turn

comportment toward the world? I do not believe

to an abstract vocabulary—­than I am in abstrac-

so. My focus on language, translation, and intersub-

tion’s modalities for Dove: the forms his abstraction

jectivity—­on signs, communication systems, and

took and, even more, the operations that his abstract

relational conditions—­may appear to preclude the

vocabulary attempted to perform. I spend time ad-

possibility of understanding Dove as someone for

dressing Dove’s own accounts of why realism did

whom nature was a source of pleasure, a means to

not work for him and why abstraction did the trick.

contemplation, a wellspring of knowledge, or a spir-

But rather than dwelling on just what it was about

itual balm. Nature most certainly was these things

abstraction that he found suitable or presuming

for Dove, as the Dove literature has already made

that because he painted abstractly and admired

clear, and Dove had more than a little in common

Kandinsky he had to possess a systematic theory or

with his American predecessors—­ Thomas Cole,

prescription for the production of abstract imagery,

Frederic Church, Martin Johnson Heade, Robert S.

I move quickly to a consideration of abstraction’s

Duncanson, and George Inness among them—­who

behavior, its actions and operations rather than its

in the nineteenth century cast the natural land-

nature of being, within his work. This jump reflects

scape as an extraordinary, exalted, and animating

Dove’s own proclivity to make rather than to rumi-

terrain. But Dove was not any of these men. He had

nate at length on the precepts and principles of his

additional things on his mind when he looked to

art, and it also signals that for him making was a

nature or away from it in order to paint, and this

matter of thinking: the registration, synthesis, and

is the point of my book, written in order to supple-

array of data as knowledge or insight in the space

ment rather than replace the tales that have been

of crafting a painting or an assemblage. And this is

told about Dove so that the various accounts of his

yet another way of saying that instead of treating

practice, taken as a whole, live up to the complexity,

Dove’s pictures as syntheses of the sources on which

vigor, and intricately layered density of his art. In

he drew, presenting them as illustrations of ideas or

other words, I want my reader to recognize Dove,

theories, from then or from now, or assuming that

but I also want Dove in these pages to come as a

these pictures arose from a direct, unmediated, and

surprise.

intuitive encounter with the natural world, I set out in this study to establish Dove himself as a thinker and a theorizer, a serious if haphazard and eclectic one, as a creator of concepts and paradigms through the often idiosyncratic means and always compelling forms of his work. My final point comes in the form of a question: What about nature, then? Dove’s magnificent seascapes, his radiant sunsets, his glowing moons, his wind-­tossed meadows, and his heavenly skies? If Introduction

9

Fig. 2  Arthur G. Dove, Sun Drawing Water, 1933, oil on canvas, 243⁄8 × 335⁄8 in. (61.9125 × 85.4075 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1933. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

1

Circles Supersight Arthur Dove painted Sun Drawing Water in January of 1933 (fig. 2). At the time, Dove lived with his wife, the artist Helen Torr, on their boat, the Mona, moored at Halesite, on the North Shore of Long Island.1 Like many of his paintings from this period, Sun Drawing Water takes the landscape of the shore as its subject. Yet the work retains only a glimmer of the particulars of locale and place, as if recalling something seen in a dream—­the curve of the beach here, the surge of the water there—­or perhaps registering an afterimage, the lingering residue of the world once perceived. This is typical of Dove’s art. Throughout his career, Dove drew inspiration from the stuff of the observable, material world. And then he distorted, even disfigured this stuff, pushing the majority of his pictures to the cusp of nonobjectivity, distorting and inventing without altogether abandoning reference to the real. In this he was not in the least unique or special, for he shared his tendency toward abstraction with numerous artists among the American and European avant-­garde.2 In Sun Drawing Water, Dove represents the heave and surge of ocean meeting land. Waves at the bottom edge of the canvas, rendered in gray, light blue, and blue-­green, gently press against what we take to be the shore, that bulge of yellow-­green that extends across the lower half of the canvas. The transparent softness of the paint that designates the waves, diluted so that it approaches the feel of watercolor, evokes the 11

12

fluid and constant lapping of water onto sand,

at the shore, save for maybe the tails of kites, but

the back-­and-­forth pull and swish of liquid across

that is not what they are. These twisting forms that

a semisolid expanse. Clouds pass over the scene,

undulate across and plunge up and down appear to

and at left, just above the point where one of these

be Dove’s attempt to give to light a material, picto-

clouds arcs elegantly into its own wavelike form,

rial form, standing for the wave patterns of light

the sun presses through the haze of fog and damp,

as it travels through air. The downward plunge of

its rays disappearing behind patches of blue and re-

the “V” visualizes the action of light and heat on

appearing as wide yellow bands that bend and flow

the earth’s surface, its upward surge the aftereffect

across the sky.

of this action: water transformed into the stuff

Put another way: In Sun Drawing Water, the

of atmosphere. The swirling ribbons also register

viewer sees what he or she might see on a visit to

wind, the bulk flow of air in time and through space.

the Long Island shore. But that viewer perceives far

Early in his career, on the occasion of the Chicago

more than just this, gaining visual access to things

exhibition of “The Ten Commandments,” Dove ex-

that one should not be able to make out at all, phe-

plained his efforts to depict wind, making clear his

nomena that are not visible or apprehensible by

intentions to render first and foremost the force it-

way of the naked eye: wind, evaporation, light, tidal

self. To paint a cyclone, he said, “I would paint the

force. To be sure, one can see the effects of these phe-

mighty folds of the wind. . . . I would show repeti-

nomena: objects blown by the wind; water drying

tions and convolutions of the rage of the tempest.

up; the sun’s glow and the things that it brings to

I would paint the wind, not a landscape chastised

light; the tide moving in and out over the course of

by the wind.”3 The repeating swerves and jigs of the

a day. But one cannot see cause; that is, one cannot

ribbons in Sun Drawing Water impart the motion of

discern the actual forces behind these end effects,

wind as it folds and bends in space, an unseen force

the phenomena of which these things are the ulti-

making its way through equally unseen terrain. The

mate result: changes in barometric pressure and the

stacked bands of tonally varied yellow-­green that

consequent movement of air mass (wind), the tran-

designate the rise of land toward the front of the

sition of molecules from a liquid to a gaseous state

scene also diagram wind. Each band signals a mass

(evaporation), electromagnetic radiation moving in

of air touching a spot along the curve of the hill as it

wave-­or particle-­form through air (light), the grav-

moves, the tonal striations from light at the base to

itational effect of one body on another (the moon

darker at the top evoking traversal across the space

acting on the earth so as to create the tides).

as a whole as well as the variations of color we see in

In Dove’s world, however, viewers are made privy

a field of beach grass buffeted by billowing gusts, as

to what the unaided eye cannot see. In Sun Drawing

the waxy undersides of blades are exposed, creating

Water, the transmutation of molecules from liquid

a shifting sea of darker and lighter greens.

to gas—­the mechanism of evaporation—­manifests

These ribbons may have served another, ad-

visually in the thrusting blue-­gray cylinders at the

ditional purpose: that of visualizing the flight of

center of the canvas, chutes of water sucked into the

birds. Prominent in two watercolor studies Dove

sky. The fading of darker blue into light yellow-­gray

made for Sun Drawing Water, similar lines appear in

toward the top of the cylinders, where they round

other of Dove’s paintings, including his Seagull Mo-

off and dissolve into cloud, reiterates this idea—­

tif (Violet and Green) (1928) (fig. 3).4 In both canvases

the transformation of a substance from one state

these lines appear to represent, in visual, abstract

into another—­as does the transition from black to

form, what the unassisted eye cannot see: the drafts

yellow that occurs just as the V-­shaped ribbon at

of air produced by the flapping of wings as well as

center traverses the boundary between land and air.

the drafts produced by the wind on which seagulls

This and the other ribbons swirling in the sky do

float and soar, those forces of lift and drag that con-

not seem to denote anything that one might see

stitute the aerodynamics of flight.5 The lines might

Chapter One

Fig. 3  Arthur G. Dove, Seagull Motif (Violet and Green), 1928, oil on metal, Collection of J. R. and Barbara Hyde.

also represent the idea of movement itself, the ef-

landscape.7 Their ripples and swells also evoke the

fect of displacement in time and space. During the

idea of a moving stream, one that flows as all streams

short period he was at work on Sun Drawing Water,

do but that also appears to “follow” a moving object,

Dove wrote a long letter to Stieglitz. He wrote this

such as a train. By rendering through these ribbons

letter while on a train headed home from Geneva,

the perceived effect of a stream relocating and ad-

New York, where he had traveled after the death of

vancing on terrain, keeping time with the train, it

his mother. In the letter, Dove told Stieglitz that he

may be that Dove wished to insert into Sun Drawing

had made two watercolors while aboard the train,

Water an emblem of the journey that interrupted

and he also described what he saw as he rode: “A

his work on the painting. He started to paint Sun

light fall of snow. And a green stream following

Drawing Water on January 17 and completed the

6

the train.” Sun Drawing Water does not depict a

picture in just under two weeks, wrapping up on

view from a train window as does another of Dove’s

January 31, but the train trip to Geneva, which oc-

works, Fields of Grain Seen from Train (1931), which

curred during this interval, forced Dove to leave off

registers through telescoping perspective the com-

painting for several days.8 The ribbon forms thus

bined effect of a fast-­ passing foreground and a

instill within the picture the temporality of its

static distance, but the ribbons that twist through

creation, for these forms act as a pictorial souvenir

the cloudy sky of Dove’s seaside scene do call to

of Dove’s trip and his train-­bound encounter with

mind the meander of a stream through a snowy

the tag-­along stream. The memory of a stream that

Fig. 4  Arthur G. Dove, Fog Horns, 1929, oil on canvas, 18 × 26 in. (45.7 × 66 cm), Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Anonymous Gift, FA 1954.1.

14

Chapter One

Fig. 5  Arthur G. Dove, Moon, 1935, oil on canvas, 88.9 × 63.5 cm (35 × 25 in.), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth, 2009.39.1.

seemed to accompany him in time and space fur-

bands of gray, purple, and plum diagramming the

nished Dove with an emblem of the temporal and

travel of sound waves through air as well as the

geographic interlude that constituted the paint-

perceived transmutation of sound—­here, that of a

ing’s coming into being, the serial displacement of

foghorn signal—­as relative to a stationary listener.

the stream transmuting in Sun Drawing Water into

In Moon (1935) (fig. 5), a tree stands silhouetted

the shimmer and swirl of wind, water vapor, and

against the glow of the lunar sky. Dove shows what

birds moving in air.

the moon does, not what it looks like, and he gives

The impulse to render in visual form the nonvis-

visual form to its actions on the earth, marshaling

ible or phenomena not perceivable by the unassisted

paint to make seen what is normally unavailable to

human eye marks many of Dove’s pictures. As other

the eye. The trunk establishes a literal connection

scholars have previously suggested, if not explored

between moon and earth, as if to evoke the gravi-

at length, Dove wished for these supersighted

tational force exerted by the one on the other, the

paintings to show his viewers the world anew, to

brown limb pressing toward the ground as if bend-

9

grant access to a kind of superhuman vision. In Fog

ing under the weight and pull of the radiant orb.

Horns (1929) (fig. 4), for instance, Dove transforms

The shift in the outmost circle from black, in the

sonic sensation into visible matter, with spiraling

bottom half, to blue, in the upper, gives visual form

Fig. 6  Arthur G. Dove, Silver Sun, 1929, oil, metallic paint, and wax (?) on canvas, 55.3 × 74.9 cm (21¾ × 29½ in.), Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.531, The Art Institute of Chicago.

16

Chapter One

Fig. 7  Arthur G. Dove, Sunrise III, 1936–­1937, wax emulsion and oil on canvas, partly coated in gesso, 63.5 × 89.1 cm (25 × 351⁄16 in.), Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Katherine S. Dreier to the Collection Société Anonyme, 1949.3.

to the idea of a lunar phase, the waxing and waning

alizing radiating light as well as the movement of

of the illuminated portion of the moon as visible

the earth around the sun, what one sees only as a

from earth that the eye can only see as a series of

series of static spatial displacements as the earth’s

fixed states, unable as it is to detect the infinitesimal

position relative to the sun shifts over the course

and constant transformations in size and shape of

of a day. A smaller concentric circle motif appears

this illuminated patch that occur during the lunar

just beneath these forms, hovering at the earth’s

cycle. I am struck by how much Dove’s concentric

crust, its tonalities reversing that of its larger coun-

circles here conjure something like a giant, staring

terpart: dark on the outside, light at center. This

eye, suggesting that Dove indeed depicts a view of

point-­counterpoint maps the operation of reflec-

things as if seen by a superhuman orb, so that all of

tion, light cast onto and bounced off a surface, a

a sudden the unseeable, physical forces that govern

phenomenon that Dove registers materially here by

the earth appear in plain sight.

way of a metal-­based silver paint, so that the can-

Dove frequently employed such a concentric

vas becomes, quite literally, a medium of reflection,

circle motif to render the motion and mechanics

reflecting and refracting waves of light across and

of light or celestial bodies, both in his paintings,

through its silvery metal sheen. A similar big-­circle,

as in Me and the Moon (1937), Silver Sun (1929), and

little-­circle pairing occurs in Dove’s Sunrise, North-

Sunrise III (1936–­1937), and throughout his small-­

port Harbor (1929) (fig. 8), where the sun at the hori-

scale sketches and studies, where the motif prolif-

zon confronts its reversed reflection in the waves

10

erates in myriad forms (figs. 52, 6, 7). In Sunrise III

beneath it, dark orange migrating from perimeter

the sun and its rays take on a concentric cast, while

to center in the shift from sun to not-­quite-­mirror

curving lines and biomorphic forms amplify the ro-

image. In Golden Sun (1937) (fig. 9), Dove doubly fig-

tational force of the composition, an effect repro-

ures the travel of light waves from sun to earth’s

duced in Sunrise I and Sunrise II, both 1936, which

surface: by concentric bands of yellow and white

11

together with Sunrise III form a series. In Silver Sun,

and by a collection of lines that slice through space,

careening circles originate in inky black and spiral

originating at or near the sun’s yellow center, trav-

out through shades of blue to a whitish-­gray, visu-

eling through layers of paint, and touching down Circles

17

Fig. 8  Arthur G. Dove, Sunrise, Northport Harbor, 1929, oil on canvas, 38 × 51 cm (1415⁄16 × 201⁄16 in.), Princeton University Art Museum, Gift of John S. McGovern, Class of 1926, y1962-­44.

Fig. 9  Arthur G. Dove, Golden Sun, 1937, oil on canvas, Collection of J. R. and Barbara Hyde.

Fig. 10  Arthur G. Dove, Naples Yellow Morning, 1935, oil on linen, 251⁄8 × 35 in. (63.8175 × 88.9 cm). Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (www.pafa.org). The Vivian O. and Meyer P. Potamkin Collection, Bequest of Vivian O. Potamkin, 2003.1.2.

20

amid encircling bands of green and stacked strips

stuff of vegetal life, constituting the chemical pro-

of black and gray.

cess vital to the growth of plants—­photosynthesis,

In Naples Yellow Morning (1935) (fig. 10), Dove

fully described within science by the nineteenth

establishes a similar yellow-­sun, green-­earth con-

century—­and essential to all life on earth.12 The

nection by way of a whimsical collection of concen-

title of this work refers, of course, to the time of

tric circle motifs. Just as the bands of yellow dia-

day depicted in the scene and to the yellow light of

gram the transmission of light from sky to earth,

the morning sun, but it also refers to the paint that

the bands of green that make up two tree-­forms

Dove used to create it, Naples yellow, a synthetic,

evoke vegetal growth, the budding and spreading

lead-­based pigment, with roots in the Renaissance,

of leaves and branches over a period of time, a pro-

that lands somewhere between the soft yellow of

cess made possible by the sun and that one cannot

banana flesh and the brighter yellow of a daffodil.13

literally see. The blue and blue-­gray cloud-­amoebas

Naples yellow is remarkable as a yellow for its par-

continue this lesson in natural science. Situated

adoxically cool warmth, something that probably

between the sun and the trees against a backdrop

appealed to Dove, for this quality allowed him to

yellow atmosphere, their moisture-­ laden of pale-­

capture the morning’s admixture of sun and chill—­

heft and drag evokes the interrelationships among

the anticipation of warmth, rather than heat itself.

light, plant, oxygen, and water that make up the

Dove cited his media in other titles, such as Pozzuoli

Chapter One

Fig. 11  Above, Arthur G. Dove, Pozzuoli Red, 1941, wax emulsion on canvas, 221⁄8 × 36 in. (56.1975 × 91.44 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1941. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Fig. 12  Left, “Structure of the Radium Atom,” in H. A. Kramers and Helge Holst, The Atom and the Bohr Theory of Its Structure: An Elementary Presentation, trans. R. B. Lindsay and Rachel T. Lindsay (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923), color plate 2. Lewis Library, Princeton University. Photograph: David Connelly.

Red (1941) (fig. 11), which refers to a pigment of clay

cess, photosynthesis, as well as the product of this

tinted warm red-­brown by iron oxide and obtained

p ­ rocess.

14

from iron ore deposits near Pozzuoli, Italy. In such

Dove’s efforts to render unseeable aspects of

cases, the title indicates both the painting’s subject

the physical universe somehow available to the vi-

matter and its medium, thus alluding to both the

sual sense coincided with similar exertions on the

what and the how, a doubled reference most fitting

part of other artists of the period as well as with

for Naples Morning Yellow, which describes a pro-

comparable undertakings in other disciplines, inCircles

21

cluding the sciences. Diagrams, charts, graphs, and

and non-­Euclidean geometry and to the concept of

mathematical equations and symbols had begun to

the fourth dimension, which was theorized in the

supersede illustrations of objective appearance so

late nineteenth century and the early twentieth as a

as to make possible the picturing of a whole range

yet undetected physical characteristic of space and

of newly theorized but not necessarily observed

a realm of higher consciousness, and he cited or al-

15

phenomena and effects. Exemplary is a diagram

luded to numerous other sources from the realms of

of the structure of the radium atom that appeared

science and philosophy that took up consideration

in The Atom and the Bohr Theory of Its Structure (1923)

of the laws or fundamental forces of nature and the

by H. A. Kramers and Helge Holst, which only ab-

matter of rendering these laws and forces in picto-

stractly approximates rather than illustrates the

rial or graphic form.19

atom’s form (fig. 12). Dove would have been ac-

These scientific and philosophical contexts

quainted with this range of imagery and with the

most certainly informed Dove’s formulation of his

spheres of inquiry that had given rise to it. He took

abstract vocabulary, including the concentric circle

a course in physics while enrolled at Cornell. He

motif. Dove spoke frequently of his quest for a set

noted in his ship’s log that he had borrowed a tele-

of forms or “motives” that would push painting

scope and consulted astronomy texts obtained at

beyond specificity and particularity and toward

the library in Huntington, on Long Island, while

something more universal in its expression of na-

at work on an assemblage, Starry Heavens (1924),

ture’s principles, a pictorial language that would

that depicts the moon, stars, and the Big and Little

sideline direct observation and eschew “innumer-

Dippers, star groupings within the constellations

able little facts” and “dependence upon the ob-

Ursa Major and Ursa Minor (fig. 133). In a 1934 let-

ject.” Such a mode would, as Dove stated, “contain

ter to Stieglitz, he named Albert Einstein as one

all of nature, built on and enveloped in a precisely

of four in a list of “the few great ones” (the other

pure mathematical dream.”20 But as the research of

three were his childhood mentor Newton Weath-

Sherrye Cohn and Ann Lee Morgan has suggested,

erly, Alfred Stieglitz, and Jesus Christ), and Dove’s

Dove’s paintings are far from simple illustrations

son, William Dove, reported that there were two

of scientific ideas or evocations of scientific im-

people his father wished he had been able to meet

agery; his relationship to the scientific and philo-

during his lifetime: Gertrude Stein was one, and

sophical material on which he drew was never one

Einstein was the other.16 Dove made numerous spe-

of straightforward borrowing or modeling, and his

cific references to Einstein in his correspondence

recourse to this material was never systematic.21

and writing. In letters to Steiglitz, he noted an

So although Dove’s interest in giving visual form

Einstein essay as well as an interview that he had

to unseen or unseeable phenomena was, indisput-

read and enjoyed, and he also referred to popular

ably, an important part of his project, this effort was

studies of the physicist’s work, including Bertrand

not at all the whole or extent of his endeavor. Put

Russell’s The ABC of Relativity (1925), which Dove

another way, Dove’s practice constituted far more

purchased at a bookshop in New York in 1929. In

than a search for an appropriately abstract vocab-

1930, he wrote to Stieglitz that “Einstein . . . is more

ulary for use in rendering the unseen or invisible

of a painter than most literature and a great deal of

forces and laws of nature, as revealed and scruti-

art.” An undated typewritten essay of Dove’s indi-

nized by science, or for recording his individual,

cates that Einstein’s ideas had affected him so much

subjective response to the effects of these forces

that he found it almost impossible “to sit and make

and laws. Abstraction was a necessary by-­product of

17

paintings with what I know any more.” In 1920, a

a different quest, one preoccupied with what a work

critic referred to Dove as a member of “the Einstein

of art, abstract or otherwise, might achieve through

18

school.” Dove also made allusions in his writing, including in the undated essay, to both Euclidean 22

Chapter One

its forms, whatever those forms might be. The diagramming impulse of a work like Sun

Drawing Water, with its mapping of the mechanisms

and unrestrained sense of human communication

of wind, the tides, evaporation, and flight, or a

and interchange.

painting such as Moon, with its charting of celestial operations, formed part of a much larger, far more complex and distinctive pictorial project, one that

Translation

I conceive as constituting a geography of circles,

Extensive period documentation of Dove’s activi-

waves, and weather. When used to refer to a disci-

ties and interests exists, and Dove had more than a

pline of study, “geography” connotes both distilla-

fair amount to say about his art—­in letters, in di-

tion, such as the reductions and abstractions of a

aries, in exhibition catalog statements, in drafts of

regional or topographical map or a statistical group,

never-­published essays and poems, in the margins

and expansion or lateral spread, for geography is at

of technical manuals, in the daily ship’s log he kept

bottom a science of distribution, mobility, region,

for years while living aboard the Mona, on the backs

and terrain. As such, geography provides both con-

of paintings, and on slips of paper stowed here and

ceptual latitude and terminological specificity for

there. What emerges from this material is a portrait

comprehending and describing the chief impulses and predominating forms of Dove’s art: abstraction, of course, but also modalities and forms other than abstraction. This would include language, understood in keeping with Dove’s own practice as any type of sign or system of expression, and that, as a form, simultaneously distills and proliferates, reducing complexity to a system of efficient signs, as does a map, while circulating and transforming widely and endlessly, as do terrain and its inhabitants. Dove’s project was fundamentally driven by an abiding interest in language, broadly defined, and, more specifically, in two of language’s chief operations. The first of these operations was translation, the rendering of something that exists in one form in another alternate form. The second was communication, the conveying of information between parties by way of a mutually intelligible system of signs, as made possible by translation. Dove’s preoccupation with translation and communication was such that he made them the primary procedures of his art, although his understanding of their operations and effects was decidedly nonspecific and broad, and intelligibility was never a constant criterion. Rather than carefully wrought definitions of particular procedures underpinned by specific theoretical paradigms or texts, or even by conventional usage, Dove’s practice called forth an idiosyncratic and eccentric, at times inexpert, embrace of myriad forms of transmutation and conveyance, one that reflected his own expansive

Fig. 13  Page 3 of an Arthur Garfield Dove letter to Helen Torr Dove, Nov. 10, 1933. Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2:1:41, image #8.

Circles

23

of an artist who wrote regularly and abundantly—­

Torr was visiting her mother in Hartford, Connecti-

the Dove holdings at the Archives of American Art

cut, Dove arrayed the letters of “Sweets” vertically

include over fifteen folders’ worth of his unpub-

and then repeated these letters immediately to the

lished poetry and prose—­as well as an individual

right of this column, but in reverse, as if a mirror

intensely interested in the properties of language

image (fig. 13). Dashes between like letters empha-

and, in particular, the capacity of language in its

size the connection between the two columns, as

multiple incarnations to transmit and communi-

do the spiral lines that Dove drew around the two

22

cate information.

24

stacks, enclosing them in an irregular cylinder of

Play with prose, words, and single letters sur-

space. A horizontally spiraling line sits at the base

faces throughout Dove’s published and unpublished

of this cylinder, with portions of its loops filled in

writing. In letters to Torr, of which there are many,

with ink. Short, vibrant strokes radiate out from the

Dove often signed off as “Sweets,” and in some cases

edges of the double stack, and Dove explains his

he transformed this nickname into a graphic pat-

design in a short phrase penned next to it: “That’s

tern or design. In the body of a letter written while

a hug from me to you.” Here, words combine with

Fig. 14  Page 4 of an Arthur Garfield Dove letter to Helen Torr Dove, Nov. 22, 1934. Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2:1:31, image #30.

Fig. 15  Page 9 of an Arthur Garfield Dove letter to Helen Torr Dove, Nov. 10, 1933 or 1934. Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2:1:31, image #11.

Chapter One

graphic marks to create an image of a hug but also

and Torr enjoyed reading the Hyman Kaplan sto-

the idea of an embrace. The result occupies a middle

ries, written by Leo Rosten under the pseudonym

or hybrid ground between text and image, with the

“Leonard Q. Ross” and published in the 1930s in the

spiral form creating a link between Dove’s writing

New Yorker.26 These told the story of Kaplan, an im-

of the letter and the rest of his body of work, in

migrant enrolled in an evening English-­language

which circles and spirals proliferate. Dove closed

course in New York. Kaplan’s inability or unwill-

the letter with another play on his nickname, where

ingness to master the rules and pronunciation of

the final “s” of “Sweets” spirals out and entangles

English forms the basis for a larger narrative in the

the preceding letters in a series of loops.23

stories about language and its limits and, also, about

Dove produced something similar in another

how simple errors in spelling, grammar, or pronun-

letter to Torr, sent in November 1934, in which

ciation result in sizeable miscommunication, often

he reports that he is “due at 10 at the dentist to-­

to humorous effect. The rendition of Kaplan’s name

morrow” (fig. 14). He renders the word “dentist” in

in print—­as H * Y * M * A * N  K * A * P * L * A * N—­

capital letters and adds tick marks along the edges

calls to mind Dove’s own graphic additions to let-

of several of the letters so as to indicate rows of

ters and words, and Dove made a point of approx-

teeth. In another note, most likely sent earlier that

imating this combination of letters and asterisks

same month, and shortly after Torr departed Ge-

when he referred to the Kaplan stories in a letter

neva by train, Dove wrote that he hoped the porter

to Torr.27 Such an attentiveness to language play is

had attended to her luggage at the station, sparing

on evidence in a short essay written by Dove, dated

her the effort. The conductor, Dove recalled, had

December 13, 1928, in which he considers questions

“said he would see to it as he went by.” Dove spelled

of size, contrast, and relation in artistic expression,

the “see” of this sentence in capital letters sepa-

using the example of relationships among different

rated by dashes, two between the “s” and the first

numerical values to explain his understanding of

“e” and one after each “e,” so that the word stretches

relationships among pictorial forms. In stating that

across half the span of the page (fig. 15). Dove drew a

numbers and forms have like properties and behave

schematic arrow above and running parallel to the

according to the same set of laws, Dove suggests an

elongated “see.” The arrow’s tip points toward the

equivalency or interchangeability between the two,

right edge of the sheet and a few short strokes at the

a point underscored by the circular configuration

other end designate the fletching. Here, words and

of numbers he crafts to elucidate a point about rep-

graphic marks combine to evoke the idea of a man

resenting the size of the sun (fig. 16).28 Here, Dove

moving and acting in time and space, for the exag-

wittily substitutes a ring of numbers for a natural

gerated procession of the letters across the page and

form, transforming the natural world into series of

the directional arrow call to mind the conductor’s

notational symbols and in turn compelling those

traverse of the station platform as he seeks out the

symbols to assume pictorial form. As with his

missing porter. The combination of three types of

picture-­text hybrids in his letters to Torr and the

sign—­letters, punctuation marks, and a symbol—­

Hyman Kaplan moniker, which combines letters

allows Dove to register multiple acts (moving and

and a typographical symbol, the asterisk, making

looking) as well as multiple tenses (he will see to it,

the name take on the quality of an image, the in-

but he is not at present doing so) in a single, effi-

tervening little stars giving it an almost sculptural

cient notation. He does so redundantly, of course,

appearance, Dove with his number-­sun generates a

because the arrow-­letter configuration renders in

transfer among multiple notational and represen-

abbreviated form what the words of his letter al-

tational forms, breaching the limits of each so as to

ready convey, with Dove thus translating his own

create a novel expressive mode.

24

speech into a hybrid word-­image sign.

Dove clearly appreciated such wordplay.25 He

Dove’s interest in language extended beyond the witty and playful. In his writings he contemCircles

25

feeling in a universal language is quite a job. Especially when confined to one language.” Dove then remarked on the relationship between writing and painting and the difficulty of translating the one into the other. “It would be quite difficult for a painter to paint about writing,” he said. “One might today paint Joyce for instance, he can still be fine, but more a man like Rembrandt . . . or Menaechmus, the ancient Einstein who was a Greek sculptor.”30 Here Dove suggests that it would take a man of rare skill to translate the work of James Joyce into pictorial form, and he offers two different possibilities for such a translation: painting as such, but also the language of mathematics and, specifically, the vocabulary of geometry. Menaechmus was a Greek mathematician and the supposed discoverer of the conic sections, curves produced by intersecting a cone with a plane, as in the circle or ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola. Dove referred to these sections in the final draft of his letter to Kootz, published in 1930 in Kootz’s Modern American Painters, as the “Maenechmian Triads.” In the final letter, he indicated that study of the conic sections had provided for him, much as color had, a means by which to render the unique essence of “all objects in nature” Fig. 16  An essay by Arthur Garfield Dove dated Dec. 13, 1928. Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 3:3:1, image #3.

and thus to move away from “representation in the ordinary sense.”31 Dove was of course not unique in turning to geometry as inspiration for his abstract vocabulary, but his suggestion that writing might be rendered mathematically indicates that his interest

26

plated the potential of using various forms or signs

in geometry lay as much in matters of language or

to craft an ideal language. “Maybe art should be sign

signification as in the question of abstraction.

language,” he mused in one unpublished note.29 In a

What is more, the fact that Dove referred to

draft of a letter to the critic and author Samuel M.

the Greek mathematician as the “ancient Einstein”

Kootz, Dove took up the topic of communication

suggests that to his mind the conic sections could

and its misfires, considering the possibility of a lan-

install, in the space of painting, a type of lan-

guage or form that might be universally understood.

guage—­in this example, a pictorial translation of

He characterized the difficulty of universal commu-

Joyce by Menaechmus or Rembrandt—­that pos-

nication in terms of the legibility of an act to an ob-

sessed temporal and spatial dimensions. Dove else-

server, in this case the act of building a house. “The

where evoked such a connection among writing, ge-

spirit of anything modern or ancient,” he wrote, “is

ometry, space, and time, thus imagining writing in

understood but by a few. If one took a sandy beach

something other than its conventional text-­bound

and built a house thereon that would be useable to

and two-­dimensional guise. In a letter to the critic

someone. If one did it on a desert island and went

Edward Alden Jewell, which he titled “Self Portraits

away he might not be understood. To express one’s

by Others,” Dove strung together a series of obser-

Chapter One

vations and aphorisms to create something resembling verse, including the following line: “One can

A silver leaf frame goes round a painting and does its duty as it should—­33

be caliographic [sic] in planes as well as line, just as sidereal.” Here, Dove suggests that writing (as in

Here, nouns and adjectives accumulate as a kind of

calligraphy) can assume planar form yet still pos-

verbal still life, while phrases that indicate actions

sess a spatiotemporal dimension, as indicated by

and everyday use—­“left over,” “canisters that have

the term “sidereal,” which refers to measurements

to be filled occasionally,” “dented a bit,” “the day’s

of time based on the movement of celestial bod-

work”—­give Dove’s lines the feel of a portrait, in

ies, including the sun, moon, and stars.32 Like the

which an accounting of the lives of objects replaces

spirals of “Sweets” that evoke the circle and spiral

likeness as the mode of portrayal.

forms that populate his pictures, Dove’s allusion

Such experiments with poetry and prose re-

to the sidereal here establishes a direct connection

flect Dove’s interest in words and their use in com-

between his writing and his art, for his paintings

munication as do other examples of his written

and assemblages are rife with depictions of celes-

expression. The bulk of Dove’s published writing

tial bodies and their motion relative to the earth,

appeared in the pamphlets that accompanied the

suggesting Dove’s own attempt to mingle the prop-

exhibitions of his work at Stieglitz’s galleries. Most

erties of language, art, time, and space.

often this writing took the form of poetry or poetry-­

Jewell was not the only recipient of Dove’s id-

like meditations and, like the wordplay in his corre-

iosyncratic verse. An undated letter to the critic

spondence, evidenced an interest in manipulating

Henry McBride contained a series of lines describ-

language so as to produce an effect beyond simple

ing the objects arrayed on Dove’s kitchen table, the

description. “An Idea,” printed in the pamphlet

form of the text falling somewhere between a poem

for Dove’s 1927 exhibition at Stieglitz’s Intimate

and a laundry list, as in the following excerpt:

Gallery, begins with a question—­“Why not make things look like nature?”—­before wending through

About an inch of bread, and a package of Lucky Strikes—­ An aluminum colander and a 10¢ store bottle of Schneiders chili sauce—­

a series of observations and allusions, including references to Wassily Kandinsky, weather lore, science, and music. Dove closes by evoking Kandinsky’s 1926 Point and Line to Plane, in which Kandinsky analyzed

Some butter left over—­

what he believed to be the basic elements of vari-

A big table spoon, not used and two knives,

ous forms of artistic expression, including painting

one not used, one dirty. And a little salt & pepper in canisters that have to be filled occasionally.

and music, and illustrated these basic elements in part by describing the transposition of sensory or physical phenomena such as the body in motion

And some paper napkins—­

or a musical composition into diagrammatic form.

A Birdseye match that isn’t struck—­

Dove’s version of Kandinsky’s ideas initially hews to

And there’s the top cap for the pin money

the spirit of the Russian artist’s remarks, but after

pickles that is dented a bit—­ And a card board box, pink—­part of a pie in it—­

a few clauses he departs significantly, spiraling out from Kandinsky’s careful elaboration of geometric translation into a meditation on existence: “As the

And O yes one burnt match—­

point moves it becomes a line, as the line moves it

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

becomes a plane, as the plane moves it becomes a

There is the necessity of soap powder before

solid, as the solid moves, it becomes life and as life

the day’s work is done—­ And to roll your own cigarettes takes time, if your time is valuable.

moves, it becomes the present.”34 Dove elsewhere produced texts laden with allusions and bent on toying with the properties and procedures of lanCircles

27

guage. His poem “A Way to Look at Things,” which

and European artistic and literary avant-­garde, in-

appeared in the catalog to Stieglitz’s 1925 Seven

cluding Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Juan

Americans exhibition and was reprinted in the pam-

Gris, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray,

phlet for Dove’s 1942 exhibition at An American

Loringhoven, Hart Hans Arp, Elsa von Freytag-­

Place, reads as an earnest meditation on the nature

Crane, André Gide, Franz Kafka, André Breton,

of representation, the fallacy of likeness, and the

William Carlos Williams, Samuel Beckett, Ger-

primacy of abstraction, but it also toys with lan-

trude Stein, and James Joyce.36 Dove described

guage, each sentence taking its cue from a word or

the linguistic experimentalism of the journal by

idea in the preceding sentence and then riffing on

calling it uncharacteristic as a text in its seeming

it, taking that word or idea in a new, often unpre-

aliveness; transition, Dove wrote to Stieglitz, “gives

dictable direction:

quite an idea of what is going on” and “has always interested me as a live thing—­one of the very few

We have not yet made shoes that fit like sand.

printed ones.”37 James Joyce was a particular favor-

Nor clothes that fit like water—­

ite of Dove’s. He read portions of Joyce’s “Work in

Nor thoughts that fit like air.

Progress,” a partial draft of Finnegan’s Wake that

There is much to be done—­

appeared serially in several numbers of transition,

Works of nature are abstract.

and he mentioned Joyce frequently in his writing

They do not lean on other things for

and correspondence.38 Joyce is “is certainly quite a person,” Dove wrote to Stieglitz in 1928; in another

meanings. The sea-­gull is not like the sea.

letter he produced a short list of contemporaries he

Nor the sun like the moon.

admired, with Joyce appearing alongside Stieglitz,

The sun draws water from the sea.

O’Keeffe, John Marin, and D. H. Lawrence; and in a

The clouds are not like either one—­

third he enclosed a statement titled “On Reading

They do not keep one form forever.

the Current Papers” in which he lamented the lack

That the mountainside looks like a face is

of “pure writing” about art and opposed Joyce and

accidental.

35

Picasso to Thomas Hart Benton who, along with Thomas Craven, exemplified for Dove all things

In this and other of Dove’s articulations, the line

pernicious in art and culture.39

between profundity and apparent meaninglessness

Dove himself contributed to the avant-­ garde

is so fine that one feels that he must have been hav-

press. His submission to an issue of the little maga-

ing a little bit of fun, truly playing with words—­not

zine MSS on the subject “Can a Photograph Have the

as a joke, to be sure, but rather in order to see what

Significance of Art?” appeared alongside statements

words might do for him or for his paintings, so as to

by artists and writers known for their experimental

explore the arrays or sequences they might take on

approach to language, writing, and words, including

a page, with serendipitous meanings and behaviors

Duchamp and Marius de Zayas; the cover of the is-

arising as a result.

sue, designed by O’Keeffe, consciously mimicked the

As a member of the circle of artists, writers, and

word and phrase repetitions of Dada, with “Manu-

critics associated with Stieglitz, Dove was of course

scripts Number Four New York December 1922” run-

well aware of contemporaneous artistic and literary

ning in a continuous loop across the bottom half.

experiments with language. He was a regular reader

Dove’s contribution reflected his interest in verbal

of vanguard journals and art writing, including the

experimentation, and it came complete with his

Paris-­based experimental literary journal transition.

own version of Dada­esque looping and babble:

This publication declared in its manifesto that “the revolution in the English language is an accomplished fact,” and it featured work by the American 28

Chapter One

What does photography mean to me?—­ Nothing!

I’d rather have some photographs than most

a consideration of personality, the characteristic behavior of friends and family, and the human im-

paintings. I’d rather have some paintings than most

pulse to produce offspring that Stein would go on to include in her Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein with

photographs. I’d rather have writing than typewriting.

Two Shorter Stories (1933), and that Dove described as

I’d rather have vision than art.

“a beauty.” Both texts reflect Stein’s experimental, at

I’d rather have today than yesterday.

times bewildering narrative style and both appeared

I’d rather have tomorrow than today.

in the modernist literary journal the Dial, which is

I’d rather have Stieglitz than Rembrandt.

where Dove encountered them.41 In addition, Dove

I’d rather have Chaplin than Twain.

read Tender Buttons (1914), which was reprinted in

I’d rather have the impossible than the

transition in 1928, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), and he commented in a 1932 letter to

possible. I’d rather have the abstract than the real.

Stieglitz that, despite the claims of the writer and

I’d rather have truth than beauty.

illustrator Oliver Herford, who had argued that Ten-

I’d rather have a soul than a shape.

der Buttons derived from biblical verse, Stein’s book

I’d rather have orange than blue.

was closer in spirit to Shakespeare.42 In a 1934 letter

I’d rather have black than white.

to the art writer Elizabeth McCausland, who had become a dear friend of his, Dove wrote, “The Stein

But all these things are identical so 40

photography means nothing to me.

play is great!” referring to Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts, which opened on Broadway that February.

As in other of his articulations, Dove’s remarks here

Dove could have seen the play, but the comment

walk a fine line between serious commentary and

was most likely prompted by McCausland’s review

deliberate opacity, philosophical musing and ba-

of it, which she sent to him. He also indicated that

nal, meaningless blather. Such oscillation suggests

he was planning to read Stein’s The Making of Ameri-

that in addition to being a text about photography,

cans, an abridged edition of which was published in

Dove also meant his poem to be a text about itself,

the United States in 1934. He told McCausland that

one that remarked on its own capacity to transmit

Torr said the book “is about the greatest thing she

information by being simultaneously captivating

has read” and “should be compulsory reading” for

and recalcitrant, the combination of its singsong

everyone.43 As early as 1912, a writer in the Chicago

cadence and arbitrary-­ seeming judgments con-

Tribune suggested a connection between Dove and

founding full comprehension.

Stein, albeit in the form of a gentle lampoon. After

Dove’s playful riff on the nature of photography

reprinting the portrait poem of Matisse by Stein

along with the verbal still life that he conjured from

that had appeared in Camera Work, the writer noted

his kitchen table call to mind the experimental

that “compared with the foregoing, the canvases of

writing of Gertrude Stein, whose work Dove avidly

Mr. Arthur Dove were miracles of simplicity.”44

read and greatly admired. One of two people Dove

The affinity between Dove’s prose and Stein’s,

wished he could have met during his lifetime (the

and Dove’s great admiration for her, further dem­

other, recall, was Einstein), Stein served as a con-

onstrates Dove’s interest in language and its op-

stant model for Dove’s thinking, writing, and mak-

erations as well as his own investment in verbal

ing. Dove noted in letters to Stieglitz his reading

experimentation. Dove’s kitchen table portrait,

of Stein’s 1926 “Composition as Explanation,” a dis-

although more straightforwardly descriptive, calls

cussion of modern narrative and an attempt to “ex-

to mind the object portraits and word clusters of

plain” her aims as a writer as well as certain of her

Tender Buttons, where words do not describe but

chief literary devices, such as repetition. He also in-

rather construct and incarnate their subjects even

dicated that he had read Stein’s “A Long Gay Book,”

as they vigorously exceed their function as stand-­ Circles

29

ins for things, as in “A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass,”

Stein contributed her own word-­portrait of Stieg-

one of the best known poems from the collection:

litz to America and Alfred Stieglitz: “That is Stieglitz’s

“A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and noth-

way. . . . He was the first one that ever printed any-

ing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement

thing that I had done. And you can imagine what

in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary,

that meant to me or to any one. I remember him

not unordered in not resembling. The difference

dark and I felt him having white hair. He can do

45

But it is Dove’s published poetry

both of these things or anything.” Although less of a

and prose, with its wordplay, repetition, staccato

paean to Stieglitz than Dove’s, and cagey in its oscil-

rhythms, seeming pithiness, deliberate obscurity,

lation between homage and possible satire, Stein’s

and slightly lurching forward momentum, includ-

poem is close enough in form to Dove’s to suggest

ing “A Way to Look at Things,” that bears the closest

that Dove drew on her style in crafting his verses,

resemblance to Stein’s writing. Take, for example,

here and in other written works.48 To be sure, Dove’s

this passage from Dove’s essay “291,” published in

writing in no way equaled Stein’s in sophistication

Camera Work in 1914 along with other homages to

or innovation, and one would be hard-­pressed to ar-

Stieglitz and his gallery: “It has grown and out-

gue that Dove should be inserted into the modern-

grown in order to grow. It grew because there was a

ist literary canon. Rather, Dove’s imitation of Stein’s

need for such a place, yet it is not a place. Not being

modernist experiment with words constitutes one

a movement, it moves, so do ‘race horses,’ and some

aspect of what was a larger interest on his part in

people, and ‘there are all sorts of sports,’ but no bet-

the nature and operations of language and human

ting. It is finer to find than to win. This seems to be

sign systems and in the potential that might be un-

‘291’ or is it Stieglitz?”46 Or consider his prose poem

leashed through manipulating and reconfiguring

“A Different One,” which appeared in America and Al-

letters, words, and texts.

is spreading.”

fred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait (1934) and included the following playful yet earnest lines:

Dove’s interest in language and its operations, in particular translation and communication, did not confine itself to experiments in speech, sym-

There was a great necessity for a live one because there were so many undertakers,

communication also fascinated him, including the

and they all made their livings from the

phonograph, radio, and telegraphy. Chapter 3 con-

dead ones.

siders this fascination at length, including a series

The Gentlemen of the Juries would go to

30

bol, or script. Technologies of translation and

of paintings that Dove created while listening to

Stieglitz’s exhibitions and get themselves

phonograph records and several paintings based

talked to by an honest man which they

on radio listening. For now, I will simply note that

never liked any more than they did the

in painting while listening to records, Dove trans-

paintings.

lated into visual form the tunes to which he lis-

But it put some of them onto themselves and

tened, this sonic stimulus itself the product of two

it put others onto them, so they had to

translations: from live music into recording, with

paint modern faces on the backs of their

music expressed graphically as a spiral groove on

heads, but the knowing ones knew that

a plastic disc, and then back again into volumetric

the undertakers’ faces were on the other

sound. In the paintings based on radio listening,

side so they couldn’t go in places where

something similar occurred. Dove registered his ex-

there were mirrors.

perience of hearing popular tunes on his radio and

And they had to wear snap ties, and all

in so doing rendered sound that had transmuted

together it was pretty difficult.

multiple times: from live or recorded sound played

And everyone laughed at the wrong moment.

at a radio station into acoustic signals traveling as

And they forgot to bring their check-­book.47

radio waves and then back into sound, as translated

Chapter One

and amplified by the radio apparatus. Dove’s explo-

telegraphy comprised its own language and consti-

ration of the translating potential of sound tech-

tuted a network of interrelated apparatuses through

nology also intersected with his forays into occult

which this language was transmitted; in this sense,

communication. Although not at all a fully com-

it constituted a signaling instrument as well as a

mitted occultist, and little interested in enchant-

system of communication. Thus for Dove it would

ment or mysticism, Dove was attentive to phenom-

have expounded the potential of graphic, sonic,

ena that appeared to exceed ordinary natural and

and mechanical notation and communication and,

human limits, and he plainly believed there existed

consequently, formed part of his larger interest in

a human capacity to transmit thought in an extra-

sonic translation and communication and his par-

sensory fashion. His letters and writings contain

allel interest in the mechanisms of registration as-

numerous references to telepathic events and to

sociated with such transmission along with enti-

the telepathic capabilities of certain of his friends

ties employed therein, such as phonograph needles,

and acquaintances, including Stieglitz. In speaking

telegraph keys, electrical wires, and human bodies.

of mental telepathy, Dove employed a technolog-

In a letter to Torr dated October 15, 1936, Dove wrote

“instrument,” “sending outfit,” ical vocabulary—­

about his radio listening, and he also took time to

“radio”—­indicating that he classified extrasensory

describe a recent invention similar in conception

communication among the other devices and sys-

to the telegraph: “Some guy in Wash. has invented

tems of transmission, technological and otherwise,

a typewriter that will take and print messages over

49

that he engaged and explored in his practice.

radio.”53 On its own, this statement seems innoc-

In the period, mental telepathy was regularly

uous. Taken together with his exploration of the

associated with communication technologies, in-

phonograph, telegraphy, and radio, Dove’s noting

cluding radio and another of Dove’s interests, te-

of another sort of modern transmission device—­

50

legraphy. Dove’s brother Paul reported that Dove

one that triply translated, from speech into type,

was very handy, creating for his sibling “windmills

from type into radio sound or waves, and from radio

run by electric motors, even a camera which took

back again into print—­exemplifies his keen curios-

excellent photographs on glass” as well as “electri-

ity about the apparatuses and operations of tech-

cally operated toys.” Among these creations was a

nologies of translation and communication.54

“telegraph instrument,” its manufacture and use as-

Additional examples of Dove’s preoccupation

sisted by Dove’s knowledge of Morse code.51 Dove’s

with translation and communication abound. He

extraordinary Telegraph Pole (1929) (fig. 17) mani-

fashioned a system by which to render musical

fests his interest in telegraphy. Painted on a steel

sound in a vertical format using strips of ticker

plate, Telegraph Pole both represents and potentially

tape–­like paper, creating “a score for written mu-

embodies the conductivity of the materials em-

sic . . . not a painted interpretation of it.”55 Not

ployed in telegraphy, while the flickering, twisting

interpretation, but translation: this undertaking,

leaflike forms that constitute the surface of the pole

about which little is known, appears to have been

and arm evoke the crisp tap-­tapping of telegraphic

designed to explore the visual dimension of trans-

language—­the dashes and dots of a clicking tele-

mitted sound—­ that is, what sound might look

graph key along with the “dah,” “di,” and “dit”

like if one could see it or how one might express

sounds of Morse code when spoken out loud—­as

it through a visual vocabulary commensurate with

well as the intervals of electrical current that carry

its sonic properties. About “music over the radio,”

this code.52 Dove depicts the pole and its horizon-

Dove asked, “Have you ever tried to think how it

tal crossarm seeming to bend under the weight of

would look?” This query may have been related

the electrical signal transmitted through the wire.

to the ticker tape scheme, for according to one

Telegraphy would have captivated Dove’s interest

of Dove’s earliest biographers, Suzanne Mullett-­

as had radio and the phonograph. As a technology,

Smith, Dove’s transcription of jazz heard over the Circles

31

Fig. 17  Arthur G. Dove, Telegraph Pole, 1929, oil, metallic paint, and pencil on steel plate, 71.1 × 50.5 cm (28 × 197⁄8 in.), Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.535, The Art Institute of Chicago.

radio was linear, with lines replacing notes on a ver-

when I needed television.”57 Dove may have been

tical rather than a horizontal scale: “Experimenting

referring here to the developing technology of tele-

with sounds he had worked out his own shorthand

vision transmission (what Herbert Hoover in 1927

system that recorded sounds as music does on a

described as the unprecedented “transmission of

scale—­the music scales were used vertically and the

sight”), or he may have adopted the term to describe

sounds were written by linear movements instead

more literally his wish to see through a kind of opti-

56

of notes.” In a 1936 letter to Torr, Dove envisaged a

cal telepathy the people whose voices he heard over

similar sound-­to-­image translation, but instead of

the telephone: “tele” + “vision.”58 Either way (and it

music rendered graphically, he envisaged the pros-

may have been both), his remark underscores his

pect of making visible the unseen, distant source of

desire to explore and experiment with processes of

sound transmitted over the telephone. Referring to

transmission and translation as well as his capac-

a previous phone conversation, Dove wrote, “I was

ity for reimagining existing transmission technolo-

going to send greetings to R. Jr. but it all went so

gies, a form of curiosity apparent in his hypothesiz-

fast. Your voice changed to Marian’s without any

ing about the “look” of radio.

warning then Bill’s and the angels [kids]. That was

Dove’s experimentation with notational sys-

Fig. 18  Arthur Garfield Dove diary pages dated Mar. 19 and 20, 1942. Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 3:2:13, image #43.

Circles

33

ing of which is “sound writing” (fig. 19). The use of Gregg shorthand entailed learning how to translate among multiple systems of communication—­ speech, writing, and drawing—­and the system itself combined its aims of ease and efficiency with an aspiration to universal use.60 It may thus have offered Dove another model, in addition to that of the musical score, for imagining the relationship between the graphic and the sonic as well as their mutual translation, or perhaps another template, alongside geometry, for a universal language. According to William, Dove also regularly practiced speedwriting.61 This transcription method involved spelling words without vowels and rendering certain sounds with letters other than those employed in conventional English spelling. Anne Cohen DePietro notes the example “klwdy” for “cloudy,” one among many weather abbreviations Dove fashioned for use in his diaries based on the principles of speedwriting; Dove employed other abbreviated words, such as “wkd” for “worked,” throughout the diaries as well.62 Although far less complicated than Fig. 19  “Word Drill,” in John Robert Gregg, Gregg Shorthand: A Light-­Line Phonography for the Million, anniv. ed. (New York: The Gregg Publishing Company, 1930), p. 98, exercise 175. Photograph: David Connelly.

Gregg shorthand, and legible to the untrained eye in a manner that Gregg notations are not, Dove’s speedwriting caused some confusion on the part of the critic Edward Alden Jewell, who mistakenly believed that the title “Colored Dwg” on the list for the 1930 exhibition of Dove’s work at An American

tems that translated sonic stimulus into pictorial

Place referred to a canine subject (“dog”) rather than

or graphic form was not limited to music. Dove’s

to the medium of the work (“drawing”). In order to

son, William, reported that his father had “studied

see a dog in either of the two works by Dove that

shorthand for years,” teaching himself the Gregg

bore the title in question, one on paper, the other a

method, a stenographic form mainly used for tran-

work on canvas, Jewell wrote that the viewer would

scribing speech first introduced in 1888 by John Rob-

have to go into “the sort of trance that Irish mystics

ert Gregg. Dove regularly employed shorthand in his

manage when they sit in the caves of the Druids.

diary entries, as exemplified by the final two lines of

In short, you might have to go temporarily ga-­ga.”63

59

34

the entry for March 20, 1942 (fig. 18). As explained

Dove’s paintings themselves manifest a con-

in the anniversary edition of Gregg’s instructional

stant and assiduous pictorial exploration of the

manual, Gregg Shorthand: A Light-­Line Phonography

idea of translation, one that occurs across his body

for the Million (1929), Gregg shorthand was “written

of work. Over and over again in his pictures, forms

by sound.” Consisting of a phonetic writing system,

encounter other forms and, as a result of these col-

combinations of curvilinear and straight lines and

lisions, transform, translated from one state into

other types of marks, including dots, dashes, and

another. R 25-­A (1942) is exemplary (fig. 20). This

crisscrossed lines, stood in for spoken sounds—­

is a canvas very much about shapes encountering

hence the term “phonography,” the literal mean-

boundaries or seams and mutating as they do, about

Chapter One

Fig. 20  Arthur G. Dove, R 25-­A, 1942, wax emulsion on canvas, 15 × 21 in. (38.1 × 53.34 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1946. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

halfway points that split shapes in two and demar-

ize the idea of one sort of form transmuting into

cate moments of transposition. A circle just below

another. Even Dove’s signature, at bottom center,

center, its left half brownish-­red, transmutes into

articulates the idea of translation, shading from a

a brighter red as it encounters a line that vertically

darker blue to a lighter one as the “e” at the end

bisects the composition. This line signals another

of “Dove” encounters and crosses over the canvas’s

translation, that of blue-­gray into a lighter version

central divide, as if the artist wanted to make ab-

of itself as a biomorphic trapezoid traverses the

solutely clear, through the use of actual language,

surface plane. Something similar happens to the

that translation was what was on his mind. The

inverted trapezoid in the upper half of the canvas,

canvas’s subject, R 25-­A, the main road along Long

dark brown on the left, purple-­plum on the right,

Island’s North Shore, which passed Dove’s house in

and in the smaller circles that hover at left and

Centerport, might be understood to serve a similar

right, each one hitting a dividing line constituted

purpose, with its evocation of bodies and vehicles

by yet more shapes colliding and transforming and,

transposed from one place to another—­an effect

consequently, slipping into another hue. The area

not unlike that produced by the “see” arrow motif in

of pale yellow, in the canvas’s right half, translates

Dove’s letter to Torr. Numerous other works boast

from planar sweep into linear thrust when it bumps

similar effects, including A Reasonable Facsimile (fig.

up against the inverted trapezoid, as if to literal-

21), created the same year as R 25-­A, in 1942, with the Circles

35

Fig. 21  Left, Arthur G. Dove, A Reasonable Facsimile, 1942, encaustic on canvas, 47.3 × 63.2 cm (185⁄8 × 247⁄8 in.), Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.541, The Art Institute of Chicago. Fig. 22  Below, Arthur G. Dove, Lake Afternoon, 1935, wax emulsion on canvas, 25 × 35 in. (63.5 × 88.9 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1947. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

Fig. 23  Top right, Arthur G. Dove, Rose and Locust Stump, 1943, wax emulsion on canvas, 24 × 32 in. (60.96 × 81.28 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1944. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Fig. 24  Bottom right, Arthur G. Dove, Sea II, 1925, chiffon over metal with sand, Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth.

Fig. 25  Arthur G. Dove, Rain, 1924, twigs and rubber cement on metal and glass, 49.5 × 39.7 cm (19½ × 155⁄8 in.), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Avalon Fund, 1997.1.1.

term “facsimile” evoking the passage of data from

cal notes and etched grooves, which are both them-

one state into another and, perhaps, by way of the

selves and something else, the medium registers

word “reasonable,” signaling the difficulty or impos-

simultaneously as itself (chiffon, glue) and what it

sibility of exact or precise transcription. Lake After-

stands for (water, paint, rain) in a pictorial system

noon (1935) (fig. 22), in which zoomorphic forms

that combines certain of the effects of resemblance

intersect and transmute, presents another example

and symbolic representation without behaving

of the translation motifs that populate Dove’s work.

exactly or properly as either. Dove tried out mul-

So too Seagull Motif (Violet and Green) (fig. 3), where

tiple monikers for these assemblages—­calling them

curving lines and ribbonlike forms that slice into

“portraits,” “things,” “stuff things,” “sculpture paint-

and spiral through the central cyclone shape mark

ings,” “painting sculptures,” “caricature paintings,”

transitions between tonalities and hues, and Rose

even, simply, “paintings”—­as if curious to see what

and Locust Stump (1943) (fig. 23), in which circular,

might happen to these works or to his understand-

rectangular, and biomorphic shapes shift in color

ing of their procedures when variously signified,

midway through their course.

this list of possible names evoking the transforma-

Dove experimented with media in the body of work known as his assemblages, the subject of

tions and substitutions resident in the assemblages themselves.64

chapter 4, interchanging materials in these works

As numerous scholars have described, Dove

so as to make, for example, chiffon look like streaks

sketched regularly, producing preparatory draw-

of paint or maybe waves and drips of glue like rain.

ings for many of his paintings (figs. 28, 30, 56, 113,

In Sea II (1925) (fig. 24), Dove stretched blue-­gray

122). In the 1930s, he began making small-­ scale

chiffon over a metal plate so as to approximate the

studies, usually three by four inches, some of them

look and feel of sea and sky as well as the effect of

surrounded by a frame of unmarked paper, in vari-

bold strokes produced by a paint-­soaked brush, and

ous media—­oil, wax emulsion, watercolor, gouache,

in Rain (1924) (fig. 25) dabs and strings of rubber

graphite, ink, or combinations thereof—­in which

cement combine with a cluster of twigs to repre-

he experimented with various configurations of

sent drops falling from the sky and beading on a

color and form (fig. 26). Some of the small-­scale

glass surface. What Dove does in works such as

studies, which Dove called “ideas,” contain motifs

these differs from the sign-­signifier relationship

that Dove excerpted for use in subsequent paint-

conventional to representational painting or sculp-

ings, and some of the studies map out wholesale

ture, where the properties of an artistic medium or

the compositions of larger works, as in the series

material are suppressed in order to approximate the

of ten sketches preliminary to Dove’s 1942 paint-

qualities particular to the thing depicted. Instead of

ing The Brothers.65 But many did not serve such a

illusion or representation, the key term for Dove’s

preparatory function. There are scores of these

assemblages must be “substitution.” Substituting

pocket-­size studies in various museum collections,

one material for another, with the first standing

a large portion of them the gift of Dove’s son, Wil-

in for the second, Dove’s assemblages perform an

liam, and they constitute a sizable and arresting

operation analogous to the procedures of musical

body of work. A good number of the studies bear

notation or shorthand, where graphic marks regis-

an exact date—­day, month, and year—­and many

ter sound and speech, and one similar to the proce-

include Dove’s notes-­to-­self, such as “egg yolk and

dures of phonography, where music translates into

oil color” and “dries in an hour,” or “wx and egg +

grooves on a plastic disc. Rather than suggesting a

tube oil.”66 Some of the studies depict recognizable

new entity or implying that the thing that does the

subjects, while others are fully abstract. All of them

replacing is identical to that which is replaced, sub-

have the feel of an artist meticulously and fascinat-

stitution connotes surrogacy or proxy, neither the

edly investigating the possibilities of form and the

same as nor something altogether new. Like musi-

properties of media, each study serving as a miniaCircles

39

Fig. 26  Arthur G. Dove, Untitled, 1942, oil on wove paper, 17.8 × 13.3 cm (7 × 5¼ in.), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Gift of William Dove, 1992.111.17.

ture laboratory for Dove. As a group they register

moved to Centerport, Dove made use of the panto-

the pleasure Dove took in making, every rectangle

graph housed at the state-­run Agricultural Experi-

of color an occasion for discovery and delight in the

ment Station, where he had become friendly with

potential of visual form.

one of the station’s scientists, the German botanist

In many of the cases in which the studies served

Bernard Rudolf Nebel.68 Dove was, of course, not

as preparatory, Dove used a magic lantern or a pan-

alone as an artist in his use of such a device, but

tograph to transfer their basic forms onto a primed

in conjunction with everything else I have detailed,

67

40

canvas. With four arms jointed together to form

the practice—­which entailed a translation of me-

a parallelogram, the pantograph device allowed

dium as well as of scale—­strikes me as significant,

Dove to move a pointer, attached to one arm of the

not least because the tracing of the pantograph’s

pantograph, along the contours of a small-­scale

pointer along the contours of a drawing or painted

image such that a pencil, attached to another arm,

sketch calls to mind a phonograph needle track-

traced an identical pattern at enlarged scale onto

ing a record’s grooves, with the result in each case

year residence a canvas surface. During his five-­

being data rendered in a new form. With a panto-

in Geneva, New York, from 1933 to 1938, before he

graphic transfer, of course, and unlike the needle-­

Chapter One

groove-­sound translation, the trace is quite close in

if unmet aim of the phonograph at the time, it was

appearance to the original image. Yet a notational

not necessarily Dove’s. Dove most likely created A

translation still occurs, one that registers at the

Reasonable Facsimile (fig. 21) by enlarging a sketch for

level of medium and scale but also by way of the

the picture with a pantograph, yet outspoken in its

slight deviations between small image and large

titular claim against exact duplication, the painting

painting, those accidental perturbations or jigs

makes clear Dove’s lack of interest in exact replica-

caused by an unsteady arm or an uneven surface

tion or translation.69

or perhaps purposeful steerings-­ off-­ course that

The configurations of line and form in Dove’s

one might think of as analogs to the extramusical

No Feather Pillow (1940) and its preparatory water-

sounds produced by the workings of a phonograph

color sketch do the same (figs. 27, 28). An excellent

apparatus, noises that are not part of an original

example of Dove’s sketch-­to-­painting translations,

musical performance but arise from the mechanism

the pair also comments on the operation of mechan-

itself and thus wind up constituting its technolog-

ical translation through which the painting, clearly

ical translation and transmutation (about which I

the result of a pantographic or lantern trace, came

will have more to say in chapter 3). In neither case—­

into being.70 At the right of each, an ellipse—­or a

phonograph nor pantograph—­did straightforward

disc in oblique perspective—­overlaps the edge of

imitation result. Although mimesis was the stated

a semirectangular form; at the exact point of in-

Fig. 27  Arthur G. Dove, No Feather Pillow, 1940, oil and wax emulsion on canvas, 16 × 22 in. (overall), Edward W. Root Bequest, 57.134, Munson-­Williams-­Proctor Arts Institute. Photo Credit: Munson-­Williams-­Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, NY / Art Resource, NY.

Circles

41

Fig. 28  Arthur G. Dove, No Feather Pillow, 1940, watercolor on wove paper, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Dr. and Mrs. Milton Lurie Kramer, Class of 1936 Collection; Bequest of Helen Kroll Kramer, 72.110.005. Photography courtesy of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University.

tersection, the line that forms the ellipse’s con-

blue, and indicating a pantographic or lantern

tour (marked by ticks in the sketch) changes into

transfer, most likely from the wax emulsion study

a series of dots. There is a color shift as well, from

(fig. 30), which is closer in basic structure to the

bright yellow to yellow-­tan, a change echoed in the

painting than is the watercolor and bears similar

painting (but not the watercolor) by the smaller el-

tick marks (in the other sketch, the line looks liked

lipse sitting astride the line that marks the point of

barbed wire). In Sun, the oblique tilt of the ellipse

contact and transformation and that shifts in tone

may evoke the curvature of the earth, or perhaps

from light gray to dark. In each image the contour

the surface of a body of water reflecting the sun as

of the ellipse is broken, its upper half, the one con-

it crosses the sky. This point-­counterpoint, along

tained in the semirectangle, and its lower portion

with the idea of reflection itself, draws attention

not quite matching up on the left-­hand side. Here,

to the inexact relationship between study and fin-

shifts in color, shape, or line that occur at inter-

ished painting as established by the mechanical

sections and points of encounter, akin to those in

transfer of the one to the other. The shifts in color

the works discussed above, combine with this mis-

that occur as the ellipse encounters the contours of

matching of forms in order to put front and center

the series of green-­brown bands that connote water

the simultaneously imitative and transformative

or land similarly call to mind the transmutations of

process of translation.

translation, as do the tonal shifts from dark orange

A similar ellipse in the lower right of Dove’s Sun (1943) also emblematizes translation (fig. 29). Dove

42

to apple green in the bands that surround the sky-­ bound sun.

made two studies preliminary to Sun, one in water-

In Sun, Dove’s signature, rendered in brown but

color and ink and the other, like the painting, in

adorned with a light-­green aura or reflective shine—­

wax emulsion. A pencil line adorned with V-­shaped

strokes of paint that shadow the curves and straight-

tick marks—­one to the right of the sun’s center and

aways of his script—­serves as a badge for the pro-

one to the left—­undulates across the upper half of

cess of reflection depicted in the painting (fig. 31).

the finished work, dividing the central orb into un-

In that it visually summarizes or consolidates the

equal halves, one plum colored, the other midnight

subject of the picture, collapsing a complex image

Chapter One

Fig. 29  Above, Arthur G. Dove, Sun, 1943, wax emulsion on canvas, 24 × 32 in. (61 × 81.4 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Suzanne M. Smith, 1989.83.3. Fig. 30  Left, Arthur G. Dove, Sun, 1943, wax emulsion on paper mounted on paperboard, 3 × 4 in. (7.6 × 10.2 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Suzanne M. Smith, 1989.83.2.

Fig. 31  Detail from Arthur G. Dove, Sun, 1943, wax emulsion on canvas, 24 × 32 in. (61 × 81.4 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Suzanne M. Smith, 1989.83.3.

44

of reflection into a short sequence of four letters,

as he does in Sun, using two pigments: metallic sil-

Dove’s signature also serves as an emblem or sign

ver paint for the letters and a coppery red at the

of translation. In fact, Dove’s signature performs

edges, to highlight the letters’ twists and turns (fig.

this function throughout his body of work, regu-

33). This combination reiterates two of the work’s

larly miming or recapitulating, in radically reduced

dominant hues, but the metallic paint also regis-

form, the chief subject or formal properties of a

ters the fact that Dove rendered his composition on

painting, much as shorthand reduces the complex-

a metal ground, a steel plate, to be exact. In other

ity and variety of language to an abbreviated series

paintings, Dove’s signature appears to partake in

of simplified marks, including curvilinear notations

the scene, registering a line or a form as if acted on

that bear a close resemblance to the arcs and tilts of

by it, much like the way a mechanical instrument

Dove’s own handwriting. Like many artists before

registers input, such as a telegraph key registering

him, including Frederic Church, Winslow Homer,

strokes or a phonograph needle registering grooves,

and Thomas Eakins from the American context,

or the manner in which a device indexes a condi-

Dove’s signature serves a purpose beyond signifying

tion by itself changing form, such as the expansion

authorship. Playing with his own name in the space

or contraction of mercury in a thermometer, say, or

of his pictures is yet another way to announce his

the motion of a barometer’s arrow around its dial. In

interest in language and to explore the properties

Young Old Master (1946), for instance, Dove’s name

and operations of systems of notation and commu-

tracks the curving border between a blue shape and

nication, translation chief among them.71

a brown one, as if lifted up and tossed about by the

In some cases, as in Moon (fig. 5) and Summer

line on which it sits (figs. 34, 35). Similarly, in Poz-

(1935) (fig. 32), Dove’s signature straightforwardly

zuoli Red, Dove’s signature appears at once buoyed

recapitulates the predominant contours, forms, or

by and pressed under a flow of reddish-­brown (fig.

colors of a composition. In Moon, Dove extends and

36). In Sun on the Lake (1938), a wave cradles Dove’s

bends the first and last letters of his name so that

name, making it appear to bob in the current.72

they mirror the horizontal arc of the foreground

And in Thunder Shower (1940), the signature, placed

slope, and in Summer, he repeats the upward thrust

against two jagged strips of pale yellow-­ green,

of the central dolphin-­like shape in the decisive in-

crackles with the energy and force of the lightning

cline of the lowercase “d.” In his sunrise series (fig.

bolt depicted above it (figs. 37, 38). I have already

7) and in numerous other works, Dove renders his

noted that in Dove’s R 25-­A (fig. 20), his signature

signature using a principal color from the compo-

shifts in hue at the site of an encounter between

sition. Dove fashions his signature in Telegraph Pole,

two shapes, each one a different shade of blue.

Chapter One

Fig. 32  Left, Arthur G. Dove, Summer, 1935, oil on canvas, 63.82 × 86.36 cm (251⁄8 × 34 in.), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of the William H. Lane Foundation, 1990.405. Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Fig. 33  Right, detail from Arthur G. Dove, Telegraph Pole, 1929, oil, metallic paint, and pencil on steel plate, 71.1 × 50.5 cm (28 × 197⁄8 in.), Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.535, The Art Institute of Chicago.

Likewise, in Another Arrangement (1944), dark blue

with the boat, washed to shore on the same wave

letters—­the “d,” “o,” and a snippet of the “v”—­shift

that caused the ship to founder.

to lighter blue at the point of intersection between

Such signature play occurs throughout Dove’s

an oblong stretch of the lighter blue and a plane of

body of work from 1930 onward, making the assidu-

the darker hue (figs. 39, 40). In Red, Olive and Yellow

ousness with which he used his signature to register

(1941), the two-­toned signature—­light brown with

the form and content of his pictures a striking fea-

a dark-­brown shadow or aura—­echoes the overall

ture of his practice. Those canvases that feature a

earthy tonality of the painting but also registers the

nondescript or neutral signature are in the minority,

two-­toned wing of the painting’s seeming protago-

suggesting that Dove endeavored in the space of

nist, a bird, with the “v” in “Dove” reiterating the V

his paintings to establish a relationship between

shape of the bird’s wing, and the word itself, “dove,”

the paintings’ pictorial vocabulary and another

of course calling to mind a creature from the avian

notational form, in this case writing, and that he

realm (figs. 41, 42). And in Ferry Boat Wreck (1931), red

imagined that this relationship was constituted by

letters painted over black that appear to stand out

conversion or abbreviation, operations associated

in relief register physical destruction and an air of

with the process of translation and, by extension,

disaster while condensing into script the painting’s

communication. This is the case not least because

most striking motif, concentric circles of red and

the point-­counterpoint established between com-

black that signify the violent event (figs. 43, 44). De-

position and condensing signature produces a kind

spite the sculptural effect created by the juxtaposi-

of internal dialogue, a back-­and-­forth between pic-

tion of red and black, Dove’s signature here appears

torial parts. By 1930, Dove almost always placed his

to exist in the same slanting plane that designates

signature at the center of the lower edge of his can-

a portion of land near the wreck, marking it, at least

vas, rather than in the lower left or right corner. Do-

fictionally, as part of the depicted scene rather than

ing so was of course not unprecedented, but given

an accoutrement of the canvas support. The effect

the manner in which his signatures engage their

is one of the signature having run aground along

pictorial surround, they can be said to perform the Circles

45

Fig. 34  Left, Arthur G. Dove, Young Old Master, 1946, oil on canvas, 10 × 11 in. (25.4 × 27.94 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1946. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

Fig. 35  Right, top, detail from Arthur G. Dove, Young Old Master, 1946, oil on canvas, 10 × 11 in. (25.4 × 27.94 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1946. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Fig. 36  Right, bottom, detail from Arthur G. Dove, Pozzuoli Red, 1941, wax emulsion on canvas, 221⁄8 × 36 in. (56.1975 × 91.44 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1941. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

Fig. 37  Above, Arthur G. Dove, Thunder Shower, 1940, oil and wax emulsion on canvas, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, 1967.190. Fig. 38  Left, detail from Arthur G. Dove, Thunder Shower, 1940, oil and wax emulsion on canvas, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, 1967.190.

Fig. 39  Arthur G. Dove, Another Arrangement, 1944, oil on canvas, 68.5 × 91.4 cm (2615⁄16 × 36 in.), Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, 1398. Photo by Peter Jacobs.

Fig. 40  Detail from Arthur G. Dove, Another Arrangement, 1944, oil on canvas, 68.5 × 91.4 cm (2615⁄16 × 36 in.), Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, 1398. Photo by Peter Jacobs.

Fig. 41  Above, Arthur G. Dove, Red, Olive and Yellow, 1941, wax emulsion on canvas, 15 × 21 in. (38.1 × 53.34 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1945. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Fig. 42  Left, detail from Arthur G. Dove, Red, Olive and Yellow, 1941, wax emulsion on canvas, 15 × 21 in. (38.1 × 53.34 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1945. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

Fig. 43  Arthur G. Dove, Ferry Boat Wreck, 1931, oil on canvas, 181⁄8 × 301⁄8 in. (46 × 76.5 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, purchase, with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Roy R. Neuberger, 56.21. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art.

Fig. 44  Detail from Arthur G. Dove, Ferry Boat Wreck, 1931, oil on canvas, 181⁄8 × 301⁄8 in. (46 × 76.5 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, purchase, with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Roy R. Neuberger, 56.21. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art.

function of a caption, as in a book or magazine illustration or a scientific diagram. In such a manner,

50

Circles

the caption assists in making legible to the viewer

It should be clear by now that Dove was an art-

what the painting presents in visual terms, and thus

ist with more than a passing fancy for questions

distributes the dialogue that unfolded in Dove’s

of language and expression, and that he set out

painting, signapictures among three entities—­

in his work to explore multiple varieties of nota-

ture, and viewer—­rather than two or, to be precise,

tional systems, those representational codes and

among four, if one includes the artist himself.73

forms—­letters, words, numbers, images, diagrams,

Chapter One

symbols, sounds—­employed in the articulation and

annotations make clear that the text had an impact

communication of information. The very process of

on his ideas about color and its utility in art and,

encoding—­that is, the transmission or translation

also, that Andrews inspired certain of the experi-

of said information from one form or state into an-

ments with color that he described in his diary and

other, with exchange between entities as the end

letters.75 Yet the Andrews text played a role beyond

result—­clearly also captivated Dove. The concen-

the merely practical or instructional in solidifying

tric circle motif that pervades Dove’s body of work,

Dove’s thinking about his project and about his

appearing throughout his oeuvre in the context of

­circles in particular.

a wide range of subjects, from suns and moons to

Andrews was a trained chemist and addressed

ferryboat wrecks, foghorns, and jazz, itself served as

Color and Its Application to Printing to all practical

a predominant emblem for this set of procedures.

users of color, especially artists and printers. In

As is evident, Dove employed the circle motif to vi-

the book, he combined chapters on the physical

sualize the nonvisual, the unseen, or the invisible

properties of light and color with chapters on color

(light or sound waves, gravity, and evaporation, for

perception and the laws governing color’s visual

example). But his ambitions for it were grander

effects; the manual closes with several chapters

than this. He also meant for his concentric circle

on the printing process itself, as informed by the

motifs to incarnate the very processes, translation

information and arguments of the preceding sec-

and communication, by which such visualization

tions. The second chapter, entitled “Light and the

occurred. The subject matter of these works, trans-

Spectrum,” begins with a discussion of the physical

mission and contact between entities, between the

properties of light. The metaphor Andrews employs

sun and the earth, for instance, or between a fog-

in this chapter to describe light’s wave motion,

horn and a receiving ear, vigorously underscores

which he says he borrowed from the Nobel Prize–­

this intent. I return to the circle motif now in order

winning physicist ­ Albert Abraham Michelson,

to begin to elucidate just what Dove had in mind for

points directly to Dove’s circles. The wave motion

his paintings and assemblages when he set about

of light, Andrews writes, following Michelson, is

making translation and communication and, more

akin to the wave motion of sound: “Doubtless there

broadly, the materials, operations, and limits of lan-

are but few who have not watched with interest

guage and expression—­human, technological, and

the circular waves produced by a stone cast into a

otherwise—­a focus of his practice.

still pond of water, the ever-­widening circles going

To start, why circles? The beginning of an an-

farther and farther from the center of disturbance,

swer may be found in Dove’s preoccupation with

until they are lost in the distance or break on the

the properties of his paint. As is well known, Dove

shore.”76 With this description, Andrews conjures

took great interest in the basic materials of the art-

an image of the familiar pattern initiated by a hole

ist’s craft, especially the qualities and capacities of

punched in water at a plunging rock’s point of im-

the medium of paint, and throughout his career

pact, an emphatic point of origin that then expands

he devoted himself to exploring the character and

into a series of concentric circles, each one larger

potential of various pigments and solutions, in-

than the one that preceded it. Such a ringed pattern

cluding mixtures he concocted on his own. To this

oscillates between being an impression of succes-

end, he owned and regularly consulted a number of

sive rings and an image of a series of circular bands,

technical manuals, annotating some of them, and

the latter suggested by the successive intervals of

he kept up a regular and detailed discussion of his

ripple-­free water between each expanding ring.

experiments with media in his diary entries and 74

It goes without saying that the image sum-

correspondence. His collection of how-­to books

moned by Andrews accords well with the look and

included Color and Its Application to Printing (1911) by

implied behavior of Dove’s concentric circles. Dove

E. C. Andrews. Dove annotated this volume, and his

constructed these circles in order to depict sources Circles

51

52

of light and sound, including the sun, moon, and

This insight allows one to grasp two very im-

foghorns, as well as the movement of that light and

portant qualities that attend Dove’s concentric

sound through time and space. For both Andrews

circle motifs. First of all, Dove, like Andrews, in-

and Dove, then, concentric circles serve as a device

tended his concentric circles to act as a metaphor:

for visualizing something that the human eye on

a metaphor for wave motion, of course, but also for

its own cannot detect. But if one understands the

the process of translation. For both Andrews and

phenomenal sources in Dove’s paintings (celestial

Dove, circles comprise instances of translation.

bodies, sound-­making entities) as analogous to An-

Andrews translates the idea of wave motion into

drews’s cast stone, and the phenomena themselves

both a verbal description and a mental image of

(light and sound traveling through air) to be anal-

circular ripples, and Dove translates the same idea

ogous to Andrews’s ripples, another critical, and

into pictures of concentric bands. Each in his own

more fundamental, aspect of Dove’s circles, one I

way, then, converts a natural phenomenon into a

have only alluded to thus far, stands out in relief.

graphic representation, creating a picture for use

With some of his circles, Dove implied infinite

in conveying something without native pictorial or

traverse, and with others he evoked a finite span

graphic qualities, as when a composer renders mu-

between source and recipient, as with the earth

sical sound as musical notation. The idea of a con-

receiving the sun’s light or a human ear receiving

version is key here. Dove’s concentric circles, as a

a sound. In either case, Dove endeavored to show

graphic metaphor that calls to mind a familiar ver-

not just the fact of traverse, but the mechanisms

bal metaphor that itself serves to translate words

by which that traverse occurred and the manner in

into a mental image, thus mimic the procedure of

which it registered its presence and motion on its

translation as performed by figurative language. As

surround as it moved and, ultimately, on its final

a result, these circles call vigorous attention to their

destination. As did Andrews, who characterized

own translating capacity, suggesting their status,

the effect of concentric rippling as the result of the

for Dove, as a conversion device akin to a figure of

disturbance and displacement of liquid through

speech or a musical score.

the introduction of a foreign body that disrupts

Second, in both Andrews’s text and Dove’s im-

the surface tension of a body of water, causing the

ages, the phenomenon of transmission figured by

initial disturbance to propagate as waves, Dove

concentric circles is posited not simply as a matter

with his concentric circle motif conjures a fluid dy-

of motion between here and there but also as en-

namics of transmission. Originating from a circular

counter or exchange, such as a stone breaking the

center that evokes the initial stone’s throw into a

surface of a pond, or a wave breaking on the shore,

pond, Dove’s ever-­expanding bands, in mimicking

physically shaping that shore by displacing dirt or

this originating circle form even as they undergo

sand even as the shore in turn materially shapes the

perturbations as they propagate, coming into con-

wave by slowing its course and causing it to crest,

tact as they do with other forms and intervening

spill, and collapse. Indeed, the ever-­widening and

sections of paint, also articulate their status as

proliferating rings or bands in both Dove’s paint-

successively displaced matter, this despite the fact

ings and in Andrews’s text articulate matter mov-

that they intend to stand for something putatively

ing from one place to another, but they also suggest

impalpable—­that is, for light, sound, or air. By mak-

a sort of back-­and-­forth, an interaction rather than

ing these circles behave materially, as does water,

a single act. Like the moment of contact between

and appearing to approximate with them the famil-

wave and shore in Andrews’s example and the

iar idea of radiating ripples in a pond, Dove insists

consequent mutual reshaping of the two, the rela-

on marking traverse in his pictures as a mechanical

tionships that Dove constructs between his rings

phenomenon, one that unfolds in a physical uni-

and bands and the other parts of his pictures—­

verse governed by physical laws.

between moon and earth, or sun and sea or plant

Chapter One

life—­call to mind the material effect produced by

Fundamental to one of the most proliferate

transmission on a receiving entity, the physical

forms of Dove’s pictures, then, was the idea and

contact that the process of transmission almost

instantiation of communication, understood as a

always entails. Dove thus configures transmis-

mutually affecting transaction or exchange bet­

sion as conspicuously transactional, as an action

ween entities or parts, a transfer that produced a

that transpires between entities and constitutes

structure that was essentially relational in nature,

material and multi­directional exchange, resulting

forming as it did a conceptual and material net-

in a connection or connections being formed. As

work of interrelated entities. If language, broadly

a chief consequence of this postulation, Dove af-

understood as any system of communication or

firms translation—­itself an act of transmission—­as

notation, preoccupied Dove, it was his investment

a matter of interchange, a conversion that occurs

in the product of language’s translating opera-

between entities that leaves both affected or altered

tions that underpinned much of what he strove to

by the exchange, thus transpiring chiefly as a rela-

do in his art. It was the operations and offspring

tionship, the formulation of a bond between things.

of language—­networks of relations as well as the

In this way Dove figures both transmission and

very idea of relationality itself—­that Dove sought

translation in his pictures as a matter of commu-

to install in order to explore them in his work. For

nication, where encounters between entities occur

this the concentric circle motif served as a princi-

through the transmission of phenomena such as

pal tool. As a visual form, it efficiently and compel-

light and sound and wind up resembling the form

lingly configured the idea of relationality in picto-

and structure of human converse, again, with ef-

rial terms. Yet given its implied multidirectionality

fects of encounter and exchange as the correspond-

(center to periphery or vice versa, radial rotation or

ing links. Take as an example the trunk-­like form in

rotation of the whole), as well as its conventionality

Moon (fig. 5) that spans the distance between moon

in the period as a figure for movement and contact

and earth. This stretching rectangular slab evokes

in space and time, the motif would have induced,

both the traverse of light waves through the air and

not just represented, these operations in the space

the material effect of the moon’s gravitational force

of one of Dove’s works. Furthermore, the circle, as

on the earth, the moon making contact with the

one of Dove’s exalted conic sections, served to liter-

earth as earthbound viewers in turn commune with

alize the concepts of connection and relation, for a

it. The moon of course does not in a literal sense

circle comes into being as a shape by way of the in-

communicate with the earth, but Dove’s emphasis

tersection of a plane with a cone, and it consists at

on connection, contact, and rapport in this paint-

once as an abstract concept and as a physical entity.

ing and in others like it suggests that he wished

Golden Sun (1937), Naples Yellow Morning (1935),

in his work to construe the relationship between

and Dawn III (1932) are exemplary in this regard (figs.

two things as not simply a matter of association or

9, 10, 45). In Golden Sun, a painting once owned by

spatial relation but, rather, as one of material en-

O’Keeffe and displayed at her Abiquiu, New Mexico,

counter and material exchange, a type of transac-

residence, Dove groups three forms along a diago-

tion he articulated in his assemblages through his

nal axis that runs from upper left to lower right.77

switchbacking between materials, chiffon to paint,

The topmost form, the sun, consists of a series of

say, or glue to rain. By installing the properties of

yellow and white concentric circles, with a bright-­

communication—­contact, transfer, mutual reshap-

yellow circle at its core. Beneath this, concentric

ing—­if not the phenomenon itself, in his works in

ellipses radiate from dark green at center to bright

such a manner, Dove created the visual equivalent

white at the perimeter. This collection of greens

of substantial converse as well as a pictorial version

and whites, likely indicating plant life, appears

of its source, translation, with the concentric circle

supported by five horizontally undulating bands, all

form, again, as the presiding explanatory motif.

shades of black or gray, that together call to mind a Circles

53

54

cross section of striated rock or soil. Dove indicates

One could also compare Dove’s lines in Golden Sun,

a material relationship among these three forms in

which look very much like shallow incisions even

numerous ways. The sun’s outermost circle presses

though they are not, to the precisely etched grooves

into the perimeter of the plant form, which in turn

in a phonograph record, an association augmented

nestles snugly within the cradle formed by the gray

by the sun’s concentric circular bands. Perhaps

and black bands. Streaks of yellow paint that orig-

Dove wished to insert, through an allusion to the

inate in the sun bathe the lower forms in radiant

translating operations of the phonograph, yet an-

light, and the upward incline of the elliptical bands

other sign of translation and its various forms of

at center connotes the upward growth of a plant as

contact and interconnection into the mix. And be-

made possible by the sun and also gives the impres-

cause the razor-­sharp lines in Golden Sun were most

sion that the plant is stretching skyward to reach

likely rendered with the aid of a straightedge, one

the source of its sustenance. Three precisely drawn

might imagine such activation of a device in the act

lines reinforce the implied connections and mo-

of painting as akin to Dove’s material activation of

ments of contact among the painting’s parts. One

a machine, the phonograph, in the process of paint-

line originates from within the sun’s core and ter-

ing from records, or the pantograph, in the process

minates toward the bottom of the plant. The other

of transferring sketch to canvas.

two share a point of origin in the white band that

Reinforcing this reading is the fact that, like Sun

encircles the sun’s center, and they then diverge as

Drawing Water, which depicts the transmutation of

they descend; one stops just right of the plant’s cen-

water into air and cloud, Golden Sun renders an anal-

tral ellipse, and the other continues on, penetrating

ogous process, that of photosynthesis, the conver-

the gray and black bands before it runs its course.

sion of sunlight into energy and food for plants, as

Most portions of these lines sit at the surface of the

evoked by Dove in Naples Yellow Morning (fig. 10). Na-

canvas, but in a few places, Dove painted over them,

ples Yellow Morning configures a relationship among

making it appear as if the lines weave in and out of

a concentric circle sun, gray-­ banded clouds and

their painted surround. The rightmost line breaks

haze, and concentric circle plants, diagramming the

toward its base, stopping short just before it hits

material interchange between the celestial sphere

the gray band and resuming as it intersects with

and life on earth. The parts of this painting—­the

this band; another shorter line, adjacent to but not

sun, the tree forms, and the wisps and bulges of

continuous with the longer line, patches the break.

cloud—­behave as if engaged in conversation with

These effects of weaving and stoppage mimic the

one another, or at least involved in some sort of ex-

behavior of light when it intersects with the earth’s

change, one similar to the back-­and-­forth among

atmosphere and earthbound matter: light’s im-

forms in Golden Sun and evocative of that painting’s

peded trajectory through clouds, fog, or haze and the

interconnecting, groove-­ like lines. The topmost

refraction and scattering that results, for instance,

cloud form in Naples Yellow Morning nudges the sun,

or light waves reflected off of a solid surface and

desirous of its attention, and the sun nuzzles back,

forced to change their course, as represented by the

its right edge stretching a bit beyond what would

jig of the rightmost line. It is tempting to see Golden

be a circle’s exact perimeter so as to commune with

Sun as a redaction of Sun Drawing Water (fig. 2), with

the cloud. The wisp of haze or mist in the middle

the diagonal lines and upward-­inclining ellipses in

inclines toward the trees, gesturing for their atten-

Golden Sun an alternate version of the watery cyl-

tion, the up-­and-­down curvilinear bend of the wisp

inders that connect earth and sky in the earlier

echoing the trees’ circular arcs. These two trees tip

work. It is also tempting to see the discontinuous

toward one another as if sharing a joke, and they

and breaking lines as emblems of translation’s mis-

effectively stare out of the canvas, suggesting that

fires, figurations of the transmutations that occur

they have come to attention on hearing a viewer’s

in the process of transmitting or communicating.

approach and peer curiously beyond the picture’s

Chapter One

frame to see just what and who that viewer is. As he

circle forms, themselves connected by a chain-­link

does with the aid of his captioning signatures, Dove

of ovals that extends from the sun to its reflection

here creates a dialogue among multiple entities,

on the ground. Treelike shapes stretch upward, as

artist included, the latter posited as the facilitator

if responding to the sun’s heat, quivering under its

of a network of encounters among sun, sky, earth,

hot, melting glare. Like the tree forms in Naples Yel-

plant life, painting, and viewer, what would result if

low Morning, these plant personages appear called

the linking straight edge of Golden Sun assumed hu-

to attention by something or someone outside the

man form. A similar web of relations arises among

scene, transforming a view of nature into a web

the forms in Dawn III (fig. 45), in which Dove pins

of pictorial and extrapictorial encounter and ex-

sky to earth by way of reverberating concentric

change.

Fig. 45  Arthur G. Dove, Dawn III, 1932, oil on canvas, 22 × 22 in. (55.9 × 55.9 cm), Mary and Sylvan Lang Collection, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, USA. Photograph © McNay Art Museum / Art Resource, NY.

Circles

55

In both Silver Sun and Sunrise, Northport Harbor,

are about suns rising or setting, also puts the viewer

Dove uses the concentric circle motif to create an

in mind of the material relationship between the

analogous sort of dialogue, pairing his sky-­bound

earth and the heavens which in turn highlights the

suns with their reversed, water-­bound or earth-

fact that one’s sense of the latter (the heavens) is

bound reflections (figs. 6, 8). In Silver Sun, he con-

always relational (as opposed to straightforwardly

verts large to small and a dark center and lighter pe-

empirical), a function of the relative positions

rimeter to a white core bounded by a band of black.

between here and there. This pairing also points up

Similarly, in Sunrise, Northport Harbor, he replaces a

the fact that this relationship arises out of literal

white-­yellow center for a dark-­orange one, switch-

contact, through an encounter between celestial

ing the colors of inner and outer so as to create a

light waves and the ocular apparatus, with a form of

diminutive sun substitute. By using a motif of re-

material as well as visual exchange—­the experience

flection to evoke not mirroring but displacement or

of perception—­the end result.

transposition, Dove signals his interest in the trans-

What is more, by virtue of calling to mind in

lations and transmutations endemic to myriad sign

Silver Sun and Sunrise, Northport Harbor the idea of a

systems—­with the sun as referent, the reflection

reversed or negative image as produced by the ac-

as nonmimetic, transmuted sign. Such a pairing,

tion of light, Dove evokes a specific instrument or

which makes these paintings as much about the

mechanism of transmission, photography, that was

idea of a relationship between two terms as they

conceived of by Dove’s close associates, including

Fig. 46  Alfred Stieglitz, Music—­A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs, No. X, 1922, gelatin silver print, 23 × 18.5 cm (91⁄16 × 75⁄16 in.), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.3.838. © 2015 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

56

Chapter One

Stieglitz and Paul Strand, as a translating rather

contingency. We have been hoping to be able to

than a mimetic medium. Photography, they under-

paint our interior all white for some time. It looks

stood, reconfigured the stuff of the world, such as

now as though it would have to be done soon. The

clouds and porch shadows, into a new and at times

walls of this old post office are supposed to be white,

strange visual language for use in, as Strand put

but scrubbing did not make them as pure as they

78

it, the creation of a “living expression.” Although

should be.” A few weeks later, he wrote to Stieglitz

photography was of course not Dove’s medium of

that “the photographs are marvelous things to have

choice, he regularly took photographs, some to use

on the wall. We have been very happy with them.

as models for his illustrations and others to doc-

New ideas have come since they have been here. It

ument his life and his relationships with family

is great to have such fine company.”83

and friends; he also had photographs made of his 79

Given the importance of Stieglitz’s photographs

own work. Dove’s contribution to the MSS issue

for Dove, one surmises that the silver metal-­based

on photography in 1922, despite its coy obfuscating,

paint in Dove’s Silver Sun served in part as an ana-

indicates an interest in the medium, as does his fer-

log for the chemicals employed in the photographic

vent admiration for Stieglitz’s work. A show at the

process. Relevant here is the painting by Dove now

Anderson Galleries in April of 1923 included a group

called Sunrise in Northport Harbor (1929), which is

of images Stieglitz titled “Music—­A Sequence of

strikingly similar in appearance and effect to his

Ten Cloud Photographs” (fig. 46), comprising work

Sunrise, Northport Harbor (fig. 8), a painting that

Stieglitz had initiated at his home on Lake George

also dates to 1929, although Dove used metal, rather

80

in 1922. Dove greatly admired these photographs

than canvas, for the ground of Sunrise in Northport

as well as their progeny, the Equivalents, made over

Harbor, and incorporated the reflective warp of the

the following decade or more, so much so that he

metal sheet into his rendition of the sunlit sky in

and Torr purchased an Equivalent print in 1942, an

this work.84 This suggests that metal may have been

acquisition that was accompanied by Stieglitz’s gift

very much on his mind when he created the paired

of a second print from the series. When Dove sent

big and little suns in the other Northport scene. The

Stieglitz a check for $200 to cover the purchase of

Equivalents, so admired by Dove, were gelatin silver

one print, to be chosen by Stieglitz, he wrote that

prints; the final image consisted of metallic silver

81

he and Torr had “been hoping for this for years.”

embedded in a gelatin coating.85 With his metallic

This statement echoed one made a month earlier, in

paint, Dove likely paid homage to Stieglitz and to

another letter to Stieglitz, in which Dove wrote of

photography more generally, a proposition rein-

his wish to acquire one of his mentor’s works: “We

forced by the assemblage portrait of Stieglitz that

both feel so very glad to have this fine last num-

Dove created in 1924 (fig. 47), shortly after the 1923

ber of this ‘Twice a Year’ with the reproductions of

exhibition of Stieglitz’s early cloud photographs.

the ‘Equivalents.’—­Of which we are going to have

In the portrait, Dove assembled a lens, a mirrored

[one], if anything tangible happens to make it pos-

glass plate, a watch spring (toward the top of the

sible. It has been on our minds for some years, and

plate), a clock spring (in the lower left quadrant of

it is part of our plan.”82 The two Equivalents, once in

the plate), and a strip of steel wool on a plywood

Dove’s hands, decisively shaped his thinking about

ground. The reflective plate—­ transparent glass

his own art. “The work is going fine now,” he wrote

backed with a metal coating—­calls to mind the

to Stieglitz. “The photographs really are a great

metals (silver, platinum, and palladium) and the

help. . . . We are enjoying the photographs and lov-

metal-­coated plates or paper commonly used by

ing them.” He continued by explaining how their

both Stieglitz and Strand in the printing process. By

presence in his Centerport residence transformed

attaching the metal springs and the steel wool to the

his conception of that space and its suitability for

plate, Dove fashioned a direct association between

the display of art: “They have brought up another

metal and photography, suggesting that metal figCircles

57

Fig. 47  Arthur G. Dove, Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz, 1924, assemblage of lens, mirrored glass plate, springs, steel wool, glue, and nails mounted on board, 157⁄8 × 121⁄8 in. (40.3 × 30.8 cm), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA, purchase, 193.1955. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

ured largely in his conception of the photographic

surface of the board support, further evoking Stieg-

process, regardless of the actual process itself. The

litz’s practice, and photography more generally, by

mirror image of the metal springs cast in the plate’s

referring to the smoky, atmospheric effects of many

reflective surface solidifies this association—­metal

of his photographs and to the camera’s translating

is here both the subject (springs) and the medium

effects.86

(the mirror’s metal backing) of representation—­as

Dove’s assemblage portrait of Rebecca and Paul

does the fact that the uneven and eroded coating of

Strand (fig. 48), titled Painted Forms, Friends when it

the plate transforms the look of the springs, much

was exhibited in 1925 at the Seven Americans exhibi-

as Stieglitz hoped his photographs would trans-

tion along with the assemblage portrait of Stieglitz,

mute the objective appearances of the observable

also includes a metal spring as well as other metal

world. Dove smoked the lens before gluing it to the

items: rods, wire, nails, a fence staple, and a disc.87

Fig. 48  Arthur G. Dove, Untitled (Portrait of Rebecca and Paul Strand), ca. 1925, oil paint, metal rods, wire, nails, metal spring, fence staple, metal disk, and wood mounted on panel, 4¾ × 51⁄8 in. (12.1 × 13 cm), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Paul Strand, 1974, 1974-­175-­1.

Circles

59

Here again Dove draws a connection between pho-

I should add that the small size of Dove’s assem-

tography and metal, and he does so in conjunction

blage portraits of Stieglitz and the Strands more

with three iterations of the concentric circle motif,

closely approaches the dimensions of the photog-

that summa of translation associated in Silver Sun

raphers’ original prints than it does the easel-­scale

and Sunrise, Northport Harbor with the photographic

of contemporaneous painting, including the bulk

process. In the Strand portrait, Dove glued a two-­

of Dove’s own works; the same can be said for the

pronged piece of wood, striped with blue, to the sur-

diminutive size of Golden Sun which, at around thir-

face of a rectangular panel. Adjacent to this bit of

teen by nine inches, was an unusually small paint-

wood, he attached a circle shape adorned with rings

ing for Dove. Thus scale, along with metal, signifies

of black, plum, red, and yellow. Beneath the circle,

the relationship Dove wished to articulate between

he attached at an angle a spirally grooved metal rod,

both his person and his work and Stieglitz and the

probably a screw bolt shaft, its lowest end abutting

Strands, both in terms of the likeness in size of

the upper incline of a partially coiled metal spring,

his paintings and assemblages to theirs and also

likely from a clock. A fence staple, painted dark blue,

because scale automatically posits a relationship

appears to prop up a second spiraled bolt shaft that

between one thing and another, one underscored

is wedged in between the clock spring and a metal

by the work’s original title, Painted Forms, Friends,

disc that Dove has tacked to the panel and painted

which triangulates paint, things, and friendship.

with concentric circles of red, orange, yellow, and

Such a connection among media, people, and ex-

white. Rust disrupts in places the pigment adorn-

perience arises in the assemblage portrait of Stieg-

ing this circle, making the disc’s surface resemble

litz, as well. “The one of you was on vellum with a

dry and cracked earth. Dove divided the whole

smoked lens,” Dove explained to Stieglitz, “suggest-

into triangular sections with intersecting wire and

ing what I saw about you when you were speaking

painted lines, and he filled in these sections with a

of your mother to Bloch the musician at your broth-

range of yellows, blues, grays, and greens. Delicate

er’s house.”88 As a property Dove would have associ-

flares or spikes of blue-­black radiate from one of the

ated with a pantographic transfer, scale also served

clock spring’s lower curves, a crimson aura edges

for him as a figure for the translating operations

the panel, and the whole assortment rests on a

responsible for creating relational bonds.

wooden base fashioned out of a strip of molding or trim stained dark brown. Together with the coiled spring’s tracking of the curve of the sun-­like disc,

60

Waves

the point-­counterpoint effect produced by this disc

As should be clear by now, in almost all his works

and the circles at the heart of the spring—­akin to

that feature the concentric circle motif or itera-

the negative-­like reversals in Silver Sun and Sunrise,

tions of it, such as the actual springs he attached

Northport Harbor—­establishes a material connec-

to a painting and to several assemblages, Dove em-

tion between the spring and the disc, or between

ployed this motif to envision the traverse of light

metal and sun, and fashions the spring’s outward

waves between sun or moon and earth as well as

coil as rays of light streaking toward the earth’s

the various actions of waves of light when they

surface, an effect underscored by the lines bursting

encountered and engaged earthly terrain or ma-

from the outermost coil. By making light waves and

chines, including cameras. In this guise, the motif

metal of a piece, Dove further suggests the translat-

both represented and actualized the associations

ing mechanism of photography, for of course it was

and relationships among the phenomena and en-

the relationship as comprised by physical interac-

tities involved in these exchanges as well as the in-

tion among light and the equipment and materials

terchanging mechanisms by which these networks

employed in the photographic process that con-

of relations came about, and also incarnated the

stituted the creation of a photograph at the time.

operations of encounter and exchange as such. For

Chapter One

Fig. 49  Arthur G. Dove, Silver Tanks, 1929, oil and metallic paint on canvas, mounted on panel, 54.6 × 77.5 cm (21½ × 30½ in.), Gift of Leo S. Guthman, 1996.793, The Art Institute of Chicago.

Fig. 50  Arthur G. Dove, Silver Tanks and Moon, 1930, oil and metallic paint on canvas, 233⁄16 × 181⁄16 in. (71.6 × 45.9 cm), Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949, 1949-­18-­3.

Fig. 51  Arthur G. Dove, City Moon, 1938, oil and wax emulsion on canvas, 347⁄8 × 25 in. (88.6 × 63.4 cm), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966, 66.1413. Photography by Cathy Carver.

Dove, translation and communication spoke ev-

encounter or contact in Silver Tanks and Moon arises

idently and essentially of connections made and

by way of resonance between the blue, gray, and sil-

relationships forged. Even in works such as Silver

ver bands that designate the moon and the vertical

Tanks (1929), Silver Tanks and Moon (1930), and City

banding that constitutes the two tanks, a connec-

Moon (1938), all three of which juxtapose a celes-

tion reinforced by the formal echo of the moon’s

tial body with the urban or the industrial rather

circular shape in the columnar shape of the tanks.

than the natural world, concentric circles suggest

Something similar occurs in Silver Tanks, which, like

contact and exchange via the mechanism of a wave

the other picture of moon and tanks, relies on me-

between interstellar space and the domain of hu-

tallic paint to generate its silvery sheen. Like the

man life (figs. 49, 50, 51). In City Moon, the moon

metallic pigment in Silver Sun, the metal in these

crowds the scene, pressing forward toward a screen

paintings suffuses the scene, uniting all parts, and

of crisscrossed lines and expanding beyond the

also enters into an exchange with waves of light:

frame on all sides but one. The spiky forms that

figuratively through the use of metal paint to de-

proceed across the bottom register of the painting

pict the moon’s radiation, and literally by virtue of

also reach upward toward the moon and in some

the manner in which the reflective silver pigment

cases make contact with its outermost circle, an

shapes and guides the encounter between actual

encounter similar to that between sun and earth in

light waves and the canvas surface.

Golden Sun and Naples Yellow Morning. The effect of 62

Chapter One

I draw attention to the connection between cir-

cles and waves in these paintings—­to light waves

ning in the early nineteenth century, scientists such

and not simply to light—­because waves of multiple

as Thomas Young, Hermann von Helmholtz, James

sorts populate Dove’s canvases, including those of

Clerk Maxwell, Michael Faraday, and Heinrich Hertz

light but also water waves and sound waves. Like his

converged on the wave as an explanatory figure for

concentric circle motifs, waves constitute a shared

the mechanics of all optical and electromagnetic

vocabulary across his works and thus serve as a

phenomena, establishing that multiple forms of

connective tissue among them. Dove’s waves fre-

energy, including visible light, exhibited wavelike

quently operate in conjunction with his circles, and

behavior when traveling through space. Einstein

like the circles, they play a significant role in carry-

and quantum theory would complicate wave the-

ing out the work that Dove called on his pictures to

ory in the early decades of the twentieth century,

perform. Of course, their precursors were many and

but waves as a mechanical common denominator

significant. The pursuit of a universal model for use

remained at the forefront of the public’s scientific

in describing and explaining processes such as light

imagination into the 1920s and 1930s, associated

and sound, and for which the wave provided one

as they were with all manner of phenomena and

answer, had roots in classical antiquity, and the fact

possibilities, including transatlantic travel, men-

that sound travels in the form of a wave had been

tal telepathy, the ether, astronomical observation

established as early as the sixteenth century. Begin-

and measurement, wireless telegraphy, and radio.89

Fig. 52  Arthur G. Dove, Me and the Moon, 1937, wax emulsion on canvas, 18 × 26 in. (45.72 × 66.04 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1939. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

Circles

63

Fig. 53  Lee Lawrie, Sound, 1934, main entrance, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY, carved Indiana limestone, cast glass, polychrome paint, gilding. Photograph: Christine Roussel.

Fig. 54  Above, Sears, Roebuck and Co., Radio Headquarters catalog, 1924. Source: Steve Davis, via MagazineArt.org. Fig. 55  Right, Vincent Lopez and Owen Murphy, On the Radio (New York: Robbins-­Engel, Inc., 1924). Courtesy of Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

Dove thus chose well in calling on waves to supply

an effect augmented by the formal echo among the

in combination with his circles a pan-­oeuvre em-

radiating lines, the circular frame around the fam-

blem of translation and communication and, ac-

ily, and the circle shape of the radio’s amplifying

cordingly, contact and interrelation.

horn. The lines designating sound issuing from a

Me and the Moon (1937) (fig. 52) provides a good

radio in an image that illustrated the sheet music

example of such a pairing of circles and waves.

for On the Radio (fig. 55), composed by Vincent Lo-

Here, Dove’s concentric circle motif accompanies

pez and Owen Murphy in 1924 and performed that

raucously expanding and undulating adjoined

year by the Vincent Lopez Orchestra at the Green-

bands of color and a painted line that snakes and

wich Village Follies (a well-­known and popular New

loops through the scene. Made by Dove in response

York revue), resemble those in the Sears picture and

to his experience of radio listening, this painting

call to mind the curving sound bands of Me and the

conjoins two types of waves: light waves, as repre-

Moon.92 They resemble the effects of brushwork, and

sented by the concentric circle moon, and sound

the borders between bands are uneven and rough;

waves, figured by the reverberating colored bands

their upward press represents waves of sound ex-

and the snaking line. The sound bands that Dove

iting the radio amplifier and filling a room as do

uses to evoke radio transmission might have been

the undulating but more precisely wrought bands

suggested to him by the idea of “bandwidth”—­the

on which the radio appears to sit. A photograph of

frequency or wavelength range assigned to a radio

the orchestra at work occupies the rectangle formed

station or broadcaster—­or by period imagery of

by the radio box, making explicit the nature of the

transmitted sound, in which sound takes the form

sound emanating from the apparatus, translated as

of a series of expanding circular or semicircular

it was from live performance into electromagnetic

bands. One well-­known example, Lee Lawrie’s 1934

waves and then into a once again audible tune, with

sculptural relief Sound (fig. 53), adorns the main en-

several apparatuses aiding this course: a transmit-

trance of 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City and

ter, an antenna, a receiver, a detector, and an ampli-

depicts a man cupping his hands around his mouth

fier. In Me and the Moon, Dove likens the translations

as he cries out, the sound issuing forth as a series

that occur in the context of radio listening and the

of semicircular bands. The 1924 Sears, Roebuck and

communication between entities that results from

Co. Radio Headquarters catalog, widely distributed

these translations, as illustrated by such popular

and heavily advertised in popular magazines such

images, to the transmission of light between moon

as Boys’ Life, Popular Mechanics, and Popular Science,

and earth, something like the Sears lightning bolt

featured on its cover a similar motif, this time di-

on a cosmic scale. Rendering radio waves in his

90

The

painting with the same curvilinear (if not concen-

cover of the catalog, a picture of which was included

tric) banding effects employed in popular culture

in print advertisements, depicts a family listening

to designate radio sound and configuring the moon

to a radio and reacting with a combination of ex-

and its light through such bands as well, which for

citement and wonder. The source of their wonder

him of course also diagram waves of light, Dove

is, presumably, the wireless technology of radio, as

too creates an image of temporal and spatial trans-

represented by the bolt of lightning that issues from

mission and connectivity. The idea of a wave serves

cables atop the Sears, Roebuck and Co. headquar-

as the chief point of connection here. The shared

ters in Chicago, which broadcast the popular Sears-­

banding motif and the loops of line that shimmy

operated radio station WLS between the years 1924

about the scene, configuring radio waves moving

rectly associated with radio sound (fig. 54).

91

and 1928. Rippled, concentric lines radiate from

through the atmosphere as does the light of the

the building and enfold the listening family; these

moon, provide the link, as exemplified by the loops

animated lines represent the seemingly magical

that intersect with and are embraced by the moon’s

travel of sound waves from station to living room,

outermost circular band, moments of merger that Circles

65

solidify the idea of an equivalency between the two.

and pencil study, entitled #4 Creek. Both feature

It is not clear whether Dove meant the horizontally

a series of radiating bands that press up from the

oriented, curvilinear strips of color in the lower por-

lower edge of the scene toward a half-­moon shape

tion of the canvas to be solid earth or ocean waves

slightly above the center of the pictorial field. This

(or either of the two), but if he intended waves—­an

half moon generates its own radiating bands, which

undated pencil study for the painting (fig. 56) sug-

are segmented by a series of vertical forms: lines

gests that this is indeed the case—­Me and the Moon

in the sketch, tonally varied bands in the painting.

would wind up commingling not two but three

Because they are truncated by the upper border,

types of waves: those of light, sound, and water.

these bands appear to extend beyond the confines

Such an admixture points toward an interest

of the canvas, much as do the lower set of banded

on Dove’s part in drawing an analogy or suggest-

forms, which one imagines forming the upper half

ing an equivalency among wave types and also in

of a series of concentric ellipses, with the center

making the waveform, like the circle motif, a vital

located at the painting’s lower edge. In both cases,

and recurrent aspect of his figural and conceptual

the bands call to mind the turbulence created when

vocabulary. Dove’s Penetration (1924) presents an ex-

a solid object is inserted into a moving stream,

cellent example of this (fig. 57). In Penetration, Dove

here the parting of water around Dove’s legs as he

uses the motif he employs elsewhere for indicating

stood in the current as well as the water’s conver-

sunlight or moonlight to designate instead the rip-

gence after it passed around him and regrouped.

ples and waves formed by the movement of water.

Dove of course does not adhere precisely to the

In A Primer of Modern Art, the critic Sheldon Cheney

laws of fluid dynamics—­there is no reason why he

reported that when he inquired about the origins

should—­but both painting and sketch nonetheless

of the painting, Dove recalled creating the sketch

possess certain qualities of a schematic presenta-

for it “while knee-­deep in flowing water, looking

tion of the physics of water flow. As such, both may

93

The painting var-

be associated with other diagrammatic images of

ies in composition only slightly from its charcoal

phenomena constituted by wave motion, including

downstream into the woods.”

Fig. 56  Arthur G. Dove, Me and the Moon, n.d., pencil on paper, 7 × 10 in. (17.78 × 25.4 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Gift of William E. O’Reilly in memory of Leland Bell and Lawrence Gowing, 1991. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

66

Chapter One

Fig. 57  Arthur G. Dove, Penetration, 1924, oil on board, Collection of Jan T. and Marica Vilcek, Promised gift to The Vilcek Foundation.

those belonging to science but also to popular cul-

space, and the stone-­ pond-­ ripple example fre-

ture, such as images of radio’s sound, and to Dove’s

quently served as the explanatory device. Draw-

own body of work, namely, his depictions of light

ing on Douglas’s analysis, Alexander Nemerov has

waves and sound waves by way of snaking lines or

described other contemporaneous associations

concentric circle motifs. The bright yellow-­white

between radio and water, the ocean in particular. He

half moon at Penetration’s heart, itself composed

characterizes Edward Hopper’s Ground Swell (1939)

of banded semicircles, reinforces the connection

as embedded in a period discourse that linked ra-

Dove makes here and in paintings such as Me and

dio and the ocean, arguing that Hopper’s waves, the

the Moon among light, sound, and water, for this

“ground swell” of the painting’s title, in combina-

half-­moon shape at once resembles a burst of light

tion with the bell buoy depicted in the work, visual-

at the end of a tunnel of trees, the ripple of sound

ize the radiating traverse of sound as evoked by the

through air, and the flow of water down a stream

explanatory rippling pond, with the lateral sweep

and around a solid form. What is more, a small

of the canvas a meditation on the surpassing range

circle just below the center point of the canvas com-

of wireless technology.94 Dove himself employed a

prising a white dot surrounded by a green circular

related wave metaphor in discussing his work:

band reflects in radically reduced form the configuration of the radiating mass of bands in the upper

The line still holds and the contrasting sizes. Ac-

half of the painting, also composed of a white core

tual size all the time, and as much as you need of

and a green perimeter. Such a pairing compares to

any size, so that all the things you feel are quite

the point-­counterpoint relationship between large

real, the actual, and all the feelings can be con-

and small concentric circle motifs in Silver Sun and

trasted much the same as waves roll on a shore

Sunrise, Northport Harbor, but in emphasizing reflec-

and wash back against each other. It certainly

tion rather than reversal in its depiction of light

can be drawn through as fine as that. And as I

reflected in a stream, this coupling reinforces the

said before things can be of the same size and of

implied connection between waves of light and

different sizes at the same time. That is certainly

waves of water. The small circle also registers as an

true and covers both vision and feelings.95

object floating on or breaking the water’s surface,

68

as if a stone tossed in, its “plop” along with the im-

Here, the image of waves striking against a shore

plied murmur of the current adding sound to the

aids in elucidating Dove’s conception of the idea of

experience of the scene.

interrelationship and, in particular, his sense of the

When he utilized the metaphor of circular rip-

connections between things as produced by con-

ples produced by a stone thrown into a pond to de-

trast or juxtaposition. Dove posits multiple sizes,

scribe the waveforms of sound and light, Andrews

feelings, and perceptions as equally real by virtue

in Color and Its Application to Printing made the same

of the relationships and interactions among them.

connection among light, sound, and water as Dove

The encounter between a wave and the shore to-

does in Penetration, in which Dove’s own partially

gether with the intermingling backwash that re-

submerged body or the diminutive white and green

sults constitute a complex of material in motion,

circle form plays the role of the disrupting stone

for which relationality serves as the binding mech-

in that work. As the historian Susan Douglas has

anism. In similar fashion, as Dove indicates in his

pointed out, during the decades that Dove was at

remarks, diverse forms and cognitive states might

work, water was conceptually linked to radio, and

be understood as expressions of an ultimately col-

to sound more generally. Among other things, the

lective or composite entity or phenomenon, a brand

behavior of water was often used analogously to

of simultaneity that encompasses the potential for

explain the phenomenon of radio broadcasting,

one thing to be many things at once. In an unpub-

particularly the travel of radio waves in time and

lished series of verses, Dove described the breaking

Chapter One

of waves on the shore in terms that seem equally

generate a corresponding sense of commonality,

to describe natural phenomena and a painting of

encounter, or exchange, one that I take to be the

those phenomena, thereby positing another ver-

pictorial expression on Dove’s part of the procedures and effects of translation and communica-

sion of such simultaneity:

tion and the networks of relations that result (figs. The silver wisps of silver wills do moonlight slide

58, 59). Neither of these works features a straight-

on sands with grit and water so easily gifted with

forward concentric circle motif but, as in Me and

ease on a beach that washed its hands with soap

the Moon and Penetration, striated and processing

of sand and to my cods with out their fins or

bands produce effects similar to those generated by

bones and silver leaves laid one upon the other as

Dove’s circle suns and moons. And in both, Dove

waves overlay themselves on the shore and back

renders multiple types of waveforms pictorially

again to sea. To go gouge [?] a piece of moonlight

interchangeable so that the paintings wind up as

out and let it slip along the shore with the waves

narratives of translation as such and also, I would

that make the rise and fall of tide and slide over-

suggest, as approximations of the very devices that might facilitate such a translating procedure. In

96

hand to reach the shore more and more.

River Bottom, thickly encrusted paint that in places As one scholar has noted, the cadence of Dove’s 97

appears to have been applied with a palette knife

lines evoke the rhythmic lapping of waves. The

doubles as sediment unsettled by a rushing current,

conjured back-­ and-­ forth effect, in combination

and bulbous, blossoming forms evoke the bubbles

with the imagery of moonlight sliding along sand

and eddies formed by water as it moves across a

and silver fish scales accumulating as the waves

rocky riverbed. Ranging from the deep red of oxi-

break, also suggests the gravitational back-­ and-­

dized blood to a cool silver-­gray, the colors of the

forth between the moon and the earth as well

work call to mind everything from the russet-­hued

as an artist laying down silver paint on canvas—­

bark of waterlogged branches and the shiny brown

like that in Penetration and many other of Dove’s

of submerged, water-­smoothed pebbles to the glint

works—­with a push then pull of hand and wrist.

of the sun on the water’s surface and the scurry and

Here, water, moonlight, paint, and bodily motion

scuttle of silver-­scaled fish. Dove does not distin-

collectively assume wavelike form, either figura-

guish between surface and depth in this work, for

tively or in a literal sense. This gives one to under-

the image simultaneously conjures the river’s bot-

stand the connections that Dove draws among var-

tom and the water that flows over it. In this way,

ious forms of waves in Penetration as belonging to a

he establishes the constitutive connection between

larger impulse within his practice that treated such

the two, a link iterated by the two curving lines

forms as not just analogous but conceptually inter-

than span the canvas’s vertical length and interlink

changeable. Dove expresses this interchangeability

all its parts as well as by the two ovoid forms that sit

by making these waveforms, through his concentric

in the picture’s upper third. Dove renders one of the

circles and banding motifs, visually cognate as well

ovoids in full; as it bisects a heavy horizontally flow-

as materially or physically of a piece, an effect sug-

ing line its colors change, from semicircular bands

gested by Dove’s breaking-­wave metaphor and by

of pink, rose, and gray in the lower half to gray, sil-

the title of the work, Penetration, which connotes

ver, and black above. One sees only half of the other

intersection or intercourse, in the sense of some-

ovoid, or at least that is the effect; its upper portion

thing shared by or communicated between two or

appears to peek over the lip of the horizontal edge,

more entities or an encounter or exchange among

its bright-­white center like a staring eye. In empha-

people or things.

sizing bisection by highlighting the boundary at

Other works, including River Bottom, Silver, Ochre,

which the ovoid forms are split between one side

Carmine, Green (1923) and Sea Gull Motive (1928),

and another, Dove produces a sense of above and Circles

69

Fig. 58  Arthur G. Dove, River Bottom, Silver, Ochre, Carmine, Green, 1923, oil on canvas, 24 × 18 in. (61 × 45.7 cm), Michael Scharf Family Collection.

below, but he does so only in order to establish the

alight on and illuminate the river’s surface (those

coexistence of surface and depth in the work. That

of light) and those that constitute its flow (those

is, by articulating spatial relations through the ren-

of water). A miniaturized concentric circle motif

dition of two-­dimensional, bisected forms that fall

beneath the left ovoid comprising rings of black,

in step with the overall flatness of the composition

green, and white calls to mind the doubled circles

even as they seem to occupy various spatial strata,

in works such as Silver Sun and Sunrise, Northport

Dove signals that he wishes to convey surface and

Harbor. In River Bottom, this motif is its own double,

depth as coextensive, as aspects of the same plane

for alone it must stand for both radiating waves of

or continuum of space. Along with the silver paint,

light and their watery reflection. Like those in Pen-

which simultaneously calls to mind reflections at

etration, the curving semielliptical forms in River

the surface and fish swimming in the deep, such

Bottom that process from bottom to top also signify

an articulation of coextension—­of the sameness

sound—­the rustle and gulp of water as it proceeds

or interchangeability of multiple planes of space,

downstream—­thus adding to the picture’s workings

one substituting for any other—­works to express

yet another kind of wave. Here, then, Dove makes

not just an interconnectivity among materials

his colors and forms responsible for being multiple

and forms but the interchangeability of light and

things at once—­bodies, water, light, and sound—­

water, an equivalence between the waveforms that

and they slip in and out of each guise as we watch,

Fig. 59  Arthur G. Dove, Sea Gull Motive (Sea Thunder or The Wave), 1928, oil on wood panel, 26¼ × 20½ in. (66.7 × 52.1 cm), The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, museum purchase, Richard B. Gump Trust Fund, Museum Society Auxiliary, Museum Acquisition Fund, Peter and Kirsten Bedford, Mrs. George Hopper Fitch, Art Trust Fund, and by exchange of Foundation objects, 1990.19. Photography © Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Circles

71

each transmutation a case study in encounter,

the waves a pictorial condensation of their serial,

translation, and exchange.

banded form, at once capturing their essence and

Various titles have graced Dove’s Sea Gull Motive

generating a graphic translation, shorthand-­like, of

(fig. 59). Dove gave it the present label, but as early

their essential nature: two series of short, sturdy,

as 1929, it was listed in Stieglitz’s exhibition check-

vertical bands of the same hues used to depict the

list as Sea Gull Motif, and in subsequent exhibitions

waves, one dominated by gray tones, the other by

it was called The Wave or Sea Thunder. None of these

iterations of blue. That the waves are posited in

titles represent a stretch. The painting’s billowing

pictorial terms as about to reach their shorthand

and curving bands and ridges resemble surging

versions gives emphasis to the idea that the one is

ocean waves and, as Marc Simpson has pointed out,

a translation of the other, the graphic-­like bands in

they can also suggest the shape of a bird or echoing

Reaching Waves that evoke the color spectrum dia-

98

72

waves of sound. As a result, Dove in the space of

grams in Andrews as well as anticipate present-­day

a single image calls to mind the physical form of a

color separation charts being the thing in the paint-

bird, the motion of water, and the echoing sound

ing that results after the actual waves transmit and

of a storm at sea, which may explain the various

transmute. In this way, Dove effectively diagrams

monikers that have been attached to the painting.

the procedures he wishes to evoke through the form

In doing this, Dove suggests an equivalency among

and the idea of a wave, a result made all the more

multiple waveforms: those that constitute the

palpable by the elongated discs in Reaching Waves

motion of the sea; those of light, which make the

that shoot through, like arrows, the translating

physical world, including birds and ocean waves,

series of vertical bands, suggesting through their

available to the visual sense; those that constitute

action none other than Dove’s “see” arrow, itself a

sound, as in the sound of the surf or the roar of

graphic annotation designed to register movement

thunder; and those that are traced by the rhythmic

and traversal in time and space and the encounters

flapping of a bird’s wings as it flies. The term “mo-

that arose forthwith.

tive,” which can refer to a motif in a work of art, mu-

Dove’s shifting from one type of wave to an-

sic, or literature as well as to something that causes

other in paintings such as Me and the Moon, Sea Gull

or impels motion, was thus a perfect choice, for it

Motive, Penetration, River Bottom, and Reaching Waves

encompasses the multiple iterations of waves—­

such that the one becomes the other—­much as En-

radiant, sonic, mechanical—­ commingled in Sea

glish becomes French, say, or live sound becomes

Gull Motive. As with Penetration, River Bottom, and

audio signal through an act of sonic translation—­

the range of paintings so far discussed, Dove with

recapitulates the manifold operations of transla-

this work suggests exchanges among multiple enti-

tion that Dove explored throughout his practice,

ties and processes by engendering communication

translating procedures within the confines of lan­

and converse through a single, shared form, the

guage, as with shorthand or word-­image doodles,

wave, which transmutes as it translates from one

but also translating operations of other sorts, those

incarnation to the next. Dove’s painting Reaching

of the phonograph, radio, or telegraphy or as per-

Waves (1929), which depicts a cluster of waves about

formed by Dove’s pantograph and by his recur-

to crash, literalizes this idea.99 Dove renders each

ring pictorial motifs. Waves, then, along with the

of the cresting waves as conjoined bands of color,

concentric circle motif, itself a visual iteration of

each one a progressing series of tones of white,

the waveform, provided Dove with a pictorial vo-

brown, gray, and blue, so as to suggest the process

cabulary by which to articulate his preoccupation

of transmutation and the ultimate exchange as the

with translation and communication, and they also

waves surge toward and eventually hit land. Dove

served as a means for enacting these operations

underscores his sense of the wave as the catchall

within the space of his pictures much as a meta-

signifier of such an effect by placing in advance of

phor rhetorically enacts a transfer or exchange

Chapter One

between two things (light and truth, say, or a house

tion are, technically speaking, crepuscular rays, the

of cards and a delusional existence). As analogous

term employed in atmospheric optics to describe

components within Dove’s visual language, circles

rays or columns of light that appear to descend

and waves designated the myriad transmissions

from breaks in masses of clouds. The title of Dove’s

and transmutations produced by translation and

work, Sun Drawing Water, borrowed the phrasing of

communication and demonstrated the encoun-

a mariner’s harbinger in which sun drawing water

ters, connections, and networks of relations that

from the sea portended stormy weather; the phrase

resulted.

itself originated in the mistaken belief that cre-

Yet Dove did not restrict his circles and waves

puscular rays were a form of evaporation, caused

to a purely metaphorical, symbolic, or performa-

by sunbeams drawing water into the sky.101 Chances

tive function, nor did he imagine that their picto-

are, then, that in naming the work thusly (and it was

rial nature—­the fact of their being images only—­

his title), Dove most likely had crepuscular rays in

confined their potential to the pictorial realm. His

mind, as did other nineteenth-­century artists who

ambitions for them far exceeded this, a point I al-

employed the phrase when titling their work.102

luded to earlier when discussing the circle motif

And it could be that the wording of the phrase

as representing but also inducing connections and

“sun drawing water” struck Dove as a lovely play on

networks of relations in Dove’s works. This point is

words, one very much in tune with his various trans-

now worth underscoring for what it allows us to un-

positions and translations. Crepuscular rays are vis-

derstand about Dove’s project as a whole and, also,

ible to an observer because of the sun’s action as it

for what it tells us about Dove as a maker of things,

shines through clouds or mist and radiates airborne

but the idea requires elucidation. Dove articulated

particles. Sunlight, thus, in a sense, “draws,” gives

the operations of language, translation and com-

visible, seeable form to otherwise unseeable water

munication chief among them, through the forms

molecules suspended in air. Sun in Dove’s picture is

of his art, but he also envisaged that art as structur-

consequently an analog to paintbrush or pencil, and

ally capable of initiating and executing these pro-

also to phonograph needle, or even barometer, as it

cedures on its own, materially and actually as well

is the instrument that registers, renders, and trans-

as metaphorically, an action hinted at in my call-

lates one system of signs into another. Sun is also

ing the multiple and interchangeable waveforms

here a figure for photography, that pencil of nature

in paintings like Me and the Moon or Golden Sun

that draws forms with light and that, in the realms

approximations of the devices—­ wires, receivers,

of art and science both, has regularly been made to

amplifying horns, a straightedge—­that could facil-

transfigure the simply seen into something else. In

itate just such an operation. By way of further ex-

the case of Stieglitz’s Equivalents series, for example,

planation, I return to Sun Drawing Water (fig. 2), the

photographs of cloud-­filled skies become putative

painting with which this chapter began and which,

mindscapes of music and spirit or, in the case of pe-

like many of Dove’s works, aims to surpass material

riod meteorological photography, a weather event

limits and show what the eye cannot see. But Sun

such as lightning is made over into scientifically

Drawing Water wishes to do much more than simply

scrutinizable evidence.103 The chutes of water in Sun

show. It seeks to act, to behave as if an instrument

Drawing Water, then, show a natural phenomenon

or an instrumental operation. It consists of a view

but also diagram the very act of this showing: the

of things but also a way of proceeding or function-

act of representing, or translating, itself.

ing, a noun, one might say, but also a verb, the idea

As a painting, Sun Drawing Water thus demon-

of instrument here connoting a tool that operates,

strates its own and, to Dove’s mind, its radical po-

100

The two

tential: its capacity as a work of art to model but

cylinders at the center of Sun Drawing Water that

also to make materially manifest through acts of

give visual form to the unseen processes of evapora-

translation a series of interchanges among all man-

performs, transforms, and generates.

Circles

73

74

ner of entities. Sun Drawing Water proffers itself as

sections, those circular and elliptical forms that

an instrument and makes a claim on instrumental

he described as expressive of the essence of nature

work. Assembling through its operations a com-

and that served as fundamental and constant mo-

plex of matter, phenomena, cognitive operations

tifs in his work. The curving line that divides the

and, by extension, perceiving beings, the painting

light-­blue tip of the left cylinder from the darker

brings these things into relation much as a picture

gray-­blue beneath it looks especially like its coun-

created while listening to a record amasses a cluster

terpart would in a diagram depicting the curve that

of interrelated sounds, instruments, machines, and

results when a plane intersects a cone and outlines

bodies that together constitute the very nature of

a circle or an ellipse. At once an atmospheric ef-

that painting’s being. Put another way, Sun Drawing

fect and a mathematical construct, the cylindrical

Water at once represents these interchanges and

forms in Sun Drawing Water oscillate between these

makes them possible, instantiates them, in the first

two states, each of which calls to mind a constitu-

place; the very fact of the painting existing gener-

tive component of Dove’s pictorial and conceptual

ates the relationships demonstrated therein. The

vocabulary—­his circles, water, and waves and also

photographer and critic Paul Haviland described

his distilled, abstract forms—­with oscillation itself

such a combinatory entity in an issue of the little

figuring the transmutations and exchanges ren-

magazine 291. He described the work of photogra-

dered and registered in Dove’s images of sky, sea,

phy as an ideal merger among man, machine, and

and land.

art, a “new trinity” in which each activates and sus-

It goes without saying that Sun Drawing Water

tains the others through the mutual exchange of

is a picture of waves—­ocean waves, but also those

actions, thought, and media.104 Sun Drawing Water,

of light, as represented by yellow paint and the

as a painting-­cum-­instrument, constitutes an anal-

streaming ribbon forms. The sky-­blue cloud that

ogous aggregated unit. Following this, one may

toward the left edge of the canvas assumes the form

describe Sun Drawing Water as a summary image,

of a cresting wave just about to break establishes,

a painting that gathers together aspects from the

as do the cylinders / crepuscular rays, a connection

whole of Dove’s exploratory work—­his art making

between the two kinds. Clouds consist of clusters

but also his other activities, from weather watch-

of water droplets or ice crystals made visible by re-

ing and radio listening to letter writing and diary

flecting light, and they form partly as an effect of

keeping—­and narrates but also enacts that labor

the sun heating the earth and causing water vapor

by means of constructing a single virtuoso array:

to rise and condense. Clouds thus arise from the

sun, light, water, waves, clouds, wind, birds, kites,

transmutation of one substance into another and

land, ships, storms, metal, meteorology, photog-

through an encounter and exchange between sur-

raphy, train travel, meandering rivers, the earth’s

face and atmosphere. By now it should be clear that

atmosphere, letters, words, writing, paint, artist,

Dove’s choice in Sun Drawing Water of a waveform to

art. Although Sun Drawing Water does not feature

represent a cloud at the middle point between water

a concentric circle motif, the tonal striations that

and sun signals his investment in the waveform

connote wind whipping across the grass-­covered

as a notice of translation and communication for

slope as well as the upward press of a series of semi-

use across his body of work. But it also announces

circular forms—­waves, hills, clouds, sky—­resemble

his wish to surpass the emblematic by transform-

similar banding and pressing effects in Me and the

ing his paintings and assemblages into machines

Moon, Penetration, River Bottom, and other of Dove’s

or mechanisms of translation and communication

works, transforming Dove’s seaside scene into a

themselves, devices that show but also activate and

stacked sequence of watery swells. The cylinders at

embody these operations, as a phonograph appara-

center, intersected as they are by various lines and

tus activates and embodies—­literally constitutes—­

planes, call to mind Dove’s devotion to the conic

the translation of live into recorded sound, or as a

Chapter One

camera activates and embodies the translation of

beating against masses of air as seagulls propel

light into an image of the world.

themselves through the sky. In 1928, the same year

A most basic element of human language, the

Dove painted Seagull Motif (Violet and Green), the art-

formation of words, also features in this painting’s

ist Florine Stettheimer created a group portrait of

synthesizing summary array: individual letters that

members of the Stieglitz cohort in which she regis-

when clustered together create words condense in

tered exactly these pictorial and linguistic concur-

their actions the whole of Dove’s pan-­oeuvre lan-

rences (fig. 60). In the picture, Stieglitz takes center

guage play. Dove’s signature sits in the trough of a

stage surrounded by representations of habitués of

wave and echoes in the arc and flow of its contig-

the Intimate Gallery, which serves as the setting of

uous “v” and “e” both the swells that surround it

the scene. Stettheimer provides relatively straight-

and the cloud form in the upper left of the painting

forward portraits of some of these figures. Baron

that resembles a wave. In mimicking through the

Adolph de Meyer enters, royally clad, at the right;

manipulation of letters the look of a wave, Dove

Charles Demuth comes in from the left, his gloved

creates here a word-­image hybrid akin to those

hand holding a cane, the sharp end of which nar-

that peopled his correspondence, including the

rowly misses one of Stieglitz’s cloud photographs

doubled “Sweets” in his letter to Torr, in which lan-

lying faceup on the floor; the critic Henry McBride

guage constitutes simultaneously picture and text.

leans against the wall; and either Francis Picabia

He also fashions letters into a suggestion of sound.

or Randolph Bourne (portrayed posthumously) sits

The eloquent incline of the neck of the “d” and the

on a low stool, looking at Stieglitz.106 Other figures

abrupt downward tilt of its top together remind

receive more indirect treatment. John Marin joins

one of the posture of a body about to spring into a

the group in the form of his watercolors on the wall

dive, the moment of stillness and contraction prior

at left, and O’Keeffe’s face in profile appears on the

to an upward leap followed by a downward, water-­

wall behind Stieglitz, accompanied by the letters of

bound plunge. Farfetched, perhaps, but the idea be-

her name rendered in reverse. Three panels at left

comes less so when one notes that “Dove” can be a

feature the names of Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove,

proper noun but is also, in lowercase form, as in the

and Paul Strand, each one spelled out with custom-

painting, a verb: “dove,” as in the past tense of “to

ized lettering. In the Dove panel, Stettheimer ren-

dive.” With his signature here, Dove has fun with a

ders Dove’s name so that it assumes the form of a

particular linguistic form, the homograph, a word

bird in flight. The slightly tipped “D” serves as the

that shares its spelling with another but boasts a

bird’s inclining head, the “O” as its body, the “V” as

different meaning. He also toys with language’s

its wings, and the “E,” also tipped, as its feet. Here,

spoken sounds, toggling back and forth between

Dove is simultaneously a person, a bird, a paint-

“Dove” with a short “u” vowel sound and “dove”

ing, and a string of letters, fitting for Stettheimer’s

with a long “o,” experimenting with language’s ca-

work, which registers identity in myriad forms, and

pacities by imagining restoring sound to reading

a telling parallel to Dove’s own play with his lin-

and making coincident within writing two usually

guistically agile name and signature. Stettheimer’s

distinct registers, the sonic and the graphic.105 Of

punning jibes with Charles Demuth’s poster por-

course, “dove” is also a type of bird, and it is worth

trait of Dove, from 1924, which arrays the letters

noting that the swing and sway of Dove’s letters

of his name in all white against a clear blue sky, as

echoes the lilt of the airborne twining ribbons in

if to suggest a bird in flight—­Demuth cropped the

Sun Drawing Water that indicate light and wind but

“V” at its base so that it looks like a pair of raised

also chart the flight of birds in a manner similar to

and flapping wings. One thinks also of Elizabeth

the looping, spiraling lines of Seagull Motif (Violet

McCausland’s description of Dove’s 1939 retrospec-

and Green) (fig. 3) that call to mind the coiling tra-

tive exhibition as offering a “dove’s-­eye-­view” of his

jectory but also the whoosh and thump of wings

work.107 Circles

75

Fig. 60  Florine Stettheimer, Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz, 1928, oil on canvas, 38 × 26¼ in. (96.5 × 66.7 cm), Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Co-­owned by Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photography by Edward C. Robison III.

76

Now consider the weaving and plunging ribbon

sketched the essential compositional elements of

forms in both Sun Drawing Water and Seagull Motif

Seagull Motif (Violet and Green), emphasizing above

(Violet and Green) in light of Dove’s proliferating lan-

all the approximate contours of the semielliptical

guage play (as well as the verbal and visual “Dove”

bands that form the background, the waves at the

puns of his associates and friends). Diagram-­like

painting’s base, and the weaving, bobbing, and spi-

visualizations of atmospheric phenomena and

raling lines in the sky. The resemblance between

avian bodies in motion, these curving, looping, and

this sketch and another composition of Dove’s, this

switchbacking streams also call to mind the charac-

one undated, is startling (fig. 62).108 Dove included

ters of Gregg shorthand (fig. 19), the stenographic

the undated composition at the end of a series of

form that Dove studied in which combinations of

remarks, collectively titled “Abstraction,” that he

curving lines and other types of marks substitute

wrote by hand on a pad of notepaper. In the compo-

for the sounds of speech. In a letter to Dove, Ed-

sition, he configured a series of written comments

ward Alden Jewell expressed his deep appreciation

that continued the remarks of the previous page

of Dove’s Orange Grove in California, by Irving Berlin

into a form that recapitulates the combination of

(1927) (fig. 102), which Stieglitz had presented to

funnel, shore, and waves in both Seagull painting

Jewell in 1928 after its exhibition at the Intimate

and sketch. One of Dove’s phrases—­not all of them

Gallery. On the reverse of this letter (fig. 61), Dove

are legible—­begins at the upper left of the com-

Chapter One

Fig. 61  Above, a drawing on the back of a letter from Edward Alden Jewell to Arthur Garfield Dove dated Jan. 25, 19–­. Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2:1:19, image #39. Fig. 62  Right, a page from Arthur Garfield Dove’s “Abstraction” essay, n.d. Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 3:2:19, image #6.

position, plunging diagonally downward before it

the two images, painting and sketch, that it appears

changes course and rises again, then looping back

to mimic or foretell. But one can note the similar-

leftward to rejoin its point of origin: “If one could

ity and speculate that the composition consists of

only get a jar for thoughts and a cover to hold them

yet another instance where Dove explored the rela-

in.” A line that contains the phrase “like rocks to

tionship between image and word by making them

build upon would hold them in” occupies a loca-

of a piece, as he had in the word-­image hybrids

tion that matches that of the rocky shore in the

featured in his letters to Torr. One might also see

­painting.

in this composition support for the idea that the

Without an exact date or a precise sense of the

ribbons in Seagull Motif (Violet and Green) and Sun

circumstances of this word doodle’s creation, one

Drawing Water count as allusions to written nota-

cannot assume a direct relationship between it and

tion, and to Gregg shorthand in particular, with the Circles

77

latter present in those works in transmuted, picto-

function for the curving lines and, perhaps, their

rial form. The cursive “L” that in both the Seagull

ultimate failure to describe or denote weather as

Motif (Violet and Green) painting and sketch initiates

successfully and efficiently as did words. In a list of

the upward looping flow of the bird flight / cyclone

“ideas,” recorded on the final page of his 1924 diary,

form is so close in appearance to the looping char-

Dove wrote the following: “Sea gulls—­feathers—­

acters of Gregg word-­signs that the possibility of

line.”110 The progressive translation in this phrase

such a script-­picture interchange is impossible to

from living creature to linear form verbally en-

dismiss. Both Gregg characters and the loops of

capsulates the operations of the ribbon forms in

the Seagull Motif (Violet and Green) series of images

Seagull Motif (Violet and Green) and further cements

also resemble notations that Dove made in the up-

the interrelationship of the verbal and visual man-

per right-­hand corner of a number of his 1942 di-

ifest across Dove’s practice, as exemplified by the

ary entries. What these notations signify remains

suite of seagull images.

unclear, but they probably indicate weather, per-

The resemblance among Dove’s shorthand, the

haps wind direction or speed, because they share

ribbon motifs in his paintings and in his seagull

the space at the top of the diary pages that Dove

sketch, and his weather notes—­ a threefold ex-

reserved for recording prevailing conditions. The

change among forms—­underscores his fascination

entries for March 31 and April 1 are exemplary (fig.

with notational substitution and interchange. It

63). In each, a looping line or combination of lines

also suggests an attempt to incarnate the proper-

accompanies Dove’s record of temperature and

ties but also the capacities of language within a

109

In subsequent entries, in-

work of art, making paintings and assemblages not

cluding those for May and June, Dove replaced the

just language-­like but themselves a form of lan-

shorthand-­like notations with verbal descriptions

guage—­a novel one, to be sure, and one that ges-

of conditions, further suggesting a meteorological

tures toward a radical reformulation of the nature

barometric pressure.

Fig. 63  Arthur Garfield Dove diary pages dated Mar. 31 and Apr. 1, 1942. Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 3:2:13, image #49.

78

Chapter One

and limits of not just language but also pictorial

Dove’s signature in Golden Sun (fig. 9) takes on an

art. Like his signature, Dove’s lines in Sun Drawing

analogous role. Placed at the base, in the center,

Water and Seagull Motif (Violet and Green) articulate

just beneath a curving band of black, but with the

his profound investment as an artist in manifold

arc of the “d” crossing over into the space of the

expressive systems, from written language to trans-

band, “dove” appears to support the configuration

lated and transmitted sound, and this articulation

of forms above it, an array of circles, bands, and

comes in the form of a motif, the ribbon, that reg-

lines that represents the natural world but also

isters within the paintings as a sequence of waves.

resembles a stack of stuff, an amassing of objects

This registration, in turn, along with the toggling

one on top of the other, the whole bound together

among script (shorthand or words), pictorial sign

by a tautly pulled string or tightly stitched thread.

(ribbon), and symbol (weather notes)—­in a single

The tail of the “v,” which makes contact with the

image or between two different ones—­bears out

strip of black and calls to mind a hand or shoulder,

the suggestion that Dove wanted his pictures to

appears bent by the weight of the objects it holds

translate and communicate, imagining them at one

aloft. In both Sun Drawing Water and Golden Sun,

and the same time as inanimate, material entities,

then, Dove’s signature plays a triple role. The signed

as if instruments, and motile, maneuvering expres-

name marks the works as his, but it also serves to

sive form, like language. Mediums in both senses

signal his intention to highlight the operations,

of the word, his pictures simultaneously assume

pictorial and material, that constitute the scene

the guise of the vehicle or medium of transmission

and that might unfold apart from him, even if at his

(paintbrush, phonograph, body) and that of the en-

behest. The signature thus suggests a constitutive

tity transmitted or the medium itself (paint, sound

connection between Dove the painter and the work

waves, speech). The fact that Dove painted Seagull

he produced, not unlike all artists’ signatures, to be

Motif (Violet and Green) on a metal ground, suggest-

sure. But Dove’s “dove” does more than announce

ing waveforms traveling through an amplifier or

“I was here, I made this.” Marcia Brennan has de-

across a conducting wire, reinforces the idea that

scribed how Dove’s paintings were characterized by

he wished his production to articulate but also em-

Stieglitz and the critics in his cohort to be invested

body the properties and effects of conduction and

with Dove’s corporeal presence. I too conceive of a

communication, that he wished to depict transla-

relationship between painting and maker that boils

tion and converse but, also, that he hoped to incar-

down to a relation between bodies and material

nate these things in and through his work.

objects.111 But rather than immersion or projection,

By placing his signature at the bottom center

for me, equivalency and substitution constitute the

of Sun Drawing Water, with the neck of the diving

mechanisms of such a relation. By placing “him-

“d” seeming to bend under the weight of the com-

self” by way of his signature inside his scenes as

position, Dove signals the presence of an entity

if materially interacting with them—­holding up or

responsible for rendering but also triggering the

setting into motion their forms—­Dove suggests an

machinery of the scene, one that installs and then

equivalency between his material presence and his

activates the operations that are depicted therein,

actions as an artist and the material presence and

an authorial hand that flips the switch and sets

actions of the work, signaling that his paintings and

the picture’s myriad translations and interchanges

assemblages should be taken as operating within a

into motion, one after another as if a sequence of

class of objects or entities that includes the human

waves generated by the tossing of a stone into a

body as well as mechanical devices, instruments, or

still pond. Fulcrum-­like, the signature offers itself

machines. Dove activates the apparatus, and then

as the thing on which the entire scene pivots, the

he assumes a less dominant role, collaborating with

outward stretch of the “d” and the “v” resembling

rather than directing his creation, learning from

arms extended to support and activate the whole.

his picture in addition to showing it what to do. Circles

79

80

The razor-­neat lines fashioned with a straightedge

medium much in the same way he experimented

in Golden Sun and the metal plate in Seagull Motif

with pigments, binders, and grounds. But this is

(Violet and Green), along with analogous motifs

what I believe is happening in Dove’s work. Dove’s

and media in other works, prompt categorization

allusion in Sun Drawing Water to a diagram of a

within the realm of bodies and things, rather than

conic section from the realm of geometry rein-

within the domain of “representation” or “image”

forces the idea that he wished for this picture, and

strictly speaking, even as such works intimate and

for all his paintings, to serve as propositions and

visualize a world beyond the material and mechan-

also as demonstrations, proofs of the operational

ical sphere. In this way Dove underscores what he

potential of art akin to the validating sequences of

envisages as the instrumental nature and potential

steps within mathematics but that have gone on

of his paintings and assemblages, their status as

to assume both visual and material form. Because

pictures of something as well as pictures that have

they are at once the product of human thought and

something to do. Of course, a painting such as Sun

proclaimed as self-­operating given their associa-

Drawing Water does not in a literal sense do any-

tion within mathematics with absolute, essential

thing. It does not move, speak, or act. But its collec-

truth, the conic sections stand as a fitting emblem

tive features venture the proposition that a work of

for Dove’s explorations of what it might mean to

art can be more than a “painting” or a “sculpture,”

make a painting over into language and its prop-

period, the end, fathoming through their effects

erties and an artist over into art or device while

the possibility of action, the potential for a work of

underscoring the fundamentally collaborative, re-

art to embody the very procedures and operations

lational nature of these transfers and translations.

through which it came into being, the looking,

Again, Dove’s works do not really operate, of course;

thinking, speaking, hearing, and touching that add

they are not instruments that register or transmit

up to the creation of it as a material entity. Dove,

as do barometers, pantographs, phonographs, or ra-

on the literal outside of his pictures during the

dios, and of course Dove remains on their outside.

course of their creation, triggers these processes; he

But the works exist in a continuum of actions as

is the one that thinks, hears, speaks, and touches

do such machines, and it is this continuum among

or prompts other things to act or execute accord-

objects and translating acts, among the work itself

ingly. But then he puts himself inside, through

but also everything involved in the process of its

the device of his signature, thus reinstalling him-

creation, that Dove’s paintings and assemblages

self, as trigger, as one of a given painting’s many

seek to incarnate—­not just allude to, but materially

procedures and parts. In so doing he articulates a

install—­in the final product. One grasps all aspects

transfer of his agency into the aptitude of the work,

of Dove’s practice as part of this effort, as a collec-

utilizing the figure of the artist-­as-­activator as he

tion of gestures toward establishing his creations

would any other material or medium, like paint or

as endowed with the properties of animated or op-

a metal clock spring. Through this figure’s applica-

erational entities or beings: his subject matter, in-

tion and use the painting becomes then both ve-

cluding natural processes or systems such as photo-

hicle and medium, maker and made, speaker and

synthesis, evaporation, and solar radiation as well

spoken, a mutual and simultaneous substitution

as mechanical operations such as photography; his

that postulates the notion, implausible as it seems,

motifs of translation, contact, converse, and com-

that a work of art as well as its artist can be made

munication; his materials, metal especially, includ-

over as a device. The conventional categorical dis-

ing metallic paint and actual metal parts such as

tance between “artist” and “work of art” makes it

clock springs, staples, and nails; and his methods

hard to wrap one’s head around the idea that an

of making, including pantography, phonograph

artist might himself be the literal material of his

listening, and the use of a draughtsman’s or car-

own artistic work, experimenting with himself as

penter’s tool.

Chapter One

Circles, Waves, and Weather

sensory data, or matter between sites and states: the transmission of words or musical sound between

The circles that appear across Dove’s pictorial out-

radio station and listener, say, or the transmission

put with abiding regularity have a specific job to do:

of sound waves, electromagnetic radiation, or water

they register phenomena (visible and otherwise),

molecules through air. Not all the transmissions

but they also provide a vocabulary for narrating,

that Dove evokes in his paintings transpire by way

exploring, and embodying the properties and pro-

of waveform, but the majority of them do. The con-

cedures of translation and communication. They

nections he draws among various forms of motion,

show us things transmitting, transmuting, and in-

traversal, and motility—­from the spin of a phono-

teracting, and they do these things on their own,

graph record to the surge and flow of water at the

and they step back and consider the nature of these

shore—­suggest that, for him, the idea of a “wave”

processes. Through Dove’s circles we learn that the

served as conceptual shorthand for transmissions

operations of translation and communication un­

and encounters of all kinds, and that along with the

fold across and between media, that they produce

concentric circle motif, waves came to be pictorial

networks or webs of relations, and that they estab-

shorthand for these selfsame transmissions and for

lish connective tissues among disparate and dis-

the interrelation of the entities involved in them. If

persed things and beings, including sound and

Dove’s circles represented a work of art-­cum-­device,

graphic mark, moon and earth’s crust, human and

Dove’s waves represented that device’s circuitry,

machine. We also learn that Dove’s devotion to

the connections among component parts that gave

building such networks, connective tissues, and

that device the potential to spark into life.

webs in the act of making and then incarnating

As a summary image, Sun Drawing Water collects

them in the appearance and effects of his works

within its confines these myriad aspects of Dove’s

suggests a preoccupation on his part with investing

practice and encapsulates the effects and opera-

his creations with the attributes of an instrument

tions that Dove activated throughout his work, as

or machine, with the ability not just to show but to

signified by his circles and his waves as well as by his

accomplish a task, in this case the job of building

persistent articulation of the interchangeability of

itself, of fostering the connections demonstrated in

the two. In so doing, Sun Drawing Water models the

his art and essential to the workings of any gener-

instrumentality that Dove desired to install in his

ative device. Dove’s act of making, then, modeled

creations, making them equally images and things,

what he wished his paintings and assemblages

pictures and picture-­bound machinery. Sun Drawing

would ultimately see to on their own.

Water also reports on the weather, presenting the

those that form in water as well as Waves—­

viewer with clouds, haze, wind, evaporation, and

those that travel in air, including the waveforms of

crepuscular rays, conditions that cause and consti-

light, sound, and radio—­tell a similar story. Dove

tute atmospheric phenomena described and ana-

spent the majority of his mature artistic career

lyzed by the science of meteorology. The paint­ing

oceanside—­living directly on the water in his boat

thus comprises all three aspects of the tri­par­tite

or in quarters proximate to the Long Island shore,

schema to which I briefly alluded at the beginning

in borrowed rooms in a yacht club or in a converted

of this chapter—­a geography of circles, waves, and

post office at the water’s edge. It thus makes sense

weather—­and to which I will return in the chap-

that Dove established waves as a presiding sub-

ter that follows, having so far elucidated the sta-

ject of his art and that waves not only prompted

tus and function in Dove’s works of the first two

a consideration of translation and communication

terms in that equation, circles and waves. In this

but also served as a motif for use in exploring the

next chapter, through a consideration of the third

specific phenomenon of transmission—­that is, the

term, weather, I address one of the most pressing

very mechanics of the migration of information,

questions raised by my discussion up to this point: Circles

81

82

Why? Why was Dove preoccupied with translation

conceptual, for achieving the work he wished ul-

and communication, with various and diverse sys-

timately to do. If Dove, in exploring and enacting

tems of expression, interrelation, and exchange?

translation and communication, was after connec-

And what in particular did he mean to achieve

tion and converse, with circles and waves providing

when he set about materializing these systems and

the necessary machinery, then it was weather, un-

their effects within his paintings and assemblages?

derstood both as a phenomenon and as a concept,

Weather provides part of the answer to these que-

that provided the joinery and the conducting sys-

ries, as does meteorology, the science of weather,

tem. Weather proved the medium through which

both of which furnished Dove not just with a means

exchange among parts would occur, like electricity

to articulate and incarnate his chief interests, as was

traveling among circuits, tendering the activating

the case with his circles and waves, but also with a

material needed to transform a cluster of compo-

template or a topographical map, visual as well as

nents into a living, breathing whole.

Chapter One

2

Weather Intersubjectivity So just what did Dove think he could accomplish by creating paintings and sculptures under the sign of language, and what might it have meant for Dove to turn to the properties, procedures, and effects of language, relationality chief among them, as models for his art in the early decades of the twentieth century in the United States? If circles and waves served as emblems and instruments, what, ultimately, were they meant to articulate and produce? And what about the weather, the third term alongside circles and waves in what I am calling the geography of Dove’s art? There is a lot of all three of these things—­circles, waves, and weather—­in Dove’s work and each proliferates for a reason. Consequently, weather talk abounds in this chapter, and I will argue that it was weather as well as the language of weather that provided an essential and fundamental paradigm for both the instrumentality and the desired outcome of Dove’s art. Regarding that outcome, this chapter characterizes how Dove’s preoccupation with language, translation, communication, and connection constituted an investment in intersubjectivity. Defined most basically as the sharing of subjective states among two or more individuals, intersubjectivity was also approached by Dove as a condition whereby information migrated among entities, human and otherwise, by way of various systems of signs, with the ul83

timate aim of establishing pictorial art’s capacity

and coherently expressed credo or doctrine, and

for rendering new forms of interchange and thus

when I first encountered the range of his commen-

profoundly reorienting human expression and in-

tary, I was hard-­pressed to discern any significant

teraction. For Dove, intersubjectivity entailed inter-

patterns or trends of thinking among his musings.

connections among combinations of entities more

But as I began to note and document Dove’s preoc-

so than it did a condition of unification or oneness.

cupation with systems of expression, translation,

Intersubjectivity, through processes like exchange

and communication and, also, to realize that I had

or projection, collected and aggregated, rather

on my hands not a shrinking, nature-­besotted vi-

than producing indivisible, gestalt-­ like wholes.

olet but a vigorously social individual, I began to

Dove’s rearticulation of Kandinsky in “An Idea”

recognize that certain of Dove’s most pithy and

announced his investment in relations as formed

intriguing statements hovered around the con-

by both encounter and aggregation as well as, cru-

cepts of connection, continuity, interrelation, and

cially, exchange: “As the point moves it becomes a

interchange—­“hovered” because Dove never stated

line, as the line moves it becomes a plane, as the

directly and straightforwardly that these were his

plane moves it becomes a solid, as the solid moves,

chief interests, yet close attention to his words re-

it becomes life and as life moves, it becomes the

veals them migrating toward this cluster of con-

present.”1 But this reworking also reveals what was

cepts time and time again. Taken together, these

at stake in the formation of such relations as Dove

statements, considered in combination with Dove’s

envisioned them, and these stakes were anything

sustained exploration of expressive systems across

but low. Life itself somehow stood in the balance,

his practice as well as the material characteristics

and Dove in his art calibrated accordingly, creating

and effects of his production, including the prolif-

works that would rise to the occasion, their capabil-

erating concentric circle motif, the pervasive waves,

ities commensurate with what he felt to be the task

and the instrumental or device-­like qualities of his

at hand. The language of weather, particularly as

work, directed me toward the idea of intersubjectiv-

manifest in period meteorology, guided this effort.

ity, suggesting it as a viable term through which to

I remind the reader that “intersubjectivity” is

84

understand and describe his art.

my term, not Dove’s. I have selected it because it

In an essay of his that he sent to Stieglitz in 1931

efficiently and accurately encapsulates the condi-

entitled “The 20th Century Limited or The Train

tion or state that, as I see it, Dove sought to ap-

Left Without Them,” Dove reflected on people who

proximate through the array of investments, forms,

rejected new ideas in favor of the comfort and fa-

and techniques that constituted his wide-­ranging

miliarity of the past, and he attempted to char-

artistic practice. Like his attention to language and

acterize the spirit underpinning the modern and

its operations, Dove’s investment in intersubjectiv-

the new.2 “They accept Bach, understand his idea,

ity was not that of the expert or the academic, nor

and refuse Marin and Klee,” he wrote, intimating

did it arise from conversance with period literature

throughout the essay that the most alive and the

from the realms of psychology or sociology. Rather,

most promising work would bypass naysayers and

it constituted a cobbled-­together and at times un-

leave them regretting their blind obstinacy. At sev-

systematic philosophy of being, one shaped by an

eral points in his essay, Dove describes the spirit of

assortment of outside sources and ideas but also

this modern, animate art. Calling the shared genius

forged in the very act of making. Dove, clearly, had a

of Bach, Marin, and Klee “the same love”—­a phrase

great deal to say about his art and about the creative

that embodies the idea of relational interchange—­

act more generally, and many of his statements re-

Dove characterized their efforts as stopping just

sist easy interpretation. Certain of his remarks are

short of a oneness or unanimity of expression,

downright baffling. His various articulations by no

which for him constituted the “perfect thing.” “One

means amount, collectively, to a deliberately crafted

in his own realm of sound,” he wrote, “one in his

Chapter Two

own sensation of space, and one in a colored mea-

rangement,” which connotes an organized group or

surement of life trying to combine the other two.

array but not necessarily the establishing of an es-

They seem to be held just at the point where all the

sential relationship among components, conveys a

arts become identical.” Dove further explored this

concern for the idea of an image as a system, a whole

notion of identity among disparate entities when

made up of interrelated entities. The term “forma-

he hypothesized in the essay “a line so pure, so that

tion,” regularly employed by Dove in his writing to

the shortest distance is the same to one mind as an-

characterize the nature of his imagery, for him also

other.” Such a proposition posits shared experience

connoted interconnection. In a 1933 letter to his

as an ideal state, for purity of line affords in-­kind

friend, the critic Elizabeth McCausland, he equated

connections to multiple minds, creating the arma-

formation with rhythm, using the idea of a recur-

ture for intersubjective exchange, here imagined as

ring pattern formed by interrelated beats indicated

an artist creating a common pathway of thought.

by the term to describe his artistic vocabulary. “Just

At points in the text, Dove equated the spirit of the

at present,” he wrote, “I have come to the conclusion

avant-­garde with being itself. “The one thing,” he

that one must have a flexible form or formation

wrote, “that seems so far to me to remain is the con-

that is governed by some definite rythmic [sic] sense

dition of existence which can be followed through

beyond mere geometrical repetition, to express and

any further existence by knowing definitely the

put in space an idea so that those with sensitive

other existences that have had their influence upon

instruments can pick it up, and further that means

it. We can blow up a rubber band with dynamite &

of expression has to have grown long enough to es-

they both continue with their residues which could

tablish itself as an automatic force.”5 Dove’s priv-

be traced back or unblown so to speak.—­That seems

ileging of rhythm, which connotes essential rela-

to me to be the answer to this so-­called infinite

tions among parts, over repetition underscores his

3

thing.” Dove’s exact meaning here is hard to pin

investment in interconnection as does his sense

down. But a general picture of connected and mu-

that a formation governed by rhythm could serve

tually knowing and influencing existences emerges

as a means of communication between artist and

clearly enough, while Dove’s reformulation of cause

audience, here figured as the expression and trans-

and effect (explosion and residue) as unfolding bidi-

mission of an idea in space, akin to the traverse of

rectionally, as a back-­and-­forth exchange between

a radio signal or sound wave. Dove used the phrase

entities rather than one active thing acting on a

“sensitive instrument,” which combined period dis-

passive other thing, reinforces the idea that a form

course on radio broadcasting with occult rhetoric,

of integrated unity among parts and persons struck

particularly that associated with mental telepathy,

Dove as an ideal condition or state.

in order to refer to the heightened sensory powers

The statement Dove provided for the pamphlet

of certain individuals, Stieglitz among them (I will

that accompanied his exhibition at An American

say much more about this in chapter 3). In the letter

Place in 1940 expressed a similar concern for unity

to McCausland, his evocation of telepathic human

among parts, for stitching together—­in this case,

receivers thus suggests not mere viewing but the

in the space of art—­disparate things: “As I see from

transmission of ideas between minds, something

one point in space to another, from the top of the

like a condition of shared mental states.

tree to the top of the sun, from right or left, or up, or

Dove put a good deal of store in the capacity

down, these are drawn as any line around a thing to

of rhythm to abet such transfer and translation.

give the colored stuff of it, to weave the whole into

As a variety of connective tissue, rhythm served

a sequence of formations rather than to form an

for him as a template for making. He often char-

4

arrangement of facts.” Dove’s favoring of the word

acterized his work as proceeding in terms of musi-

“sequence,” which by definition entails intentional

cal tempo, describing in his diary painting in “2⁄4,”

and particular connections between parts, over “ar-

“1/2,” and “3/4” time.6 Dove’s use of time signatures to Weather

85

describe the character of his working suggests that

as interlinked in a manner similar to individual

he envisioned the act of painting as itself a kind of

measures within a musical staff. As has been noted

formation, one stitched together and essentially in-

in the literature, Dove often painted in series, and

terlinked by a common tempo. A conventional form

the three-­part series of paintings he created in 1942

of musical notation, a time signature includes two

and 1943 comprising Formation I, Formation II, and

numbers; the top number indicates the number of

Formation III (Green Landscape) serves well as an ex-

beats per bar and the bottom number designates

ample of the articulation of such a condition of in-

the type of note that stands for a single beat. The

terconnection. This is the case for several reasons:

time signature of a musical score thus announces

because of the series title; because as with any series

properties shared among all the notes and measures

one is meant to imagine the components of this one

of that score. In similar fashion, Dove’s evocation of

as a sequence and in dialogue with one another; and

tempo posits his sense that all the actions involved

because Dove’s use of the series format implies a

in the creation of a picture, like his pictorial forms,

wish to explore an idea or set of ideas among several

existed as a kind of spatiotemporal system of in-

paintings, so that the three pictures might be imag-

terconnected parts, the three-­dimensional, motile

ined as sharing or passing along similar thoughts.7

equivalent of a metered musical score. Dove’s time

As part of a series, the paintings resonate power-

signatures also suggest that he construed paint-

fully with one another, compelling the viewer to ex-

ings not as self-­contained, autonomous units but

perience them collectively as an unfolding and con-

Fig. 64  Arthur G. Dove, Formation I, 1943, oil and wax emulsion on canvas, museum purchase with funds from the Helen M. Towle Bequest, The San Diego Museum of Art, 1972.189, www.sdmart.org.

86

Chapter Two

tinuous rhythm of color and form, one that evokes

paintings in the series, however, Formation I springs

the rhythmic cadence of musical sound.

to life, its forms activated by their echoes in the

Like many of Dove’s paintings from the 1940s,

other two canvases and by the implied movement

Formation I (1943) (fig. 64) abandons variegated and

and serial transformation among the three. A sense

intersecting colors and forms for greater empha-

of masses butting heads and left sides of canvases

sis on the picture plane along with spare, discrete,

braced against right provides a connecting thread

and bluntly distilled shapes. On its own, the work

among the three even though the massed forms

stands bereft of the transmutations and trans-

in question take on distinct shapes in each. Dove’s

lations that characterized Dove’s earlier produc-

brushwork in areas of Formation III (ca. 1942) (fig.

tion. Dove meticulously maintains the boundaries

65) is far rougher and more obviously worked than

between shapes. There exists only the slightest hint

that in the other two, suggesting transmutation

of overlap or intermingling in the upper right-­hand

not within a single work but from one to another

corner, where a triangle of mauve-­pink creeps into

and then to the third. Banding effects in the lower

areas of green and lavender-­gray. Braced against the

left of Formation III announce a kinship among the

central yellow form, the V-­shaped section of green

three works in the series and, also, with similar mo-

appears to hold all pieces tautly in place, propping

tifs of Dove’s earlier works, as do the red squiggles

up the left of the canvas so its parts do not shift in

in the upper right, putting the series in dialogue

space or topple. In the company of the other two

with Dove’s larger oeuvre. Dove created another

Fig. 65  Arthur G. Dove, Formation III (Green Landscape), ca. 1942, oil and wax on canvas, reverse of Abstract Composition (oil on canvas), 50.8 × 71.44 cm (20 × 281⁄8 in.), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of the William H. Lane Foundation, 1983.385a. Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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88

composition on the reverse of Formation III, one

nection, a continuum among all things in life, from

that includes bold semicircular banding effects

the smallest point to the whole of the cosmos, as it

and bisected half circles and horizontal strips, one

is about the representation and translation of geo-

of them assuming the form of a wave. Overall, this

metric forms.8 The Formation series, which strikes

composition resonates with the other Formation

up a conversation across thirty years’ worth of artis-

pictures. It also bears a close resemblance to the

tic work, exemplifies just such an all-­encompassing

emphatic, slicing geometries of Dove’s early pastels,

system, with the diminutive circles of paint that dot

thus connecting this painting and the series as a

the surface of Formation III representing the point

whole to prominent aspects of Dove’s larger body of

on a continuum that passes through lines, planes,

work. The very fabric of the canvas support of For-

and solids so as to arrive at and vigorously partake

mation III, because painted on both sides, serves as

in life. This calls forth a capacity for painting be-

a medium of translation or transmission between

yond its usual constitution—­not just pictorial form

recto and verso, producing the effect of a rhythmic

but material and motile formation—­as well as a

point and counterpoint and calling to mind and

new mode of relationality for humans who, within

condensing into a single object the translations

such a system, enter into substantial relations with

that occur across Dove’s practice.

the human and the nonhuman alike.

As a cluster of pan-­oeuvre citations, the Forma-

Dove’s diary entry for August 12, 1939, confirms

tion series, which includes a 3″ × 4″ watercolor study

this hypothesis. “To locate in space, expr. by line?”

dated July 8, 1942, now in the collection of the

he wrote. “Not static planes in space. Not form but

Wichita Art Museum, that sketches out the basic

formation. To set planes in motion. Einstein. ‘Most

composition of Formation I, embodies the lines of

degenerate form of imagination—­pathological in-

connection that Dove intended the term “forma-

dividualism.’ ”9 The final phrase of this note comes

tion” to describe. In the McCausland letter, Dove

from a 1928 novel by S. S. Van Dine, The Bishop Mur-

paired the idea that his motifs constituted signals

der Case, that featured the detective Philo Vance.

for use in human interchange with the suggestion

S. S. Van Dine was the penname of the critic Willard

that these motifs also amounted to an “automatic

Huntington Wright, brother to the Synchromist

force,” one freed from the hand and will of the

painter Stanton MacDonald-­Wright, who in addi-

artist as if a physical law, a principle that under-

tion to his art-­critical writing, authored a series of

pinned and unified the entirety of existence and

best-­selling Vance novels in the 1920s.10 Vance cites

was thus analogous in its interconnecting capacity

the phrase, attributing it to Einstein, in a chapter

to thoughts transmitted in space. Dove’s reformu-

entitled “Mathematics and Murder,” in which he

lation of Kandinsky’s geometric translations—­“as

details the pathology of the novel’s villain, includ-

the point moves it becomes a line, as the line moves

ing his asocial nature and his complete withdrawal

it becomes a plane, as the plane moves it becomes

from society as caused by the “fictions of thought”

a solid, as the solid moves, it becomes life and as

of modern mathematics.11 Replete with references

life moves, it becomes the present”—­posited exis-

to the signal ideas of contemporaneous mathemat-

tence as a series of essentially interconnected parts.

ics and theoretical physics as well as allusions to

When considered in relation to Dove’s claim for

esoteric interpretations of non-­Euclidean geome-

art as a flexible form or force that travels in space

try, courtesy of the erudite Vance, the novel—­along

and time, the latter as suggested by Dove’s refer-

with the movie released by Metro-­Goldwyn-­Meyer

ence to rhythm, and also in light of his admiration

in 1930 and starring Basil Rathbone—­ urged its

of Einstein, whose special theory of relativity de-

readers to choose sociability over “pathological in­

scribed the space-­time continuum, this revision of

dividualism” and to avoid the abyss of “abstraction”

Kandinsky may be understood to be as much about

as well as any obsession with abstruse theories at

the intimation of a form of monumental intercon-

the expense of normal participation in society,

Chapter Two

cautionary notes that clearly resonated for Dove.12

another. A statement published in the 1929 catalog

Dove’s insistent rejection of the term “abstraction”

for Dove’s exhibition at the Intimate Gallery fore-

for use in describing his own art—­“there is no such

shadows his articulation of this idea for Kootz. “Just

thing as abstraction,” he wrote—­in favor of other

now,” he wrote, “I am trying to put a line around,

terms, including “formation” but also “extraction,”

in, and through an idea. After that, or at the same

stemmed from an analogous belief that one’s work

time, to thoroughly grasp or sense the light condi-

must always engage in and activate the material of

tion in which the idea exists.”17 Here posited as the

life, the opposite of pathological individualism, if

situating context for an idea, the condition of light

not necessarily by depicting it outright.13

becomes known by activating it with line, the very

In 1929 and 1930, Dove made a series of state-

thing Dove had deemed essential to the creation of

ments about something he called a “condition of

“a sequence of formations” rather than “an arrange-

light,” a concept that was clearly very important to

ment of facts” and that he had posited as the ideal

him. The most frequently cited remark comes from

medium of connection among multiple parts.

the letter that Samuel Kootz included in his Modern American Painters, published in 1930:

In his letter to Kootz, Dove also made clear that he understood the condition of light after which he sought as a property or quality of color, an ele-

There was a long period of searching for a some-

ment of design that he assiduously explored in his

thing in color which I then called “a condition of

reading, writing, and painting. His son, William,

light.” It applied to all objects in nature, flowers,

indicated that Dove’s reference to visits to the Mu-

trees, people, apples, cows. These all have their

seum of Natural History related to his mixing and

certain condition of light, which establishes

experimenting with pigments.18 In the “Notes” sec-

them to the eye, to each other, and to the under-

tion of his copy of Andrews’s Color and Its Application

standing. To understand that clearly go to nature,

to Printing, Dove assembled circle-­shaped samples

or to the Museum of Natural History and see the

of pigment into arrays that look like experiments

butterflies. Each has its own orange, blue, black;

with color or postexperimental demonstrations of

white, yellow, brown, green, and black, all care-

results. In one particularly captivating example (fig.

fully chosen to fit the character of the life going

66), he drew a series of lines among these samples, connecting the dots vertically, horizontally, and, for

14

on in that individual entity.

a selection of them, diagonally, fashioning a sort of Equal in complexity to other of Dove’s remarks,

color diagram, complete with capital-­letter anno-

this statement has been variously interpreted, most

tations to indicate hue. It is difficult to determine

often as reflecting a search on Dove’s part for the

what information, exactly, Dove wished to express

fundamental properties or essences of things.15 Un-

by way of this diagram, but the network of lines

derstood in this way, “a condition of light” would

that interconnects the color blots, transforming a

refer to a quality particular to an individual being or

page of individual samples into a constellation-­like

object, a unique character not shared by anyone or

system, suggests to me that color and connectivity

anything else. As Dove elsewhere stated, “Every ob-

were to his mind of a piece and that he intended the

ject in nature has it . . . can’t get away from it. Leaves,

phrase “a condition of light,” which he used in refer-

16

trees, animals, all have it, a condition of light.” But

ence to both color and interconnection, to capture

Dove also made clear that this “condition of light”

and convey this essential relationship. If nothing

served as the medium or vehicle by which connec-

else, the act of suspending dots of color in a web of

tions among individuals were made; for, as he ex-

lines propelled them into the realm of space, sup-

plained in his letter to Kootz, it is through this con-

porting the idea that Dove imagined art as a forma-

dition that one perceives objects in nature, and it is

tion of networked parts that existed and acted in

also how these objects see or make contact with one

essential relation to their surround—­that is, within Weather

89

Fig. 66  Arthur G. Dove, “Notes,” annotated page of E. C. Andrews, Color and Its Application to Printing (Chicago: The Inland Printer Company, 1911), from the collection of The Heckscher Museum of Art and the Newsday Center for Dove / Torr Studies, Huntington, NY.

90

space but also, by extension, in relation to time.19

apart to show the color ran all the way through,” a

The color diagrams created by Andrews without a

gesture that would have highlighted color’s status

doubt inspired Dove’s own, but probably not any

as a binding medium, an entity akin to line that suf-

more than did Andrews’s emphasis on color as an

fused and unified multiple parts: in this case, the

entity governed by combinations and relationships,

surfaces and interior structures of a petal.20

a claim characteristic of color theory in general; it

Dove provided his most detailed description

was likely such attention to the relational aspects

of the “condition of light” in a text he called “Pen-

of color had a hand in encouraging Dove to sup-

cil Notes Made on a Boat,” written and mailed to

plement his version of the diagram featured in the

Stieglitz in 1930, which outlined, as he put it, “some

manual with a network of interconnecting lines.

theories about ‘form’ and ‘color.’” He introduced the

The idea that color by its very nature existed as part

text by stating that he had “come to the conclusion

of a series or sequence of relations, that its essential

that there is one form and one color.” The form, he

condition was a continuum—­as part of the electro-

explained, is the cone, from which one derives the

magnetic spectrum or as configured by the spokes

conic sections, which for Dove served as fundamen-

or sections of a color wheel—­allowed Dove to imag-

tal forms, but also the spiral and the straight line,

ine color as a connective tissue in its own right. Wil-

which in turn generated the sphere, the cylinder,

liam described Dove “pulling the petals of flowers

and the cube. The one color, he wrote, “is White

Chapter Two

Light.”21 We know that Dove’s sense of the capacity

state of interconnection. Dove’s references to white

of the conic drew inspiration from classical math-

light and the aura, including a note to Stieglitz in

ematics, and he would have encountered in books

which Dove described his attempt to capture the

such as Color and Its Application to Printing a discus-

photographer’s aura in his assemblage portrait of

sion of white light as the admixture of all colors, or

him, make clear that it was the relational aspect of

light wavelengths, in the visible spectrum. But as

these theosophist notions that attracted Dove and

­Sherrye Cohn has pointed out, Dove’s understand-

that the idea of pervasively radiating and intercon-

ing of white light and the cone as singular forms

necting fields of energy provided a model for craft-

was also inspired by his reading in the literature of

ing a condition of intersubjectivity in his own art.26

theosophy, popular among artistic and literary cir-

Dove’s characterization of “a condition of light”

22

cles in the United States at the time. In all three

in the Kootz letter as the quality that differentiates

contexts (mathematics, color theory, and the oc-

between things and beings even as it interconnects

cult), white light figures as an all-­encompassing

them jibes well with theosophist belief, as does the

admixture of parts: of visible wavelengths or, in the

statement that follows his identification of white

case of theosophy, of all colors as well as all forms

light as the one color in his “Pencil Notes” text, in

of knowledge and being. According to proponents

which he evokes the shift from white to another,

of theosophy, white light constituted eternal truth,

particularized hue. “The over balance of one color or

cosmic love, and the essence of life; variety in the

the insufficiency of another,” he wrote, “will bring

world, from the colors of flowers to forms of hu-

all of the most subtle ‘conditions of light.’” The fact

man worship, existed as a function of white light,

that Dove went on to describe white light as anal-

which illuminated and suffused all things but as-

ogous to space, rather than form, makes clear that

sumed different forms according to the nature of

in describing the condition of light he had both

the entity it encountered and entered. Humans and

theosophy and physics, especially Einstein’s space-­

things were thus “colorations” of this white light,

time continuum, in mind.27 Dove’s further elabora-

the latter being the “life-­force” that refracted into

tion of the concept underlines his understanding of

23

a condition of light as simultaneously essence and

Dove alluded to this very idea in an undated hand-

interconnection, as defining the nature of an en-

written note: “The greatest Light is where the great-

tity while setting all things and beings, through the

est contrasts are. Form & Color the same.”24 As Cohn

unceasing movement of line, into relation within

has suggested, Dove’s musings about color and light

a cosmic continuum or system: “I’ve always had

also drew on the theosophist notion of the aura, a

the feeling that the condition of light was directly

vibrating cloud-­like shimmer of color and light that

related to the line motif in form and color and all

encompassed every living being, emanating from a

the other senses. . . . The color condition is closely

person’s life force in response to thought or emotion

related to the principle in line upon which that

and interacting with the surrounding atmosphere,

object’s growth is built.” All things, Dove said, “cut

the “manifold and multi-­colored forms of life.”

25

The

the color cone with their own individual curve.”28

particular vibrations and colors of an aura allowed

In other words, all things have a condition of light,

knowledge of a person’s inner state, and theoso-

and this condition, like Dove’s interconnected blots

phists developed categories and keys for decoding

of color in his copy of the Andrews manual, com-

an aura’s appearance. The ability to discern the in-

prises singularity and system simultaneously. And

teriority of another implied not just perception but

Dove’s “cut” calls to mind intersecting and thus

also participation, for the aura formed part of the

interlinked geometric figures, their cutting into

field that sustained all people and things. Appre-

one another proffering the inaugural gesture in the

hending a person’s aura thus entailed an exchange

creation of a geometry-­inspired schema depicting a

across bodily borders that revealed an essential

vast network, an immense system or complex con-

which shaped its appearance and motion.

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91

stituted not by mere coexistence, but by converse

its operations, structures, and forms would bring

and interchange among multitudinous parts. Else-

into being a novel mode of relationality, one that

where Dove described the creation of such an all-­

embraces and envelops everything that is.

encompassing complex in similar terms. “The thing

The interlocking shapes and pattern-­like de-

has never been done that I should like to do,” he

signs of Dove’s early work, especially the series of

wrote. “It must contain all of nature,” he continued,

pastels that he produced in 1911–­1912 now known

“built on and enveloped in a precisely pure math-

as “The Ten Commandments,” fall in step with this

ematical dream, wherein the tones and lines and

vision of an interlinking network initiated by a

spirit create a form in themselves, as one would add,

geometric gesture and sustained by mathematical

multiply, subtract, and divide whole conditions of

operations and interconnected facets of life. The

existence, the sum of two or three motives, curves

pastels were exhibited first at Stieglitz’s 291 in Feb-

so to speak, representing instincts from all of

ruary and March of 1912 and then in Chicago, at the

life.”29 Here, Dove envisions an aggregate of calcu-

W. Scott Thurber Galleries, also in March.30 In Sails

lation, mental operations, and spiritual states that

(1911–­1912) (fig. 67), for instance, the central sail that

amounts to an unprecedented entity that through

stretches its tip past the upper edge of the support

Fig. 67  Arthur G. Dove, Sails, 1911–­1912, part of “The Ten Commandments” series, pastel on composition board mounted on panel, 177⁄8 × 21½ in. Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1993.10, Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, IL, USA. Photo Credit: Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago / Art Resource, NY.

92

Chapter Two

conjures an originating curve or cut, one replicated

work appear to be an animate entity, a motile if not

in the two sails adjacent to it and in similar forms

living body operating as a system, an assembly of

that multiply and mutate throughout the scene.

component pieces with a common purpose or goal.

The repeated triangular shape stitches pieces to-

Although for the most part smoothly and precisely

gether so as to create a spatial whole, an effect rein-

worked, Dove applies his pastel medium bluntly

forced by the ballooning fields of green, brown, and

and coarsely in certain sections of Team of Horses

blue that like a viscous binding medium conjoin

and Sails: in the upper right-­hand corner of Sails, for

the myriad parts. In Team of Horses (1911 or 1912) (fig.

instance, where yellow and orange strokes resemble

68), ellipses proliferate. Some stretch, others bulge,

crumbling stucco or rusting metal, and across the

and yet others sprout sawteeth at their edges; all

bottom third of Team of Horses, where evenly distrib-

press leftward, as if compelled to move by a single,

uted yellow-­white morphs into ragged and stutter-

unvarying force, the implied rotation of the saw

ing streaks of the same hue before dissipating into

blades compounding this unanimous, nondistilled

a pool of milky pinks and grays. The combination

push. The force generated by the concerted action

of fluid, continuous color and broken, textured sur-

of every part dynamizes both scenes, making each

face compounds the dynamism of the scenes while

Fig. 68  Arthur G. Dove, Team of Horses, 1911 or 1912, pastel on paper fiberboard mounted to plywood, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, 1984.29.

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93

drawing attention to the medium itself, suggesting

the planes on the sides of the trees, and three

an analogy between the systemic behavior of Dove’s

colors, and black and white. From these was

geomorphic forms and the nature of pastel, where

made a rhythmic painting which expressed the

individual granules of powdered pigment combine

spirit of the whole thing. The colors were chosen

with a binder so as to form a single instrument, the

to express the substances of those objects and

pastel crayon or stick, that then operated in abso-

the sky. . . . These colors were made into pastels

lute concert with the artist’s moving and pigment-­

carefully weighed out and graded with black and

scattering limb. In characterizing the origin of his

white into an instrument to be used in making

pastel series in his letter to Kootz, in particular the

that certain painting. There were nine others,

genesis of Nature Symbolized No. 2 (ca. 1911) (fig. 69),

each with its own different motive.31

also called Wind on Hillside, Dove described his medium in just such terms:

In describing here his careful translation of color into the medium of pastel, whereby he carefully cal-

Then one day I made a drawing of a hillside.

ibrated the admixture of hues, Dove describes pas-

The wind was blowing. I chose three forms from

tel as an “instrument” for use in bringing a draw-

Fig. 69  Arthur G. Dove, Nature Symbolized No. 2, ca. 1911, pastel on paper, 458 × 550 mm, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.533, The Art Institute of Chicago.

94

Chapter Two

ing into being, and he characterizes that resulting

state of comprehensive interconnection, the very

drawing as an instrument by which a painting

condition depicted in the pastel works, including

based on its preliminary forms might be created.

Nature Symbolized No. 2, with its buoyant and rever-

In so doing, Dove characterizes the act of making

berating comma forms and the sail-­like slices that

a picture as a collaboration between himself and

fan out across the surface and plunge into the im-

his medium-­ as-­ device, which together delineate

age’s depths. At once a chaos of rotational motion

the “motive” of a given work, establishing through

and billowing form and a precisely calibrated and

both observation and the pastel device’s operation

meticulously organized design, Nature Symbolized

the work’s predominant theme, and also in concert

No. 2, like Sails and Team of Horses, embodies the nec-

generate the rhythmic force that would activate the

essary pairing of precision and brute force within

synchronized motions or operations of the whole.

a well-­ made, generative machine, exemplifying

Like his paintings and assemblages, which he en-

the aggregate of connections, encounters, and ex-

visioned as incarnating the operations of everyday

changes for which such a machine, or “instrument,”

instruments such as phonographs, cameras, and

served Dove as a model system or network in his

radios, the medium of pastel for Dove afforded an

formulation of the desired condition of light, his

instrumental capacity for use in the creation of a

theorized condition of systemic and all-­embracing

Fig. 70  Arthur G. Dove, Cows in Pasture, 1935, wax emulsion on canvas, 20 × 28 in. (50.8 × 71.12 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1936. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

Weather

95

intersubjectivity. In his 1924 Port of New York, Paul

did in that art, one can confirm that it was unity if

Rosenfeld made an explicit connection between

not homogeneity among parts that stood for Dove

Dove’s use of pastels and “those very conditions of

as the ultimate and ideal form of contact and con-

light recurrently established by his subject-­matters,”

nection. Dove understood such a condition in for-

suggesting an insider’s knowledge of Dove’s concept

mal terms, fashioning essential interconnection as

and confirming the relationship between this con-

a criterion for his pictorial work, but it should be

cept and “The Ten Commandments” for which I am

clear by now that he also imagined this condition

32

96

arguing here. Of course, Dove’s exploration and ex-

as unfolding in a broader context, that of everyday

pression of the idea of a condition of light unfolded

life, such that art wound up the thing that, through

across the entirety of his production, from the inter-

the mechanisms of translation and communica-

weaving lines and formal rhythms of works such as

tion, construed all existence as a web of vital rela-

Seagull Motif (Violet and Green), Me and the Moon, and

tions, with myriad objects, beings, and phenomena

the Formation series to the puzzle-­piece and inter-

set into relation and interconnected much as the

stitched patchwork compositions of Cows in Pasture

color of a flower blossom essentially interrelated

(1935), Sand and Sea (1943), and Another Arrangement

its constituent parts. It was the desire for vitality—­

(1944) (figs. 70, 87, 39). But consideration of the pas-

for rhythmic, mobile, animated connections rather

tel series demonstrates how fundamental the idea

than a mere piling up of components—­along with

was for Dove even in the early years of his career.

Dove’s wish to forge bonds among human and non-

The terms I have been using to elucidate the

human entities that pushed his vision past a desid-

basic themes or precepts of Dove’s artistic theory—­

eratum for formal coherence or for a metaphorical

connection, interrelation, continuum, exchange—­

correspondence between image and world (what

are not seamlessly interchangeable (nor was this

would wind up merely an elaborate, overwrought

“theory” all that vigorously theorized). These terms

version of imitation) and toward a hypothesized

mean different things and the histories of their use

state of actual transfer and exchange among all

are varied and diverse. In employing them, I do not

things. Hence my use of the term “intersubjectivity”

aim for definitional or etymological precision, pe-

instead of simply “unity” or “harmony.” Intersubjec-

riod or otherwise. Rather, I wish these terms as a

tivity for Dove operated on multiple levels—­artistic

cluster to give some sense of what motivated Dove’s

but also material (as in material life), phenomenal,

constant exploration of the nature and properties

mental, and cosmic—­and in each case Dove imag-

of expressive systems in his practice. As terms, they

ined that the instrument that compelled inter-

emerge from close attention to what Dove himself

subjective interchange, or that at least articulated

said about his art, and collectively, they indicate his

through modeling the potential for such a state,

devotion as expressed throughout his various ar-

would be a work of art.

ticulations to establishing connections, to forging

It should also be clear by now that Dove, long

links between entities. This could occur by way of

described as a bit of a loner whose practice con-

literal translation (sound into musical notation, or

sisted mainly of an attempt to register subjective

speech into shorthand), through encounter or use

experience through the rendition of nature’s es-

(as with the connections established among vari-

sential forces and truths, with no especial concern

ous entities—­bodies, machines, and sensations—­

for everyday matters, the material world, or the

activated when one listens to a record on a phono-

manner in which his work was received by others

graph), or as the result of analogy or equivalency

once it left his hands, was an artist quite other than

(light and water as linked through a shared wave-

this.33 Even without the preceding account of the

form, for instance, or the connective capacity com-

extensive evidence of his interest in communica-

mon to both line and color). Above all, given what

tion and conveyance—­from his engagement with

he had to say about his art, together with what he

experimental literature, sound technology, and

Chapter Two

theosophy to his constant wordplay and explora-

and his dedication to the everyday, human activi-

tion of shorthand and musical notation—­the case

ties associated with and through which he explored

for Dove’s investment in connection, as opposed

these things. As characterized in the early twenti-

to singularity and isolation, would be watertight.

eth century by Georg Simmel, sociability refers

To start, he lived a life dedicated to exchange with

to “the free-­playing, interacting interdependence

others. He corresponded widely and recurrently

of individuals,” a condition of “togetherness” and

with many people, including family and friends

“union with others” resulting from the predomi-

and prominent members of the New York art world.

nance, albeit contingent and transitory, of associ-

The sheer number of surviving letters from Dove

ation over “the solitariness of the individual.” Ac-

to others, including hundreds he wrote to Stieglitz

cording to Simmel, such sociability results from the

and O’Keeffe, testifies to his investment in estab-

distillation of “the pure essence of association”—­

lishing and maintaining relationships and to the

association in and of itself as a value or source of

importance he accorded his friendships as part of

from societal unions motivated by satisfaction—­

his daily life but also in regard to his artistic work.

interests, economic, religious, or otherwise.34 Dove’s

That these letters were often quite long and writ-

articulation of intersubjectivity—­its nature, opera-

ten with great care, sometimes over the course of

tions, and upshot—­diverges from the sociologist’s

several days and drafts, underscores this commit-

account of sociability, of course. Simmel described

ment. Dove also willingly exchanged letters with

sociability as already resident within human

people he did not know, individuals who wrote to

groups, whereas Dove believed his desired form of

him asking about his work or soliciting his partici-

intersubjectivity to be not yet extant—­this is a key

pation in a project, exhibition, or event. He traveled

point. What Simmel characterized as one condition

frequently to New York from his homes in Geneva

among many possible conditions in human society

and on Long Island to see exhibitions and to make

Dove postulated as the condition, if unrealized. And

social calls, describing these encounters with detail

what for Simmel accounted for relations among

and care in his diaries and letters. The diaries kept

humans for Dove served to hypothesize relations

by him and Torr document a constant stream of

among humans and everything else. But Simmel’s

friends visiting or staying at their home, and they

utopian premise that sociability was or should be

record many occasions of communal music making

fundamental to human intercourse provides the

or music listening, fishing trips, drinks, and din-

conceptual means for understanding the essential

ners out. Indeed, these accounts occupy as much

sociality of Dove’s formulation of intersubjectivity,

space in the diary as do discussions of Dove’s art,

and it aids one in fully grasping the extent of Dove’s

indicating the significance Dove and Torr accorded

ambition to produce a novel form of lived reality.35

to them as part of their lives. The diary itself, be-

Take for example Dove’s privileged place in

cause it was kept in collaboration with Torr, while

Stieglitz’s circle of artists as well as Dove’s oft-­

private, still reflects, embodies even, a dedication

expressed devotion to Stieglitz and his enterprise.

to dialogue, to the passage of information between

Although my account of Dove aims to dislodge him

parties (each read the other’s entries) and to the

from the confines of Stieglitz-­centered interpreta-

shared experience that arose as a result.

tions, Dove’s investment in connection and, I will

Dove’s sociability looms quite small in the art-­

now officially add, sociability, his efforts to make

historical literature, but it matters a great deal—­

wholes out of parts, be those parts inanimate or

not just because acknowledging it sets the record

living, must be understood in the context of Stieg-

straight, but also because sociability as a term or

litz’s own beliefs about the power and potential

idea cannot justifiably be left out of considerations

of the group. Without discounting Stieglitz’s self-­

of Dove’s project, given his investment in language,

importance, as exemplified by his less than modest

translation, communication, and interconnection

autobiographical essay “The Origin of the Photo-­ Weather

97

Secession and How It Became 291,” or the cult of

tential pedagogical, social, and political use-­value

personality that arose around him, one can point

of art. Examples include Robert Henri’s conviction

to a strain of collectivism in his ventures and in un-

that art should integrate with life and expand the

dertakings associated with him or, at a minimum,

consciousness of the public, the John Reed Club’s

to a Whitman-­inspired rhetoric of common cause

politically minded artists’ forums, Aaron Douglas’s

and the social good that attached itself to his proj-

activist and utopian images of racial uplift and

36

Typical are Paul Rosenfeld’s rhapsodic de-

equality, the antilynching exhibitions staged by

scription of Stieglitz as a harbinger of artistic and

the American Communist Party and by the NAACP

social revolution in his 1916 essay “291 Fifth Avenue”

(the latter organized in collaboration with the

and Harold Rugg’s valorizing of Stieglitz as a cata-

College Art Association), the Federal Arts Project,

lyst and model for social reconstruction and the

John Dewey’s advocacy in Art as Experience (1934)

formation of a cooperative community in his con-

for art as a tool of democracy, and the Museum of

tribution to the 1934 publication America and Alfred

Modern Art’s emphasis on democratic culture and

Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait. Equally characteristic

consumption.40 Whether Stieglitz really was a man

are the publications produced in honor of Stieglitz

of the people or wholeheartedly subscribed to the

or with his support, among them Camera Work and

notion of the primacy of the collective or what Clur-

291, in addition to America and Alfred Stieglitz, all of

man called the “group idea” is irrelevant here. What

which insisted on collective authorship and the

matters is Dove’s regular exposure to the collectivist

ects.

37

representation of multiple perspectives. Usually

rhetoric generated by and associated with Stieglitz

associated with radical individualism and the pri-

and others and the impact the idea of collectivity

macy of the subjective self, Stieglitz was during his

on its own would have had on him. That impact, I

lifetime often described in very different terms. “In

would argue, was significant, and the Stieglitz mi-

a word,” wrote Harold Clurman, “Stieglitz’s whole

lieu provided an important context for Dove’s own

work, from his photographs to his conversations,

articulation of connection and sociability.

clearly reveals that classic conception of art that

The same might be said for theosophy, with its

today we call collective.” Stieglitz, Clurman argued,

emphasis on cosmic unity and the oneness of all be-

citing his “innate understanding of the interdepen-

ings, and also for various strains of utopian thought

dence of all things and of all beings,” provides an ex-

circulating in the late nineteenth and early twenti-

ample of how art might “change the world,” thereby

eth century, including those that posited new com-

demonstrating the potential for the fruitful coexis-

munication technologies such as the telegraph, tele-

38

photograph, telephone, and radio as mechanisms by

The cohort known as the “Young Americans,” which

which the ideal of a transnational, universal human

overlapped with Stieglitz’s camp and included

community, borne of universal communication net-

Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank,

works, might be attained.41 Period discourse linked

James Oppenheim, Paul Rosenfeld, Hart Crane, and

Dove to this technological context and the utopia-

Sherwood Anderson, also formed part of Dove’s in-

nism (and sometimes occultism) associated with it.

tellectual and social milieu, especially during his

In an article that appeared in Camera Work in 1913,

years in Westport, Connecticut, which was a locus

Maurice Aisen analyzed the innovations of Picabia

for this group. Associated with the journal Seven

in the context of broader transformations in the do-

Arts, the “Young Americans” explored frequently in

mains of art, philosophy, and science. He identified

their work the relationship between the individual

Dove as sharing Picabia’s outlook and intentions,

and the communal, the experience of social contact

including Picabia’s quest for “a new nomenclature,”

and exchange, and the capacity of art to have a col-

parallel to the new vocabularies of scientific inquiry

tence of artistic independence and collaboration.

39

98

lective influence. They did so alongside Stieglitz’s

and capable of expressing new worlds of knowledge

collectivism at a moment that took seriously the po-

and insight. Aisen situated this new nomenclature

Chapter Two

as the latest manifestation in a genealogy of the

remarks to Hapgood allude to and draw connections

various languages “for inter-­communication” that

among his abstract vocabulary, his concept of the

societies have developed over time and that be-

condition of light, the prospect of profound inter-

come obsolete with succeeding generations. “Our

connection, and the sociopolitical, suggesting that

words,” he wrote, “communicate at first through

as early as 1912 he would have been primed to imag-

the atmosphere and in personal contact. When we

ine his practice as an artist and the properties and

first talked, we communicated through the air, later

procedures deployed or generated within his work as

through signs, still later through writing, afterwards

definitely oriented toward the sphere of human rela-

through telegraph, telephone, till today through

tions. As Dove himself makes clear in his comments,

wireless telegraphy and telephone.” To his mind,

the sociability and the essentially collective nature

Picabia and Dove pushed this genealogy forward

of that sphere corresponded to and took visual form

by materializing in their art a new medium of in-

in the connections fostered by his art. It follows that

tercommunication, one that like new technologies

the pictorial and material manifestations of trans-

of communication “increases extraordinarily the

lation and communication in Dove’s paintings and

perception and interchange of the five senses,” but

assemblages existed to explore and, ideally, compel

much more radically so, in the form of a “psychic

intersubjectivity, understood by Dove both as an ar-

sense.”42

tistic method and an artistic goal.

Dove himself understood individual artistic pur-

My point here is that Dove, that putative re-

suit to be bound up with the social, collective sphere.

cluse who left the city for the countryside because

On the occasion of the exhibition of “The Ten Com-

he thought modernity was objectionable and found

mandments,” the journalist and anarchist Hutchins

people annoying—­and whose abstraction has been

Hapgood reported Dove’s comments on the affinity

understood as the pictorial equivalent of this re-

between his art and radical politics. Hapgood’s ar-

treat, a withdrawal from the material and the messy

ticle began with a discussion of labor reform and an

into the domains of the essential, the subjective,

account of a strike supported by the labor organiza-

and purity of form—­such a Dove must be under-

tion Industrial Workers of the World before turning

stood in very different terms. His work may look

to a characterization of the relationship between

radically individual, but it existed to connect, bear-

politics and social matters as exemplified by Dove’s

ing the intent to function as a thread whose stitch

abstraction. “In politics and all human affairs,” Dove

and weave gathered and grouped. Period discourse,

told Hapgood, “advanced workers are trying to re-

which drew no hard and fast distinction between

duce things to the simplest.” All pursuits, Dove said,

allegiance to individualism and subscription to a

as they increase in intensity, tend “to assume the

collective model—­and which understood the very

essentials of form,” including the labor movement’s

possibility of individualism as arising from the

drive toward simplifying “the conception of classes”

group—­allowed for this, setting the stage for mak-

as well as the simplification of the relation “between

ing art that appeared to turn away from the mate-

the will of the people and governmental and legis-

rial world even as it remained squarely within it and

lative forms.” According to Dove, because “the same

desirous of engaging all its parts. When considered

intense and simplifying process goes through all

alongside his sustained exploration of systems of

human activities and one thing throws light on

expression and his theorization of a condition of in-

everything else,” an artist, to remain vital, must

tersubjectivity, including his postulated “condition

not “cut himself away from the labor movement or

of light,” Dove’s little acknowledged investment in

other movements.” “If I could work out a simple so-

sociability and the social—­the fact that he was a

cial proposition,” Dove said, “it would be as beautiful

social being who thoroughly enjoyed forging con-

and as esthetic as any color, or form harmony that

nections with others and believed heartily in uto-

the fire of my imagination might compose.”43 Dove’s

pian visions of human, even cosmic collectivity—­ Weather

99

demands that one understand his art in just these

gled in the material, phenomenal, and social do-

terms.

mains. Dove’s vision was a utopian one, to be sure,

In sum, Dove’s intersubjectivity hypothesis en-

but any vision that posits art as somehow prepared

tailed a preoccupation with effects of connection

to change the world—­in this case, through a radi-

or communication as produced by operations of

cal form of collectivity or community wrought by a

transmission or translation: in rhythms, sequences,

pictorial reconfiguration of relationality—­can be of

formations, and lines that conveyed ideas from one

course nothing else. This was a project experimen-

mind to the next; in a condition of light that forged

tal in nature and wildly ambitious in aim, and Dove

bonds between forms and colors in a painting and

knew it. “What is your artist credo, or your concep-

among entities in the world, human and other-

tion of what it is the artist undertakes to do?” he

wise; in things moving through air and producing

was asked in 1938 by an author preparing a book on

effects across vast expanses of space (as with the

contemporary painting and sculpture. Dove’s reply,

sun illuminating the earth’s surface or the moon

exuberantly expressed in sweeping pencil strokes

producing the tides); in spatially dispersed humans

scrawled beneath the neatly typed question: “The

sharing sonic experience by way of a technology

impossible.”44

like radio; in the supernatural and simultaneous sharing of thought associated with mental telepathy; or in the sonic continuum produced among

100

Weather

performer, sound recording, playback apparatus,

But what does this talk of translation, communi-

painter, and painting in the act of creating a picture

cation, connection, and intersubjective complexes

while listening to a record on a phonograph. Such

have to do with the weather, one of the terms in

an investment on Dove’s part in contact and trans-

my tripartite schema of Dove’s practice that I have

mission across a series or set of relations added up

dubbed a geography of circles, waves, and weather?

to a fantasy of connectivity, a vision of the disso-

It goes without saying that there is a lot of

lution of boundaries between the animate and the

weather in Dove’s paintings and assemblages:

inanimate, humans and machines, the heavens and

sun­shine, rain, snow, wind, fog, clouds, h ­ umidity,

the earth, sight and touch, seeing and hearing, with

lightning, thunder, storms, and cyclones. In the

art posited as the connective tissue—­the medium

assemblage Rain (fig. 25), Dove sandwiched a clus-

of communication and converse—­among all these

ter of twigs between two panes of glass; he ap-

things, the apparatus that could engineer, through

plied rubber cement to the reverse of the top pane,

its imagining of novel modes and models of inter-

dabbing and pulling the glue so that it resembles

change, just such a desired state of profound and

drops and stringy streaks of rain, an effect rein-

proliferative interconnection, a simultaneity of ex-

forced by the downward sloping pattern of paint

change, borne of translation, among objects, phe-

streaks or scratches in the metal ground on which

nomena, and beings. It was for this reason that Dove

the whole configuration sits. The twigs, which in-

fashioned his paintings and sculptures as simulta-

tersect the top edge of the assemblage but not the

neously images and instruments, affirming their

bottom and appear oriented upside down relative

instrumental potential by imbuing them with the

to natural growth, their tips pointing to the earth

materials, vocabularies, and operations of various

rather than stretching skyward, double as sleeting

expressive and transmission systems or forms—­

rain. Storms were a favorite of Dove’s, featured in

from metal paint and script-­like lines to circles and

works such as Seagull Motif (Violet and Green), Thun-

waves—­and by making sure that through this pic-

der Shower, Thunderstorm (1921), After the Storm, Silver

torial and substantial incarnation of the being and

and Green (Vault Sky) (ca. 1923), Golden Storm (1925),

behavior of such systems and forms, these works

Storm Clouds (1935), Electric Peach Orchard (1935), and

remained tethered to and thus essentially entan-

Wind (No. 3) (1935–­1936) (figs. 3, 37, 71–­75).45 The

Chapter Two

Fig. 71  Arthur G. Dove, Thunderstorm, 1921, oil and metallic paint on canvas, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Gift of Ferdinand Howald, 1931.167.

Fig. 73  Arthur G. Dove, Golden Storm, 1925, oil and metallic paint on plywood panel, 189⁄16 × 20½ in. (47.14875 × 52.07 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1926. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

Fig. 72  Arthur G. Dove, After the Storm, Silver and Green (Vault Sky), ca. 1923, oil and metallic paint on wood panel, Collection of the New Jersey State Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. L. B. Wescott, FA1974.75. Reproduced with permission.

sheer eloquence with which Dove rendered nature’s

Storm Clouds, irregular bands of pink, mauve, green,

outbursts testifies to his fascination with meteoro-

gray, and plum surge skyward, contracting and ex-

logical phenomena, especially extreme weather. In

panding as they rise, shifting from curving forms to

Thunderstorm, slashes of silver paint plunge toward

jagged edges on the ascent. At the center of these

the earth; terra firma slices across the bottom of the

billowing cloud forms sits what looks to be an eye—­

canvas like a chainsaw blade, its surface glistening

the “eye” of the storm, to be sure, here accompanied

as if wet or polished to a menacing sheen. A ser-

by the eerie green of a thunderstorm sky, but also

rated strip stretching between sky and ground sep-

an emblem of the power of the weather, its strength

arates the scene into two unequal halves, creating

and potency symbolized by this other-­than-­human,

the effect that the canvas itself is about to buckle

staring orb. Its brazen gape stands akin to that of

and split apart as a result of the thunderstorm’s fury

Dove’s Moon (fig. 5), its animal stare perhaps prefig-

and force. Oil and metallic paint in After the Storm,

uring a painting Dove began work on shortly after

Silver and Green (Vault Sky) combine to produce the

completing Storm Clouds, one called “Eagle Cloud” in

shimmer and glisten of a rain-­slicked landscape as

the diaries.47 Dove made and painted the silver-­leaf

a storm recedes, the air seeming to tremble as the

frame for Storm Clouds himself.48 Its silvery-­pink me-

emerging sun’s rays illuminate the droplets of water

tallic sheen, created through the use of silver leaf,

still suspended in the atmosphere or on the surface

which catches, reflects, and refracts the light that

of leaves and blades of grass. Dove renders these ef-

hits its surface, aptly evokes one of the subjects of

fects almost otherworldly, and the subtitle Vault Sky

the painting: the scattering of light among water-­

along with the blue-­black expanse that consumes

laden air and clouds. By registering the scene’s pre-

almost half of the canvas’s space presses the scene

dominant hues at the literal border between inside

toward a preternatural realm. Although different in

and out, the frame also suggests that the scope and

overall effect, both Thunder Shower and Storm Clouds

power of a storm cannot be contained within any

convey the explosive potential of the earth’s atmo-

single view.

sphere. In Thunder Shower, which may have been in-

Dove exuberantly painted the weather, and he

spired by a storm that caught Dove and Torr while

also took weather reporting as a subject. Several of

driving home to Centerport from Brentwood in

Dove’s works boast titles that evoke weather reports

September 1939, jagged swaths and zigzags of color

or forecasts, including Partly Cloudy (1942) and Rain

burst from the center and careen toward the canvas’s

or Snow (1943) (figs. 76, 77). Dove’s signature in Partly

edges, as if a bomb has been detonated, the wiry line

Cloudy, at bottom center, sits nestled in the crook

that descends through the heart of the canvas evok-

of a downward sweeping curve, one of a series of

46

ing both a lightning strike and a burning fuse. In

yellow-­white and yellow-­gray bands that, in combination, call to mind the hull of a ship, as if to evoke the idea of the artist on board a boat reading and recording the weather—­“partly cloudy”—­or predict-

Fig. 74  Top, Arthur G. Dove, Storm Clouds, 1935, wax emulsion on canvas in artist-­made frame, 15 × 211⁄8 in. (38.1 × 53.7 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection, Gift of Muriel Kallis Newman, 2006, 2006.32.14. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. Fig. 75  Bottom, Arthur G. Dove, Electric Peach Orchard, 1935, oil on canvas, 20¼ × 28 in. (51.435 × 71.12 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1935. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

ing future conditions as he sails. The title of Sun Drawing Water itself evokes the actions of weather watching and forecasting and, as noted in the previous chapter, the phrase “sun drawing water” at the time colloquially described crepuscular rays, columns of light that appear to descend from cloud breaks and were commonly thought to portend the coming of a storm.49 Dove’s use of this colloquialism—­in the painting’s title and also in his poem, “A Way to Look at Weather

105

Fig. 76  Arthur G. Dove, Partly Cloudy, 1942, oil on canvas mounted on masonite, 357⁄8 × 255⁄8 in. Collection of the University of Arizona Museum of Art & Archive of Visual Arts, Tucson; Gift of Oliver James, 1950.1.1.

Fig. 77  Arthur G. Dove, Rain or Snow, 1943, oil and wax emulsion on canvas, 35 × 25 in. (88.9 × 63.5 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1943. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

Things,” which includes the line “the sun draws

annotation, suggesting that the title was indeed a

water from the sea”—­echoes other invocations on

quotation from this clipping and thus intended to

his part of weather or seasonal prognostications,

signal the phrase’s origin in the rhetoric of weather

including the phrase “the wind has weight,” which

watching and forecasting, including the locutions

signaled the coming of a storm and appeared in the

of common weather talk.52 A favorite topic of the

essay Dove wrote to accompany his exhibition at

period was weather prediction based on observing

Stieglitz’s Intimate Gallery in 1927–­1928. Dove’s ob-

animal behavior—­the circling of chimney swallows

servation that “The geese are flying northward . . .

as a foretelling of rain, the active spinning of long

it is a good sign,” included in the pamphlet that

threads of web by spiders as indicative of fair con-

accompanied his 1940 exhibition at Steiglitz’s An

ditions to come, the cessation of swarming on the

All three

part of bees as presaging a storm. Dove was himself

phrases fall into the period categories of “weather

attuned to such signs, writing from Centerport to

proverb,” “weather lore,” or “weather sign,” state-

Stieglitz in January 1944 about the “thousands of

ments about the weather and its future behavior

seagulls in now. Never have seen so many since we

that were borne of observation, experience, and

have been here. Sometimes mean storms, but this

tradition rather than the scientific procedures and

time they act differently.”53

American Place, is another example.

108

50

data of the discipline of meteorology. Well-­known

Of course, Dove was not the first or the only art-

examples of such weather wisdom from the period

ist to paint the weather—­not by a long shot—­or to

(and that have persisted into the present) include

call on weather wisdom in his daily life. It would be

the verse “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight / Red

laughable to suggest otherwise.54 But weather per-

sky in morning, sailors take warning,” the Ground-

meated the whole of his practice in a manner not

hog Day tradition, and the belief that a “mackerel

at all usual for an American painter in the twenti-

sky,” in which clouds resemble the scales of a fish,

eth century. Dove’s invocations of weather wisdom

foretells stormy weather. The period phrase, “Mack-

reflected a larger preoccupation on his part with

erel sky, soon wet or soon dry,” reflects the hedging

the weather, which he watched and reported with

that commonly characterized proverbial weather

painstaking and persistent regularity. In letters

51

wisdom in the first half of the twentieth century.

to family and friends, Torr and Stieglitz included,

Dove’s use of weather vernacular to discuss and de-

he made a point of describing weather conditions,

scribe his art makes clear that he was conversant

particularly extreme weather events, sometimes in-

in this wisdom, which had its own extensive litera-

cluding pictures or diagrams to accompany his ex-

ture in the period, including handbooks, manuals,

planation; animated accounts of storms sit along-

and almanacs. In 1942, he tucked into his diary a

side musings about his art in these missives, and

newspaper clipping that described a selection of

they not infrequently take center stage. In August

weather signs, including “light puffy clouds” (which

1936, Dove wrote to Torr and described a cyclone

foretold clear conditions), “merging clouds” (rain),

that had swept through Geneva, including in the

“ring around the moon” (a storm within forty-­eight

letter a graphic representation of the cyclone’s

hours), “hazy atmosphere” (warm), and “red in the

winds (fig. 110) and a newspaper clipping with pho-

sky” (if in the morning, rain or snow; if at night, the

tographs of the storm’s damage; Dove also described

end of rain or snow). It is tempting to imagine that

this cyclone at length and with great excitement in

the title of Dove’s Rain or Snow was inspired by this

a letter to Stieglitz.55 Writing to Stieglitz in Octo-

nugget of weather wisdom, clipped and saved by

ber 1923 on the occasion of another storm, Dove re-

him shortly before he created that painting. In the

counted how he had “been trying to memorize this

checklist for Dove’s 1943 exhibition at An American

storm all day so that I can paint it. Storm green and

Place, the title was given in quotes (“Rain or Snow”),

storm grey. It has been too dark and nerve stained

the only one of twenty-­two works to boast such

to paint, so did three illustrations this morning just

Chapter Two

to keep from cutting that rope through by think-

for several months, from September 24 through

ing so hard about it.” And in an August 15, 1924, let-

the end of December. Although they are difficult

ter to Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, Dove reported that a

to decipher, these circular diagrams appear to be

storm passed through on Tuesday and that he had

Dove’s records of the location of the sunrise or the

“grabbed one of my best paintings out of it. . . . The

position of the sun in the sky as the day passed.57

workmanship is certainly better than anything yet,

In the case of circles that adorn the September 28

56

almost ‘mathematics.’” As his remarks to Torr and

and 29 entries, blue predominates, suggesting the

Stieglitz indicate, Dove found the drama of weather

sky (or perhaps the sea), while strokes of red and

fascinating and he also regarded it as a generative

yellow, mainly at the periphery, suggest the rays of

force within his practice, a phenomenon that he

the sun or their reflection in water; in the circle at

watched and with which he collaborated.

top right, overlapping colors blend to create green

In his diary entries, Dove kept regular and dil-

and purple, evoking the effect of light reflected and

igent records of weather conditions, reported on

refracted through water or a prism. The idea that

storms, and discussed the day’s forecast, developing

the diagrams designate the location of the rising

his own vocabulary for use in signifying weather

sun—­or at least the actions and effects of the sun

conditions. The diary entries for September 28 and

vis-­à-­vis the earth’s atmosphere—­is supported by

29, 1936, which combine words and images, are

a letter Dove wrote to Torr, postmarked October 5,

typical (fig. 78). On each page, Dove noted the tem-

1936, in which he included a tick-­marked circular

perature and barometric pressure, sometimes more

diagram identical to those that appear in the di-

than once so as to register changing conditions.

aries, complete with accompanying temperature

He also drew a series of circles, their interiors filled

and barometric pressure data. Penciled toward the

in with a range of colors that appear to have been

bottom of page 3 of his letter appears the following

rendered with pastel or wax crayon. Such circle

phrase: “Have your diary all full of sunrises, to-­days

forms recur in the 1936 diary, one or two to a page,

is,” a sentence that ends directly above the circle

Fig. 78  Helen Torr Dove and Arthur Garfield Dove diary pages dated Sept. 28 and 29, 1936. Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 3:2:9, image #139.

Weather

109

diagram, as if pointing to it.58 If the circle diagram in the letter and those in the diary are sunrises, as Dove’s annotation “to-­days is” indicates, then the V-­shaped marks that sit at the perimeter of the majority of the circles and that closely resemble the similarly shaped tick marks in Dove’s painting Sun, most likely designate the sun’s location according to the graduated numerical markings on a modern compass rose that represent the degrees of a circle, from 0° to 360°, and that correspond to the cardinal directions, including all thirty-­two directional points of the compass, as in north, north by east, north north east, north east by north, east north east, and so forth. This is a big “if,” to be sure, because the logic of the circle drawings in the diary, if there is one at all, does not correspond exactly to the regular path of the sun relative to the motion of the earth over the course of a day.59 Still, and again, these diagrams recur throughout Dove’s 1936 diaries and in his correspondence for much of that year. Whatever they are, they undoubtedly constituted a part of Dove’s weather watching, accompanied as they are in his diary by other weather data. Like the diary, Dove’s ship’s log, kept while living aboard the Mona, combines notes about visits from friends, the progress of his painting, and repairs made to the boat with daily and detailed data on the weather. The inside front cover of the log bears a list of abbreviations that Dove used in his daily reporting, with single letters standing for an array of conditions, including “b” for blue sky, “c” for cloudy, “d” for drizzly rain, “f” for fog, “h” for hail, “l” for lightning, “m” for misty, “p” for passing showers, “q” for squally, “s” for snow, “t” for thunder, and “u” for ugly. Log entries record the time of day as well as prevailing weather conditions, the tides, and the state of the sea. The two consecutive pages that include entries from May 31 to June 3 serve as a good example (fig. 79). At the head of the entry for May 31, Dove records the time (6:00 a.m.), writes “B” for blue sky, notes a breeze coming from the west, and draws a circle diagram, repeating the “B” inside Fig. 79  Two pages from the “Log for the Mona” (May–­ Dec. 1924), dated May 31–­June 3. Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 3:1:51, image #9.

110

Chapter Two

the perimeter of the circle. Dove also includes circle diagrams in his entries for June 2 and 3, but they look more like abstract and abbreviated renditions

of sky conditions, rather than potential sunrise locators. Dove notes a “red & gray dawn” for June 2; the right half of the circle is shaded softly with pencil, while the left contains a series of wavelike lines, perhaps designating clouds or wind. At the center of the diagram, Dove made the notation “B2,” most likely code for a certain kind of blue sky (the June 3 diagram contains the note “B1”).60 The previous page of the log records the conditions for May 30 (fig. 80).61 In this instance, the circle diagram, partially shaded and adorned with wavelike marks, encloses an inverted triangle shape, which in turn encloses the letter “B.” Dove notes that there was wind all day, and to the left of the circle he writes “B2.” The entries for May 23 and 24 also boast circular diagrams. The diagram for the twenty-­fourth consists of a line encircling the word “Grey,” while Dove divides the diagram for the twenty-­third into two parts, filling the left portion with wavy lines and the right sector with a word: “haze.” Here, word and image combine in a single figure to render the day’s conditions. “B7” and “C3” annotate this diagram, as does the phrase “Air fm South.” Throughout his writing and records, Dove experimented with such verbal and visual vocabularies for use in translating raw data or lengthy description into legible, efficient, and meaningful signs, including through shorthand and speedwriting techniques. As the above examples make clear, not all his weather codes are decipherable today, and it is not at all certain that these codes, meant for private use, were supposed to be perfectly consistent or systematic to begin with, or that they were intended to be readable by anyone other than Dove or Torr. This is an important point to keep in mind. Although I am arguing that language was centrally and deeply at issue for Dove, I resist any suggestion that his project consisted of a literal attempt to invent a new sign system, code, or tongue that might then be deciphered and used by viewers and readers, a resistance reflected in my emphasis thus far on the properties and procedures of language, translation and communication among them, as well as language’s visual forms—­for example, the likeness between Gregg shorthand and Dove’s spi-

Fig. 80  Two pages from the “Log for the Mona” (May–­ Dec. 1924), dated May 27–­30. Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 3:1:51, image #8.

Weather

111

raling lines in Sun Drawing Water and Seagull Motif

paint or found objects, for use in the creation of

(Violet and Green)—­rather than language as a code.

new, experimental forms, and it was also a model,

In devising forms of signification for recording the

its properties suggesting to Dove things he might

weather, for which he deliberately drew on numer-

do with his art. If I insist on anything in this book,

ous already existing notational systems, Dove ex-

it is that Dove’s art consisted of a proposition, not a

hibited less of an interest in invention than he did

prescription. His experiments across the board pro-

in reformulation, whereby he took what existed,

posed possibility rather than stipulating particular

adopted it for his own usage, and experimented

ways of proceeding.

with its capacities as he had experimented with

Other instances of weather notating in Dove’s

the capacity of the graphic in his letters, poems,

writing and recording, with their emphasis on

and prose. To be sure, he created novel, hybrid

translation of phenomena into verbal or graphic

configurations—­ recall the arrow-­ annotated “see”

sign, help to make this distinction clear. At the

in his letter to Torr—­but nothing altogether new,

back of the ledger book that Dove kept from 1923 to

that is, nothing unrecognizable within the existing

1927, while living shipboard, he sketched a diagram

domain of language. As such, and again, his efforts

for use in the interpretation of data recorded with

constituted an exploration of the operations and ef-

an aneroid barometer, which registers changes in

fects of language, of language’s capacity to facilitate

atmospheric pressure by the expansion or contrac-

connection, communication, and interchange—­of

tion of a small cell or capsule (fig. 81).62 As is stan-

language as a mode rather than a specific and rule-­

dard with such a device, numbers at the perimeter

bound configuration or system of signs. Put another

of Dove’s circular diagram, beginning with 28 at the

way, language was for him a medium, analogous to

left and ending with 31 at the right and graduated

Fig. 81  Page from an accounting ledger that details the personal and business expenses, 1923–­1927, of Arthur Garfield Dove and Helen Torr Dove. Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 5:3:37, image #145.

112

Chapter Two

in between, indicate atmospheric pressure. The let-

the Beaufort Wind Force Scale, a system for esti-

ters that proceed along the inner edge of the circle,

mating and describing wind speed by observing the

from “A” to “K,” are Dove’s addition. According to

appearance of the sea.63 The scale expresses wind

the notations with which Dove fills the circle, each

force both numerically, on a scale from 1 to 12, and

letter corresponds to a specific pressure value so

descriptively. Categories of wind types correspond

that a particular numerical-­alphabetical range cor-

to a numerical value, as can be seen in Dove’s chart;

responds with a certain set of weather conditions:

the number 7, for example, indicates a moderate

C–­B indicates “very stormy,” for instance, and E–­D

gale, while the number 2 designates a light breeze.64

indicates “clearing high winds accompanied by

As he did with the barometer diagram, Dove elab-

squalls.” Some aneroid barometers from the period

orated the basic Beaufort scale, annotating it with

included a few weather notes alongside the nu-

a list of the sailboat rigging appropriate for use

merical values, specifying what type of weather—­

with each wind type on the right; on the left side

stormy, rainy, fair, or dry—­might accompany which

of the scale, he annotated further, adding a series

pressure readings. But Dove’s elaborate and detailed

of numerical ranges under a heading, only partly

system for barometrically registering and predict-

legible, that indicates that the numbers measure

ing the weather, which combines numbers, letters,

something “in miles.”

and verbal description in a single diagram, was his

Also exemplary of the idiosyncrasy and experi-

own invention. On another page at the back of the

mentalism of Dove’s weather notating are his diary

ledger, Dove again listed the letter abbreviations

entries from the 1940s, in which he favored words

for weather conditions he had created for use in his

over pictures, including in these entries symbols

ship’s log (fig. 82). Opposite this list, he transcribed

and terms borrowed or adapted from meteorology

Fig. 82  Page from an accounting ledger that details the personal and business expenses, 1923–­1927, of Arthur Garfield Dove and Helen Torr Dove. Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 5:3:37, image #143.

Weather

113

as well as notational marks of his own devising.

so as to form an eccentric weather narrative and a

The entries for March 31 and April 1, 1942 (fig. 63),

personalized weather language, one that toggles

in which he combined numerical values, symbols,

between data specificity and an observer’s subjec-

words, and the delicately twisting lines that re-

tive impressions while forging a unique idiom from

semble the characters of Gregg shorthand, are ex-

multiple lexicons.

emplary. Although they bear a relation to the rib-

barometer diagram, wind In all three cases—­

bon and waveform lines in Sun Drawing Water and

scale chart, and the 1942 diary entries—­ and

Seagull Motif (Violet and Green) and to the cursive

throughout his diaries and ship’s log, Dove drew

L-­shaped motif in the seagull painting and sketch,

on but embellished or repurposed the established

these shorthand-­like marks do not have a match in

vocabularies of weather watching and meteorology

the notational language of period meteorology. It

that were used to transfigure raw, often unseen data

is likely that Dove devised these characters himself,

into usable signs or terms. He did so in order to de-

perhaps to indicate wind direction or speed, and it

velop a system by which to register his own trans-

seems likely that he did so with the looping line

lations or intranotation equivalencies: air pres-

motifs that populated his paintings in mind. The

sure into number into letter and then into verbal

entry for January 18, 1942, like the March and April

description, or miles into wind force into rigging,

entries, is expansive in its combination of multiple

say, or a cloud-­and bird-­filled sky into weather sign

expressive forms (fig. 83). The following cluster of

and weather knowledge. In none of these instances

phrases accompanies temperature and barometric

are Dove’s translations perfectly precise or rigor-

pressure readings on the January page: “ptl klw,

ously logical, and in no case do they reflect an at-

Sea gulls flying high in a mackerel sky. Warm ‘soft’

tempt to craft a systematic code. But taken together

65

Here, instrumentally registered numerical

these schemes evidence his devotion to watching

values, speedwriting, weather wisdom, and a ver-

and reporting the weather as well as his awareness

bal description of conditions coexist and combine

and exploration of the notational procedures and

day.”

Fig. 83  Arthur Garfield Dove diary pages dated Jan. 18 and 19, 1942. Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 3:2:13, image #13.

114

Chapter Two

symbolic operations of meteorology, what entailed

given the presence of multiple languages talking to

an idiosyncratic cobbling together of multiple no-

one another and interacting on a single page. And

tational systems and forms. The concern for lan-

much as horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines

guage, and for what experimenting with language

interconnect Dove’s color blots in his copy of An-

might yield, that underpinned such a cobbling to-

drews’s manual, the ruled lines of the diary page

gether on Dove’s part might be articulated in the

here serve as the matrix for Dove’s consolidation of

form of a question, similar to one asked many years

multiple languages and forms, calling to mind the

later, and in a much different context, by Hans-­

significance of lines within Dove’s overall concep-

Georg Gadamer: “But what kind of being is it that

tion of an interconnected, intersubjectivity, which

66

language possesses?” While Dove’s interest lay in

he indicated in his writing by the formulation “a

what language did, not so much what it essentially,

condition of light.” The calendrical, diary format, it-

ontologically was, Gadamer’s query acknowledges

self a system for calculating and expressing, in this

that language has qualities apart from the human

case the concept of a year built from a succession of

that might be of vital use, and it was just such prop-

months composed of twenty-­four-­hour days, serves

erties that Dove set about exploring and subjecting

as a metamatrix for the imaginative interlacing

to experiment. Dove’s selection and recombination

Dove undertakes within each individual entry, and

of notational systems and verbal forms in the 1942

it establishes the diary as an analog of or perhaps

entries evidences his dedication to testing the lim-

a test site for Dove’s pictorial and sculptural work,

its of and relationships among different forms of

envisioned by him as instrument-­like complexes of

translation and communication, meteorological

circuitry for use in modeling or perhaps activating

and otherwise, through experimentation with the

a series of superintegrating bonds.

properties and qualities of these different forms.

In this way, Dove’s diary, like the paintings and

The resulting expressive unit can be described as its

assemblages, is as much about the properties and

own kind of network or intersubjective exchange,

modalities of expression as it is concerned with

Fig. 84  Arthur Garfield Dove diary pages dated Nov. 10–­16, 1941. Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 3:2:12, image #49.

Weather

115

what is therein expressed: again language as a mode

in a great diversity of media and expressive forms,

rather than decipherable code. Nowhere is this more

indicates that it was more than business as usual

evident than in Dove’s diary entry for November 14,

for him. For Dove, the weather, precisely because it

1941, in which he wrote, “Coated canvases & started

was at once a mundane affair and something quite

Ptly Cloudy” (fig. 84). Here, he utilized the same

extraordinary, served as a critical model or meta-

strategy of abbreviated spelling that he employed

phor for what he wished to accomplish in his art.

in noting the weather in his diary and ship’s log to

It functioned as a template for use in fathoming

indicate the first word of the title of his painting

the intersubjectivity and radical interconnectivity

Partly Cloudy, and he stretched his sentence beyond

after which he sought, a state forged from the stuff

the entry for the fourteenth. As a result, the phrase

of embodied and material existence through tech-

“Ptly Cloudy,” which refers to his painting, occupies

niques of translation even as it intimated a condi-

the upper left-­hand corner of the entry for the fif-

tion that was anything but earthbound in its power

teenth, the very spot in which he customarily re-

and reach.

corded the weather data he gathered each day, often

So weather occurs across Dove’s body of work,

using that very phrase, “ptl klw,” to indicate condi-

unfolding in his paintings and assemblages but

tions, as he did at the top of his entry for the four-

also throughout his other productions and articu-

teenth. In the case of this diary entry, the phrase

lations, spreading through his practice in a man-

from the fourteenth shares space with the values

ner similar to the concentric circle motif and the

for temperature and barometric pressure that Dove

waveform, which constitute their own connective

67

recorded for the fifteenth. By adopting a weather

tissues among a great diversity of his productions.

abbreviation to indicate one of his paintings and by

The multicolored circular sunrise diagrams that

literally conflating a remark about his work in pro-

adorn the September 1936 entries of the diary con-

gress with the space of his weather notating, Dove

solidate multiple media and systems of representa-

puts forward his painting and his weather watching

tion within a single image and, in echoing the con-

as essentially conjoined, their conceptual and prac-

centric circles that populate his pictures, produce

tical linkage established within the systematic and

a visual bridge between Dove’s art (as signified by

interconnecting diary format.

both the color and the shape of the diagrams) and

To repeat, Dove was not at all alone in painting

the rest of his practice, including writing, drawing,

the weather, nor was he unique as an artist (or as a

weather watching, and diary keeping, thus embody-

human) in keeping regular records of weather con-

ing the all-­encompassing nature of weather’s suffu-

ditions or in talking about the weather with family

sion. But what exactly did the weather do for Dove?

68

116

and friends. As someone who lived on a boat and

What compelled him to attend to and represent it

continued to sail regularly after he moved to shore,

so assiduously and ubiquitously?

and who for a period of time, first while living in

Let me begin to answer this question by posing

Westport, Connecticut, and then in Geneva, tried to

another: What is “the weather,” after all? Defined

make a living by farming, Dove would be expected

in a very basic sense, “the weather” refers to a set

to pay especial attention to the weather, which was

of phenomena that occur in the earth’s atmosphere

an integral aspect of his daily existence, and he

at a given time, a collection of states and events in-

would have owned as a matter of course the basic

cluding temperature, air pressure and precipitation

instruments for use in doing so, including a com-

as well as the products of the interactions among

pass, a barometer, and a thermometer.69 As I will

them. Weather constitutes a fundamental process

come to explain, the everydayness of the weather,

of the earth, and it underwrites the existence of all

and the everydayness of watching and recording it,

living things. It is a phenomenon that unfolds on a

were part of weather’s appeal for Dove. But the fact

macroscale, for weather events in a particular place

that weather pervades Dove’s practice, manifesting

are of course the result of a succession of phenom-

Chapter Two

ena that arise over time and across large expanses

of the far-­reaching effects produced by massive or

of terrain. Weather, as such, ties together earth’s

minute fluctuations in the earth’s atmosphere, com-

disparate parts and peoples into a single meteoro-

monly called an “ocean” of air in order to emphasize

logical whole. Weather thus constitutes a system or

the contiguity or unity of its many parts; our daily

a network, in the sense of a widely distributed col-

weather, he wrote, is connected with “the grander

lection of entities that communicate with one an-

atmospheric movements of our planet,” even if re-

other and operate as a unit, a combination of related

motely. “If expanses of atmosphere were as open to

elements that together form a complex, aggregated

view as expanses of sea,” wrote the author of another

whole. The same can be said about the science of

manual, Our Own Weather, “the slightest brushes of

weather, meteorology, which came into being in

weather would be all the time giving us intimation

the middle years of the nineteenth century and, by

of a vastness, a puissance, and a mystery far exceed-

the end of the First World War, was in the United

ing the sea’s.”72 Period writing regularly cited trade

run States a fully institutionalized, government-­

winds, cyclones and anticyclones, warm and cold

enterprise. From the outset, weather was described

fronts, and hurricanes as examples of weather sys-

as a global phenomenon, with atmospheric condi-

tems that produced effects across vast geographical

tions of disparate and distant regions understood

terrain.73 Only by staying abreast of weather trends

as fundamentally interrelated. This understanding,

and events across the hemispheres could accurate

which arose in a broader context of thinking about

predictions be made, and only through the same

how to articulate and systematize spatial and tem-

communication technologies, including telegraphy

poral relationships among various regions of the

and radio, that allowed for such tracking and pre-

globe (and between the earth and celestial bodies),

dicting could these predictions be widely dissemi-

resulted in an oft-­articulated need for data collec-

nated and put to use.74 As such, weather science was a

tion and data sharing—­for a vast weather science

collaborative endeavor of observation, registration,

70

network—­across the continents. By the 1910s and

and communication that unfolded as a vast network

1920s, weather reporting and weather forecasting

of places, people, and machines, an undertaking that

in the United States did indeed constitute a vast,

combined the efforts of hundreds of individuals in

nationwide and transnational network of people

multiple locales and that, as the historian of science

and machines charged with gathering masses of

and technology Katharine Anderson has described

raw data and translating it into legible and usable

it, involved a monumentally scaled coordination of

form.

multiple and scattered parts, a “collective science”

As accounts of the history of meteorology de-

the work of which required far more than a single

scribe, the emergence of the science of weather

individual’s or a single institution’s expertise and

hinged on the development of new communication

whose mode of producing knowledge constituted

technologies, particularly the telegraph, that al-

“a vast spatial and social exchange.”75

lowed for the establishment of national and transna-

Both scientific curiosity and commercial con-

tional communication networks and thereby the ef-

cerns, particularly the shipping and agricultural in-

ficient, long-­distance tracking and transfer of data.71

dustries, propelled the development of the science

As emphasized again and again in period writing

of weather in the United States. The first weather

about the weather, scientific as well as popular, such

reporting network was founded at the Smithso-

networks were necessary because weather was not

nian in 1849, and in 1870, Congress created an en-

a strictly local phenomenon; conditions in remote

tity called the Weather Service within the US Signal

regions had a hand in shaping the weather outside

Army Office, the duties of which were transferred to

one’s front door. “Conjure the globe before your

the Department of Agriculture in 1891 and managed

eyes,” instructed the author of the handbook Read-

by the newly designated United States Weather

ing the Weather, before describing weather in terms

Bureau. Efforts to establish a telegraph network Weather

117

for weather reporting and forecasting began in

to the bureau headquarters in Washington, DC,

the United States as early as the 1840s and 1850s,

where it was tabulated by bureau meteorologists.

and by the second decade of the twentieth century,

The process of transmission and tabulation was

weather science in the United States constituted

a complex one. Local weather stations converted

a coast-­to-­coast network of people and machines.

recorded data into an alphabetic cipher prior to

Under the auspices of the Weather Bureau, hun-

sending it via telegraph to Washington, where te-

dreds of weather stations across the country used

legraphers decoded the messages and entered the

government-­issue instruments to collect measure-

data into statistical charts. The data ultimately re-

ments, including temperature and barometric pres-

ported by the Weather Bureau was thus the product

sure, at specified times of day. One such volunteer

of multiple translations: instruments translated

outpost was established in 1914 at the Agricultural

atmospheric phenomena, such as wind velocity or

Experiment Station in Geneva, New York, where

barometric pressure, into numerical form; these nu-

Dove had made the acquaintance of the scientist

merical values were then translated into an alpha-

Bernard Rudolf Nebel and borrowed the station’s

betic code; this code was then, after transmission,

pantograph (the weather station operated until

translated back into quantitative data; and the en-

76

1968). These stations, some run by Weather Bureau

tire process itself originated in a spatial translation,

employees, others manned by local volunteers, sub-

the transmission of data across hundreds of miles

sequently reported the gathered data by telegraph

by way of telegraphic wire.77

Fig. 85  Daily Weather Map, Jan. 22, 1922, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Weather Service (NWS) Collection, US Weather Bureau / NOAA / Department of Commerce.

118

Chapter Two

In order to make use of this data and to dissem-

indicate current wind direction, while shaded areas

inate it to the public, yet another translation was

specify measurable precipitation over the previous

required. Once the Weather Bureau tabulated the

twenty-­four hours.

data it received from local weather stations, it con-

Isolines constitute the most prominent and

verted numbers into pictorial form. Bureau meteo-

striking feature of the weather map. They traverse

rologists handed off the accumulated mass of nu-

the surface, curving and looping dramatically

merical values and statistics to their cartographer

across geography and in places settling into the

colleagues who translated this mass into a synoptic

form of circles or ellipses. Some of these lines are

map. The bureau “weather map,” as it was called,

confined to the terrain of the United States while

was published in newspapers across the country

others stretch beyond the shoreline and extend be-

and posted in public spaces, including railroad sta-

yond the country’s borders, toward other nations

tions, department stores, and post offices. It was

and continents or out to sea. The contour of each

also regularly used to illustrate both scientific and

line represents a constant numerical value, as des-

popular texts on meteorology. The map employed

ignated by the numbers that accompany them on

an elaborate array of symbols and graphic signs to

the map; that is, the path traced by any given line

visualize current conditions over a very large area

specifies areas where identical readings were taken.

and, through this visualization, to facilitate the pre-

The black lines are isobars, indicating swathes of

78

diction of future meteorological states.

equal barometric pressure, and the red lines are iso-

The bureau’s map from January 22, 1922, which

therms, indicating bands of equal temperature. The

displays data gathered at 8:00 a.m. Eastern Stan-

circles and ellipses formed by isobars indicate ar-

dard Time that day, is exemplary (fig. 85). Numer-

eas of low or high pressure, usually associated with

ical data and other information accompany a map

inclement weather and fair weather, respectively.

of the continental United States that is graphically

These linear configurations are significant for the

annotated to indicate prevailing weather condi-

fact that they convey systems of pressure and tem-

tions and trends. Various forms of display and types

perature rather than individual data points or ob-

of mark combine to communicate present and

servations; the same goes for the large regions of

future weather. Columns on the right display the

shaded gray that mark systems of precipitation and

data gathered at local weather stations, including

the dotted red lines that specify dramatic changes

pressure, temperature, wind velocity, and precipita-

in temperature.79

tion. Immediately to the left of the columns, charts

The weather map thus construed amounted

display data gathered from Atlantic, Pacific, and

to an image of relationships: among temperature,

Alaskan stations as well as information about river

pressure, and wind but also among different places

water levels in various US cities. At bottom center,

and regions, as constituted by like conditions in

a box contains information about how to read the

disparate locales and represented by lines that

map and interpret its data. Another box, at bottom

tracked these equivalencies and in so doing stitched

left, provides a twenty-­four-­hour forecast for vari-

together multiple parts into a complex, interrelated

ous US regions. Within the borders of the depicted

whole. By representing weather in relational or sys-

North American continent, information is ex-

temic terms, as a series of connections, as a network,

pressed pictorially, translated into an arrangement

one literalized by the network of data gatherers at

of graphic notations by the bureau’s cartographers

weather stations across the country and globe and

so as to convey, legibly and efficiently, a massive

also by the telegraph network that made transmis-

amount of data in a single, straightforward descrip-

sion of weather station data possible, the map af-

tive array. Standardized symbols designate current,

forded viewers, bureau forecasters included, an over-

local weather—­a transparent circle for “clear,” for

all, all-­encompassing view, allowing them to absorb

instance, or a solid triangle for “hail”—­and arrows

and understand an immense and immensely comWeather

119

plex collection of data quickly and easily and also

of translation with mass communication as its

to fathom weather on a monumental scale. This of

goal. Meteorology connected the vastly dispersed

course aided in the prediction of future conditions,

dots of weather and generated a picture that served

such as a coming storm or a cold snap—­a capacity,

to interconnect, through shared knowledge, vastly

when first realized in the nineteenth century, that

dispersed people and places. Accordingly, just how

was the subject of no small amount of wonder and

data was to be translated into pictorial form was

amazement—­but the map also worked to cement

a matter of great concern; beginning in the nine-

an individual’s understanding of himself or herself

teenth century and continuing into the twentieth,

as part of a nationwide and, by extension, a global

meteorologists devoted much discussion and de-

network of interconnecting phenomena, people, in-

bate to the development of weather map symbols,

80

struments, and terrain. Although most Americans

working to develop a standard graphic language as

were primarily concerned with the weather map for

well as a standardized set of terms that could com-

North America, the Weather Bureau also produced

municate complex ideas in radically reduced form

and distributed a weather map of the Northern

yet still be transnationally legible.83 For meteorol-

Hemisphere, utilizing a point of view above the pole

ogists, finding the correct visual language to com-

and relying on observations transmitted by tele-

municate weather conditions was just as important

graph from remote stations. Such synoptic images,

as ensuring that the instruments used to collect

along with even more ambitious weather maps that

data were uniformly calibrated and accurate. The

depicted all the continents of the globe, drove home

result, of course, was a hybrid of visual and verbal

the transnational nature of weather, as did the iso-

forms: a conglomeration of pictures, charts, words,

lines that breached national boundaries in the US

numbers, and, depending on the situation, sound,

weather map, vigorously underscoring the essential

as in a weather report broadcast over the radio.84

relationship between the local and the global.81

As Bernard Mergen describes in his cultural his-

Meteorology during the period under discus-

tory of weather in the United States, radio broad-

sion was thus a science of registration, through the

casters sometimes “read” the weather map over

work of human observation and data-­collecting in-

the air, translating picture into broadcast speech,

struments; a science of translation, among phenom-

an act that indicates that listeners, who could not

ena, device, numerical value, statistical array, and

see the weather map themselves, were fluent in its

graphic expression; and a science of communication,

pictorial language and that their receipt of weather

among weather stations and between the Weather

data involved an act of visualization, of imagining

Bureau and the public. It was, clearly, also a science

the image as it was read by the radio announcer,

of picture making. Scholars of the subject agree that

who himself had to be fluent enough in meteorolo-

meteorology before 1945 was chiefly a matter of vi-

gy’s visual language to convey it sonically through

sualization. It was the graphic expression of data,

speech.85 Although in early twentieth-­century me-

rather than its mere collection (or its complicated

teorology instrumental measurement and quan-

numerical manipulation, which would come later),

tification largely superseded data gathered by the

that allowed for meteorological assessment and

senses alone, as was the dominant trend in the

prediction, and it was the translation of masses of

sciences at the time, sensory engagement was par-

information into synoptic visual form that in the

amount to meteorology’s methods and conclusions.

first place enabled an understanding of weather as

Producing and looking at pictures made the work of

a system or a network, as opposed to a collection of

weather science possible, and as a visual practice,

82

120

isolated events. Put another way, it was the act of

meteorology made visualization and knowing one

creating a picture and the manipulation of visual

and the same.86

signs that produced weather knowledge, making

Weather science and its images were every-

meteorology, above all, a visual practice, one borne

where in the first three decades of the twentieth

Chapter Two

century. By 1912, almost 150 newspapers published

sign “sun drawing water” as a title for one of his

daily weather maps, and by 1921, nearly one hun-

paintings signal that, in addition to engaging with

dred commercial radio stations in thirty-­five states

the tools, procedures, and vocabularies of weather

87

As

science, he participated in a traditional culture

Mergen writes, by the 1930s, the US Weather Bureau

of weather watching that persisted alongside the

was a “household presence.” The bureau’s weather

emergence of the professionalized science of mete-

map and radio broadcasts brought weather science

orology. Observation, experience, accepted wisdom

to the populace, and so did bureau-­sponsored out-

or “weather lore,” and colloquial speech rather than

reach programs. Bureau representatives visited

instrumentally derived data, quantification, and

grammar schools, conducted teacher education

statistically based cartographic synopsis consti-

workshops, and sponsored lecture series. Between

tuted the means by which nonprofessional weather

the years 1909 and 1917, the bureau created weather

watchers and forecasters in the early decades of the

kiosks in dozens of American cities that contained

twentieth century (and previously) described and

information about weather reporting and forecast-

predicted the weather. Everyday conversation, di-

ing and featured basic data-­gathering instruments

aries and other forms of personal record keeping,

that displayed current conditions. In 1931, the New

and popular almanacs, not telegraph networks, al-

York Daily News constructed a new office, the lobby

phabetic ciphers, and official bureau weather maps,

of which featured an enormous glass weather map

served for recording and transmitting this weather

that was plotted daily as well as gauges connected

information, and they did so in a decidedly popular

to instruments on the roof that reported tempera-

and amateur context.90

broadcast Weather Bureau weather reports.

ture, wind direction and velocity, humidity, atmo-

In the nineteenth century and earlier, weather

spheric pressure, and rainfall. A Weather Bureau

commentary reached the public through the popular

meteorologist provided lectures twice a day. By

press, mainly through almanacs. Published yearly,

1928, a member of the Boy Scouts of America could

almanacs were a hodgepodge of information; they

earn a weather merit badge by, among other things,

almost always contained a calendar as well as all

keeping a daily weather log, learning how to read

manner of tables, charts, timelines, and lists. Some

a weather map, and identifying dangerous weather

featured articles, with topics ranging from garden-

88

conditions.

ing, fishing, and food preparation to astronomy,

Dove’s particular attentiveness to the weather

politics, and history, and many included humorous

was decisively shaped by the popularization and

items and anecdotes about strange or unprece-

cultural dissemination of meteorological science—­

dented occurrences. In the Philadelphia-­based Farm-

by a pervasive visual culture of weather—­and, in

er’s Almanac for the Year of Our Lord 1820, for example,

particular, by meteorology’s visual methods.89 I

the following appear in quick succession: a diagram

will discuss at length the exact nature of this shap-

of human anatomy as governed by the constella-

ing in the next section, but it is important first to

tions, a list of feast days, a table of solar and lunar

emphasize that other cultures of weather aided in

eclipses, an article on coffee excerpted from a local

forming the larger context for his weather watch-

newspaper, a joke poking fun at a literal-­minded

ing and weather reporting, including the culture

schoolteacher, monthly calendars spanning twelve

of “weather wisdom” I described earlier, one that

pages annotated with daily weather predictions,

has been discussed at length by the scholar Kath-

an excerpt from the German naturalist Alexander

arine Anderson and in which Dove, with his re-

von Humboldt’s account of his travels, advice for a

course to weather proverbs and his keeping of daily

happy marriage, an article on horses and intestinal

weather logs, was plainly immersed. Dove’s point-

worms, information about potatoes, and a schedule

ing to the northward flying of geese as a portent of

of court sessions for New Jersey.91 Clearly, the goal

good weather and his use of the popular weather

of the almanac was to edify, but also to entertain. Weather

121

Prominent among the contents of nearly every al-

history of weather bureau,” Dove noted in the diary

manac publication was information about past and

entry that first recorded his work on the painting

future weather, including daily predictions, as seen

Partly Cloudy.94 The conjunction of remarks about

in the 1820 example, as well as seasonal or multi-

his painting and a note about interesting weather

year forecasts; anecdotes and information about

data is telling, underscoring the idea that Dove

weather events that occurred over the previous

understood weather watching and making art to

twelve months accompanied sweeping predictions

be of a piece, as he himself had articulated in his

for the coming year or years, with special attention

letters to Stieglitz. But his source for this weather

paid to severe weather. Rather than the product of

statistic could have been either an official bureau

synthesized and statistically analyzed data, these

publication or, just as likely, a popular almanac that

predictions were most often the articulations of

reprinted bureau data.

a single individual, the author of the almanac or

Richard Warren’s Reading the Weather, pub-

some other person noted for his preternatural in-

lished in 1920, is typical of the period’s hybrid ap-

sight regarding the weather. Such prognostications

proach to weather.95 Warren begins his text by de-

were based on personal observation, experience,

claring, “Science is certainly coming into her own

and popular tradition, and some almanacs touted

nowadays,—­ and into everybody else’s.” Hereto-

the near wizardry of their always-­accurate prognos-

fore entrenched in “superstition and hearsay,” the

ticators, whose predictions were regularly likened to

weather has been “the subject of more remarks un-

92

prophecy or divination.

122

relieved by common sense than any other.” Yet with

After the turn of the century, almanacs retained

the coming of meteorological science, “the person

their basic format, presenting the reader with a

who talks about storm centers and areas of high

mishmash of lists, tables, pithy statements, advice,

pressure and cumulus clouds is no longer regarded

and essays on a range of subjects, but many began

as slightly unhinged.” Intended as a guide for the

to include Weather Bureau data alongside weather

amateur, Warren’s text addresses itself to those in-

wisdom, including in some cases weather maps,

dividuals to whom the weather represents a puzzle

exemplifying what Anderson has described as a

or mystery, unlike the sailor and the farmer who

murky, at times contested middle ground between

have by necessity had to cultivate a “weather eye.”96

weather science and popular weather lore. A single

Chapters on the earth’s atmosphere and its weather

page of The World Almanac and Book of Facts for 1924,

patterns introduce the layperson to current scien-

for example, featured a Weather Bureau chart of

tific knowledge; a chapter on the Weather Bureau,

normal temperature and rainfall figures for each

which Warren describes as a modern replacement

state as well as a section labeled “Weather Wis-

for the almanac, characterizes the bureau’s activities

dom,” which included traditional weather knowl-

and presents a detailed description and explanation

edge, as in “A gray, lowering sunset, or one where

of the weather map; and a chapter on the barome-

the sky is green or yellowish-­green indicates rain”

ter instructs readers in its use. The final chapter of

or “Unusual clearness of the atmosphere, unusual

the book, entitled “A Chapter of Explosions,” takes

brightness or twinkling of the stars, indicate rain.”93

aim at weather superstitions and debunks with

Weather-­ watching guidebooks dating from the

no small amount of humor a selection of weather

early decades of the twentieth century, including

proverbs, including the chestnut “If March comes

those already noted, make clear that for the lay-

in like a lion it will go out like a lamb.”97 Yet Warren

person, weather watching was during this period

does not at all dismiss the idea that an individual

equal parts meteorological science and vernacular

with a practiced eye and a familiarity with legiti-

practice, drawing as it did on scientific knowledge

mate weather wisdom might equal the predictive

and procedures at the same time it depended on ev-

accuracy of the Weather Bureau. In fact, his book,

eryday experience and received belief. “Warmest in

more so than it constitutes an introduction to the

Chapter Two

new science, consists of a primer on how an indi-

instructional literature on meteorology, which cele-

vidual might see and read the natural world so as to

brated advances in reporting and forecasting while

predict coming conditions—­that is, how one might

stressing the persistent inscrutability or recalci-

become versed and proficient in weather wisdom.

trance of the atmosphere. A rhetoric of wonder and

In fact, he dedicates the longest chapter, entitled

intimations of supersight often accompanied this

“Sky Signs for Campers,” to just such a tutorial. Fol-

noting of weather’s obscurity. That weather was

lowing in the tradition of weather wisdom, Warren

newly understood as an irregular process rather than

posits nature as a conglomeration of “signs” that,

a material object contributed to this, as did the ac-

when read properly, offer up information and un-

knowledged enormity and impalpability of weather

derstanding: the color of the sky, the appearance of

systems or events. Clouds caused especial trouble.

clouds, the behavior of animals, the direction and

In them, wrote the author of Our Own Weather, “all

strength of wind, the visibility of stars, or changes

the activities and intentions of the whole system

in barometric pressure, with numerical data here

of the weather are bound up as if in immense, dec-

treated as a sign or emblem rather than as a sta-

orated, gold-­clasped books, written half to inform

tistic.

and half to mystify.” Their variety is “incalculable”

Importantly, weather watching for Warren

and their form changes ceaselessly.99 The sublim-

and his cohort of popular weather writers and

ity of weather made it an object of fascination for

amateur prognosticators entailed not just look-

laypersons such as Dove, while weather’s elusive-

ing at the world but seeing the unseeable—­future

ness made it also the subject of intense, at times

conditions—­through scrutinizing nature’s visible

obsessive scientific scrutiny, as exemplified by the

forms. Equal parts prophetic divination and science,

bureau’s elaborate quantification techniques.

Warren’s recommended mode of weather watching,

The entanglement of science and wisdom in

typical for its time and place—­a moment obsessed,

popular meteorology in the early decades of the

for instance, with the meteorological meaning of

twentieth century would have primed someone like

different types of clouds—­married new scientific

Dove to take precise daily measurements of weather

knowledge to a conviction that meteorology was

conditions, as would a volunteer at a bureau-­run

still very much about a person observing and then

weather station, and to fashion as he did a fastidi-

translating the language of nature into another

ously elaborate key for use in interpreting barome-

form of information, an operation analogous but

ter data even as he looked skyward—­at flying geese

not identical to the translations involved in the

or crepuscular rays—­for signs heralding weather

production and use of the weather map, itself a sys-

to come. This entanglement also made it possible

tem of signs demanding to be read. As the author

for him to confront weather as at once wondrous

of The Book of the Sky (1922) put it, the weather map

and everyday, beyond full human comprehension

generated meaning through being observed, by

and within easy, measurable grasp. His ship’s log

offering a “bird’s eye view” of nationwide weather

and his diaries took on an almanac-­like form, com-

conditions in the form of isoline patterns that, like

bining meteorological quantification and synoptic

weather signs, addressed and required the visual

imaging—­as with his circular diagrams, which con-

98

sense. In both cases—­isolines and signs—­seeing

stituted his own radically reduced version of the

exceeded its normal capacity. Divination of future

bureau’s weather map—­with anecdotes about the

conditions through scrutiny of weather signs or

day’s events, weather included, and the progress of

the patterns of a weather map produced access to

his work. The fact that he regularly recorded Torr’s

the as yet intangible and, in the case of the weather

temperature in his diary entries for the months of

map, allowed for a prospect enjoyed by no resident

February and March 1942, using the abbreviation

of earth, not even a bird. Themes of seeing the un-

“RT” (“Reds Temperature”; Reds was Torr’s nick-

seeable or not seeing at all ran through the popular,

name) to notate each value, suggests just such an Weather

123

embedment of data collecting and reporting in his 100

Dove’s diaries, everything from trips to town and

The combination of numerical data,

haircuts to grocery lists and the day’s menu—­and

weather lore, and poetic description in his January 18,

its reliance on individual observation as well as hu-

everyday life.

1942, diary entry—­temperature and pressure values,

manity’s capacity for wonder. One of Dove’s ship’s

seagulls, mackerel sky, “ptl. kwl.”—­exemplifies this

log entries, for May 25, 1924, makes clear that he

back-­and-­forth between science and everyday expe-

owned an almanac for that year and consulted it for

rience, as well as a constant shifting between being

information about the weather.102 And that Dove

dazzled and amazed by weather events and attempt-

was well aware of the entanglement of and potential

ing to reduce them to containable numbers, sym-

tension between weather science and weather lore

bols, and standardized terms or signs particular to

is borne out by a statement he made in the essay he

the almanac genre. Many almanacs from the period

sent to Stieglitz in 1931, “The 20th Century Limited

included blank pages or calendars so their readers

or The Train Left Without Them”: “I know an old

could annotate or log as they wished, and the diary

weather prophet who intensely dislikes the word ba-

books used by Dove and Torr incorporated numer-

rometer.”103 Given the essay’s critique of nostalgia in

ous features of the almanac format: the calendar,

the face of the modern and new, one might interpret

of course, but also various types of tables, lists, and

Dove’s statement about the weather prophet, who

charts as well as how-­to advice, maps, and short in-

rejects new science, here represented by the barome-

formational essays. Dove’s “Ready Reference Diary”

ter, in favor of old superstition, as embodying his in-

for 1926, for instance, called itself a “practical diary

dictment of cultural obstructionism. But more im-

and encyclopedia” containing “one thousand useful

portant is what the remark reveals regarding Dove’s

facts.” It featured on the bottom of its pages short

relationship to period weather watching—­namely,

texts on topics such as “Polar Exploration,” “Tele-

that he was absorbed enough in both weather wis-

phone Statistics,” “Personal Hygiene,” “Layout of

dom and weather science to be able to articulate the

Tennis Courts,” “How to Avoid Lightning,” “Chinese

hybrid nature of the popular meteorology in which

Language and Literature,” and “Velocity of Radio

he was immersed. Clearly, Dove knew his weather,

Waves.” Some of these texts were titled “Weather

and he watched it with both the informed eye of the

Wisdom” and included just the sort of proverbs and

scientist and the prophet’s divining gaze.

lore characteristic of popular meteorology at the time and regularly referenced by Dove. The text at the bottom of the page for January 9 and 10, for example, reads as follows: “A morning rainbow is re-

Dove’s weather watching was thus the product of

garded as a sign of rain. An evening rainbow is a

two cultures of weather, one scientific, the other

sign of fair weather. Fogs indicate settled weather.

vernacular, and it was from these two cultures and

The first and last frost are usually preceded by a

their combination thereof that he drew inspira-

temperature very much above the mean.” Other

tion as an artist. Bent on crafting a visual language

sections provided lists of World Series winners, ra-

that, in his words, rejected “innumerable little

dio broadcast stations, and population data for the

facts” in favor of simplified motifs, and systemat-

101

One cannot know for sure whether

ically engaged in experimentation with the signs,

Dove read or even paid attention to these items in

systems, and devices through which communica-

United States.

124

Geography

the margins of his diary books, but the very act of

tion transpired—­from letters and words to phono-

noting the facts of his daily life, weather included, in

graphs and radio waves—­Dove must have found

a quasi-­almanac format places him squarely within

meteorology’s translations and synoptic distilla-

a tradition of popular practice associated with al-

tions immensely appealing as a form of language

manac reading as well as weather wisdom, with its

and a mode of exchange.104 These meteorological

focus on the local and the everyday—­in the case of

operations, which culminated in the production

Chapter Two

of an image, the weather map, would also have

then and now, that weather is what humans have

aided him in fathoming and activating the power

in common, and talk about the weather is one of

and instrumental potential of pictures in his own

the most common forms of human verbal inter-

work. As I see it, weather science, as an intellectual,

change. The colloquial or conversational bent of

instrumental, and visual practice that stitched to-

the almanac as well as the fact that weather lore

gether widely dispersed peoples and terrains—­ a

was just that, lore, traditional knowledge handed

complex of weather itself as well as weather’s ma-

down and disseminated by word of mouth, its idi-

chine or human transmissions and translations—­

omatic, spokenness just what the almanac authors

served Dove as a model network, an exemplary

wished to capture in their mode of address, made

instance of the radical connectivity after which he

the watching of weather simultaneously scientific

sought. The visual strategies of the daily weather

and social, a network of specialists, instruments,

map proffered an example of how to articulate and

and numerical values as well as a web of everyday

incarnate this vast interconnectedness in pictorial

speech, a form of sociability based in verbal and

form. And through their entangling of the everyday

visual exchange among humans but also between

and the extraordinary, both scientific and popular

humans and instruments or humans and natural

meteorology provided Dove with a template for

signs, as in clouds or a stormy sky. In discussing

instantiating a superhuman effect through mate-

weather signs, the author of Reading the Weather

rial means and within the domain of human life.

employed a metaphor of speech, writing of how the

Everyday talk about the weather in almanacs, diary

sunrise “talks so confidentially to the hunter of the

entries, and among friends in combination with

coming day,” presenting nature as one participant

the mass distribution of Weather Bureau reports

among many in everyday weather talk.107 Hence my

demonstrated the activation of interconnectivity in

claim that weather itself, as a naturally occurring

the space of the everyday, giving Dove an idea as to

global network and connective tissue—­a matter of

how to ensure the participation of his productions

“world connections,” as one author put it in 1913—­

in and their effect on the material world. Weather

was likely for Dove a most powerful model for the

science construed knowledge as a visual practice,

idea of a vast web of relationships that occurred

and weather wisdom posited nature as a network

through shared experience at a monumental scale

of visual signs, as in sky color, cloud shape, or an-

and produced the conditions for a radical form of

imal comportment, and suggested that the act of

intersubjectivity.108 And it may well be that weather

viewing and deciphering these signs, approaching

was the very thing that provided the desideratum

nature as if it offered itself as an array of images

for his art in the first place. To an artist who wished

to be read, was a matter of revealing and commu-

to achieve a sublime state of all-­encompassing in-

nicating knowledge. Both would have struck Dove

terrelations through constituting a vast network

as model forms of communication or interchange

of the everyday, material, and mundane, with art

while making clear that the everyday, in the end,

as the agglomerating and activating machinery,

was the extraordinary, and vice versa.

weather—­at once cosmic and the nuts and bolts of

“The weather is for everybody,” wrote the author of Reading the Weather. “To-­day every part of our country contributes to the knowledge of existing 105

everyday life—­would have offered itself as a model system or approach. Preoccupied with exploring manifold forms of

“Everyone has something to

communication in all aspects of his practice, Dove

do with the air,” concurred the author of Weather

thus located in meteorology the essential materials

weather conditions.” 106

While referencing the networked nature

(notational systems, instruments, images) and pro-

of Weather Bureau reporting and forecasting as

cedures (translation, abstraction, supersight) as

well as the omnipresence of the weather, these

well as the desired outcomes of this creative work

statements also reflect the sentiment, oft expressed

(communication, the formation of networks, a con-

Rambles.

Weather

125

126

dition of everything connected all at once) while

lines of Golden Sun (fig. 9) that connote the use of

sharpening his sense of the potential of pictures to

a draughtsman’s tool, the vertical lines in Rain or

achieve these ends. Because meteorology in Dove’s

Snow also articulate the procedures—­measuring,

day constituted an instrumental and informational

mapping, and drawing—­ whereby longitudinal

network as well as a network of sociability or hu-

lines are demarcated graphically. The visible out-

man intercourse, and was also, and essentially, a

lines of the square shapes that hover around the

visual practice, one that through a series of transla-

lines and bands suggest that Dove employed a pan-

tions created a vast network of people, places, phe-

tograph or another drawing tool to plot the basic

nomena, and things, Dove, in seeking an analogous

forms of his composition. By placing emphasis on

result, emulated this practice, compelling his pic-

the act or idea of drawing in the space of a scene

tures to perform the interconnecting procedures of

of weather, Dove connects his picture making to

weather science. Rain or Snow (fig. 77), for instance,

the visual practices of meteorology as well as to

proposes a story of its own origins that recapitulates

the instruments utilized therein to register and

the genesis and operations of the bureau weather

render data, suggesting an instrumental role for

map. The tale it tells of its beginnings, partly a fic-

the painting itself. Essential to map making and to

tion of course, goes something like this: Dove as

ocean navigation, longitudinal measurements are

weatherman observed conditions and gathered data

themselves a sort of instrument, a graphic struc-

with mechanical instruments, including his barom-

ture that allows for the calculation and plotting of

eter. He then made note of weather likely to come—­

location and movement. Understood in this way,

“rain or snow”—­as foretold by current conditions.

Dove’s evocation of the earth’s coordinate system

And then he reduced this material complexity to

in Rain or Snow further underscores his claim for the

legible, digestible marks, as did the bureau mete-

instrumental capacity of the work.109 In an undated

orologists with the weather map. In Rain or Snow,

typewritten essay, Dove described an approach to

thin vertical lines stand for rain, tipped squares for

painting that accords with the appearance of his

snow, and sloping bands for wind or, perhaps, pres-

pictures in the 1940s, including Rain and Snow. “Try

sure fronts, designated on the weather map by curv-

two or three areas,” he stipulated, “and make each

ing isobars that simultaneously represent weather

one do its own thing within its own boundaries, the

in the present and foretell future weather events.

areas to be chosen in the same sense as a motif in

The tilting vertical lines—­one white, one orange-­

color.” He then characterized this process as akin to

brown, and one black—­call to mind the color-­coded

navigation: “To go on, I would say, to make the ‘fix’

linear notations of the weather map and also re-

as a navigator would say of the whole area and with

mind the viewer of the lines that mark longitudinal

two or three of those ‘fixes’ to establish an idea or in

values on a globe or a map, including the bureau’s

other words the ship’s position.”110 This is a fascinat-

weather map. The tilt itself evokes the curvature of

ing statement, for it likens the process of painting

such longitude lines, which are halved ellipses, but

to the task of locating the position of a ship on the

also points up the fact that on the weather map for

earth’s surface, an undertaking that in Dove’s day

North America the lines appear not as curves but as

entailed measuring the distances or angles of lati-

diagonals sloping either to the right or to the left.

tude or longitude from the ship to multiple known

In Dove’s painting, the intersection of the vertical

reference points, such as a known landmark like

lines with lateral bands and tipped squares con-

a lighthouse or an island, and then plotting posi-

jures the grid pattern produced by the intersection

tion lines from which to calculate the ship’s coor-

of longitudinal lines with their latitudinal counter-

dinates. “Fixing” a ship, then, required inserting it

parts, further linking Dove’s picture to the visual

into a network of relations comprising other enti-

language of the weather map, and to that of car-

ties as well as the linear grid fundamental to car-

tography more generally. Akin to the razor-­straight

tography. In comparing fixing a painting to fixing

Chapter Two

a ship, then, Dove implied that the very process of

ficiency as well as the sensitivity of a barometer,

this pictorial fixing constituted a form of mapping,

an effect reinforced by pairing the straight-­edged

a cartographic act that inserted a single painting or

metal strips with the softly floating and bending

the forms within that painting into a network of

forms that dominate the scene.

locations and relationships. In this way, painting as

Dove undertakes something analogous, if not

fixing manifested as an instrumental act, one akin

identical, in Partly Cloudy (fig. 76). Here, concentric

to the use of measuring devices to plot the world’s

bands that expand around a circle of yellow desig-

weather or a ship’s transoceanic course, an idea un-

nate the sun. Playing a fundamental role through-

derscored by Dove’s injunction in his undated essay

out Dove’s body of work, such a concentric circle

to make the parts of a painting “each . . . do its own

motif both indicates celestial bodies and natural

thing,” such that the very forms of a picture are in-

forms and functions as an emblem and instrument

strumentalized.

of transmission, communication, connection, and

The strips of silver leaf at the edges of Rain or

exchange, thereby embodying and enacting the

Snow also incarnate the instrumental component

fundamental procedures of Dove’s art. As such, the

of Dove’s weather watching, and of meteorology as

circle motif may also be said to evoke the idea of in-

a whole. In the same manner that metal paint and

finity, or infinite traversal, giving off the sense that

metal springs in other of Dove’s works suggest the

the circular bands might continue to multiply and

mechanism and media of photography or the con-

proliferate, spreading their radiance or their noise

ducting material and capacity of telegraphy, these

across canvas surface and beyond, and calling to

strips call to mind the barometer’s metal parts as

mind an unceasing cascade or an ever-­expanding

well as the device’s translating function. Dove’s

series of ripples as well as the far-­ranging reach and

placement of the metal at the edges of the scene,

impact of weather systems and weather science. In

as if enclosing or containing the painting’s interior

Partly Cloudy, this effect is explicit. The sun’s con-

space, produces the effect of outer pressing against

centric bands echo in the irregular yet still concen-

inner, with the dark-­brown band’s upward arc and

tric bands of the wave and cloud forms beneath it,

the light-­brown band’s downward buckling the re-

this point-­ counterpoint suggesting a substantial

sult of this inward compression. This figurative ap-

connection among all parts of the scene, an inter-

plication of pressure calls to mind the workings of

change among forces and materials that results

a barometer, which measures the weight of air as

in atmospheric phenomena such as evaporation,

it presses against a solid surface, while moments

rain, and fog or haze as well as more far-­reaching,

of encounter, overlap, and color-­shift throughout

global effects, such as currents, tides, trade winds,

the painting put the viewer in mind of the barom-

pressure systems, and storm fronts. In a 1940 let-

eter’s conversion of the phenomenal into the in-

ter to Stieglitz, Dove spoke of such an epic inter-

formational. Two shapes intersect the uppermost

change between the earth and the stuff of the sky.

lateral band. One, an inverted triangle, shifts from

Referring to the vast, empty terrains depicted in

gray to brown and then back again as it crosses

O’Keeffe’s recent paintings, Dove wrote, “I’ve often

over the band, and the other, a tilted and irregu-

wondered what those huge areas do to the sun and

lar square, does the same. A triangle that pierces

moon.”111 Because Partly Cloudy employs concentric

the lower band, just to the left of the black vertical

circles and banding effects to envision the invisible

line, undergoes a similar transformation, while the

but monumental, global connections between the

plane of intersection between the two gray squares

heavens and the earth and traversing the globe in

at bottom right is marked by a shift from a lighter

the context of a scene of weather reporting—­“partly

to a darker, more saturated hue. The precision with

cloudy”—­it is no stretch to suggest that Dove’s cir-

which Dove has applied the metallic leaf combined

cles were also intended to call to mind meteorolo-

with its fragile delicacy evokes the mechanical ef-

gy’s own abstract renditions of the earth and its acWeather

127

Fig. 86  Daily Weather Map, Oct. 6, 1941, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Central Library Data Imaging Project, US Weather Bureau / NOAA / Department of Commerce.

128

tive atmosphere, especially the circular or elliptical

works are not just pictorial artifacts but also con-

groupings of isobars in a typical weather map that

sist of a cluster or collection of operations. They

indicate areas of low pressure and foretell the com-

are condensations of expressive processes within

ing of a storm (fig. 86). Dove’s circles are of course

the space of painting akin to the compression of

not illustrations of isobars, but they call on the sym-

infinitely complex temporal and spatial phenom-

bolic language of meteorology in order to incarnate

ena and various instrumental procedures into the

the idea of connection across space and time that is

two-­dimensional space of the bureau weather map.

exemplified by a weather system traveling far and

Bear in mind that weather forecasting collapses

wide. As a result, they install within Dove’s painting

past, present, and future into a single prophetic

both the instrumental origins and the instrumental

act. As a representation, then, a work like Rain or

potential of the bureau weather map.

Snow purports to record a past event: Dove in the

These, then, are not simply pictures of weather,

company of weather, perhaps in a boat at sea. But

and they are not paintings that use weather only

in the moment depicted, Dove sees and experiences

as a jumping-­off point for explorations of indi-

the weather as if in the present tense so as to make a

vidual feeling or subjective response. Rather, they

determination of future conditions. In this way, the

are paintings that aim to embody the capacity of

painting is simultaneously a record of the seen and

weather and weather science to encompass and in-

known and a description of the not yet experienced.

terlink, through acts of measuring and mapping,

In predicting conditions to come, Rain or Snow com-

the globe and its inhabitants, human and other-

municates with the future, speaking in advance of

wise. As if themselves instruments, paintings like

time, such that the material constraints of time, of

Rain or Snow and Partly Cloudy operate as translating

geography, and of human perception are surpassed,

devices, conjuring and conjoining in their confines

as they are by the wireless reach of broadcast radio,

every aspect of the process by which they were cre-

telegraphy, or mental telepathy. Rain or Snow, then,

ated: watching the weather, using an instrument,

proposes a new relationship between a being and

recording and interpreting data, creating an image,

time, and its temporal summa—­past, present, and

communicating the result. In so doing they sug-

future all at once—­figures summation as such.

gest a radical continuum among the things and

It is worth mentioning here that the word “fore-

bodies involved in this process. As such, these

cast,” used in relation to weather since the nine-

Chapter Two

teenth century, embodies a chief aspect of Dove’s

the “mother of all sciences.”113 Although it had an-

effort to reimagine relationality through reimagin-

cient roots, geography emerged as an academic dis-

ing the capacities of painting and making. That is,

cipline in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,

“forecast” embodies the idea of “casting,” as in a net

in conjunction with exploration, colonization, and

or a line, so as to connect with or entangle an entity

expansion on the part of Europe and the United

in advance of or beyond something else. So in the

States, becoming by the 1870s a staple of university

production of a forecast, one casts into the future

curricula, prompting the establishment of geo-

in order to secure a sense of what is to come, hoping

graphic societies, and rapidly professionalizing af-

to capture and reel into the present an image or idea

ter 1900, a process that accelerated during the First

of the future. Understood in this way, “forecasting”

World War.114 Cartography, one of the chief tools

is a close cousin to “broadcasting,” as in radio, an-

of geography and meteorology both, and a matter

other of Dove’s passions, which entails the casting

of especial concern within geography classrooms,

of radio waves into the atmosphere from a single

textbooks, and societies, served for Dove as a sa-

point to be picked up by a widespread network of

lient pictorial and conceptual model. The scholar

receivers, with the radio signal, while not a hook on

Denis Cosgrove’s characterization of geographi-

the future, thus becoming a many-­threaded web or

cal mapping as a pictorial endeavor entailing the

net as it spreads through the atmosphere, and also

“complex construction and communication of

a multiply shared and thus interconnecting expe-

spa­tial knowledge” captures what Dove saw in the

rience on the part of those listening. And it bears

practice, in particular cartography’s combination

mentioning that, in the early years of radio and into

of drastically reductive abstractions and lateral,

the 1920s, one often had to “fish”—­this was the pe-

all-­ encompassing spread, its simultaneous com-

riod term—­for stations with one’s receiver because

pulsion to distill and set into wide circulation, as

signal strengths were unreliable or weak. Dove re-

exemplified by the weather map.115 Cartography

ported doing such “fishing.” Thus it is fair to see

showed Dove exactly what his abstract pictures

the radiating bands and concentric circles of Rain

could be and do. This was definitely the case in

or Snow as akin to the radio-­wave bandings of a work

the 1940s, when he painted Rain or Snow and Partly

such as Me and the Moon (fig. 52), as nets cast out and

Cloudy, a period during which his pictures began to

in search of connection, as network or system in

flatten and organize themselves as if cartographic

addition to symbol or sign.112

systems and to look more like two-­dimensional sur-

As paintings, works such as Rain or Snow and

faces than cross sections or projections of nature’s

Partly Cloudy and other of Dove’s pictures demon-

inner workings. These late works are usually under-

strate what was to Dove’s mind their radical poten-

stood as departures from Dove’s earlier production,

tial: their capacity as works of art to model but also

precursors to Abstract Expressionism’s embrace of

to make literally manifest through manifold acts

total nonobjectivity, experiments in form, color,

of translation a continuum among entities, phe-

and line for the very sake of form, color, and line.116

nomena, and cognitive and material operations.

Despite its abstractions and distortions, one easily

Hence my suggestion, at the outset of this study,

recognizes a work like Sun Drawing Water as a land-

that one might characterize Dove’s practice as a

scape, a portion of the land selected and then ren-

form of geography. Geography is the science that

dered as art. Works such as Sand and Sea and Flight,

deals with the study of the earth: its lands, features,

both 1943, on the other hand, all but abandon ref-

inhabitants, and phenomena. That is, geography is

erence to the world (figs. 87, 88). Yet to my mind,

the science that accounts for everything. It takes

when viewed in the light of Dove’s preoccupations

as its object of study the world (“geo”) and it aims

as I have thus far described them—­ his fixation

to write that world (“graphy”). Or at least it did in

with language, translation, and communication,

the early twentieth century, when it was dubbed

and with meteorology—­ these late works count Weather

129

Fig. 87  Top, Arthur G. Dove, Sand and Sea, 1943, oil and sand on canvas, 271⁄8 × 36 in., Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, university purchase, Bixby Fund, 1952. Fig. 88  Bottom, Arthur G. Dove, Flight, 1943, wax emulsion on canvas, 12 × 20 in. (30.48 × 50.8 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Bequest of Elmira Bier, 1976. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

incontrovertibly as landscapes. But they ask their

dence and interconnectedness of all phenomena,

viewers to conceive of them as landscape in a new

terrains, and living things here packed into a single

sense. Dove’s pictures constitute not views seen or

annotated image. The same universalizing impulse

experienced subjectively. Rather, they exist as an in-

compelled Humboldt’s early use of isobars and iso-

strumental terrain: a system, a discipline, a grounds

therms to indicate pressure and temperature av-

for knowing constituted not only by a sense of place

erages, which to him represented the equilibrium

but also by the materials and procedures of earth

and integration of all natural forces; this impulse

science and by the fantasy proffered by such science

also drove his magnum opus, Cosmos, published in

of an utterly interlinked, essentially relational, and

multiple volumes between the years 1842 and 1865,

radically aggregate world.

which strove to imagine a wholly integrated and

Put another way, Dove’s paintings proffer land-

unified universe, with close observation and accu-

scape as geography. The simple, self-­ contained

rate measurement the tools by which connections

forms of Sand and Sea, for example, resemble puzzle

and interdependencies would be identified.117

pieces or cutouts. They also call to mind continents

Humboldt’s flattening and sectioning of Chim-

and oceans packed together in the space of a world

borazo inadvertently anticipates the flattened and

map. Dove renders the brown platelike shapes in

distilled forms of Dove’s Sand and Sea, as if a prog-

this painting with actual sand. As a product of ero-

nostication of the radical simplicity that would be

sion, specifically the interaction between mineral

required to visualize the idea of a network—­Dove’s

matter and water, sand serves as a perfect emblem

desired relational summation—­equal in its unfath-

of the essential interlinking of the land and the sea,

omable complexity to the infinitely threaded fabric

a status underscored by the fact that sand literally

of the universe itself. The landform on which Hum-

occupies the shoreline boundary between the ocean

boldt’s Chimborazo sits is reduced drastically in

and solid terrain. Dove’s Clouds (1927), materializes

scale and cropped at the base, so that the country of

this idea in an equally literal sense (fig. 89). A strip

Ecuador looks like an island; the ocean surrounding

of sandpaper pasted to the work’s metal support

this seeming island intersects with the edges of the

black storm indicates a shore darkened by blue-­

scene at both right and left. In both cases—­implied

clouds and rain; the metal support is zinc, an ele-

island and truncated sea—­the cropping infers con-

ment abundant in the earth’s crust. The simplicity

tinuation beyond the frame, an effect similar to

of the composition of Sand and Sea belies its ambi-

Dove’s own cutting short of shapes at the canvas

tion, a desire to achieve monumentally on par with

edge in Sand and Sea. Such cropping also puts for-

the ambition of the grand illustrations that accom-

ward the ocean as the global connective tissue par

panied the German naturalist Alexander von Hum-

excellence, an idea that inspired meteorology’s dub-

boldt’s endeavors in physical geography, including

bing of its own privileged connective tissue—­the

the “Tableau physique des Andes et pays voisins,”

earth’s atmosphere and its attendant effects—­an

which Humboldt made to accompany his Essai sur

“ocean of air.” In Sounding the Ocean of Air, published

la géographie des plantes (1807) (fig. 90). Obsessive

in 1900, the meteorologist A. Lawrence Rotch char-

in its ravenous, chock-­full accumulation of myriad

acterized this “ocean” as a terrain of exploration and

forms of data—­adorned with the names of individ-

use akin to the seas and employed the term “sound-

ual plant species and vegetation zones, flanked on

ing,” derived from ocean exploration, to describe in-

either side by twenty columns of quantification and

vestigation of the earth’s atmosphere. Mechanical

observation, and annotated with more than twenty-­

sounding devices for surveying the seafloor were in

six thousand words in the text of the Essai—­this

use by the late nineteenth century, and electronic

view of the Andean peak Mount Chimborazo prof-

echo-­sounders, a sonic technology that used sound

fers an expression of Humboldt’s belief in a condi-

waves to map ocean depths and sea­floor topogra-

tion of cosmic equilibrium, the global interdepen-

phy, were developed in the 1920s.118 Rotch’s use of Weather

131

Fig. 89  Top, Arthur G. Dove, Clouds, 1927, oil and sandpaper on zinc, 38.1 × 50.8 cm (15 × 20 in.), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of the William H. Lane Foundation, 1990.401. Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Fig. 90  Bottom, Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, “Tableau physique des Andes et pays voisins” [“Physical Tableau of the Andes and Neighboring Countries”], in Essai sur la géographie des plantes [Essay on the Geography of Plants] (Paris: Fr. Schoell; Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1807). Photograph © Kew Library, Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, Richmond, Surrey, UK.

the term “sounding” to describe the procedures of

blages.121 When Dove recorded creating a “stuff

meteorology thereby reinforces the metaphorical

thing” in his diary entry for April 3, 1943, he most

interchangeability of the air and the ocean common

likely referred to a preliminary version of Sand and

to the first half of the twentieth century, and it illu-

Sea. Dove used the term “things” to describe those

minates the larger context of Dove’s privileging of

works of his that incorporated found objects and

the waveform as a connecting and binding vocabu-

everyday materials, including sand, and he dis-

lary or motif. Because the waveform literally consti-

cussed working with sand in an entry two days later,

tuted one global connective tissue—­the ocean—­it

on April 5.122 The brute materiality, the condition

can also be said to metaphorically constitute the

of emphatic physicalness and presence that actual

atmosphere-­as-­ocean. If one takes the interlocking

sand brings to Sand and Sea accords with remarks

shapes of Sand and Sea to be essentially interwoven

made by Dove included in the pamphlet for his

in such a manner—­land masses, stretches of ocean,

1943 exhibition at An American Place. “I would like

and the sky above stitched together by the instru-

to make something,” he said, “that is real in itself,

mental sounding of ubiquitous waves—­ one can

that does not remind anyone of any other thing,

understand Dove’s own literal stitching together of

and that does not have to be explained.”123 If Dove

forms in this work as enacting the assaying and in-

added sand to Sand and Sea, made the same year as

terconnecting work of meteorology and geography,

this statement, in order to make it “real in itself,”

positing the painting as its own kind of sounding

this would have been a powerful gesture, for with it

and mapping device.

Dove rejected the idea that the work was an abstrac-

In Sand and Sea, the viewer consumes the earth’s

tion of something else—­what the weather map was,

surface from a vantage point somewhere within

that is, an abstract, synoptic view of the real—­in

that very atmosphere-­as-­ocean, an ocean of air that,

favor of declaring it real on its own. This would in-

if one takes the brown shapes to be continents and

dicate that he meant his aerial view of continental

the blue and blue-­gray patches to be the surround-

terrain and the surrounding sea to adopt but also to

ing sea, offers up a vast terrestrial expanse.119 The

surpass the capacity of the weather map by instan-

dark shape at left and the expanse of brown sand

tiating materially, in actuality, an all-­encompassing,

at center interact like two clasped hands or two

systemic view: not the idea of a cosmic sum, but

puzzle pieces snapped together, reinforcing the idea

that sum itself or, at least, the aspiration that a

that the composition, following the example of a

work of art could generate such a condition or be

weather map, means to suggest a conglomeration

such a thing. The idea that the isolines of a weather

of interconnected terrains, forces, and phenomena.

map proffered a bird’s-­eye view goes some way in

The rhetoric of period weather watching of course

characterizing, if inadvertently, this imagining of

confirmed this implied link between meteorology

a paradoxical simultaneity of abstraction and the

and a continental view. In 1900, one prominent al-

utterly real. Isolines constitute an abstraction, and

manac author characterized his account of changes

are of course not at all visible to a bird or to any

in climate from region to region as “a grand mete-

other creature that might hover up in the air. But

orological panorama” and a “bird’s eye view,” and in

implicit in the suggestion that isolines are what one

the decades that followed, such descriptions pro-

would see of the weather if one looked from a perch

liferated, including one that appeared in The Book

high above the earth’s surface is the idea that an all-­

of the Sky, whose author characterized the weather

encompassing and interconnecting view, were it to

map as offering the earthbound observer a bird’s-­

exist, would be a view not of everything as it is and

eye view of present and future conditions by way of

looks but one of graphic translation, of the world

legible patterns made out of isolines.

120

transmuted into diagram, schema, pattern, or code.

Because it incorporates a found material, Sand

Implicit, then, in the conceit of seeing isolines from

and Sea has been counted among Dove’s assem-

the sky is the idea that graphic translation conWeather

133

stitutes perhaps the truest, most valid state, that

some taken of the Centerport area where he settled

graphic notation stands as essence or the “real.”

in 1938, among them shots that included views of

Thus also inherent in this suggestion is the notion

his own house at the edge of a mill pond. And aerial

that the two operations of human notation and

imagery proliferated in American culture during

expression that most intrigued Dove, translation

this period, as exemplified by Waldo Frank’s use of

and communication, were understood by him to be

a commercially produced Fairchild Aerial Surveys

uniquely suited to accomplish the task of hypoth-

photograph to illustrate an essay, “Straight Streets,”

esizing a means to fashion a condition of intersub-

from his collection In the American Jungle (1937).125

jective joining together. In the series of statements

Flight, of course, played a major role in the devel-

that accompanied his 1929 exhibition at the Inti-

opment of meteorology in the twentieth century,

mate Gallery, Dove had stated that “there is no such

for it enabled first-­hand scrutiny and measurement

thing as abstraction.” It is “extraction, gravitation

of the phenomena of the earth’s upper atmosphere.

toward a certain direction, and minding your own

With the onset of the Second World War, under-

business. If the extract be clear enough its value will

standing and predicting the behavior of this ocean

124

The operation of extraction, which entails

of air became essential to the tactical and strategic

removing something from a source by separating it

deployment of air power, an increasingly crucial

from other materials resident in that source, hews

component of international warfare in the 1930s

close as a description to Dove’s process. Rather than

and 1940s.126 In this way, Flight highlights seeing as

distilling the essential or the general from the par-

a theme and in particular the prospect of supersight

ticular, a painting like Sand and Sea extracts mate-

in a manner akin to Sun Drawing Water, Moon, and

rials from multiple sources—­sand from the beach,

Fog Horns, which visualize entities and phenomena

visual signs from cartography, an aerial point of

not available to the unaided human eye. “There is

view from the phenomenon of flight—­and recom-

nothing in all nature of greater interest to human

bines them, refiguring their role rather than their

beings than the atmosphere,” declared Edwin C.

form. The sand of Sand and Sea anchors the work in

Martin in Our Own Weather. But the difficulty in

the material world, further indicating Dove’s favor-

fathoming this, he continued, “is due, no doubt,

ing of extraction over abstraction and suggesting

largely to the fact that we see next to nothing of it.”

that he imagined this work as functioning instru-

Martin noted that certain effects involving water

mentally, like Golden Sun or Rain or Snow, alongside

vapor and dust give weather periodic visibility, in-

other physical objects and devices, including ba-

cluding the formation of crepuscular rays, the very

rometers, pantographs, and record players, so as to

things that Dove conjured in Sun Drawing Water for

activate and cement, rather than simply represent,

the purpose of likening the operations and effects

a state of radical interconnection and intersubjec-

of his pictures to the illuminating and pictorializ-

tivity, one modeled by the cosmos itself as well as

ing action of light. But, in the main, Martin wrote,

by the sciences dedicated to fathoming its nature

weather as a system or series of systems eludes our

and scope.

view and for this reason our scant faculty for seeing

exist.”

134

In Flight (fig. 88), Dove’s rotating forms evoke

the weather must be compensated for by technolo-

the spin of a propeller while the scene as a whole

gies such as the weather map.127 In Flight, Dove reg-

connotes the perspective granted by flight, an aerial

isters the paradoxical coexistence of nonseeing and

view that transforms the world into a patchwork

total sight within the practice of early twentieth-­

of abutting colors and shapes and that allows lit-

century weather watching and reporting. At once a

eral access to a version of the vast perspective that

mere cluster of colored shapes and a cartography-­

meteorology and geography only abstractly imag-

like prospect of the surface of the earth made pos-

ine. Dove was directly familiar with aerial photo-

sible by an aerial point of view, the painting signi-

graphs, having in 1940 been shown by a neighbor

fies the simultaneity of blindness and total sight

Chapter Two

that gave rise to the perceived wondrousness of

less, disorienting, antiperspective views, Stieglitz’s

weather and weather prediction during the period.

photographs analogized the weather map as an

Authors touted aerial travel as a means to truly see

array of data and as a gesture toward extrahuman

and understand the earth’s atmosphere and its ef-

cognition. Stieglitz’s clouds, and cloud forms in

fects, particularly clouds, the period’s signal but

general, may also have provided a model for Dove’s

elusive indicators of current conditions and harbin-

own abstract vocabulary. Clouds in the period were

gers of weather to come. The seeming intangibility

described as if the equivalent of abstraction—­hard

of clouds, along with their transient nature, made

to pin down, nonreferential, recalcitrant, resistant

them less than ideal objects of sustained scrutiny

to interpretation—­even as they were understood

and study and also produced a confounding prob-

to be a monumentally important source of human

lem of language, for it was immensely difficult to

knowledge and acknowledged as prominent, hyper-

fashion a systematic terminology for entities that

visible atmospheric effects, physical and palpable

seemed wholly without system or consistency. Ad-

manifestations of an actively if invisibly intercon-

ditionally, the view of the sky from the earth, as

nected world. Clouds, which gave up so little but

one author warned, was “deceptive,” as was one’s

did and meant so much, would have been a perfect

sense of the earth itself, and only a tour through

template for Dove’s desired instrumentalized ab-

cloudland and the view from above could offer

straction, for his attempt to muster the materials

128

an objective, undistorted, and rigorous survey.

of his practice into abstract yet vital, real and yet

Flight gives the viewer both perspectives, one from

not, animating and actualizing machines.

the ground as if looking up—­what enables the be-

Dove’s inclusion of a propeller-­ like shape in

holder to see the propeller—­and one looking down

Flight is significant in this regard. Dove was not

at the earth’s surface from a plane, doubling up in a

averse to rendering machines or the trappings of

manner similar to the bureau weather map, which

industry in his paintings, as evidenced by his views

graphically renders a sweeping and synoptic conti-

of storage tanks, oil rigs, motors, and gears as well

nental view at the same time it notates in its tables

as by his inclusion of clock and watch springs and

a series of particular instrumental readings taken

other metal parts in his assemblages, but he cre-

at specific locations on the ground. The doubled

ated literal representations of machines relatively

perspective of Flight allows insight into what Dove

infrequently. Of course, the propeller form in Flight

must have admired in Stieglitz’s Equivalents, photo-

equally evokes an actual part of a plane and the idea

graphic images of cloud-­filled skies captured from

of rotational propulsion itself. As such, the painting

an earthbound point of view. The camera, like flight,

depicts a machine in action, its parts moving in pre-

was touted as an instrument through which the sky

cise coordination—­an effect evoked by Dove’s viv-

could be transformed into an object of scientific

idly colored and carefully orchestrated shapes—­as

scrutiny or into a scientific record, and the meteo-

well as the result: airborne motion. The human

rological texts from the period that included photo-

of course played a central role in early twentieth-­

graphic illustrations dedicated most of these plates

century aviation, for, with the exception of a small

to photographs of clouds, the majority of which are

number of early, unmanned aircraft, a plane could

conspicuously difficult to read, ironically so, given

become airborne only when there was a pilot at

129

Stieglitz’s photographs

the controls.130 Dove’s painting, then, with its dual

may have struck Dove as a parallel species to the

perspective, suggests a relationship between hu-

weather map, and to meteorology itself. Combin-

man and machine similar to that formed through

ing the registration of scientific data and thus the

the use of a pantograph or a record player, with the

potential for scientific explanation with the other-­

machine producing an effect—­material, visual, or

than-­ scientific suggestion of something beyond

sonic—­when activated by human hands. The im-

human vision and reach, created through horizon-

plied clockwise rotation of the multicolored propel-

their lauded purpose.

Weather

135

ler form certainly calls to mind a hand turning a

registration of itself. Accuracy of meteorological

phonograph crank or guiding a pantograph pointer

data was believed to hinge on the disembodiment

along the contours of forms in a small-­scale sketch,

and automatization of measurement techniques,

and this is relevant here because in both cases—­

and the idea of self-­acting registration supplied an

pantography and the phonograph—­effects result

extrascientific source of wonder at the time.132 In

that exceed the limits of intention. The sound

Our Own Weather, for example, Martin marveled at

emitted by a phonograph is a product of live mu-

meteorology’s solution to the problem of measur-

sic performed in a studio but also of the machinery

ing wind given its variability at different elevations.

that elicits this sound from a plastic disc, and of

Meteorologists, he wrote,

the plastic disc itself, creating sonic artifacts not native to the musical composition or traceable to

have subdued the wind into making, with the aid

any intentionality, human or otherwise (as I will

of automatic devices, its own record. All through

discuss at greater length in the next chapter). At its

the day, all through the night, and all through

inception, observers marveled at the phonograph’s

the year, and whether any observer is present or

ability to read itself, absent a human interlocutor.

131

not, it is tracing on paper, in a plain infallible

And pantography produces a copy at a larger scale

line, just as if it were a human draftsman, its

than the original sketch by means of tracing, but

every descent and mount in strength, from none

of course that tracing, even setting aside questions

at all to the mightiest it is capable of. Because of

of scale, never perfectly reproduces the exact con-

this ingenious management of it a thing always

tours of the original. In this way, the phonograph

invisible and ever varying gets exhibited to us, at

and pantography possess an automatistic aspect,

chosen places of observation, in its quality and

whereby what is produced exceeds the design or

action with such a constancy and minuteness

will of the human activating the apparatus in ques-

as was never any human being nor, indeed, any

tion. Any relation involving the collaboration of

living creature.133

human and machine—­as with a pilot flying a plane,

136

a machine that also responds on its own as if will-

In Martin’s characterization, the wind measures

fully to certain conditions of flight—­will have such

itself, producing a data representation that, ac-

an aspect. It is in part the automatism resident in

cording to the author, surpassed in its fidelity all

human-­machine relationships that I believe Dove

previous observations and descriptions on the part

wished to evoke by instantiating, through a single

of living things. Dove, of course, cared little about

form, a machine part, the propeller, in addition to

fidelity to appearances, but the notion of self-­

rendering the end result of human activation of the

action on the part of a nonliving entity, like that of

machine as a whole, that is, flight. And it is in part

a barometer or the wind, along with the prospect

the automatistic aspect of pantography and the

of extrahuman seeing, would have been immensely

phonograph that, to my mind, drew Dove to these

compelling to him and surely played a role in his at-

technologies in the first place.

traction to weather and weather science in the first

I raise the issue of automatism in a discussion

place. Self-­action was, in fact, an artistic objective

of the meteorological condition of Dove’s works

of Dove’s. Dove likened extraction, the operation he

in part because Dove may have used a pantograph

identified with his own process, to gravitation and

to create Flight but also because meteorology’s

to “minding your own business,” suggesting that his

automatisms constituted a source of fascination

work proceeded according to a force over which he

during the period under discussion, including the

had no control—­in this case, gravity, a fundamental

extraobservational, automatic registration of data

force of the universe—­and when it was left to its

by instruments such as the barometer as well as

own devices.134 In the letter to McCausland that ex-

what was described in period texts as weather’s

pressed his desire to establish art through rhythmic

Chapter Two

formation as an “automatic force,” Dove wrote, “To

measuring automaton, but this notion would have

build a head and put on it hair and eyes and lips

appealed to him precisely because wind was an at-

and ears like the handles on a jug is not enough. To

mospheric force to which was attributed the facility

make it breathe as does the rest of nature it must

of global interconnection. This capacity for binding

have a basic rhythm. In other words I should like

far-­reaching terrains together through phenomena

to make a painting exist in itself.”

135

In a series of

notes, he reiterated and elaborated on this idea:

such as trade winds and hurricanes, together with wind’s ability to be its own meteorologist, posited wind as a thing of extraordinary power and, conse-

Have always felt that I could stand knee deep in

quently, as a ready exemplar for Dove’s art, which

the sand or water and paint what was going on

he wished to instill with instrumental potential,

inside. That is working directly on the paint-

and to do so in a literal sense even if this was ul-

ing . . . without resorting to the representing of

timately impossible, and not simply at the level of

anything but simply to the presenting of the

metaphor. Dove’s description of himself in the let-

thing felt. . . . That is not using nature as model

ter to McCausland standing in sand or in a stream

glancing back and forth. Nature to the eye,

and making direct contact with the object of his art

through the arm to the hand and to the picture.

along with his characterization of the chain of con-

But doing the thing you are doing, making some-

nections among his vision, his body, and his work

136

thing you want to function by itself.

established in the act of making suggest that Dove may well have imagined himself as instrumental

Dove expresses in these remarks a desire to produce

within his pictures-­cum-­devices. Just as his signa-

a painting that would, once created, exist unto itself

tures colluded with and participated in the forms

and function on its own, a wish that reiterates his

and operations of his paintings, making him over

aspiration to paint parts of a picture so that they did

as a simultaneously external and internal activator

their own thing. This was not a longing for whole-

or prompt, Dove’s sense of himself translating from

sale disembodiment or formalist purity—­ Dove

human into machine (or into wind-­as-­machine), be-

writes here of an essential connection among eye,

coming part of a work’s automatic operations, oper-

arm, hand, and picture, after all—­or for an animis-

ating in step with that work in the act of creation,

tic art. Rather, my sense is that Dove’s articulated

fashions Dove the artist as Dove the instrument.137

desire for a self-­acting painting, one that remained

This interweaving of self and object—­an instance

yet in process after the fact of its making, drew on

of a human becoming a registering and translating

the model of automatism proffered by meteorology

machine, conversely analogous to a painting ren-

and its procedures. Barometers and wind, within

dered operational by assuming the properties of

weather science, were automatons only in the sense

human language and communication—­would of

that, once activated or engaged by a human, they

course constitute the definitive expression of in-

executed a procedure by their own devices: barome-

tersubjective association and relation. And in the

ters registered atmospheric pressure; the wind mea-

space of a painting that proffers the sky from the

sured its own velocity. Their automatic operations

point of view of an earthbound human as well as a

proceeded from a human-­machine collaboration,

view from above made possible by a machine, and

from an exchange between a person and a register-

does so by activating the concepts and vocabularies

ing instrument that produced the conditions for

of the totalizing technologies of earth science, the

self-­action, which entailed taking a measurement

propeller in Flight, whose spin within the canvas

apart from and unavailable to the intervention of

produces the effect of a rotating embrace of all other

the human senses or a phenomenon measuring

compositional parts and calls to mind the spin of a

itself. One cannot know whether, in point of fact,

record and the trace of a pantograph, would serve

Dove was tuned in to the idea of the wind as a self-­

perfectly to signify this absolute interchange. Weather

137

Fig. 91  Arthur G. Dove, Your Baby, 1942, collage on newsprint. Photograph courtesy of Christie’s, New York.

The propeller also and inevitably binds Flight

Dove’s watercolors in 1939 and, later, a painting,

to its time and place. In his diary entry for Decem-

Lattice and Awning, dated 1941).139 In Dove’s diary

ber 7, 1941, the day the Japanese military attacked

entry for November 17, 1942, he wrote that he had

the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Ha-

“Pasted up ‘NY Times’ for Bernsteins.”140 Dove’s

waii, Dove wrote in bold script “WAR with Japan”

note refers to a collage, now called Your Baby and

and then circled the phrase; in subsequent entries

previously unremarked in the literature, that he

Dove treats the participation of the United States

crafted on that day by pasting an assortment of

in the Second World War with equal intensity and

clippings onto the front page of the November 17

makes note of war-­related blackouts and food and

edition of the New York Times, which he then gave

138

Dove’s son, William, worked in war

to the Bernsteins (fig. 91). News of the war dom-

production in 1942 and was drafted into the army

inated the paper’s headlines, which included dis-

in 1943. And Dove received firsthand accounts of

patches from Europe, the Soviet Union, Africa, and

the European theater from his friend and doctor in

the Pacific. Dove pasted over the majority of these

Centerport, J. C. ( Jake) Bernstein, who had joined

reports, replacing stories about foreign policy, mil-

the armed forces in 1942 and spent three years over-

itary strategy, and battles with less-­serious-­minded

seas (and, with his wife Julia, had acquired one of

imagery. Photographic portraits of individuals not

fuel rationing.

138

Chapter Two

associated with the headlines in question, adver-

intended by Dove as a private memento and a ges-

tisements for lingerie and fertilizer, a want ad for

ture of friendship, its intermixing of war news, au-

“beautiful girls,” a playing card, and images of a

tobiographical references, and jokes characteristic

toilet, a dancing woman, pipes, and a coiled snake

of his irreverent, at times bawdy sense of humor

jostle for attention with the day’s news. Dove

confirms and underscores the connection he felt

added text to the page, as well, creating in conjunc-

between his world and that of the war overseas.

tion with the newspaper copy a Dadaesque jumble

The war, of course, did not severely impinge

of sense and nonsense. Many of these additions

on Dove, but it was a constant in his everyday life

were autobiographical, including textual additions

during these years, and as early as 1939 it found

reading “Reds,” “Arthur Dove,” “Bernstein,” “Soldier

its way into the mainstream of his pictorial out-

Doctor” (above a pasted photograph of Bernstein

put. In War (fig. 92), a work on paper from 1939, a

in uniform), and “Greenlawn Pharmacy” (a refer-

bomb blast takes the form of a bolt of lightning

ence to the Bernstein’s hometown of Greenlawn),

or a column of fire, blue in color and tinged with a

and many were humorous. Dove pasted the head-

blazing-­orange hue, spewing debris, ash, or shrap-

line “Mrs. Roosevelt Receives 3 Kings” immedi-

nel across the right half of the composition; alumi-

ately adjacent to a playing card featuring the king

num leaf applied throughout registers the machin-

of spades. Above the pasted ad for manure-­based

ery of warfare responsible for this infernal strike.

fertilizer, Dove added copy from a marketing cam-

Other works, including two closely matched scenes,

paign for a constipation remedy, making it seem as

both entitled Italy Goes to War, one an oil painting

if the cows featured in the fertilizer pitch were in

and the other a watercolor, also render the explo-

digestive straits, and throughout he appended text

sive violence of war, in this case as precipitated by

that commented ironically on the paper’s content:

Italy’s invasion of France in 1940, which accompa-

“Phew!” “Are you happy about it?” and “Burlesque

nied Italy’s declaration of war on both France and

Type Show.” Although the collage was presumably

Britain.141 Although the paintings U.S. (1940) and

Fig. 92  Left, Arthur G. Dove, War, 1939, gouache and aluminum leaf on paper, 7 × 5 in. (17.8 × 12.7 cm), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA, given anonymously, by exchange, 468.1980. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 93  Right, Arthur G. Dove, U.S., 1940, oil on canvas, 50.8 × 81.3 cm, Museo Thyssen-­Bornemisza, Madrid, 1975.23. Photo Credit: Museo Thyssen-­ Bornemisza / SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

Weather

139

Fig. 94  Arthur G. Dove, 1941, 1941, wax emulsion on canvas, 25 × 35 in. (63.5 × 88.9 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1942. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

1941 (1941) (figs. 93, 94) do not explicitly reference

terconnection, as also a matter of confronting the

war, their titles and appearance, in particular the

horror of a pan-­geographic, world war, one with un-

palette of army greens and olive drab, the morph-

precedented global reach and devastation, as made

ing of abstract shapes into the form of a helmeted

possible in part by the very science and technology,

or gas-­masked head, and the possible allusion to

from meteorology to flight, that Dove strove to em-

a falling bomb or a tossed grenade as well as the

ulate and embody in his work.143 The banding and

configuration of ovals that resembles an airplane

quasi-­concentric effects in 1941 bear close resem-

propeller in 1941, identify them as war-­related in

blance to those I have described as connoting in-

theme. In a 1940 letter to Stieglitz, Dove referred

terconnection, networks, and human sociability or

to U.S., which he reported having painted “at the

exchange throughout Dove’s imagery, reminding us

German Inn across the way,” in the same breath that

that totality, in Dove’s conception, could take either

he described the inn playing “Taps” and lowering

a futuristic and utopian or a distinctively dystopian

the flag at night and alongside a conjecture that

shape.

the war was “just a means of keeping the mob occupied” while diplomats “go on with their intrigue.”142 And it was during the period of global escalation

140

Full Circle

leading up to the Allies’ declaration of war on Ja-

Dove’s work endeavored to imagine a dynamic and

pan that Dove created Neighborly Attempt at Murder

all-­encompassing web of relations wherein bound-

(1941) (fig. 115), one of only a handful of paintings

aries between things and beings were dismantled

by him that connote violence in the extreme. Given

as easily as trade winds, ocean currents, storm sys-

the presence of war in Dove’s life and in his body

tems, and fighter jets defied and dismantled hemi-

of work, one could understand his meteorological

spheric, continental, or national borders. In his

and geographic impulses, including his aerializing

diary entry for October 11, 1939, Dove noted that

views, which articulated fantasies of utopian in-

he was “putting down one color after another in

Chapter Two

Fig. 95  Arthur Garfield Dove diary pages dated Oct. 11 and 12, 1939. Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 3:2:10, image #283.

formation,” employing the term, “formation,” that

weather map, designating significant systems of

throughout his writing connoted interconnection,

pressure, served as a chief source of weather knowl-

communication, and networked exchange. Adja-

edge for the public as well as for bureau forecast-

cent to this note he drew a spiraling line that closely

ers, and everyday meteorological literacy assumed

resembles the concentric circle motif ubiquitous

immediate recognition and comprehension of this

144

The implied link

visual cue. The structure of the atmosphere itself

between the idea of interconnection and the circle

was described visually as well as verbally in terms of

motif posited by this pairing leaves no doubt that,

stacked and interconnected circular forms. The au-

in Dove’s pictorial world, the interconnecting sys-

thor of Man and Weather (1926), Alexander McAdie,

tems of weather and those of the science of meteo-

for instance, wrote that our atmosphere “may be

within his body of work (fig. 95).

rology found their pictorial equivalent in the circle

likened to a six-­story building. That is, there are six

form. This makes sense, for circles were prominent

concentric aerospheres or air floors,” what he also

in the visual and verbal rhetoric of weather science

called a “six-­story air shell.”145 The exact specifica-

and, in Dove’s own weather watching and record-

tions of the atmosphere’s various layers, especially

ing, they constituted a fundamental diagram-

those not yet reachable by humans, were still in

matic form. Circles configured, either actually or

scientific flux, but the very terms used to describe

graphically, certain of the fundamental processes

them, including “troposphere” and “stratosphere”

of weather and the signal phenomena of weather

along with the word “atmosphere” itself, perpetu-

science, especially those that figured largely in con-

ated the stacked-­circle metaphor. Period illustrators

temporaneous meteorological discussions of global

often depicted these concentric layers in the form

weather patterns, including cyclones, anticyclones,

of a sectional view of the nestled spheres. Charles

and hurricanes, either concentric in nature or con-

F. Brooks, for example, in Why the Weather? (1924),

centric in form when represented graphically. The

illustrated the prevailing ocean winds against a

concentric circle isobar patterns of the bureau

backdrop of atmospheric semistrata, a format typWeather

141

ical for the period (fig. 96). In Meteorology for Avia-

fabric of existence: celestial bodies, sound waves,

tor and Layman (1930), Richard Whatham included

gusts of wind, clock springs, the ocean, humans,

a diagram of the structure of the atmosphere that

animals, foghorns, shorthand, Einstein, Joyce, the

combined a sectional view of the major layers with

Mona, love letters, jazz, seagulls, airplanes, thun-

an evocation of the three-­dimensional globe (fig.

derstorms, the tides, phonograph records, radio re-

97). Concentric circles and spheres have of course

ceivers, and so forth. What is more, if circles were a

long been used to represent the earth itself. From

signal form of meteorology and Dove wished for his

ancient cosmological models, including Aristotle’s

creations to do the work that meteorology did, his

conception of the celestial spheres, to John Cleves

concentric circular forms would have taken shape

Symmes Jr.’s hollow earth theory in the nineteenth

so as to fashion his act of making as meteorology,

century, which inspired both Edgar Allan Poe and

as an equivalent binding together of all existence

Jules Verne, concentricity has served thinkers of all

and all phenomena through material and pictorial

stripes in their imagining of the structure of the

means. In this way, his paintings and assemblages

earth and the surrounding universe as well as in hy-

existed as instruments that registered, translated,

pothesizing the interactions among celestial bodies

and communicated among multiple parts even as

This concentric model, if not all the

they materially fashioned the very intersubjective

ideas that gave rise to it, appeared throughout me-

network that would arise from these collective op-

teorological writing in the first half of the twentieth

erations.

in motion.

142

146

century, as typified by the illustrations in Willis Lu-

Dove was not alone in imagining an apparatus

ther Moore’s Descriptive Meteorology (1910) in which

or organism capable of such a feat. In Weather Pre-

concentric circles represent the earth, including an

diction by Numerical Process (1922), the British math-

image delineating the relationship between local

ematician and meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson

isobars and isobars in general circulation (fig. 98),

recounted his efforts to produce equation-­based

and in which circle forms are used for myriad other

forecasts. He proposed that the behavior of the

illustrative purposes in the text, as in the case of a

atmosphere could be expressed through a system

diagram of cyclonic wind direction (fig. 99).

of mathematical equations and its future behav-

With circles representing everything from baro-

ior thereby predicted by way of calculation, and he

metric pressure and wind systems to the structure of

described in his book how this might be accom-

the earth and the architecture of the cosmos, it is no

plished. The first scientist to theorize and attempt

wonder they wound up an essential motif for Dove.

numerical weather prediction, Richardson’s efforts

For him, they represented suns, moons, and water

failed only because the machines capable of run-

as well as waves of many sorts but also stood for the

ning his equations—­computers—­had not yet been

all-­encompassing and systemic interchange among

invented.147 He permitted himself a fantasy of suc-

entities he wished to incarnate in his paintings and

cess, however, and called it his “Forecast-­Factory.”

assemblages. If geography is the science of every-

After estimating that sixty-­four thousand human

thing, where everything is imagined as a massive,

“computers”—­at the time a term for a person who

interlinked system, one modeled by the intercon-

performed mathematical calculations—­would be

necting capacity of weather and weather science,

required to predict global weather three hours in

then circles, like the waveform, served for Dove as

advance by using a combination of his equations

signifiers of the potential of pictures to achieve

and data-­filled computing forms, he envisioned

just such a system. And because weather science,

as an alternative a hyperefficient forecasting hive.

along with geography, was itself understood as a

I quote Richardson’s fantastical description at

science that interconnected everything, one sees

length here in order to convey the scope and par-

that Dove’s circles could represent and embody a

ticularity of what he envisioned, and because the

threading and entanglement among all parts of the

very nature of his vision demands an account that

Chapter Two

Fig. 96  “Air Circulation in a Sea Breeze,” in Charles F. Brooks, Why the Weather? (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1924), p. 113, fig. 23. Photograph: David Connelly.

Fig. 97  Above left, “Structure of the Atmosphere,” in Richard Whatham, Meteorology for Aviator and Layman (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1930), p. 4, fig. 1. Photograph: David Connelly. Fig. 98  Above right, “Relation of the Local Isobars to Those of the General Circulation,” in Willis Luther Moore, Descriptive Meteorology (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1910), p. 147, fig. 43. Photograph: David Connelly. Fig. 99  Right, “Variation with Altitude of Cyclonic Vectors and Components,” in Willis Luther Moore, Descriptive Meteorology (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1910), p. 151, fig. 46. Photograph: David Connelly.

renders it in one piece, fully intact and missing

of a huge spinning bowl, but so far the arithmetic

none of its parts.

proves the better way.” Another building housed “all the usual financial, correspondence and adminis-

Imagine a large hall like a theatre, except that the

trative offices.” And outside were “playing fields,

circles and galleries go right round through the

houses, mountains and lakes.” Stated Richardson,

space usually occupied by the stage. The walls

“Those who compute the weather should breathe

of this chamber are painted to form a map of

of it freely.”149

the globe. The ceiling represents the north polar

In Richardson’s vision, a full-­circle amphithe-

regions, England is in the gallery, the tropics in

ater doubles as the earth, representing its geog-

the upper circle, Australia on the dress circle and

raphy but also embodying in the theater’s architec-

the Antarctic in the pit. A myriad computers

ture the earth’s spherical shape. Within this space,

are at work upon the weather of the part of the

humans interact with numbers, machines, and one

map where each sits, but each computer attends

another so as to produce accurate, usable predic-

only to one equation or part of an equation. The

tive results. The division of labor among the “com-

work of each region is coordinated by an official

puters” calls to mind that of a factory assembly

of higher rank. Numerous little “night signs”

line—­the Ford Motor Company perfected the con-

display the instantaneous values so that neigh-

cept in the years immediately prior to Richardson’s

boring computers can read them. Each number

publication—­ with each individual in sequence

is thus displayed in three adjacent zones so as

contributing to the creation of a final product; the

to maintain communication to the North and

emphasis placed by Richardson on precision, effi-

South on the map. From the floor of the pit a tall

ciency, and standardization suggests that theories

pillar rises to half the height of the hall. It carries

of scientific management more generally informed

a large pulpit on its top. In this sits the man in

his scheme.150 In his account, Richardson heralds

charge of the whole theatre; he is surrounded by

communication as absolutely key to the success of

several assistants and messengers. One of his du-

his operation. Fittingly, his fantasy factory incor-

ties is to maintain a uniform speed of progress in

porates a buzzing communication network formed

all parts of the globe. In this respect he is like the

of multiple modes of translation and transmission

conductor of an orchestra in which the instru-

that would address internal and external audiences

ments are slide-­rules and calculating machines.

alike, including speech, illuminated signs, rays of

But instead of waving a baton he turns a beam of

light, pneumatic tubes, code, telephone, and radio.

rosy light upon any region that is running ahead

Experimentation and research play a role, as does

of the rest, and a beam of blue light upon those

traditional weather wisdom in the form of the “en-

who are behindhand. Four senior clerks in the

thusiast,” although Richardson puts relatively little

central pulpit are collecting the future weather

store in this particular participant’s contribution.

as fast as it is being computed, and despatching

The image of a conductor orchestrating perfect co-

it by pneumatic carrier to a quiet room. There it

ordination among humans (the “computers”) and

will be coded and telephoned to the radio trans-

machines (slide rules and mechanical calculators),

148

mitting station.

a synchronization as pleasing as musical harmony, along with Richardson’s nod to the necessity of out-

144

Richardson pictured his factory as a complex of

door recreation for his workers, cement the utopia-

spaces and functions extending beyond this main

nism of his vision. Aspects that evoke surveillance

computing room. “In a neighboring building,”

the elevated overseer, the and discipline today—­

he wrote, “there is a research department, where

corrective beams of light—­were for Richardson ex-

they invent improvements. . . . In a basement an

empla of good organization and rigorous, ground-

en­thusiast is observing eddies in the liquid lining

breaking work performed in the name of scientific

Chapter Two

and social progress, elements necessary to the effi-

at the level of global geography, and his works of

cient performance of his monumental forecasting

art strove to be near-­magical, superinterconnecting

apparatus.

computing instruments, minifactories that forged

In imagining the triumph of numerical weather

bonds among isolated parts, suturing this to that

prediction, Richardson envisions a vast organism,

and here to there with the ultimate aim of radically

not a living creature but a system that functions as

reinventing conventional notions of how one com-

if alive and, in this case, that counts humans among

municates and with whom. If weather and weather

its component parts. A complex of people, architec-

science provided Dove with a model of global, even

ture, maps, signs, lighting effects, numerical values,

cosmic interconnection and interaction, with the

colors, pneumatic tubes, telephones, radio, and

weather map inspiring an idea of how to make a

watchtower perches, the Forecast-­Factory subjected

picture of intersubjective union, and meteorology’s

masses of data to a system whereby that data was

instruments an idea of how a picture could be a ma-

set into relation with yet other data through cal-

chine, then it would have been a vision like Richard-

culation so as to produce a form of knowledge—­a

son’s that afforded a view of how all this vastness

weather forecast—­that bound the past to the future

and all this instrumentality could find a home in

and the far-­flung to the close at hand. Numbers

a physical, smaller-­scale, diminutive thing—­in a

interacting with other numbers in the space of

painting or a sculpture—­and also a view of how

equations, humans communicating across amphi-

this scaled-­down thing might come to embody the

theaters or between buildings by way of voice or me-

ideal of communication, converse, and connec-

chanical devices, incompatible tenses coexisting,

tion among all the world’s phenomena and parts

distant geographies shaking hands: every aspect

that came to be expressed in Dove’s work and in

of Richardson’s forecasting scheme entails an ani-

his myriad articulations of this ideal, including his

mating encounter or relation, the establishing of a

characterizations of extraction, formation, and the

line of communication and a mode of conversion or

sought-­after condition of light. I doubt that Dove

translation that activated yet more transmutations,

read Richardson’s Weather Prediction by Numerical

all within an ever-­expanding web of activity. What

Process, but I am sure that he shared Richardson’s

one has in Richardson’s vision, then, is an ambitious

dream of creating a many-­bodied, animate transla-

and out-­of-­this-­world blueprint for the machinery,

tion and communication instrument or organism,

circuitry, and activating medium of a global system

one that integrated the capacity and cosmic con-

or network, one that encompasses natural phenom-

nections of weather and weather science into the

ena, humans, instruments, language, sonic effects,

material and intercourse of everyday life. And if he

and pictures in its objects of study, operations, and

had in fact encountered Richardson’s fantasy of a co-

outcomes, and that exists to register, translate, and

lossal calculation, conversion, and communication

communicate on a global scale.

apparatus, Richardson’s privileging of mathematics

If a meteorologist could have imagined such a

over any other human code would not have been

thing in 1922, then so too could have Dove during

the thing that captivated Dove, despite his dedica-

the years he was at work on paintings and assem-

tion to the conic sections and his praising of his

blages such as Sun Drawing Water, Seagull Motif

best work as “almost ‘mathematics.’” Rather, Dove

(Violet and Green), Rain, Partly Cloudy, and Flight. If

would have found alluring the idea that a material

what Richardson imagined was a vast circulatory

entity composed of many parts and processes could

system or organism that interwove weather, hu-

function as did language or, put another way, that

mans, machines, and notational mechanisms and

the properties of language, especially those that

modes, then Dove could have envisioned some-

possessed the capacity to connect and convert and

thing similar. And he did. Dove’s circles evoked this

thus create binding ties, could attach themselves

very sort of circulatory system, one that functioned

to and live inside of things. Alluring also would be Weather

145

146

the idea that those things inhabited by the opera-

more literal pairing of matter and motility. Also in

tions of translation and communication could in

the 1920s, he played around with sound, pairing,

turn become templates for human interchange and

for example, painting with the phonograph to see

existence. Dove explored such habitation in paint-

how the act of painting and the workings of an in-

ings produced throughout his career. In the 1920s,

strument of sonic transmission might compare. I

he added a form of sculpture to his repertoire, cre-

turn now to such experimentation and to its place

ating the series of assemblages he called “things,”

in Dove’s career-­long exploration of the possibility

the subject of chapter 4, in which he explored a

of a living art.

Chapter Two

3

Sound Sound Torr’s entries in the diaries she and Dove kept for 1926 and 1927 describe one of Dove’s most direct engagements with the idea of translation. Over a period of several months during these two years, he undertook a series of paintings based on musical compositions, created while listening to phonograph records. Collectively, the entries, along with passages from the 1928 diary, establish the basic outlines of Dove’s listening and painting. On May 23, 1926, Torr reported a “nice evening” during which she and Dove played the Victrola, one of numerous entries that describe she and Dove purchasing and listening to records, by themselves or with friends. In July 1926 they bought “‘Rhapsody in Blue’ by Gershwin & 4 jazz” in Huntington, and in January 1927, Dove went to Huntington and “brought back Fire Bird records—­Stravinsky—­played them . . . in P.M. quite beautiful.” Torr reported that Dove was “quite amused by Gershwin.” “Early in P.M. Holly & Hank here,” she wrote on February 8, 1927. “Had coffee, played Stravinsky records to them, & ‘The Jealous Lover.’” In January 1927, Torr traveled to Huntington and purchased compositions by Gershwin and Stravinsky for Dove, and in late December 1927, she bought Dove “a Whiteman record & an address book.” In January 1928, she returned to Huntington and purchased several more records as pres­ents for Dove. Torr’s diary entries also mention occasions on which she and Dove painted while listening to their record collection, Dove p ­ ainting 147

148

directly in response to the music that played. On

paintings share certain features, including the use

December 1, 1926, Dove “did a handsome spirited

of found objects and the medium of metal. During

‘music’ with almost everything in sight to Gersh-

this time, Dove was also at work on a small number

win’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’” continuing work on this

of other canvases, including Seagull Motif (Violet and

painting for the next several days. In early January

Green), completed in 1928 but underway by January

of the next year, Dove continued painting from Ger-

1927 (fig. 3).2 It may seem excessive to enumerate as

shwin, creating, as Torr described it, a “Gershwin

I have Dove’s music listening and music painting

ink—­steel spring, it is mean and beautiful!” Dove

during this period of many months but as Harry

began another painting shortly thereafter, which

Cooper stresses in his article on Dove’s record pic-

Torr referred to as “An Orange Grove in California,”

tures, any interpretation of these paintings must

completing and framing it and the “‘Gershwin’ ink-­

attend to the conditions of their making and to

spring” piece by the middle of the month. During

the intriguing fact that they originated in listen-

these weeks, Torr described Dove “painting big jazz,

ing rather than in looking.3 This listening, the diary

beautiful” and creating as a result “6 things” from

entries together reveal, occurred not only as a stim-

the records to which they listened, sand papering

ulus to putting brush to canvas—­play record, paint

and varnishing frames for three of these pictures

picture—­ but also transpired across Dove’s daily

late in January. Dove next began a painting from

life, often in the company of other people. Other

“Stravinsky records” and worked on this canvas into

entries from these months describe yet more expe-

February before he “tore it up.” He revisited one of

riences of music listening. Torr notes that she and

the Gershwin pictures late in February 1927, chang-

Dove attended vaudeville performances, went to

ing the “‘head’ in Rhapsody in Blue,” as Torr put it,

the movies, and listened to the radio on their boat.4

and he made a “pastel—­Jazz—­very fine” around the

All these things formed Dove’s day-­to-­day musical

same time. More painting from Gershwin ensued,

résumé and would have had a hand in his decision

Stravinsky having been scrapped: “Jazz on victrola.

to paint while listening to records.

A decides on Gershwin—­ Whiteman—­ Stravinsky

Those moments when phonograph music did

sad.” This resulted in “‘I’ll Build a Stairway to Para-

provide the immediate stimulus to painting—­when

dise,’ ” which Torr also referred to as “I. B. a S. T. P.” in

Dove put on a record and then took up his brush—­

her entries. Torr described checking out Melville’s

wound up producing five identifiable canvases, now

Moby-­Dick from the library in Huntington and both

dated 1927, all of which are directly linked to specific

of them reading it during this time, and her entries

musical compositions and also to a particular pho-

suggest that she understood the two activities as

nograph recording of those compositions.5 All five

somehow connected: “A working on ‘I. B. a S. T. P.’ A

paintings were displayed at Dove’s 1927 exhibition at

got Moby Dick from library”; “Both reading Moby

Stieglitz’s Intimate Gallery. A sixth painting, clearly

Dick. A worked on ‘I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise’

music based but which may or may not have been

in pastel.” Torr reported in April 1927 that “A did

a direct response to record listening, accompanied

‘I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise’ entirely over—­in

the other five. Yours Truly (1927), also on exhibition,

oils” and had framed it by the end of the month.

shares its dynamic, swinging forms and spiral mo-

Dove gave Stravinsky another chance in November

tifs with the record pictures and may owe its title to

1927. “A did beautiful painting of 4th movement of

a popular Broadway musical that premiered at the

‘The Fire Bird,’” Torr wrote on the thirtieth of that

Shubert Theatre in January 1927, but no documenta-

month.1

tion exists to confirm this. As Donna Cassidy has de-

Dove’s work on the record paintings, as I will

termined, Dove painted George Gershwin—­Rhapsody

call them throughout this chapter, coincided with

in Blue, Part I and George Gershwin—­Rhapsody in Blue,

work on his assemblages, including Hand Sewing

Part II while listening to the 1924 Victor recording

Machine (1927) (fig. 120), with which the record

of the Paul Whiteman orchestra playing Gershwin’s

Chapter Three

composition, with ­Gershwin at the piano (figs. 100,

canvases the silvery sheen of metallic paint and, in

101). Dove most likely painted Orange Grove in Cali-

one—­Rhapsody in Blue, Part I—­through sections of a

fornia, by Irving Berlin and George Gershwin—­I’ll Build

clock spring attached to the canvas surface. Linear

a Stairway to Paradise while listening to Victor re-

forms stand against a relatively unadorned ground

cordings of Whiteman’s orchestra playing composi-

in Improvision, the whole of which is dominated by

tions of the same name by Irving Berlin and Gersh­

a protagonist-­like figure: a T shape, formed by a

win, released in 1923 and 1922, respectively (figs. 102,

vertical line topped by a horizontal one from which

6

103). A fifth painting, Rhythm Rag, the current lo-

extend what look like arms. This anthropomorphic

cation of which is unknown, was probably based on

effect is amplified by a “head” that sits atop the “T”

yet another Victor recording of the Whiteman or-

and “feet” that spring forth from the base of the

chestra, released in 1927 and bearing the same name

vertical line. Torr referred in one of her entries to

as Dove’s work; the composer of “The Rhythm Rag,”

the “head” of the “Rhapsody in Blue” painting, and

Willard Robison, recorded it in 1924 with his Deep

in the other canvases configurations of line do now

7

River Orchestra.

and then assume the role of a dominant “note” or

The remaining painting in this group, titled

“phrase.” But none of the other pictures suggest

Improvision in the 1927 exhibition checklist, cannot

such a straightforward figure-­ground relationship,

be linked definitely to a particular piece of music

one constituted by a prominent configuration of

8

(fig. 104). Given that Torr’s diary entries describe

shapes set against a quieter backdrop. Still, Impro-

Dove producing several paintings while listening to

vision takes its place among the other musical pic-

Igor Stravinsky records (including a work that Dove

tures in the 1927 catalogue—­it is listed as number

destroyed), it is possible that Improvision’s musical

6; the others are numbers 1 through 5, out of a total

source was one of that composer’s works. A likely

of nineteen works—­suggesting that Dove classed it

possibility, Stravinsky’s The Fire Bird, a recording of

among those made by way of phonograph listening.

which Dove purchased in 1927, was commissioned

Given this, and because it bears a title that evokes

by Serge Diaghilev for the first season of his Ballets

a musical operation (improvisation), the work war-

Russes in Paris and premiered at the Paris Opéra in

rants consideration alongside the other five.

1910; subsequently fashioned into several concert

Dove’s record paintings are usually considered

suites by Stravinsky in 1910, 1919, and 1945, the com-

in isolation from the rest of his body of work, not

position would have reached Dove in 1927 in the

necessarily because they are understood as a side-

form of such a suite rather than the original 1910

line or as unrelated to his practice as a whole, but

9

score. Yet unlike the rest of the music paintings,

because they were produced in a distinct manner,

Improvision does not borrow its title wholesale from

one unique to this moment in Dove’s career, and

a musical work, a fact that argues against its origins

also because they are related to other artistic prac-

in a particular composition or recording or against

tices in and around the 1920s that engage music as

Dove’s wishing to mark it as such. The painting also

subject matter or inspiration. As a result, they are

diverges in formal terms from the four canvases

often discussed alongside such practices, rather

Dove created while listening to Gershwin and Ber-

than in the context of the rest of Dove’s oeuvre.10

lin. All five canvases feature lines of varying thick-

I would not argue against the specialness of Dove’s

ness in the form of spirals, cross-­hatchings, single-­

record paintings, but I do take them to be an in-

rail tracks, zigzags, and sawteeth. But such marks in

tegral part of his larger project and, perhaps most

Improvision are rigorously simple compared to those

importantly, as part of a persistent and prolonged

in the other four works, where they proliferate and

engagement on his part with the sonic and, more

assume exceedingly complex forms, interweaving

particularly, with the possibilities of transforming

among one another and also through planes of bold

sound, a phenomenon unavailable to the naked eye,

and shimmering color, including in three of the

into visual form, something explored by numerous Sound

149

Fig. 100  Arthur G. Dove, George Gershwin—­Rhapsody in Blue, Part I, 1927, oil on metallic paint with clock spring on aluminum support. 11¾ × 9¾ in., Michael Scharf Family Collection. Fig. 101  Arthur G. Dove, George Gershwin—­ Rhapsody in Blue, Part II, 1927, oil, metallic paint, and ink on paper, 20½ × 15½ in., Michael Scharf Family Collection.

Fig. 102  Arthur G. Dove, Orange Grove in California, by Irving Berlin, 1927, oil on cardboard, 51 × 38 cm, Museo Thyssen-­ Bornemisza, Madrid, 1975.52. Photo Credit: Museo Thyssen-­Bornemisza / SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

Fig. 103  Arthur G. Dove, George Gershwin—­I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise, 1927, ink, metallic paint, and oil on paperboard, 50.8 × 38.1 cm (20 × 15 in.), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of the William H. Lane Foundation, 1990.407. Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Fig. 104  Arthur G. Dove, Improvision, 1927, oil on paperboard, Denver Art Museum Collection: The Lucile and Donald Graham Collection, 1997.312. Photograph courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.

artists in Europe and the United States in the first

the musical potential of other sonic forms, such as

half of the twentieth century, and an undertaking

factory noise; (2) paintings based on radio listening;

that for Dove constituted part of his translation

and (3) paintings that represent “live” sound, rather

11

154

work. Painting from records constituted only one

than recorded or broadcast sound, a category that

of several sonic experiments carried out by Dove,

includes foghorn blasts, the wind, the tap-­tap of

and this chapter explores the specific nature of

telegraphy, and the crackle of electricity. As Dove’s

each of these pictorial investigations, all of which

brother Paul recalled, Dove was keen on music and

entailed Dove painting a particular kind of sound

owned several musical instruments, but also took as

generated in a particular sort of way and listened

subject matter “anything from a knothole in a tree

to or heard in a particular fashion. So I discuss the

trunk to the wind in the willows, the sound in the

paintings based on record listening, of course, as

telephone wires, the moo of a cow or the coo of a pi-

well as three other categories of works: (1) paintings

geon or the clouds and sunrise.”12 Jazz, Morse code,

based on music more generally, or on the idea of mu-

radio broadcasts, thunder and lightning, sound

sic, in which Dove explores not a particular musical

waves, and bird calls: all these things and more

composition but a musical type, such as swing, or

show up in Dove’s exploration of the sonic in art.

Chapter Three

have been referring to one of several types of pho-

Painting from Records

nographic devices available at the time, including

I begin my analysis of the paintings made from

acoustic and electrical models, the latter having

record listening by returning to Harry Cooper’s in-

been previously introduced by Victor.15 However,

junction to attend to the conditions of the making

it is almost certain that she and Dove owned an

of these paintings. To comprehend what painting

acoustic (or “mechanical”) phonograph—­one that

from record listening entailed for Dove and to un-

amplified sound by way of a diaphragm and horn

derstand fully the paintings that resulted, I take my

and that relied on a hand-­wound, spring-­powered

cue from Cooper in wanting to account for the most

motor to spin the turntable—­because their boat

basic facts of Dove’s listening and making. The fol-

was not wired for electricity until November 1926,

lowing two questions guide my inquiry: To what,

several months after Torr’s first mention of their

exactly, did Dove listen? And what, consequently,

Victrola listening. Because the Victor brand domi-

did he hear?

nated the market in the 1920s, it is safe to assume

It is important to register once again, even if it means restating the obvious, that Dove listened

that Dove and Torr did in fact own a Victor-­made Victrola.16

to records and, as Torr noted in the diaries, used a

One gathers from Torr’s diary entries that it

Victrola in order to do so. The records were 78 rpm

took Dove several days over the course of several

discs, made of a plastic compound and measuring

months to complete the Rhapsody in Blue canvases,

ten inches across, with a playing time of around

and as his son, William, reported, Dove played the

three to four minutes per side. They were molded

Gershwin record repeatedly as he painted.17 So over

or stamped from a master disc onto which live

the course of his listening, which was instigated

13

sound had been recorded. The Victor recording

by placing the disc on the phonograph’s turntable,

of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” that Dove owned

Dove had to stop and restart or flip the record, re-

was acoustical, as opposed to electrical—­that is, re-

locating the phonograph needle to the outer edge

corded without the aid of electrical amplification,

of the disc whenever one three-­to four-­minute side

which was introduced in the mid-­1920s—­as were

finished playing. He would also have had to turn

the recordings of “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise”

the phonograph’s hand crank periodically in order

and “An Orange Grove in California.” As reported

to maintain or restart the turntable’s rotational mo-

by Cassidy and Cooper, the “Rhapsody” disc was

tion.18 The act of painting is, inarguably, a physical,

double sided, divided into a “Part I” and a “Part

material one, for it involves a body with limbs ma-

II”—­a division that carried over into Dove’s two

nipulating matter. The act of painting while listen-

paintings, which were titled accordingly—­and, as

ing to a record played on an acoustical phonograph,

was often the case with earlier phonographic re-

as described here, amplifies the physicality of this

cordings, Gershwin’s composition was presented

act, for the painter, rather than simply looking at

14

in abbreviated form. It is difficult to determine

a referent, must engage that referent physically in

with precision what kind of phonograph Dove and

order to make it actively present and thus available

Torr used to play these records, but one can make

as a pictorial source. That is, Dove, in order to have

an educated guess. Torr first mentions playing a

Gershwin’s tune at hand so that he could paint from

Victrola in her diary entry for May 23, 1926. While

it, had to interact with and activate two objects, the

the moniker “Victrola” refers only to internal-­horn

phonograph and the phonograph disc.

phonographs made by the Victor Talking Machine

This is important to note because, as historians

Company beginning in 1906 (the horn was hidden

of sound technology and the recording industry

in the machine’s cabinet, the doors of which were

have observed, the invention of the phonograph

opened when played), the colloquial use of the term

ushered in new cultures of listening as well as

was (and continues to be) more loose, so Torr could

novel conceptions of musical form, in part because Sound

155

phonograph technology simultaneously disembod-

it parsed a distinction between the simply inani-

ied and reembodied listening. Emily Thompson

mate and matter activated by and utilized within

has described how “dramatic transformations in

networks of human relations.

what people heard” resulted from changes in the

The process by which Dove engaged and acti-

manner in which these people listened within the

vated objects so as to produce his referent—­that is,

context of a rapidly transforming auditory land-

to make music materially present—­when undertak-

scape, one reshaped by new technologies and new

ing to paint while listening to records would have

19

At the

comprised multiple instances of translation, a fact

same time it evacuated the musician’s body from

that probably drew him to sound technology in

the experience of music listening, the phonograph

the first place, but that also compelled and shaped

and its appurtenances transformed music into a

the nature of his subsequent engagement with

graspable, material object—­a commodity of course

this technology. The very material engaged at the

but, more basically, a material artifact, a tangible

outset of his process, the phonograph records, the

and tactile presence quite unlike its live and fleet-

playing of which initiated Dove’s act of painting,

ing source, one that, as Douglas Kahn has pointed

constituted a technology of translation. Acoustic

out, was newly fixable, as linear inscription on the

records rendered the properties of live music as a

phonograph disc as well as by way of the graphic

spiral groove inscribed on a disc. A large horn col-

techniques of acoustical research that served to

lected the sound produced by musicians in a stu-

quantify and objectify sound through rendering it

dio and directed it toward a diaphragm apparatus,

as image. Repeatability, for instance, the fact that

the vibrations of which guided a stylus that cut

Dove could hear Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”

this groove into the disc’s surface. Musical sound

over and over again in quick succession, was itself a

was thus rendered as a visually available, if illegi-

circumstances for encountering sound.

function of sound’s novel material forms.

20

Dove, thus, in making his paintings, listened to

when literally translated, “phonograph,” a term

music, but he did so by engaging music in a bluntly

coined in 1863, means “sound-­” or “voice-­writer,” and

material fashion. Listening for him was at its origin

the term most likely derived from the nineteenth-­

a matter of the manipulation of things, what may

century practice of “phonography,” a form of pho-

explain his tendency to call the music paintings just

netic shorthand where notational marks signified

this—­“things”—­in the diaries (Torr borrows Dove’s

sounds rather than letters (hence the combination

term thusly: “Gershwin thing,” “6 things,” “Stravin-

of “phono” and “graphy”).22 Dove’s study of short-

sky thing”) but also in “An Idea,” the essay he wrote

hand and speedwriting thus predisposed him to see

to accompany the 1927 exhibition, where he refers to

record grooves as abbreviated script or sign.23 It is

21

156

ble, graphic mark. It is worth mentioning here that

his record paintings as “the music things.” Dove’s

also worth mentioning that the phonograph itself

work on these paintings coincided with work on his

was originally intended for the recording and trans-

assemblages, which he regularly called his “things,”

mission of human speech and thus at its inception

several of which accompanied the music pictures in

was linked to language, and that even earlier sound

the 1927 exhibition, as if to highlight the fact that

technologies, including the “phonautograph” and

the material conditions of the canvases made from

the “parleóphone,” were designed to translate

records was not wholly dissimilar to the materiality

sound, including speech, into visual form, making

of the assemblages, three-­dimensional works made

it no stretch to suggest that the phonograph in the

of everyday stuff. I will have more to say about the

1920s would have connoted for Dove the graphic as

historical and conceptual significance of the term

well as the aural, or a hybrid of the two.24

“thing” when I discuss the assemblages at length

When Dove played one of his records, the lin-

in chapter 4. For now, suffice it to say that Dove’s

ear or graphic representation of music was re-­or

designation was a knowing one, not least because

untranslated by a phonograph needle tracking the

Chapter Three

concentric grooves. A phonograph needle vibrates

employed to listen and existed precisely because

as it registers the lateral displacement of the inci-

of those technologies.27 In other words, what he

sions, motion that is transferred to the sound-­box

heard had not existed prior to its recording and

diaphragm which converts, also through vibration,

playback, and it was thus not at all an index of its

mechanical energy into acoustical energy. When

original referent; rather, this phonographic sound

Dove placed the needle on the rotating disc, mu-

was a new iteration of what had been originally

25

performed, one that hewed close to its source but

Painting this sound, then, was for Dove a matter

diverged in important ways, as did a translation of

of hearing the product of two translations—­sound

text from its original source, a phenomenon theo-

into line, line back into sound—­and then translat-

rized by Walter Benjamin and, in the case of sound,

ing once again, transforming played and listened-­to

an outcome that one scholar has aptly character-

music’s spatial and temporal dimensions into picto-

ized as the “phonographic effect.”28 I draw attention

rial, visual form, compressing music’s volume, once

to such an effect not because I believe that Dove

again, into a two-­dimensional, if not strictly linear,

would have worried over such technological medi-

system of notational marks. If this, then Dove’s ear

ation, although he would have been well aware of it,

was itself a registering device, akin to a sound box or

having heard Whiteman play Gershwin and Berlin

diaphragm, and his brush became the phonograph

live previous to his purchase of the Victor records,

needle’s analog, for its bristles both registered and

but rather as a way of attending with precision to

recorded, instrument-­like, what Dove heard, trans-

the sound that did reach Dove’s ear during his pro-

lated from ear to brain to brush-­wielding arm, and

cess of painting: music, yes, but also what have been

these bristles also replayed this music, retranslat-

dubbed “sonic artifacts,” sounds indigenous to the

ing it as paint on canvas or, to quote Dove’s 1927 ex-

process of recording and playback and to the de-

hibition catalog essay, as “music of the eye.” Music

vices used therein.29

sic manifested once again as volumetric sound.

was itself the product of a translation, Dove noted

By this I mean, for example, short bursts of

in this essay, for it reduced sound as such, in and of

sound, three to four minutes at a time, followed

itself, into a more simplified and direct form. In a

by the whisper of the needle tracking the termi-

manner analogous to Dove’s own pictorial reduc-

nus of the groove, the swish of its removal from

tions of motifs from nature but also in accordance

the surface of the disc, then the intervening hum

with his notion of stitching and interweaving

of the turntable’s rotation followed by the pop of

formations and line into a complex whole, music

the needle hitting the outer edge of the moving

transfigured the sonic into a system. As he wrote,

disc as the process begins again. I also mean the

matter and phenomena such as wind and water and

recorded sound of instruments, some of them too

sand are simplified as “color and force lines and sub-

loud, others too soft, depending on their proximity

26

stances, just as music has done with sound.”

to the recording horn, with brass perhaps sounding

And what did Dove hear? He heard Gershwin

too deep or wind instruments excessively shrill; and

and Berlin and Stravinsky of course, but not as if

maybe a few notes or sonic effects here and there

he were in the presence of the live performance re-

that registered on the recording but during a live

corded on the disc. Although record companies in

per­formance would have been unavailable to the

the 1920s marketed their products as exact replicas

hu­man ear; this, plus the scratch and scrape of

of the live and went to great lengths to establish

the phono­graph needle on the plastic surface of

the documentary function of the disc, phonograph

the disc as it played, and also the skips and crackles

recordings transformed the live in manifold ways,

caused by the needle hitting dust or debris settled

especially when produced and played without the

into the grooves; also the too-­fast pace of a tune

aid of electrical amplification. So what Dove heard

generated when the hand crank has been turned to

was decisively a function of the technologies he

its limit so as to ensure that the record’s spin will Sound

157

not slow prematurely and make the sound drag

understanding of these works, for I see such regis-

and distort, and the thickening and lengthening of

tration as an integral aspect of the material condi-

sound when such slowing did occur as the motor’s

tions of Dove’s making of the music paintings.

spring completed its release; and all this against

So Dove’s painting from records constituted

the backdrop of a thick hiss or sonic haze—­a sound

multiple acts of translation and engaged multiple

akin to that produced by putting an ear to a seashell

translating operations, including registration, and

and “hearing” the rushing roar of the sea—­as gen-

his process involved activating and interacting with

erated by the collective mechanical workings of the

material objects that in turn imposed a specific set

phonograph apparatus, a thick symphony of sounds

of material conditions on his listening and making.

generated by the synchronized operation of all its

And Dove’s painting from records did not consist

parts.

30

I spend time with what Dove’s listening to pho-

equivalents for particular notes or musical phrases.

nograph records most likely entailed—­the actions

To be sure, the forms of the record paintings evoke

he would have taken, the objects he would have

the characteristics of the jazz music to which Dove

engaged, and the sounds he would have heard—­

listened in the manner that Cassidy and others, in-

because to my mind these things bear directly on

cluding Cooper, have described. Sweeping and spi-

the nature of the paintings that resulted, including

raling lines and sizzling color mark the quick and

the four about which I will have the most to say:

deft cadences and the brash energy of the compo-

Rhapsody in Blue, Part I and Part II, I’ll Build a Stair-

sitions in question, while linear couplings call to

way to Paradise, and Orange Grove in California. For

mind the call-­and-­response effects typical of jazz.

Cassidy, jazz offered Dove a specifically American

This includes the zigzag pairs that dance through-

model of abstraction for use in embodying the

out Orange Grove in California, the clock spring and

American spirit and marking a particular national

its painted almost-­ shadow in Rhapsody in Blue,

identity, and I build here on the idea that jazz pro-

Part I, and the staccato slashes welded over wending

vided Dove with a model of expression.31 I also fol-

lines in Rhapsody in Blue, Part II. Quick-­seeming and

low Cooper’s insistence that the formal character-

all-­over brushwork engenders a sense of improvisa-

istics of these jazz-­based works cannot be bound

tion in each of the canvases, with the linear lurches

to a particular musical piece. Dove, Cooper writes,

and spasms of Orange Grove in California pushing

was less interested in illustrating jazz than he was

the closest toward ecstatic musical abandon, some-

in pushing abstraction closer to its limits, by col-

thing Dove probably associated with jazz even if

lapsing the distinction between figure and ground

the recordings were not themselves the products of

(predicting Pollock in the process), an effort modu-

improvisation.

lated by the physical limits of music listening in the

So record music may have provided Dove with

second half of the 1920s and by the fact of painting

a vocabulary by which to register emotional experi-

from listening itself, where concentration on an un­

ence in pictorial form, as scholars have proposed.33

seen surround (volumetric but nonvisible sound)

Yet more than it was an attempt to produce pictures

eclipsed consciousness of the visible world. All this

of music, Dove’s painting from records entailed an

amounted to registration rather than illustration,

exploration of the possibility that painting might

the production of a graphic trace rather than a

itself constitute a sound technology, one like but

denotative contour, which Cooper describes as an

not identical to the plastic disc or the phonograph.

essential, enabling aspect of Dove’s push in these

Dove saw painting as proffering the notational po-

32

tential for rendering recorded music once again as if

I am less concerned with the matter of abstraction,

live, through the processes of translation described

but Cooper’s insight regarding Dove’s painting as a

above, but he also expected more from painting than

form of registration has proved critical to my own

this. I do not mean that for Dove painting was a sup-

pictures toward an ever more radical abstraction.

158

primarily in a search for visual or iconographic

Chapter Three

plement to records constituted by lack, or that Dove

then to the point. A moving point could follow a

wanted to right any perceived wrongs perpetrated

waterfall and dance. We have the scientific proof

34

against music by the recording industry. What I

that the eye sees everything best at one point.”36

suggest here, instead, is that Dove, inspired and in-

Dove’s remarks drew on Kandinsky’s consideration

trigued by the idea that music might be translated

of how musical notation might be translated into

and thus reconfigured in the first place, wished to

a geometric vocabulary in the form of a configu-

know what painting might add to the mix, and

ration of variously sized points, a proposition he

also what painting might tell us about music and

illustrated in his text (fig. 105).37 That Dove paired

listening to music that a record, and music itself,

Kandinsky’s ideas about reducing phenomena to

could not. Put another way, Dove had an inkling

geometric form with a comment on what (accord-

that the experience and understanding of music,

ing to Dove) science had contributed to an under-

and the possibilities for communication, connec-

standing of human visual capacity—­we see best at a

tion, and exchange proffered therein, might be ex-

single point—­in order to elaborate on his character-

panded or otherwise productively transformed if he

ization of the “music things” indicates that he had

painted it, and that only doing so in collaboration

more than the pace of modern life in mind when

with sound technology, which itself rendered music

he created his record paintings. Clearly, perception

anew, would do the trick. For him, then, painting

concerned him as well. That he closed “An Idea” by

from records and the translations executed therein

resisting the notion that a painting consisted only

opened up new possibilities for music and also for

in the reduction of motifs to abstract form suggests

pictorial art. Painting from records, like painting

that he was interested in a kind of translation that

in collaboration with weather and weather science,

reconstituted the motif in full yet altered form: “As

generated for Dove a thorough analysis of music as

the point moves it becomes a line, as the line moves

an operational form and consequently introduced

it becomes a plane, as the plane moves it becomes

new operational potential to the domain of paint-

a solid, as the solid moves, it becomes life and as

ing, instrumentalizing pictures by way of bringing

life moves, it becomes the present.” The first two

them into vital relation with musical sound and,

phrases of this sentence recapitulate Kandinsky,

also, with sound technology.

but the remainder imagines not reduction or dis-

In “An Idea,” the essay that accompanied the

tillation, but generation and plenitude: a form of

1927 exhibition, Dove wrote that “the music things

abstraction that translates, transfigures, and en-

were done to speed the line up to the pace at which

genders rather than whittles away so that a work of

we live to-­day,” one of a very few remarks made over

art’s origins—­the motifs or materials that initiated

the course of his career that seem to indicate that

its creation—­are fully and excessively present, if

his art was at all meant to capture the character-

transposed. “It becomes the present,” Dove wrote.

istics oft attributed to twentieth-­century moder-

The record paintings, I suggest, are precisely this:

nity: “inventiveness, restlessness, speed, change,”

pictorial translations of music, music-­ listening,

as Dove supposedly put it elsewhere. But Torr is

and listening technologies that amounted to a re-

the one who recorded this conversation among

constituted composite of these three things, what I

her, Dove, and Dove’s dear friend the painter Al-

would thus describe as a reimagined recording and

fred Maurer, and above her jottings she wrote “I

registering system, one that strove to “play” music

wrote things as they talked—­don’t know who said

so that the eye could see but also hear, in Dove’s

what.”35 After his comment in “An Idea” about why

words, “everything best.” One might say that paint-

the music things were created and the speeding up

ing music from records, for Dove, made it more real

of their line, Dove began his revision of Kandinsky’s

than real. Neither documentary (a mere record of

1926 Point and Line to Plane: “The line is the result

musical sound) nor mimetic (the reproduced illu-

of reducing dimension from the solid to the plane

sion of musical sound), the record pictures comSound

159

Fig. 105  “Theme 2 translated into points,” in Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, ed. Hilla Rebay, trans. Hilla Rebay and Howard Dearstyne (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1947; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1979), p. 45, fig. 11. Originally published in German in 1926 as Punkt und Linie zu Fläche. Wassily Kandinsky: © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photograph: David Connelly.

bined multiple modes of playing and listening

of monumental procedures (flight) and new points

and registered both the sensory and the material

of view (from the air or encompassing the might

aspects of the sonic so as to constitute a new all-­

of continents and oceans). In creating pictures that

embracing complex of sound, one that through

are at once paintings and music, oil on canvas as

analysis conducted in the act of painting called

well as the agglomerated apparatuses and effects of

forth the lived experience of music, the fulsome,

music making and music listening, Dove re-­created

not pared away, material essence—­the “real”—­of

neither of these things: not painting, not music.

musical sound. “Anybody,” Dove wrote a few years

Rather, he produced something new, a novel expres-

later, in 1929, “should be able to feel a certain state

sive form born of an essential suturing among the

and express it in terms of paint or music . . . to feel

entities, operations, and phenomena that consti-

the power of the ground or sea, and to play or paint

tuted the experience of bodies, pictures, and sound.

it with that in mind, letting spirit hold what you

The prevalence of circle and spiral motifs in the

do together rather than continuous objective form,

music paintings suggests that Dove understood

gaining in tangibility and actuality as the plane leaves

his paintings as analogs to the technology he uti-

38

160

the ground.” Allusions to painting, music making,

lized to paint them, for they register the material

natural forces, ocean waves, and a prospective aerial

conditions of record listening through mimicry

view combine in this statement to suggest a condi-

of the rotational aspects of the phonograph: spin-

tion or entity comprising a network of matter, oper-

ning discs, needles tracking spiral grooves, hands

ations, and sensation—­the stuff of material life—­as

turning cranks, springs winding and unwinding to

well as the wholesale transposition and reconstitu-

make motors run. In Improvision (fig. 104), a spiral

tion, but not dematerialization, of this stuff by way

runs regularly and neatly across and up the canvas’s

Chapter Three

lower right corner, giving way as it ascends to an-

ing, zigzagging, sawtoothing, and cross-­hatching

other spiraling form, this one more ribbonlike in

forms unleashed and cascading up and down at

shape. Similar spiraling forms run up and down

left and right, and also by the spherical forms in

and across the top of I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,

the upper portion of the canvas that appear to have

and a slight spiral form arcs out from the right edge

been generated by a set of orbitally spinning, en-

of Rhapsody in Blue, Part II, with echoes of its twist

circling lines. Dove conceived of the spring and the

emerging across the whole and reverberating writ

spiral as metaphors of time: “The future seems to be

large in the oval shape of the canvas (figs. 103, 101).

gone through by a spiral spring from the past. The

Orange Grove in California brims with circling and

tension of that spring is the important thing,” he

spiraling forms, so much so that the rectangular

wrote in a letter to Stieglitz in 1925.39 This further

and immobile canvas can seem to twist, turn, and

suggests that the spiral forms in these canvases

wriggle in space (fig. 102). Thick, slashing spirals

were intended to evoke constitutive properties of

of black paint at bottom center and across the up-

phonographically played and listened-­to music: its

per half echo delicate twists wedged in the upper

existence and unfolding in time (an aspect of all

right corner and squeezed between swathes of dark

music), but also its successive repeatability and its

blue-­gray at upper left as well as looping lines de-

frequent starts and stops, with this starting and

scending from top center, these calling to mind the

stopping subject to the exigencies and automa-

lines of a musical staff as if whipped by the wind. In

tisms of the machine or the whims of its operator,

both Orange Grove in California and Rhapsody in Blue,

who could drop or lift the needle at will, and thus

Part II, Dove inserted a scaled-­down version of his

not necessarily a function of the natural beginning

concentric circle motif, at the upper edge of Orange

or end of a musical piece.

Grove in California, with blue-­green encircling black,

Through these circle and spiral motifs, Dove

and in the upper right of Rhapsody in Blue, Part II,

established a constitutive connection between

with yellow encircling red encircling black. The

his canvases and the material that initiated their

circular shape and concentric lines of these motifs

creation, his pictorial twists and turns evoking the

evoke, in the space of canvases made from record

spirals and spins and circles of records and record

listening, the spirally grooved records themselves,

listening. Metal does something analogous to this.

and their diminutive stature announces the differ-

Silver metallic paint in Rhapsody in Blue, Part II, I’ll

ence of these canvases from the weather pictures

Build a Stairway to Paradise, and Orange Grove in Cali-

discussed in the previous chapter, with their big-

fornia, and metallic paint and the metal clock spring

ger and bolder concentric circle motifs, brash key-

in Rhapsody in Blue, Part I, establish a connection

notes rather than bit parts, while yet proclaiming

between the world of art and the world of machines

a shared investment in sonic translation, be it the

or, more specifically, between paintings and phono-

sonic conditions of listening to jazz or the globally

graph parts. Dove used metal and metallic paint in

resonating deafening booms, ear-­splitting cracks,

other of his paintings and also in several of his as-

beating rain of a thunderstorm. The and drum-­

semblages, but in the context of the paintings made

clock spring attached to the surface of Rhapsody

from records, metal signifies in a very specific way,

in Blue, Part I (fig. 100) constitutes the most literal

establishing a continuum between the paintings

evocation of the material of record listening—­the

and the thing activated (phonograph apparatus)

spring-­driven motor of the phonograph—­and the

in order to produce the paintings’ referent (music),

fact that Dove has pulled it taut, save for a few coils

such that an equivalency is drawn between the two

toward the bottom edge of the painting, gives one

(canvas and phonograph), a sense of “the same as,”

the impression that it is about to spring, that the

or even “more than,” rather than “an illustration of.”

painting, so to speak, has been wound and is poised

The presence of metal in these pictures also con-

to do its work. Such work here signifies as the spiral-

notes the sonic artifacts produced by the recording Sound

161

and playback processes, those sounds that origi-

along with the phonograph’s metal parts essential

nated from the machinery used therein and that

media within his art.

thus belong to the machine rather than to the mu-

Sherrye Cohn has argued convincingly that

sic itself. In other words, the fact that metal literally

Dove’s practice was in part shaped by his interest

constitutes parts of Dove’s paintings establishes a

in the occult, and in theosophy in particular, and

connection between these works and the machine

that what he took from theosophy was not incom-

and the machine noises that initiated their produc-

patible with the scientific principles on which he

tion, a kinship emblematized by paintings that do

also drew: white light and the aura, inspiration for

not simply show music but, rather, render music in

Dove’s “condition of light,” but also theosophy’s

a state marked and transformed by technology. In

idea that, to paraphrase Cohn, the universe is a

both recording and painting the machine is liter-

continuous medium of energy manifested as vi-

ally in the music, making Dove’s pictures more of a

brations that organize themselves as phenomena,

matter of sound plus sound technology than musi-

including mind and matter, an idea that paralleled

cal sound on its own, what I described above as a re-

the claim of contemporaneous physics that all mat-

configured composite of record listening’s multiple

ter was in constant motion and part of a dynamic,

aspects and the operations and conditions of paint-

electromagnetic continuum, a formulation of the

ing and, consequently, a fashioning of the sonic in

universe as a constantly transforming and all-­

excess of itself. In a 1934 essay entitled “The Form

constituting complex that counted as a precedent

of the Phonograph Record,” Theodor Adorno char-

the De rerum natura of Lucretius. Cohn connects

acterized the record as a brutely material thing, as

what she characterizes as vibratory patterns in

form in and of itself divorced from content: “a black

Dove’s paintings with this theosophical precept.41

pane made of a composite mass . . . a circular label

Without rejecting this interpretation, I would sug-

in the middle . . . at the very center a little hole.” The

gest an alternate way of conceiving the place of

record, he wrote, “is covered with curves, a delicately

vibration in Dove’s thinking and painting. Sound,

scribbled, utterly illegible writing, which here and

music included, originates in vibration, travels in

there forms more plastic figures . . . structured like

the form of waves, and entails minute changes in

a spiral, it ends somewhere at the vicinity of the

local air pressure; the last is caused by the motion of

title label, to which it is sometimes connected by

air molecules displaced by a vibrating object—­the

a lead-­out groove so that the needle can comfort-

source of the sound—­which generates the traveling

40

162

ably finish its trajectory.” Although forming part

waves. When a record is played on a phonograph

of his critique of new modes of receiving music,

like the one Dove owned, mechanical energy (vibra-

including the manner in which these modes evac-

tion) converts into acoustical energy (oscillating

uated substance and nuance from musical sound,

air molecules and consequent sine waves).42 Much

which was in turn part of a larger indictment of

as they register their mechanical, metal-­ parted

commodity culture, Adorno’s emphasis on the ma-

source, Dove’s record paintings diagram these

teriality of the phonograph and its accessories and

displacement and conversion processes, and not

the formalist language with which he describes the

simply by virtue of the fact that in all of them lines

phonograph record brings Dove’s approach to the

assume wavelike forms. The pictures do not do so

phonograph and its accessories further into relief.

exactly or scientifically, or even in a manner that

Adorno perceived as tragic his sense that the poten-

suggests that Dove understood fully the acousti-

tial of the phonograph record lay in its status “as a

cal phenomena I have just described; he probably

thing” to be possessed that so easily submitted to

did not. But his paintings do evoke certain of the

analysis as dumb form. Conversely, Dove embraced

basic operations of sound reproduction, attending

the phonograph record’s objecthood, making its

particularly to the idea of conversion and the phe-

like grooves holes, curves, spirals, and writing-­

nomenon of the displacement of air. Dove’s evo-

Chapter Three

cation of Kandinsky in “An Idea” of course speaks

“conditions of sound,” which he implied were com-

to his interest in conversion: point into line into

ponents of a larger “condition of existence,” and

plane into solid, and the solid into life and the pres-

he hypothesized the form those conditions might

ent. Additionally, his citation in this same essay of

have taken in Cézanne’s art, stressing space and

a phrase used by mariners, “the wind has weight,”

extension, qualities associated with sound.44 The

while discussing the idea of converting the “mon-

hiss and whoosh that Dove would have heard when

umental bulk” of a tree into a representation of its

he played a record on his phonograph, as produced

“force lines,” places his sense of conversion squarely

by the material workings of the machine as well as

within the realm of wind, water, and air, as does

by the movement of air currents through that ma-

his expressed wish, also in this essay, to simplify

chine, surely reminded him of the gusts and blasts

“wind and water and sand” into “color and force

of ocean winds, thus establishing for him a link

lines and substances, just as music has done with

between listening to records and the operations

sound.”43 The phrase “the wind has weight” evokes

and effects of the wind. It seems almost too easy to

the press of a strong gust against a solid form, a

point out that the verb that describes a hand turn-

sensation produced by the force of displaced air

ing a crank, as on a mechanical phonograph, or the

molecules. Dove’s use of the phrase, while not ev-

action that causes a spring to coil—­“wind”—­is a

idence of a full understanding of the physics of

homonym of the noun that describes the weighty

wind, does suggest that he imagined his pictures

blasts of air of which Dove spoke in “An Idea,” and

of music as engaging the same forces and phenom-

that he painted across his body of work. But let it be

ena as did his pictures of weather and the shore.

said, and let me also point out that one could rea-

So the spiraling and wavelike strokes, and also the

sonably draw an analogy—­and I believe Dove prob-

crosshatches and doubling and tripling lines in the

ably did—­between the instruments that Dove reg-

record paintings, all of which evoke the idea of air

ularly used to register displacements of air (changes

displaced in time and space—­one line initiates the

in barometric pressure) and those he used to regis-

movement, the others, as if dominoes, register and

ter and transmit recorded sound, itself a product

track its consequent traverse—­describe not just the

of air molecules in motion: the barometer and the

rotations of the phonograph and the notes of jazz

phonograph, respectively, both of which served to

but also the very air that moves through the pho-

convert or translate something from one form into

nograph machine so as to generate sound. These

another—­that is, weather into numerical data and

marks behave much as do the ribbonlike lines and

grooves on a disc into music, with the first conver-

sweeping spiral forms in paintings such as Sun

sion reducing or distilling a physical phenomenon

Drawing Water and Seagull Motif (Violet and Green)

and the second restoring volume and life.

that plot the motion of the wind and the flight of

This in turn suggests that when Dove painted

birds and also replicate the arching swoops and

from records he explored the possibility of restor-

hatches of shorthand, themselves not unlike a re-

ing a bodily dimension to music, not because he

cord’s linearly incised grooves, the “graphy” side of

believed sound technology deprived music of its

phonograph technology.

essential corporeality but, rather, for the purpose

Once again, circles and waves describe but also

of imagining a notational system or language that

foster interconnection among disparate entities

might register and communicate music’s material

and experiences, serving as both a formal and con-

basis, its origins in the body but also in the appa-

ceptual apparatus for such suturing and also mak-

ratus that made music present for Dove and any-

ing clear that Dove’s “condition of light” encom-

one else who listened to music by way of winding

passed not just color and light but sound as well. In

a crank and spinning plastic discs. In this manner,

a series of undated remarks on Cézanne, Stravinsky,

Dove’s paintings were, again, more like music than

music, and painting, Dove referred to Stravinsky’s

music itself, at least music as imagined by others of Sound

163

his generation (or their present-­day interlocutors),

such an instrumental status for Dove’s pictures. In

as abstract, ethereal, disembodied, or exclusively

1926, Edmund Wilson described an affinity between

45

of the spirit. For him, music was tangible, solid,

Dove’s pictures and the operation of Thomas Wil-

weighty, measurable, and materially and excessively

fred’s color organ, or “Clavilux,” a mechanism de-

present. Painting from records allowed Dove to im-

buted by Wilfred in 1922 that produced elaborate

merse himself in a particular experience of music,

compositions of colored light, sometimes accompa-

and he came away from that experience under-

nied by music, and Edward Alden Jewell made the

standing music to be so much more than sound. In

same connection in 1935.47 In I’ll Build a Stairway to

this way, Dove created a system by which to trans-

Paradise (fig. 103), Dove thickens his silver paint in

late music into a kind of visual language without

two places. To the right of center, the multidirec-

making it visual as such: language that did and did

tional and cube-­like strokes wedged between two

not translate, that transfigured without disfiguring,

cascades of black build up to a layer of impasto dis-

or disembodying, its referent, music, which for him

tinct from the surrounding surface, one that in its

constituted a complex of relations and exchanges

crumpled appearance looks like crushed aluminum

between objects, phenomena, bodies, and beings

foil. Through the middle of the picture, appearing

that might be transferred wholesale to the oper-

to move from top to bottom, pushes an elongated

ations of a work of art, itself a complex of things

silver shape, its front pointed like the tip of a knife,

and acts. How else to explain the clock spring boldly

its heft accentuated by thickly applied pigment set

and gleefully protruding from the surface of Rhap-

into relief by its more thinly laid surroundings. In

sody in Blue, Part I? Or the ubiquitous metal paint

both instances, Dove’s brushwork waxes sculptural

and the moniker “things”? That Dove exhibited the

and in so doing introduces the mass and volume

music paintings with several of his assemblages, in-

of the object world—­ and, specifically, given the

cluding Hand Sewing Machine (fig. 120), a collage on

silver hue, the matter of metal—­into his pictures

a metal ground that features a device powered by

of sound. That he does so in the space of one of

a hand turning a crank (two others on view, Hun-

his most putatively nonobjective, depth-­canceling

tington Harbor I and Huntington Harbor II, both 1926,

paintings makes his point about materiality all the

boast metal supports), also makes clear that, in cre-

more plain.

ating a dialogue in Stieglitz’s gallery space among

We know from the diaries that music listening

like works (the assemblages) and works object-­

was a part of Dove’s everyday life, and that this lis-

made through the use of a thing (the phonograph),

tening often took place in the company of family

Dove wished to highlight the essential connection

or friends. Historians of sound technology have

between the material world and pictorial art, and in

described the manner in which the idea of the

addition to this that he wished to evoke the promis-

audience was reconfigured by new modes of mu-

cuously material experience of listening compelled

sic consumption, and how with the phonograph

46

164

by a sound technology like the record player. And

in particular, performance became, in one schol-

of course it was this materiality that had in the

ar’s words, a “mere adjunct to musical experience.”

first place inspired the idea, formulated by Dove

Newly material and transportable in the form of

in the act of painting from records, that a paint-

a disc, thus unmoored from a particular time and

ing itself might be configured by way of a transla-

place, music could migrate from one site to another

tion and transfer of properties to be itself a kind of

and, when played, would unfold apart from the bod-

technology, an instrument alongside other instru-

ies and the instruments that generated it.48 But of

ments, among them barometers, cameras, and pho-

course other bodies and devices filled the void, such

nographs. At least two critics drew a direct com-

that what resulted was not so much music robbed

parison between Dove’s paintings and an apparatus

of its corporeal aspect but, rather, a new physical-

that produced “music for the eye,” suggesting just

ity or materiality, one constituted by the listener or

Chapter Three

listeners and the listening machine, and also by the

and linking these various components into a sonic

reanimation, through said machine, of the limbs

continuum or system. Prescient, then, was Torr’s

and lungs that generated the sound at its origin.

characterization of Dove as painting “with almost

Dove, I believe, found the idea of a simultaneous

everything in sight” as he worked on one of the

continuum of bodies, machines, and sounds across

Rhapsody in Blue pictures while listening to Ger-

time and space compelling because it suggested a

shwin.50 As such, painting from records entailed

novel form of human interchange (his interest in

calling into being, in concentrated pictorial form,

theosophy would have primed him for this), and

novel modes of making contact and communicat-

perhaps he imagined that the dialogue among his

ing among people but also across media and mate-

paintings and his assemblages in the 1927 exhibi-

rial. Painting from records thus offered an idea of

tion approximated such a connectivity, a new form

the operational modes, instrumental capacities,

or mode of music played “live,” and also that the

and phenomenal outcomes—­ those encompassed

network of relations he established among him-

by the phonograph as a technology, from a start in

self and his wife and his friends by way of music

a recording studio to a finish in a listener’s ear, or

listening over the course of days and months did

a painter’s brush—­apposite to the task of rewiring

the same. It is worth emphasizing here that Dove

and reconfiguring a much larger complex, that of

bought records, but as the diaries make clear he also

human existence.

received many as gifts, with the phonograph disc

This might mean that Dove’s paintings were

thus rendered a literal medium of transfer and ex-

illustrations, after all. As Cooper has noted, Dove

change; he also listened to the records with Torr and

used the word “illustration” to describe at least

with friends, and sometimes Dove and Torr painted

one of the record pictures, writing to Stieglitz in

together as the records played. In a discussion of

October 1926 of the reaction on the part of two of

telephony, Steven Connor has described how the

his acquaintances to his work: “They have waxed

illusion of bodily presence persisted for those who

enthusiastic over a ‘thing’ of mine being done from

used this new technology, through, he writes, “the

Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ not as yet completed,

sense that the voice that arrived at the other end

but I feel it will make people see that the so-­called

of the line had not been transported so much as

‘abstractions’ are not abstract at all. R. said that in

stretched out,” and my understanding of how Dove

describing it to some people who had heard the

imagined the experience of listening to records

music, he found that they understood this even

49

played on a phonograph hews closely to this. It

though they had objected to my other ‘things.’ It

is possible, then, that in the record paintings Dove

is an illustration.”51 This final phrase could mean

meant to model a form of intersubjectivity that

any number of things, including that Dove did

transcended time and space and also one that abol-

in fact mean in his music paintings to illustrate

ished barriers between the animate and inanimate,

straightforwardly the music to which he listened

between sentient beings and machines. The sonic

or, as Cooper suggests, that Dove called the most

complex instituted by the record pictures through

radically abstract of his canvases illustrations as a

multiply translating and thus reconstituting both

way to explain their nonobjectivity and thus soften

music and painting inferred radical intersubjectiv-

their blow.52 It is also possible that Dove meant

ity as such. The novel modes of music production

to evoke another sense of “illustration,” one even

and transmission that characterized phonography

more literal than what Cooper envisions. Dove

demanded collaboration and exchange among mul­

tended to use the term disparagingly, dismissing

tiple entities and phenomenal forms, ­ gathering

the work of Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood

into a single, collective experience of listening mul-

as “huge colored illustrations” and indicating his

tiple bodies collaborating with multiple machines,

preference for having his tooth drilled at the den-

the through-­line of transmuting music gathering

tist over looking at a Benton self-­portrait. He beSound

165

littled the mural format in similar terms: “There

his pictures translated sound but also sound tech-

seems to be an epidemic of wall trouble now. Think

nology into pictorial and material form and, in so

I should enjoy a floor better covered with glass.

doing, rendered both anew. The paintings did so

Most of these wall frescoes look like huge water-

by collapsing barriers between opposed terms—­

53

color illustrations.” When Dove discussed in his

live / recorded, embodied / disembodied, visual / 

draft of a letter to Samuel Kootz the idea of paint-

material, human / machine, sound / graphic mark—­

ing Shakespeare, he made clear that there existed

so as to reconstitute each in excess of its original

a distinction between such an undertaking and

state, thereby intimating a new relational, inter-

merely “illustrating his works.”54 But it is import-

subjective mode and, through the pictures them-

ant to remember that Dove himself worked as an

selves, positing the vocabulary to be used therein.

illustrator for many years, continued to take on illustration commissions through 1930, and was at work on commissioned drawings in the fall and winter of 1926, the period during which he initi55

Before he made paintings while listening to records,

ated his series of music paintings. Most scholarly

Dove created several pictures related to music, in-

accounts insist on Dove’s resentment of such work,

cluding Music (1913) and Sentimental Music (ca. 1913)

but in 1926 he reported that he had “become a tri-

(fig. 106).58 An even earlier work, Movement No. I

fle reconciled with my old work of illustrating” and

(1911) (fig. 107), might also belong with this group,

believed that his “experiments at this modernistic

which I designate his music paintings to distin-

painting of mine” had improved his skill as an illus-

guish them from the record pictures. Dove revived

trator.56 This suggests that by the late 1920s Dove

this early effort two years after he completed the

imagined his painting and his illustration work to

record pictures, in 1929, with Primitive Jazz (location

be in some manner related, rather than opposed,

unknown), and again in what wound up being the

and also that for him, in 1926, the year he called

final years of his career, with a canvas entitled Prim-

his Gershwin painting an “illustration,” the term

itive Music (1944) (fig. 108).59

may have designated a middle ground between his

166

Painting Music

The music-­based works created prior to 1926–­

two pursuits, one encompassing an attention to the

1927 might be seen as more straightforward at-

relationship between words and images as necessi-

tempts (at least for Dove) than the record pictures

tated by his illustration work and that at the same

to render in visual terms the effects and experience

time bore in mind the conclusions drawn by his

of specific musical sounds or types. In Sentimental

experiments with an abstract pictorial vocabulary

Music, for example, layers of white, rose, gray, and

in his art. “Illustration,” then, when used in refer-

gray-­blue pastel form a thick, plush surface that

ence to the record paintings, evoked not only depic-

calls to mind the feel of velvet and is set into mo-

tion but translation, the operation necessitated by

tion by a series of rounded and billowing forms

rendering the words of a magazine story in visual

and dramatically surging lines, including two that

form and constitutive of the process of painting

shoot skyward, as if propelled by rockets, evoking a

abstractly from record listening, including all the

heightened emotional state. Dove moved his pas-

translating operations that unfolded within that

tel stick in multiple directions as he laid his color

process. In this sense, then, Dove’s paintings from

down so that the entire surface lurches and seethes,

records did after a fashion illustrate their source.

thereby registering the motion of his hand as well

Dove listened while he painted, but he also looked

as the swells, plateaus, and crescendos of an expres-

up—­in so doing he would have been given to “see”

sive and affecting musical piece. Thick black lines

the sound he was painting, not as sound but in the

that skim across and bubble through the compo-

form of the phonograph apparatus sitting near him

sition foreshadow the spirals and linear sweeps of

and with which he had to interact.57 In this way,

the later record paintings, while the center cylin-

Chapter Three

Fig. 106  Above, Arthur G. Dove, Sentimental Music, ca. 1913, pastel on paperboard, 215⁄8 × 18 in. (54.9 × 45.7 cm), recto: Landscape with House and Barn, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949, 49.70.77a, b. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. Fig. 107  Right, Arthur G. Dove, Movement No. I, 1911, pastel on canvas, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Gift of Ferdinand Howald, 1931.166.

Fig. 108  Arthur G. Dove, Primitive Music, 1944, gouache on canvas, 18 × 24 in. (45.72 × 60.96 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1944. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

der forecasts the skyward-­bent liquid chutes of Sun

The pastel Team of Horses (1911 or 1912) (fig. 68), for

Drawing Water. The twist and turn-­back at the base

instance, shares spinning discs and sawtooth arcs

of one of the rocket-­propelled lines predicts analo-

with Chinese Music, and the up-­thrusting chimney-­

gous shimmies and shifts in the later pictures, and

like shapes and fanning rectangular shards of Nature

perhaps also evokes the sharp intake of breath of

Symbolized No. 1 (Roofs) (1911–­1912) foreshadow those

a singer pausing to inhale between the end of one

in the later work. William Innes Homer included

note and the beginning of another. One comes away

Movement No. I in “The Ten Commandments” group,

from Sentimental Music thinking of inner works or,

suggesting a concrete link between this suite of

even, innards. The coiling tube-­forms at upper right

pastels and a painting like Chinese Music.60 Yet Chi-

and the half-­round, half-­pointed form at left, with a

nese Music is noisy in a way that the pastels are not.

saggy paunch at its base and a sharp triangle at its

The pastels move and jostle and thrust and spin,

apex, evoke human organs and organ systems while

but they do so quietly, as if film without sound.

the pumping, thrumming, and bellowing shapes of

Even Movement No. I—­with its whisper-­soft pastel

the painting collectively call to mind musical in-

surface, its planes of deeply saturated blue gently

struments at work: the throaty blasts of horns, the

rotating in space and across smooth fields of gray

sharp hum of wind instruments, and the whining

and gray-­brown, and its slow motion starburst ef-

vibrations of strings, or perhaps even the internal

fect, evocative of a galaxy coming into being—­can

machinery that produces the plonks of a piano or

seem mute despite the apparent clatter of its forms.

the bellows of a pipe organ.

This suggests that the “movement” of the title re-

Chinese Music (1923) (fig. 109), with its quasi-­

168

fers as much to the idea of motion as it does to

Cubistic fragmentation and multiplication of

music or sound. Chinese Music, on the other hand,

sharp-­edged geometric forms, seems closer in spirit

hums, clangs, and roars. Its shapes, along with lib-

to the pastels that make up the series “The Ten Com-

erally applied metallic silver paint at right, call to

mandments” than it does to the record pictures or,

mind buzz saws, turbines, and pistons—­machine

for that matter, than it does to Sentimental Music.

or factory noise—­in addition to musical notes or

Chapter Three

Fig. 109  Arthur G. Dove, Chinese Music, 1923, oil and metallic paint on panel, 2111⁄16 × 181⁄8 in. (55.1 × 46 cm), Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949, 1949-­ 18-­2.

sounds. The rising wave or crescendo of semicircles

There are multiple points of connection, for-

at right, which culminates in the sharp points of a

mal as well as conceptual, despite the first-­glance

sawtooth blade, evokes music, as do the multiplying

radical difference between the painting and the

and repeating rectangular shapes that seem to push

ten photographs in the “Music” series. Both boast

up from the bottom edge of the canvas one after the

a shared slicing of a circular or cresting form across

other. These can seem like notes pressed out of an

the foreground space: a silhouetted hill in many of

instrument or a throat by the exhalation of breath,

Stieglitz’s images, and in the Dove, a curving saw-

or perhaps the depress of piano keys and the conse-

tooth blade, the shading into shadowy black at the

quent strike and rebound of hammers hitting steel

tip of each tooth perhaps referencing the blacked-­

strings. But such forms also call to mind factory

out landscapes in the photographs. The circles that

buildings or smokestacks at night, the burnt red at

float across the left half of Chinese Music may allude

the base of each evoking the blaze and heat of man-

to the partially obscured white-­hot suns, mere dots

ufacturing within and the circular forms that drift

within vast expanses of sky, in some of Stieglitz’s

across the canvas’s left half denoting industry’s of-

pictures. The resemblance of Dove’s circles to the

fal, smoke or ash channeled into the atmosphere by

sunspots that radiate throughout Georgia O’Keef-

61

a chimney flue.

fe’s The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y. (1926) also sug-

It has been suggested that Chinese Music was in-

gests that Dove had the sun and its associated op-

spired by a visit Dove made to a Chinese restaurant

tical phenomena in mind when he created Chinese

with Rebecca and Paul Strand in October 1923, but

Music.

even if this were the case, one cannot know just

Rosalind Krauss has described the particular

what Dove meant by the phrase “Chinese music”

mode of abstraction on offer in the cloud photo-

and what about such music struck him with the

graphs as a function of cutting or cropping by

desire to give it visual form. As Cassidy has noted,

which a natural sign—­ the sky—­ is rendered un-

other artists and writers of the period alluded to

natural by virtue of excerpting and dislocation,

Chinese, or “Oriental,” cultural forms, and Dove’s

producing disorientation rather than recognition

62

painting surely fits within this broader strain. It

on the viewer’s part.65 I resist drawing a parallel

is also likely that Dove’s turn, or return, to a musi-

between such “cutting” and the implied action of

cal subject in 1923 was inspired by Stieglitz’s exhi-

the sawtooth blades in Chinese Music and other of

bition that year, the one that featured “Music—­A

Dove’s works, including Team of Horses and also

Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs,” the series

Thunderstorm (1921), and vestiges of which appear

he had begun in 1922 at his Lake George home (fig.

in the paintings made from records and also those

63

170

46). Chinese Music does not initially appear as if

from radio, including Swing Music (Louis Armstrong)

inspired by the cloud photographs, so different

(1938) (figs. 71, 114). But I do insist that what Krauss

in appearance is it from those works. But because

characterizes as the chief operation of Stieglitz’s

Dove held these photographs and the Equivalents in

photographs—­excerpting or, as she puts it, “punch-

such high esteem, he may well have seen in them

ing” out a segment from a continuous field—­abides

something he might like to try.64 Given the impact

in Dove’s Chinese Music as well. In this work, two

of the cloud photographs on Dove in 1942, when

sawtooth blades signal the cut of each canvas edge

he purchased one after hoping “for some years” to

through geometric shapes that begin or end beyond

do so, one can infer that they made their initial

the frame, suggesting the unfolding of musical or

mark when early examples were exhibited in 1923,

industrial sound across time and space while resist-

prompting him to pair abstraction and music in a

ing any attempt to match form or color to a partic-

manner comparable but not identical to Stieglitz’s

ular musical note or phrase, a resistance that might

in the “Music” suite, the result being a painting like

explain the recalcitrance of the work’s title, which

Chinese Music.

precludes any iconographic impulse.

Chapter Three

And I would also suggest that it was with a

All paintings have genealogies, and many art-

work like Chinese Music that Dove began to sense

ists’ bodies of work are intratextual, but I like to

a connection between music and the weather, one

think that the connections among Dove’s early mu-

that set the stage for his paintings from records

sic pictures, his paintings from records, his paint-

three years down the road. Golden Storm (fig. 73)

ings of the weather and the shore, and Stieglitz’s

provides a kind of missing link: between the early

photographs of clouds are something more than the

music pictures and the record paintings, but also

usual artistic borrowing from this or that source,

between the early works and Dove’s weather paint-

from the art of others or from one’s own production.

ings of the 1930s and 1940s, including Sun Drawing

My sense is that somehow this intertextuality, for

Water and Rain or Snow. Made two years after Chi-

Dove, was yet another model of the intersubjectiv-

nese Music, in 1925, Golden Storm translates the geo-

ity in which he was invested, one that stood along-

metric and industrial forms of the earlier picture

side the model that technology-­aided music listen-

into a natural setting. The metallic paint, the steely,

ing held forth, and that, by way of the sawtooth

rough, even rusty feel of the surface, and the fore-

form, forged a vocabulary or language of its own,

ground sawtooth blade of Chinese Music carry over

with this particular motif circulating among his

into the storm scene, establishing a direct connec-

works, assemblages included, in a manner similar

tion between the two works, while the blackened

to the ubiquitous concentric circle and waveforms,

hill-­like forms in the bottommost register of Golden

as if shared data or a communal voice. The zigzag

Storm pay homage to their kin in Stieglitz’s cloud

edge that defines the point of transition between

photographs, from which they seem directly trans-

a yellow triangle at center and a darker yellow strip

posed. In Golden Storm, the sawtooth motif has

to its right in Dove’s final music painting, Primitive

transfigured from an emblem of sound or slicing

Music (fig. 108), constitutes yet another transpo-

into a rendering of waves and wind beating against

sition of the sawtooth motif, but stands also as a

a shore. One cannot know whether Dove made the

hearkening back to the spiral forms of the paint-

connection between sonic waves and those made

ings made from records. Like the cloud arc in Sun

of water or air prior to making Golden Storm in 1925,

Drawing Water, then, it bridges the distance across

or if this work’s dialog with Chinese Music suggested

these various works, putting them in conversation

the connection after the fact, but the link persisted,

across time and space, making them buzz with the

reappearing in the record pictures in the manner

sound of wind, water, factories, and jazz, but also

I have already described: where doubling, tripling,

with the chatter and hum of shared speech. In late

spiraling, and cross-­hatching lines posit an analogy

August of 1936, Dove wrote to Torr, who was visiting

between the “breathing” of phonography and the

her mother in Hartford, Connecticut. In his letter

operations and effects of the wind, with one result

he described in detail a cyclone that had hit town

being the twinning or analogizing of the phono-

in the wee hours on a Sunday morning, enclosing a

graph and barometry. Sun Drawing Water confirms

newspaper clipping, “Some of ­Geneva’s Shade Trees

this connection in the subtlest of manners, by way

Laid Low in Sunday’s Storm,” that featured pho-

of the cloud or vapor mass at left, part of which

tographs of the damage caused by the storm. “It

pulls away from that mass and arcs elegantly into a

blew the southwest column off the front porch,” he

wavelike form, its tip pressing pointedly toward the

wrote. “It picked all our harvest apples which I have

left, thus calling to mind the sawtooth forms of Chi-

gathered. And the yard is full of sticks and horse

nese Music and Golden Storm, in Sun Drawing Water a

chestnuts and crabapples. It wasn’t dark a second.

misty vestige of those sawtooth motifs that origi-

One right after another. This window here by the

nated in Dove’s thinking in the early 1920s about

desk is dark with the leaves plastered flat against

intersections and exchanges among sound, music,

it. Quite exciting. Hope it didn’t hit you.”66 The

wind, and waves.

“O” that begins the sentence “One right after anSound

171

Fig. 110  Page 2 of an Arthur Garfield Dove letter to Helen Torr Dove, Aug. 23, 1936. Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2:1:32, image #22.

172

other” loops downward to connect to the “n” that

ship’s logs, “ideas,” shorthand, and notes). The re-

follows it, but also upward, where it breaks out of

sult: painting, music listening, weather watching,

letter mode and streaks into a rightward-­leaning

and language-­based communication among family

sawtooth squiggle (fig. 110). Here, Dove employs the

and friends combine in a single epistolary gesture.

sawtooth motif to represent a weather condition—­

It is worth noting that this coalescence occurs in

cyclone winds—­further cementing the connection

the context of an operation—­ correspondence—­

I have been making between this motif and weather

that is by nature a medium or mechanism of in-

effects, the wind in particular. But he also renders

tersubjectivity, one that involves the transfer and

the sawtooth form coextensive with a letter of the

exchange of matter and states of thought between

alphabet, which in his note to Torr forms part of

parties across distances over time. Here, then, with

a word, recalling the graphic hybrids, “Sweets” and

this sawtooth squiggle, Dove supplies an emblem

“see,” that he produced in other letters to Torr, and

of what he wished for his paintings to achieve, or at

bringing to mind his wordplay more generally. Here,

least to imagine as possible: the construction and

then, the sawtooth motif is more than metaphori-

animation of an all-­encompassing system of inter-

cally or analogously a vocabulary or language: it is

connection and exchange among all things across

literally part of a word, and thus announces itself

all space, one that took its cue from the world as

as a kind of speech or tongue, hybrid in that it com-

system but then one-­upped that world, generating

municates meaning both verbally and visually, for it

unprecedented forms of relation and interchange—­

is simultaneously letter and pictorial sign, and also

the transfer of properties and states of being

because it conjoins Dove’s pictorial projects with

between music and weather, say, or between human

his constant writing work (letters, but also diaries,

and machine.67

Chapter Three

Fig. 111  Arthur G. Dove, The Moon Was Laughing at Me, 1937, wax emulsion on canvas, 6¼ × 8¼ in. (15.875 × 20.955 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Bequest of Elmira Bier, 1976. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

Radio Pictures

52), also originated with a popular tune (of the same

If music listening and a shared sawtooth vocabu-

name), with music and lyrics by Lou Handman and

lary constituted models of communication and in-

Walter Hirsch; multiple artists recorded the song

tersubjectivity for Dove, then radio listening surely

in 1936, including Bing Crosby, whose version was a

constituted another. Dove based at least two paint-

radio hit.68 Dove wrote in his diary on December 2,

ings on songs he heard on the radio. One, The Moon

1936, that he “did small ‘Moon is Laughing at Me,’”

Was Laughing at Me (1937) (fig. 111), was inspired by

and in several entries in February 1937, Torr used

the popular song “The Moon Is Grinning at Me,”

the phrase “From the Radio” to describe a painting

which had been recorded in 1936 by Ben Pollack and

on which Dove was at work, treating the phrase in

His Orchestra and also by the Mills Blue Rhythm

three of four of the entries as an actual title; on Feb-

Band. Dove’s slight alteration of the title reflects

ruary 14, she noted that “From the Radio” was based

the theme of the song: a man spurned by the object

on a “song with moon in it.”69 Both paintings were

of his affection whose bad luck moves the moon to

exhibited in 1937 in Dove’s annual show at Stieg-

mock him. The other, Me and the Moon (1937) (fig.

litz’s An American Place; in the checklist to the Sound

173

exhibition, the titles of the two pictures are given

vice to which one passively listened, reflected radio’s

in quotation marks while the other titles are not,

reception and use at the time. Dove approached the

indicating that Dove wished to make a direct con-

phonograph in terms of its connecting capacities,

nection between his works and the musical pieces

essential to and embodied by the technology but

70

from which they derived. The radio paintings, al-

implicit within it rather than explicitly its func-

though of course closely related to the record pic-

tion. Radio, on the other hand, wore its connectiv-

tures, warrant their own discussion because they

ity on its sleeve, understood from its inception and

originated in a sound technology not identical to

invention as a device for use in facilitating multi-

the phonograph and, also, because the music that

directional communication and connection among

gave rise to them was not strictly instrumental, as

multiple parties. As one historian has written, radio

were the Victor recordings of George Gershwin and

participated along with the phonograph and tele-

Irving Berlin, for it featured the human voice.

phony in a “revolution” in the aural environment,

It is clear from a series of letters that Dove wrote

one that precipitated a “major perceptual and cog-

to Torr in 1936, during her extended visit with her

nitive shift” in the United States and changed the

mother in Connecticut, that he was an avid radio

nature of people’s relationship to sound. Radio in

listener. In the letters, he described when he lis-

particular fostered a new concept and form of com-

tened to the radio and what he heard: popular and

munity, an imagined one engendered by the phe-

classical music (Bach was a favorite) but also plays,

nomenon of large numbers of people in disparate

political speeches, commentary, news items, and (of

locations tuning into and partaking in the same set

71

course) weather reports. Dove’s correspondence

of broadcast sounds; the word “broadcast” itself sig-

during this time makes clear that his interest in ra-

naled a shift in thinking: from wireless technology

dio was in part inspired by the arrival of one “Mr.

as a matter of communicating between two parties

Thomas” to the Dove Block, a commercial building

to imagining this technology as a form of mass

owned by the Dove family in Geneva to which Dove

transmission and communication.74 In a 1922 essay

and Torr moved in 1937, having previously resided at

entitled “Singing to Tens of Thousands,” a performer

the family home nearby; they transformed a former

recalled that, ahead of his first radio broadcast, he

roller-­skating rink on the third floor of the Dove

imagined “a life-­size map of the United States, and

72

Block into a studio and living space. Mr. Thomas

in every town, every hamlet, every crossroads, there

rented space in the building for his radio station.

was nothing but ears” waiting to tune into his voice.75

Dove called him a “radio wiz.” in an August 30

In Radio: An Art of Sound (1936), the German-­born

letter to Torr—­he “knows codes etc. and can reel

psychologist Rudolf Arnheim undertook to explore

them off,” Dove said—­and suggested that he and

the nature of radio as a medium, and his character-

Torr use radio as a means to communicate during

ization of the temporal, spatial, psychological, and

her absence, providing an example of how such an

sociopolitical transformations wrought by the new

exchange might transpire on the air: “P.S. If you

technology parallels that of the 1922 performer and

would like to hear me over the radio, I’ll find out his

also accords with Dove’s sense of the sonic within

station letters ‘W-­H-­O-­Q (or something) DOVE’S

his pictorial project. Arnheim examined the new

HALL Geneva—­Graham McDove speaking.’ Let you

aural capacities rendered by wireless transmission

know when I’m on the air and you can tune in.” In a

as well as its social effects, and he described ra-

letter the next day, Dove reiterated this idea, writ-

dio as a potentially global medium or macrocosm

ing to Torr that Mr. Thomas “did some broadcasting

that refashioned perceptions of reality by defying

for me. You could have heard it about 9 o’clock on

the boundaries of geography, time, and ontology.

the shortwavelength.”

73

That Dove understood radio as a medium of communication and exchange, and not simply a de174

Chapter Three

With radio, a new world was created, and previously namely, music and matter—­ distinct entities—­ exchanged properties: “so music entered the mate-

rial world, the world enveloped itself in music . . .

proposition continued what appears to have been

what hitherto had only been thought or described

a running story line between Dove and his wife

now appeared materialised, as a corporeal actual-

about a “ghost” or “ghost noise” in their home, one

76

ity.” As the scholar Jeffrey Sconce has made clear,

described in their letters as having taken up resi-

by the 1930s radio engendered a novel iteration of

dence in their telephone or as living in their cel-

perceived connectivity, one that involved a sense

lar and making itself known by “tunking.” In one

of flow and simultaneity among multiple entities:

letter, Dove explained to Torr that the ghost tunks

among the electromagnetic spectrum (of which ra-

translated as “When is Reds coming home?” before

dio waves are a portion), the electricity that powered

inquiring if she would like him to buy her a radio.80

the radio medium, the information transmitted by

Dove also associated the inventions of the radio afi-

this medium, and the listener-­recipients of this in-

cionado Mr. Thomas with extranatural or enchanted

77

formation. Radio thus constituted a technology of

capabilities. “He is an electrical wizard,” Dove wrote.

communication that produced the conditions for a

“Has all that sign stuff that turns on when anyone

new intersubjectivity, one that comprised connec-

comes near it. Vaudeville, specialties, etc.”81 Dove’s

tions across time and space and between the ani-

wonder in this letter at the radioman’s ingenious

mate and the inanimate brought about by way of

creations referred to apparatuses like the one that

a series of translations among forces, matter, and entities, including the translation of unseen and impalpable wave frequencies into audible sound that could be registered materially as a graphic trace. What is more, radio at its inception and into the 1930s was commonly associated with the occult, as was wireless telegraphy, of a piece with invisible forces and entities and unfathomable realms. Tuning into the radio in Dove’s day was thus a matter of joining a widespread network of many parts but also a potential means for making contact with the denizens of unknown and unseeable worlds, and radio broadcasts themselves were likened to the telepathic transmission of consciousness or thought. This, along with the fact that it was wireless—­sound generated out of thin air, as if by magic—­made radio amenable to imaginings of unprecedented and/ or superhuman modes of contact and interchange.78 Dove clearly considered radio in these terms for, in addition to proposing it as a form of communication between him and his wife, he often drew associations between radio and various forms of occult communication, including telepathy. Referring to the many letters they had exchanged during Torr’s absence, Dove suggested an alternative: “I could talk with you on radio from block [the Dove Block] if you have short wave length. W8XKI. . . . We would have to have a date beforehand. Our hour on the air. Maybe we could have our own telepathy?”79 This

Fig. 112  Page 2 of an Arthur Garfield Dove letter to Helen Torr Dove, Sept. 26, 1936. Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2:1:36, image #28.

Sound

175

Mr. Thomas built in the Dove Block’s skating rink,

on “tunking,” magic eyes, and mental telepathy at-

which Dove labeled “a photo cell thing” in another

test. Dove’s son, William, reported that his father

letter to Torr, providing her with a sketch to illus-

“believed that he had certain powers,” and Dove

trate the apparatus (fig. 112). What the apparatus

himself made note of his telepathic experiences.84

entailed exactly is not fully clear, but Dove wrote

When he spoke directly of occult operations such

that when a person crossed between two boxes,

as telepathy, Dove often associated them with ra-

shown in the sketch with a dotted line between

dio broadcast technology, likening the mind or

them, pieces of ground glass lit up, followed by

thought to radio sound or transmission and the

the ringing of a bell and then a radio commencing

body to the radio apparatus that did the transmit-

to play. If the boxes were photoelectric cells, as is

ting. Cohn has identified several possible sources

likely, the shadow of a body passing between them

for Dove’s ideas, including Upton Sinclair’s book

would have triggered an electrical impulse that

on paranormal perception and communication,

caused the lights to flash and the radio to turn on.

Mental Radio (1930), which featured a short pref-

Dove noted in his letter that one also sees a “magic

ace by Albert Einstein, in which Sinclair analyzes

eye” when the line between the cells is crossed.

visually based experiments involving drawings and

This could refer to another illuminated component

compares telepathy to radio broadcasting. What-

of the apparatus or, more probably, to the idea that

ever the source—­and Sinclair is a likely one—­Dove

the photoelectric cells “saw” a person pass and re-

considered paranormal communication and radio

sponded by triggering light and sound effects. Ei-

to be not just analogous in their operations but in-

ther way, Mr. Thomas’s ensemble both amused and

terrelated phenomena. In a document titled “Sug-

impressed Dove with its ability to produce effects

gested Interview,” from his miscellaneous writings,

absent any apparent human intervention, and he

Dove hypothesized the following exchange: “What

described the implied connection between the two

do you think of the mystics? Mysticism is like radio

cells in terms of a waveform traveling through the

and the mind and body are the instruments.”85 Dove

air. “The things are on tables,” he wrote, “so you just

used the term “instrument,” as did both scientists

walk between them and there is hell to pay. Some

and occultists, to refer to a device or entity that

82

Dove’s description of a light ray that

received signals or messages and also transmitted

turns on lights and makes a radio play, as if out of

them to other devices or entities. He employed the

thin air, taps into connections made at the time

term and related turns of phrase to describe both

between technologies such as telegraphy and radio

machines and humans, putting devices such as

and the supernatural, aligning in his thinking the

barometers and phonographs alongside telepaths

83

technology of radio with the wondrous or magical.

and other preternaturally insightful individuals

Later in the photocell letter, Dove noted how much

in his formulation of exquisitely sensing entities.

he missed Torr and affectionately cautioned her to

In this he may have been inspired by Paul Strand,

watch out for his “competition” in Hartford. “Don’t

who employed the term “instrument” to refer to the

let anyone cross our light ray,” he wrote, positing

preternatural capacities of the camera in a privately

their connection in terms of the photocell-­radio ap-

published tribute to Stieglitz, a copy of which he

paratus and its magic-­seeming capacities.

sent to Dove.86 In a letter to Stieglitz, Dove wrote

light ray.”

176

Although not seriously involved or deeply in-

that the photographer had “a very strong sending

vested in occult circles and practices, yet prone to

outfit,” and in another he recounted with no small

using occult vocabulary metaphorically (in his ex-

amount of humor his first attempt at using a tractor

pressions of affection for Torr, for example), Dove

on the Geneva farm to plow a barley field, saying “I

was without a doubt attentive to certain of the

do not believe any human instrument can give out

ideas explored therein, as Cohn has aptly demon-

its best when its ass is being shaken off a tractor.”87

strated and to which his aforementioned remarks

Both statements echo the remarks Dove made in

Chapter Three

his letter to Elizabeth McCausland regarding his

of the transmitted sound would come: “How do

search for a fundamental motif, for a flexible and

you feel about a person when you’re talking over

rhythmic “formation” rather than blandly repeated

the phone? If you know them, or if you don’t know

geometric shapes. With such a formation he would

them, do you get something, do you put that into

release into space ideas “so that those with sensitive

words of your own, from what they say, or from

instruments” might access his thoughts, the whole

what you think? Or if it were music over the radio,

process eventually establishing itself as “an auto-

have you ever tried to think how it would look?”91

matic force.”88 Elsewhere Dove drew a direct analogy

Here, Dove places equal emphasis on the how as

between telepathic minds and modern machines,

well as the what of transmission, considering what

evoking a description of sound technology preva-

transmitted sound might look like as well as the

lent at the time: as a medium that transcended time

means by which such an image would be generated

and space, gathering past, present, and future, as

in the act of communication or broadcast.

did a weather forecast, into a single entity or expe-

Given that Dove understood radio as a means

rience. “Modern instruments,” he wrote, “are finally

of communication and exchange and associated

getting around to what those fine old gentleman

it with occult transmission, and that this under-

of the East could do a thousand years ago. . . . Their

standing was accompanied by his use of radio as a

most sensitive individuals could do things a thou-

stimulus to creative production, one guesses that

sand years ago that our modern world is all stirred

the paintings that resulted from radio listening

up inventing instruments to do. We think it re-

constituted more than visual renderings of the

markable to hear what is now happening at a dis-

moods and images conjured by the music he heard.

tance with our ear phones clamped to our heads,

The Moon Was Laughing at Me and Me and the Moon

and many of these fine old individuals in the east-

did register what Dove heard, of course, just as the

ern countries thought nothing of doing the same

paintings made from records did. But these works

thing in the present, past or future. They seem to

also modeled the idea of a network of relations

have eliminated time.” That Dove associated such

that embodied newly imagined forms of commu-

mental gifts with both radio and the act of painting

nication and intersubjectivity, with telepathy—­the

is clear from the following undated remarks: “The

transmission of thoughts and information in a

human being is probably born with a far finer radio

manner that transcends time, space, and the lim-

outfit than he ever invents for himself afterward.

its of technology and human physiology—­as well

More people who have this gift are appearing every

as radio broadcast joining weather and weather

day. This so-­called sixth sense is very closely con-

science as exemplars.

nected with what is being done by the moderns in

The radio paintings diverge significantly in

painting, literature and music. They may not admit

style and overall feel from the paintings made from

it but it is.”89

records. Although they evoke the landscape format

Radio without a doubt inspired Dove to paint.

by way of proffering what might be read as com-

He wrote to Torr on September 28 that he had

binations of earth, sky, moon, and stars (Cassidy

“heard some really good music on Joe’s radio yester-

has aptly called them “pseudo-­landscapes”), they

day noon. It started me on abstractions again. My

appear flatter and more surface oriented than the

table shook so I didn’t dare paint. So did water-­color

record pictures, for there exists little variegation

abst. in my lap.” Dove’s diary entry for the previous

among their formal components, save for obvious

day confirms this: “Worked on abstractions in water

differences in hue and shape.92 Dove’s mark making,

color,” he wrote.90 In an unpublished, undated note

which transmuted and transfigured multiply within

Dove expressed curiosity about translating radio

each record painting, is here rigorously uniform,

and telephonic sound into visual form, wondering

his marks remaining consistent and unobtrusive

from whence one’s impression of the unseen source

across the whole of each canvas even if painterly or Sound

177

Fig. 113  Arthur G. Dove, Study for Me and the Moon, between 1935 and 1938, pencil on paper, 51⁄8 × 63/4 in. (13.0175 × 17.145 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Gift of Lisa Travers and William O’Reilly, 1997. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

178

roughly sketch-­like in places. Color predominates,

dia, most likely inspired by Max Doerner’s The Mate-

rather than line, producing a flat puzzle-­piece or

rials of the Artist, which Dove began reading in the

patchwork effect that approaches the feel of later

fall of 1935, and also by a more general renewal of in-

works like Sand and Sea and Flight. This is the case

terest in wax-­based painting techniques in Europe

especially in The Moon Was Laughing at Me, where

and America in the 1930s, encouraged in part by

sectors abut and interlock but rarely intersect or

Doerner’s work.93 The wax emulsion technique, in

overlap (fig. 111). Given the healthy size of each

which wax is combined with pigment so that min-

plane or sector of color relative to the rectangle of

iscule drops of color are suspended throughout the

the canvas whole, Dove’s radio pictures produce the

wax, was not for Dove unique to these two paint-

effect of shapes pushing and spreading across the

ings, so it would be unwise to place too much store

surface, rather than a sense of motifs moving and

in its use in the radio pictures. But my sense is that

twisting energetically in space as in the case of the

two of the qualities associated with this technique

record paintings. This is not to say that line is un-

would have been particularly appealing to Dove for

important in these works. Two preparatory pencil

use in rendering radio sound: the overall matte ef-

drawings for Me and the Moon emphasize either the

fect of the medium as well as the suspension of one

outlines of the major shapes of the painting as ini-

material within another that defines wax emulsion,

tially conceived or the fluid and delicately twisting,

something with which Dove would have been very

wavelike line that meanders almost whimsically

familiar, having conducted extensive tests and ex-

through the finished picture, the only thing that

periments with various suspensions, as inspired by

interrupts the effect of lateral spread across the sur-

Doerner’s treatise and other technical manuals and

face plane in the painting (figs. 56, 113). But color

attested to by marginal notes in his well-­worn copy

and shape predominate, something predicted by

of Doerner’s book and by remarks in his correspon-

Dove’s color annotations in the small pencil sketch.

dence and the journals.94

The radio paintings differ from the record pic-

While not exceptional within Dove’s body of

tures in choice of medium as well. In both, Dove em-

work, the combination in the two radio paintings

ployed wax emulsion, with which he experimented

of planar sweep and flattening effects with the

extensively beginning in 1935 and for the remaining

matte quality of wax emulsion, which produces an

years of his career, along with other wax-­based me-

effect of continuity and sameness across the sur-

Chapter Three

face despite variations in brushwork or hue, proved

both operations—­propagated radio waves and wax-­

eminently suitable for the rendition of the experi-

encased molecules of pigment—­having a touch of

ence of sound characteristic of radio listening, an

the supernatural about them. Emulsions are made,

experience that entails the connecting of widely

after all, by forcing a mixture of substances that do

dispersed parties by virtue of airborne waves that

not naturally combine.

travel in space. Understood at the time as engen-

Another key difference between the record

dering a new connectivity among individual listen-

paintings and the radio pictures involves the source

ers who listened as a gathered group even in the

of their sound. The music that inspired the crea-

isolation of their own homes, radio’s collectivizing

tion of the radio pictures featured singing, while

capacity set it apart from the phonograph in the

the music that inspired the record paintings did

popular imagination, leading Dove, for instance,

not. Radio’s transmission of the human voice wire-

to fashion radio as a technology of connection in

lessly through time and space—­translating speech

his correspondence with Torr and to link it to the

and other sounds, including live and recorded mu-

operations and effects of telepathy. The material

sic, into signal and back again—­probably inspired

characteristics of The Moon Was Laughing at Me and

the drawing of parallels between it and telepathy,

Me and the Moon thus appear to model the idea of

Dove’s own associations as well as those of his

radio itself and, in so doing, to model a condition of

contemporaries. But this feature—­ the fact that

collective experience and, by extension, a condition

real humans communicated in real time by way of

of intersubjectivity. Such a condition combined ra-

radio broadcasts, speaking to other humans and

dio’s properties and procedures, particularly its gen-

transferring information directly, as if in imme-

eration of a continuum of many bodies across time

diate proximity—­may also have suggested radio

and space as evoked by Dove through the continu-

technology in particular as a model for a new form

ous and lateral-­spreading flatness of the paintings,

of human interchange and new capacities for rela-

with operations of a more otherworldly sort, as

tionality not bound by the constraints of distance,

figured by the seemingly weightless suspension of

physiology, or nature of being. The lyrics to both of

pigment characteristic of wax emulsion, what some

the radio tunes that inspired Dove’s paintings de-

occult-­minded commentators might have likened

scribe the moon, a celestial body, in conversation

to that medium of preternatural propagation, the

or directly interacting with a human. To wit: “Me

ether.95 Wax emulsion’s resistance to registering the

and the Moon are wondering where you can be. Me

perturbations of a moving hand holding a brush,

and the Moon are longing for your company. . . . I’ve

its sui generis effect, together with the manner

asked the Moon to find you somewhere behind the

in which its opaque solidity and pictorial weight-

stars”; and “The Moon is grinning at me for fall-

iness showcase its status as matter that has been

ing in love with you. . . . The Moon is grinning at

worked, underscored radio’s dual aspect as simulta-

me for giving my heart to you.”96 In each case, the

neously mysterious and machinelike. Radio, like the

lyrics posit phenomena that would necessitate un-

phonograph, employed machines—­ at the origin

precedented and perhaps occult forms of commu-

of the radio broadcast and at the receiving end of

nication and exchange. Of course popular music is

things—­but the fact that its transmission was wire-

and has always been rife with personification, and

less, the quality that made it amenable to telepathic

impossible scenarios like moons and people having

analogies in the first place, also set it apart from

a chat have appeared in modern American song

record playing in that the latter was manifestly

with consistent regularity. But the fact that Dove’s

and often obtrusively wired. Sound, in radio, was

paintings, which triangulate radio, telepathy, and

literally airborne, something that Dove may have

speech in a seeming attempt to imagine transcend-

analogized by way of the mechanism of suspension

ing the confines of conventional communication,

that defined the wax emulsion technique, with

originated in lyrical narratives of unconventional Sound

179

180

or otherworldly exchange is worth noting. This is

ing together earth and sky. Its color-­shifts (from

especially the case because in both of these paint-

dark gray to a lighter-­gray hue as it leaves the yel-

ings Dove articulates not just a connection among

low center of the moon and begins to traverse the

all parts—­ through the matte character of wax

gray and black bands that encircle it) as well as its

emulsion and the various flattening effects I have

physical transmutations (from continuous line to a

described—­but also a link between the moon and

series of dots to a spiraling loop) evoke the idea of

the earth, one that entails the visual integration

a connective tissue among entities that responds

of a celestial body and the earthly sphere by way

to the qualities of each as it encounters them in

of motifs of encounter and exchange of the very

turn, consequently taking on the characteristics of

same kind as those found across Dove’s work from

all and establishing a collectivity or unity among

the 1920s and 1930s, including his pictures of the

them. As the thread that forms this bond, Dove’s

sun and the weather as well as those of the urban-­

meandering line calls to mind radio waves, and it

industrial landscape, a visual vocabulary that in

also evokes the bonds among subjects formed by

such pictures articulated and incarnated the oper-

radio listening as well as the phenomenon of voice

ation of translation and, consequently, intercon-

translated and transmitted via radio waves work-

nection. Think of City Moon (fig. 51), for instance, in

ing to knit together the myriad persons that hear

which a series of triangular forms incline upward

it into a sonic whole. In radio’s early years, when

toward a yellow moon that responds with a mis-

signals were weak and reception irregular, listen-

chievous smile, calling to mind the teasing moons

ers pursued and tried to “catch” transmissions, a

of Dove’s radio paintings, or Golden Sun and Naples

practice called “DXing” or “DX fishing.”97 Improve-

Yellow Morning (figs. 9, 10), where suns enter into

ments in technology made DXing for the most

conversation with earthbound nature.

part unnecessary by the 1930s, but Dove undertook

In Me and the Moon, an off-­center and radiant

a similar sort of searching during this period. As

white-­yellow orb extends its circumference by way

he reported in a 1936 letter to Torr: “Brought ra-

of concentric bands of alternating black, gray, and

dio out and connected turned it on and first thing

dark gray-­green. These bands echo the striations of

got Beethoven. Paul [Dove’s brother] wasn’t trying

the shape that dominates the upper half of the can-

for anything. Tried all eve until 9 P.M. and noth-

vas, a roughly rectangular plane twisted at its center

ing but trash.”98 Dove’s words reflected the sense of

so that it resembles a sheet buffeted by the wind or,

wonder prompted by fishing sound out of the sky

alternately, the wings of a butterfly. This twisting

that characterized the radio imaginary in the 1920s

action proffers a slight nod to the third dimension,

and that persisted into the decade that followed.

pushing the rectangular plane into space by virtue

His remarks also suggest that the ribbons coursing

of its torque, but the whole remains emphatically

through Me and the Moon might have for him served

surface oriented. An ooze of yellow appears along

not just as symbols of radio waves or analogs to the

the top of the twisted shape, as if pressing upward

idea of forecasting, where the present casts a glance

from behind and dripping over the rectangle’s front

into the future, as in Dove’s Partly Cloudy, but also

edge. All this unfolds against a backdrop of black

as metaphorical fishing lines, a web of threads cast

sky and deep-­brown ground. Each part—­ground,

into the sky hoping to hook and reel in broadcast

moon, sky, and clouds or stars—­intersects with the

sound. The diagonal line in Dove’s pencil study for

delicate ribbonlike line that meanders across the

Me and the Moon (fig. 113) that connects the crest-

canvas surface, taking root at the lower right and

ing shape at top right to the waves beneath it looks

left and ascending with delicate sways and loops,

very much like a fishing line with a float, or “bob-

some of them filled in with yellow or gray, toward

ber,” attached, represented by the circle Dove drew

the top where it disappears behind the yellow ooze.

at the line’s terminus and then labeled “red,” the

This line bisects the moon on its way up, stitch-

color most often used to enhance the visibility of

Chapter Three

sportfishing floats, now and in Dove’s day.99 Dove’s

preternatural communication, and the act of let-

usual placement of his signature at bottom center

ter writing. In creating such a collection of links,

in Me and the Moon likewise registers in a manner

he articulated within the space of two sentences a

particularly apt to the idea of skyward fishing, its

set of equivalencies very close to those generated

position suggesting an earthbound subject making

by Me and the Moon among sky, earth, waveforms,

contact with the moon, stars, and sky, casting his

and radio broadcasting as well as a transposition of

net to see what he might grab hold of and hear. In

self analogous to the painting’s own casting of Dove

the song “Me and the Moon” the protagonist poses

through space and time. The doubled directional-

a question to the moon, so it is not for nothing that

Stieglitz’s sky transposed ity of Dove’s missive—­

Dove produces a formal correspondence between

to Dove’s terrain, Dove’s thoughts transmitted to

the leftward and descending arc of the “D” of his

Stieglitz’s home—­together with the possibility that

name and the leftward declination of the ribbon

Dove took up paper and pen in response to an actual

line above and slightly to the left of his signature,

photograph or the memory of one, underscores the

implying that “Dove,” the “me” of the paintings and

implied materiality as well as the mutuality of such

thus of the songs that inspired them, generated

a translation of thought, its status as a materially

the ribbon line so as to establish contact with and

based and materially generative instance of trans-

communicate through the nighttime sky, translat-

action and interchange, one that takes visual form

ing his person across time and space by virtue of

in Me and the Moon as solidly spreading pigment and

capturing distantly originating and widely travers-

decisively interweaving lines.

ing sound, and perhaps even drawing an analogy,

No such lines wend through The Moon Was

through the idea of “fishing,” between radio waves

Laughing at Me (fig. 111), but interlocking shapes and

and those of the sea.100 In August 1924 Dove wrote

an overall green cast, created by dark-­green hues at

to Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, in residence at the Stieg-

the surface as well as by green-­toned underpaint,

litz family home at Lake George, New York, with

produce a puzzle-­like whole, creating a single, bur-

news about his painting as well as an account of his

geoning form out of autonomous entities (ground,

move via the Mona with Torr from New York to the

sky, and moon). Exemplary of this formal inter-

Long Island shore. Wedged between an anecdote

connection are the pinkish, fingerlike shapes at

about a lost mooring and details about their new

lower right that interlace with their brown, equally

Halesite locale, the following sentences, accorded

fingerlike counterparts, as if wedged or snapped

their own paragraph in Dove’s letter, stand out:

into place. Many of Dove’s abstract canvases boast

“Your sky has been really quite wonderful here. It

zoomorphic forms, and that is certainly the case

seems as though I could think into those clouds and

here: a birdlike creature, wings spread and head

you would get the thought.”101 By “your sky,” Dove

and beak silhouetted against the moon, comes to

may have been referring to the sky at Lake George,

roost in the canvas’s left half, while what looks to

the sky over Halesite, or the sky in one of Stieg-

be a dog squats contentedly at right, his flapping

litz’s photographs of clouds. One cannot know for

ear constituted by a triangle of yellow and his face

sure, but identifying the exact referent seems less

and snout by an amalgam of ruby red, yellow, and

important than noting that Dove here character-

green. Rather than a picture of a bird or a dog, Dove’s

izes the sky as a possible medium of transmission,

painting skews more toward the idea of animate

one that might through the mechanism of clouds

creatures in conversation with the moon—­visually

carry his thoughts upstate to Stieglitz’s summer

reinforced by the sharing of contours between the

home. With such a proposition, assuredly a fanci-

moon’s concentric circles and the body parts of the

ful one, issued in a letter to Stieglitz, Dove concep-

bird—­in order to call to mind the kind of super-

tually conjoined a multitude of things: looking at

natural connectivity that radio for him exemplified.

nature, the earth’s atmosphere and its phenomena,

Dove associated communication technologies with Sound

181

wizardry and otherworldly noise (recall the “tunk-

what would have been in Dove’s estimation yet one

ing” of his resident ghost and Mr. Thomas’s magic

more model or means for the imagining of unprec-

eye), in keeping with period descriptions of radio’s

edented forms of communication and exchange.

otherworldly or occult origins or effects, includ-

The presence of other models of transmission and

ing the manner in which radio broadcasts seemed

translation registered in the forms of The Moon

to produce sound out of nowhere, or from an un-

Was Laughing at Me underscores this idea: the pho-

known realm—­radio, wrote the New York Times in

netically efficient, symbolic marks of shorthand or

1922, “brought to the ears of us earth dwellers the

the tap-­taps of Morse code as evoked in the pro-

noises that roar in the space between the worlds.”102

cession of near-­vertical lines that stretches across

It makes sense, then, that in a painting inspired by

the bird’s pink-­yellow “wing,” or the diagrammatic

radio listening Dove would envision a form of ex-

representation of the phases of the moon by way

change, between animals and the moon, unheard

of concentric circles that proceed from an inner

of on earth. Equal in its fantastic nature to the ra-

orange to an outer sea green, effects analogous to

dio “hauntings” regularly reported or described in

those of radio waves or the transmission of current

popular fiction during the first three decades of the

over wire as signaled by the traversing lines in Me

twentieth century, such a picture, with its animals

and the Moon.

and its weighty, waxy paint, remained firmly in con103

tact with solid ground.

182

According to Cassidy, Dove’s Swing Music (Louis Armstrong) (1938) (fig. 114) was not inspired by radio

It may also be the case that Dove, in conjuring

listening, as were the two moon paintings. Rather,

the idea of a conversation among the heavens, a

she reports, Dove created the painting either from

dog, and a bird, wished to evoke the new forms of

a phonograph recording of Armstrong’s music—­

language that radio had brought into being, what

perhaps 1936’s “Swing That Music”—­or from his

one historian of the medium has called “radio talk”

memory of the movie Artists and Models, starring

or “acoustic shorthand.” Such radio talk provided

Jack Benny and Ida Lupino, which opened in New

monikers for radio’s operations and technical as-

York in August 1937 and was seen by Dove and Torr

pects, such as the strings of capital letters and

on October 24, 1937.105 The film’s musical program in-

numbers known as call signs or call letters that

cluded “Public Melody Number 1,” a musical sketch

designated station “addresses,” or the locutions

performance set in Harlem featuring Louis Arm-

formulated to accommodate the exigencies of ra-

strong on trumpet and the singing of Martha Raye.

dio listening, in which things described could not

The scene begins with gunshots and people scatter-

be seen and images could not supplement words,

ing, then Raye descends a fire escape to the strains

104

thereby necessitating novel manners of speaking.

of Armstrong’s trumpet; we see the shadow silhou-

Dove was familiar with this new language, one that

ette of Armstrong playing before he emerges onto

was neither text nor image and represented a new

the street to accompany Raye. The “hot” trumpet

category or form of speech. He fashioned his own

playing is posited in the number as “public melody

locutions in this tongue, as in “ ‘W-­H-­O-­Q (or some-

number 1,” a play on the phrase “public enemy num-

thing) DOVE’S HALL Geneva—­ Graham McDove

ber 1,” and Armstrong combines his trumpet play-

speaking,’ ” and he expressed admiration for the

ing in the scene with dialogue and scat singing. The

radioman Mr. Thomas’s knowledge of radio “codes,”

first mention of Dove painting from Armstrong’s

an appreciation that would have been rooted in

music occurs in March 1938 when Torr noted it in

Dove’s own interest in notational systems such as

a diary entry; several subsequent entries track the

weather maps, telegraphic code, shorthand, and

progress and completion of the picture, which Torr

musical scores. Perhaps, then, animal-­moon com-

called in several places “Louis Armstrong Music.” By

munication in the radio paintings figured for Dove

the time of Dove’s annual exhibition that year, the

the new speech generated by radio technology,

painting had acquired its current title.106

Chapter Three

When Dove began painting his Armstrong pic-

note the conjoined red and brown sawteeth at

ture, one could have heard that musician’s music on

lower right—­produce a point-­counterpoint rhythm

the radio, so it may have been the case that radio

across the canvas plane, with bright-­red accents,

broadcasts aided in inspiring Dove’s work, along-

including Dove’s signature, making the whole siz-

side Artists and Models and phonograph record-

zle and flash. Cassidy associates these blasts of red

107

Whatever the source, there is good reason to

with a trumpet’s blare, and there is most certainly

include Swing Music (Louis Armstrong) in a discussion

a sense of the air being filled at an instant with

of paintings that originated in radio listening, for it

raucous sound, a sonic effect subsequently overlain

hews closely to Me and the Moon and The Moon Was

with layer after layer of new and unpredictable re-

Laughing at Me in terms of formal vocabulary and

frain: the improvisation of instrumental jazz or the

appearance, and it shares its medium, wax emul-

random and nonsensical syllables of scat singing,

sion, with these two works, although in Swing Music

of which Armstrong was a master, as exemplified

Dove combined wax emulsion with oil paint, as he

by his 1926 recording of “Heebie Jeebies,” one of

did in a number of other works. As in The Moon Was

the earliest instances of scat, as well as his perfor-

Laughing at Me, in Swing Music shapes erupt at the

mance in Artists and Models.108 Lobes of gray, white,

ings.

surface and spread laterally, as if feeling their way

and blue at top center seem as vestiges of the color-­

exuberantly through space. Interlocking forms—­

filled loops formed by the meandering line in Me

Fig. 114  Arthur G. Dove, Swing Music (Louis Armstrong), 1938, emulsion, oil, and wax on canvas, 44.8 × 65.7 cm (175⁄8 × 257⁄8 in.), Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.540, The Art Institute of Chicago.

Sound

183

and the Moon, and five sections of tonal banding or

tory singing of Armstrong, which hovered between

striation in Swing Music recall the banded and twist-

human speech and pure musical sound, much as

ing rectangle and the concentric strips in the ra-

pigment lies suspended among layers of wax in the

dio picture. These include the triplicate bands that

painting based on his musical work, was for Dove

constitute an oblong form at upper left that looks

yet another possible model of a new kind of lan-

very much like a bird; tonal variations of green that

guage or system of interchange.

surround the crimson splat just left of center; the strips forming a current of purple, plum, lavender, and gray that snakes toward the lower right corner, terminating in pendant drops held together by sur-

In comparison to the record and radio paintings,

face tension yet threatening at any moment to fall;

Dove’s attempt in Fog Horns (1929) to visualize the

the blocks of tan and brown that segment the tri-

idea of sound appears relatively straightforward,

angle form at center; and the brick-­red and brown

closer in effect to the sonic registrations of Senti-

stripes that detail the leftmost edge of the tipped

mental Music (figs. 4, 106). Tonal gradations of purple

square of deep blue-­purple at the upper right.

and plum fashion four circular forms, lighter at the

Intimations of human and animal forms in

edges, darker at the center, that march with surety

Swing Music akin to the bird and dog forms in The

across the canvas’s horizontal span. The effect pro-

Moon Was Laughing at Me suggest a space seething

duced is one of looking into the bells of a row of

with sound but also with life. Patches of gray, lav-

brass instruments, as if Dove meant to make most

ender, and lavender-­gray combine in the upper left

literal the idea of a foghorn. It is also one of sound

to create a birdlike form, its eye and beak trained

approaching a listener, or a listener approaching a

toward the upper edge of the canvas. Along with

sound, such that what began as a faint hum winds

a putative Armstrong silhouette formed, according

up as a roaring blare. Perhaps Dove meant to render

to Cassidy, by the black silhouette at upper right,

this particular acoustic phenomenon, named after

the upper right quadrant features several shapes

the Austrian mathematician and physicist Chris-

that look very much like human profiles, includ-

tian Doppler, who first described it in 1842. Called,

ing one with an elongated oval for an eye and, in

of course, the “Doppler effect,” it involves an appar-

another instance, two profiles that share a com-

ent change in the frequency and wavelength of a

mon facial contour: the nose and upper lip of a red,

wave that is perceived by an observer moving rela-

right-­side-­up profile becomes the neck and chin of

tive to the source of the wave, which explains what

its dark-­brown and upside-­down counterpart, al-

one hears as the waxing and waning of a sound (of

most like Dove’s personal transposition of the well-­

a siren of a fire engine or ambulance, for instance)

known duck / rabbit or old woman / young woman

as it approaches and then moves on. The concen-

optical illusions, both of which were published in

tric bands, originating in a deep purple-­black and

109

When looking at these

lightening in hue as they spread outward, diagram

illusions, one seesaws between “rabbit” and “duck”

the illusion of transforming sound in a manner

or “young” and “old” but cannot perceive both as-

analogous to similar circle forms in Moon (fig. 5)

the United States by 1915.

110

184

Other Sounds

pects of the composite illustration at once. Insert-

that visualize the idea of a lunar phase, a process

ing a reference to emblems of the limits of human

of waxing and waning undetectable by the naked

vision into a painting like Swing Music, which shares

eye. In Fog Horns, the implied distance between the

with the radio pictures features evocative of new

three large concentric circle motifs and the much

forms of communication and intersubjectivity,

smaller one at right further articulates the idea of

might have been for Dove a way to signal that it

sound traveling in space and seeming to transmute

was with something other than conventional cog-

along the way. What to do with Dove’s evocation

nition that he was here concerned. The improvisa-

here of sonic transfiguration despite the fact that

Chapter Three

the hearing of foghorn sound is not usually subject

cabulary he devised for the purpose of recording

to the Doppler effect remains an open question. It

weather within which circular forms predominated.

could be that his attribution to foghorn sound of a

Horizontal bands of tonally varied gray in the upper

set of properties not usually associated with such

half of the painting directly register the silver-­gray

an acoustic phenomenon was meant to press the

misty creep of fog as it rolls in or out, with the lower

painting past the realm of the straightforward and

half of this stack of bands also conjuring a sweep of

the empirically accessible and closer toward the ter-

sea. The intersection of the outermost circles of the

rain of telepathy and tunks.

front two horns with whitish-­pink paint that ap-

Dove’s Fog Horns also begs the question of synes-

pears to represent a rise of shore or a cresting wave

thesia, in which a stimulus usually perceived by one

calls to mind the manner in which forms go in and

sense presents to and stimulates another, as when

out of focus when surrounded by moving and trans-

a person perceives a color when he or she hears a

muting banks of fog. That weather and sound come

especially because synesthetic particular sound—­

together here in a painting about foghorns and the

experience embodies the effects of interconnection

sea is especially interesting because of course fog-

and serial substitution that preoccupied Dove. Yet

horns speak in code, the duration, frequency, and

one would be hard pressed to find evidence for an

sequence of their blasts communicating informa-

engagement on Dove’s part with this phenomenon

tion about the conditions confronting ships in the

and its interlocutors in the period, and his pictures

vicinity. One cannot know for sure if Dove knew

111

the exact code employed by his local foghorn. The

Rather, in a painting like Fog Horns Dove brings to-

diaries first mention Dove at work on the paint-

gether three major fixations—­weather, the sea, and

ing in February 1929, so his locale would have been

sound—­thus intimating the connections he would

Halesite, first in a room in the Ketewomoke Yacht

draw among the three in his record and radio paint-

Club and then, by April, aboard the Mona, and thus

ings. Because a foghorn is a sound-­producing in-

within hearing distance of the nearby foghorn on

strument—­an actual horn that relies on vibrating

Huntington Harbor.112 This may or may not have

air to generate its sonic blasts—­and because each

been his particular referent. Yet given his assiduous

of Dove’s circle motifs look, as I have said, like the

weather notating and his evident knowledge of the

inside of the bell of a brass instrument and thus

verbal and visual vocabularies of meteorology, it is

also like a view onto the inner surface of a phono-

likely that he at least knew of the existence of fog-

graph horn, one surmises that Dove drew an associ-

horn signaling and found it as interesting as he did

ation among these three sound technologies or de-

other systems of translation and communication,

vices: brass instrument, foghorn, and phonograph.

from telegraph talk and shorthand to musical no-

The concentric bands in Fog Horns call to mind the

tation and the phonograph. The variant sizes of the

concentric grooves of a phonograph record, as do

horns in Fog Horns might then refer to variations in

similar motifs in the paintings made from records,

foghorn speech, akin to the manner in which talk

and the implication of foghorn sound moving

between a bird or dog and a celestial body refers

through space calls to mind wireless radio trans-

in the radio paintings to radio’s own novel modes

mission, with its signals borne on air or through

of communication. If so, the painting as a whole

the ether, for which fog might be an analog here.

thus offers an early formulation of the models of

All this reinforces the idea of Dove hypothesizing a

translation and communication on offer in the

connection between unrelated apparatuses; so too

record and radio paintings. In this way, then, Fog

does the fact that the many invocations of sound

Horns stands as a precursor expression of Dove’s hy-

and its sources arise in the space of a painting about

pothesis that a painting, with its capacity to defy

fog, a weather condition Dove regularly made note

the laws of nature and to combine or put into rela-

of in his diaries and ship’s log using the visual vo-

tion incompatible or disparate operations, forms,

in the end do not really support the association.

Sound

185

and beings, might manifest a new mode of seeing,

In June 1940, Dove wrote to Stieglitz to report

saying, knowing, and being in the world, one ex-

that he was feeling better than he had in a long

emplified by his reconfiguration and hybridization

while, having the previous year suffered a heart at-

of painting and music in the record paintings. That

tack and received a diagnosis of Bright’s disease, a

Fog Horns is hauntingly beautiful, resonant with the

condition afflicting the kidneys; from the diagnosis

sonorous tones of the featured horn and possessive

on, he was never fully well, despite his assertions

of a kind of transfixing power despite its small size,

to the contrary.113 In his letter, Dove assured Stieg-

is not beside the point. The intersection between

litz that his physician had declared that he was “in

the plum bands and the pink-­white rise evokes ob-

the best shape since first taken ill.” He also offered

jects obscured in a fog, but these moments of inter-

an explanation for a recent setback: “He [the phy-

section and overlap also conjure the idea of encoun-

sician] allows that I would not have had this last

ters and thresholds crossed, suggesting that Dove

setback had a lady not tried to kill her two boys and

meant this painting to intimate or summon a world

succeeded with herself just outside here in the early

other than his own and to conjure capacities not yet

morning. Having ears like an animal it was a bit

within reach on earth, deploying ethereal beauty to

vivid for me.” In a subsequent letter, penned almost

make the gesture eminently striking and clear.

a year later, Dove wrote to Stieglitz about a painting

Fig. 115  Arthur G. Dove, Neighborly Attempt at Murder, 1941, oil and wax on canvas, 51.12 × 71.44 cm (201⁄8 × 281⁄8 in.), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of William H. and Saundra B. Lane and Robert Dawson Evans Collection, Bequest of Mrs. Robert Dawson Evans, by exchange, 1990.374. Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

186

Chapter Three

listed as number 10 in the catalog to his exhibition

is supported by Charles Van Wyck Brooks, son of the

at An American Place: “Do not think I would bother

critic Van Wyck Brooks, who recalled the incident

to satisfy just curiosity. The drawing was made of a

as told to him by Dove when he visited Dove and

dead tree without remaining consciously aware of

Torr in Centerport in 1946, just a few months before

the tragedy that had occurred there to which I had

Dove’s death. Dove described frequent shouting and

114

listened.”

The painting in question, Neighborly Attempt at Murder (1941) (fig. 115), earned its title by way of

fighting on the part of the occupants of a neighboring house. “One night,” Brooks wrote, “instead of shouts there were shrieks.”

Dove’s experience of overhearing the act he described in his 1940 letter. Despite his insistence

For minutes and minutes, perhaps hours, there

that he did not have the attempted murder in mind

were shrieks, first of rage then of terror. Later

when he undertook to create the work, the fact of

Reds learned that the woman had fought off the

his titling it as he did suggests that in the end the

man and succeeded in killing herself, and had

painting for him spoke of that awful episode. This

almost succeeded in killing the two children.

Fig. 116  Arthur G. Dove, Fire in the Sauerkraut Factory, 1936–­1941 (drawn in 1936, painted in 1941), oil on canvas, Bequest of Seymour Lawrence, University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses, 1998.15.4.

Sound

187

Arthur had lain in bed, unable to move. The next

visual effects. Dove took photographs of the 1934

day he was unable to speak. The second day he

fire, making sure to preserve its sensational look for

was still unable to speak. On the third day, Reds

future use.119

assembled paints and canvases for him, and he worked without a word until all was set down.115

Neighborly Attempt at Murder (fig. 115) dazzles in another way, in a manner similar to that of Swing Music (Louis Armstrong), but in exaggerated fashion.

Other work on view in the 1941 exhibition de-

Roughly curving forms erupt at the surface, jos-

tailed disastrous or violent events: Italy Goes to War

tling and hurried as they spread laterally across the

(1940) and Fire in the Sauerkraut Factory (1936–­1941)

canvas plane, while earth-­toned strips and shards

116

Dove made an emphatic note of Italy’s

vye for space with green and blue blobs and spikes.

declaration of war in his diary entry for June 10,

Loose brushwork, minimal underpainting, and vis-

1940, and elsewhere in the diaries and also in let-

ible ground throughout indicate a canvas made

ters he lamented the wages of war, including local

quickly. One confronts in this painting a quality of

rationing and the experience of friends overseas,

explosiveness rarely seen in Dove’s work, save for

and he expressed his disgust at Nazism. The ag-

the few canvases that depict fire or war, an effect

(fig. 116).

gressive, bomb-­blast feel of Italy Goes to War regis-

exacerbated by the near-­white form at center, which

ters as much, as do the other war-­themed pictures

has the look of being pinned against the front of

in Dove’s body of work, including U.S. (1940) and

the picture by a blast detonated just behind it. The

1941 (1941) (figs. 93, 94), both of which conjure the

sharp points of what look like grass blades at lower

look but also the sound of an explosive, either its

right and two adjacent, daggerlike forms toward the

whistling descent or the shattering boom of its im-

top of what Dove characterized as a dead tree, make

117

There is no indication that the sauerkraut

this scene seem to screech, far more shrill in tone

factory fire had an impact on Dove equal to that of

than its scat-­singing counterpart despite the soft-

overhearing attempted murder or the fact of inter-

ening effects of the wax medium in sections of the

national warfare, but he rendered it just as dramat-

painting, and partly the result of roughly scraped

ically and sensationally. His description of a fire he

and nervously wiry brushstrokes visible ­throughout.

witnessed in 1934, on which the painting is likely

I spend time here with Neighborly Attempt at

based, further connects Fire in the Sauerkraut Factory

Murder because, unlike the radio pictures, which re-

to his paintings of war, especially because he em-

fer to, even if they do not directly illustrate, recog-

ploys a military metaphor to describe the event. “It

nizable things, and thus remain fixed to visual

was a beauty of a fire,” he wrote to Torr, “with the

experience, Dove’s 1941 painting, like the record

high tension wires running white violet fireworks

paintings, was created from listening rather than

all over the building white light ran out the wires to

from looking, from the experience of the ear rather

a switch box on a pole and set off an octave higher

than the eye. Or, rather, and more precisely, it was

color pinwheel in violet orange. The people would

created from overhearing, which makes its sonic

all scatter when it went off. Sounded as though

impetus somewhat different than that of the record

someone had run a zipper down between two rows

pictures, which originated in Dove’s conscious and

pact.

118

In the resulting painting, with

deliberate interaction with a phonograph appara-

its foreground fireball, a spiky spiral of yellow and

tus with the purposeful aim of generating musical

bright purple-­pink, and its massive and shooting

sound. It could be that Dove’s report to Stieglitz

licks of red, orange, pink, and yellow flame, be-

that he did not consciously begin the painting as a

neath which trees and telephone poles wither and

murder scene reflected the fact of its origin in an in-

melt, Dove recounts the conflagration with the

advertent reception of sound. This sonic sneak at-

exuberance of someone interested in the event for

tack, described by Dove as “a bit vivid for me” given

its drama but also for the spectacular quality of its

his especially acute “animal” ears, presented to him

of machine guns.”

188

Chapter Three

an experience vastly unlike his usual listening reg-

a gift but forcibly conferred, and muteness rather

imen. As a result of its seeming agency, of the one-­

than converse results. What one faces here, then,

sidedness of its acting on him, among other things

is a painting that describes the opposite of what

making him unable to speak, this sonic ambush

Dove hoped his pictorial project might achieve,

diverged drastically from Dove’s other, purpose-

something wholly other than that for which he

ful and generative listening: to the phonograph or

strove when he put needle to record or ear to ra-

the radio, sometimes in the company of others; to

dio and then brush to canvas, or when the memory

friends and family over the phone; to the “tunks”

of a Louis Armstrong tune or the intonations of a

that he heard in his home and in his machines. It

foghorn pressed him to paint. It is as if in 1941 he

followed that he had to register this surreptitious

took a look back over his previous endeavors and

sound, as had his unsuspecting ears, as something

attempts and, going forward, sounded a cautionary

akin to the explosions of a factory fire or the blast

note, one that reminded him of the ambition and,

of a bomb.

perhaps, the impossibility of his project even while

Within Dove’s art and world, then, Neighborly At-

acknowledging the progress he had made over the

tempt at Murder presents something like a negative

years. If nothing else, this retrospective glance

example, one analogous to the dystopia that stalks

called to mind an earlier attempt to imagine a less

Dove’s pictures of flight and global geography: a

nefarious or troubling form of agency or will. It is

model of communication gone awry, of translation

to Dove’s exploration of this form of sentience in

and exchange among entities that exemplifies any-

his assemblages through the inanimate things from

thing but an intersubjective ideal, where sonic in-

which they were made that I now turn.

formation is not pleasurably shared or received as

Sound

189

Fig. 117  Arthur G. Dove, Long Island, 1925, assemblage: paint, shells, twigs, leaves, grasses, pebbles, and painted paper on panel, 41.91 × 57.15 cm (16½ × 22½ in.), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, A. Shuman Collection—­Abraham Shuman Fund, 62.1128. Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

4

Things Dove’s Assemblages Between the years 1924 and 1930, Dove created a series of works, over two dozen, that have been variously called “collages” or “assemblages.” Fashioned out of found, collected, scavenged, or purchased objects, these three-­dimensional works, like Robert Rauschenberg’s combines, to cite a well-­known example, occupy a category somewhere between painting and sculpture, their apparent lineage reaching back to Picasso and forward to Joseph Cornell, Neo-­Dada, junk sculpture, and more recent experimentation with assemblage in large-­scale installation formats.1 Dove characterized the blurring of boundaries between media in an undated, typewritten note that in working out a definition of sculpture addressed the capacity of painting as well. “Sculpture in a different sense,” he wrote, “raised or lowered to meet the attention or feelings as forms recede from the eye. That can be done with just paint.”2 This description of “different” sculpture, as a format alternating between high and low relief, matches the both/and quality of the assemblages, my term of choice for Dove’s three-­dimensional works. Some of the assemblages exist vigorously in space, their complex configurations creating the effect of a deeply cut sculptural relief. In Long Island (1925) (fig. 117), for example, Dove combined branches, leaves, seashells, pebbles, dried grass, a magazine clipping of a car, and brightly colored paint to create an energetic and complex surface, while a boxlike frame accentuates 191

the depth of the work. Other assemblages hew as

status as made from actual objects, never attempt-

closely as a sculpture might to the planarity of a

ing to trick the viewer into thinking they are any-

painting, in some cases approximating the look of

thing but combinations of literal things.3 And for

a painted, two-­dimensional surface through subtle

the most part, they appear designed to be displayed

collage effects. Draped over a metal ground dotted

on the vertical, like a traditional easel painting, if

with sand, blue-­gray chiffon in Sea II (fig. 24) con-

not necessarily hung on a wall. Dove exhibited the

jures sky, sea, and waves but also broad strokes of

assemblages throughout his career, but they ap-

thinly applied, soaking paint. Despite the variance

peared en masse at two exhibitions in particular,

among them, all the assemblages announce their

in the 1925 Seven Americans exhibition organized by Stieglitz at the Anderson Galleries and in Dove’s 1927 one-­man show at the Intimate Gallery, which included the suite of record paintings. The pamphlet for Seven Americans included Dove’s poem, “A Way to Look at Things,” while Dove’s “An Idea” appeared in the pamphlet that accompanied the 1927 exhibition.4 Dove reported that Stieglitz, on first seeing his assemblages in 1924 in advance of the 1925 exhibition, called them “one of the finest things he’s ever seen—­way beyond everything he had expected,” adding, “Wait until Duchamp sees them.”5 Dove selected his materials for the assemblages from a wide range of object types. An incomplete, unsystematic list includes sand, chiffon, linen, metal, wood, glass, tinfoil, newspaper clippings, sheet music, twigs, human hair, pine cones, shells, buttons, string, dried flowers, cork, chicken wire, Christmas wrapping paper, bark, cross-­stitch, a folding wooden ruler, nails, a denim shirt, sandpaper, a camera lens, clock springs, a watch face, shoe insoles, gardening gloves, velvet, a change purse, glue, moss, monkey fur, and bone. In many of the assemblages, Dove combined such materials with more traditional artistic media, including oil paint and graphite, and several of the works employ a metal base or ground. The subjects of the assemblages vary. Some are landscapes or seascapes, some evoke natural phenomena, some depict objects, others

Fig. 118  Arthur G. Dove, The Critic, 1925, assemblage of paper, newspaper, fabric, cord, broken glass, watercolor, and graphite pencil on board, 19½ × 13 × 2¼ in. (49.5 × 33 × 5.7 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, purchase, with funds from the Historic Art Association of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Mr. and Mrs. Morton L. Janklow, the Howard and Jean Lipman Foundation, Inc., and Hannelore Schulhof, 76.9. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art.

192

Chapter Four

are idea based or associational, and yet others are “portraits” of family members or friends, including Torr, Stieglitz, and the Strands. All fall into a subject category only roughly. The Critic (1925) (fig. 118), for instance, lampoons art criticism as a genre but also suggests a portrait of a particular critic, and Grandmother (1925) could be a portrait of Dove’s

own grandmother or, with its Bible concordance

brother were architects in Port Washington. He

title page, needlework, and pressed flowers and

drove in to Huntington in a sleigh one winter and

ferns, may intend a more general summoning of

stayed so long in a café there they had to bring a

6

grandmotherly associations. And Rhapsody in Blue,

wagon to take him home. He came home to his

Part I (fig. 100), which by virtue of its attached clock

boat one day with two bottles, making his wife

spring has been counted among the assemblages,

so mad that she threw them overboard. He dived

occupies multiple categories simultaneously, its ab-

in right after them and came up with one in

stract vocabulary and distinctive origins resisting

each hand. When tight he always sang “Shall We

any categorical pinning down.7

Gather at the River.”11

Dove created his assemblages while living shipboard, on the Mona. In a letter to Dorothy Rylander

As others have pointed out, in the assemblage the

Johnson, author of the only comprehensive pub-

kingfisher bird fashioned out of pieces of wood, the

lished study of these works, Georgia O’Keeffe wrote

snippet of sheet music, and the wooden ruler refer

that she believed that Dove worked in the medium

to Dusenberry’s aquatic talents, drunken singing,

of collage “because it was cheaper than painting

and professional life, respectively. Like the camera

and also it amused him—­once he was started on

lens in Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz that refers to Stieg-

it one thing after another came to him very easily with any material he found at hand.”8 Torr offered a slightly different explanation. “One day,” she recalled, “he said ‘I’m tired of putting brush strokes on canvas.’ After the next walk we took on the other side of the water in Halesite he collected leaves and things and made his first collage. He got some handsome old wire on Marshall’s dump.—­Put it, a blue chinese silk from a belt of mine in a beautiful white plaster rectangle.”9 Whatever the initial impetus, the assemblages clearly bear personal, biographical meaning. The “portrait” assemblages depict friends and family, while the landscape and seascape configurations evoke Dove’s Long Island environs. Others, including Rain, Clouds, and Starry Heavens (figs. 25, 89, 133), register Dove’s fascinations, including the nighttime sky and the weather, or his pleasures, as in Goin’ Fishin’.10 Dove’s own description of Portrait of Ralph Dusenberry (1924) (fig. 119) indicates that the items included in the work refer particularly to its subject, who was a good friend of Dove’s, and to Dove’s impression of him: Apropos of the hymn in the “Ralph Dusenberry,” the Dusenberrys lived on a boat near us in Lloyd’s Harbor. He could dive like a Kingfish and swim like a fish. Was sort of foreman on the Marshall Field Place. His father was a minister. He and his

Fig. 119  Arthur G. Dove, Portrait of Ralph Dusenberry, 1924, oil, folding wooden ruler, wood, and printed paper pasted on canvas, 22 × 18 in. (55.9 × 45.7 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949, 49.70.36. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

Things

193

litz or the monocle and newspaper clippings in

music included in Ralph Dusenberry, at the local Sal-

The Critic that designate reactionary art critics, the

vation Army. Similarly, Dove’s entry for December 7,

objects in the portrait of Dusenberry act as iden-

1924, reports that he “found willows” for use in the

tifying accoutrements. Such objects appear in all

assemblage Rain. In addition to describing Dove’s

the assemblage portraits, serving to evoke the per-

collecting of “leaves and things” and his scaveng-

sonality and pursuits of people significant within

ing of wire from a dump and silk from one of her

12

Dove’s personal or professional life. The works are

belts to make an early assemblage, Torr reported

in this way autobiographical, as much self-­portraits

their collecting of shells, driftwood, and stones “for

as they are pictures of family or friends. The assem-

paintings” in her diary entry for October 7, 1926, and

blages also functioned as agents within Dove’s re-

again in the entry for August 18, 1930, and she noted

lationships or as markers of his ties to others. The

on January 26, 1926, that Dove took a walk “looking

crafting of Ralph Dusenberry began a few days after

for materials” and had returned with some rusted

the Dusenberrys visited Dove and Torr on the Mona

metal.15 Dove created a freestanding sculpture from

and culminated several weeks later when Dove

weathered wood collected near his home and exhib-

showed the portrait to Dusenberry, who report-

ited the piece, titled Silver Cedar Stump, in his one-­

edly loved it. O’Keeffe purchased Rain and gave it

man show at Stieglitz’s Intimate Gallery in 1929.16

pride of place first in her New York apartment and

Dove used various terms to refer to his assem-

then in her home in Abiquiu, where it accompanied

blages: “things,” “stuff things,” “sculpture paintings,”

Dove’s Golden Storm as an emblem of the friendship

“painting sculptures,” “caricature paintings,” “por-

13

between the two artists. A letter to Stieglitz, writ-

traits,” even, simply, “paintings.” In many cases, he

ten in 1925 while Dove was at work on several of his

employed two different terms to refer to the same

assemblages, including The Sea I and Sea II, makes

work, calling, for example, Alfred Stieglitz a “thing”

clear that Dove understood these works to be re-

as well as a “portrait.”17 Yet the term “thing” predom-

lational mediums. “You always do such wonderful

inates throughout the diaries and Dove’s correspon-

things,” Dove wrote, “that thanking you seems su-

dence, as it does in his essay “An Idea,” suggesting

perfluous. The only way is with work even though

that this was his generic term of choice for all the

it be ‘sticks and stones.’ I seem to get on with them

assemblages, even if it did not preclude experimen-

14

194

better than ‘words.’” Here, Dove invokes a popular

tation with other names for use in describing them.

proverb (“sticks and stones will break my bones but

In a June 1925 letter to Stieglitz, for example, Dove

words will never hurt me”) to describe his facility at

wrote excitedly that “one of the ‘things’ of the sea

material expression over and against verbalization,

is as good as ‘Rain,’ I think,” referring to either The

and he describes his creations as material missives

Sea I or Sea II, which he had created the previous

for communicating his debt to Stieglitz.

month, in May.18 As he did that of his paintings,

As Torr suggested in remarking on the origin of

Dove detailed in writing the process of creating

Dove’s assemblage practice, the assemblages also

the assemblages, but instead of reporting on prim-

served to register and record, diary-­like, Dove’s hab-

ing, painting, and framing canvases, he recounted

its of looking, finding, and gathering. The diaries

his gathering and assembling of objects, including

indicate that Dove frequently went out “looking for

trips taken to stores to purchase materials. He char-

ideas” and also for materials for use in crafting his

acterized the process of fashioning one of the as-

works, as evidenced by the wide variety of things

semblages, Miss Woolworth, as a matter of her being

included in them. He recorded in his ship’s log trips

“borned.”19 Dove used this term metaphorically no

to Huntington in October and December of 1924 to

doubt; in 1929 he dubbed his works his “children,”

purchase materials for Alfred Stieglitz, Starry Heavens,

saying that if it were not for Stieglitz’s support they

and Ten Cent Store, and on October 20, 1924, he noted

would be “stillborn in the mind.”20 But his use of an

his purchase of “Shall We Gather at the River,” the

image of human reproduction to refer to the crea-

Chapter Four

tion of an assemblage is in keeping with the cate-

more intent on understanding what happened af-

gorical instability he instituted by way of his many

ter the fact of that inspiration. Claims that Dove’s

labels; the assemblages are paintings, sculptures,

innovative abstractions and constructions arose

caricatures, portraits, and things all at once, and

sui generis from the mind and hands of a solitary,

they oscillate playfully between the category of art

primordially original genius are specious, no ques-

and the status of a material entity or living being.

tion, but equally misleading are accounts that fash-

Dove’s assemblage practice had its precedents,

ion Dove’s assemblages as an intricate mixture of

of course, including contemporaneous experiments

influences, an empty cup into which was poured

with portraiture. The list includes Cubist collage,

a cocktail of the avant-­garde’s heavy hitters, with

the constructions of Picasso and Joan Miró, Dada

Duchamp and Surrealism as the dominant notes.

photomontage and the readymade, the Surrealist

Dove indisputably existed within a modernist and

object, Paul Klee’s fantastic and playful composi-

avant-­ garde genealogy. The Museum of Modern

tions, Francis Picabia’s mechanomorphic portraits,

Art included Ralph Dusenberry in its 1936 exhibi-

Charles Demuth’s poster portraits (which Stieglitz

tion Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, after all.24 The

featured alongside Dove’s assemblages in the 1925

literature has made Dove’s heritage perfectly clear,

Seven Americans exhibition), Gertrude Stein’s por-

dwelling on what might have influenced him and

traits of Matisse and Picasso published in Camera

why: experimental portraiture’s unseating of like-

Work in August 1912, Marius de Zayas’s caricatures,

ness, Cubism’s play with illusion and signification,

and the Merzbilder of Kurt Schwitters. All share

Duchamp’s multifaceted embrace of the object,

material qualities and conceptual concerns with

Surrealism’s habits of finding or collecting as well

Dove’s assemblages and, as has been discussed quite

as its flirtation with chance and automatism and,

sufficiently in the literature, Dove surely drew on

of course, its auto-­or psychobiographical bent, the

certain of these practices for inspiration. Dove’s

avant-­garde’s sustained and vigorous exploration

assemblages also anticipated work to come, includ-

of sculpture as a radically additive process, and so

ing the boxes of Joseph Cornell and the combines

forth. But it is not with genealogy that I am here

21

of Rauschenberg. Whether there exists a genetic

primarily concerned, and Dove himself was equally

link, so to speak, between Dove and these other

without such genealogical investment. Dove of

practitioners of collage and assemblage of course

course alluded to and evoked his artistic past, as all

remains an open question. In “The Pasted-­Paper

artists do, and his drawing on multiple precedents

Revolution,” Clement Greenberg describes Picasso

or contemporaneous practices in creating his own

and Braque mixing sand and other substances into

version of assemblage was itself an expression of

their paint as a way to call attention to the “tactile

the networks, interconnectivity, and forms of socia-

reality” of their pictures, thereby enhancing their

bility that he sought to call forth in his art. It would

corporeal presence. It may be that Dove, who em-

thus be disingenuous to claim that his assemblages

ployed both sand and sandpaper in his assemblages,

came out of nowhere, but the somewhere from

was attuned to such an effect in the Cubists’ work,

which they did come, as regards influence, was not

but it is possible that he was not.22 By the same to-

their most salient point.

ken, one could argue that Cornell’s boxes along with Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings occupy a branch at the apex of Dove’s family tree, yet one could just as easily discount such a familial link.23

A Case Study On December 15, 1924, Dove wrote in his diary that

I concern myself only briefly with questions of

he had purchased a sewing machine for Torr, who

influence in this chapter, for although I am inter-

was a regular sewer and mender. Two years later,

ested in other artistic practices that may have had

on December 8, 1926, Torr wrote that Dove had be-

a role in inspiring Dove to do what he did, I am far

gun work on the assemblage Hand Sewing Machine Things

195

Fig. 120  Arthur G. Dove, Hand Sewing Machine, 1927, oil, cut and pasted linen, resin, and graphite on sheet metal, with artist-­ made frame, 147⁄8 × 19¾ in. (37.8 × 50.2 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949, 49.92.2. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

(fig. 120), which he undertook while in the midst

operated sewing machine in black paint on a rect-

of creating his series of paintings from records.

angle of sheet metal. His version of the machine is

Work on Hand Sewing Machine commenced just a

stripped down, deprived of what would have been

few days after he started the Rhapsody in Blue pair,

in real life its more exaggerated curvilinear profile,

made while listening to Gershwin. By February 1927,

its floral decal decorations, and its gold-­painted

he had finished and framed Hand Sewing Machine,

manufacturer or model name. To the painted image

just a few days after completing Orange Grove in Cali-

of the sewing machine, Dove added four pieces of

fornia and a little less than a month after attach-

linen fabric: a V-­shaped swatch at the center of the

ing a clock spring to the surface of Rhapsody in Blue,

composition comprising two distinct fabric pieces

Part I. Along with the record paintings, Hand Sewing

separated by the arc of the hand crank and, toward

Machine was exhibited in Dove’s 1927 show at the

the top, a rectangular swatch with a semicircle

25

Intimate Gallery.

196

cut out from its left edge. All but the semicircular

Among Dove’s assemblages, Hand Sewing Ma-

swatch boast real machine stitching at their lower

chine veers closer to collage than to sculpture. Dove

edges. Black paint overlaps a portion of the small-

painted the basic form of a 1920s-­vintage hand-­

est, leftmost fabric piece, making it seem to disap-

Chapter Four

pear under the machine’s arm and then reappear in

color dots the surface, albeit sparingly: underneath

the semicircle created by the left edge of the ma-

the join of the machine’s arm and head, where Dove

chine and the upper half of the silver hand crank.

has streaked silver-­yellow and bright blue, and on

Scratches extend across the surface of the alu-

the machine’s base, where dots of yellow, gray, blue,

minum ground, suggesting that Dove sanded or

and red indicate loose threads or snips of cloth.

otherwise worked the metal plate. A section of un-

The composition as a whole connotes movement

painted aluminum configures the faceplate at the

and action, as intimated by the repeated, rhythmic

front of the machine, which sits underneath the

forms and the Cubo-­Futurist fragments but also

needle and conceals the bobbin, while short, precise

by the glint and gleam of the incised metal surface

strips of black paint articulate the small, rectangu-

which sets the field in motion as the viewer moves

lar cavities in the faceplate that receive the plung-

in front of it or as light conditions change. Even

ing needle. Dove fashioned the needle mechanism

the slightest shift in the direction of the beholder’s

from unpainted metal ground adorned with deli-

gaze triggers a kinetic effect, a shimmering across

cately applied black paint to indicate contours and

the sheet of metal but also a seeming flutter of fab-

what appears to be metallic paint to emphasize the

ric and bits of thread as well as the vibration of a

solidity and strength of the needle arm and presser

machine at work.

foot. Used to render a metal mechanism, the metal

Hand Sewing Machine exemplifies Dove’s assem-

paint and aluminum ground make that mechanism

blage work. In it congeal the disparate but related

oscillate between the real, as in real metal, and the

properties and procedures of the over two dozen

represented, as in a picture of a mechanical appara-

assemblages he created between 1924 and 1930, so a

tus. The same can be said for the metal shaft that

parsing of its pictorial parts serves to generate the

connects the wooden crank handle to the circular

terms and concepts fundamental to the arguments

crank, for Dove renders it, like the faceplate, by leav-

I make about the assemblages in this chapter. Each

ing bare the actual metal ground. A related effect

of the sections that follow begin with such a pars-

attends the wooden handle itself, which, rendered

ing before moving into a more general and com-

in oil paint, verges on the status of trompe l’oeil.

prehensive analysis of the meaning and methods

This suggests an homage to the trick-­the-­eye nails

of Dove’s assemblage practice, understood in light

of Picasso and Georges Braque, and fittingly so,

of his project as a whole as I have described it but

as this would be the very part of the machine one

also on their own terms, including those terms es-

would grasp if one could, were it a real thing and

tablished by the nature and limits of the sculptural

not simply a collaged conjuring of the machine’s

medium. My first chapter considered the thematics

26

appearance and operations. A vertical succession

of language, notation, translation, transmission,

of squares above and to the right of the needle that

encounter, and instrumentality that Dove produced

appear to have migrated from a Cubist or Futur-

in his art and across the activities of his life, with

ist composition suggest a mechanism in motion,

the circle and the wave as exemplary figures within

the up and down pump of the needle caused by a

this cluster of concepts and operations. The second

hand grasping the handle and winding the crank.

chapter undertook to explain the exact nature of

The staccato rhythm finds an echo in the staircase

Dove’s engagement with translation as constitut-

pattern forming the upper right edge of the central

ing a preoccupation with the idea of a network and

swatch and in the row of vertical semicylinders that

its attendant effects of interconnectivity and inter-

sits between this staircase edge and the needle arm.

subjectivity in which weather served as a model of

Similarly, semicircular scratches to the left of the

both pictorial representation and material action.

crank elicit its circular motion, as do the unpainted

And my third chapter considered Dove’s explora-

silver arc that splits the uppermost swatch and the

tion of the sonic in light of the insights developed

downward arc of the central piece of linen. Vibrant

in the first two chapters, arguing that the record Things

197

and radio paintings and other of his depictions of

operational aspects, all of which I signal here by

sound, as well as Dove’s practice overall, must be

the word “hand”: through the term’s association

understood in terms of materiality, embodied re-

with the bodily and touch as well as its status as a

lations, and the creation of novel representational

chief point of contact between the body and other

modes which in turn served as blueprints for new

material entities.27 I have noted Dove’s use of in-

modes of relation. Circles and waves, weather and

struments—­a straightedge, a phonograph, a radio,

weather science, sound and sound technology, and

and a barometer, among others—­and I have also

now “things”: in this fourth and final chapter, I elu-

noted the sheer ordinariness of this use. Less ordi-

cidate how Dove’s assemblages do and do not fit

nary was Dove’s translation of that use into artis-

within the interpretive paradigms generated thus

tic form, in the paintings made from records and

far even as I attribute to them the quality of a cur-

the radio and in his pictures of weather, all of them

riculum vitae, a summing up of the nature, or “life,”

marked by an insistence on carrying the materiality

of Dove’s work as well as the capacity for predicting

of record playing, radio listening, weather watch-

where he would want that work to go next. Put far

ing, and so forth, over into these works and, also,

more simply, if Dove took the properties of language

an insistence on intimating the body as part and

to be a model and potential medium for his art; if he

parcel of their material and operations. Hand Sew-

did so because language, understood broadly to in-

ing Machine exists suspended between image and

dicate myriad forms of notation, possessed capac-

thing, a state captured by one critic’s description of

ities like translation and interconnection that he

the work as “a treatise in design and color, and yet

wished to incarnate in his work; if these capacities

real enough to make a shop girl shudder.”28 Just as

allowed for the gathering of putatively distinct or

the record paintings register both a body engaging

incompatible entities and phenomena into produc-

a machine and the operations of that machine, and

tive systems so as to achieve both a new kind of

as the weather paintings register the many bodies,

pictorial form and a superintegrated, supercharged

instruments, terrains, and graphic records of the

condition or mode of being, then the assemblages,

discipline of meteorology, Hand Sewing Machine as

as “things,” can be taken to be material propositions

a consequence of its doubled identity inventories

for these new forms: of language, of art, and of be-

the operations of a body making use of a machine

ing. Acknowledging the sheer ambition of such

to produce a result, in this case a new or mended

an undertaking—­the hope and hubris with which

item for the body’s own use, raw fabric and thread

Dove conducted his search for the new in art and

translated into a functional item. The sewing ma-

life—­this chapter forecasts my closing observations

chine’s circular crank and the trick-­the-­eye invi-

in the epilogue, in which I contemplate Dove’s em-

tation to grab its handle and give it a turn call to

brace, seemingly paradoxical, of mistranslation and

mind a hand winding a phonograph so as to cause

blocked communication, his embrace of the failure

a record to spin, in each case activating a needle so

to connect, within his formulation of an intersub-

as to create the desired effect, be it stitching or the

jective art.

reproduction of sound. Like the spiral motifs that populate the record paintings and that transform

Hand

198

those paintings into incarnations of the properties, parts, and procedures of the phonograph, or

As both an image of a thing—­a sewing machine—­

the motifs that instrumentalize the weather paint-

and a thing itself, one that flaunts its objecthood,

ings, the metal ground of Hand Sewing Machine es-

Hand Sewing Machine advertises Dove’s investment

tablishes a sameness or equivalency between the

in materiality, by which I mean very basically the

thing represented and the representation, between

material, object-­ filled world, human and animal

the metal parts, especially the faceplate of the sew-

bodies included, and this world’s phenomenal and

ing machine, and the work itself. Both the faceplate,

Chapter Four

where needle, thread, and fabric converge, and the

face in the Steinbergian sense: it does so literally,

metal plate, on which Dove combines paint, graph-

receiving many forms of input—­oil paint, pencil,

ite, fabric, thread, and scratched or sanded lines,

fabric, and thread—­that it transforms into a fin-

serve as a ground of production, the surface that

ished assemblage, as if a graphic synthesis of data,

gives rise to a completed work through procedures

as well as figuratively, in that as an assemblage it

of conversion or recombination.

represents but also materially executes the work of

One cannot know whether Dove created Hand

a sewing machine, which receives disparate mate-

Sewing Machine on the horizontal or vertical, but

rials so as to convert them through combining and

the equivalency established between faceplate

binding procedures into a functional whole.

and metal ground suggests that for this work he

Such transmutation calls to mind the transla-

had the horizontal plane in mind. The machine-­

tions carried out by a phonograph, radio, weather

stitched fabric pasted to the surface of the assem-

instrument, or weather map as well as the horizon-

blage calls to mind the horizontal passage of cloth

tal surfaces that support or receive these translating

over the faceplate as it is fed under the presser foot,

devices and their material outcomes. The tabletop

further tipping Hand Sewing Machine toward a hor-

work of Dove’s sewing machine—­the work it de-

izontal orientation. In “Other Criteria,” Leo Stein-

picts, executes, or exists as a result of—­also stands

berg employed the term “flatbed picture plane” to

alongside other forms of work performed by Dove,

characterize the transformed nature and content of

including his artistic work as well as his manual la-

certain art of the 1950s and 1960s as exemplified by

bor, to which he and Torr gave equal weight and

the work of Robert Rauschenberg. Inspired by the

space in their correspondence and diaries. Notes

flatbed printing press, Steinberg’s flatbed picture

about the progress of Dove’s art appear together

plane encompassed a shift in orientation from the

with regular and detailed reports on Torr’s sewing

vertical, which corresponded to erect human pos-

and mending work as well as her other domestic

ture and evoked visual experience, to the horizontal,

labors and in combination with accounts of Dove’s

an orientation that, as Steinberg put it, “makes its

home and automobile repairs, boat care, labor in

symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops,

the field, and crafting of supports and frames for

studio floors, charts, bulletin boards—­any receptor

his pictures. Dove and Torr devoted at least as much

surface on which objects are scattered, on which

ink in the 1920s, while living aboard the Mona, to

data is entered, on which information may be re-

recounting the constant upkeep of their boat—­

ceived, printed, impressed—­ whether coherently

scrubbing, stripping, sanding, painting, varnish-

or in confusion.” This new orientation, Steinberg

ing, patching, rewiring, and reorganizing—­as they

wrote, did not analogize the human experience of

did to their artistic undertakings.

seeing nature, but, rather, served as an analogue for 29

Dove appears to have relished working with

Of course, Dove’s Hand

his hands. Paul Dove, Dove’s brother, recalled that

Sewing Machine accommodates only inexactly Stein-

when they were boys, Dove “made many quite com-

berg’s account of the reoriented picture plane, and

plicated amusing things for me. Windmills run by

I do not suggest that Dove’s assemblages foreshad-

electric motors, even a camera which took excellent

owed or anticipated Rauschenberg’s combines. But

photographs on glass” as well as other “electrically

the shift from wall to tabletop and from vision to

operated toys” and “telegraph instruments.”30 Dove

operations described by Steinberg provides an apt

regularly made his own frames, and he found en-

characterization of the substance and gist of Dove’s

grossing the properties and potential of artistic

sewing machine assemblage. This is the case be-

materials and media, prompting his regular con-

cause Hand Sewing Machine insists on its own be-

sultation of technical manuals for advice regarding

longing as much to the realm of work as to that of

formulating and mixing his supports, mediums,

art, and also because it functions as a receptor sur-

and paints. As they do his music listening and

“operational processes.”

Things

199

music making, the diaries assiduously record the

a process in and of itself, in the physical act of using

details of Dove’s constant experimentation with

the hands to manipulate or translate information,

media, including brush and ink, wax emulsion, and

material, or phenomena, and he was clearly curious

crayon, and his letters to Torr describe his various

about the very physicality or embodiment of such

experiments with varnishes, emulsions, and pig-

an act, in part because he found so compelling the

ments and detail his insights regarding their partic-

properties of materials themselves, which he ex-

31

ular qualities and capacities. Dove corresponded

plored and with which he gained fluency during the

regularly with artists and nonartists alike regard-

act of making. It follows that he would have imag-

ing materials, including an eight-­ page letter to

ined his assemblage work and, by extension, his ar-

Elizabeth McCausland detailing his selection and

tistic work as a whole, as unfolding analogously to

preparation of pigments, and on one occasion, he

other of his manual undertakings and, also, that he

sent O’Keeffe a “medium to try” used by “the boys

would have wished for his assemblages, by way of

in Egypt.” He himself tried out unconventional me-

their material, their operations, and their effects,

dia, sometimes on request, as appears to have been

to make that analogical relationship manifest.33

the case when he received a shipment of sheets of

The remarks of Waldo Frank, writing about Dove in

Bakelite, an early plastic used in the manufacture

1926 after having seen his exhibition at Stieglitz’s

of radios and other electrical devices, at the request

Intimate Gallery, which included assemblages as

of its inventor, Leo Baekeland, “with a view to de-

well as paintings on metal and glass, reflect such a

termining the suitability of the material for paint-

reciprocity among actions and occupations, artistic

ing.” Dove exchanged numerous letters with a Bing-

and everyday. Dove, Frank wrote, “is a craftsman,

hamton, New York–­based physician by the name of

sober slow, exact: the proper sort for the mute busi-

Oswald H. Boltz regarding “Temperol,” a painting

ness of birth. He is probably more free of philosoph-

medium that Boltz had invented. And on one oc-

ical systems than the ordinary motor mechanic; he

32

is certainly more free of the prophetic gesture than

The fact that, as a person, Dove made things

the usual advertising agent. This perhaps explains

and performed various kinds of work sets him apart

why his paintings . . . live so humbly within their

from exactly nobody. But the fact that he took the

home-­made frames.”34

casion, Dove even tried his hand at textile design.

time to record these acts certainly does. And the

200

A sampling of Torr’s diary notes from a two-­

seamlessness among these various forms of mate-

week period during the time Dove was at work on

rial engagement or making on Dove’s part speaks

the record paintings and completed Hand Sewing

volumes. To read Dove’s diaries, notes, and corre-

Machine evokes the collective noise of Dove’s pro-

spondence as a collective is to move from one form

cesses, those of his various forms of work, including

of handwork or manual labor to another without

painting and frame making, as well as the sounds

noticeable interruption, as if the ultimate purpose

of his music listening: “A[rthur] started paintings

of these many texts was to produce a narrative of a

from Stravinsky records”; “A. grinding sewing ma-

body variously inhabiting the physical world and at

chine. Concert in evening”; “A. sand papered and

work with things in this world. Without suggest-

varnished 3 frames, the 3 ‘music’ paintings—­they

ing that Dove drew no distinction between, for ex-

look beautiful”; “A. cut class & framed ‘Sewing Ma-

ample, making a painting and painting his boat, or

chine’”; “A. working on Stravinsky thing but tore

crafting an assemblage and repairing a boiler—­of

it up.”35 Dove’s description in a letter to Stieglitz of

course he would have—­one can surmise that these

his and Torr’s move to a larger farmhouse on the

various forms of handwork and labor, because they

Geneva property generates a similar intermingling

had in common a commingling of body and mate-

of actions, media, and phenomena across myriad

rial or machine, existed for him on a continuum.

aspects of their daily life: “This room here is rather

Without a doubt Dove was interested in making as

fine, the kitchen. The walls were gone to pieces, so

Chapter Four

we used linseed oil and aluminum paint, over old

equally to Dove’s assemblage practice, not least be-

paper, plaster, holes and all.—­Silver has covered

cause he referred to the assemblages as “things.” “I

many sins. . . . There are white ceilings here, white

would like to make something that is real in itself,”

doors, a black surbase [strip of molding] and what

Dove stated elsewhere, “that does not remind any-

36

shall be a Mars Violet floor.” A series of substitu-

one of any other thing, and that does not have to

tions transforms the kitchen’s walls into a primed

be explained.”38 It is impossible to know what Dove

and painted canvas, the room as a whole into a gal-

meant, exactly, by “real in itself,” or his intentions in

lery, the floor into a smear of deep red-­violet pig-

stating his preference for “things” over “something

ment, and the labor of home improvement into

about things,” although in a typewritten version of

the manufacture of art. Likewise, in Dove’s diary,

the second statement he added the phrase “like the

the sounds of Dove’s handwork—­ scraping, tear-

letter A for instance,” suggesting a call for a mode

ing, painting, sanding—­overlap and merge with

of signification in which signs and referents came

concurrent musical sounds. Taken together, Torr’s

close to a state of nondifferentiation.39 His com-

diary entries and Dove’s letter highlight not just

ments contain an implicit rejection of likeness and

the coincidence but the easy entanglement or in-

illusionism even as they stop short of calling for a

terchangeability of Dove’s various endeavors, the

wholesale plunge into nonobjectivity. In valorizing

blending of art making, handwork, and music play-

“pure painting” and “things,” Dove conjures neither

ing and listening in his daily life. Dove of course

absolute abstraction nor does he advocate for an art

did not set out to make this point in his letter, nor

of the readymade. Rather, he appears to stake his

did Torr when she recorded Dove’s activity, but both

claim halfway between the two, at a point defined

still serve to document not only what the two reg-

by substitution and recombination, where things

ularly did but also the significance they assigned

do not look like other things because they remain

to various activities in their lives, thus further illu-

themselves (fabric, shells, metal, leaves, twigs, mon-

minating and confirming the perceived seamless-

key fur, and so forth), but at the same time are not

ness among these pursuits. Torr’s effortless shift-

themselves, exactly, because they have been made

ing between myriad undertakings asserts a sense

to substitute for something else (chiffon poses as

of continuity among all acts and their objects, a

paint and waves, a metal sheet reconfigures as metal

network of various states of sensing and forms of

sewing machine or telegraph machine parts).40 As

action that places sanding a piece of wood and the

materials, these things are malleable but undergo

scratch and scrape that resulted on a continuum

no literal change, as if readymades granted the ca-

with listening to a Stravinsky record. In this way,

pacity to be something else, the same capacity that

sanding transforms into a sound technology, and

allows paint to take the form of a body or a land-

listening to a record on a phonograph into a form of

scape, but not the properties necessary to morph

handwork, thereby revealing all the parts of Dove’s

into and inhabit the form of that thing. As such, the

material practice to be crucially of a piece.

assemblages as a group constitute a demonstration

In October of 1929, Dove wrote in a letter to

on a very large scale of Dove’s dedication to both

Stieglitz that he was “more interested now than

materiality and to the native properties of mate-

ever in doing things than doing something about

rials. They spell out and make literal Dove’s belief

things. The pure paintings seem to stand out from

that art’s ideal state consists in its entanglement

those related too closely to what the eye sees there.

with the world and, also, that art’s entanglement

To choose between here and there—­I should say

with the world can serve as a model for forging

here. The recent philosophy and fiction also tend

material connections among diverse physical and

37

to strengthen that idea.” These remarks ostensibly

phenomenal entities. The state of interconnection

refer to abstraction in painting and have been inter-

or constitutive relation embodied by a piece of fab-

preted in the Dove literature thusly. Yet they speak

ric intimates such a bond, as in the piece of fabric Things

201

202

glued to the surface of Hand Sewing Machine that is

dicated, would be to create a literal representation of

simultaneously a discrete, self-­contained, single ob-

ruggedness, such as “a stump or tree or some rock.”41

ject and a system. As a combination of elements and

It should be clear by now that line was import-

qualities—­real fabric, represented fabric, a likeness

ant for Dove, for it served as a fundamental, almost

of paint, an intimation of canvas support or table

primal connective tissue within his practice, as a

top—­this fabric swatch is simply itself even as it

figurative as well as a literal binding tie. Recall the

creates on its own accord a compound whole or in-

simultaneously casting and suturing lines in Me and

tegrated complex.

the Moon as well as the ribbonlike forms whipping

As further explanation: In the “Notes” printed

about the sky in Sun Drawing Water and Seagull Motif

in the pamphlet that accompanied Dove’s 1929

(Violet and Green). Consider also the emphatic lines

exhibition, which included his weathered wood

throughout Dove’s paintings, including R 25-­A and

sculpture, Silver Cedar Stump, Dove presented three

A Reasonable Facsimile (figs. 20, 21), that serve as bor-

examples of the sort of motifs he sought to create

ders or points of intersection between forms trans-

in his art, forms that would sustain the properties

lating from one state or hue into another. And bear

of line he wanted to produce. For the purpose of

in mind the myriad graphic permutations of lines

his discussion, he chose “ruggedness” as the idea

that Dove invoked or utilized across his practice,

he wished these motifs to express, an admittedly

among them shorthand, geometry, record grooves,

“blunt way,” as he put it, to illustrate his point. Each

signatures, electrical wires, and the isolines of a

motif combined color notes and a particular qual-

weather map. Think, too, of Dove’s insistent charac-

ity of line. The first paired “Prussian blue black; raw

terization of line as the thing that served to instan-

sienna with a touch of light gray, and transparent

tiate substantial and essential relations between

brown mixed with burnt sienna and a bit of white”

entities—­between pictorial forms, between minds,

with a line motif as constituted by “the lines in a

and between conditions of being—­so as to produce

lump of coal.” The second motif paired “raw sienna

complex, interconnected systems out of disparate,

with a touch of white; silver, burnt brown wood

conventionally incompatible parts. Immediately

color dark” with a line motif comprising “the line

following his account of his three exemplary motifs

in a grain of wood.” The third and final motif com-

in the 1929 “Notes,” Dove further refined his sense of

bined silver and ultramarine ash with “pure straight

the significance and capacity of line. He described

line,” unattached to an object such as coal or wood.

his effort to “put a line around, in, and through an

In the first two examples, Dove located the motif’s

idea” so as to summon a unifying and interconnect-

linear component in a thing, most likely referring

ing condition of light. Coming on the heels of his

to the representation of that thing in a painting

insistence that while the exemplary motifs must

that featured the colors specified for that particular

not consist in an act of imitation—­painting a pic-

motif. But his language—­“a grain of wood,” “a lump

ture of a stump, tree, or rock—­they might still incor-

of coal”—­evacuates any distinction between repre-

porate the lines already present in material objects,

sentation and the real, leaving the impression that

such as those in coal and wood, thereby eliminating

he might as well be talking about actual objects, real

the middle term, representation, and going straight

wood and real coal, and about finding ideal motifs

to the source, Dove’s formulation of putting a line

in these objects’ actual forms and characteristics.

around, in, and through an idea grants an impos-

Dove closed his discussion of exemplary motifs in

sible status or capacity to line. That is, it posits line

the “Notes” by explaining the effects that would

as the entity responsible for bringing into being an

arise from them. “This would seem to be enough to

actual, material exchange between an artist’s work

work with,” he wrote, “and let these forms as orga-

and its referents in the physical world, one imag-

nized motifs go through each other and take care

inable only within the confines of Dove’s theoriza-

of themselves.” The undesirable alternative, he in-

tion of line as a thing that can be extracted literally

Chapter Four

from objects and put into art. One should not paint

I would even suggest that in the act of making his

a lump of coal or a piece of wood, Dove said, but

assemblages, Dove in fact turned over the problem

one might directly incorporate the objecthood or

of intersubjectivity to things, even if temporarily,

the properties of these things into one’s work, using

for a period of five to six years, to stuff extracted

line as an extranormal medium of exchange.

from the inanimate, object world, in an attempt to

And Dove did, as evidenced by Silver Cedar Stump,

find a model for use in fathoming a state of radi-

a sculpture created not by imitating the appearance

cal interconnection. With the assemblages, rather

of wood through the manipulation of marble, clay,

than making things act like humans by imagining

or bronze, or even wood, which might be carved to

or incarnating their capacity for animation or life,

look like another version of itself, but by extracting

thus enabling their consort with humans and their

pieces of wood from the world, leaving them un-

capacity to interconnect, he mined things for their

changed save for a bit of combining and rearrang-

properties and capacities, among them a form of

ing, and setting them alongside a group of paintings

agency, if not aliveness, so as to bequeath those

in a gallery space. The wood here is neither wood as

properties and capacities to us, with “us” conceived

such nor a representation of wood; it consists of an

of as objects or things in our own right. This en-

extraction of wood and the enlisting of that wood,

tailed a surprising and seemingly paradoxical shift-

in its literal, material form, into the service of mo-

ing of the burden of intersubjectivity away from the

tif making. Transformation does occur; the wood is

living to the nonliving, the rejection of an animate

not the wood itself, even as it is just and precisely

blending and interrelating in favor of imagining a

this. It is now a motif of the sort that Dove wished

kind of across-­the-­board death—­not a matter of

to create in his painting, one fashioned out of the

ceasing to exist, exactly, but a tilt toward the inan-

material, in a literal sense, of the world, out of the

imate and its qualities nonetheless.42

lines, namely, of that wood’s grain. Hence it exists as

I will say more about what I mean by this tilt

a sculpture that exemplifies what painting, accord-

in the following sections. But before moving on, I

ing to Dove, should do. Silver Cedar Stump hovers

return to Rain (fig. 25) and offer it as a final example

between representation and reality—­it is neither/

of Dove’s material swerve. In this assemblage, Dove

nor—­and it also exists suspended between the arts,

placed a large handful of twigs between two panes of

between painting and sculpture, for it suggests that

glass; drops and strings of rubber cement on the top

good paintings might be created out of something

pane double as rain, as do the downward-­pointing

other than paint, that things, in their capacity to

twigs and streaked metal ground that supports the

be themselves and not themselves simultaneously,

whole. Despite his reputation as an artist keenly at-

could aid Dove in navigating his way out of the bind

tuned to the living rhythms of the natural world,

of abstraction, a vocabulary ever in thrall to the idea

in Rain Dove arrests motion and stymies growth.

that art is an act of representation, even if what is

Extracting the twigs from nature renders them life-

represented is not the world. Things could aid him

less, a state that Dove appears to have accentuated

on his way toward what he himself called, in the

by orienting their upper ends downward in direct

“Notes,” “extraction, gravitation toward a certain

opposition to their natural pattern of growth. Of

direction.”

course, as Dove noted in the diary, he harvested the

By evoking in this instance gravitational force

twigs used in Rain from a willow tree, a type that

to characterize extraction, his chosen term for the

would come to have special significance for him, so

fundamental operation of his art, Dove makes clear

their downward plunge in the assemblage makes

that it is within the object world—­the world of

perfect sense.43 Yet the inevitable allusion to weep-

things, of stuff, of materiality and the properties

ing, as in weeping willow, in conjunction with the

of materials—­that he wished to remain, that the

sleeting rain puts the viewer in mind of mourning.

objects of that world held great promise for him.

By ensuring that the rubber cement, which fixes the Things

203

twigs to the lower pane of glass, remains clear to

by Stieglitz’s Equivalents, greatly admired by Dove,

view, Dove further emphasizes not just the quality

which excerpted a square of sky and displaced it

of a particular material—­the binding agent’s vis-

onto a two-­dimensional, paper surface, transform-

cous compliance when wet, its squishy resistance

ing that patch of sky into a graspable thing. In the

when dry—­but also the arresting and immobiliz-

case of the assemblages, however, Dove extracted a

ing effects of assemblage. This effect stands analo-

thing in order to make a thing, swerving far closer

gous to the pinning of entomological specimens to

toward the guise of a naturalist collector than

a display mount or the subjecting of a once-­living

Stieglitz ever did. Like Dove’s notes and poems, in-

creature to the permanent paralysis of taxidermy, a

cluding the verse that inventoried the contents of

technique evoked by the material of other of Dove’s

his kitchen table, the assemblages extract, gather,

assemblages, including the gleaming white-­yellow

and array, making the world over into a kind of at-

breastbone nailed to a wooden plank in The Intel-

tenuated or fractional still life or nature morte.

lectual (1925) and the thin strip of monkey pelt pre-

On the last page of Dove and Torr’s diary for

44

served in Dove’s Monkey Fur (1926) (figs. 128, 144).

1924, under the handwritten heading “Idea,” Dove

Even the metal plate of Hand Sewing Machine, most

jotted a few lines, grouped like stanzas, including

likely aluminum, conjures lifelessness, for it is com-

the following cluster: “Rainy day—­/ Willow tree on

posed of an element that was at one time a vital

glass, rain drops, another / glass country beyond—­.”

if not literally animate part of nature, now ossified

This sounds like a straightforward description of

through the processes of ore extraction and indus-

the twigs, rubber-­cement drips, and two panes of

trial manufacture and cut to size. The mourning of

glass that compose Rain, and it is likely that Rain,

Rain points directly to such loss, but only to cele-

which was reported “finished” by Torr just a few

brate it as the potential for a new form of life.

pages earlier in the diary, in the entry for December

In a letter to Stieglitz, written while Dove was

13, inspired Dove’s words here.46 It may also have

on a camping trip with his son, William, and some

been that an actual rainy day compelled Dove’s

of William’s friends, including Charles Van Wyck

musings, drawing his thoughts toward his assem-

Brooks, son of Van Wyck Brooks, Dove described

blage but also out his window, both of which—­a

looking at the scenery as a matter of extracting

depiction of rain, a rainstorm seen through a pane

ready-­made motifs from it for use in his art, visu-

of glass—­easily qualify as the thing described in the

ally excerpting items from their surround. “It is

verse. Or perhaps neither assemblage nor weather

quite peaceful here and almost too much on the

precipitated the writing of these lines. Whatever

side of beautiful scenery,” he reported, “but there

the case, the short poem eclipses the possibility

are some stronger things. A sluice gate for instance

of distinguishing between things in the world

of rusty used iron, warm grey weathered wood, and

(the “real”) and things extracted from that world

a strip of blue grey water which I have been at this

(something other than the real). In this way, Dove’s

45

204

morning.” Like countless artists before him, Dove

lines serve as a cipher for Dove’s assemblage work

sought motifs in the landscape, but rather than rep-

as a whole, illuminating this work’s stubborn fix on

resenting them in their natural state and context,

materiality along with its desire to put stilled ag-

he extracted them (a gate, a strip of water, a piece

glomerations of materials on display. The ease with

of wood), literally so in his assemblages, removing

which the reader of Dove’s words slips between, on

them from proximate terrain, arraying them with

the one hand, imagining Dove seeing, sensing, and

other object-­motifs, and putting them on display

then recording his impression of looking through

by nailing, gluing, or tying them down, anchoring

his window onto a rainy day and, on the other, en-

them to an array as so many gems, fossils, or but-

visioning a set of objects that in combination re-

terfly specimens in a natural history museum. One

constitute the materials and phenomena of that

could compare such extraction to that performed

selfsame rainy view, confirms Dove’s intention with

Chapter Four

the assemblages to create more than a connection

construed his assemblages as templates for being

or continuum among humans and things. This ef-

so as to leave one wondering just what might arise

fortless back-­and-­forth between life and its lack,

from such agglomerations—­not the death of paint-

between a human seeing things and those things

ing, to be sure but, rather, a new form of subjec-

existing in and of themselves without being per-

tivity partially predicated on the capacities of the

ceived, points toward Dove’s wish to intermingle

inanimate world and, thus, on the absence of usual

or exchange human properties and capacities with

forms of life, conventionally understood. Stieglitz’s

those of the material, object world, to array bod-

Equivalents isolate portions of the sky much as do

ies alongside things, and to make bodies in the vein

the eye miniatures discussed by Grootenboer, as if

of things, within an extraordinary network arising

in their transposition of reality they too possess the

from just such material interchange. In her essay

ability to look, a sky’s-­eye perspective that fashions

on Stieglitz’s Equivalents, Rosalind Krauss writes

the photograph-­as-­object into a subject standing in

that Stieglitz’s images assert “the photograph as

equivalent relation to its viewers, ready to engage

an absolute transposition of reality.” Photographs

and interact.

are this, she says, not because they do not resemble reality in size, scale, or hue, but “because as a set of marks on paper made by light” the photograph has

Sewing

“no more ‘natural’ an orientation to the axial direc-

But what exactly did Dove want from the object

tions of the real world than do those marks in a book

world and its putative lifelessness? What made at-

47

that we know as writing.” Dove’s assemblages anal-

tachment to and extraction from materiality—­from

ogously transpose the human subject’s relationship

things, from work, from material phenomena—­for

to the real by conjecturing an exchange between

him de rigueur? There exists an extensive literature

people and inanimate things, one that imagines the

on the nature and properties of material artifacts—­

de-­centering of the human by way of the human

things, objects, material culture, or whatever one

translating into object, or at least assuming the ob-

chooses to call them—­and on their status and func-

ject’s hypothesized capacities as a model for exis-

tion within human society and culture. Most of this

tence. Dove’s attachment to the Equivalents as well

writing, the bulk of it from the fields of philosophy,

as his preoccupation with language and notational

sociology, anthropology, literature, and the history

systems, including myriad forms of writing, surely

of science, Dove would not have or could not have

arose from his sense, articulated down the line by

read. Yet having spent several years thinking about

Krauss, of both photography and writing as tem-

Dove, his works, and his words and having as a re-

plates for such game-­changing transposition and

sult arrived at the conclusion that, for Dove, things

translation, blueprints for a shifting of the axis of

really mattered—­ and also capitalizing on the

relations among living and nonliving things. Han-

happy coincidence that he called his assemblages

neke Grootenboer has described a similar effect of

“things”—­I have turned to this literature in search

transposition as generated by miniature eye por-

of both concepts and terms so that I might make

traits, popular in Europe in the late eighteenth and

sense of and productively characterize the status

early nineteenth centuries. Eye miniatures elim-

and desired function of materiality within Dove’s

inate the features of a subject’s face in favor of a

assemblage practice.49 Following from my first ques-

single, painted eye that, in its framed isolation,

tion concerning just what Dove wished to cull from

converts into a material thing that stares back at

the properties of the object world, I pose another,

the viewer. Because of this reversal of agency, eye

more specific query, one encouraged by the wealth

portraits, she writes, “offer little to remind us of the

of writing on this world, and, of course, by Dove’s

genre of portraiture; we may wonder what is left

assemblages themselves, and one assemblage in

here of painting as such.”48 In like fashion, Dove

particular: What does a hand sewing machine do? Things

205

Well, it sews. That is, it joins things together

Woolworth) (1922), a gouache-­and-­charcoal view on

by employing a needle to pass thread repeatedly

paper of a tumult of buildings against a cerulean

through pieces of material, usually fabric. As the

sky, presents a more proximate parallel. The paper

needle moves, the thread is pulled through the

cutout of a sunburst sewn with thread to the pic-

fabric so as to form stitches that bind one piece

ture’s lower edge suggests a viewer looking down

to another. Dove’s paintings made from radio lis-

on the city from a point far beyond the earth’s at-

tening, Me and the Moon (1937) and The Moon Was

mosphere, perhaps alongside one of Dove’s mock-

Laughing at Me (1937), produce an effect of stitch-

ing moons. Dove, too, made sewing a literal subject

ing by virtue of the shapes and lines that weave

of his work, in assemblages like Grandmother, which

through and bind together their parts, pointing

includes a section of needlework, and Hand Sewing

both to the threads that connect and collectivize

Machine, which represents the action of a hand-­

widely dispersed radio listeners as well as to more

cranked needle, boasts actual machine-­ stitched

general connective tissues, including the earth’s

fabric, and serves as an operational analog to

sound, atmosphere and the varieties of waves—­

Dove’s assembling work. Sewing as subject matter

light, and so forth—­that travel through it. Dove did

underscores Dove’s formulation of stitching as an

not sew together the parts of his assemblages, of

imperative process within his practice and marks

course, but his fastening of one element to another

the assemblages as particularly salient testing

with a binding mechanism, such as glue, staples, or

grounds for the potential of sewing for his work, al-

nails, in order to create a whole made of many parts

beit in slightly different fashion than Man Ray and

resembles the procedures of sewing: the gathering,

the others. When Dove witnessed a fire in 1934, he

cutting, aligning, and fastening involved in mak-

breathlessly described it in a letter to Torr. “It was

ing a piece of clothing or a patchwork quilt. Sewing

a beauty of a fire,” he wrote, “with the high tension

of course served as both a motif and a technique

wires running white violet fireworks all over the

for members of the Dada and Surrealist groups.

building white light ran out the wires to a switch

Think of Man Ray’s L’Enigme d’Isidore Ducasse (1920),

box on a pole and set off an octave higher color

which features a sewing machine draped in a wool

pinwheel in violet orange. . . . Sounded as though

blanket and secured with string. Man Ray’s work

someone had run a zipper down between two rows

drew its inspiration from the line in Les Chantes

of machine guns.” Dove enlisted several media in

de Maldoror (1869), written by Ducasse under the

his attempt to capture these effects: “Made drawing

pseudonym Comte de Leautréamont and made fa-

of it and two photographs with the little camera.

mous by the Paris and New York avant-­garde, con-

Made 3 small paintings after lunch of same to get

cerning a chance encounter “on a dissecting table,

motif clear. . . . Went out and made other drawing

of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” Consider

again and am going to try that sewing without a

also Mr. Knife and Miss Fork (Answers all the wishes of

needle stuff.”51 Dove’s invocation of sewing in his

René Crevel) (1944), in which Man Ray attached an

description of picturing a fire characterized by

embroidery frame stretched with netting onto a

the dazzling traverse of current and “white light”

cloth ground; André Breton’s poem-­object Jack the

across electrical wire and a sound like a violent zip-

Ripper (1942), where stitches of embroidery thread

pering demonstrates the appropriateness of char-

secure a postcard to a piece of paper; and Marcel

acterizing his practice in terms of stitching while

Duchamp’s Network of Stoppages (1914), where the

also making clear that for him, such stitching was

chance-­derived curves of the 3 Standard Stoppages

to be understood as a connecting and conducting

(1913–­1914) multiply and assume a diagram for-

line or wire. Likewise, the machine stitching in

mat, each line pinned to the canvas with several

Hand Sewing Machine does double duty, threading

John Marin’s

through the pieces of fabric but also appearing to

Lower Manhattan (Composing Derived from Top of

fasten those pieces to the metal plate underneath,

staple-­like “stitches” of red paint.

206

50

Chapter Four

thus underscoring the role of sewing as a process,

in the wake of the passing white-­hot charge and

material as well as figurative, in Dove’s assemblage

the grounding of that charge through a transfer

art, one akin to the transport of electrical charge

of energy from bolt to earth, the Zs thus acting

and sparks over high tension cables or the gnash-

as sutures that bind together earth and sky. Over-

ing of a zipper’s teeth as they are pressed together

seeing the whole transaction is a circular flare of

to form a linear length of interlocking bonds. In

yellow paint, moderated by a touch of black, that

an untitled study he made some time between 1941

hovers above the flash—­a diminutive echo of the

and 1946 (fig. 121), Dove slashed a zigzag of bright

larger circles that populate Dove’s paintings, here

blue across a crackling sky and then repeated the

a summary condensation of the intense energy of

Z form twice in the ground below, once in crim-

the entire scene.

son and then in midnight blue. Probably meant to

In a handwritten essay under the heading “What

connote lightning, the slicing color wraps around

I should like to do at present is,” Dove described his

a graphite armature, tracking Dove’s thin pencil

goal as a draughtsman. “In drawing,” he wrote, “to

lines as it moves in space. Alternately taut and pli-

keep any pencil on the paper and the line a continu-

able, these pencil lines in combination with their

ous unit sensitive to every thought going on within

aura of blue evoke a charge zipping across a wire.

whether objects, ideas, or their meeting places. Then

The earthbound Z forms underscore its reverber-

as you go over it the color and form should develop

ating force, and double as charred paths laid down

the consciousness of that line.” This, he said, would

Fig. 121  Arthur G. Dove, [Landscape], ca. 1941–­1946, watercolor, gouache, and graphite on cream watercolor paper, 315⁄16 × 4 in. (10.00125 × 10.16 cm). Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (www.pafa.org). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William Dove, 1985.55.3.

Things

207

Fig. 122  Top, Arthur G. Dove, Barn Next Door, 1934, watercolor and black ink on paper, 5 × 7 in. (12.7 × 17.78 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1934. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Fig. 123  Bottom, Arthur G. Dove, Over Seneca Lake, 1935, watercolor and pencil on paper, 5 × 7 in. (12.7 × 17.78 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired probably 1937. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

“tell me much more of what was going on within

line demarcates the barn’s façade, forward roofline,

just as your life tells you eventually what you have

and side wall before it dissolves into the inky black

52

done and why you have done it.” Extraordinary in

of the tree at right. In Over Seneca Lake, only three

its ambition, such a drawing practice would regis-

lines, rendered in pencil, constitute the foreground

ter every thought or thing it encountered, creating

forms—­likely shoreline, trees, and water—­and the

out of the trajectory of a continuous ink or pencil

relative consistency of Dove’s line throughout the

line a collection of ideas, sensations, and objects on

scene creates the effect of continuous, conjoined

par with the collected experiences and encounters

contours. In another of Dove’s watercolor sketches,

of a lifetime. Many of Dove’s watercolor drawings

Barn IV (1935) (fig. 124), a single line originates at

feature attempts to produce multiple forms out of

the paper’s left edge and terminates at lower right.

an unbroken line, including Barn Next Door (1934)

In between, it traces the lowest edge of the barn

and Over Seneca Lake (1935) (figs. 122, 123). In Barn

roof, outlines the triangle of the roof’s peak, loops

Next Door, comprising an exquisite amassing of

around to form the outline of a tree, and zigzags

undulating forms and whipping lines, a single line

a bit to denote what looks like the terminus of a

of ink forms the dominant contour of two trees

path or road. And in Trees on the Pond (1941) (fig.

that face one another across a meadow and ren-

125), single lines serve to fashion three agglomer-

ders a hilltop and part of the barn structure mid-

ations of trees, earth, water, and reflections, each

way along its route between the two; another lone

looking as much like a living being or a whimsical,

Fig. 124  Arthur G. Dove, Barn IV, 1935, watercolor and ink on paper, 47⁄8 × 67⁄8 in. (12.3825 × 17.4625 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1937. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

Things

209

Fig. 125  Arthur G. Dove, Trees on the Pond, 1941, watercolor and ink on paper. Photo courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York.

benevolent monster as it does lakeside vegetation.

brush dipped briefly in watercolor, a calm, sensu-

The rightmost “tree” could almost be a sailboat,

ous spreading of red and green, and it was over.53

its “rigging” coterminous with the circling loops that form the foliage and the trunk of the tree to

A Barn Here and a Tree There (1940) (fig. 126) wittily

the left, its wake a back-­and-­forth streak of black

acknowledges Dove’s exploration of linear conti-

line and a radiance of reddish wash. Charles Van

nuity through its title and its conjoining, semicir-

Wyck Brooks once watched Dove create one such

cular line, slightly broken at the base but handily

watercolor drawing, called Hollyhock, and his rec-

bridged by Dove’s signature, and it also gives the

ollection of Dove’s working method when making

effect of Dove here and there stilling his hand in

the drawing accords with the suturing effects I am

order to sense a moment, to employ the phrase used

describing here:

by Brooks. The brown wash that hovers over this linking line produces the effect of an aura or an

210

I was in the same room with Arthur Dove in the

electrical charge, connoting the idea of an instru-

summer of 1935 when something impelled him

ment registering input or transmitting energy or, to

to begin the single black line on a piece of paper

put it as Dove might have, a linear unit sensing the

which grew in zigzag, curling, dropping, climbing

“thoughts” of the things through which it passes

to its completion. The hand that drew followed

and developing a form of consciousness as a result,

some deep inner rhythm, pausing here and there

or flashes of light zipping across a network of em-

in its course to sense a moment before looping

blazoned high tension wires and sending pinwheel-

off. There was no haste, no hesitation. Then a

ing sparks flying through the air. Dove described

Chapter Four

Fig. 126  Arthur G. Dove, A Barn Here and a Tree There, 1940, watercolor on paper mounted on board, 47⁄8 × 67⁄8 in. (12.38 × 17.46 cm), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Bequest of Mr. and Mrs. James H. Beal, 93.189.28. Photograph © 2013 Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

such linear vitality early in his career, in 1913. “I

sewing machine, established materiality—­objects

must make my line vital,” he said, having begun to

and their engagement by a body—­as an axial pre-

fear, after seeing some of his pictures on view at 291,

cept of his practice. Although Dove made it many

54

that his line had gone “dead.”

years after he created his Hand Sewing Machine as-

It may be unexpected to spend time with

semblage, a watercolor sketch from 1941 (fig. 127)

Dove’s drawings in a chapter devoted to his as-

depicting the same subject (and perhaps the same

semblages, but these drawings and many others

machine), reinforces this idea. As in many of his

within Dove’s body of work plainly illustrate his

other watercolors, Dove binds the forms of this

interest in fashioning sewing, or the idea of sew-

image together with a continuous line. Beginning

ing as a matter of stitching together or suturing,

in the lower left corner, this line delineates the base

as an artistic procedure. He was devoted to line as

of the machine before looping around to form a cir-

just such a stitching device, which in the drawings

cular repository for a light-­green wash, and then

and sketches threads and gathers multiple objects

continues on to render the machine’s trunk, arm,

and forms: drawing as stitching one might say. This

and head. From the arm, the line proceeds upward,

devotion carried over into his thinking about his

creating another circle, this one inhabited by semi-

three-­dimensional work, as evidenced by his three-­

circular shards of pale yellow and gray, and then

motifs-­of-­ruggedness thought experiment and by

it expands its looping motion so as to create a se-

Silver Cedar Stump, and also by the fact that many

ries of bulging forms in the top half of the picture.

of his drawings served as templates for his painted

It goes without saying that a sketch of a machine

works, transferred from paper ground to canvas by

that sews, fashioned by way of a line that creates

a hand-­held, hand-­cranked device, the pantograph,

and then stitches together its parts, has something

which, like the phonograph, the radio, and the hand

to say about the fundamental status of stitching Things

211

Fig. 127  Arthur G. Dove, The Hand Sewing Machine, 1941, watercolor on paper, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Morris G. Bishop, 54.073. Photography courtesy of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University.

212

and suturing within Dove’s practice and also about

but also of accumulation, sometimes bereft of ap-

the fundamental materiality of these operations

parent meaning.56 A tabletop inventory, a rapid-­

as Dove conceived them. And I would venture that

fire line-­by-­line accounting of what photography

other of Dove’s agglomerating or accumulating

does (or does not) mean, a Steinian portrait poem

habits and acts reinforce this coupling of line and

of Stieglitz, a catalog of nonaffinities in “A Way to

things under the sign of sewing such that, along

Look at Things,” a string of aphorisms posing as a

with circles and waves, stitching served for him as

letter to the critic Edward Alden Jewell: these very

an essential and elemental gesture and motif across

different texts by Dove have in common a listing

multiple parts of his production.55

effect, a quality of arranging verbal items and,

Take, for instance, Dove’s poetry and prose,

by extension, their material referents in vertical

discussed at length in the first chapter, the para-

stacks on a page, one after the other, short bursts

digm for which I would identify as the list, as in

of things and thoughts rather than a wending, in-

a one-­by-­one series of related or unrelated items

terlacing narrative. One could argue that narrative

such as names, things, or numbers, or an ordered

prose approximates a whole stitched together from

set of information or data, but also in the sense of

parts just as well as does a list-­like poem. But there

a list as an open-­ended and at times incongruous

is something about the arbitrariness of lists, espe-

collection—­that is, as an instance of enumeration

cially those crafted by Dove, which press together

Chapter Four

and fix to one another disparate components so that they are made to appear as if by nature essentially related, even if they are not and even as they maintain their singularity and original form, that puts one in mind of Dove’s stitching in his drawings and in his assemblages. This is the case especially with the assemblages, where pieces of the world are at once themselves and made to be something else by virtue of the assemblage structure, with its list-­like if not vertical or one-­by-­one collecting of things and “ordering” of those things as a group or a set, and with the work’s title as the list’s heading: as, in the case of Rain, “metal, sandpaper scratchings, glass, glue, twigs, more glass, frame” or, for Hand Sewing Machine, “metal, scratchings, paint, graphite, glue, stitched fabric, frame.” Some of the assemblages, such as The Intellectual (fig. 128), actually look list-­like. In this work, Dove stacks things on the vertical, one object succeeding another from top to bottom: magnifying glass, bone, moss, bark, pocket balance scale, fabric, and wooden plank, all contained within a shadow box frame that serves as a metaphor for the structuring and interrelating effects of an enumerating and accumulating list. Dove’s accumulating and suturing of objects together in his assemblages along with the threading and conjoining lines in his drawings and watercolors, then, are list-­like in the sense that they bind together objects or forms from disparate locales so as to produce interrelationships, connections and associations (but not necessarily meaning) that arise from the condition of their being physically interlinked, a phenomenon that Umberto Eco has termed “transforming a list into form,” analogous verbal or material examples of which would include a house inventory, a taxonomy, a cabinet of curiosities, or a museum gallery.57 Lists, of course, abound in Dove’s diaries, ship’s log, ledger, and unpublished notes: lists of painting titles, media, weather conditions, weather abbreviations, wave types, and sailboat rigging, among other things. The notes themselves often take list form, one thought after another proceeding down a page like bullet points, and Dove’s periodic thoughts about his art appeared frequently in list form under

Fig. 128  Arthur G. Dove, The Intellectual, 1925, wood box with magnifying glass, bone, moss, bark, and a scale on varnished cloth mounted on wood, 17 × 71⁄8 in. (43 × 18.2 cm), The Philip L. Goodwin Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA, 101.1958. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

Things

213

the heading “Ideas.” Lists featured prominently in

have relatively recently turned their attention to

the work of Dove’s two favorite authors, Stein and

the material practices of intellectual inquiry, con-

Joyce. The run-­on sentences and suppression of

sidering how the materials engaged, generated, and

punctuation in Stein’s portrait poems rejects con-

stored in the course of producing information and

ventional narration for a list-­like accumulation of

knowledge might shape that production; scien-

objects, impressions, and ideas, and the inventory

tific instruments and imagery but also footnotes,

of Leopold Bloom’s kitchen shelves, bedroom draw-

lists, indexes, commonplace books, almanacs, and

ers, and books in “Ithaca,” the second-­to-­last chap-

other forms of compendia have been subjected to

ter of Joyce’s Ulysses, opens with a list of Bloom’s

scrutiny as material participants in inquiry along-

and Stephen’s conversation topics, each annotated

side the contents of that inquiry.61 Taking my cue

with its own catalog-­like list, and ends with Bloom

from this scholarship and, of course, from Stein, I

cataloging the day’s events and budget, offering

understand those practices that accompanied, sup-

the reader a collection of lists within lists.58 If one

ported, or recorded Dove’s art making, such as his

takes the diary or log format to have a structuring

weather notating, poetry writing, and diary keep-

and ordering effect similar to that of a list or an

ing, to be a vital and material part of his artistic

almanac’s collection of lists, Dove’s daily tempera-

production. That is, I take these practices to be ar-

ture and barometric pressure notations as well as

tistic media in their own right, rendered by Dove as

his other regular notes on the weather may be con-

if objects, as if inanimate—­although never really

ceived as list-­like in their repetition and accumu-

this—­so as to integrate as vital components among

lation. Thought of in this way, the diaries and the

canvas, paint, wood, shells, metal, fabric, or sand

logs may themselves begin to look like the assem-

in the intersubjective complexes Dove fashioned

blages, accretions of items over time in the form

through his assemblage work. Conversely, the quo-

of a physical, graspable thing, while the very act of

tidian nature of the materials selected by Dove for

collecting data and storing it in a book calls to mind

the assemblages finds an equivalent in the every-

the gathering, amassing, and framing of objects so

day quality of Dove’s diary keeping: in the routine,

as to create an assemblage. In both cases, diary and

workaday tenor of the entries as well as in the sta-

assemblage, Dove interweaves and interconnects

tus of the daybooks as objects among many others

people, terrains, ideas, sensations, data, and things.

that populated Dove’s and Torr’s daily life. And the

He transforms geography (the sites from which he

act of making an assemblage recapitulates, in the

collected his materials as well as the terrains con-

most basic sense, what humans do in the everyday:

nected by weather systems) and temporality (the

exist in space and interact with other things. As

passage of days and weeks that constitute a year)

William Seitz, who organized the important 1961

into concrete, tangible form, an operation Leo G.

exhibition The Art of Assemblage at the Museum of

Mazow has illuminated in relation to the daybooks

Modern Art, wrote of the practice of assemblage,

of Dove’s contemporary, the artist John Covert, and

“Physically, its method can be as direct as filling

that one could liken to the materialization of a si-

a cupboard or setting a dinner table.”62 Even the

multaneity of past, present, and future in the form

constellation-­like color sample diagram that Dove

of a forecasting weather map or a work like Partly

created in the pages of his copy of Color and Its Ap-

59

214

Cloudy (fig. 76). The sheer repetition of data input

plication to Printing (fig. 66) functions as a kind of

from day to day in the diaries might be likened to

list, an annotated visual cataloging of materials,

the devices of repetition and excess in Stein, which

experimental processes, and results, its color blots

serve to obscure meaning and thus objectify her

stitched together by a network of intersecting lines

prose, the relentlessness of her piling up and ad-

much like the threads of ink and paint that string

joining of words transforming her texts into quasi-­

together forms in Dove’s sketches and paintings or

sculptural works.60 Scholars from multiple fields

the metaphorical stitching that created a compi-

Chapter Four

lation of objects and materials in the assemblages

Heidegger’s insistence on ontological definition

themselves.

and differentiation, has retained his emphasis on

The devices of listing and stitching that recur

the effect of gathering or grouping. Considering the

across Dove’s production locate Dove’s practice—­

status and meaning of objects within social con-

his painting, sculpting, writing, notating, and so

texts and social relations, this body of scholarship

forth—­in the physical, material realm, in a world

identifies connecting and grouping as two of the

where things or their verbal equivalents are physi-

chief operations of things. In Outline of a Theory of

cally collected, combined, and arrayed. And it was

Practice (1977), Pierre Bourdieu, for example, argued

in this everyday, material realm that Dove per-

for the primacy of objects and their ordering within

ceived the potential for crafting an art of unprec-

processes of socialization. The contributors to the

edented interconnection, drawing on brute matter

influential essay collection edited by Arjun Appa-

as a model for the network of intersubjectivity he

durai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural

wished to chart with his work, one created by oper-

Perspective (1986), examined the status and value of

ations of translation, transfer, and converse: mak-

things in the context of human transactions such as

ing actions into media, and assemblages of media

gift giving, trade, and other forms of exchange and

into activated, apparatus-­like beings. Weather and

argued that use and circulation define the meaning

sound technology supplied suitable templates, and

of things even as those things, as commodities in

things proffered another, a point underscored by

contexts, grant meaning and value to social and po-

Dove’s referring to his assemblages as none other

litical relations, classifications, identities, and sys-

than “things.”

tems. In a similar vein, Alfred Gell in Art and Agency:

The scholarly literature on the object world

An Anthropological Theory (1998) rejected aesthetic

has concerned itself with defining the essential

interest as the driving force behind the production

nature of things as well as with characterizing the

of art in favor of the capacity of art to distribute and

status and function of things within human soci-

circulate through its effects the ideas and thus the

ety. Things, of course, exist—­they are “what we en-

influence of its makers.65 In his account of scientific

counter,” wrote Leo Stein in The A-­B-­C of Aesthetics

practice, Bruno Latour has focused attention on the

63

(1927). But as those writers concerned with ques-

relationships that arise among entities or agents,

tions of things and the social have described, things

human and nonhuman alike, within a social net-

also act and interact, not necessarily as animate

work such as a scientific laboratory or a classroom;

beings but as agents that by virtue of their being

he describes the actions and products of said net-

adjacent to humans (as with the material of nature)

work as resulting from the relationships formed

or created and set into circulation by humans (as

and re-­formed therein, between a teacher and a

with the material of culture) serve to engage the

student, say, but also between that student and

senses, the body, and the mind as well as to estab-

the contexts as well as the artifacts that he or she

lish all manner of points of contact, pathways, and

engages in the classroom (pedagogical theory and

networks among humans and objects. In formulat-

textbook publishing, for instance, but also a desk,

ing a distinction between an “object” and a “thing,”

a computer, a chalkboard, a periodical table, and

Martin Heidegger famously located the essence

so forth). These entities and relationships are not

of thingness in a capacity to gather and enfold, to

static, but ever changing and migratory; networks

combine the manifold—­“earth and sky, divinities

consist of temporary and unstable collections, com-

and mortals”—­and offer it as a single outpouring

binations, or arrays, “contingent compositions” of

64

or unity. Subsequent writing on the object world,

humans and nonhumans, to borrow the words of

concerned with finding a middle ground between

the social scientist and scholar of human geog-

imagining objects as animate beings and exposing

raphy Nigel Thrift. Similarly, following Heideg­ger’s

them as mere discursive constructs, while rejecting

example of the gathering jug, Latour proposed that Things

215

artifacts themselves make up multiparticipant and

meanings and creating unanticipated experiences

motile webs of associations, complex and entan-

and effects by way of the properties and operations

gled sets of relations among multiple terms or en-

native to them: for example, the seeming self-­

tities. Such an understanding of things presumes

operation of the instruments considered by Joel

reciprocity between the human and the material

Snyder in his essay in the volume or the apparent

worlds as well as a blurring of the assumed bound-

capacity of a Rorschach test card to evaluate a sub-

ary between subject and object, between an ani-

ject and articulate a diagnosis, as described by Peter

mate being and the artifact he or she engages. In

Galison in his contribution to Daston’s book. Or, as

describing the human/nonhuman interface, John

Matthew C. Hunter and Francesco Lucchini have

Frow likened objecthood to a “mode of being” and

put it, not all things but, rather, a certain species of

called for a return of things as “quasi subjects” to

them, dubbed “clever objects” in their account, are

the human, an acknowledgment that things and

streetwise, situatedly canny rather than premedi-

persons have properties and behaviors in common

tatedly intelligent, clever in part because they may

that avoids the fantasy of animism and resembles

not mean to be, because they possess agency with-

only a little the concept of the fetish, commodity or

out explicit intention, stealthily, even lazily.67

otherwise; things have lives but they are not alive,

Again, Dove did not read Heidegger or “thing

their properties may shape outcomes—­each thing

theory,” nor was he privy to studies in material cul-

has its own script or code—­but never on purpose

ture from the fields of art history, philosophy, and

66

or by willful choice.

216

the social sciences. I had not read this literature in

As such, all participants in a network, human

full until I began to suspect that Dove was intent

and otherwise, count as social actors or agents. Ap-

on doing something out of the ordinary with ob-

plying the concept of agency to the object world,

jects and that he intended to exploit the proper-

Latour and others have described how human and

ties of those objects in accomplishing that task. It

nonhuman entities in a network are equally com-

was through an encounter with recent writing on

plicit in producing effects; humans and nonhu-

the object world that I came to see that certain of

mans coproduce one another, Latour has written, a

the questions addressed in this writing were Dove’s

characterization echoed by the anthropologist Dan-

questions also: What can an object do? What prop-

iel Miller who argued that “persons and things ex-

erties reside in it? To what use might those prop-

ist in mutual self-­construction” and also by Thrift

erties be put? What effects might be generated by

who spoke of the coconstitution of the physical and

gathering and grouping objects? What happens

mental worlds. Even the most innocuous seeming

when humans and objects encounter one another?

objects, stated Latour, “act,” “do things,” and “make

What insight might be gained through paying at-

you do things”; they possess, in Bill Brown’s charac-

tention to the operations and effects of physical

terization, a potency and a power to organize the

matter, including the things used to construct an

humans who make and use them. Hubert Damisch

assemblage but also materials such as paint, wax,

has used the term “theoretical object” to describe

and glue? Hardly for him the product of intense

a thing that “obliges you to do theory but also fur-

and systematic philosophical reflection, these que-

nishes you with the means of doing it,” producing

ries arose out of Dove’s curiosity about the world

“effects around itself” in the course of one’s en-

and what he could do with it, and from his expe-

gagement with it; art, in other words, pursues phil-

rience working with the material of that world.

osophical inquiry—­it thinks. Similarly, in her in-

If we consider Dove’s assemblages alongside his

troduction to the essay collection Things That Talk:

closest period kin, Dada and the Surrealists, Dove’s

Object Lessons from Art and Science, Lorraine Daston

preoccupation with the materiality and opera-

wrote that things, without literally speaking, “press

tions of matter becomes even clearer. The objects

their messages on attentive auditors,” asserting new

of Dada and Surrealism have been characterized in

Chapter Four

the scholarly literature as receptacles or stand-­ins

“Introduction to Metaphysics.”69 That is, Dove’s un-

for human desire, pleasure, or torment, or as sub-

derstanding of intersubjectivity, as incarnated in

stitutes for the body or body parts, but Dove’s as-

the assemblages, in dispensing with conventional

semblages are not these things at all, even if a chief

hierarchical classifications of subject and object

link between him and his counterparts would be

positions (human as subject, thing in the world

the attempt to create through assemblage “a tool

as perceived object), in substituting language as

for doing things,” to use the art historian Julia Kel-

notation or sign with language as operation and

ly’s apt phrase, and thus a shared interest in the

process, and in redistributing the properties and

potential generative power of combining objects

capacities of these positions (human agency and

and images from everyday life into incongruous

sentience, an object’s networked omnipresence

68

wholes. In objects, Dove saw a medium and mech-

and alchemy in the world), reorganized relations in

anism for connection; he recognized the ability of

the world as such. Dove once described to Stieglitz

objects to group, gather, and stitch together—­as

the experience of seeing “some tall black birds” at

with the phonograph, which agglomerated bod-

the Bronx Zoo. They made him and Torr wonder, he

ies producing sound, recording machines, record-­

said, “if we had seen all of nature. They are amazing.

stamping presses, plastic discs, playback apparatus,

Almost portraits of thoughts.” 70 Dove’s formulation

and a listening body materially engaged with that

for describing the birds mapped his blueprint for

apparatus—­and he perceived in this ability a for-

relations writ large; at once magnificent specimens

mula for creating. He also identified in the collu-

of the avian realm, beings seeming in excess of

sion of body and device—­body plus phonograph,

the known natural world, and emblems of an idea,

barometer, radio, daybook, camera, line drawing,

the birds coalesce the variant conditions of being

pantograph, or hand sewing machine—­ the po-

a creature, being a person, being a thought, and

tential to translate the procedures and capacities

being a thing. Dove’s formulation, that is, entailed

of such devices to the animate world. Thus Dove’s

imagining an exchange between a multiplicity of

assemblages skew closer to Gilles Deleuze and Felix

categories of being and forms of expression or ac-

Guattari’s sense of an “assemblage” as an agglom-

tion where things could behave as if animate and,

erating multiplicity characterized by connectivity,

perhaps more importantly, humans would take on

multidirectionality, heterogeneity, and the absence

the qualities and capacities of nonhuman things,

of fixed subject and object positions (language, as

thus embodying, through assimilating object prop-

an assemblage, for instance, must be approached

erties and positing thingness as a template for hu-

in terms of everything related to it), even if Dove’s

manness, new relational capacities and new modes

practice does not share their particular social, po-

of being in the world. This is the tilt toward death

litical, and philosophical investments. The assem-

to which I earlier referred and that Stieglitz’s Equiv-

blages also hew to a more historically proximate

alents, if inadvertently, held out for Dove as a new,

theoretical formulation of the nature of thought:

object-­like state. One almost feels that Dove read

Henri Bergson’s characterization of thoughts as

Bergson and said, “Ok, I’ll build that.” Combinations

things (as opposed to the idea of things as either

of disparate media in the assemblages, including

the cause or effect of thoughts) and, importantly,

the entanglement of painting and sculpture and

not things merely, but things phenomenally, always

their mutual transfer of qualities, as well as the

in process and by nature constantly multiplying

range of names Dove gave to his “things” (paint-

and proliferating as they develop and move, not

ings, portraits, sculpture paintings, painting sculp-

through symbols or signs—­not through language

tures, and caricature paintings) underscore Dove’s

as such—­but through the very coincidence or one-

fixation on translation and exchange as strategies

ness of a thought and that thought as a phenom-

within his art but also, as the essential properties of

enal object, as articulated by Bergson in his 1903

things, as model operations for existence. Things

217

Christopher Pinney, following Latour, has ar-

barometer, radio, or phonograph. Not “abstraction”

gued against the “human-­besotted” and demateri-

but “extraction” and “gravitation” were the terms

alizing vision of reality offered up by the literature

that Dove used to describe his work. In extracting

on material culture which, to his mind, privileges

the properties of one thing and transferring them

the human at the expense of the thing, reducing

to another—­making ideas and actions into objects

the thing to an expression or construction of so-

and making objects into agents, say, by facilitat-

cial formations, its “life” simply a living out of the

ing an exchange of their basic operations—­Dove

life of humans within human culture; Ian Bogost,

fashioned the fundamental operation of his art.

countering what he sees as the overly human-­

He also provided, perhaps unintentionally, a new

centric casts of Heidegger, Latour, and theorists of

way to fathom the practice of abstraction, as some-

artificial intelligence and the posthuman, among

thing other than a distilling, monomaniacal drive

others, articulates something similar in Alien Phe-

away from the world. The pairing of the two terms,

nomenology in proposing a model of thingness ab-

“extraction” and “gravitation,” encapsulates Dove’s

71

218

sent human-­object relationality. Pinney’s insight,

intentions as I describe them here: in combination,

and Dove’s too, consists in recognizing that the

extraction, as a human action aimed at objects, and

route between humans and things is a two-­way

gravitation, as a nonhuman, phenomenal force ba-

street; and like Bogost, Dove, while not dispensing

sic to material, physical existence, constitute an

with the question of human subjectivity cast in re-

artistic practice driven by human and nonhuman

lation to other subjectivities, took equally seriously

alike, by an animate being but also by the prop-

the idea that the human point of view might not

erty that governs the behavior of physical bodies

need to be paramount. For Dove, this meant work-

on earth, granting objects weight and compelling

ing to produce a symmetry among entities: mak-

diffuse matter to coalesce, much as Dove compels

ing works of art behave like language, that animate,

materials to transmute, conjoin, and settle in the

motile connective tissue fundamental as a translat-

process of making his assemblages.72

ing and communicating force within human lives,

Dove’s Flight (1943) (fig. 88), discussed in the sec-

be it letter writing, weather notating, DX fishing,

ond chapter, evokes the metal parts and mechani-

diary writing, list making, or record listening; and

cal workings as well as the sensation of flying and

also endeavoring to envisage making humans more

the viewpoint granted by flight. The painting also

instrument-­like, this double transfer or translation,

articulates an instance of exchange between a hu-

as he understood it, from human to thing and back

man and a machine and iterates the possibility of

again, being the way to achieve comprehensive in-

an inanimate object’s self-­action, like a barometer

tersubjectivity, a radical integration of and bond-

or a body affected by gravity, along with the poten-

ing among unlike entities, which for him was not

tial for a human body itself to function as a self-­

a cultural phenomenon but materially and opera-

acting instrument, registering data, amalgamating

tionally based. The most basic action performed in

entities, or producing effects automatically. Flight

the creation of the assemblages—­the assembling of

thus exemplifies the absolute exchange between

materials—­solidifies this idea. Dove created, found,

human and nonhuman I am describing as a chief

scavenged, purchased, and repurposed material for

process within Dove’s practice and in the case of

the assemblage works, rendering objects mobile

the assemblages in particular. I return to the idea of

and putting them in circulation by virtue of his

a human-­machine collaboration here because Dove

collecting, assembling, and, ultimately, display-

created the bulk of his assemblages on his boat, the

ing, with each activating procedure (each verb)

Mona. Although I resist attributing the material

an analog for one operation among the many—­

characteristics of the assemblages to the cramped

together forming a list—­that engaged, activated,

conditions of the Mona and the scarcity of materials

and impelled an instrument or machine such as a

on board, as some scholars have, I take seriously the

Chapter Four

idea that an act of making might have been shaped

then, the assemblages would have instantiated a

by its taking place on a waterborne boat. Dove and

condition of collaboration between the human

Torr lived on the Mona because they had limited fi-

(Dove) and the nonhuman (the Mona), with Dove’s

nancial means, but I would not be surprised if Dove

animation of material a concrete metaphor for the

perceived the situation as a potential experiment,

boat materially shaping the actions of the humans

or came to see it as such over time, as he got down

on board, for the transfer of the boat’s operations

to making his work. It certainly was not the case

to Dove’s own limbs and hands. As such, the assem-

that he disliked his floating quarters. When he and

blages embodied the idea that in inanimate objects,

Torr moved back aboard the Mona in 1929 after a

including those of the natural world—­driftwood,

winter on Pratt’s Island, Noroton, Connecticut,

sand, and water, as well as radios, barometers, and

where Dove served as a caretaker, Torr reported

so forth—­one might locate a model and the pro-

Dove saying that “he’d never been as happy any

cedural means to activate an animating and inter-

where as here.”73 Making on the Mona would have

penetrating network among all things and beings.

been cramped, but it also would have been shaped

Dove’s fascination with technologies of sonic

in some way by the motion of the boat as it bobbed

transmission arose in part from the manner in

in the waves. Already keenly attuned to the chang-

which those technologies transformed how things,

ing conditions of the weather, Dove was likely at-

phenomena, and people are made present to others,

tentive to the qualities of his new environment and

how a telephone, say, transformed one’s encounter

to the fact that the literal ground of his production

with and thus one’s relationship to the person at

was now a mobile, ever-­transmuting one. Perhaps

the other end of the line. This fascination, then,

he turned to working with objects in response to

was part of a larger preoccupation on his part with

this shift in conditions, a possibility supported by

the ability of things to reconstitute relations and

the title that Dove gave to his essay “Pencil Notes

to refashion materiality. Things, while not alive,

on a Boat,” which perfectly expresses the contents

have lives of their own, and they develop and dis-

of the essay, a series of notes that unfolds in list-­like

play new properties and intentions when extracted

form, as well as the implied water-­bound condition

from their original contexts and relocated to an as-

74

semblage where they remain themselves but also

Constructing the assemblages and crafting their

play the role of something else, just as live music

frames would have unfolded alongside other, very

transmutes into itself and not itself when subjected

similar work: scraping and painting the boat, sizing

to recording and playback or as gusts of wind are

and cutting patches to repair its cracks and leaks,

both wind and something else when registered,

or scrubbing its floors and decks. After their return

measured, and graphically mapped. From the inher-

to the Mona in 1929, Dove and Torr spent an after-

ent properties of pigments and binding mediums,

noon “reducing chaos—­finding permanent places

which Dove spent hours investigating, analyzing,

for things, chucking out. Agreed that moving is a

and describing, and which are themselves members

great clearinghouse and upsetter of the stagnation

of the object world, to the innate operations and

of inanimate objects,” suggesting an association

effects of a phonograph, which he explored over the

between returning to the boat and the act of setting

course of five listening-­based paintings, the quali-

of the making of these notes, penciled “on a boat.”

75

things in motion and animating them. Perhaps,

ties and capacities of matter were for Dove model

then, Dove intuited an analogy between the man-

procedures for use in establishing a substantive and

ner in which the boat set things into motion, in-

material analogy among beings, things, and works

cluding his own body, and his own activation of ob-

of art and thus summoning a living system of con-

jects in the course of creating an assemblage, and,

nections and intersubjective exchanges within his

conversely, that the assemblages and their matter

practice.76 Like the envisioning of the invisible,

in turn activated him. In a manner similar to Flight,

the ineffability and elusiveness of weather, and Things

219

the wireless transmission of sound, this system in

performer and creating a sonic bond between any

Dove’s conception would be wondrous. Far from a

individuals who might together be listening. The

straightforward, possibly nefarious making over

swooping and spiraling lines and the metal clock

of existence into machine, Dove’s object-­inspired

spring in Dove’s Rhapsody in Blue, Part I, which counts

and monumental complex of interrelations would

among the assemblages, grant visual form to the

make a grasp for sublimity, not by abandoning or

linear origin of amplified, diffusing sound and fash-

transcending the material and the everyday but,

ion that line-­based sound as a material that stitches

rather, through a vital, instrumental, entity-­based

together the disparate parts of the canvas, analo-

sociability that stitched or wove a collective out of

gous to the manner in which sound waves, those

dispersed and disparate things, humans included—­

of the phonograph but also radio, stitch together

not as observers only, but as material, coequal, es-

entities in real space and time. Probably it was such

sentially collaborating and cognizing parts.

a process that Dove described when he refashioned

The innate properties of things, the binding

Kandinsky’s description of translation into a for-

capacity of lists and lines, and the stitching elic-

mulation of movement from point to line, from line

ited by creating an assemblage: together these were

to plane, from plane to solid, and, finally, from solid

to fashion a monumental and all-­ encompassing

into life and the present, or maybe he recognized

system of connection and interchange. Making

this process as resident in the Weather Bureau’s

a painting while listening to a record materially

maps, especially in their spiraling and expanding

manifested such a combination, for it entailed the

isolines, which stitched together terrain as well

collaboration between a body and a machine as well

as stitched equivalent numerical values together

as the combining of multiple parts to produce the

across terrain. Dove’s portrait assemblages produce

end effect, including the parts of the machine, the

a similar effect. They literally as well as figuratively

disc and the phonograph, and the various materials

stitch together the parts of a personality, and they

of the painter. But not only this: the phonograph

also fashion a simultaneously literal and figurative

embodied precisely what Dove wished his lists and

relationship between humans and things. They

lines to achieve, that is, the stitching together of all

evoke a person by linking associated objects such as

things—­to repeat, a threading whereby the human

a musical score and an expandable wooden ruler in

would bear an essential, exchange-­based relation to

Ralph Dusenberry or a camera lens and a clock spring

the nonhuman, and vice versa, as if both belonged

in Alfred Stieglitz, but they also create that person

to the same (or perhaps a new) species group. As

out of those objects, instantiating through a ges-

Douglas Kahn has pointed out, sound has since an-

ture of substitution a literal exchange between hu-

tiquity been associated with line, including cases

man and nonhuman, a suturing of the two that re-

like the one-­stringed Pythagorean monochord in

places the one with the other and reduces duality to

Plato’s Republic; instruments that graphically reg-

singularity, an operation of the same kind as gath-

ister sound in linear form, such as the phonauto-

ering together the time, space, bodies, and instru-

graph; and the ubiquitous likening of sound waves

ments of a live musical performance and pressing

to concentric circles on the surface of water. Recall

these things into lines etched on a plastic disc. The

that the term “phonography” had its origins in such

threading and weaving together of objects in the

a graphic context, and the traverse of the phono-

portrait assemblages and the stitching together of

graph’s needle as it moves back and forth within

bodies and space in the music pictures, along with

a record’s grooves draws a type of line, tracing a

the many and varied operations of gathering resi-

zigzagging path that through the operations of

dent in Dove’s entire body of assemblages, suggest

the phonograph transmutes from “drawn” line into

that the work of assemblage itself was for Dove the

77

220

sound. This sound-­from-­line unfolds in time and

work of stitching together everything in the world

fills the surrounding space, connecting listener to

into its own system-­like, pan-­sociable whole.

Chapter Four

Machine

devices, were for him things in the world alongside a whole slew of other sorts of objects and artifacts.

Dove liked to paint, hammer, stitch, and glue, but he

What attracted him to machines as subject and me-

was into metal, too. His regular use of metal-­based

dium were their qualities, properties, and effects—­

pigments, the metal clock spring he attached to one

namely, their ability to translate and transmit as

of his record paintings, the metal that proliferates

made possible by their metal parts. If Dove wished

throughout his assemblages, and the multiple com-

to create out of the stuff of the world a monumen-

positions he created on metal grounds demonstrate

tal network of interconnections, a vast and compre-

as much. In my discussion of circles and waves, I

hensive system from which would arise a condition

characterized Dove’s metallic pigment as a medium

of radical intersubjectivity, he would have to bring

of reflection and connection as well as a metaphor

something to that world. Whatever that something

for making, and in particular for making a picture

was, it could not simply imitate the fact of the

with a camera. The metallic paint in Silver Sun (fig.

world as a network, which it already was and had

6), for instance, represents the phenomena of ra-

been known since Lucretius to be. For Dove did not

diation and reflection but also produces the effect

set out to recapitulate the conditions of existence

of reflection in actuality, suggesting that the paint-

in his creations, a mimetic folly on a monumental

ing itself could have an operational capacity akin

scale. Instead, he wished to reconfigure those con-

to that of photography. In my analysis of Dove and

ditions. To do so he had to create an entity simul-

weather, I pointed out the analogy drawn between

taneously alien to and of a piece with that world.

metal media and the instruments of weather

For this reason he created works of art. Of course

science. And in my chapter on sound, I described

the world as network made it possible in the first

the metal pigment and metal parts of the record

place for Dove to adopt certain of its features, such

paintings as serving to establish a material con-

as the weather, as models for his practice and for

nection between Dove’s paintings and the machine

his creation of proposed novel forms. But systems

that inspired their making. In what follows, I build

in order to do their work need power, they need fuel,

on these observations and say more about what

they need a charge—­without a starting spark and

metal did for Dove.

a sustaining flame they remain static networks of

The assemblage Hand Sewing Machine places

stitched-­together yet inert, immobile parts. And

Dove’s practice within the domain of work and,

those parts remain just that, parts, unless they are

specifically, within the realm of manual labor.

substantively and essentially interconnected with

Through the piece of equipment depicted and the

other parts through a literal transfer or exchange

composition’s metal ground, Hand Sewing Machine

of properties or effects, something more than a

also establishes a fundamental link between Dove’s

stitching or suturing and in excess of naturally

art and the operation of a machine. And the fact

extant networks, an operation approaching tran-

that Dove chose to represent a hand-­cranked de-

substantiation, if not in the biblical sense, whereby

vice indicates an interest in the kind of collabora-

one substance verges on changing into another but

tion between a body and a machine I have already

does not go all the way. One needs a medium and

described. Dove neither worshipped machine cul-

also an activating mechanism to bring about such

ture nor condemned it. He put no great store in

a transfer or translation—­call it material or oper-

the promises of mechanization and industry, but

ational mimicry—­and for Dove it was metal that

by the same token, he never displayed or expressed

would do the trick.

anxiety about machines and their ever-­expanding

In a typewritten note from 1928 or 1929, Dove

role within American society, his exuberant nature

wrote, “It would seem that Ezra Pound has summed

paintings notwithstanding. Machines, by which I

up a good deal in one word: ‘Charged.’ That is a good

mean all manner of apparatuses, instruments, and

word as applied to anything from a battery to a perThings

221

son or a work of art. Once in a while a word comes

Latin poetry. An experimentalist, Pound strove to

along that you are glad about and that seems to

retain the particular impact and distinctiveness

78

be one of them.” Dove’s enthusiasm for the term

of another language in its English translation by

“charged” drew on Pound’s analysis of the crea-

expressing its character through English’s own

tion of meaning through words, which Pound ex-

distinctive forms, including archaic locutions and

pounded at length in his ABC of Reading (1934) and

colloquial speech. This ensured, for example, that

in two earlier essays, “The Serious Artist,” published

the particular charge of a text in Italian, the very

in 1913 in the London-­based periodical the New Free-

thing that made it unique but also great, would be

woman, and “Cavalcanti: Medievalism,” an analysis

sustained throughout the process of its transla-

of the thirteenth-­century Italian poet Guido Cav-

tion into English, where it would be reconstituted

alcanti that appeared in 1928 in the American lit-

through other equally charged expressive forms na-

79

erary journal the Dial. The serious artist, Pound stipulated, as opposed to one that creates bad,

Just as he reformulated Kandinsky, Dove aug-

vulgar, and false art, works with precision, control,

mented the meaning of Pound’s “charge,” positing

and economy and possesses a “faculty for amalga-

it as a potential quality of not just language but also

mation” by which he draws on the genius of past

of persons and things, and all manner of things to

writers in creating his own original work. That work

boot: batteries as well as works of art and every-

generates discovery and holds “a sort of energy,

thing in between. The term “charge” designates a

something more or less like electricity or radioac-

fundamental characteristic of matter and also re-

tivity, a force transfusing, welding, and unifying.”

fers to a quantity of electricity, as in the charge of

Great literature, Pound elaborated in ABC of Read-

a battery. The condition of being charged, then, as

ing, “is simply language charged with meaning to

a criterion adopted by Dove, might be satisfied by

the utmost possible degree.” He described how one

everything that exists, given that all matter boasts

could charge a word with meaning—­for example,

electrical properties arising from interactions

by conjuring a visual image, inducing the effect of

among subatomic particles. But Pound spoke of

sound, grouping words together to enhance their

words charged to the utmost possible degree, and

verbal impact, or evoking the intellectual or emo-

neither he nor Dove would have intended “charge”

80

tional associations of words and word groups. It is

in their use of the term simply to reiterate its defini-

worth noting the congruence of Pound’s formulae

tion within particle physics, although I am sure that

for great writing, which called for bringing things

Dove, champion of the vernacular and the everyday,

into relation and recombining their properties, as in

appreciated the fact that all things shared the qual-

text and sound, and Dove’s artistic and notational

ity of having a charge. What Pound and Dove had in

strategies as I have described them, which created

mind was something like a blast or an eruption, an

hybrid forms from multiple representational oper-

expression of force in the form of a sizeable release

ations and modes. In his essay on Cavalcanti, Pound

of electricity or, alternately, a hefty electrical charge

put it this way: “We appear to have lost the radi-

not yet expressed, as in the flow of electrical current

ant world where one thought cuts through another

across a wire or the latent voltage of a battery or an

with clean edge, a world of moving energies ‘mezzo

unactivated electrical circuit. Hot-­blooded words

oscuro rade’ . . . the glass under water, the form that

and hot-­blooded art—­this is what Pound and Dove

81

222

tive to the new language.82

seems a form seen in a mirror.” Even more to the

envisioned. The strangeness and shock of certain of

point is the fact that Pound developed his concept

Pound’s translations exemplified such a condition:

of highly charged, powerfully expressive language

a line from Guido Calvacanti’s “Donna mi prega”

in the context of his own translation work—­that

given as “In that every high noble vertu leaneth to

is, through his translation of past literature, in-

herward,” or “corna caldast” from the Anglo-­Saxon

cluding Chinese, Anglo-­Saxon, Italian, Greek, and

poem “The Seafarer” rendered “corn of the coldest”

Chapter Four

and “bitre breostceare” as “bitter breast-­cares.”83 So

arm, as current would within wire, perhaps meant

did Dove’s fire-­whipped wires and his heavy metal.

to embody both electricity and theosophy’s white

Dove’s Telegraph Pole (1929) (fig. 17) perhaps

light or Dove’s own “condition of light.” The critic

best conveys such a charge. The subject, telegra-

Edward Alden Jewell captured this doubling when

phy, calls to mind powerful currents traveling over

he described the forms as “delicate spirit-­shapes of

great distances as does the metal plate on which the

electricity.”84 The leaf forms also evoke the corona

whole is painted, and overall Dove’s forms conjure

of violet light that can sometimes be seen at night

the crackle and hum of conduction. Leaflike forms

along lines that transmit high-­voltage current, an

flicker and twist within the boundaries of the cross-­

oft-­remarked phenomenon in the weather litera-

shaped pole as if current on the run. Perceived as

ture of the day and similar to “St. Elmo’s Fire,” the

negative shape or scraped off paint, they also call

electrification and glow of elevated objects such as

to mind clouds or spirits and thus appear to hover

the masts of ships at sea, a weather vane, or the spire

within the wooden material of the pole’s horizontal

of a church during a storm, also much-­discussed at

Fig. 129  Arthur G. Dove, Cross and Weather Vane, 1935, oil on canvas, 88.3 × 62.6 cm (34¾ × 245⁄8 in.), Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.538, The Art Institute of Chicago.

Things

223

Fig. 130  Arthur G. Dove, A Walk: Poplars, 1912–­1913, pastel on silk mounted on board, 215⁄8 × 177⁄8 in., Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.47, Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, IL, USA. Photo Credit: Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago / Art Resource, NY.

224

the time—­phenomena suggested also by the elec-

between them vibrate ecstatically with sound.85 It

trified “Z” in Dove’s small study of lightning (fig.

must have been paintings like Telegraph Pole that in-

121). Semicircular, concentric bands of green-­toned

spired his brother, Paul, to note that Dove painted

and metallic paint radiate from the top of the cross

everything from knotholes in tree trunks and the

in Telegraph Pole like waves of heat generated by the

wind in the willows to the moo of a cow and “the

current passing through the scene and also call to

sound in telephone wires.”86 Two rectangular slabs

mind sound waves. In this way they evoke what was

of metal intersect toward the base of the compo-

dubbed in the period the “hum,” “singing,” or “sizzle”

sition; depicted as bolted together, their outward

of a telegraph or telephone wire that accompanied

splay, which terminates at the arm of the pole,

the wire’s nighttime coronal glow, an effect also

gives the feel of an apparatus desperately trying

captured by the American artist Charles Burchfield

to contain an assemblage of tightly bound pieces

in a watercolor entitled Song of the Telegraph (1917–­

threatening to burst apart, perhaps blown and bent

1952) in which telephone poles and the wires strung

by stormy gusts or assaulted by errant electrical

Chapter Four

Fig. 131  Arthur G. Dove, Tree Forms, 1932, oil on canvas, 281⁄16 × 201⁄16 in. (71.3 × 51 cm), Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ackland Fund, 65.25.1.

charge. Dove left the metal plate bare in order to

to electrical current and conduction in his work,

configure these two constraining slabs; scratches

to charging that work, so to speak. Even pictures as

in the actual metal surface that depicts them un-

powerfully organic and earthy as A Walk: Poplars

derscore their literal potential as metal material to

(1912–­1913) and Tree Forms (1932) (figs. 130, 131) carry

conduct the flow of electrical current and to emit

such a charge. With its snaking, stretching, inter-

the preternatural glow produced by that moving

twining limbs and its explosive bursts of orange

charge. Echoes of Telegraph Pole and other of Dove’s

and brown, Tree Forms evokes in equal parts autumn

paintings in Dove’s Cross and Weather Vane (1935)

foliage and the buzzing, crackling flow of an elec-

(fig. 129), including the concentric circle motif, the

tric current across cables or wires. In A Walk: Pop-

cross form, the weather vane-­cum-­lightning rod,

lars, disc-­shaped forms partially outlined in black

the metal-­ gray and green palette touched with

migrate across a yellow limb-­like form suggesting

brown and rust red, and the writhing, burgeoning

the pulsating intensity of a powerfully conducting

shapes, underscore Dove’s interest in giving form

charge. Two diagonally sloping and precisely renThings

225

dered lines, one at the lower left and the other on

vivified materiality, a superconducting complex par

the upper right, also call forth the idea of a trans-

excellence. As early as 1913 Dove expressed a desire

mitting cable or wire, an effect exacerbated by the

to give vitality and life to his line, to make it “live,”

streak of crimson that runs along the topmost line

as he put it, and he stipulated that he must draw

as well as the plush materiality of Dove’s thickly

equally on his own vision and on objective exis-

worked pastel, which calls to mind the quality of

tence in order to do so.88 This suite of works, which

pastel-­as-­instrument in works like Sails and Team of

combine linear motifs and lines from the world—­

Horses (figs. 67, 68) and makes the image itself reg-

electrical wires, lightning rods, and the limbs of

ister as a conducting medium. Kandinsky triangu-

trees—­so as to create vigorously animated compo-

lated line, current, and tree forms in Point and Line

sitions, pictorial spasms of vivacity, accomplishes

to Plane in just this manner, discussing in a section

that task.

of the book entitled “Technics” the interchangeable

Telegraph Pole eloquently combines the preoc-

linearizing properties of several graphic and actual

cupations of Dove’s practice by depicting a subject,

apparatuses, including a diagram of electrical cur-

telegraphy, in which these preoccupations coalesce:

rent, singled out for its translation of numerical

transmission, translation, communication, circles,

values into line; a radio tower seen from below in

waves, weather, the sonic, the “condition of light,”

a photograph by Lázló Moholy-­Nagy, described as

interconnecting lines and wires, things, and ma-

a “line-­point construction” in space; and a cluster

chines. Like a machine that gathers unto itself

of utility poles, or “masts,” referred to as a “techni-

myriad phenomena, objects, and beings, as in the

cal forest” because of its resemblance to a stand of

case of a phonograph, Dove’s painting, its parts as-

trees and notable for its two-­dimensional graphic

sembled on a metal plate, puts everything together

87

Another of Dove’s

and flicks the proverbial switch. No current flows

works, Electric Peach Orchard (1935) (fig. 75), takes

through Telegraph Pole, of course, but metal pro-

the analogy between tree limb and conducting

vides the potential, allowing the painting to em-

line even further, transforming a row of fruit trees

body the possibility of transferring from machine

into lighting rods or telegraph poles, their electri-

parts and communication networks to a work of

cal wires wildly waving and straining to break free

art the capacity to conduct and thus palpably and

from their wooden anchors and reminding one of

powerfully interconnect, to be language as a me-

Dove’s description of the pinwheeling sparks and

dium in a wholly new, cross-­species form. Dove’s

leaping currents produced by electrical wires on fire.

assemblages The Sea I and Sea II, both 1925, boast no

The medium of wax emulsion embodies the idea of

obvious ties to machines, telegraphy, or electrical

conduction in this painting, its molecules of paint

conduction (figs. 132, 24), but both are composed on

suspended in spreading wax much like an electrical

metal plates and in both Dove overlays the metal

charge resides in spreading lengths of metal wire.

with chiffon to create the effect of water and clouds

The electrified and interweaving lines of Tree Forms,

as well as strokes of paint. The outcome of this over-

A Walk: Poplars, and Electric Peach Orchard resemble

lay is striking. The glint and sheen of the metal vis-

the lively, interconnecting lines in Dove’s drawings

ible through the translucent chiffon makes the fab-

and sketches, those in which he attempted to de-

ric appear to be interwoven with minute shards of

lineate multiple, disparate forms with a single lin-

glass or glitter, an effect enhanced by the sand that

ear mark. The formal congruity between these two

Dove has glued onto each metal ground. Conversely,

examples of line establishes an association among

the soft blue and delicate weave of the chiffon ren-

drawn line, electrical wires, interconnectivity, and

ders the metal underneath velvety and molten, as if

charge, suggesting that in the phenomenon of elec-

warm and soft to the touch. By making each mate-

trical conduction Dove saw an exemplary instance

rial, chiffon and metal, acquire the properties of the

of stitched-­together, essentially intermingled, and

other, Dove enacts a material transfer or exchange

quality when photographed.

226

Chapter Four

Fig. 132  Arthur G. Dove, The Sea I, 1925, collage (gauze, sand, and paper) on metal, 33.65 × 53.97 cm (13¼ × 21¼ in.), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of the William H. Lane Foundation, 1990.404. Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

between the two so as to assert their connection

as charged as the current running through a trans-

or fusion if not their utter identity. Dove’s articu-

oceanic cable or the potential force of a cresting

lation of an interchange between metal and sea, as

wave. In The Sea I, Dove depicts the feel of such a

represented by the chiffon, adds up. Both connote

charge by stretching the chiffon tightly across the

transmission and interconnection, the sea through

metal plate so that its weave in places has buckled,

its waves and its global spread and metal through

creating large wavelike ripples at the right and a

its capacity to conduct; and of course telegraphy

series of semicircles that connote the pulsation or

was at the time associated with the ocean, literally

vibration of matter at lower left, as if someone has

so but also in the form of analogies drawn between

slightly bent and released the metal plate so as to

89

water waves and those of sound. In The Sea I, di-

send a slight shudder through its length. When the

agonal lines scratched into the metal plate, orig-

viewer changes position before this assemblage,

inating at the sun and streaking through the sky,

the assemblage itself changes, the chiffon as well

emphasize the idea of a traversing wave through

as the metal seeming to ripple and swell, suggesting

their depiction of rays of light. The Sea I and Sea II,

a great if latent power resident within this slight-­

then, like Telegraph Pole and Electric Peach Orchard,

seeming work.

narrate the nature of the connections after which

Dove’s Starry Heavens (1924) (fig. 133) proffers its

Dove sought—­as constituted by literal, material

own version of charged instrumentality. The as-

exchange—­and they also articulate the desired re-

semblage features oil and metallic paint on a sheet

sult: a capacity to interconnect and interlace akin

of glass that has been reversed, paint side down,

to that of a telegraph network or the sea itself and

and backed with black paper. Dove purchased the Things

227

Fig. 133  Arthur G. Dove, Starry Heavens, 1924, oil on metallic paint on reverse side of glass with black paper, 18 × 16 in., Michael Scharf Family Collection.

Fig. 134  Left, star chart, in “Astronomical Phenomena in 1917,” Popular Astronomy 25 (1917): 54. Photograph: David Connelly. Fig. 135  Below, “Star Clouds and Black Holes in Sagittarius,” in David Peck Todd, Astronomy: The Science of the Heavenly Bodies (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1922), opposite p. 352. Photograph: David Connelly.

glass in Huntington, New York, near his Halesite

mic composition” comprising an infinite number of

mooring. On the same trip to town, he checked out

independent compositions, all of them originating

two books on astronomy from the library, while a

from points and forming complexes out of clusters

few days earlier he had noted in his diary that he

of many such points. He illustrated this idea with

returned a borrowed telescope (to whom he did

a photograph of the star cluster surrounding the

90

Dove watched the nighttime sky just

constellation Hercules from a book on popular as-

as he watched the weather, and the composition

tronomy published in Leipzig in 1921 that depicts a

of Starry Heavens closely resembles a constellation

bright white mass at center surrounded by bright

chart, or “star chart,” a map of the night sky used to

white dots that disperse and thin out across the

locate and identify stars and constellations, and a

sky-­black ground, along with a diagram of a mi-

close cousin to the bureau weather map. A typical

croscopic view of a “nitrate-­forming nodule” from

chart, like the one featured in the 1917 issue of the

the root of a plant, an image in which small black

journal Popular Astronomy (fig. 134), depicts within

particles populate a circular field.92 In combination,

the border of a circle the sky viewed from a loca-

the clustering effect of the star photograph and

tion in the Southern or Northern Hemisphere at a

the circular form of the nodule image establish the

particular time of year and shows the brightness

basic components of Starry Heavens. All this makes

and relative positions of stars and constellations.

Starry Heavens far more complex than it appears

In Starry Heavens, Dove adopted the chart’s “con-

at first glance, for in it coalesce three forms of vi-

nect the stars” technique in his rendering of the

sualization or visual notation: the diagrammatic,

Big and Little Dippers, star groupings within the

the photographic, and the representational or mi-

constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, but he

metic. And in addition to being a record of Dove’s

embellished his diagrams so that the clusters ap-

own experience of the sky and stars, the work of-

pear to form actual metal ladles and, in addition,

fers itself as available for use, as was the case with a

he included a representation of the moon. He also

star chart, which users employed recreationally or

included far more stars than the typical constella-

for purposes of navigation, or like an astronomical

tion chart: large, brightly glowing bodies as well as

photograph, employed to edify or, as recorded data,

a dusting of smaller or perhaps more distant ones.

to produce knowledge about the galaxy and beyond.

The dense clustering of stars as well as their all-­over

As such, Dove in Starry Heavens cements the work’s

scattering in Dove’s Starry Heavens looks more like

instrumental, or instrument-­like, potential, a pos-

the actual nighttime sky than does the schematic

sible capacity augmented by the link to Kandinsky’s

star chart, but these effects also resemble the pho-

analysis of composing and translating operations

tographs of star groupings (fig. 135) that appeared

in nature and by the work’s metallic paint and the

alongside the circular charts in popular as well as

brute materiality of its cut-­to-­size glass support.

not say).

230

scientific books on astronomy at the time, images

The image of Dove gazing into the night sky

that were hardly more revealing or edifying than

puts one in mind of a visitor to one of Stieglitz’s gal-

the photographs of cloud types included in period

leries who would in turn gaze at a work like Starry

meteorology texts.91 Dove worked on Starry Heavens

Heavens along with other of Dove’s assemblages,

at the same time he was reading the library books

paintings, and sketches.93 There exists an extensive

on astronomy, and it is likely that he used the charts

body of art-­critical writing produced about Dove

and photographs that illustrated those books to

during the period of his career; responses to his

formulate a vocabulary for his own rendition of the

art run the gamut from stern disapproval or sat-

night sky. Kandinsky’s Point and Line to Plane may

ire, some of it good natured, to effusive, adulatory

also have provided inspiration. In the section of the

praise. Certain themes recur: Dove’s originality; his

book dedicated to the geometric point, Kandinsky

varying debt (or lack thereof) to Cubism, Futurism,

describes the whole world as a “self-­contained cos-

and Surrealism; the resistance of his work to inter-

Chapter Four

pretation, or its sheer meaninglessness or unintel-

Dove wrote, “are placed now perhaps better than

ligibility (“they are just plain pictures that mean

they ever will be again. That is the thing I wanted

nothing at all,” wrote one critic in 1912); the useful-

you to see.” In August of 1928, Dove removed a group

ness or inadequacy of his titles; the subjective qual-

of his paintings from storage and arrayed them for

ity of his images; his efforts to depict the unseen;

review in “a large sort of dance room,” probably at

the affinity between his art and music; the deco-

the yacht club in Halesite where Dove worked for

rative quality of “The Ten Commandments” and

a spell in exchange for the use of a room. Seeing

the resemblance of these works to Francis Picabia’s

them as a group, and alongside a selection of paint-

abstractions; color’s predominance over plasticity

ings by Torr, clearly affected Dove’s sense of them,

and form; ambivalence about the assemblages; the

catalyzing insight as did his viewing of two prints

increasing strength of his output in the late 1920s;

from Stieglitz’s Equivalents series when installed in

94

and his experimental nature. A thorough review of

his Centerport residence. “There were some of mine

this criticism and other forms of response to Dove’s

there that I think would stop traffic anywhere,” he

work gives one a good sense of how that work was

wrote in the letter to Stieglitz. “Two of them I do

received by his various audiences, including those

not think now that I would trade for all the past

critics associated with Stieglitz, the artistic and

ones.”96 In another letter to Stieglitz, Dove detailed

critical community at large, Dove’s friends and as-

the transformation of his work that occurred on

95

sociates, and, to a lesser extent, the general public.

transferring it from his quarters to the Intimate

More difficult to piece together is Dove’s own sense

Gallery, housed in room 303 of the Anderson Gal-

of how he wished his work to be received and what

leries building in New York:

he wanted the experience of the viewer to be when he or she encountered his art in a gallery space. Yet

The effect of 303 on the paintings was quite

Dove said enough about what it was like when he

amazing. The red tree [Red Tree and Sun] is twice

looked at his own work and about the conditions

the size at 303 that it was here. The “Silver Sun”

of that work’s display to suggest that he cared very

about ¾. The “Reaching Waves” about ½ as to

much about what happened on the beholder’s side

here. Sea Gulls [Sea Gull Motif (Violet and Green)]

of things. This makes perfect sense, for if his aim

were about 5 to 1 as to that house in Halesite

was to formulate if not fully execute a condition of

where it was done. “Distraction” 1 = 1. Of course,

all-­absorbing intersubjectivity through his art, then

the room is high, superbly so in spirit. Think I

that art would have to somehow gather the viewer

shall use outdoors as a studio this year, to be sure

into its folds. The assemblages, perhaps more di-

that the ceiling is high enough. . . . Still feel a

rectly and overtly than other of Dove’s works, ap-

certain strain in trying to produce when I see my

proximated such a gathering effect.

things there. Hope that will disappear this year.97

Dove regularly staged “viewings” of his own work for himself or family and friends and his ac-

In describing his transformed experience of his

counts of these occasions demonstrate his under-

work when it was relocated to the gallery, Dove

standing that objects and their setting colluded in

spoke as if his paintings had undergone an actual

the shaping of the viewer’s experience. He wrote

change in scale, a material mutation that signifi-

in 1941 to Stieglitz to express his eagerness to re-

cantly altered their effect. He used a fractional ra-

turn to his own exhibition “to study the paintings”

tio to quantify this transformation, much as he had

before the works returned to Centerport and, con-

when he employed a time signature to describe the

sequently, to less-­than-­ideal viewing conditions. A

tempo of his paintings, in each case implying a vital

1927 letter to Duncan Phillips, on the occasion of

and indispensable relationship between parts, and

Dove’s exhibition at Stieglitz’s gallery that year,

perhaps suggesting a link between the production

articulated much the same thing. The paintings,

of a rhythmic formation and conditions of viewing. Things

231

Dove reported something similar in 1937, writing to

when hung in the rooms of the Dove Block, Dove

Stieglitz that his paintings appeared big when hung

also advised Stieglitz about how to install his show,

on a large wall in the Dove Block in Geneva, prob-

suggesting that the paintings go on the walls and

ably in the former roller-­skating rink where he and

the watercolors remain unframed in a portfolio.

Torr resided at the time, and that they appeared to

Frames were important to Dove, and he regularly

“walk forward” when he applied a finishing coat to

made his own, including the one on Hand Sewing

them. A year later, in 1938, Dove reiterated this idea,

Machine. While this was partly a matter of economy,

stating that “the things look big—­different. If they

he plainly understood his frames as contributing

look big here, they should there [at the gallery], as

decisively to the experience of his work. In a letter

98

this place is huge.” On at least two occasions, Dove

to Stieglitz, written in 1929 from Noroton, Connecti-

wrote to Phillips and his assistant, Elmira Bier, to

cut, where he and Torr were living rent-­free as care-

thank them for sending photographs of his work

takers of a waterside cottage owned by A. W. Pratt,

installed at the Phillips Memorial Gallery. The pho-

Dove described taking a number of paintings out to

tographs, he said, helped him to see his paintings

have a look and concluding that one of them “just

properly and to synchronize his past and present

didn’t work with the copper frames.” So he “evolved

work. Seeing not simply his pictures but his pic-

one from plastic wood” that he believed would

tures translated in scale and appearance through

“stand white walls and clean severity.”101 Many of

the medium of photography generated insight

his frames Dove adorned with metallic pigment or

for Dove much as did encountering his work in a

leaf, such as the rose-­tinted silvered frame of Storm

99

Clouds and the silver frames of Clouds and I’ll Build

changed venue.

In a diary entry for August 5, 1942, Dove explic-

a Stairway to Paradise. Some he crafted from metal

itly addressed the viewer’s experience of his work.

rather than wood, such as the copper strip frame of

“Try larger ones,” he noted. “People do not see small

Silver Tanks, or used a combination of the two, such

ones. Seem to want to get into them? Large ones

as Alfie’s Delight (1929), which features a wooden

give onlooker larger idea of himself. Identifica-

frame and a copper-­wrapped inner edge.102 Dove

tion.” Here, Dove described a beholder’s desire to

expected the metal of these frames to generate a

see himself or herself in a work, and his musing on a

substantial effect. Recalling a previous exhibition,

possible means to achieve that effect suggests that

Dove wrote in 1931 to Stieglitz that “there was just

this was also a criterion of his. His use of the word

something in those frames that did not blaze the

“identification” suggests such a process of viewer

way it should. Think I have found out that thing. It

self-­recognition but also a deeper bond, one involv-

was the effect on the eyes, and after two years of us-

ing a perceived sameness between the viewer and a

ing Japan gold size that they sell in the stores, I have

work of art. Just two weeks later, on August 20, Dove

found out how to do it better with a varnish ground

recorded the oft-­cited remark that he strove to work

so that the same frames have twice the speed.” Dove

100

“at the point where abstraction and reality meet.”

assigned metal, more generally, the task of blazing

Dove was concerned of course with the visual vo-

in such a manner. A note he wrote to accompany

cabularies and pictorial strategies of his paintings

the list of works in the catalog for his 1932 exhibi-

and assemblages, and this comment, coming so

tion at An American Place explains his use of media

closely on the heels of his consideration of how

in Black Sun, Thursday as well as his expectations for

to facilitate identification between his art and

metal media. “The more gold is burnished,” he said,

its viewers, may also have addressed the point of

“the blacker it becomes with its own dazzling bril-

meeting between his work and the realm of mate-

liance.”103

rial existence, here in the form of bodies occupying and moving through a gallery space. In the 1937 letter that reported on his paintings 232

Chapter Four

I discuss Dove’s engagement with viewing, his own and that of his audiences, in a chapter on his assemblages because I have become more and more

convinced that, in his attentiveness to the condi-

dios, telegraphs, and laboratory equipment. Rich-

tions and effects of display, Dove easily could have

ardson described the various components of his

imagined the conditions of an exhibition as approx-

proposed factory as working in absolute harmony,

imating the conditions of one of his assemblages,

functioning as a single unit or system, a monu-

perhaps serving to activate their charge, making

mental calculating organism or apparatus consti-

them blaze, so to speak, as he wished the frames

tuted by a network of connections and powered by

of his paintings to do. Conversely, the assemblag-

a combination of human work and the exertion of

es—­as agglomerations of materials—­would have

machines, consequently generative of a transfer of

for him modeled the work he wished his exhibi-

properties among data, bodies, phenomena, and

tions to do. Both, as superintegrating complexes,

things. Dove’s vision of an exhibition space filled

recast the graphic, material, motile, animating, and

with instrumentalized works of art addressing mo-

interconnecting properties of language and human

bile viewers, themselves newly instrumentalized

interaction as material object and physical, phe-

by way of their engagement with these very works,

nomenal space, making representation, significa-

entailed a fantasy similar to Richardson’s, a dream

tion, and converse over as substance.

104

In response

of a hub or hive of radical and intersubjective re-

to a selection of Dove’s assemblages and paintings

lations and all-­encompassing interchange among

on glass and metal on view in 1926 at the Intimate

all things. The metallic frames of Dove’s paintings

Gallery, a critic for the Art News described the in-

provided a material link between the interiors of

stallation in terms that suggest the exhibition was

his pictures and the object world on the exterior,

primed for such an effect. “This is the first time for

the two realms converging in the space of a gallery

a long while that we have seen Dove’s work shown

populated by objects and persons and through the

in the way the artist himself would have it seen,” he

ubiquity of metal paints and parts primed to carry

wrote. “There is no formality in the exhibition. The

a charge. In the case of paintings featuring both

paintings, drawings and things created from other

metallic paint and a metallic frame, such as Silver

things are scattered about, some on the walls, some

Tanks, the charge would prove especially power-

on shelves, some on the floor. All of them show

ful. The assemblages themselves, as emphatically

to better advantage than they have when on pa-

object-­like, materially embodied such a Richard­

105

Although probably not overly distinct in

sonian dream. There was of course no way for Dove

design from other exhibitions staged at Stieglitz’s

literally to incorporate bodies into his works, al-

galleries, Dove’s shows were especially at stake for

though he intimated such a gesture by including in

him because they performed a very specific sort of

them human hair (Torr’s) in Reds (ca. 1926), the hide

rade.”

work: they gathered together diverse entities—­art

of a monkey in Monkey Fur, and an animal bone in

objects, gallery architecture and accoutrements,

The Intellectual. Nor could Dove in actuality spark a

viewing bodies—­from multiple locales, the works

charge that would through its conduction suture a

on view list-­like in their procession along walls or

collection of gallery-­based animate and inanimate

atop ledges and the trajectories of visitors weaving

parts. But the simple act of putting his work in a

among these works serving to stitch together the

space the purpose of which was to compel connec-

parts into a whole. In chapter 2, I compared Dove’s

tions between viewers and the objects on view must

effort to instrumentalize his paintings by way of

have for him, in a figurative sense, come very close.

incarnating within them the properties and op-

And the assemblages themselves, when on view in

erations of weather and weather science to Lewis

this space—­established as profoundly present, bla-

Fry Richardson’s fantasy of a “Forecast-­Factory,” a

tantly material, and thus right there with their accu-

buzzing network of maps, lighted signs, pneumatic

mulated and metal parts—­provided a synoptic map

tubes, human calculators and code specialists, and

of such an exhibition-­cum-­factory, an object-­based

all manner of machines, including telephones, ra-

microcosm, akin to the weather map’s condensaThings

233

tion of weather and the devices that sensed it, of

criticism and practice of those counted among the

what Dove would have loved to achieve on a mac-

membership of Stieglitz’s circle, so I need not re-

rocosmic scale. I have employed the term “diagram”

hash the particulars here; sufficient should be the

throughout my descriptions of Dove’s paintings

reminder that Dove, according to Rosenfeld, was

and assemblages, and I have characterized the prev-

“very directly the man in painting,” just as O’Keeffe

alence of diagrams and diagram-­like imagery across

was the female, Dove’s subject matter manifest-

Dove’s body of work. By now it should be clear that,

ing “the mechanism proper to his sex as simply as

along with “map,” the term “diagram,” which con-

O’Keeffe’s method manifests the mechanism proper

notes a concrete, actualizing system (as opposed to

to her own,” by which Rosenfeld meant that while

a merely formal array of parts), lines up well with

O’Keeffe painted from her body, Dove projected

Dove’s ambitions for his works, the assemblages

himself outward, disassociating from his con-

especially. In The Culture of Diagram, John Bender

sciousness in the act of discovering “the qualities

and Michael Marrinan characterize the diagram as

and identities of the object.”107 Ultimately, Rosen-

“a proliferation of manifestly selective packets of

feld’s account of Dove cannot be disentangled from

dissimilar data correlated in an explicitly process-­

its gender politics, and in the end he positions

oriented array that has some of the attributes of a

Dove in relation to the bodily in equal measure to

representation but is situated in the world like an

O’Keeffe. But here I would like to isolate one of Ros-

106

Diagrams, they suggest, embody the qual-

enfeld’s chief claims from the paradigms of gender

ities of multiple representational modes and possess

and sexuality that govern his remarks—­an artificial

the properties of myriad entities, and they function

detaching, of course, but one executed for the pur-

by transferring and translating data among entities

pose of entering into a discussion of the role played

and forms. This is certainly the case with Dove’s di-

by animals in Dove’s intersubjective art.

object.”

agrams, such as his “Sweets” signature or his “see”

Animals populate the assemblages by virtue

arrow, his rendition of atmospheric and artistic op-

of Dove’s inclusion of their fur, their bones, their

erations in Sun Drawing Water, or his alphabetically

shells, and, in the example of the kingfisher in Ralph

and numerically annotated circle diagrams, all of

Dusenberry, approximations of their forms. They

which combine multiple forms of data into a new

also appear with relative frequency in Dove’s paint-

operational whole—­not a static image but a thing

ings, which, as a general rule, do not depict the hu-

charged with potential, chomping at the bit to do

man figure. In the case of a small selection of paint-

its work. Dove’s assemblages, it follows, exist vocif-

ings, animals count as Dove’s primary subject (they

erously as diagrams in the round.

are more prominent in his small-­scale sketches, cows especially). Dogs Chasing Each Other (1929) in-

Animals

234

cludes forms recognizable as two dogs on the run, and in Goat (1935) the animal eloquently matches

I will close this chapter with a series of observations,

step with his landscape surround. Dove’s bird-­

related to my remarks on metal and charge, partly

watching inspired Blackbird (1942), and an eclectic

inspired by the essay on Dove that Paul Rosenfeld

gathering of grazing cattle features in Cows in Pas-

included in his book Port of New York (1924). Ros-

ture (fig. 70).108 Insects, too, tended to receive a more

enfeld’s remarks present difficulties for the twenty-­

literal treatment: for example, in Moth Dance (1929),

first-­century reader because they so closely hew to

which depicts a swaying moth, or in From a Wasp

and exploit the gender stereotypes elucidated and

(ca. 1914), which depicts the insect’s head, thorax,

perpetuated by Stieglitz’s photographic practice

abdomen, legs, and wings as a fluttering mass (figs.

and within Stieglitz’s larger critical project, espe-

136, 137). Mostly, however, animals emerge in Dove’s

cially regarding the work of O’Keeffe. Marcia Bren-

compositions slyly or stealthily. They appear as zoo-

nan has thoroughly characterized the gendered

morphic shapes or configurations: for instance, the

Chapter Four

Fig. 136  Top, Arthur G. Dove, Moth Dance, 1929, oil on canvas, 50.8 × 66.4 cm (20 × 261⁄8 in.), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.2.1. Fig. 137  Bottom, Arthur G. Dove, From a Wasp, ca. 1914, oil on wood, 22 × 26.7 cm (85⁄8 × 10½ in.), Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.532, The Art Institute of Chicago.

Fig. 138  Above, Arthur G. Dove, Tree Forms II, 1935, wax emulsion on canvas, 20 × 28¼ in. (50.8 × 71.755 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1936. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Fig. 139  Left, Arthur G. Dove, Car in Garage, 1934, oil on canvas, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee, Eugenia Buxton Whitnel Funds, 76.12.

birdlike creatures in Swing Music (Louis Armstrong)

it stitches the outlines of the two creatures, shown

(fig. 114), Red, Olive and Yellow (fig. 41), and The Moon

in profile—­a critic dubbed a similar linear structure

Was Laughing at Me (fig. 111). In Tree Forms II (1935),

in Cows and Pasture “mental line.”110 The continuous

a brown shape dotted with an “eye” assumes the

line suggests a state of species coming into being

form of a quadruped surrounded by three other

rather than animals already extant in the natural

one-­eyed animallike figures, and in Car in Garage

world, as do the abrupt transitions from green to

(1934), the combination of a spiky, crest-­like shape

black where the threading line bisects the animals’

and a rectangle of yellow encircled by white re-

bodies. The animals’ seeming glare as well as their

sembles the horned head of a rhinoceros (figs. 138,

rightward pitch amplifies the intensity of the picto-

139). Dove pairs two colorful creatures in Lake After-

rial drama of their genesis and ongoing metamor-

noon (1935) (fig. 22), part bird and part horse or fox,

phosis. The Barn Next Door (1934) (fig. 141), a paint-

perhaps, or possibly meant to conjure monsters of

ing based on the watercolor sketch of the same

the deep, whose backward-­glancing eyes cast them

name—­a pantograph facilitated the transfer—­in

109

The two ap-

which a single line defines the contours of multiple

pear coextensive with the central triangular form

forms, features one of the most striking zoomor-

intersecting their noses or beaks and torsos so that

phic shapes in Dove’s body of work.111 By the time

the contours of the three central shapes—­animals

they find their way to the painting, the sinuous and

and cone—­give the impression of being formed by

snaking branches of the tree on the left side of the

a single continuous line. Even in Cows in Pasture,

sketch have taken on the guise of an animal, per-

which more or less straightforwardly depicts cattle,

haps a chipmunk or a fox, complete with striped fur,

Dove’s animal forms stray from their putative spe-

two ears, an eye, and a tail, and the tree’s trunk has

cies. These creatures array themselves variously for

come to form part of the profile of what could be

the viewer: one from above, at the bottom right,

a bird pecking at the ground. The painting retains

its black silhouette revealing a twisting body and

the sketch’s impulse to interconnect. The lines that

prominent ears or horns; one in a larger-­scale pro-

delineate the animals also outline the barn and the

file view, along the right edge, its eye narrowed to

tree opposite them, conjoining the forms but also

a slit; and, at the left, what looks to be a massing

suggesting, through the coincidence of their con-

herd. The animal viewed from above looks as much

tours, a material exchange among them, an oper-

like a slug as it does a cow or steer, especially in

ation similarly suggested by the commingling and

relation to its much larger mate, which itself could

coincident contours of Lake Afternoon. Comparable

be just about any large quadruped, while the crea-

conjoinings occur in Barnyard Fantasy (1935) (fig.

ture peeking its head above the fray at far left might

142), in which two birdlike creatures appear threat-

as well be a bird, its squinting eye trained out of

ened by another creature whose arm (or leg) reaches

the canvas at the viewer, its beak as if pursed. Three

across the lower right quadrant of the picture in

of these paintings—­Lake Afternoon, Cows in Pasture,

an attempt to grab its prey. The seeming screech

and Tree Forms II—­probably began with a sketch like

of the imperiled birds reverberates through the

the one Dove made around 1930, a striking combi-

canvas, reaching the ears of other beings, includ-

nation of greens and grays that features two loom-

ing a two-­legged torso with a single eye at center

ing, animallike forms, underscoring the mutability

and other forms lurking at the margins, their eyes,

of the category “animal” for Dove. In this sketch,

hooves, and hands emerging from a cloudy, yellow-­

Composition in Green and Gray (Untitled) (ca. 1930)

gray murk. The title of Dove’s Something in Brown,

(fig. 140), which gave rise to the painting Green,

Carmine, and Blue (1927) properly reflects the brown

Black, and White (1938), likely with the aid of a pan-

creature-­like shape at center that stares out at the

tograph, Dove weaves together sections of green,

viewer with a single eye, accompanied perhaps by

black, and gray with a threadlike line that traces as

another “something” just behind it, also one-­eyed.112

as sentient, even calculating beings.

Things

237

Dove’s paint, laid down on a metal ground, bursts

work. In the act of painting, Dove moves himself

into slippery squiggles throughout the scene, call-

“out into the object,” the object being for Rosenfeld

ing to mind both the dazzlingly overstimulated wa-

anything other than Dove himself, including both

tercolor compositions of Charles Burchfield and the

animals and human-­ made things, among them,

slither and squirm of an animal.

he wrote, “rusty pieces of farm machinery” or the

In his essay on Dove in Port of New York, Ros-

acetylene lamp featured in one of Dove’s paintings.

enfeld dedicated a fair amount of space to a dis-

Through such acts of imagined bodily projection

cussion of Dove and the animal world. All Dove’s

into the object world, Dove brings to the canvas

drawings and paintings, he wrote, “bring us with a

“the shy interior life of things” and “a sense of the

queer thrill close up to some of the gross and earthy

thing as it exists for itself, deep in proportion to his

substances from which we moderns involuntarily

experience of it,” establishing through the picture a

shrink; and lay our hands gently upon hairy animal

condition of being the very entity he paints, a state

hides, and rub them over rough stubbly ground, and

that is “binding upon himself” and that sutures his

pass good gritty soil through fingers. They bring to

being to that of another creature or thing such as a

the nostrils the healthy pungence of pastures and of

butterfly, cow, tree, flower, or piece of metal. Dove

barn-­lofts.” Through such an encounter, Rosenfeld

wished, Rosenfeld wrote, “to coincide with the ob-

said, Dove induces a condition of “animalism,” by

jects before him, to catch their actual substance,”

which the critic meant the feeling of being or be-

and importantly, he wished to transfer that con-

coming an animal while in the presence of Dove’s

dition of coincidence to his viewers. In painting a

Fig. 140  Arthur G. Dove, Composition in Green and Gray (Untitled), ca. 1930, tempera, watercolor, and black ink on paper, 37.9 × 38 cm (1415⁄16 × 1415⁄16 in.), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, A. Shuman Collection—­Abraham Shuman Fund, 62.66. Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

238

Chapter Four

Fig. 141  Above, Arthur G. Dove, The Barn Next Door, 1934, oil on canvas, 20 × 28½ in. (50.8 × 72.4 cm), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Collection of C. K. Williams II, 274-­2009-­45. Fig. 142  Right, Arthur G. Dove, Barnyard Fantasy, 1935, oil on canvas, 78.4 × 58.8 cm (307⁄8 × 231⁄8 in.), Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Duncan Phillips, B.A. 1908, to the Collection Société Anonyme, 1949.85.

herd of cows, for example, Dove “felt from within

hence the assemblage format, hence the weather,

the rich dull animality of their beings” and strove

the circles, the waves, the sound, and the lines. And

to create a picture that would bequeath that ani-

hence the animals, which, by way of their material

113

One

encounters and exchanges chart the course of a

feels that Rosenfeld would have deemed the title

viewer’s incorporation into and activation within a

of Dove’s watercolor sketch From Cows (1937) wholly

gallery installation. Because viewers presented the

apposite. Rather than a picture of cows, Dove pre-

only literally mobile entities in the gallery, perhaps

sents a cluster of vibrant, earthy forms, only one of

Dove’s animals, as living, mobile beings themselves,

them possibly animallike. The title suggests a motif

also signaled those viewers’ capacity to activate the

taken from life and then abstracted, but it also con-

space and its contents, sending a charge via their

notes the world as if seen and experienced from the

traverse through the installation so as to power up

malism to anyone who looked at the work.

114

perspective of being a herd of cattle.

240

the whole and bring it to life.

Rosenfeld’s fulsome account of Dove’s “earthi-

Dove’s animals, as almost animals, zoomorphic

ness” without a doubt struggles under the weight of

forms rather than recognizable specimens, also em-

its own verbosity and rhetorical excess, and the text

body the potential for radical connection, the pos-

may produce snickers from the twenty-­first-­century

sibility of stitching together entities through a mu-

reader. But if one peels back the layers or vows to

tual exchange of properties and parts. Thing theory

tolerate temporarily the glutting embellishments

and material culture studies have relatively little to

of Rosenfeld’s prose, one realizes that underneath

say about animals, but as scholarship within the

it all the critic made two deeply compelling points:

humanities has made manifestly clear, there exists

first, Dove’s pictures mucked around in the mate-

a long multidisciplinary history of considerations

rial world, and second, the people that viewed these

of the nature of the relationship between humans

pictures found themselves also making contact and

and animals, the potential animalism of humans,

trading places with the stuff of the material realm,

and the possible humanity of animals. From Charles

and with animals in particular. This may not be an

Darwin and Tarzan of the Apes in the nineteenth and

accurate characterization of every viewer’s expe-

early twentieth centuries to biotechnology now, the

rience, but that is here beside the point. Not only

modern period has seen the boundary between the

does Rosenfeld’s description of Dove’s work as facil-

categories “animal” and “human” persistently scru-

itating a human-­to-­animal translation confirm that

tinized, redefined, and cast into doubt.115 Because

it was possible for someone like Dove, enmeshed

Dove’s animals move in and out of the very cate-

in the same intellectual and social contexts as Ros-

gory of “animal,” congealing as creatures even as

enfeld, to imagine his paintings and assemblages

they morph into other things, they add their two

as doing just this, but Rosenfeld’s characterization

cents to the human-­animal conversation by em-

also sheds important light on what Dove might

bodying the possibility of conversion, the potential

have wished to accomplish on the beholder’s side

for a swapping of properties or features between

of the frame. If Dove wanted his paintings and as-

supposedly divergent or incommensurable classes

semblages to model through their operations and

of things, described by Rosenfeld as entering into a

effects a condition of all-­encompassing intersub-

state of animalism by trading one’s own body and

jectivity, and if he wanted these works to start up

consciousness for the bodily experience of another,

into life, so to speak, within the context of an ex-

nonhuman creature.

hibition so that the beholder might come to feel

The amorphous forms of Dove’s Reminiscence

himself or herself as one part within a larger system

(1937) (fig. 143) illustrate this point. A series of

or network of entities actively and busily at work

hued shapes along the bottom edge are green-­

in the gallery space and beyond, Dove knew he had

equally waves, grass, or a row of grasping hands;

to build just the right machine: hence the metal,

the black shape at the center adorned with a blue

Chapter Four

Fig. 143  Arthur G. Dove, Reminiscence, 1937, oil and wax emulsion on canvas, 14½ × 20½ in. (36.83 × 52.07 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1937. Any reproduction of this image shall not be made without written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

sawtooth form delineates a human head in profile,

and Reminiscence a novel hybrid form, a condition

complete with a staring blue eye and wavy hair,

of being human and animal at the same time. The

while also serving to designate the eye and ear of

duck / rabbit, old woman / young woman oscilla-

a horse or a sheep, its mouth opened to let out a

tion between human and beast in Reminiscence ar-

neigh or a bleat. Another of Dove’s pictures fea-

ticulated such an exchange as occurring through

tures this kind of human-­animal back-­and-­forth.

an act of seeing that, for Dove, would have entailed

In two separate letters to Stieglitz, one written in

the embodied viewing that transpired in a gallery

1937, the other in 1938, Dove noted that a Professor

space. It is worth recalling here that “having ears

Boswell, at Hobart College, and his wife were the

like an animal,” in Dove’s words, made the experi-

figures featured in Lake Afternoon. Dove most likely

ence of overhearing a murder an especially “vivid”

referred to Foster Partridge Boswell, a professor

one for him, a luridness expressed in the explosive

of philosophy at Hobart at the time, but of course

and twisting forms of Neighborly Attempt at Murder,

the looming creatures in Lake Afternoon present

the painting based on the incident.117 Dove spoke

not portraits of Boswell and his spouse, who were

metaphorically, of course, but the suggestion that

friends of Dove’s and Torr’s, but, rather, a vision of

the particular charge of the overheard event and, by

them transformed from humans into something

extension, the charge of the painting that resulted

116

As he did with his paintings made from

arose by way of a transfer of an animal faculty or

records, Dove produced in works like Lake Afternoon

an animal’s insight to Dove’s person intensifies the

else.

Things

241

Fig. 144  Arthur G. Dove, Monkey Fur, 1926, corroded metal, monkey fur, tin foil, and cloth on metal, 43.2 × 30.5 cm (17 × 12 in.), Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.534, The Art Institute of Chicago.

effect of the human-­animal dalliances that Dove in-

and center religious and scientific debates about

timated in his letters to Stieglitz and that he carries

the relationship between humans and animals,

out in Reminiscence and Lake Afternoon.

Dove’s Monkey Fur would have undoubtedly reso-

The assemblages, like the paintings, engage

nated. As the historian Constance Areson Clark has

the animal world and figuratively contravene the

written, “Monkeys were everywhere in the 1920s.”

boundaries among animals, humans, and things.

The Scopes Trial received widespread coverage in

Their breach finds a parallel in Dove’s reading of

the press, drew huge crowds to the courtroom in

animal signs in order to gauge the weather, a grasp

Dayton, Tennessee, and attracted the attention of

at preternatural insight that involved cognizing the

all manner of people trying to make a point or a

world from the point of view of an animal’s state of

buck, among them photographers, moviemakers,

being. I have already mentioned the animal bone in

radio stations, souvenir sellers, chimp handlers,

The Intellectual, the shells of ocean creatures in as-

evangelists, cartoonists, and free-­speech activists.

semblages such as Long Island (1925), and the animal

The sensational response to the trial was aided and

hide in Monkey Fur (1926) (figs. 117, 144). Monkey Fur

abetted by the popularity in the 1920s of a genre of

also features a zoomorphic shape. While the piece

entertainment featuring the Stone Age and the ex-

of rusted metal at the center of the composition

ploits of cavemen, ape-­men, and other monkey-­like

does not look like a monkey, it most certainly as-

prehistoric beasts.118 Thus it is hard to imagine that

sumes the form of an animal. The metal strip has

Monkey Fur would not have in some way invoked for

ears, a snout, a longish neck, and front and back

both Dove and his viewers the period’s ubiquitous

legs, while the encircling strip of monkey hide

conversations about humanity’s monkeyness and

confirms the belonging of the rusted metal shape

the proverbial missing link between humans and

to the animal kingdom. The bumpy folds of the

apes. And I would wager that Dove included real

rusted surface themselves conjure the roughness

monkey fur in his assemblage precisely in order

of an animal’s skin or its hairy coat. Dove covered

to facilitate the imagining of a material link or an

the heads of the nails that fasten this metal form

actual exchange of properties between people and

to its metal ground with pieces of tinfoil; the bit

beasts, here with the weight of science to back it up.

of foil toward the top serves as the creature’s eye,

Monkey Fur invites the viewer to imagine a

making it seem alert to whatever might be happen-

human-­animal encounter or swap. The work also

ing beyond the frame or perhaps busy keeping a

puts one in mind of other procedures that involve

watchful eye on us. The fact that the brassy gold-­

the transformation or transmutation of animals,

toned metal ground captures, distorts, and reflects

specifically processes that render animals materi-

back the viewer’s visage materializes the idea that

ally available to and as if conversant with us. The

there exists a substantive connection or exchange

nails, which pin the metal strip to its ground, along

between our world and that of the creature before

with the strip of monkey hide evoke the procedures

us as well as the notion that in the act of looking

of natural history, including the slicing, skinning,

at the work we materially transform in a manner

and reconstituting of animals and animal parts in

analogous to the warping of our reflection, one that

taxidermy as well as taxidermy’s transformation of

parallels the human-­animal transformation of the

live creatures into immobile and staring specimens

Boswells. As far as I have gathered, Dove made no

for the purpose of display, a conversion process also

mention of Darwin or period conversations about

called to mind by the corroded state of the metal

evolution in his diaries, notes, or correspondence.

strip which marks it as an entity that has undergone

But coming on the heels of the Scopes, or “Monkey,”

a material transmutation. Stitching and handwork

Trial of 1925, which pitted the schoolteacher John

in Hand Sewing Machine; binding and fixing with

Thomas Scopes and the American Civil Liberties

wire, staples, and nails in the assemblage portrait

Union against the state of Tennessee, and put front

of Rebecca and Paul Strand; working with wood to Things

243

fashion armatures and frames; and gluing, fasten-

nication prevalent among the museum’s diorama

ing, and reconstituting throughout Dove’s body of

scenes. Like the humans in an anthropological life

assemblage work: these operations evoke labor in

group, diorama animals endeavor at the behest

general but also, more specifically, the procedures

of the scientists and artists that created them to

and labor of taxidermy. The shallow shadow box–­

suggest continuity between their world and ours,

like format of Monkey Fur and other of Dove’s as-

proffering the possibility of a material exchange

semblages, usually framed and often fronted with

between the space of the diorama and the region

a glass pane, looks ahead to Joseph Cornell’s assem-

just beyond the partition of glass that fronts the

blages but also back to Titian Ramsay Peale’s but-

display, one instigated by the viewer’s fantasy of

terfly boxes. Their status as containers also makes

mutual recognition and bodily participation.

them kin to the display formats of natural history

244

The American Museum of Natural History first

museums, and to a diorama populated with taxi-

introduced such large-­scale dioramas in the early

dermy specimens especially. The product of a late

years of the twentieth century and added diorama

nineteenth-­century embrace of materialism within

displays to their galleries throughout the 1930s,

the fields of anthropology and natural history that

1940s, and 1950s, including grand-­ scale exhibits

identified objects as science’s chief pedagogical

such as the Akeley Hall of African Mammals, opened

tool, the diorama aimed to reconstruct an “occupa-

in 1936 and named after the naturalist and taxi-

tional” or “life” group. Knowledge, it was believed,

dermy expert Carl Akeley, who oversaw its construc-

arose through encountering objects situated in fac-

tion. As the museum’s major draw, the diorama halls

similes of their original contexts and in a state of

packed in visitors in the early years much as they do

being used, as in the example of a female manne-

today.120 Dove made regular visits to the museum.

quin wearing native garb wielding a tool in a set-

He particularly admired the butterfly exhibits,

ting constructed to match the built environment

which could have inspired the specimen-­pinned-­

and living conditions typical to the cultural group

to-­a-­ground format of many of his assemblages,

to which she belonged. As Bill Brown has described,

and he without a doubt saw the museum’s diorama

such a grouping vitalized material objects and also

halls. Yet rather than making a claim for Dove’s di-

invited imagined participation on the part of the

rect engagement in period museological precepts

viewer, who identified with the life-­size, in-­context,

and pedagogical strategies, I want to suggest that

at-­ work bodies on view.119 Knowledge about the

the dioramas on view at the museum encouraged

animal kingdom came about through analogous

him to think about his art in terms of the operations

means in the large-­scale natural history diorama,

embodied by the displays, and that this thinking in

which combined uncannily lifelike taxidermy spec-

turn aided in inspiring the assemblages and the

imens procured on scientific expeditions with re-

properties he mocked-­up in their physical form. Col-

alistic settings that paired illusionistic backdrops

lecting, gathering, dismantling, reconstituting, fas-

with three-­dimensional fabrications of vegetation,

tening, building, painting, arraying, and activating:

soil, rocks, and bodies of water. Diorama designers

the dioramas and Dove’s assemblages have these

pose the featured animal specimens in action so as

operations in common, and they share an impulse

to mimic behavior in the wild. Specimens, for in-

to dismantle the dividing lines between seemingly

stance, often look right at the viewer, such as the

opposed categories or realms, including human and

addax and dama gazelle in the Libyan Desert enclo-

animal, animate and inanimate, life and art, and

sure at the American Museum of Natural History in

even life and death.121 Although he worked in a con-

New York, which respond to a viewer’s intrusion in

text still flush with the possibilities of animation

kind, matching the viewer’s motion with their own

and animism, Dove, far from wanting to talk to the

implied movement and redirecting the gaze back at

animals or wishing to claim that pictures are people

the audience, a fiction of human-­animal commu-

too—­“paintings should exist in themselves, as well

Chapter Four

as people,” he told Duncan Phillips, but they should

new things they are made to accompany, between

not be people—­instead identified a model system in

a whalebone and a magic lantern in the case of a

the life group and the diorama that posited the fea-

curiosity cabinet or, with Dove, between an animal

122

Seeming life suggested

bone and a camera lens or monkey fur and rusted

more so than would an encounter with animals in

metal.123 Curiosity cabinets and other such collec-

the wild the possibility of interspecies exchange,

tions aimed to inspire wonder in their viewers,

a material encounter or transfer that itself was a

to establish intellectual, social, and political ties

model for the translations and transmutations

among their users, and to advertise the knowledge,

that entities underwent within a network by vir-

refinement, and status of the individuals or insti-

tue of their networked status and as a result of an

tutions responsible for creating or curating them.

activating, system-­wide charge. The vitalization of

The dialogue generated among visitors to such a

entities within a diorama—­the fact of their anima-

cabinet or on the part of readers of publications

tion as produced by their death, by their lifeless yet

detailing their contents played a significant role in

lifelike reconstitution and array, and as a function of

this effort. As spaces of sociability, these contained

their being looked at by a viewer who phantasmat-

and arrayed collections linked individuals together

ically converses or identifies with an anthropomor-

as groups. Their capacity “to call such a society

phized specimen, the very operations that charge the

of friends into existence,” as Lorraine Daston has

display—­aided in pressing Dove’s practice toward

written in relation to another kind of wondrous col-

the assemblage format and its requisite gathering,

lection, the Glass Flowers assembly at the Harvard

arraying, and deploying of all manner of objects, ar-

Museum of Natural History, stitches together dis-

tifacts, and things, from body parts to metal, fabric,

parate entities, human and nonhuman, into physi-

paper, and paint. Diorama vitality, as a condition of

cal as well as discursive networks of exchange.124 A

lifeless aliveness, models the transference between

similar claim can be made for natural history diora-

animate and inanimate entities that Dove strove

mas. As simultaneously entertainment and object-­

for in his assemblages, and in his paintings as well,

based narratives designed to produce knowledge,

those exchanges between, for example, acts and ar-

the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural

tistic media, bodies and signatures, and artists and

History would have produced multiple forms of

instruments, each of which reconfigured not just

discourse and many different kinds of social bonds.

the nature of the relations among those entities but

Their connecting capacity, then, would have en-

transformed the very nature of their being.

compassed relations between specimens and view-

tured specimens as if alive.

The assemblage effect itself skewed almost as

ers but would also have extended to the cultivation

close to a curiosity cabinet or Kunstkammer as it did

and facilitation of sociability on the human side of

to a natural history diorama, to be sure. But this

the glass.

only reinforces Dove’s intent to collect and array

Dove probably had such a capacity in mind

things in the company of the associations that trav-

when he created his assemblages, and also when he

eled with those things from one context to another

culled zoomorphic forms from the shapes, colors,

as well as his desire to translate those things, as-

and patterns of his painted compositions. Dove en-

sociations, and their original systems of existence

visioned the viewer’s engagement with his work as a

or value—­as with a collection of individual items

vital aspect of that work’s operation. The conversa-

stitched together as a list or an animal pelt sewn

tions and exchanges generated among the visitors

back into its animal self—­into a new network or

to his exhibitions and the works on view would not

complex. Such an integrated system would retain

have differed in kind from those that transpired in

features of the originals but activate them as some-

other exhibition contexts, although they surely dif-

thing else, emphatically suggesting the existence

fered in content. But Dove plainly put special store

of essential relationships among them and the

in what happened beyond the glass, so to speak, or Things

245

outside the frame. The fact that many of his works

about it,” Mumford observed, “Dove would long

were meant to be funny and were acknowledged

ago have been recognized and valued for what he

as such exemplifies the emphasis he placed on his

is: a witty mind whose art is play, and whose play is

viewers’ response. Recent scholarship and period

often art.” Mumford wrote two years later, in 1936,

writing on Dove both affirm, if at times begrudg-

that in Dove’s new paintings “the world is young

ingly, that humor constituted a signature if not

and unexpected and funny again . . . and cows exist

pervasive quality of his work. Beady-­eyed animals,

for more exciting purposes than providing milk and

cartoonish boats, scuffling dogs, creatures from the

meat,” and he described the creatures in Lake After-

watery deep, an inside joke made at the expense of

noon as “Thurberesque,” referring to the humorist

a friend moved to sing when drunk, women’s stock-

James Thurber whose New Yorker cartoons in the

ings, monkey fur: for all Dove’s seriousness about

1920s and 1930s featured a menagerie of surrealistic,

the totalizing, utopian capacity of his art, he still

human-­acting animals, with dogs an especial favor-

wanted to make his audience laugh. The droll wit

ite.128 Elizabeth McCausland also remarked Dove’s

on evidence in his letters and the sense of play

humor—­a “great capacity for jokes” along with the

demonstrated by his “Sweets” signature, his refer-

same “American tang” as Mark Twain—­pointing

ences to his radio persona “Graham McDove” or to

to the “hippity-­hop rhythm” of his painting of a

the “tunking” of his and Torr’s ghost, his mash-­up

train, the humor of Hound (1934), which depicted

of war news, sex, and potty jokes in his collage for

a dog that “came with the house” in Geneva, and

the Bernsteins, and his witty lament regarding

his “gentle raillery at the foibles and pretensions” of

his ass being shaken off a tractor while plowing a

both nature and humans.129 Elsewhere McCausland

barley field all found their way into his work. One

recounted Dove’s spirited response to the teasing

supposes that this winking spirit inspired Dove to

of his friends over his hearse-­ like black station

plant a sign on the road leading to his farm in Ge-

wagon: he painted it with vermillion polka dots.

125

Surely Dove’s Dogs

Even paintings without overtly witty motifs struck

Chasing Each Other, which evokes the intensity but

viewers as purposefully humorous. Edward Alden

also the comical ineffectuality of two beleaguered

Jewell called Dove’s titles “roguish” and the non-

hounds, reflects his particular sense of humor, and

objective canvases these titles described at times

the same can be said about the sly feline with car-

appearing “perversely and disconcertingly, full of

toonlike whiskers in the small-­scale sketch There

elephants.”130 Although I resist putting too much

Was a Cat Somewhere (ca. 1940), the title of which

weight on the funny in Dove’s work, the fact re-

is by itself more than a little droll, or Face on a Bank

mains that inside jokes, puns, witticisms, and plays

(1940), in which Dove adorned an orange ellipse

on words are themselves a means to sociability, the

that looks nothing like a human head with a merry,

mutual understanding and shared pleasure they

neva that read “Dove Airport.”

winking grin.

126

generate serving to create or reinforce social and

Dove’s humor was duly noted by his friends and

intellectual bonds, as the assemblages themselves

critics, if not always enthusiastically embraced.

did by circulating among Dove’s friends.131 The

Stieglitz told Dove that a curator from the Boston

“jokes” in his paintings and assemblages may have

Museum of Fine Arts called Ralph Dusenberry the

been intended to perform a similar function, stim-

127

Lewis Mum-

ulating rapport by way of inducing a chuckle or two.

ford lauded Dove’s wit in his review of the artist’s

In her discussion of the provocation of particular

1934 exhibition at An American Place, which fea-

modes of viewing and encountering compelled by

tured a number of the assemblages. He has, Mum-

graphic arrangement or installation display in the

ford wrote, “a light touch, a sense of humor, and

1930s, Martha Ward identifies open-­ended play in

an inventive mind.” “If we Americans did not so of-

which the viewer actively engages with the forms

ten do spurious honor to Art by pulling a long face

arrayed before him or her as one desired result of

“wittiest thing I’ve seen in America.”

246

Chapter Four

innovative layout design.132 Dove’s silly animals and

away face to face through a network of apparatuses,

preposterous materials provoke an analogous feel-

indicates that he had this sort of interconnection

ing of larking about. In Dove’s work, then, comedy

on his mind when writing his letter to Torr. His dis-

creates ties that bind, the viewer indulging in a joke

patch of northern flicker feathers, scavenged from

with what is on view and with anyone else in on it

his environs and sent to hers, suggests that, to his

too, including Dove himself.

mind, the weight of such a transaction might be

In the 1936 letter to Torr that described his

best shouldered by the world of animals and things,

wish to communicate by way of “television” so that

or that in sending the feathers as a surrogate for

he could see as well as hear the party at the other

himself—­putting a bird on the wing when he him-

end of a telephone conversation, Dove enclosed

self, Dove, could not fly, so to speak—­he pictured

three feathers. He hypothesized that the feathers

the intersubjectivity after which he sought as in

were “probably a flicker argument,” meaning that

some way involving the translation of properties

he imagined they had been shorn during a tussle

between himself and these other, nonhuman be-

between two northern flickers, a type of wood-

ings.134 Dove followed his assessment of a cat’s in-

pecker common throughout the United States and

ability to leave so pristine the scene of the flicker

Canada whose tail feathers bear the pattern of black

crime with a witty play on words: no cat could have

bars, spots, and crescents observable in the speci-

done this, he wrote, but “I just saw a Watson cat go

mens Dove gave to Torr. Dove figured that the lost

over Gossiptown Bridges.” While it is hard to know

feathers were remnant of a bird scrape because, as

exactly what Dove meant by this, the underlining

he wrote to Torr, “a cat couldn’t have done away

of “Watson” signals a less than literal meaning,

with every thing but 3 feathers.”133 On the one hand,

pointing out that Dove has something up his sleeve

a sweet gesture, on the other, a telling missive: Dove

and giving a heads-­up to Torr that she should read

missed Torr terribly during the weeks she spent in

between the lines. And most probably he referred to

Connecticut tending to her ill mother, and his many

the very next sentence of his letter, which conveyed

letters, filled with affectionate drawings (including

a bit of gossip—­one of the Appletons left his wife

his “Sweets” doodle) and talk of staying in touch via

for Molly, he reported—­thus making Dove himself

radio, telepathy, or a sympathetic “tunking” ghost,

the sly if self-­deprecating cat on his way to Gossip-

make obvious his desire to sustain their connec-

town. In a few short sentences plus feathers then,

tion while physically separated. The letters do so

Dove managed to bring about an exchange, both

both psychologically and literally, by maintaining

material and figurative, among humans, humans

emotional intimacy between Dove and Torr and as

and terrain (Hartford, Geneva), humans and things

material entities dispatched over distance that se-

(feathers, a letter), and humans and animals (fight-

cure a material link between sender and recipient,

ing flickers, chatty cats) that amounted to a binding

their trajectory from Geneva to Hartford a kind of

gesture of sociability, one that in its temporal and

stitching together in time and space. Dove’s gift of

spatial reach offered a model of what Dove was after

feathers symbolizes this link. As a material transac-

in his art.

tion, this act of giving also transformed a figurative bond into a material one, the exchange of brute matter, of things, between hands thus securing a web of relationships—­among people, feathers, notepaper,

Nature versus Machine, and a Segue to Impossibility

ink, writing, post offices, and geography—­ much

In the early 1940s, Jackson Pollock declared, “I am

like those fashioned among the myriad parts of

nature.” Not too long after, in 1963, Andy Warhol

Dove’s assemblages or among the audiences and

issued his own such declaration: “I want to be a

equipment of radio or the phonograph. Dove’s fan-

machine.”135 While a convenient pairing for use in

tasy of “television,” which would bring people far

teaching introductory surveys of art in the twenThings

247

Fig. 145  Arthur G. Dove, Cinder Barge and Derrick, 1931, oil on canvas, 22 × 30 in. (55.9 × 76.2 cm).

248

tieth century, the nature-­ machine binary these

ries marshaled to explain art in America before the

statements imply when treated as a twosome easily

Second World War, including machine and body,

leads to simplified interpretations of each artist’s

industrial fabrication and handwork, materiality

work as well as rather-­too-­neat chartings of the his-

and discourse, and irony and eros.136 So treating

tory of modern art. Equally curt readings of the art

Dove’s paintings of machines and industry and his

and artists of the so-­called Stieglitz circle threaten

proclivity for mill-­made metal and manufactured

to arise out of analogous pairings: Duchamp’s ad-

metal parts as serious artistic business rather than

ulation of American plumbing over and against

atypical or insignificant within his larger body of

Stieglitz’s dislike of automobiles, say, or Picabia’s

work, or suggesting that the assemblages really

mechanomorphic portraits versus Strand’s psy-

mattered to him and consisted of more than a brief

chologically penetrating photographs of his close

and Dada­esque detour from the real substance of

colleagues and friends. Rosenfeld’s Dove-­O’Keeffe

his practice, as I have attempted to do in this chap-

dichotomy has on its own caused no small amount

ter, means taking Dove and his works at their word,

of interpretive trouble, and the same goes for his

paying attention to what they have to tell us about

Stieglitzian insistence that both artists were firmly

what they were supposed to achieve. A painting

rooted in the natural world and the American soil, a

such as Cinder Barge and Derrick (1931) (fig. 145), then,

pigeonholing perpetuated by a whole slew of bina-

rather than an anxious quelling of industry through

Chapter Four

the imposition of nature’s swelling, organic forms,

through a circuitry constructed of all manner of

might more simply be a picture about machines and

entities, objects, and processes. Likewise, Dove in

the work they do; a crane loading a ship, after all, is

his assemblages gathered the stuff of the world and

a crane loading a ship. The same could be said about

then sent it back out, newly equipped with a charge

Dove’s Red Barge, also painted in 1931, or Sand Barge,

that had the power to circulate and stitch, traveling

137

At the time, Dove and Torr lived on

as would an electromagnetic wave through solid

the Mona in Halesite, on Huntington Harbor, so the

objects and across vast stretches of terrain or at-

trappings of the shipping industry would have been

mosphere so as to weave all parts it handled and

part of their daily life. And shipping, as an activ-

inhabited into an immeasurably immense intersub-

ity that connected multiple locations through the

jective whole, all the way from point, line, and plane

transit and transfer of many forms of matter, would

to solidity, motility, and reconstituted life. And just

have been for Dove an apposite subject. Likewise,

as Richardson’s Forecast-­Factory was nothing but

Dove’s “things,” rather than the derivative leavings

a glorious fantasy, Dove’s vision of a translation-­

of an artist stuck on a boat, mattered to him just as

borne, materially conjured, and all-­encompassing

much as his paintings did. By paying attention to

intersubjectivity was mostly a dream. Humans can-

and taking seriously what Dove and his works have

not talk with the animals or converse with heavenly

to say about themselves, one realizes that Dove sits

bodies, and never will. They have no capacity to see

absolutely nowhere in regard to the great but false

the earth’s surface as it is offered up by a weather

Duchamp-­Stieglitz, Culture-­Nature divide. Rather,

map or the heavens as imparted by a constellation

Dove’s work, and his “things” in particular, emerge

chart. And people do not really become intimately

as open-­minded and as many-­folded as Heidegger’s

conversant with the machines they use, know what

jug or Richardson’s Forecast-­Factory. Richardson’s

it feels like to be a boat floating on water, or form

proposed weather hive held itself open to masses

viable virtual communities by listening to the same

and masses of incoming information, data of myr-

radio station or visiting the same stuffed ape. But as

iad sorts registered and transmitted by a great

far as Dove was concerned, they could try, and his

diversity of means; it then conducted this data

art could lend a hand.

from 1930.

Things

249

Epilogue

I return at the close of this study to the question Dove was asked in 1938—­What is it that you as an artist undertake to do?—­and to his r­ eply: the impossible.1 Given the ambitions of Dove’s practice as I have described them, this might have presented the only reasonable answer. “Impossible” also fit the bill because, as intent as he was on making connections and forging bonds, Dove acknowledged the possibility of mistranslation, embracing it, in fact, as an essential and irreducible aspect of any system. By mistranslation I do not mean the inaccurate rendition of a word or phrase in one language in the form of another, nor do I invoke a state of misunderstanding or a bungled transfer of information that produces confusion or error. I point rather to those things arising within the process of transmission or translation as if on their own accord, generated apart from or in addition to the intentions of the human and nonhuman entities responsible for setting in motion and facilitating the transfer or encounter in question. I mean, for instance, the sonic effects produced by the mechanical works of a phonograph, the pictorial results arising from the inherent properties of a medium such as wax emulsion or pastel, the perturbations and jigs registered by a pantograph as it traces, the transmuted voice transmitted over a telephone wire or in the form of radio waves, the end product of oxidizing metal that forms part of an assemblage, the unpredictable consequences of painting shipboard or in a house rattled and shaken by storm-­wrought winds, or the 251

involuntary overhearing of a murder. Unexpected

sistant to the imposition of a system, and regaling

finds on his scavenging sorties, unanticipated re-

audiences with tales of weirdly glowing mastheads,

sults produced by his experiments with pigments

singing electrical wires, or wind’s uncanny ability to

and solutions, unplanned effects of juxtaposition

register itself, Dove drew attention to the extraordi-

generated by his assembling of incongruent things

nary qualities and behaviors that featured distinc-

into a work of art, serendipitous transformations

tively within his endeavor. In the words of one of

of the works themselves when arrayed in a new or

his critics, he dwelled knowingly “on the substan-

unconventional space: all played a welcome and

tial things of this world, but keeping all the while

vital role in Dove’s artistic practice. Just as Dove

a mariner’s eye on the upper heavens lest some

exulted in bringing unseen phenomena to light in

fine passing moment of cloud or shine be lost.”2

paintings such as Sun Drawing Water, Fog Horns, and

In looking to the material and immaterial both,

Moon, giving visual form to physical processes such

he made clear that to his mind any system bent

as evaporation, air flow, and gravity normally well

on calling all-­encompassing intersubjectivity into

beyond the grasp of the senses, and just as he strove

being must rely on its own inherent extrasystem-

to conjure perspectives on the world unattainable

atic procedures and effects, that one could fathom

by humans in works such as Flight, Rain or Snow, and

setting about engineering such an interconnecting

Me and the Moon, he was captivated by the prospect

and fully charged complex of beings and things

of things acting on their own, collaborating as equal

but still had to leave some of the conjuring up to

partners within a cluster of entities configured as a

chance. The mismatch between an anticipatory or

network so as to produce an outcome, as was the

hypothetical thought and its object served Dove as

case with a sonic system comprising a complex of

a metaphor for the inevitability and necessity of

live music, recording apparatus, playback device,

mistranslation and the extraintentional, and one

and human listener. Even the overheard murder

suspects that Dove’s sustained fascination with me-

paid pictorial dividends. Analogous to the pursuit

teorology arose as much from its failure to predict

of automatism by Duchamp or the Surrealists, but

future conditions as it did from his interest in the

also crucially distinct, Dove’s attentiveness to auto-

weather as a phenomenon or from the necessity of

matic procedures amounted to a fascination with

knowing what the weather would be. Perhaps the

the unintended consequences of translation and

preposterousness of Pound’s translations, the bulk

the fundamentally productive part those uninten-

of them illegible and bordering on sheer nonsense,

tional outcomes played in transmuting and recon-

attracted Dove to them in equal measure as did

stituting human language and communication as

their “charge.” Something similar might be said for

well as their potential for recasting the nature of

Dove’s love of Joyce, the epitome of a difficult read.

the relationship between humans and things and,

Joyce’s description in “Hades,” the sixth episode of

also, among all things in the world.

Ulysses, of the dead speaking from their graves with

Calling his task as an artist an impossible one

the help of a gramophone might have held partic-

was thus for Dove a way to express the sheer ambi-

ular appeal. The occasion of Paddy Dignam’s fu-

tion of his practice and the preposterousness of his

neral compels Leopold Bloom’s thoughts to turn to

objective. But it also entailed making clear that his

­Hades, the land of the dead, and to Odysseus’s visit

project and his intentions were seriously invested

there, during which the dead spoke to him. Bloom’s

in the wondrous, the magical, and the supernatu-

musings point up the absurdity of imagining the

ral, with automatism proving an exemplary figure

success of any indirect, necessarily translated ex-

for those things. Just as the science of meteorology

change:

signaled its own wondrous aspects, marveling as it

252

did at the double identity of clouds, subject to clas-

Besides how could you remember everybody?

sification and codification and preternaturally re-

Eyes, walk, voice. Well, the voice, yes: gramo-

Epilogue

phone. Have a gramophone in every grave or keep

to do,” and he knew full well that he himself would

it in the house. After dinner on a Sunday. Put on

not manage the job.5 Were he a force of nature or

poor old greatgrandfather. Kraahraark! Hello­

more plainly a thing, on the other hand, he might

hello­hello amawfullyglad kraark awfullyglada-

have been properly up to the task.

seeagain hellohello amawf krpthsth. Remind you

I intend my claims regarding the fundamental

of the voice like the photograph reminds you of

preoccupations of Dove’s practice to serve a dual

the face. Otherwise you couldn’t remember the

purpose. I arrived at my argument about Dove by

face after fifteen years, say. For instance who?

way of careful historical research and with a fair

For instance some fellow that died when I was in

amount of conviction and, as such, I do aim to per-

Wisdom Hely’s.

3

suade. But with this book I also set out to chart a path for revisiting the work of a much-­studied art-

Such a lack of correspondence as embraced by Dove

ist like Dove, someone we thought we knew very

extended even to the act of looking at something

well. I care almost less about whether my ultimate

directly and face-­to-­face: “If you have been asked

claims concerning the “what” and the “why” of

to meet someone in another room whom you’ve

Dove go down smoothly than I do about readers

never seen,” he said, “it wouldn’t be easy not to

taking seriously the means by which I made my

think what that person was like on the way into the

way to those claims. My hope, then, is that by plot-

other room. It would be surprising indeed if your

ting a course for rethinking Dove’s practice, in part

idea of the person in the other room and the person

by expanding the field of evidence and recasting

in the other room collided precisely—­they never

the historical and conceptual categories available

could even if you had been in the other room all

for interpretive use, I might also encourage read-

4

the time.” Here, Dove proffers the very substance

ers to look with fresh eyes at other of the artists

of establishing a social relation—­one human en-

counted as members of Stieglitz’s circle, including

countering, thinking about, and occupying the

the most pondered and written about of all them,

same space as another—­as a demonstration of the

Georgia O’Keeffe, whose art in scholarly accounts

crossed purposes and disrupted currents native to

escapes the Stieglitz paradigm even less frequently

any gesture toward an intersubjective state. Dove’s

than Dove’s.6 Despite himself, Paul Rosenfeld in

shorthand, his playfully obfuscating poetry and

Port of New York offered a glimmer of a way out.

prose, his custom-­made weather codes that, in the

He attributed to her work the linear exactness of

absence of a cipher, prove illegible to anyone but

a machine-­ cut form and a “Picasso-­ like power,”

him (or perhaps Torr), and his lovely, strange, and

suggesting in the space of a few short sentences

riveting abstract vocabulary: these things, too, in

a series of terms and concepts—­Cubism, collage,

their resistance to being read, in their refusal to

Precisionism, technology, the nonhuman, and the

be dissected, marked out, and defined, insist on

cult of the machine, among others—­that venture

the necessity of leaving matters somewhat in the

unconventional avenues of inquiry regarding her

dark. This was Dove’s embrace of the extrahuman or

work. Rosenfeld also invoked perception as a par-

preternatural aspect of intersubjectivity registered

adigm for understanding O’Keeffe’s paintings.

also in his talk of tunking ghosts, white light, sensi-

When looking at her work, he wrote, “it is as though

tive instruments, and telepathy. Dove’s project was

one had been given to see the mysterious parting

impossible, then, because he could only engineer,

movement of petals under the rays of sudden fierce

he only had language and its properties on his side,

heat; or the scarcely perceptible twist of a leaf in

leaving him hoping along the way for flashes of

a breath of air; or the tremulous throbbing of a

wonder and unanticipated, extraintentional effects

diminutive bird-­breast,” and he employed the term

to emerge as by-­products of his labor. “The thing

“flower-­movements” to describe O’Keeffe’s render-

has never been done,” Dove said, “that I should like

ing of such undetectable effects of motion someEpilogue

253

how available to the eye in picture form.7 Textual

even impulsive approach to the work of someone

nuggets such as these do not the foundation of a

like O’Keeffe, or to any other artist from the period

wholesale reinterpretation make, but the existence

whose stories we believe we know by heart, mem-

of remarks like Rosenfeld’s grants license to enter

bers of the Stieglitz circle but also other figures

and explore less well-­traveled interpretive terrain.

from the first half of the twentieth century, includ-

It might, for instance, draw one back through time

ing those that have recently recaptured popular and

to early natural history and, in particular, to the

scholarly interest, such as Charles Burchfield. Aaron

botanist William Bartram’s sense of the volition

Douglas, Charles Sheeler, Marius de Zayas, and Flo-

of plants or, a bit later, to the artist Martin John-

rine Stettheimer also come to mind. The point I

son Heade’s paintings of hummingbirds, some of

make here, that there is still a fair amount left to

these creatures suspended between the stillness of

say, is an optimistic one, and with it I mean to pay

a specimen and the vivacity of breathing, blood-­

homage to the scholarly writing on early American

pumping life. Rosenfeld’s remark also propels one

modernism that precedes my own. Without such

forward again, returning one to the intellectual

a foundation on which to build, I would not have

preoccupations of O’Keeffe’s own day, to contem-

had the wherewithal to recognize the diaries as pe-

poraneous discourse on the sensorium, perhaps, or

culiarly significant or to comprehend fully Dove’s

maybe the physics of motion and force—­in either

fixation on the weather, and I certainly would not

case, possibly relevant, possibly not, but certainly

have dedicated so much time and thought to the

worth a look.

assemblages, some of which, I must admit, initially

When I undertook the chore of reading page by

made me question Dove’s artistic and intellectual

page the diaries kept for decades by Dove and Torr,

bona fides. Above all else, I hope that my thoughts

I found dispiriting at first the ratio between what

on Dove will find a comfortable home alongside the

I thought was usable material—­Dove commenting

preexisting literature, entering into a relationship

on his art, Torr describing his artistic process—­and

with this previous scholarly work as sociable and

what I deemed mere fluff, including reports of what

supercharged as the network of relations and bonds

they ate for dinner or bought at the store, a note

Dove envisaged as establishing intersubjectivity as

about Torr washing her hair or mending Dove’s

the essential condition for the world and its myriad

socks, records of the day’s weather, descriptions of

inhabitants.

errands run in town and trips to the post office, and accounts of Dove’s constant maintenance work on the boat. But as my frustration gave way to curiosity about the value that Dove and Torr by all appearances placed on the mundane and the everyday it occurred to me that the fact of the diary’s existence might be as important as the information it contained and that the impulse to register one’s doings and the conditions of one’s surround in writing on a daily basis might just tell the scholar something about a person’s art. Realizing as much encouraged me to approach Dove with an open mind and a sense of possibility commensurate with his own and also forced me to let go of any assumptions regarding what I had thought I would wind up saying about his work. My sense is that the time has come for an analogously open, counterintuitive or 254

Epilogue

Notes

Introduction 1. The Dove exhibition was organized by Debra Bricker Balken in collaboration with William C. Agee and Elizabeth Hutton Turner; it originated at the Phillips Collection and traveled to multiple venues. Debra Bricker Balken, Arthur Dove: A Retrospective (Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art; Washington, DC: The Phillips Collection; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). 2. My account of Dove’s biography relies on the following sources: Ann Lee Morgan, Arthur Dove: Life and Work with a Catalogue Raisonné (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1984); Balken, Arthur Dove: A Retrospective; Erika D. Passantino, ed., The Eye of Duncan Phillips: A Collection in the Making (Washington, DC: The Phillips Collection, 1999); Sarah Greenough, ed., Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2000); Anne Cohen DePietro, Out of the Shadows: Helen Torr, A Retrospective (Huntington, NY: Heckscher Museum of Art, 2003); and Debra Bricker Balken, Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2009). 3. The Lobster is in the collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Forth Worth, Texas. 4. Sue Davidson Lowe, Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography (Boston: MFA Publications /  Museum of Fine Arts, 2002), 136–­37; Charles Grafly, “Art and Artists Pass in Review,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 17, 1915, 8. 5. Exceptions of course exist, including Morgan, Arthur Dove; Sherrye Cohn, Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol (1982; Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985); and Harry Cooper, “Arthur Dove Paints a Record,” Source Notes in the History of Art 24/2 (Winter 2005): 70–­77. See also DeLue, “Against the Circle,” in Inventing Abstraction, 1910–­1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, ed. Leah Dickerman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 188–­90. 6. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–­30.

255

7. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1976), xi–­xii. 8. Hans-­Georg Gadamer, “The Nature of Things and the Language of Things,” in Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 77. See also Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image/Music/Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 32–­51, in which Barthes analyzes different modes of signification in terms of their operational capacities in relation to his discussion of the manner in which an image produces meaning; Barthes’s attention to the “operational” warrants his mention in regard to language in Dove. 9. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations: Walter Benjamin, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 69–­82. 10. For Benjamin, translation, and utopia, see Lawrence Venuti, “Translation, Community, Utopia,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Venuti (London: Routledge, 2000), 482–­502. For a basic introduction to translation studies, an interdisciplinary field that describes, interprets, and theorizes the nature, effects, and applications of translation, see Jeremy Munday, Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008); and Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, eds., Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2009). Also relevant are Kenneth R. Allan, “Metamorphosis in 391: A Cryptographic Collaboration by Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Erik Satie,” Art History 34/1 (Feb. 2011): 102–­25, which discusses a contemporaneous exploration of language and translation within the American avant-­garde, one also relevant to Dove’s formulation of intersubjectivity and to what I characterize in this study as his preoccupation with notational systems and communication technologies such as the telegraph; and Kristin Schwain, Signs of Grace: Religion and American Art in the Gilded Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), ch. 1, which considers the role of language and translation in a religious painting by Thomas Eakins and sees both as central to Eakins’s understanding of how paintings should address and engage their viewers. 11. Bruno Latour, the scholar perhaps most closely associated with actor-­network theory today, objects to the term “social” when used to describe a system or network comprising persons, things, and ideas because it concretizes what, to his mind, is in reality ever in process. I use the term here for the sake of convenience. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network-­ Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? Matters of Fact, Matters of Concern,” in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 167–­68. See also John Law and John Hassard, eds., Actor Network Theory and After (Oxford, MA: Blackwell / Sociological Review, 1999), which includes essays by Latour, Law, and Michel Callon, who together were the three originators of actor-­network theory in the mid-­1980s; David Turnbull, “Rendering Turbulence Orderly,” Social Studies of Science 25/1 (Feb. 1995): 9–­33; and Fiona Cheetham, “An Actor-­Network Perspective on

256

Notes to Pages 6–7

Collecting and Collectibles,” in Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories, ed. Sandra H. Dudley et al. (London: Routledge, 2012), 125–­35. 12. Peter-­Paul Verbeek offers a useful and detailed account of translation as a concept within actor-­network theory in What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design, trans. Robert P. Crease (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), ch. 5. 13. Wittgenstein’s sense of language as a “form of life” or a kind of social relation or action is relevant here. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, rev. 4th ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Chichester, UK: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2009), 14. 14. For intersubjectivity and psychoanalysis, see J. Gentile, “Wrestling with Matter: Origins of Intersubjectivity,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 76/2 (Apr. 2007): 547–­82; J. Dunn, “Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis: A Critical Review,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76/4 (Aug. 1995): 723–­ 38; and D. M. Orange, R. D. Stolorow, and G. E. Atwood, “Hermeneutics, Intersubjectivity Theory, and Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 46/2 (1998): 568–­71. For the foundational study of intersubjectivity within phenomenology, see Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 23–­59, 86–­123 (sec. 9 and 33–­43); Edmund Husserl, “Fifth Meditation,” in Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Kluwer Academic, 1999), 89–­151. It should be noted that Husserl’s concept of “transcendental intersubjectivity” (italics mine) posits intersubjectivity not as a product of interrelation but as the very condition that makes such interrelation possible. See also Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, trans. Edward G. Ballard and Lester E. Embree (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007); Michael Lewis and Tanja Staehler, Phenomenology: An Introduction (London: Continuum, 2010), 33–­63; and David Carr, Interpreting Husserl: Critical and Comparative Studies (Dordrecht, Neth.: M. Nij­hoff, 1987). For empathy, see Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953); Matthew Rampley, “From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg’s Theory of Art,” Art Bulletin 79/1 (Mar. 1997): 41–­54; and Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds. and trans., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–­1893 (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994). For empathy in relation to art, see, in addition to Worringer, Juliet Koss, “On the Limits of Empathy,” Art Bulletin 88/1 (Mar. 2006): 139–­57; and Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Both offer a far more complete analysis of the history and bibliography of empathy within and outside art history than I can offer here. For a relevant characterization of the intersubjectivity that arises out of the experience of reading, see Georges Poulet, “Phenomenology of Reading,” New Literary History 1/1 (Oct. 1969): 53–­68. For a useful parsing of the idea of intersubjectivity as “a shared sense of being-­in-­the-­world” within the work

of a range of thinkers, including Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, George Santayana, and Edmund Husserl, see Todd Cronan, “Merleau-­Ponty, Santayana, and the Paradoxes of Animal Faith,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18/3 (2010): 487–­506. Intersubjectivity has received attention within neuroscience as well. See, for example, S. Sauvagnat, M. Wiss, and S. Clément, “A Historical Perspective on the Collaboration between Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience,” Journal of Physiology (Paris) 104/6 (Dec. 2010): 288–­95; John Onians, Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); and Barbara M. Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). See also Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), in which Belting posits the body as a living medium productive of its own images, a reality that according to him must be taken into account within art-­historical interpretation. Given its attention to human relations and social systems as organizing principles for art and its utopian outlook, the concept of “relational aesthetics” is also relevant here. See, for example, Nicolas Bour­riaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon, Fr.: Les presses du réel, 2009); and Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 51–­79. Of course the idea of intersubjectivity, if not the term itself, predates the aforementioned literature. Ovid, René Descartes, and Jonathan Swift, among others, theorized analogous conditions of empathy, sympathetic metamorphosis, or metempsychosis. Matthew L. Jones, “Descartes’s Geometry as Spiritual Exercise,” and Jonathan Lamb, “Modern Metamorphoses and Disgraceful Tales,” in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 40–­71, 193–­226. And as Janine Mileaf has noted, intersubjectivity was highly valued within Dada and Surrealist circles in the first half of the twentieth century. Janine Mileaf, Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2010), 3–­4 and passim. See also Dario Gamboni, Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), for a related discussion of compelled interchange between a work of art and its beholder. 15. I thank Ann Lee Morgan for this information about Dove’s reading habits, which she gleaned from multiple conversations with Dove’s son, William Dove.

Chapter 1 1. Elizabeth Hutton Turner, “Going Home: Geneva, 1933–­ 1938,” in Debra Bricker Balken, Arthur Dove: A Retrospective (Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art; Washington, DC: The Phillips Collection; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 95; diary entries for Jan. 17, 19, 21, 30, 31, 1933, Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 3:2:7 (hereafter cited as Dove Papers). Torr refers to the painting in these entries as “Sun Drawing Water,” making clear that the title was Dove’s own. According to Torr, Dove worked on the painting from January 17 to 31. 2. For a comprehensive survey of Dove’s precursors and contemporaries in abstraction, see Leah Dickerman, ed.,

Inventing Abstraction, 1910–­1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012). Dove would have come into contact with recent European art, including that of Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Paul Gauguin, and Wassily Kandinsky at Stieglitz’s galleries or at the 1913 Armory Show (from which Stieglitz purchased Kandinsky’s 1912 Improvisation No. 27), and also perhaps during his trip to France. Most scholars agree that Kandinsky served as a source of inspiration for Dove, but interpretations of the nature and mechanism of Kandinsky’s influence vary. An English translation of Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912) was available by 1914; two years earlier, in 1912, Stieglitz had published translated excerpts of Kandinsky’s text in Camera Work, and in November 1913 he lent Dove a copy of Der Blaue Reiter (1912), which was edited by Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Wassily Kandinsky, “Extracts from ‘The Spiritual in Art,’ ” Camera Work 39 ( July 1912): 34; Kandinsky, The Art of Spiritual Harmony (London: Constable, 1914); Marilyn Satin Kushner and Kimberly Orcutt, eds., The Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution (New York: New-­York Historical Society, 2013); Gail Stavitsky, Laurette E. McCarthy, and Charles H. Duncan, The New Spirit: American Art in the Armory Show, 1913 (Montclair, NJ: Montclair Art Museum, 2013); Ann Lee Morgan, Arthur Dove: Life and Work with a Catalogue Raisonné (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1984), 40–­43, 68n14; Sarah Greenough, ed., Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2000); Gail Levin and Marianne Lorenz, Theme and Improvisation: Kandinsky and the American Avant-­Garde, 1912–­1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992); Gail Stavitsky and Katherine Rothkopf, eds., Cézanne and American Modernism (Montclair, NJ: Montclair Art Museum, 2009); Joseph J. Rishel and Katherine Sachs, Cézanne and Beyond (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009); Debra Bricker Balken, Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2009), 33–­34. 3. H. Effa Webster, “Artist Paints Rhythms of Color: Works Are Most Strange and Confusing; Need No Titles,” Chicago Examiner, Mar. 15, 1912, 5. 4. Debra Bricker Balken, Arthur Dove: Watercolors (New York: Alexandre Gallery, 2006), 16, 17. 5. See John J. Videler, Avian Flight (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 66–­90; Carrol L. Henderson, Birds in Flight: The Art and Science of How Birds Fly (Minneapolis, MN: Voyageur Press, 2008), ch. 2. For a consideration of the representation of the invisible phenomenon of wind in European and American art and visual culture, see Alessandro Nova, The Book of the Wind: The Representation of the Invisible, trans. Marguerite Shore (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2011). 6. Dove to Stieglitz, Jan. 29, 1933, in Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, ed. Ann Lee Morgan (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1988), 264. Dove also described painting from a moving train in a June 28, 1933, letter to Duncan Phillips, housed in the collection of the Library and Archives of the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. 7. Fields of Grain as Seen from Train is in the collection of the Albright-­Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York.

Notes to Pages 8–14

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8. During the period Dove was at work on the painting, his mother died; according to Torr, Dove received a telephone call on January 22, and they traveled that evening to Geneva, New York, where the next day they made arrangements for the funeral, held on January 24. Dove left Geneva for Halesite on January 29 and returned to work on the painting. Diary entries for Jan. 22, 23, 24, 29, 1933, Dove Papers, 3:2:7. Dove, in a letter to Alfred Stieglitz written while on the train heading home, indicated that he was present at the moment of his mother’s passing: “Quite beautiful a few minutes before the end and afterward. Absolutely conscious up to the last 3 or 4 breaths.” Dove to Stieglitz, Jan. 29, 1933, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 264. Torr’s diary entry of Jan. 22 originally noted, in pen, that the telephone call concerned “Arthur’s mother.” What looks to be a later addition, in pencil, transformed the sentence into “Arthur’s mother had died” (italics mine). This may not bear directly on the meaning of Sun Drawing Water, of course, but it is worth noting the relevant documentation here. 9. See, for example, Turner, “Going Home,” 95. For further discussion of supersight, a term I borrow from the photographer Berenice Abbott, a contemporary of Dove’s, see Terri Weissman, The Realisms of Berenice Abbott: Documentary Photography and Political Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 10. Cohn notes the recurrence of ovoid, elliptical, and spiral forms in Dove’s body of work and discusses his use of such forms as part of a quest for a universal language for expressing the essence of nature; Barbara Haskell describes Dove’s circles as symbols of the “universal rhythm or life force that he felt existed in the world”; and Elizabeth Turner states that they gave Dove’s art an intensity “at once abstract and surreal.” Sherrye Cohn, Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol (1982; Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), 31–­33; Barbara Haskell, “Arthur G. Dove,” American Art Review 2/1 ( Jan.–­Feb. 1975), 137; Turner, “Going Home,” 106. Select paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and Oscar Bluemner feature concentric circle forms much like those in Dove’s pictures. See Barbara Haskell and Stephanie Lynn Schumann, “Oscar Bluemner: Suns and Moons,” Magazine Antiques, Nov. 2005, 122–­27; and Balken, Dove/O’Keeffe. 11. Sunrise I is in the collection of Edward and Deborah Shein; Sunrise II is also privately held. 12. Janet Browne, “Photosynthesis,” in The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. J. L. Heilbron, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 638–­39; John Langone, Bruce Stutz, and Andrea Gianopoulos, Theories for Everything: An Illustrated History of Science from the Invention of Numbers to String Theory (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2006), 288–­91. 13. As Turner notes, Dove read Max Doerner’s technical manual, The Materials of the Artist, trans. Eugen Neuhaus (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), in the fall of 1935, writing to Stieglitz on October 1, “Am reading every inch of Max ­Doerner’s book. Wish I had it years ago. Georgia says she reads it like the Bible.” In another letter to Stieglitz, written on October 24, 1935, Dove stated that “Doerner is the only one I have read who seems to give such complete scientific information, and what a mass of it. He makes even some of the Germans seem almost careless.” Turner, “Going Home,” 104; Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 341, 342.

258

Notes to Pages 14–22

Doerner praised the quality of Naples yellow, writing, “We might well be happy if we had nothing but colors of the quality of pure Naples yellow!” Doerner, The Materials of the Artist, 61–­62, in Turner, “Going Home,” 105. Torr mentions Dove’s study of “mediums, varnishes” in her diary entry for September 22, 1935. Dove Papers, 3:2:8. For Naples yellow, see John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 223; and Simon Jennings, Artist’s Color Manual: The Complete Guide to Working with Color (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 64. 14. Simon Jennings, Artist’s Color Manual, 75. 15. See, for example, William C. Agee, “New Directions: The Late Work, 1938–­1946,” in Balken, Arthur Dove: A Retrospective, 133–­53; Cohn, Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol; Morgan, Arthur Dove, 38–­82; and Turner, “Going Home.” Of course, Dove was not unique in his attempt to use pictures to reveal an unseen physical (as opposed to spiritual) world. Other artists of this period had similar ambitions; painters such as Georgia O’Keeffe and photographers such as Berenice Abbott and Paul Strand were especially attuned to the capacity of images to manifest visually the unseen. There is a substantial literature on images, the unseen, and invisibility, and several recent studies consider these issues in the context of scientific inquiry and experimentation. See, for example, Joel Snyder, “Visualization and Visibility,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline Jones and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), 378–­97; Lynn Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Robert M. Brain, “Representation on the Line: Graphic Recording Instruments and Scientific Modernism,” in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, ed. Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 155–­77; Peter Geimer, “Picturing the Black Box: On Blanks in Nineteenth-­ Century Paintings and Photographs,” Science in Context 17/4 (Dec. 2004): 467–­501; James Elkins, Six Stories from the End of Representation: Images in Painting, Photography, Astronomy, Microscopy, Particle Physics, and Quantum Mechanics, 1980–­ 2000 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Josh Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: Bertillon, Galton, Marey (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012); and Peter Galison, “Concrete Abstraction,” in Dickerman, Inventing Abstraction, 350–­57. 16. Morgan, Arthur Dove, 12; diary entries for Oct. 31, Nov. 1, 8, 1924, Dove Papers, 3:1:51; Dove to Stieglitz, Dec. 9, 1934, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 319; Cohn, Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol, 42. Cohn reports that Dove expressed this wish to his son, who then shared it with her in an interview conducted on October 14, 1980. 17. Dove to Stieglitz, Oct. 13, 1930, and Dec. 4, 1930, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 199, 201; Cohn, Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol, 41–­43; diary entry for Feb. 5, 1929, and undated typewritten essay, Dove Papers, 3:2:3, 3:3:2. Cohn notes that Einstein and relativity were regularly subjects of conversation for Stieglitz and that his library contained several of Einstein’s publications, in both English and German (42). 18. Bert Leston Taylor, “A Line O’ Type or Two,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar. 21, 1920, 8. 19. Cohn, Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol, ch. 2; Linda Dal-

rymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-­Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), ch. 4; Dalrymple Henderson, “The Image and Imagination of the Fourth Dimension in Twentieth-­Century Art and Culture,” Configurations 17/1–­2 (Winter 2009): 131–­60. For a period discussion of the fourth dimension in relation to art with which Dove may have been familiar, see Max Weber, “The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View,” Camera Work 31 ( July 1910): 25. For discussion of relevant intersections between art and science in the prewar period, see, for example, Julia Kelly, Art, Ethnography and the Life of Objects, Paris, c. 1925–­35 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007); Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ed., “Writing Modern Art and Science,” special issue, Science in Context 17/4 (Dec. 2007), esp. the essay by Gavin Parkinson, “Surrealism and Quantum Mechanics: Dispersal and Fragmentation in Art, Life, and Physics,” 557–­77; Sara Lynn Henry, “Form-­Creating Energies: Paul Klee and Physics,” Arts Magazine, Sept. 1977, 118–­21; Gavin Parkinson, Surrealism, Art, and Modern Science: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); and Oliver A. I. Botar and Isabel Wünsche, eds., Biocentrism and Modernism (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011). 20. Dove to Samuel Kootz, in Kootz, Modern American Painters (New York: Brewer & Warren, 1930), 37–­38; Dove to Arthur Jerome Eddy, in Cubists and Post-­Impressionism (Chicago: McClurg, 1914), 48; Cohn, Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol, 30–­31; undated typewritten essay, Dove Papers, 3:3:3. 21. Cohn, Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol, ch. 2; Morgan, Arthur Dove. 22. Leo G. Mazow has previously documented an analogous interest in notational systems, including cryptography, secret writing, and mathematics, on the part of the American artist John Covert, a contemporary of Dove’s. Mazow’s consideration of Covert’s particular preoccupation with notation bears on my approach to Dove. Mazow also presents an illuminating discussion of Covert’s daybooks as an attempt to register and comprehend the passage of time, a topic relevant to my discussion in the next chapter of Dove’s diary and log keeping. Mazow, “John Covert, Tetraphilia, and the Language of Time,” Winterthur Portfolio 41/1 (Spring 2007): 21–­42; and Mazow, John Covert Rediscovered (State College, PA: Palmer Museum of Art, 2003). 23. Dove to Torr, Nov. 10, 1933, Dove Papers, 2:1:41. See Megan McShea, “A Painter Writes a Landscape: Arthur Dove’s Prose Poem,” Archives of American Art Journal 47, 1/2 (2008): 24–­29, for the only sustained analysis in the literature to date of Dove’s writing habits. Henderson, “The Image and Imagination of the Fourth Dimension,” 154–­57, describes a link between spiral forms and theorizations of the fourth dimension in the period under discussion, a possible source for Dove’s prolific spiral forms. 24. Dove to Torr, Nov. 22, 1934 (postmarked), Nov. 10, 1933 or 1934 (postmarked), Dove Papers, 2:1:31. 25. Dove was not alone among the members of the so-­called Stieglitz circle in this regard. John Marin, for instance, experimented with writing as a medium in his notebooks, sketches, and paintings. Other artists of the period did as well, including Charles Burchfield. 26. See Leo Rosten [Leonard Q. Ross], The Education of

H * Y * M * A * N  K * A * P * L * A * N (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1937). 27. Dove to Torr, Oct. 1936, Dove Papers, 2:1:38. 28. Typewritten essay, Dec. 13, 1928, Dove Papers, 3:3:1. 29. Undated handwritten essay, , Dove Papers, 3:2:19. 30. Dove to Samuel M. Kootz, n.d., Dove Papers, 2:1:22. 31. Roger Cooke, The History of Mathematics: A Brief Course (New York: Wiley, 1997), 103–­4; Dove to Kootz, in Kootz, Modern American Painters, 37. 32. Dove to Edward Alden Jewell, n.d., Dove Papers, 2:1:23. 33. Dove to Henry McBride, n.d., Dove Papers, 2:1:23. 34. Arthur Dove, “An Idea,” in Arthur G. Dove: Paintings, 1927 (New York: The Intimate Gallery, Dec. 12, 1927–­Jan. 11, 1928), n.p; Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, ed. Hilla Rebay, trans. Hilla Rebay and Howard Dearstyne (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1947; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1979). Kandinsky’s text was part of a series of books edited by Walter Gropius and Lazlo Moholy-­Nagy and published by the Bauhaus. 35. Arthur Dove, “A Way to Look at Things,” in Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans (New York: The Anderson Galleries, Mar. 9–­28, 1925), 4, and Arthur G. Dove: Exhibition of Recent Paintings (1941–­1942) (New York: An American Place, Apr. 14–­May 27, 1942), n.p. 36. Eugene Jolas et al., “Proclamation,” transition 16/17 (1929): 13; Dougald McMillan, Transition: The History of a Literary Era, 1927–­1938 (London: Calder and Boyers, 1975); Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–­1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 173–­75. For recent writing on art and experimental literature during this period, see Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–­1875 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Arna Sigridur Arnar, The Book as Instrument: Stephane Mallarmé, the Artist’s Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Peter Collier and Robert Lethbridge, eds., Artistic Relations: Literature and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-­Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); Dario Gamboni, The Brush and the Pen: Odilon Redon and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Linda Goddard, Aesthetic Rivalries: Word and Image in France, 1880–­1926 (New York: Peter Lang, 2012); Dee Reynolds, Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art: Sites of Imaginary Space (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Garrett Stewart, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) 37. Dove to Stieglitz, Oct. 22, 1928, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 160, 161. In the October 22 letter, Dove also reported that he had “just finished quite a remarkable MS of Toomer’s,” perhaps referring to Cane, which was published in 1923. It is clear from Dove’s letters to Stieglitz and from his and Torr’s diaries that he read transition regularly and avidly. See, for example, Dove to Stieglitz, Oct. 20, 1928, Nov. 6/8, 1928, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 160, 162; diary entries for Aug. 7, Nov. 9, 1928, Aug. 9, 1929, Feb. 28, 1936, Dove Papers, 3:2:2, 3:2:3, 3:2:9. 38. Dove to Stieglitz, Oct. 22, 1928, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 161; James Joyce, “Continuation of a Work in Progress,” transition 13 (Summer 1928): 5–­32. 39. Dove to Stieglitz, Oct. 20, 1928, Apr. 24, 1930, Apr. 6,

Notes to Pages 22–28

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1931, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 160, 192, 218. According to Herbert J. Seligmann, Benton was kinder in his evaluation of Dove, stating on the occasion of a visit to Stieglitz’s Intimate Gallery that he liked Dove’s work while objecting more generally to the principles it represented. Herbert J. Seligmann, Alfred Stieglitz Talking: Notes on Some of His Conversations, 1925–­1931 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Library, 1966), 42. In the diaries, Torr wrote that Dove bought her a copy of Harper’s containing an essay by Max Eastman titled “The Tendency toward Pure Poetry.” Diary entry for June 24, 1929, Dove Papers, 3:2:3; Max Eastman “The Tendency toward Pure Poetry,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, July 1929, 222–­30. In the essay, Eastman considered poetry as a system or “strategy” (228) of communication; he discussed literary modernism and opposed poetry that sought to produce a “mystic essence” or a profound meaning to modern verse, with its vigorous attention to the material and the experiential, the descriptive and the everyday: “In place of a criticism, these poets are offering us in each poem a moment of life, a rare, perfect or intense moment, and nothing more” (224). He also discussed trends in poetry toward the meaningless or unintelligible, where words are empty of meaning or emotional heft and leave the reader with nothing but the words themselves (226–­27). 40. Arthur Dove, “What Does Photography Mean to Me?” MSS, Dec. 1922, 9. MSS had a short run, with six issues appearing in 1922 and 1923; its chief sponsors were Paul Rosenfeld and Alfred Stieglitz. The December 1922 issue, in which Dove’s text appeared, was edited by Stieglitz with assistance from Paul Strand. Ann Lee Morgan, “An Encounter and Its Consequences: Arthur Dove and Alfred Stieglitz, 1910–­1925,” Biography 2/1 (Winter 1979): 48; Robert E. Haines, “Alfred Stieglitz and the New Order of Consciousness in American Literature,” Pacific Coast Philology 6 (Apr. 1971): 26; Greenough, Modern Art and America, 298, 392–­93. 41. Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation,” Dial, Oct. 1926, 327–­36; Gertrude Stein, “A Long Gay Book,” Dial, Sept. 1927, 231–­36; Bruce Kellner, “Ex Libris: The Published Writings of Gertrude Stein,” in A Gertrude Stein Companion: Content with the Example, ed. Kellner (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988), 27, 46–­47; Ulla E. Dydo, ed., A Stein Reader (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 151–­52; Dove to Stieglitz, Dec. 1926 and Sept. 8, 1927, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 134, 143. “Composition as Explanation” originated as a lecture delivered by Stein at Oxford and Cambridge in 1926. Kellner, “Ex Libris,” 27; Dydo, A Stein Reader, 493–­94. See also Ulla E. Dydo, with William Rice, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923–­1934 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003); and Ulla Hasel­ stein, “Tender Buttons: Stein et ses portraits des choses (1914),” in Carrefour Alfred Stieglitz, ed. Jay Bochner and Jean-­Pierre Montier (Rennes, Fr.: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012), 339–­48. 42. Dove to Stieglitz, Aug. 9, 1932, and Sept. 30, 1933, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 246, 286; Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 501. 43. Dove to Elizabeth McCausland, June 10, 1934, Elizabeth McCausland Papers, 1838–­1965, bulk 1920–­1960, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2:5:11; Elizabeth McCausland, “Super-­Sense Applied to Twentieth-­ Century Life,” Springfield Republican, Mar. 4, 1934, cited in

260

Notes to Pages 29–31

Susan Platt, “Elizabeth McCausland: Art, Politics, and Sexuality,” in Women Artists and Modernism, ed. Katy Deepwell (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998), 89; Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans: The Hersland Family (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934); Lawrence Rainey, review of The Making of Americans, by Gertrude Stein, with an introduction by Steven Meyer and a foreword by William H. Gass. (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), Modernism/ Modernity 4/2 (Apr. 1997): 222–­24. 44. Bert Leston Taylor, “A Line-­O’-­Type or Two: Post-­ Impressionism,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov. 5, 1912, 6. 45. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997), 3. For other examples of verbal still life that compare interestingly with Dove’s kitchen table portrait, see Guy Davenport, Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998), chs. 2, 4. 46. Arthur Dove, “291,” Camera Work 47 ( July 1914), 37. 47. Arthur Dove, “A Different One,” in America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait, ed. Waldo Frank et al. (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1934), 243. 48. Gertrude Stein, “Stieglitz,” in America and Alfred Stieglitz, 280. 49. For a basic account of Dove and mental telepathy, including examples of Dove’s written references to it, see Cohn, Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol, ch. 3. 50. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 51. Paul Dove, “Notes relative to Arthur G. Dove” and “Facts pertaining to the life of Arthur G. Dove,” Dove Papers, 1:1:1. 52. Alexander Humez and Nicholas Humez, On the Dot: The Speck That Changed the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ch. 1; Kenneth R. Allan, “Metamorphosis in 391: A Cryptographic Collaboration by Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Erik Satie,” Art History 34/1 (Feb. 2011): 120. 53. Dove to Torr, Oct. 15, 1936, Dove Papers, 3:1:38. 54. In designing the 1934 exhibition Machine Art at the Museum of Modern Art, Philip Johnson lined some of the gallery walls with panels of aluminum, stainless steel, and copper. As Kristina Wilson points out, these panels shared their materials with many of the objects on display, an implied connection between figure and ground comparable to Dove’s use of metal in Telegraph Pole. Kristina Wilson, “Spiritual and Material Gods in the Machine Age,” in The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition, 1925–­1934 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 157, 188. See also Jennifer Jane Marshall, Machine Art 1934 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). For discussion of an illuminating precedent for the intersection of Dove’s art and the operations and sociotechnological implications of telegraphy, see Jennifer L. Roberts, “Post-­Telegraphic Pictures: Asher B. Durand and the Nonconducting Image,” Grey Room 48 (Summer 2012): 12–­35; and Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), ch. 3, an expanded version of the Grey Room article. 55. Suzanne Mullett Smith and Gordon Smith, “Music of the Eye: The Development of an Idea,” unpublished lecture, American University, Washington, DC, 1950, reedited 1976,

Suzanne Mullett Smith Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, microfilm roll no. 1043, frame 1274, quoted in Judith Zilczer, “Synaesthesia and Popular Culture: Arthur Dove, George Gershwin, and the ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ ” Art Journal 44/4 (Winter 1984): 362. 56. Frederick S. Wight, Arthur G. Dove (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), 58; Suzanne M. Mullet, “Arthur G. Dove, 1880–­1946” (MA thesis, American University, Washington, DC, 1944), 15. See also Harry Cooper, “Arthur Dove Paints a Record,” Source Notes in the History of Art 24/2 (Winter 2005): 70. 57. Dove to Torr, Oct. 2, 1936 (postmarked), Dove Papers, 2:1:37. 58. Eric Burns, Invasion of the Mind Snatchers: Television’s Conquest of America in the Fifties (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 6 (Hoover quotation); Gary R. Edgerton, The Columbia History of American Television (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), ch. 1. See also Albert Abramson, The History of Television, 1880–­1941 ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1987). 59. Anne Cohen DePietro interview with William Dove, in Arthur Dove and Helen Torr: The Huntington Years (Huntington, NY: Heckscher Museum of Art, 1989), 78; diary entry for Mar. 20, 1942, Dove Papers, 3:2:13. William Dove also noted that Dove greatly admired Billy Rose who, before he became a well-­known lyricist and theatrical producer in the 1920s and 1930s, had studied with Gregg, was a shorthand champion, and had worked as a professional stenographer during the war. Jan Jones, Billy Rose Presents . . . Casa Mañana (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1999), 17–­19. In her diary entry for February 15, 1925, Torr wrote, “French & shorthand in eve.” Whether Dove partook in this instance is not certain, but Torr tended to note when an activity was specific to herself or to Dove, using pronouns or initials to make clear who did what; the absence of pronouns in her entries usually indicates that both she and Dove participated in the activity described, such as reading a book or listening to music. At least one other diary entry records Dove himself practicing shorthand. Diary entry for Feb. 15, 1925, Dove Papers, 3:1:53; DePietro interview with William Dove, 78. 60. John Robert Gregg, Gregg Shorthand: Light-­Line Phonography for the Million, anniv. ed. (New York, NY: Gregg, 1929), 1, x–­xi. 61. DePietro interview with William Dove, 78. 62. DePietro interview with William Dove, 78. For an example of “wkd,” see the diary entries for Oct. 17–­23, 1924, Dove Papers, 3:1:51. 63. DePietro interview with William Dove, 78; Edward Alden Jewell, “Concerning Mr. Dove,” New York Times, Mar. 30, 1930, 12. Jewell corrected his mistake in “Telescoping Centuries,” New York Times, Apr. 6, 1930, 18. Dove wrote to Jewell to thank him for the first review and in his letter noted the confusion over his title, saying that the mix-­up did not prevent Jewell from producing criticism that “remains the most thoughtful in my mind that I have ever had.” Dove to Jewell, n.d., Dove Papers, 1:1:23. 64. See, for example, diary entries for Aug. 24, Oct. 7, 9, 17, 19, Nov. 22, 28, 30, Dec. 1, 2, 3, 1924, Apr. 3, 1943, Dove Papers, 3:1:51, 3:2:13. One could feasibly map onto the terms I use here a more formalized vocabulary of semiotic forms

and operations, including those most commonly discussed in relation to visual art—­namely, Charles Saunders Peirce’s “icon,” “index,” and “symbol.” But because such a vocabulary was alien to Dove, I have chosen not to pursue such an endeavor. For a thought-­provoking discussion of how Peirce’s terms can illuminate the analysis of an artist’s work, see Michael Leja, “Eakins’s Reality Effects,” ch. 2 in Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 65. All are in the collection of the McNay Art Museum (1962.3, 1962.4.1–­1962.4.10). 66. Charles C. Eldredge, Reflections on Nature: Small Paintings by Arthur Dove, 1942–­1943 (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1997); Melanie Kirschner, Arthur Dove: Watercolors and Pastels (New York: George Braziller, 1998); Balken, Arthur Dove: Watercolors. The study bearing the first set of notes cited is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an untitled work in tempera and graphite on paper, three by four inches, dated 1943 (1984.536.29); the second set of notes cited annotates an untitled study in tempera and oil from 1942 in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (1992.111.18). 67. DePietro, Arthur Dove and Helen Torr, 47, 51; Morgan, Arthur Dove, 54; Agee, “New Directions,”, 136; Kirschner, Arthur Dove: Watercolors and Pastels, 41. William Dove discussed his father’s small studies in an interview with DePietro and said that he used both a magic lantern and a pantograph to transfer them to canvas; he noted that the fit of the magic lantern dictated the 3″ x 4″ format of many of the drawings. DePietro interview with William Dove, 78. See also diary entries for Aug. 17, Sept. 16, 1930, May 25, Aug. 8, Sept. 8, 1942, Dove Papers, 3:2:4, 3:2:13. In a 1935 letter to Stieglitz, Dove reported that his son was visiting him and Torr in Geneva and that he was working on an “enlarging camera” for Dove that combined parts of an old sun lamp and Dove’s Kodak camera that may have been intended for use in transferring sketches to canvas. Dove to Stieglitz, May 6, 1935, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 337. 68. Turner, “Going Home,” 102; Dove to Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, Sept. 18/25, 1933, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 284. 69. The sketch, also dated 1942 and rendered in watercolor, gouache, and ink, maps the basic forms and colors of the finished painting, including Dove’s signature; it is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, where the painting also resides. 70. According to Barbara Haskell, this painting earned its title when one of Dove’s friends on seeing it remarked, “That’s no feather pillow.” No source is cited in her account. Haskell, Arthur Dove (San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1974), 21. 71. For signatures in American art, see Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and John Wilmerding, Signs of the Artist: Signatures and Self-­Expression in American Paintings (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). 72. Sun on the Lake is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 73. I owe this idea to a comment made by an unidentified member of the audience at the Present Day Club,

Notes to Pages 33–50

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Princeton, New Jersey, where I spoke about portions of my Dove research on January 6, 2009. 74. DePietro interview with William Dove, 75; Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 210. Dove owned or consulted the following manuals: The Book of the Art of Cennino Cennini, trans. Christiana J. Herringham (London: George Allen, 1899); E[mory] C[obb] Andrews, Color and Its Application to Printing (Chicago: Inland Printer, 1911); Jacques Blockx, Compendium of Painting (Antwerp: J. E. Buschman, 1926); Doerner, Materials of the Artist; Hilaire Hiler, Notes on the Technique of Painting (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935); Ralph Mayer, The Artists Handbook of Materials and Techniques (New York: Viking, 1940); Wilhelm Ostwald, Letters to a Painter on the Theory and Practice of Painting (Boston: Ginn, 1907); and Maximilian Toch, Materials for Permanent Painting (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1911). 75. Balken, Arthur Dove: Watercolors, 73. 76. Andrews, Color and Its Application to Printing, 20, 21. 77. Balken, Dove/O’Keeffe, 68. 78. Paul Strand, “Photography,” Camera Work 49/50 ( June 1917): 3–­4. 79. Diary entries for Aug. 27, Oct. 3, Nov. 1, 1926, Aug. 6, 11, 13, 1934, Mar. 18, 1935, Dove Papers, 3:1:54, 3:2:7, 3:2:8. 80. Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 88; and Greenough, Modern Art and America, 387–­88, 423–­26, 454–­55. Stieglitz exhibited a similar series in March 1924, called “Songs of the Sky.” Greenough, Modern Art and America, 548. Greenough discusses the relationship between Dove’s production and Stieglitz’s photographs (423–­28, 436). The years during which Stieglitz created his cloud photographs, including those specifically designated Equivalents, are variously given in the literature, but scholars agree that he began photographing the sky and clouds in 1922. 81. Dove to Stieglitz, July 7, 1942, and Stieglitz to Dove and Torr, July 8 and July 17, 1942, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 471–­72. In 1924, the first year she and Dove began to keep their diary, Torr recorded a visit to “Stieglitz’s room” in New York during which Stieglitz and his associate and unofficial assistant, the artist Emil Zoler, “showed us cloud photographs.” “No one else could have done them,” she wrote. Diary entry for Dec. 5, 1924, Dove Papers, 3:1:52. I address the significance of the Equivalents for Dove more extensively in chapter 3; my argument there draws substantially on Rosalind Krauss, “Stieglitz/Equivalents,” October 11 (Winter 1979): 129–­40. 82. Dove to Stieglitz, June 7, 1942, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 470. 83. Dove to Stieglitz, probably July 23, 1942, and Aug. 9, 1942, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 472–­73. William C. Agee discusses Dove and the Equivalents in “Arthur Dove: A Place to Find Things,” in Greenough, Modern Art and America, 423–­29. 84. Sunrise in Northport Harbor is in the collection of the Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, Kansas. 85. Gawain Weaver, A Guide to Fiber-­Base Gelatin Silver Print Condition and Deterioration (Rochester, NY: George Eastman House / Image Permanence Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology, 2008), 5–­7. Available online at Advanced Residency Program in Photograph Conservation, The George Eastman House, accessed Feb. 1, 2011, http:// gawainweaver.com/library/.

262

Notes to Pages 51–68

86. Dove to Stieglitz, Oct. 3, 1942, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 477. 87. Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans, 8; Morgan, Arthur Dove, 141. 88. Dove to Stieglitz, Oct. 3, 1942, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 477. 89. Peter Michael Harman, Energy, Force, and Matter: The Conceptual Development of Nineteenth-­Century Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), esp. chs. 3 and 4; Gillian Beer, “Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary Modernism,” ch. 13 in Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible, 68, 152–­55, 164–­68, 195–­205, 215–­18. 90. Boys’ Life, Sept. 1924, 53; Popular Mechanics, Sept. 1924, 131; Popular Science Monthly, Nov. 1924, 126. The advertisement in Boys’ Life ran adjacent to a column entitled “The Radio Tower” by Zeh Bouck (52–­53). The murals that decorate the lobby of the New York Telephone Company’s 1927 Art Deco tower offer an interesting period comparison to Lawrie’s reliefs at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Painted by Hugo R. B. Newman, they depict the history of human communication, from smoke signals and carrier pigeons to the heliograph, gunfire, and the telephone. At one end of the central panel, concentric circles of orange, bronze, and gold billow forth from an angelic figure holding aloft a telephone, suggesting at once clouds and sound waves, and at the opposite end, a second winged figure stands against a backdrop of similar waveforms issuing like wires from insulators attached to the horizontal crossbars of telephone and telegraph poles. David W. Dunlap, “Damaged by Hurricane Sandy, Verizon’s Jazz-­Age Frescoes Glow Again,” New York Times, Apr. 11, 2013, accessed June 5, 2014, http://cityroom .blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/11/damaged-­by-­hurricane -­sandy-­verizons-­jazz-­age-­frescoes-­glow-­again/?_php=true &_type=blogs&_r=0. 91. “WLS Radio Station,” Sears Archives, accessed Feb. 3, 2011, http://www.searsarchives.com/history/questions /wls.htm. The call letters “WLS” stood for “World’s Largest Store.” 92. Charles Schwartz, Cole Porter: A Biography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977), 91; Cecil Smith and Glenn Litton, Musical Comedy in America (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1981), 130–­32. The Follies was a popular revue; initially based in Greenwich Village before relocating to Broadway, it ran from 1919 to 1928. The 1924 show took place at the Schubert Theater and included among its performers Cole Porter, one of many rising stars who appeared in the Follies early in their careers, among them Martha Graham. Porter composed the score for the 1924 show. 93. Sheldon Cheney, A Primer of Modern Art (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924), 239. See also Edward Alden Jewell, “Arthur Dove’s New Work,” New York Times, Dec. 18, 1927, 12, in which Jewell quotes a similar description on Dove’s part. 94. Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 36; Alexander Nemerov, “Ground Swell: Edward Hopper in 1939,” American Art 22/3 (Fall 2008): 50–­71. 95. “Some Notes by Arthur G. Dove,” in Dove Exhibition: List of Paintings and Some Notes by Arthur Dove (New York: The Intimate Gallery, Apr. 9–­28, 1929), n.p.

96. Undated typewritten composition, Dove Papers, 3:2:10. 97. McShea, “A Painter Writes a Landscape,” 27. 98. “List of Paintings,” in Dove Exhibition, n.p.; Morgan, Arthur Dove, 151–­52; Marc Simpson, “Arthur Dove’s Sea Gull Motive,” Triptych (Nov./Dec. 1990): 18–­20. Simpson identified the correct (vertical) orientation of Sea Gull Motive when the work entered the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in 1990. 99. Reaching Waves is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 100. My definition of “instrument” draws on Jocelyn Holland and Susanne Strätling, “Introduction: Aesthetics of the Tool—­Technologies, Figures, and Instruments of Literature and Art,” in “Aesthetics of the Tool,” ed. Holland and Strätling, special issue, Configurations 18/3 (Fall 2010): 203–­9. For a related and important account of self-­acting works of art, see Harry Cooper, “Speak, Painting: Word and Device in Early Johns,” October 127 (Winter 2009): 49–­76. 101. H. H. C. Dunwoody, Weather Proverbs, Signal Service Notes, no. 9 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883), 77; Charles Franklin Brooks, Why the Weather? (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924), 88–­89; Charles Fitzhugh Talman, The Realm of the Air: A Book about Weather (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1931), 135. 102. A watercolor landscape by the nineteenth-­century American artist William Trost Richards, for example, entitled Beach with Sun Drawing Water (1872, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), illustrates the phenomenon in question, albeit with far more clarity and precision. I thank Ann Lee Morgan for bringing this work to my attention. 103. For Stieglitz’s account of the meaning of the Equivalents, see “How I Came to Photograph Clouds,” Amateur Photographer and Photography 56 (1923): 255. For meteorological photography and lightning, see Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), ch. 3. For discussion of photography, science, and evidence, see Armstrong, “Looking Forward to the 1870s: The Natural Method of Photographic Illustration,” ch. 1 in Scenes in a Library; and Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images. 104. Paul Haviland, “We Are Living in the Age of the Machine,” 291, Sept.–­Oct. 1915, 1. Haviland founded and edited 291 along with Marius de Zayas and Agnes Meyer. 105. The work of two scholars in particular has informed my reading of Dove here. In Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), Garrett Stewart considers the aural aspects of reading a text, including the displacement or silencing of voice that occurs in the act of reading. In “The Death of a Beautiful Woman,” Interval(le)s 2.2–­3.1 (Fall 2008 / Winter 2009): 571–­ 83, Walter Benn Michaels reads Susan Howe’s poem Pierce-­ Arrow (1999) through a series of questions about the nature of signs and their availability to the senses in works of art (as in, can a word be touched?), the relationship between sounds and words, the possible materiality of language, and onomatopoeia as a form that transcends ordinary language. See also the discussion of onomatopoeia and Frank Norris’s M ­ cTeague, A Story of San Francisco (1899) in Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), ch. 5.

106. Wanda M. Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–­1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 195; Jonathan Weinberg, Ambition and Love in Modern American Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 75–­78. Weinberg identifies the seated figure as Dove. Although he notes Stettheimer’s inclusion of the names of Hartley, Marin, and O’Keeffe in the portrait, he does not mention the panel that spells Dove’s name, suggesting he overlooked this allusion and mistakenly believed that Dove appeared in the scene as the seated man. 107. Elizabeth McCausland, “Dove Retrospective at An American Place,” Springfield Sunday Union and Republican, Apr. 2, 1939, 6E. The Demuth painting is in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. 108. Edward Alden Jewell to Dove, Jan. 25 [ca. 1928], Dove Papers, 2:1:19; undated composition, Dove Papers, 3:2:19. Because Jewell was the first owner of Orange Grove in California, his letter to Dove most likely dates to the period shortly after Jewell received the work from Stieglitz. Cooper, “Arthur Dove Paints a Record,” 76n13; Morgan, Arthur Dove, 155–­56; Donna M. Cassidy, Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, 1910–­1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 91. Jewell used a color reproduction of the painting for the frontispiece to his Modern Art: Americans (New York: Knopf, 1930). 109. Diary entries for Mar. 31, Apr. 1–­3, May, and June 1942, Dove Papers, 3:2:13. 110. “Ideas,” final page of 1924 diary, Dove Papers, 3:1:52. 111. Marcia Brennan, Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 107–­17.

Chapter 2 1. Arthur Dove, “An Idea,” in Arthur G. Dove: Paintings, 1927 (New York: The Intimate Gallery, Dec. 12, 1927–­Jan. 11, 1928), n.p. 2. Dove to Stieglitz, Mar. 1931, in Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, ed. Ann Lee Morgan (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1988), 213–­15. Dove mentions this essay in an earlier letter to Stieglitz: “Have been working on an ‘article’ since 5 a.m. and stretching canvas. Now 6:30 p.m. The article is on the present situation.—­ The canvas is on the future.” Dove to Stieglitz, Mar. 24, 1931, in ibid., 211. 3. Dove to Stieglitz, Mar. 1931, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 213–­15. 4. Dove, untitled statement, in Arthur G. Dove: Exhibition of New Oils and Water-­Colors (New York: An American Place, 1940), n.p. 5. Arthur Dove to Elizabeth McCausland, May 13, 1933, Elizabeth McCausland Papers, 1838–­1965, bulk 1920–­1960, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2:5:11. See also Dove’s diary entry for Dec. 17, 1942, Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 3:2:13 (hereafter cited as Dove Papers). 6. See, for example, diary entries for Feb. 6, 27, June 11, 1942, and May 5, 1943, Dove Papers, 3:2:13. The entry for February 27 includes notes about time and rhythm in relation

Notes to Pages 69–85

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to painting, but they are partially illegible; Dove’s handwriting is rough and a portion of the passage appears to have been erased or accidentally rubbed out. The entry for May 5 reads, “Temp. done in ‘½’ time.” 7. For discussion of Dove and the series, see William C. Agee, “New Directions: The Late Work, 1938–­1946,” in Balken, Arthur Dove: A Retrospective, 144. For the Formation paintings, see Ann Lee Morgan, Arthur Dove: Life and Work with a Catalogue Raisonné (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1984), 285–­ 86, 297. 8. Dove, “An Idea,” n.p. Dove appears to have felt that his version of Kandinsky’s words in some way exemplified or stood for his practice, for he excerpted it in a typed statement that he sent to the critic Samuel Kootz, who had asked him to provide commentary on his work for use in his forthcoming book, Modern American Painters, discussed above. Dove’s statement, unlike his other letters to Kootz, featured very few of his own words. Other than the Kandinsky passage, he included only a basic description of his facial features, drawn from his driver’s license; the rest of the text cited other critics’ evaluations of his work. Dove to Kootz, 1930, Dove Papers, 1:1:4. 9. Diary entry for Aug. 12, 1939, Dove Papers, 3:2:10. 10. John Loughery, Alias S. S. Van Dine (New York: Scribner, 1992). 11. Willard Huntington Wright [S. S. Van Dine, pseud.], The Bishop Murder Case (1929; Middlesex, UK: Echo Library, 2006), 145. Wright was a friend of Stieglitz’s; one scene in the book features Vance visiting the Intimate Gallery to see an O’Keeffe exhibition (138). 12. See, for example, ibid., 22. Dove’s triangulation of art, crime, and a system of knowing such as mathematics calls to mind Surrealism’s turn to noir in the 1930s as described by Jonathan P. Eburne in Surrealism and the Art of Crime (New York: Cornell University Press, 2008). 13. “Some Notes by Arthur G. Dove,” in Dove Exhibition: List of Paintings and Some Notes by Arthur Dove (New York: The Intimate Gallery, Apr. 9–­28, 1929), n.p. Dove gave the title Beyond Abstraction to one of the last paintings he created before his death; in a letter to his brother and his brother’s wife, he noted that Stieglitz referred to it as “Just Painting,” which happens to be the title of one of Dove’s earlier works, created in 1927. Dove to Betty and Paul Dove, n.d., Dove Papers, 2:1:50; Morgan, Arthur Dove, 155. 14. Dove to Samuel Kootz, in Kootz, Modern American Painters (New York: Brewer & Warren, 1930), 37. 15. See, for example, Balken, “Continuities and Digressions in the Work of Arthur Dove from 1907–­1933,” in Balken, Arthur Dove: A Retrospective, 21; Morgan, Arthur Dove, 78–­79; 16. Quoted in Sherrye Cohn, “Dove’s Writings,” in Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol (1982; Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), 61. 17. “Some Notes by Arthur G. Dove,” n.p. 18. Anne Cohen DePietro interview with William Dove, in Arthur Dove and Helen Torr: The Huntington Years (Huntington, NY: Heckscher Museum of Art, 1989), 75; Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 210. 19. E[mory] C[obb] Andrews, Color and Its Application to Printing (Chicago: Inland Printer, 1911).

264

Notes to Pages 86–96

20. DePietro interview with William Dove, 75. 21. Dove to Stieglitz, July 11, 1930, in Morgan, Dear Dove, Dear Stieglitz, 194–­95. 22. Cohn, Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol, 57–­63; Andrews, Color and Its Application to Printing, ch. 2. For an extended discussion of Dove and theosophy, see Cohn, Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol, ch. 3. For a useful account of some of the basic tenets of theosophy, see Mark S. Morrison, Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), ch. 2. 23. H. P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy (London: The Theosophical Publishing Company; New York: W. Q. Judge, 1889), 58; Annie Besant, The Ideals of Theosophy (Adyar, India: The Theosophist Office, 1912), 72–­73; Claude Bragdon, The Eternal Poles (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1931), 19, 65; “Theosophy School,” Theosophy 14/12 (Oct. 1926): 562–­63. 24. Undated handwritten note, Dove Papers, 3:3:11. 25. Cohn, Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol, 61–­62; Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, Thought-­Forms (London: The Theosophical Publishing Society; New York: John Lane, 1905), 17–­19. 26. Dove to Stieglitz, Oct. 3, 1942, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 477; Barbara Haskell, Arthur Dove (San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1974), 7. Haskell discusses Dove and the aura, and she quotes him as stating the following but includes no citation: “You can describe a person in a color,” and “the most important thing is the statement of color . . . so that an artist could know exactly in color how a person felt” (7). 27. Dove to Stieglitz, July 11, 1930, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 195. 28. Quoted in Cohn, “Dove’s Writings,” 61. 29. Undated typewritten essay, Dove Papers, 3:3:3. 30. William Innes Homer, “Identifying Arthur Dove’s ‘The Ten Commandments,’ ” American Art Journal 12/3 (Summer 1980): 21–­32; Ann Lee Morgan, “ ‘A Modest Young Man with Theories’: Arthur Dove in Chicago, 1912,” in The Old Guard and the Avant-­Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910–­1940, ed. Sue Ann Prince (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 23–­37. 31. Dove to Kootz, in Kootz, Modern American Painters, 37 32. Paul Rosenfeld, “Arthur Dove,” in Port of New York: Essays on Fourteen American Moderns (1924; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 171. 33. Duncan Phillips, one of Dove’s chief supporters, patrons, and interlocutors, surely colored the perceptions of critics and scholars to come with statements such as the following, penned in 1937: “Isolated on his farm [in Geneva, NY], far from the city’s art movements and art politics, he is intimate with the sun and the soil and with the rough hewn objects of his daily use. . . . All his inspiration as an artist is drawn from his simple life and his surprising thoughts as a man. It is his stubborn plan to achieve a unity, a synthesis of his own material and spiritual resources in complete independence from the mass-­minded, collectivist world. Consequently he is a lonely person and both his serious vision and his humorous caprice seem strange to those accustomed to a more urban, cosmopolitan and worldly point of view. What he wants for himself is an intimate understanding of the rural environment which is his microcosmos and the laboratory for his research as a designer. . . . Dove is a

nature poet of old American stock.” Duncan Phillips quoted in Arthur G. Dove: Exhibition of New Oils and Water-­Colors, 1–­2. For further discussion of the rhetoric that shaped the reception of Dove during his lifetime and for years to come, with particular attention to the discourse of the Stieglitz circle, see Marcia Brennan, Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), ch. 4. 34. Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of Sociability,” trans. Everett C. Hughes, American Journal of Sociology 55/3 (Nov. 1949), 254, 255; originally published as “Soziologie der Geselligkeit,” in Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages vom 19–­12 Oktober, 1910, im Frankfurt A.M. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1911), 1–­16. 35. Simmel, “The Sociology of Sociability,” 261. Dove would have liked Simmel’s description of a work of art as something that revealed the secret of life: “In the apparently self-­governing play of its [art’s] forms we construct and experience the meaning and the forces of its [life’s] deepest reality but without the reality itself” (261). Lisa ­Siraganian, Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), considers how the work of the twentieth-­century avant-­garde in Europe and the United States negotiated the relationship between the individual and the collective or the state by asserting the absolute freedom of the reader or viewer through asserting the absolute autonomy of texts, reconciling Lockean liberalism with the idea of a public good. The question of art and sociability has been explored more extensively in other subfields of art history, if not exhaustively. Bridget Alsdorf’s Fellow Men: Fantin-­Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-­Century French Painting (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013) offers an exemplary model to follow. 36. For the Stieglitz group and Whitman, see Celeste Connor, Democratic Visions: Art and Theory of the Stieglitz Circle, 1924–­1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), ch. 2. For Stieglitz and politics, see Allan Antliff, “Stieglitz parmi les anarchists,” in Carrefour Alfred Stieglitz, ed. Jay Bochner and Jean-­Pierre Montier (Rennes, Fr.: Presses Universitaires Rennes, 2012), 39–­57. See also Kristina Wilson, “The Intimate Gallery and the Cosmos,” ch. 2 in The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition, 1925–­ 1934 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), which examines Stieglitz’s spirituality in terms of his broader mission to address a nonelite public; and Lauren Kroiz, Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), which considers Stieglitz and his cohort in terms of early twentieth-­century discourses of immigration, identity, and race. 37. Alfred Stieglitz, “The Origin of the Photo-­Secession and How It Became 291,” Twice-­A-­Year 8–­9 (Spring/Summer, Fall/Winter, 1942): 114–­27; Paul Rosenfeld [Peter Minuit, pseud.], “291 Fifth Avenue,” Seven Arts, Nov. 1916, 61–­65; Harold Rugg, “The Artist and the Great Transition,” in America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait, ed. Waldo Frank et al. (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1934), 179–­98. For discussions of Stieglitz circle rhetoric, see J. M. Mancini, “ ‘The Safeness of Standing Alone’: Alfred Stieglitz, Camera Work, and the Organizational Roots of the American Avant-­Garde,” Canadian Review of American Studies 28/2 (1998): 37–­79; J. M.

Mancini, “Camera Work: Organizing the Avant-­Garde,” ch. 5 in Pre-­Modernism: Art World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Wanda M. Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–­1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Allan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-­Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), chs. 1–­2; and Brennan, Painting Gender, Constructing Theory. Antliff’s book provides a thorough and important analysis of the relationship between anarchist politics and modern art in the early decades of the twentieth century in the United States. 38. Harold Clurman, “Alfred Stieglitz and the Group Idea,” in Frank et al., America and Alfred Stieglitz, 275, 276, 277–­78. 39. Mark Whalan, “The Majesty of the Moment: Sociality and Privacy in the Street Photography of Paul Strand,” American Art 25/2 (Summer 2011), 35–­55. Both Marcia Brennan and Celeste Connor consider the Stieglitz group in terms of the question of sociality. See Brennan, Painting Gender, Constructing Theory, esp. ch. 3; and Connor, Democratic Visions, esp. chs. 1–­2. Dove’s 1922 essay “What Does Photography Mean to Me?” appeared in MSS alongside essays by Sherwood Anderson and Waldo Frank. 40. Antliff, Anarchist Modernism, ch. 1; A. Joan Saab, For the Millions: American Art and Culture between the Wars (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Glenn Jordan, “Re-­membering the African-­American Past: Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, and Black Art of the Harlem Renaissance,” Cultural Studies 25/6 (Nov. 2011): 848–­91; Dora Apel, Images of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), ch. 3; Kristina Wilson, “Social Identity and the Museum of Modern Art,” ch. 3 in The Modern Eye. 41. For discussion of such technological utopianism and the relationship between telegraphy and ideology, see Armand Mattelart, “Mapping Modernity: Utopia and Communication Networks,” in Mappings, ed. Denis Cosgrove (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 169–­92; Bruce J. Hunt, “Doing Science in a Global Empire: Cable Telegraphy and Electrical Physics in Victorian Britain,” in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 312–­33; Katherine Stubbs, “Telegraphy’s Corporeal Fictions,” in New Media, 1740–­1915, ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 91–­111; and Jennifer L. Roberts, “Post-­Telegraphic Pictures: Asher B. Durand and the Nonconducting Image,” Grey Room 48 (Summer 2012): 12–­35. For the telephotograph, an apparatus designed in the late nineteenth century for the purpose of transmitting images over long distances, see “New Method of Transmitting Pictures by Telegraph,” San Francisco Call, July 31, 1898, 25; Charles Emerson Cook, “Pictures by Telegraph,” Pearson’s Magazine, Apr. 1900, 345–­48; Thomas Thorne Baker, The Telegraphic Transmission of Photographs (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1910); and Russell W. Burns, “Images by Wire: Picture Telegraphy (1843–­c. 1900),” ch. 8 in Communications: An International History of the Formative Years (London: Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2004). I thank Miri Kim for drawing my attention to telephotography and for the period references.

Notes to Pages 97–98

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42. Maurice Aisen, “The Latest Evolution in Art and Picabia,” Camera Work, June 1913, 17, 18, 19. 43. Hutchins Hapgood, “The Trend of the Time,” Globe and Commercial Advertiser, Mar. 12, 1912, 4. Allan Antliff discusses the Hapgood article in Anarchist Modernism, 36–­38. 44. Martha Candler Cheney to Dove, Jan. 8, 1938, Dove Papers, 2:1:9. Cheney went on to publish Modern Art in America (New York: Whittlesey House; London: McGraw-­Hill, 1939). 45. For Wind (No. 3), see Morgan, Arthur Dove, 230. 46. Diary entry for Sept. 7, 1939, Dove Papers, 3:2:10; DePietro, “Beyond Abstraction: The Late Work of Arthur Dove,” in Arthur Dove and Helen Torr, 43. 47. Debra Bricker Balken, “Storm Clouds, 1935,” in Abstract Expressionism and Other Modern Works: The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ed. Gary Tinterow, Lisa Mintz Messinger, and Nan Rosenthal (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 41; diary entries for Jan. 14, 17–­20, 1936, Dove Papers, 3:2:9. As Balken notes, the link between the two works was first remarked by Jessica Murphy, a research associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 48. Balken, “Storm Clouds, 1935,” 41. 49. H. H. C. Dunwoody, Weather Proverbs, Signal Service Notes, no. 9 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883), 77; Charles Franklin Brooks, Why the Weather? (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924), 88–­89; Charles Fitzhugh Talman, The Realm of the Air: A Book about Weather (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1931), 135. See also DePietro, “Sense of Place in the Art of Arthur Dove,” in Balken, Arthur Dove: Watercolors, 19. 50. Arthur Dove, “A Way to Look at Things,” in Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans (New York: The Anderson Galleries, Mar. 9–­28, 1925), n.p.; Dove, “An Idea,” n.p.; Arthur G. Dove: Exhibition of New Oils and Water-­Colors, n.p. The “geese” statement is not attributed to Dove in the pamphlet, but Dove responded enthusiastically to its inclusion, and William Dove confirmed that Stieglitz took the phrase from a letter the elder Dove had written to the critic. Dove to Stieglitz, Apr. 4, 1940, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 437; DePietro interview with William Dove, 79. For period discussion of the meteorological significance of flying geese, see, for example, Brooks, Why the Weather?, 198–­99. 51. Wolfgang Mieder, “Proverbs,” and David M. Ludlum, “Weather Lore,” both in Encyclopedia of Climate and Weather, ed. Stephen H. Schneider (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 2:617–­21, 837–­39; Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chs. 1–­2. For period texts, see, for example, Dunwoody, Weather Proverbs; Brooks, Why the Weather?; Talman, The Realm of the Air; Richard F. Warren, Reading the Weather (New York: Macmillan, 1920); and W. J. Humphreys, Weather Proverbs and Paradoxes (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1934). The “mackerel” proverb is from Warren, Reading the Weather, 69. 52. Newspaper clipping, Dove Papers, 3:2:13; Arthur G. Dove: Paintings, 1942–­1943 (New York: An American Place, Feb. 11–­Mar. 17, 1943), n.p. I have not been able to determine the exact source of the clipping, but it is likely that it appeared in a paper printed in 1941 or 1942. Underneath

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Notes to Pages 99–115

the list of weather signs runs a notice for US defense bonds. The bond program was initiated in the fall of 1940 and defense bonds that sold for $18.75, as described in the ad, and which matured to $25 within ten years, were issued by spring 1941. The name of the bonds was changed from “defense bond” to “war bond” in late 1941, but the notice in question, which employed the “defense bond” moniker, continued to appear in papers in early 1942. James J. Kimble, Mobilizing the Home Front: War Bonds and Domestic Propaganda (Dallas: Texas A&M University Press, 2006), ch. 1; “Local News,” New York Evening Post, Jan. 19, 1942, 3. 53. Warren, Reading the Weather, 25, 154–­55; Dove to Stieglitz, Jan. 31, 1944, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 488. 54. For two useful if very different comparisons to Dove’s weather watching and painting, see Pierre Bonnard’s diary notations and sketches of the weather, discussed in Jean Clair, “ ‘The Adventures of the Optic Nerve,’ ” and Antoine Terrasse, “Bonnard’s Notes,” both in Bonnard: The Late Paintings (Washington, DC: The Phillips Collection; Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, 1984), 29–­50, 51–­70; and the series of preparatory studies by Charles Burchfield for his large-­scale watercolor December Storm (1941–­1960) in which he sketched weather events and then annotated the images with verbal description. Both Burchfield’s finished painting and the studies are in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. 55. Dove to Torr, August 1936, Dove Papers, 2:1:32; Dove to Stieglitz, Sept. 3, 1936, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 359. 56. Dove to Stieglitz, Oct. 24, 1923, and Dove to Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, Aug. 15, 1924, both in in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 97, 106. 57. Diary entries for Sept. 28 and 29, 1936, Dove Papers, 3:2:9. 58. Dove to Torr, Oct. 5, 1936 (postmarked), Dove Papers, 2:1:37. 59. Alan Gurney, Compass: A Story of Exploration and Innovation (New York: Norton, 2004), ch. 3; A. R. T. Jonkers, Earth’s Magnetism in the Age of Sail (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), ch. 6. I thank Jeremy Jernegan for suggesting the connection between Dove’s diagrams and the compass rose. 60. Dove, ship’s log, May 31–­June 3, 1924, Dove Papers, 3:1:51. 61. Dove, ship’s log, May 30, 1924, Dove Papers, 3:1:51. 62. Dove, barometer diagram, ledger page, n.d., Dove Papers, 5:3:37. 63. Dove, list of abbreviations, Beaufort Wind Force Scale, ledger page, n.d., Dove Papers, 5:3:37; W. E. Knowles Middleton, The History of the Barometer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), 398–­425. 64. Talman, The Realm of the Air, 144; Peter K. Taylor, “Marine Weather Observations and Predictions,” in Schneider, Encyclopedia of Climate and Weather, 2:490; Bernard Mergen, Weather Matters: An American Cultural History since 1900 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 149. 65. Diary entry for Jan. 18, 1942, Dove Papers, 3:2:13. 66. Hans-­Georg Gadamer, “The Nature of Things and the Language of Things,” in Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans.

and ed. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 78. 67. Diary entries for Nov. 14 and 15, 1941, Dove Papers, 3:2:12. That “Ptly Cloudy” referred to the painting, and not to weather conditions, in the entry for the fourteenth is confirmed by Dove’s note, in his entry for the fifteenth, that he “Drew in Partly Cloudy” as well as by additional comments about the painting in subsequent entries. See, for example, diary entries for Nov. 17, 18, and 19, 1941, Dove Papers, 3:2:12. 68. Henry David Thoreau, for example, kept daily records of the condition of the sky, and artists in the nineteenth century in Europe and America, including Pierre Bonnard (see above), commonly included cloud studies in their paintings. For discussion of such precedents, see Mergen, Weather Matters, 141, 176; Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825–­1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 5; Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); and Vittoria Di Palma, “Blurs, Blots, and Clouds: Architecture and the Dissolution of the Surface,” AA Files 54 (Summer 2006): 34–­45. See also Rudolf Dekker, “Watches, Diary Writing, and the Search for Self-­Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century,” in Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400–­1800, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Benjamin Schmidt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 127–­42, for a conceptually relevant consideration of diary keeping as a way of knowing. 69. Elizabeth Hutton Turner, “Going Home: Geneva, 1933–­1938,” in Debra Bricker Balken, Arthur Dove: A Retrospective (Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art; Washington, DC: The Phillips Collection; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 99; “Chronology,” in ibid., 176. 70. For a discussion of this broader context, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–­1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); and Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (New York: Norton, 2003). 71. Anderson, Predicting the Weather, 1–­2; Mark Monmonier, Air Apparent: How Meteorologists Learned to Map, Predict, and Dramatize Weather (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), ch. 3; James Rodger Fleming, Meteorology in America, 1800–­1870 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), ch. 7. 72. Warren, Reading the Weather, 17, 19, 148, 184; Edwin C. Martin, Our Own Weather: A Simple Account of Its Curious Forms, Its Wide Travels, and Its Notable Effects (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1913), 1; M. Luckiesh, The Book of the Sky: A Résumé of Personal Experience and Observation (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1922), vii, 198. See also A. Lawrence Rotch, Sounding the Ocean of Air (New York: E. and J. B. Young, 1900). 73. See, for example, Martin, Our Own Weather, 22, 97, 119; Brooks, Why the Weather?, 146; and W. J. Humphreys, Weather Rambles (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1937), 161–­84. 74. Mergen, Weather Matters, 108. 75. Anderson, Predicting the Weather, chs. 3 (pp. 82, 84) and 2 (p. 287). 76. Weather Source, LLC, “Weather Warehouse,” ­accessed July 21, 2010, http://weather-­warehouse.com

/WeatherHistory/PastWeatherData_GenevaExperimentSt _Geneva_NY_ January.html; Turner, “Going Home,” 102. 77. My summary account here relies on several sources: Anderson, Predicting the Weather, esp. chs. 3, 5, 6; Katharine Anderson, “Mapping Meteorology,” in Intimate Universality: Local and Global Themes in the History of Weather and Climate, ed. James Rodger Fleming, Vladimir Jankovic, and Deborah R. Coen (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications / USA, 2006), 69–­91; Kristine C. Harper, Weather by the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), esp. chs. 1–­2; Mergen, Weather Matters, esp. chs. 1–­3; Monmonier, Air Apparent, esp. chs. 1–­4, 9; and Fleming, Meteorology in America, esp. ch. 7. Monmonier discusses the first regularly appearing US weather map, which debuted in 1879 in the New York Daily Graphic. As Monmonier describes, a cipher was used to transmit the Weather Bureau map from Washington, DC, to New York. A grid of horizontal and vertical lines that corresponded to letters and numbers was placed over the weather map; the map’s prominent features, including its isolines, were then encoded as number-­letter pairs and this data was communicated by telegraph to the offices of the Daily Graphic, where it was retranslated into map form. Monmonier, Air Apparent, 158–­59. 78. Monmonier, Air Apparent, chs. 1–­2; Harper, Weather by the Numbers, 15–­16; Anderson, “Mapping Meteorology.” For the weather map used as illustration, see, for example, Willis L. Moore, Moore’s Meteorological Almanac and Weather Guide, 1901 (Chicago: Rand, McNally, 1900); Willis L. Moore, Descriptive Meteorology (New York: D. Appleton, 1910); Martin, Our Own Weather; and Richard Whatham, Meteorology for Aviator and Layman (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1930). 79. My explanation of the basic features of the weather map relies on Anderson, “Mapping Meteorology”; Anderson, Predicting the Weather; Monmonier, Air Apparent; and Warren Blier, “Charts, Maps, and Symbols,” in Schneider, Encyclopedia of Climate and Weather, 1:111–­16. 80. See Fleming, Meteorology in America, 141–­45; Anderson, Predicting the Weather, ch. 1. 81. Monmonier, Air Apparent, 54–­56. For examples of hemispheric and world weather maps, see Moore, Descriptive Meteorology, 287–­93, 303–­4, 318–­19, 322–­23. 82. See, for example, Monmonier, Air Apparent, chs. 1–­2; Mergen, Weather Matters, ch. 3; Anderson, Predicting the Weather, ch. 5. As Monmonier points out, meteorologists relied on the example of conventional cartography in fashioning the weather map, drawing on cartography’s already-­established graphic vocabulary to create a synoptic image of weather (7). 83. Monmonier, Air Apparent, 64–­65, 84–­87, 219–­28; Mergen, Weather Matters, 18–­19, 22; Anderson, “Mapping Meteorology,” 75; Anderson, Predicting the Weather, 179–­83, 195–­98. 84. For a discussion of instrumental precision, see Anderson, Predicting the Weather, ch. 4–­5. 85. Mergen, Weather Matters, 108–­9. 86. For discussion of this trend, see Alan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive: The Use and Classification of Portrait Photography by the Police and Social Scientists in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries,” October no. 39 (Winter 1986): 3–­64; Joel Snyder, “Visualization and Visibility,” in Picturing

Notes to Pages 116–120

267

Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), 378–­97; Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Merriley Borell, “Training the Senses, Training the Mind,” and Stanley J. Reiser, “Technology and the Use of the Senses in Twentieth-­Century Medicine,” both in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 244–­61, 262–­73; Stanley J. Reiser, Medicine and the Reign of Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Rachael Z. DeLue, “Diagnosing Pictures: Sadakichi Hartmann and the Science of Seeing, circa 1900,” American Art 21 (Summer 2007): 42–­ 69; and Josh Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: Bertillon, Galton, Marey (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). 87. Mergen, Weather Matters, 13, 108–­9. 88. Ibid., 321, 9–­12, 27, 79. 89. This popularization included meteorology’s glorification as a factor in America’s success and superiority in the commercial, scientific, and military spheres. See, for example, Luckiesh, The Book of the Sky; and Martin, Our Own Weather. 90. Anderson, Predicting the Weather, esp. chs. 1 and 2. 91. Andrew Beers, Farmer’s Almanac for the Year of Our Lord 1820 (Philadelphia, PA: S. Potter, 1819). 92. Information about the basic almanac form comes from Anderson, Predicting the Weather, chs. 1 and 2; Katharine Anderson, “Almanacs and the Profits of Natural Knowledge,” in Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-­Century Media, ed. Louise Henson et al. (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 97–­111; and Molly McCarthy, “Redeeming the Almanac: Learning to Appreciate the iPhone of Early America,” Common-­Place 11/1 (October 2010), accessed Nov. 15, 2010, www.common-­place.org. 93. Robert Hunt Lyman, ed., The World Almanac and Book of Facts for 1924 (New York: New York World, 1924), 68–­69. For an earlier example, see Moore, Moore’s Meteorological Almanac. 94. Diary entry for Nov. 14, 1941, Dove Papers, 3:2:12. Dove recorded a temperature of 44 degrees for Nov. 14, although it is not clear from the entry (or from the unremarkable temperature itself) that he meant to refer to that day as the warmest in history. 95. See also Martin, Our Own Weather, esp. ch. 15; Luckiesh, The Book of the Sky, esp. the discussion in ch. 3 about clouds and cloud wisdom and the discussion in ch. 20 about weather signs; Brooks, Why the Weather?; and Humphreys, Weather Rambles. 96. Warren, Reading the Weather, i, ii, iv. 97. Ibid., 167–­68, 180. 98. Luckiesh, The Book of the Sky, 196. 99. Warren, Reading the Weather, 42–­45; Martin, Our Own Weather, 25–­26, 58, 111–­12, 218. Katharine Anderson discusses the perceived shortcomings of both human sight and meteorology with regard to measuring and quantifying but also simply perceiving the weather in Predicting the Weather, chs. 4–­5. For a related discussion of the visibility and representability of weather events, lightning in particular, see Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in

268

Notes to Pages 121–131

Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), ch. 3. 100. Diary entries for Feb.–­Mar. 1942, Dove Papers, 3:2:13. 101. “Ready Reference Diary” (1926), Dove Papers, 3:1:54. 102. Diary entry for May 25, 1924, Dove Papers, 3:1:51. 103. Dove to Stieglitz, Mar. 1931, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 214. 104. Dove to Arthur Jerome Eddy, in Cubists and Post-­ Impressionism (Chicago: McClurg, 1914), 48. 105. Warren, Reading the Weather, 147, 169. 106. Humphreys, Weather Rambles, 88. 107. Warren, Reading the Weather, 147. 108. Martin, Our Own Weather, 10. 109. Jennifer L. Roberts, “Copley’s Cargo: ‘Boy with a Squirrel’ and the Dilemma of Transit,” American Art 21/2 (Summer 2007), 20–­41; Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Penguin, 1995). 110. Undated typewritten essay, Dove Papers, 3:3:2. 111. Dove to Stieglitz, Sept. 29, 1940, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 449. 112. Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 24, 37–­38, 57–­58; Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 65–­66, 75; Dove to Torr, Oct. 14, 1936, Dove Papers, 2:1:38. 113. Susan Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880–­1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 92. As the scholar Denis Cosgrove has noted, the notion of the geographer as a reliable eyewitness who might accurately report and record the various regions of the globe has been replaced by alternate configurations and approaches to the work of geography. Denis Cosgrove, Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), 5–­6. Schulten also traces this transformation as it manifested in secondary education in the United States (ch. 6). 114. David Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), chs. 4–­7; Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America, chs. 2–­5; and Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), chs.  3–­5. 115. Cosgrove, Geography and Vision, 1. 116. See, for example, Brennan, Painting Gender, Constructing Theory; Harry Cooper, “Arthur Dove Paints a Record,” Source Notes in the History of Art 24/2 (Winter 2005): 70–­77; Helen A. Harrison, “Arthur G. Dove and the Origins of Abstract Expressionism,” American Art 12 (Spring 1998): 66–­83; Robert Goldwater, “Arthur Dove: A Pioneer of Abstract Expressionism in American Art,” Perspectives USA 2 (Winter 1953): 78–­88. 117. Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Essay on the Geography of Plants, ed. Stephen T. Jackson, trans. Sylvie Romanowski (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 1–­26, 146–­55; Michael Dettelbach, “Humboldtian Science,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A.

Secord, and E. C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 287–­304; Katherine Olesko, “Alexander von Humboldt,” in The Oxford Companion to the History of Science, ed. J. L. Heilbron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 283–­84. 118. Albert E. Theberge, “Sounding Pole to Sea Beam,” Technical Papers 1989 ASPRS/ACSM Annual Convention, Surveying and Cartography 5 (1989): 334–­46. 119. William C. Agee discusses Sand and Sea’s aerial perspective in “New Directions,” 147. 120. Moore, Moore’s Meteorological Almanac, 128; Luckiesh, The Book of the Sky, 196. The examples of period weather writing cited thus far make a point of emphasizing meteorology’s bird’s-­eye or aircraft’s-­eye point of view. 121. Agee, “New Directions,” 147; DePietro, “Beyond Abstraction,” 51. 122. Diary entries for Apr. 3 and 5, 1943, Dove Papers, 3:2:13. 123. Dove, in Arthur G. Dove: Paintings, 1942–­1943, n.p. 124. “Some Notes by Arthur G. Dove,”, n.p. See also two of Dove’s undated typewritten essays, Dove Papers, 3:3:1, 3:3:4, in which Dove included the phrase “There is no such thing as an abstraction” and either drafted or reworked the extraction-­not-­abstraction formulation, titling his commentary “Just What You See.” 125. Diary entry for Mar. 27, 1940, Dove Papers, 3:2:11; DePietro, “Beyond Abstraction,” 46; DePietro, “Sense of Place in the Art of Arthur Dove,” 24–­25; Waldo Frank, “Straight Streets,” in In the American Jungle (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937), 122. DePietro reproduces one such aerial photograph in her “Sense of Place” essay (26). For the aerial perspective, see Jason Weems, “Aerial Views and Farm Security Administration Photography,” History of Photography 28/3 (Autumn 2004): 266–­82; Jason Weems, Barnstorming the Prairies: Aerial Vision and Modernity in Rural America, 1920–­1940 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming); Cosgrove, Geography and Vision, ch. 5; and Mark Dorrian and Frédéric Pousin, eds., Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013). For further discussion of the elevated viewpoint in American art, as distinct from the aerial point of view, see Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, circa 1830–­1865 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1991). Dove had flown on a plane, as he reported to Stieglitz in a 1936 letter. Dove to Stieglitz, Sept. 3, 1936, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 359. 126. Anderson, Predicting the Weather, 13; Mergen, Weather Matters, chs. 3, 4; Roger Turner, “Teaching the Weather Cadet Generation: Aviation, Pedagogy and Aspirations to a Universal Meteorology in America, 1920–­1950,” in Fleming, Jankovic, and Coen, Intimate Universality, 141–­73. For period discussion of meteorology, flight, and warfare, see, for example, Alexander McAdie, Man and Weather (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926) and Luckiesh, The Book of the Sky. 127. Martin, Our Own Weather, 25–­26. 128. Luckiesh, The Book of the Sky, 18–­19. See also Rotch, Sounding the Ocean of Air. Katharine Anderson, in Predicting the Weather, chs. 4–­5, discusses the problem of clouds and cloud nomenclature, as does Tucker in Nature Exposed, ch. 3, and Mergen in Weather Matters, ch. 3. Vittoria Di Palma, in

“Blurs, Blots, and Clouds,” discusses the cloud, as a nonobject, as an emblem of lack of fixity and visibility in art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; included in her discussion are the blot drawings of Alexander Cozens as well as a fascinating series of diagrams by John Ruskin of “cloud perspective.” She also considers a more recent engagement, in contemporary architecture, with the heterogeneity and instability of cloud forms. 129. Anderson, Predicting the Weather, 222–­32; Tucker, Nature Exposed, ch. 3; Whatham, Meteorology for Aviator and Layman; McAdie, Man and Weather; Luckiesh, The Book of the Sky; Martin, Our Own Weather. 130. Steven J. Zaloga, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Robotic Air Warfare, 1917–­2007 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2008). 131. Lisa Gitelman, “Souvenir Foils: On the Status of Print at the Origin of Recorded Sound,” in Gitelman and Pingree, New Media, 1740–­1915, 157–­73. 132. Katharine Anderson discusses the desideratum of automatic measurement in Predicting the Weather, ch. 5, and Katherine Stubbs explores a similar desideratum pertaining to telegraphy in “Telegraphy’s Corporeal Fictions,” 91–­111. Fidelity, of course, was an ideal, not necessarily an actual outcome. Scholarly writing about the problematic performance of instruments and the troublesome instability of the data and knowledge they produce, along with scholarly writing about the situatedness of knowledge more generally, has informed my thinking about Dove and instruments throughout. See, for example, Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Karen Knorr-­Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981); Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Peter Galison, How Experiments End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), esp. ch. 2, “Laboratories”; Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Joseph Rouse, Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer, eds., The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds., Materialities of Communication (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); David Turnbull, “Rendering Turbulence Orderly,” Social Studies of Science 25/1 (Feb. 1995): 9–­33; Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, esp. chs. 1, 6; Graeme J. N. Gooday, “Instrumentation and Interpretation: Managing and Representing the Working Environments of Victorian Experimental Science,” in Lightman, Victorian Science in Context, 409–­37; Davis Baird, Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Jocelyn Holland and Susanne Strätling, eds.,

Notes to Pages 131–136

269

“Aesthetics of the Tool,” special issue, Configurations 18/3 (Fall 2010); and Matthew C. Hunter, Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 133. Martin, Our Own Weather, 197. 134. In physics, gravity is conventionally referred to as one of four fundamental forces or interactions of nature; the other three are electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. For further explanation, see Bruce A. Schumm, Deep Down Things: The Breathtaking Beauty of Particle Physics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), ch. 2. 135. Dove to Elizabeth McCausland, May 13, 1933, Elizabeth McCausland Papers, 1838–­1965, bulk 1920–­1960, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2:5:11. 136. Dove, “Notes by Others,” n.d., quoted in Charles C. Eldredge, Reflections on Nature: Small Paintings by Arthur Dove, 1942–­1943 (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1997), 10–­11. 137. For a related discussion of Surrealism, automatism, and the action of instruments, see David Lomas, “ ‘Modest Recording Instruments’: Science, Surrealism, and Visuality,” Art History 27/4 (Sept. 2004): 627–­50. See also the discussion of the idea of the automaton on the part of the American avant-­garde in Barbara Zabel, Assembling Art: The Machine and the American Avant-­Garde ( Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004), chs. 1–­2; Charles Palermo’s reading of automatism in the work of Joan Miró in Fixed Ecstasy: Joan Miró in the 1920s (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), esp. the introduction and ch. 3; and Richard Shiff’s consideration of automatism and artistic autonomy in his “Puppet and Test Pattern: Mechanicity and Materiality in Modern Pictorial Representation,” in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, ed. Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 327–­50. 138. See, for example, diary entries for Oct.–­Nov. 1942, Dove Papers, 3:2:13. Dove notes an event of war (“French blew up fleet”) and marks D-­Day in capital letters in his entries for Nov. 27, 1942, and June 6, 1944, respectively. Dove Papers, 3:2:13. 139. Diary entry for Dec. 7, 1941, Dove Papers, 3:2:12; J. C. Bernstein to Dove, postcards and letters, 1943, Dove Papers, 2:1:14, 2:1:16; DePietro, “Beyond Abstraction,” 42, 49; Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 475–­76; Morgan, Arthur Dove, 276; Sue Davidson Lowe, Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography (Boston, MA: MFA Publications / Museum of Fine Arts, 2002), 414. Lattice and Awning (1941) is now in the collection of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Dove makes frequent mention of Dr. Bernstein in letters sent to Stieglitz between 1939 and 1945, during which time he was under the doctor’s care. Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 413–­14, 426–­27, 430–­31, 435, 443, 445–­46, 449–­50, 453, 455–­57, 462–­63, 465–­66, 469, 475–­78, 494. Among the Dove materials housed at the Archives of American Art is a letter Dove received from the Museum of Modern Art, dated November 10, 1942, urging Dove to “make an important contribution to the war effort” by contributing examples of his work to serve as potential models for therapeutic designs for use in treating injured US soldiers; the letter was signed by J. T. Soby, identified as the director of the Armed Services

270

Notes to Pages 136–144

Program. According to a Museum of Modern Art press release, Soby was appointed by the museum as a liaison between the museum and the armed services and charged with the task of determining how the museum might “most helpfully put its facilities at the service of the men in our armed forces.” Dove Papers, 2:1:13; “The Museum of Modern Art Appoints James T. Soby Director of Its Armed Services Program,” Jan. 27, 1942, Press Release Archives, 1940–­49, Research Resources, Museum of Modern Art, accessed Apr. 13, 2011, http://www.moma.org/learn/resources/press_archives /1940s/1942. 140. Diary entry for Nov. 17, 1942, Dove Papers, 3:2:13. 141. Both are in private collections. 142. Dove to Stieglitz, July 1940, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 446. Included in the checklist to the 1944 exhibition at An American Place was a work entitled 1944. Arthur G. Dove: Paintings, 1944 (New York: An American Place, Mar. 21–­May 21, 1944), n.p. At the time of the publication of Morgan’s catalogue raisonné, the work had not been identified. Morgan, Arthur Dove, 311. 143. The January 1918 issue of National Geographic Magazine featured the constitutive connection between world war and aviation, devoting several articles to the subject, many illustrated with aerial photographs. Joseph Talasne, “America’s Part in the Allies’ Mastery of the Air”; Jacques De Sieyes, “Aces of the Air”; Pasquale Tozzi, “Italy’s Eagles of Combat and Defense”; Hiram Bingham, “Building America’s Air Army”; and Robert E. Peary, “The Future of the Airplane,” National Geographic, 33/1, Jan. 1918, 1–­5, 5–­9, 38–­47, 48–­86, 107–­13. 144. Diary entry for Oct. 11, 1939, Dove Papers, 3:2:10. 145. McAdie, Man and Weather, 37, 40. 146. Michael J. Crowe, Theories of the World from Antiquity to the Copernican Revolution, 2nd rev. ed. (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001), chs. 2, 4; David Standish, Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth’s Surface (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Books, 2007); James McBride, Symmes’ Theory of Concentric Spheres (Cincinnati, OH: Morgan, Lodge & Fisher, 1826); Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and Related Tales, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Adam Seaborn [ John Cleves Symmes Jr.], Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery (1820; Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1965); Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, trans. Frank Wynne, ed. Peter Cogman (1864; London and New York: Penguin Books, 2009). 147. Peter Lynch, “The Origins of Computer Weather Prediction and Climate Modeling,” Journal of Computational Physics 227 (2008): 3431–­44; Diane Manuel, “Lewis Fry Richardson,” in Schneider, Encyclopedia of Climate and Weather, 2:643–­44. 148. Lewis Fry Richardson, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 219. 149. Ibid., 220. 150. See, for example, Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911; New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1913). For related discussion of streamlining in industry, science (and pseudoscience),

art, and culture, see Sharon Corwin, “Picturing Efficiency: Precisionism, Scientific Management, and the Effacement of Labor,” Representations 84 (Autumn 2003): 139–­65; Christina Cogdell, Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Jennifer Jane Marshall, Machine Art 1934 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Andrew Hemingway, The Mysticism of Money: Precisionist Painting and Machine Age America (Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope, 2013). Richardson’s description of his Forecast-­Factory calls to mind Charles Babbage’s difference engine, one of the earliest proposed machines for use in computation, first described by Babbage in 1822 as a remedy for error-­prone manual calculation, and pursued by him, in plan and prototype, for several decades. Simon Schaffer, “Babbage’s Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System,” Critical Inquiry 21/1 (Autumn 1994): 203–­27; Francis Spufford, “The Difference Engine and The Difference Engine,” in Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time, and Invention, ed. Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 266–­90; David Tomas, “On the Imagination’s Horizon Line: Uchronic Histories, Protocybernetic Contact, and Charles Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” in Clarke and Henderson, From Energy to Information, 217–­34. The Forecast-­Factory as thinking machine also shared its ideal of superintegration with the eastern European philosopher and guru George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who lectured in New York in the winter of 1923/24 to audiences that included the author Hart Crane, the founder and editor of the Little Review Margaret Anderson, and the publisher Jane Heap, also a Little Review editor. Gurdjieff described the universe as a vast machine, its parts interlinked and working together to produce thought. Kristina Wilson, “Spiritual and Material Gods in the Machine Age,” in The Modern Eye, 160–­61.

Chapter 3 1. Diary entries for May 23, 1926, July 21, 1926, Jan. 13, 1927, Aug. 2, 1926, Feb. 8, 1927, Jan. 8, 1927, Dec. 29, 1926, Dec. 24, 1927, Jan. 13, 1928, Dec. 1, 1926, Jan. 9, 1927, Jan. 11, 1927, Jan. 14, 1927, Jan. 8, 1927, Jan. 20, 1927, Jan. 29, 1927, Feb. 5, 1927, Feb. 19, 1927, Feb. 25, 1927, Mar. 2, 1927, Apr. 6, 1927, Apr. 9, 1927, Apr. 10, 1927, Apr. 11, 1927, Apr. 22, 1927, Nov. 30, 1927, Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 3:1:54, 3:2:1–­2 (hereafter cited as Dove Papers). See also Dove’s diary entry for June 27 and 28, 1943, in which he describes making pictures from Duke Ellington, Dove Papers, 3:2:13. Some material from this chapter first appeared in Rachael Z. DeLue, “Arthur Dove, Painting, and Phonography,” History and Technology 27/1 (Mar. 2011): 113–­21. 2. Diary entries for Dec. 8, 1926, Jan. 4, 5, 15, 17, 27, 1927, and Feb. 1, 4, 16, 1927, Dove Papers, 3:1:54, 3:2:1. 3. Harry Cooper, “Arthur Dove Paints a Record,” Source Notes in the History of Art 24/2 (Winter 2005): 70–­77. 4. Diary entries for Mar. 27, July 25, 1926, and Jan. 12, 1928, Dove Papers, 3:1:54, 3:2:1, 3:2:2. 5. Ann Lee Morgan, Arthur Dove: Life and Work with a Catalogue Raisonné (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1984), 27.2, 27.3, 27.6, 27.7, 27.10, and 27.14. 6. Cooper, “Arthur Dove Paints a Record,” 70; Donna M.

Cassidy, “Arthur Dove’s Music Paintings of the Jazz Age,” American Art Journal 20/1 (1988): 13–­16. In December 1925, Dove attended a performance of the Whiteman Orchestra in New York, what may have inspired him to purchase the Victor records. Diary entry for Dec. 15, 1925, Dove Papers, 3:1:53. The recordings are as follows: “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” / Victor 18949; “An Orange Grove in California” /  Victor 19169-­A; “Rhapsody in Blue” / Victor 55225; and “The Rhythm Rag” / Victor 19773-­B. 7. For discussion of Robison’s recording of the tune, see Richard Crawford, “George Gershwin’s ‘I Got Rhythm’ (1930),” in The George Gershwin Reader, ed. Robert Wyatt and John Andrew Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 157, 160n7; for Robison’s orchestra, see Wayne D. Shirley, “Religion in Rhythm: William Grant Still’s Orchestrations for Willard Robison’s Deep River Hour,” Black Music Research Journal 19/1 (Spring 1999): 1–­41. As Cooper notes, all five recordings discussed here can be sampled at www .redhotjazz.com/pwo.html. Cooper, “Arthur Dove Paints a Record,” 77n1. 8. Improvision is called Improvisation in the Dove catalogue raisonné. Morgan, Arthur Dove, 27.7. For further discussion of Improvision and Rhythm Rag, including the issue of Improvision’s title, see Cassidy, “Arthur Dove’s Music Paintings of the Jazz Age,” 23n55. 9. Program Notes, Kennedy Center, Washington, DC, National Symphony Orchestra, Feb. 19–­21, 2009, accessed Nov. 2, 2009, www.kennedy-­center.org/calendar/?fuse action=composition&composition_id=2677. 10. In “Arthur Dove’s Music Paintings of the Jazz Age,” Cassidy offers a good summary of these practices. See also Donna M. Cassidy, Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, 1910–­1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), which includes a chapter on Dove; Barbara Zabel, Assembling Art: The Machine and the American Avant-­Garde ( Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004), ch. 7 (on jazz and the American avant-­garde); and Jody Patterson, “ ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing . . .’: Jazz, Modernism, and Murals in New Deal New York,” in Music and Modernism, c. 1849–­1950, ed. Charlotte de Mille (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 228–­54. As is well known, Dove’s close friend, Georgia O’Keeffe experimented with painting from music while at Teachers College in New York during the 1914/15 term, when she dropped in on a class taught by Alon Bement and participated in an exercise that involved responding to music through charcoal drawing. Barbara Haskell, “Georgia O’Keeffe: Making the Unknown—­Known,” in Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction, ed. Barbara Haskell (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2009), 3–­4. O’Keeffe created several musical-­themed, abstract paintings in the following decades, including two early works in oil, Music-­Pink and Blue No. 1 and Music-­Pink and Blue No. 2, both 1918. One among various other local precedents with which Dove may have been familiar was the work of Pamela Colman Smith, whose exhibition of “visions evoked by music, sketched during the concert or opera” went on view at Stieglitz’s 291 in March 1909. “Exhibitions Presented by Stieglitz, 1905–­1946,” in Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries, ed. Sarah Greenough (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2000), 544; Melinda Boyd Parsons, “Pamela

Notes to Pages 148–149

271

Colman Smith and Alfred Stieglitz: Modernism at 291,” History of Photography 20/4 (Winter 1996): 285–­92. I thank Emily Burns for directing my attention to the Parsons article. 11. For studies on art and sound, see, for example, Ernst Gombrich, “Epilogue: Some Musical Analogies,” in The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, 2nd ed. (1979; London: Phaidon Press, 1984), 285–­305; Cassidy, Painting the Musical City; Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–­1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), ch. 4; Esther da Costa Meyer and Fred Wasserman, eds., Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider (New York: Jewish Museum; London: Scala, 2003); Kerry Brougher et al., Visual Music: Synaethesia in Art and Music since 1900 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005); Peter Vergo, The Music of Painting: Music, Modernism, and the Visual Arts from the Romantics to John Cage (London: Phaidon Press, 2010); and Peter Dayan, Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2011). My consideration of Dove and sound is part of a larger engagement on the part of historians of American art with questions of the sensory. In addition to the scholarship cited throughout this chapter, see, for example, the short essays by Leo G. Mazow, Mark M. Smith, Asma Naeem, Guy Jordan, and Wendy Bellion in a special section on American art and the sensorium in American Art 24/3 (Fall 2010): 2–­25; Asma Naeem, “Splitting Sight and Sound: Thomas Dewing’s A Reading, Gilded Age Women, and the Phonograph,” American Quarterly 63/3 (Sept. 2011): 461–­85; and Leo Mazow, Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). The following provide a useful overview of the history and historiography of sound studies across the humanistic disciplines: Rick Altman, ed., “The State of Sound Studies,” special issue, Iris 27 (Spring 1999); Michele Hilmes, “Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does it Matter?” American Quarterly 57/1 (Mar. 2005), 249–­59; and Kara Keeling and Josh Kun, eds., “Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies,” special issue, American Quarterly 63/3 (Sept. 2011). 12. Paul Dove, “Facts pertaining to the life of Arthur G. Dove,” Dove Papers, 1:1:1. 13. Michael Chanan, Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music (London: Verso, 1995), 48; Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 74; David L. Morton Jr., Sound Recording: The Life Story of a Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 36–­37. 14. David A. Jasen, Tin Pan Alley: An Encyclopedia of the Golden Age of American Song (New York: Routledge, 2003), 421; Cassidy, “Arthur Dove’s Music Paintings of the Jazz Age,” 13; Katz, Capturing Sound, 3, 37, 75; Cooper, “Arthur Dove Paints a Record,” 70; Morton, Sound Recording, 62–­63. Electrical phonograph recordings did not appear until after 1924; they were launched commercially in 1925. Chanan, Repeated Takes, 57. 15. Morton, Sound Recording, 42, 65; Paul C. Edie, “The Victor-­Victrola Page: Timeline of the Victor Phonograph Company,” accessed November 3, 2009, http://www.victor -­victrola.com/Timeline.htm. 16. Diary entry for Nov. 29, 1926, Dove Papers, 3:1:54. 17. Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., “The Memory and the Pres-

272

Notes to Pages 154–156

ent: Romantic American Painting in the Lane Collection,” in The Lane Collection: 20th-­Century Paintings in the American Tradition, ed. Stebbins and Carol Troyen (Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, 1983), 24. Stebbins cites a 1982 conversation with William Dove. 18. The number of springs used in the motor, from one to four, determined how often one had to turn the crank. Paul C. Edie, “The Victor-­Victrola Page: Basics of the Acoustic Phonograph,” accessed Nov. 3, 2009, http://www .victor-­victrola.com/Basics%20of%20the%20Acoustic%20 Phonograph.htm. My discussion of the phenomenology of record listening was in part inspired by Cooper’s discussion of the same. Cooper, “Arthur Dove Paints a Record,” 73–­74. 19. Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, 1–­12 (quote on p. 1), 115–­52, 233–­83. For a more historically proximate but equally penetrating analysis of the transformed circumstances of listening in the first half of the twentieth century, see Theodor W. Adorno, “The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory (1941),” “The Curves of the Needle (1927),” and “The Form of the Phonograph Record (1934),” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 251–­70, 271–­ 76, 277–­82. 20. Douglas Kahn, “Ether Ore: Mining Vibrations in American Modernist Music,” in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 114; Veit Erlmann, “But What of the Ethnographic Ear? Anthropology, Sound, and the Senses,” in Erlmann, Hearing Cultures, 9; Steven Connor, “Edison’s Teeth: Touching Hearing,” in Erlmann, Hearing Cultures, 153–­72; Chanan, Repeated Takes, 6–­7, 9, 20; and Katz, Capturing Sound, 5, 9–­10, 17. Jonathan Sterne offers a thorough and compelling history of recorded sound, its cultural contexts, and its cultural and social impact in The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). For further discussion of the subject of listening as treated by art, albeit in an earlier period, see Anne Leonard, “Picturing Listening in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Art Bulletin 89/2 ( June 2007): 266–­86. 21. Arthur Dove, “An Idea,” in Arthur G. Dove: Paintings, 1927 (New York: The Intimate Gallery, Dec. 12, 1927–­Jan. 11, 1928), n.p. 22. For nineteenth-­century phonography (of the shorthand variety), see, for example, Sir Isaac Pitman, A Manual of Phonography, or, Writing by Sound (London: S. Bagster and Sons, 1845); S. P. Andrews and A. F. Boyle, Compendium of Phonography (New York: Andrews & Boyle, 1848); and Andrew J. Graham, Handbook of Standard or American Phonography, rev. ed. (1858; New York: Andrew J. Graham, 1894). 23. Anne Cohen DePietro interview with William Dove, in Arthur Dove and Helen Torr: The Huntington Years (Huntington, NY: Heckscher Museum of Art, 1989), 78. 24. Oliver Read and Walter L. Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo: Evolution of the Phonograph, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Howard W. Sams, 1976), 3–­6, 10; Chanan, Repeated Takes, 1–­3, 23, 25, 40–­41; Morton, Sound Recording, 2–­5. The phonautograph, invented in the mid-­1850s, created a visual record of sound waves for purposes of analysis by way of a stylus, which, in response to air vibrations pressing on a diaphragm, traced a line in a rotating cylinder coated with

lampblack, or soot. Morton, Sound Recording, 2; Read and Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo, 5–­6. 25. Edie, “The Victor-­Victrola Page: Basics of the Acoustic Phonograph.” 26. Dove, “An Idea,” n.p. 27. Chanan, Repeated Takes, 137–­38; Katz, Capturing Sound, 2, 18–­19. The distinction, as Chanan points out, between “documentary” and “mimesis” is important; enhancements in recording and playback technologies in the late 1930s and into the 1940s allowed for the production of the illusion of real sound, such that recordings did not have to depend solely on a single, discrete live performance as their source. 28. Katz, Capturing Sound, 3. See also Thompson’s discussion of the technological mediation of sound in “Introduction: Sound, Modernity, and History,” The Soundscape of Modernity, 1–­12. 29. Katz, Capturing Sound, 25–­26, 30. 30. Ibid., 26, 31–­35, 81; Morton, Sound Recording, 40; Chanan, Repeated Takes, 10. 31. Cassidy, Painting the Musical City, 80, 70. See also Lauren Kroiz, Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). The music paintings, Cassidy writes, were “self-­consciously nationalist,” and his “use of this music . . . must be understood in the context of his goal—­and the Stieglitz circle’s concern—­to identify his art as American.” Cassidy, Painting the Musical City, 81. See also Cassidy, “Arthur Dove’s Music Paintings of the Jazz Age”; and Judith Zilczer, “Synaesthesia and Popular Culture: Arthur Dove, George Gershwin, and the ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ ” Art Journal 44/4 (Winter 1984): 361–­66. 32. Cooper, “Arthur Dove Paints a Record,” 71–­72, 73–­ 74, 75. 33. Cassidy, Painting the Musical City, 86; Zilczer, “Synaesthesia and Popular Culture,” 361. See also Morgan, Arthur Dove, 69–­70n36. 34. For period responses to the phonograph, including worry over the harm done to music and to the listening ear by the mechanical reproduction of sound, see Timothy D. Taylor, Mark Katz, and Tony Grajeda, ed., Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 113–­33. 35. Dove, “An Idea,” n.p.; Helen Torr letter, Dec. 8, 1929, Dove Papers, 2:1:19. 36. Dove, “An Idea,” n.p. 37. Cassidy, Painting the Musical City, 89–­90, discusses Kandinsky’s text in this regard. 38. “Some Notes by Arthur Dove,” Dove Exhibition: List of Paintings and Some Notes by Arthur Dove (New York: The Intimate Gallery, Apr. 9–­28, 1929), n.p. (emphasis added). 39. Dove to Stieglitz, August 1925, in Ann Lee Morgan, ed., Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1988), 117. 40. Adorno, “The Form of the Phonograph Record,” 277, 278. 41. Sherrye Cohn, Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol (1982; Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), 63–­66; Lynn Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 68, 152–­55,

164–­68, 195–­205, 215–­18. See also Sherrye Cohn, “Arthur Dove and Theosophy: Visions of a Transcendental Reality,” Arts Magazine, Sept. 1983, 86–­91. 42. Mark F. Davis, “Records and Phonograph Cartridges,” in Springer Handbook of Acoustics, ed. Thomas D. Rossing (New York: Springer Science and Business Media, 2007), 761–­63. 43. Dove, “An Idea,” n.p. 44. Arthur Dove, undated typewritten essay, Dove Papers, 3:3:2. 45. See Judith Zilczer, “Music for the Eyes: Abstract Painting and Light Art,” in Brougher et al., Visual Music, 24–­87. Although it is not clear how attuned Dove was to the work in sound and music of his contemporaries, he easily fits within a larger, transatlantic context of musical experimentation in the period, one that would include Futurist poetry, music, and performance, George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique, and the work of Pierre Schaeffer, who theorized musique concrète in the late 1940s. Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, 133–­44; Pierre Schaeffer, “Acousmatics,” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2004), 76–­81. 46. Huntington Harbor I is in the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, and Huntington Harbor II is in the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 47. Edmund Wilson, “Opéra Comique,” New Republic, Jan. 20, 1926, 241; Edward Alden Jewell, “In the Realm of Art: Variety in the Local Panorama; On the Abstract Trail,” New York Times, Feb. 17, 1935, 9; Kenneth Peacock, “Instruments to Perform Color-­Music: Two Centuries of Technological Experimentation,” Leonardo 21/4 (1988): 405–­6. 48. Chanan, Repeated Takes, 16–­20; Katz, Capturing Sound, 14–­21. 49. Connor, “Edison’s Teeth,” 159. 50. Diary entry for Dec. 1, 1926, Dove Papers, 3:1:54. 51. Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 128–­29. 52. Cooper, “Arthur Dove Paints a Record,” 71. See also Cassidy, Painting the Musical City, 86, where she likens Dove’s sense of illustration to Stieglitz’s idea of the equivalent. Cassidy describes Dove’s music paintings accordingly, as expressive of Dove’s emotional response to the musical pieces. 53. Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 326, 298. 54. Dove to Samuel Kootz (draft), Dove Papers, 2:1:22. 55. See Barbara D. Gallati, “Arthur G. Dove as Illustrator,” Archives of American Art Journal 21/2 (1981): 13–­22; and diary entries for Aug. 26, 27, Oct. 11, and Dec. 3, 1926, Dove Papers, 3:1:54. 56. Quoted in Prosper Buranelli, “Bricks vs. Art—­A Family Drama,” New York World Magazine, May 30, 1926, 12. 57. My sense of Dove looking up to see sound-­as-­thing I owe to Leo G. Mazow. 58. Music is in a private collection. 59. Given its title, it is possible that Dove’s Another Arrangement (1944) also in some way evokes music or musical composition. Ann Lee Morgan does not include Primitive Jazz in her catalogue raisonné, but Donna Cassidy cites Torr’s mention of it in the diaries. Cassidy, “Arthur Dove’s Music Paintings of the Jazz Age,” 21n13. 60. William Innes Homer, “Identifying Arthur Dove’s ‘The Ten Commandments,’ ” American Art Journal 12/3 (Summer 1980): 21–­32; Ann Lee Morgan, “ ‘A Modest Young Man

Notes to Pages 157–168

273

with Theories’: Arthur Dove in Chicago, 1912,” in The Old Guard and the Avant-­Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910–­1940, ed. Sue Ann Prince (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 23–­37. Nature Symbolized No. 1 (Roofs) is in a private collection. 61. As Cassidy has noted, Dove painted a picture called Factory Noise that was exhibited in 1925 at the Anderson Galleries but is now unlocated; she also discusses the period’s predilection for industrial America, the machine aesthetic, and machine noise. Cassidy, “Arthur Dove’s Music Paintings of the Jazz Age,” 11. 62. Zilczer, “Music for the Eyes,” 62; Cassidy “Arthur Dove’s Music Paintings of the Jazz Age,” 11, 22n27. Zilczer cites a letter written by Dove to Stieglitz, dated October 24, 1923, in which he mentions said dinner: “Had Chinese dinner with the Strands,” he wrote, with no further elaboration. For the letter, see Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 98. Cassidy refers to a poem published in Broom in 1921 as an example of early twentieth-­century interest in Eastern art and culture, and it is worth citing two stanzas of the poem, for they offer a startling verbal analog to Dove’s painting: “Sound the flat gold of Chinese scales / let sound the red gold / of old gongs / and the light gold of oboes. Spread metal-­blue upon the stair / pale rose and darker rose / and stream cruel lights / upon them.” Henry Bellamann, “Decorations for an Imaginary Ballet,” Broom, Dec. 1921, 117. In his 1914 book, Cubists and Post-­Impressionism, Arthur Jerome Eddy compared Kandinsky to Chinese music and drew parallels between the experience of the two. Eddy, Cubists and Post-­Impressionism (Chicago: McClurg, 1914), 128–­30. 63. Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 88; Greenough, Modern Art and America, 387–­88, 423–­26, 454–­55; Kristina Wilson, “The Intimate Gallery and the Equivalents: Spirituality in the 1920s Work of Stieglitz,” Art Bulletin 85/4 (Dec. 2003): 746–­68. Stieglitz exhibited a similar series in March 1924, called “Songs of the Sky.” Greenough, Modern Art and America, 548. Greenough discusses the relationship between Dove’s production and Stieglitz’s photographs (ibid., 423–­ 28, 436). Stieglitz began photographing the sky and clouds in 1922. 64. Dove to Stieglitz, July 7, 1942, Stieglitz to Dove and Torr, July 8, 1942, and July 17, 1942, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 471–­72; Dove to Stieglitz, June 7, 1942, in ibid., 470; and Dove to Stieglitz, probably July 23, 1942, and August 9, 1942, in ibid., 472–­73. In 1924, Torr reported seeing the “cloud photographs” at Stieglitz’s gallery. “No one else could have done them,” she wrote. Diary entry for Dec. 5, 1924, Dove Papers, 3:1:52. 65. Rosalind Krauss, “Stieglitz/Equivalents,” October 11 (Winter 1979): 129–­40. See Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” in The Originality of the Avant-­Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 87–­118, for further discussion of the device of cropping in photography. 66. Dove to Torr, Aug. 23, 1936 (postmarked), Dove Papers, 2:1:32. 67. My thinking about letter writing as a circulation of material entities has been shaped by the work of Jennifer L. Roberts, as exemplified by Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

274

Notes to Pages 170–175

68. The recordings are as follows: Pollack / Variety 504 Vocalion 3769; Blue Rhythm Band / Columbia 3157-­D; Crosby / Decca 912. Both Ann Lee Morgan and Donna Cassidy have noted the link between Dove’s work and popular radio tunes. Morgan, Arthur Dove, 233; Cassidy, Painting the Musical City, 92. Jennifer Stettler Parsons has discussed Dove’s radio pictures at length in an essay published online, which I read after the manuscript for this book was complete, including chapter 3, which was drafted in full in 2008 and 2009. Although Parsons’s argument differs significantly from mine, her essay contributes to a more complete understanding of the paintings Dove made from the radio. Jennifer Stettler Parsons, “Absence and Presence: Arthur Dove’s Paintings ‘From the Radio,’ ” Archives of American Art, retrieved Aug. 1, 2013, http://www.aaa.si.edu/essay/ jennifer-­parsons. 69. Diary entries for Dec. 2, 1936, Feb. 14, 15, 16, 17, 1937, Dove Papers, 3:2:9. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when Dove began Me and the Moon and which one of the two radio pictures was referred to as “From the Radio,” but it is clear that both paintings were based on the two radio songs cited. 70. Arthur G. Dove: New Oils and Water Colors (New York: An American Place, Mar. 23–­Apr. 16, 1937). See also Cassidy’s discussion of the genesis and sources of these paintings in Painting the Musical City (92), including her note that on the reverse of The Moon Was Laughing at Me is written the title of the work as well as the word “radio.” 71. The letters that make mention of the radio and radio listening are as follows: Dove to Torr, Aug. 30, 31 (postmarked), Sept. 26, 28, 29, Oct. 4, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20, and 24, 1936, Dove Papers, 3:1:33–­40. The diaries contain mention of Dove and Torr listening to the radio together at home. See, for example, the diary entry for July 25, 1926, Dove Papers, 3:1:54. 72. For Dove’s time in Geneva, including information about the Dove Block, see Elizabeth Hutton Turner, “Going Home: Geneva, 1933–­1938,” in Debra Bricker Balken, Arthur Dove: A Retrospective (Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art; Washington, DC: The Phillips Collection; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 95–­113. 73. Dove to Torr, Aug. 30 and 31 (postmarked), 1936, Dove Papers, 2:1:33, 2:1:34. In a 1941 diary entry, Dove underlined the phrase “New Radio,” indicating his excitement about the purchase. Diary entry for Sept. 10, 1941, Dove Papers, 3:2:12. 74. Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 7, 23–­24, 84; Morton, Sound Recording, 82. 75. Leon Alfred Duthernoy, “Singing to Tens of Thousands; Impressions of an Artist during His First Radio Concert,” (radio broadcast, Nov. 1922), in Taylor, Katz, and Grajeda, Music, Sound, and Technology in America, 268. 76. Rudolf Arnheim, Radio: An Art of Sound, trans. Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read (Salem, NH: Ayer Co., 1986), 15. For further discussion of Arnheim’s essay and other contemporaneous theorizations of radio, see Susan Key, “John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1: Through the Looking Glass,” in John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933–­1950, ed. David W. Patterson (London: Routledge, 2002), 105–­33; Serge Cardinal, “Radiophonic Performance and Abstract Machines: Recasting Arnheim’s Art of Sound,” Liminalities

3/3 (Nov. 2007): 1–­23; Shawn Vancour, “Arnheim on Sound: Materialtheorie and Beyond,” in Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, ed. Scott Higgins (New York: Routledge, 2010), 177–­ 94; and Margaret Fisher, Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–­1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), ch. 2. 77. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 7–­8. 78. Ibid., 10–­11, chs. 2, 3. 79. Dove to Torr, Oct. 4, 1936, Dove Papers, 2:1:37. 80. Dove to Torr, Sept. 19, Oct. 1, 1936, Dove Papers, 2:1: 36–­37. 81. Dove to Torr, Aug. 31, 1936 (postmarked), Dove Papers, 2:1:34. 82. Dove to Torr, Sept. 1936 (no exact date) and Sept. 26, 1936, Dove Papers, 2:1:34, 2:1:36. 83. Douglas, Listening In, 41. 84. See Cohn, Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol, ch. 3; and Cohn, “Arthur Dove and Theosophy,” 86–­91; Cohn interview with William Dove, Oct. 14, 1980, in Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol, 45; Dove to Torr, Oct. 23, 1936, Dove Papers, 2:1:39. 85. Cohn, Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol, 45. 86. Paul Strand, “Alfred Stieglitz and a Machine” (New York, printed privately, Feb. 1921), 1, Beinecke Digital Collections, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library. Strand enclosed the essay in an undated letter to Dove, Dove Papers, 2:1:3. The essay was subsequently printed in MSS, Mar. 1922, 6–­7. 87. Quoted in Cohn, Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol, 56; Dove to Stieglitz, Sept. 18/25, 1933, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 284. 88. Dove to Elizabeth McCausland (dated in pencil on the first of three typed pages “May 13, 1933”), Elizabeth McCausland Papers, 1838–­1965, bulk 1920–­1960, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2:5:11. 89. Quoted in Cohn, Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol, 56. 90. Diary entry for Sept. 27, 1936, Dove Papers, 3:2:9. 91. Quoted in Cassidy, Painting the Musical City, 92. 92. Cassidy, Painting the Musical City, 92. 93. Justine S. Wimsatt, “Wax Emulsion, Tempera or Oil? Arthur Dove’s Materials, Techniques, and Surface Effects,” in AIC Preprints: Papers Presented at the Tenth Annual Meeting of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 26–­30 May 1982 (Washington, DC: AIC, 1982), 185; Richard Newman and Irene Konefal, “Arthur Dove’s Paint Media: An Analytical Study,” in AIC Painting Specialty Group Postprints, vol. 5 (Washington, DC: American Institute for Conversation of Historic and Artistic Works, 1993), 81–­85; Turner, “Going Home,” 105; Max Doerner, The Materials of the Artist and Their Use in Painting, with Notes on the Techniques of the Old Masters, trans. Eugen Neuhaus (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934); Gail Stavitsky, “Waxing Poetic: Encaustic Art in America during the Twentieth Century,” Waxing Poetic: Encaustic Art in America (Montclair, NJ: Montclair Art Museum, 1999), 17–­21 (on Dove, 18–­19). 94. Turner, “Going Home,” 105; Wimsatt, “Wax Emulsion, Tempera or Oil?”; diary entries for Aug. 26, 1935, Jan. 2, 1936, Feb. 17, 18, 19, 20, Mar. 7, 8, 9, 17, 18, 26, 28, May 22, 23, July 31, Sept. 4, 5, 1942, Dove Papers, 3:2:8, 3:2:9, 3:2:13. 95. Sconce, Haunted Media, 63, 76; Bruce J. Hunt, “Lines

of Force, Swirls of Ether,” Ian F. Bell, “The Real and the Ethereal: Modernist Energies in Eliot and Pound,” and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “Vibratory Modernism: Boccioni, Kupka, and the Ether of Space,” all three in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, ed. Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 99–­113, 114–­ 25, 126–­49. 96. Me and the Moon (sheet music) (New York: Santly Bros.-­Joy, 1936); Mills Blue Rhythm Band: 1933–­1936 (Amersfoort, Neth.: Retrieval / Challenge Records International, 2007), track 21. 97. Douglas, Listening In, 24, 37–­38, 57–­58; Sconce, Haunted Media, 65–­66, 75. 98. Dove to Torr, Oct. 14, 1936, Dove Papers, 2:1:38. 99. Keith Harwood, The Float (Shropshire, UK: Medlar Press, 2003), 232. 100. Sconce, in Haunted Media, discusses the role of nautical metaphors in the discourse of wireless technology (63–­65), as does Douglas in Listening In (36). See also Alexander Nemerov, “Ground Swell: Edward Hopper in 1939,” American Art 22/3 (Fall 2008): 50–­71, for a discussion of radio and the sea (in light of Edward Hopper), including what Nemerov calls “oceanic metaphors of radio” (62). In the Hopper article, Nemerov builds on his argument concerning the relationship between sound technology and artistic practice in “The Boy in Bed: The Scene of Reading in N. C. Wyeth’s Wreck of the ‘Covenant’,” Art Bulletin 88 (Mar. 2006): 7–­27. 101. Dove to Stieglitz, Aug. 15, 1924, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 106. 102. New York Times, Mar. 2, 1922, 20, quoted in Douglas, Listening In, 52. 103. Sconce, Haunted Media, 68–­69. 104. Douglas, Listening In, 12, ch. 5. 105. Cassidy, “Arthur Dove’s Music Paintings of the Jazz Age,” 21n15; Cassidy, Painting the Musical City, 92–­95. See also “Artists & Models (1937)”, IMDb, accessed Jan. 8, 2010, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028587/. Torr wrote in the diary: “In afternoon both to see movie—­Artists & Models—­ with Louis Armstrong the drawing power.” Diary entry for Oct. 24, 1937, Dove Papers, 3:2:9. 106. Diary entries for Mar. 7–­13, 1938, Dove Papers, 3:2:10; Arthur G. Dove: Exhibition of Recent Paintings, 1938 (New York: An American Place, Mar. 29–­May 10, 1938). One can likely presume that the painting mentioned in the diary and Swing Music (Louis Armstrong) are one and the same. The work went on view again at An American Place in 1939, along with a selection of Dove’s previous output, including Portrait of Ralph Dusenberry, an assemblage from 1924. Arthur G. Dove: Exhibition of Oils and Temperas (New York: An American Place, Apr. 10–­May 17, 1939). 107. Douglas, Listening In, 85, 93–­94, 96–­97. 108. Cassidy, Painting the Musical City, 94; Brent Hayes Edwards, “Louis Armstrong and the Syntax of Scat,” Critical Inquiry 28/3 (Spring 2002): 618–­49. 109. Cassidy, Painting the Musical City, 94; “Which Animals Resemble One Another Most? Rabbit and Duck,” Harper’s Weekly, Nov. 19, 1892, 1114; W. E. Hill, “My Wife and My Mother-­in-­Law: They Are Both in This Picture—­Find Them,” Puck, Nov. 6, 1915, 11. 110. For further discussion of this particular form of

Notes to Pages 175–184

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optical illusion in relation to artistic representation and the apprehension of pictures, see Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 4–­9. 111. For synesthesia and American art, see Judith Zilczer, “‘Color Music’: Synaesthesia and Nineteenth-­Century Sources for Abstract Art,” Artibus et Historiae 8/16 (1987): 101–­ 26; and Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, Sensory Crossovers: Synesthesia in American Art (Albuquerque, NM: Albuquerque Museum, 2010). For a more general discussion of synaesthesia and the arts, see Crétien van Campen, The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 112. Diary entry for Feb. 21, 1929, Dove Papers, 3:2:3. Because he lived in Halesite, Dove would have regularly heard the fog bell housed in the Huntington Lighthouse on Huntington Harbor, which was built in 1912 and manned by members of the United States Lighthouse Service until 1939. However, I am not overly interested in making a case for the identity of the painting’s real-­life source. I doubt that there exists an exact, identifiable referent, and I do not believe it particularly matters. For information about the Huntington Lighthouse, see www.huntingtonlighthouse. org; and Robert G. Muller, Long Island’s Lighthouses: Past and Present (Cutchogue, NY: Long Island Chapter, US Lighthouse Society, 2003), ch. 5. 113. “Chronology,” in Balken, Arthur Dove: A Retrospective, 179. 114. Dove to Stieglitz, mid-­June 1940 and late Mar. 1941, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 445, 452; Exhibition of New Arthur G. Dove Paintings (New York: An American Place, Mar. 27–­May 17, 1941), n.p. 115. Charles Van Wyck Brooks, Sensory Awareness: The Rediscovery of Experiencing (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 221–­22. 116. Morgan, Arthur Dove, 272, 274, 263, 264; Dove to Stieglitz, Mar. 5, 1941, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 452. 117. Morgan, Arthur Dove, 263. See also Dove’s War (1939), a work on paper in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 118. Dove to Torr, Nov. 10, 1934, Dove Papers, 2:1:31. Dove’s diary entries regarding this work suggest that he sketched the outlines of the painting in 1936 and then, in 1941, finished painting it. Dove Papers, 3:2:12. 119. “Made drawing of it and two photographs with the little camera. Made 3 small paintings after lunch of same to get motif clear. . . . Went out and made other drawing again.” Dove to Torr, Nov. 10, 1934, Dove Papers, 2:1:31.

Chapter 4 1. For illuminating discussion of the practices constituting this genealogy, see Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981); Yve-­Alain Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 65–­97; Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), chs. 2 (esp. the section on Rodin and Rilke), 3, 4; and the collection of essays by Lane Relyea, Julia Kelly, Anna Dezeuze, Jonathan D. Katz, Jaimey Hamilton, Jo Applin, and Patricio del Real on assemblage and bricolage (a term whose current use in describing and

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Notes to Pages 185–193

theorizing artistic assemblage practices originated with the anthropologist Claude Lévi-­Strauss in reference to non-­Western constructed objects) in Art Journal 67/1 (Spring 2008). Jacqueline Lichtenstein’s Blind Spot: An Essay on the Relations between Painting and Sculpture in the Modern Age, trans. Chris Miller (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), surveys thinking from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries about the differing natures of painting and sculpture, thus serving as a useful prehistory for the blurring of boundaries between the two formats during the period under discussion. William C. Seitz’s The Art of Assemblage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961) stands as the foundational articulation of assemblage as an art form and as an exhibition presented an alternative to histories of modernism culminating in abstract painting. Seitz defined assemblage operationally, in terms of the action—­ assembling—­generative of such works (6). Although his exhibition predated the publication of Lévi-­Strauss’s The Savage Mind in 1962, Seitz discusses assemblage in relation to non-­Western culture and in terms of the special or magical associations of transfigured objects (83–­84, 86). Julia Kelly cites a letter that Seitz sent to Lévi-­Strauss in advance of his exhibition, which apparently went unanswered. Julia Kelly, “The Anthropology of Assemblage,” Art Journal 67/1 (Spring 2008): 28. 2. Undated typewritten essay, Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smith­ sonian Institution, 3:3:2 (hereafter cited as Dove Papers). 3. The only published study of the assemblages as a group is Dorothy Rylander Johnson’s Arthur Dove: The Years of Collage (College Park, MD: University of Maryland Art Gallery, 1967), which for the most part duplicates the material of Johnson’s master’s thesis (“Arthur Dove: The Years of Collage,” MA thesis, University of Maryland, 1967). Barbara Zabel discusses Dove’s assemblages in relation to the larger context of the American avant-­garde and collage in chapter 1 of Assembling Art: The Machine and the American Avant-­Garde ( Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004). 4. The following assemblages appeared in the 1925 exhibition: Miss Woolworth, Alfred Stieglitz, Ralph Dusenberry, Long Island, Huntington Harbor, Ten Cent Store, Mary Goes to Italy, and Rain. The 1927 exhibition included Clouds, Huntington Harbor I and Huntington Harbor II, Hand Sewing Machine, and Rhapsody in Blue, Part I. Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans (New York: The Anderson Galleries, Mar. 9–­Mar. 28, 1925), 8; Arthur G. Dove: Paintings, 1927 (New York: The Intimate Gallery, Dec. 12, 1927–­Jan. 11, 1928), 3. The subtitle to the Seven Americans catalog was 159 Paintings, Photographs & Things. 5. Diary entry for Dec. 4, 1924, Dove Papers, 3:1:51. 6. Forbes Watson and Royal Cortissoz have been proposed as subjects of The Critic. Johnson, Arthur Dove, 14–­15; Beth Venn, “Arthur Dove, The Critic,” in Frames of Reference: Looking at American Art, 1900–­1950. Works from the Whitney Museum of American Art, ed. Beth Venn and Adam D. Weinberg (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 72. Grandmother is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 7. Johnson, Arthur Dove, 14–­15, 19–­20; M. Therese Southgate, “The Cover: Arthur Dove, Grandmother, 1925,” Journal of the American Medical Association 290/14 (Oct. 8, 2003): 1821.

8. Georgia O’Keeffe to Dorothy Rylander Johnson, Oct. 25, 1965, in Johnson, Arthur Dove, 13. 9. Quoted in Ann Lee Morgan, Arthur Dove: Life and Work with a Catalogue Raisonné (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1984), 143. Torr continued: “Brancusi said it was one of the most beautiful things he’d seen in America.” The work to which Torr referred, dated ca. 1925, is titled Plaster and Cork in Morgan, Arthur Dove (141), Untitled in Johnson, Arthur Dove (49), and Untitled by the work’s current repository, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas (1966.17), which received it as a gift from O’Keeffe. The piece consists of a flat, abstract arrangement of plaster, cork, wire mesh, blue cloth or ribbon, graphite, and crayon. The pieces of cork occupy a recess in the plaster ground, the edges of which hold the cork in place, and the surface of the cork and plaster are flush; push pins or nails secure the wire mesh to the cork. In three separate places, a series of horizontal lines adorns the plaster. These lines look like they were made from pressing the cloth or ribbon into the plaster when wet but probably result from Dove’s exact copying of the horizontal pattern of the fabric’s grain onto the plaster surface. The work was exhibited at the Intimate Gallery in 1926, which is where Brancusi encountered it; when exhibited at An American Place in 1940, it was listed under the title Composition on Plaster. Morgan, Arthur Dove, 141, 143. 10. Here I refer only to the most basic subject of Goin’ Fishin’. Nancy J. Scott, “Submerged: Arthur Dove’s Goin’ Fishin’ and Its Hidden History,” Word and Image 23/2 (Apr.–­ June 2007): 147–­48, argues that there is far more to Goin’ Fishin’ than meets the eye. 11. Frederick S. Wight, Arthur Dove (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), 51. 12. Johnson, Arthur Dove, 14–­15; Suzanne M. Smith, “Arthur G. Dove” (MA thesis, American University, 1944), quoted in Wight, Arthur Dove, 52. For portraiture in the period and within the ranks of the early twentieth-­century American avant-­garde, see Sadakichi Hartmann, “Portrait Painting and Portrait Photography,” Camera Notes 3 ( July 1899): 1–­20; Marius de Zayas, “Caricature: Absolute and Relative,” Camera Work 46 (Apr. 1914): 19–­21; Craig R. Bailey, “The Art of Marius de Zayas,” Arts Magazine, Sept. 1978, 136–­44; Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “Francis Picabia, Radiometers, and X-­Rays in 1913,” Art Bulletin 71/1 (Mar. 1989): 114–­23; William Rozaitis, “The Joke at the Heart of Things: Francis Picabia’s Machine Drawings and the Little Magazine 291,” American Art 8, 3/4 (Summer–­Autumn 1994): 42–­59; Wanda M. Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–­1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), introduction and ch. 4; Robin Jaffee Frank, Charles Demuth Poster Portraits, 1923–­1929 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); Susan Fillin-­Yeh, “Dandies, Marginality, and Modernism: Georgia O’Keeffe, Marcel Duchamp, and Other Cross-­Dressers,” Oxford Art Journal 18/2 (1995): 33–­44; Marcia Brennan, Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), ch. 3; Diane Dillon and Christopher Reed, “Looking and Difference in the Abstract Portraits of Charles Demuth and Duncan Grant,” Yale Journal of Criticism 11/1 (1998): 39–­51; Barbara Zabel, Assembling Art, chs. 5, 6; Susan Chan Egan, “Paint-

ing Signs: Demuth’s Portrait of Charles Duncan,” American Art 22/3 (Fall 2008): 90–­101; and Jonathan Frederick Walz, “Performing the New Face of Modernism: Anti-­mimetic Portraiture and the American Avant-­Garde, 1912–­1927” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2010). 13. Diary entries for Aug. 9, 24, Oct. 26, 1924, Dove Papers, 3:1:51; Debra Bricker Balken, Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2009), 68; Hunter Drohojowska-­Philp, Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe (New York: Norton, 2004), 254, 279. 14. Dove to Stieglitz, June 1925, in Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, ed. Ann Lee Morgan (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1988), 114. 15. Diary entries for Oct. 7, 20, Nov. 8, 22, Dec. 7, 1924, Oct. 7, 1926, June 24, 1929, Aug. 18, 1930, Mar. 27, 1931, Feb. 5, 1932, Jan. 26, 1935, Dove Papers, 3:1:51, 3:1:54, 3:2:3, 3:2:5, 3:2:6, 3:2:8. 16. Dove Exhibition: List of Paintings and Some Notes by Arthur G. Dove (New York: The Intimate Gallery, Apr. 9–­28, 1929), n.p. Diary entries for May 28, 30, and 31, 1928, Dove Papers, 3:2:2, suggest that Dove found the wood on the beach, sawed it on site, and took it to the Mona. 17. Diary entries for Aug. 24, Oct. 2, 7, 9, 17, 19, Nov. 22, 28, 30, Dec. 1, 2, 3, 19, 22, 26, 27, 1924, Dove Papers, 3:1:51. In April 1943, Dove noted making a “small stuff thing,” but it remains unclear to what this description referred. Diary entry for Apr. 3, 1943, Dove Papers, 3:2:13. 18. Dove to Stieglitz, June 1925, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 114. 19. Diary entry for Oct. 1, 1924, Dove Papers, 3:1:51. 20. Dove to Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, Mar. 31/Apr. 3, 1929, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 169. 21. Charles Brock, “Charles Demuth: A Sympathetic Order,” in Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries, ed. Sarah Greenough (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2000), 363–­73; Ulla Haselstein, “Gertrude Stein’s Portraits of Picasso and Matisse,” New Literary History 34/4 (Autumn 2003): 723–­43. Haselstein offers a compelling account of the intermedial character of Stein’s literary portraits, which suggests that Stein perhaps more than other artists and writers would have provided Dove with a model for his multimedia work. For a recent analysis of the object in Rauschenberg’s practice, see Joshua Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). Numerous scholars have drawn a connection between Dove’s assemblages and New York Dada, singling out Picabia’s series of mechanomorphic or “machine” portraits, a selection of which were published in the little magazine 291 in 1915 and exhibited at Stieglitz’s 291, as a major influence. See, for example, Johnson, Arthur Dove; William Agee, “New York Dada, 1910–­30,” in Avant-­Garde Art, ed. Thomas B. Hess and John Ashbery (London: Collier Books, 1967), 125–­53; Jan Thompson, “Picabia and His Influence on American Art, 1913–­17,” Art Journal 39/1 (Autumn 1979): 14–­ 21; and Morgan, Arthur Dove, 18. In characterizing Picabia’s aims in a review of the 1913 Armory Show, a New York Times critic used the term “motive,” important within Dove’s practice, and attributed a quality of animation or mechanical capacity to Picabia’s art similar to the one Dove sought out,

Notes to Pages 193–195

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writing that Picabia “tries . . . to express the motive power that results in movement without asking us to recognize the moving object.” “Art at Home and Abroad,” New York Times, Feb. 23, 1913, 59. Nancy J. Scott has suggested Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, with its chapter-­length individual portraits of small-­town denizens, as a stimulus to Dove’s portrait making. As Dove’s diaries and correspondence reflect, Anderson and Dove were friends and admired one another’s work. Scott, “Submerged,” 147–­48. 22. Clement Greenberg, “The Pasted-­Paper Revolution,” Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–­1969 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 62–­63. Lisa Florman offers a thorough analysis of Greenberg’s essay and its much-­revised and expanded version, “Collage” (1959), in “The Flattening of ‘Collage,’ ” October 102 (Fall 2002): 59–­86. 23. Again, for this genealogy, see Seitz, The Art of Assemblage; Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture; Bois, “Kahn­ weiler’s Lesson”; Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, chs. 2–­4 (esp. in ch. 2 the section on Rodin and Rilke); Lichtenstein, Blind Spot; and the collection of essays on assemblage and bricolage in Art Journal 67/1 (Spring 2008). Bois’s configuration of language in relation to construction in Picasso is especially salient with regard to my discussion of Dove’s assemblage practice and, in combination with Georges Didi-­Huberman’s Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), has aided my conceptualization of Dove’s investment in the operational rather than in signification (or semiosis) as such. 24. Alfred H. Barr, ed., Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, 3rd ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1947), 211, 250. 25. Diary entries for Dec. 15, 1924, Dec. 1, 8, 1926, Jan. 9, 14, Feb. 4, 1927, Dove Papers, 3:1:51, 3:1:54; Morgan, Arthur Dove, 154. 26. Another of Dove’s assemblages, Huntington Harbor (1924, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden), pays possible tribute to Picasso. Dove used rope to frame this collage of paint, fabric, metal screening, a seashell, wood, newspaper clippings, and tacks, calling to mind Picasso’s famous Still Life with Chair Caning (Spring 1912, Musée National Picasso, Paris), which Picasso edged with rope. 27. This chapter makes careful use of the extensive literature that, following Martin Heidegger, considers the definition and status of material artifacts (understood as anything that exists as itself in the world) and that explores the possible ontological and terminological distinctions that might be drawn between something referred to as an “object” and something called a “thing.” For practical purposes, however, I will use the following terms interchangeably to indicate a thing that exists literally in the world, as opposed to a representation of that thing and to designate the media Dove used to fashion his assemblages: “thing,” “object,” “artifact,” “material,” and “entity.” The materials of representation and art making—­paint, photography, pastel, and so forth—­are themselves things in the world, another point that I will consider in regard to Dove’s assemblage practice. 28. Murdock Pemberton, “The Art Galleries,” New Yorker, Dec. 24, 1927, 57. 29. Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria” (1972), in Other

278

Notes to Pages 195–200

Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-­Century Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 82–­84. See also Rosalind Krauss’s discussion of horizontality in Krauss, “Horizontality,” in Yve-­Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 93–­103. As Krauss notes, Walter Benjamin had much earlier described such a distinction between “cuts through the world’s substance,” one longitudinal, like painting, the other transversal, like graphic production. Walter Benjamin, “Peinture et graphisme,” La Part de l’oeil, no. 6 (1990): 13, quoted in Krauss, “Horizontality,” 94. In her discussion of Joseph Cornell’s sandboxes, Janine Mileaf also presents a compelling means of understanding the shift from vertical to horizontal and considers the implications of such a shift for the temporality, spatiality, and viewing of Cornell’s work. Janine Mileaf, Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2010), ch. 5. 30. Paul Dove, “Notes Relative to Arthur G. Dove” and “Facts Pertaining to the Life of Arthur G. Dove,” Dove Papers, 1:1:1. 31. See, for example, diary entries for May 5, 1926, Jan. 5, June 4, Nov. 6, 1927, Feb. 24, Sept. 23, 1928, Jan. 28, 1929, Sept. 21, 1930, Feb. 17, 18, 19, 20, Mar. 17, 18, 26, 28, July 31, Dec. 5, 1942, Dove Papers, 2:1:54, 3:2:1, 3:2:2, 3:2:3, 3:2:4, 3:2:13; Dove to Torr, Sept. 1936 (3 letters), Oct. 1936 (5 letters), Dove Papers, 2:1:35, 2:1:36, 2:1:38, 2:1:40. 32. Dove to Elizabeth McCausland, June 22, 1933, Elizabeth McCausland Papers, 1838–­1965, bulk 1920–­1960, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2:5:11 (hereafter cited as Elizabeth McCausland Papers); Elizabeth McCausland, “Dove: Man and Painter,” Parnassus 9/7 (Dec. 1937): 3–­6; Dove to Stieglitz, Mar. 10, 1942, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 465; Florence Cane to Arthur Dove, n.d., Dove Papers, 2:1:3; Établissements Lefranc to Arthur Dove, May 4, 1935, Dove Papers, 2:1:3, 2:1:5; Dove to Stieglitz, Oct. 24, 1935, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 342; R. A. Brennecke to Arthur Dove, June 27, 1924, Dove Papers, 2:1:3; Samuel Kootz to Arthur Dove, Aug. 10, Sept. 10 and 30, 1937, Dove Papers, 2:1:8; Oswald H. Boltz, MD, to Arthur Dove, Nov. 20, Dec. 16, 1940, Jan. 20, Apr. 21, May 1, 10, June 4, 12, 24, July 2, 1941, Apr. 21, 1942, Dove Papers, 2:1:11, 2:1:12, 2:1:13. Dove’s correspondence suggests that Baekeland was an acquaintance of Stieglitz’s; Dove met him in New York in 1922, where Baekeland had a boat moored near Dove’s. Dove to Stieglitz, Sept. 1922, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 86, 87. 33. My understanding of Dove’s analogizing has been importantly shaped by Barbara Stafford’s analysis of analogy as a connecting practice that forges bonds “between two or more incongruities or spanned incommensurables” through strategies of comparison, correlation, and concordance. Barbara Stafford, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 9, ch. 1. Likewise, my understanding of Dove’s investment in materiality as equally attentive to the object world or the idea of the object and to the specific properties and capacities of materials themselves has been informed by Michael Podro, Depiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Tim Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues 14/1 ( June 2007): 1–­16, as well as the series of responses to that essay, in the same issue of the journal,

by Christopher Tilley (16–­20), Carl Knappett (20–­23), Daniel Miller (23–­27), and Björn Nilsson (27–­30); Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013); and Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 34. Waldo Frank, “The Art of Arthur Dove,” New Republic, Jan. 27, 1926, 269. 35. Diary entries for Jan. 20, 25, 29, Feb. 1, 5, 1927, Dove Papers, 3:1:54. 36. Dove to Stieglitz, May 15, 1934, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 308. 37. Dove to Stieglitz, Oct. 1929, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 180. 38. Arthur G. Dove: Paintings, 1942–­1943 (New York: An American Place, Feb. 11–­Mar. 17, 1943), 2. 39. Arthur Dove, undated typewritten note, Dove Papers, 3:3:11. 40. Steinberg discusses Johns in terms that inspired my own here. Leo Steinberg, “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art,” in Other Criteria, 17–­54. See also Alex Potts, Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), for a conceptually relevant discussion of the complex realism of certain strains of postwar American and European art. 41. “Some Notes by Arthur G. Dove,” in Dove Exhibition, n.p. 42. As described by Johnson, the assemblages perform a material metamorphosis, making objects into what they are not and demonstrating “the power of objects to seem different from what we know them to be.” Such transformation, she writes, approaches the magical, as lifeless things “assume an anomalous ability to seem alive.” Although my conclusions regarding the assemblages and animation differ from Johnson’s, I agree that “metamorphosis” and “life” are chief among the terms that best describe the aims and operations of these works. Johnson also notes Dove’s “kinship with objects,” a closeness or connection to the stuff of the material world that I also consider integral to his assemblage work. Johnson, “Arthur Dove,” 22, 23, 29. 43. Diary entry for Dec. 7, 1924, Dove Papers, 3:1:51. As Anne Cohen DePietro has pointed out, every year Dove recorded in his diary the first appearance of leaves on a willow tree outside his window in Centerport. DePietro, “Beyond Abstraction: The Late Work of Arthur Dove,” in Arthur Dove and Helen Torr, 42. Dove created the painting Willow Tree in 1937 (Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL) and a closely related watercolor of the same title in 1938. Debra Bricker Balken, Arthur Dove: Watercolors (New York: Alexandre Gallery, 2006), color plate 25. In 1940, he made two watercolor sketches called Willows (Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC). Other willow subjects include the paintings Willow Sisters (1936; Morgan, Arthur Dove, 239) and Willows (1940; ibid., 270). Sherrye Cohn considers Willow Tree (1938) in light of theosophist beliefs in the latent geometry of nature, particularly the spiral and ovoid forms, in “Arthur Dove and Theosophy: Visions of a Transcendental Reality,” Arts Magazine, Sept. 1983, 90–­91, and Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol (1982; Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), 76.

44. For taxidermy in relation to lifelessness in art and display, see Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–­1936,” Social Text 11 (Winter 1984–­1985): 20–­64; Susan Stewart, “Death and Life, in That Order, in the Works of Charles Willson Peale,” in Visual Display: Culture beyond Appearances, ed. Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen (New York: New Press, 1998), 31–­53; Alex Nemerov, “Haunted Supermasculinity: Strength and Death in Carl Rungius’s ‘Wary Game,’ ” American Art 13/3 (Autumn 1999): 3–­31; Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert, “Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: An Introduction,” in Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-­Animal Relations, ed. Philo and Wilbert (London: Routledge, 2000), 1–­34; Rachel Poliquin, The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and The Cultures of Longing (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012); Erica Fudge, “Renaissance Animal Things,” in Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective, ed. Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee, and Paul Younquist (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 41–­ 45; and Nigel Rothfels, “Trophies and Taxidermy,” in Landes, Lee, and Younquist, Gorgeous Beasts, 117–­36. 45. Dove to Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, Aug. 1921, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 75. Charles Van Wyck Brooks recalled the camping trip in Sensory Awareness: The Rediscovery of Experiencing (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 214. 46. Diary entry for Dec. 13, 1924, Dove Papers, 3:1:52. 47. Rosalind Krauss, “Stieglitz/Equivalents,” October 11 (Winter 1979): 140. 48. Hanneke Grootenboer, “Treasuring the Gaze: Eye Miniature Portraits and the Intimacy of Vision,” Art Bulletin 88/3 (Sept. 2006): 497. 49. See, for example, the following contributions to this literature, many of which have decisively shaped my understanding of Dove’s assemblages: Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas, TX: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture / The Pegasus Foundation, 1999); Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Bill Brown, ed., Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004); James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996); Josh Ellenbogen and Aaron Tugendhaft, eds., Idol Anxiety (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing?, trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967); Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–­56; Martin Heideg­ ger “The Thing,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins, 1971), 161–­84; Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of

Notes to Pages 200–205

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Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network-­Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Stephen Melville, ed. The Lure of the Object (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2005); Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Stafford, Visual Analogy; Barbara M. Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Peter-­Paul Verbeek, What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005; Amsterdam: Boom Publishers, 2000); Mariët Westermann, ed., Anthropologies of Art (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2005); Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Karen Lang, ed., “Notes from the Field: Materiality,” Art Bulletin 95/1 (Mar. 2013): 10–­37; and Matthew C. Hunter and Francesco Lucchini, eds., “The Clever Object,” special issue, Art History 36/3 ( June 2013). 50. Comte de Lautréamont, Lautrémont’s Maldoror, trans. Alexis Lykiard (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1972), 177; Aturo Schwarz, Man Ray: The Rigour of Imagination (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 233. Johanna Malt discusses stitching as a motif in Surrealism, and Bréton’s work in particular, in Obscure Objects of Desire: Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), ch. 5. See also Julia Kelly, Art, Ethnography and the Life of Objects, Paris, c. 1925–­35 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007), ch. 5; Renée Riese Hubert, Surrealism and the Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), ch. 6 (Salvador Dalí and sewing); W. Bowdoin Davis, Duchamp: Domestic Patterns, Covers, and Threads (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2002) (Duchamp and sewing); and Herbert Molderings, Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance: Art as Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), chs. 1–­3 (on 3 Standard Stoppages and Network of Stoppages). 51. Dove to Torr, Nov. 10, 1934, Dove Papers, 2:1:31. It may have been this fire that inspired Dove to later paint Fire in the Sauerkraut Factory (fig. 116). 52. Dove, undated handwritten essay, Dove Papers, 3:2:18. 53. Brooks, Sensory Awareness, 214. A photograph of Hollyhock appears on p. 215 of Brooks’s book. 54. Quoted in Hutchins Hapgood, “The Live Line,” Globe and Commercial Advertiser, Mar. 8, 1913, 1. 55. In Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2007), Tim Ingold offers what he calls “a comparative anthropology of the line.” The practice of creating lines, he writes, is ubiquitous in human history and activity and thus forms a connective tissue among diverse and disparate cultures, disciplines, actions, and media. This sense of suturing across entities, as well as Ingold’s characterization of a species of line as constituting a threading mechanism, presents a compelling parallel to my description of Dove’s practice. 56. For lists as collections, see Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists, trans. Alastair McEwen (New York: Rizzoli,

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Notes to Pages 206–214

2009), 165–­215. For further discussion of the nature and operations of lists, see Liza Kirwin, Lists: To-­Dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art (New York: Princeton Architectural Press; Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2010); Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris, “Part I: We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die” and “Part II: People Have Their Preferences” (interview with Umberto Eco), Spiegel Online, Nov. 11, 2009 , accessed Aug. 3, 2011, http://www.spiegel.de/international­/zeitgeist­ /0,1518,659577–­2,00.html. I thank Vittoria di Palma and Erika Naginski for aiding my thinking about Dove and lists. 57. Eco, The Infinity of Lists, 131. Other period instances of listing within artistic practice that bear a resemblance to Dove’s include Joseph Cornell’s dossiers, repositories of visual material organized by theme; Tristan Tzara’s 1934 “When Things Dream,” which includes a list of phrases—­ “things to touch, to eat, to crunch, to apply to the eye, to the skin,” and so forth—­in its discussion of Man Ray’s photograms; Arthur Wesley Dow’s teaching diagram, in which he surveys the possible outcomes of applying his “Principle of Fine Art”; Oscar Bluemner’s meticulously illustrated and annotated lists of completed paintings; and John Covert’s daybooks. Mileaf, Please Touch, 14, 169–­80; Kirwin, Lists, 54–­ 55, 88–­89; Leo G. Mazow, “John Covert, Tetraphilia, and the Language of Time,” Winterthur Portfolio 41/1 (Spring 2007): 21–­42; and Leo G. Mazow, John Covert Rediscovered (State College, PA: Palmer Museum of Art, 2003). 58. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Penguin, 2008), ch. 17. For listing and cataloguing in Ulysses, see Karen R. Lawrence, “Style and Narrative in the ‘Ithaca’ Chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses,” ELH 47/3 (Autumn 1980): 559–­74; and Andrew Gibson, “Introduction” and Fritz Senn, “ ‘Ithaca’: Portrait of the Chapter as a Long List,” both in Joyce’s “Ithaca,” ed. Gibson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 3–­27, 31–­76. For Stein and materiality, see Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), esp. ch. 4; and Peter Schwenger, “Words and the Murder of the Thing,” in Brown, Things, 135–­49. I would also suggest the poetry of William Carlos Williams, which was influenced by colloquial speech and sound, attended to local conditions and everyday life, and strove to recapitulate rather than simply evoke or allude to material reality, as a possible analog to or context for Dove’s listing as I characterize it. As an example, take the following lines from the poem “Tree” (1927), where description proceeds as a series of object-­like extractions from the material world, the effect underscored by Williams’s unconventional line breaks: “The tree is stiff, the branch / is arching, arching, arching / to the ground. Already its tip / reaches the hats of the passersby / children leap at it, hang on it—­/ bite on it. It is rotten, it / will be thick with blossoms in / the spring.” “The Great Figure” (1921), on which Charles Demuth based his 1928 portrait of Williams, I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, is also exemplary: “Among the rain / and lights / I saw the figure 5 / in gold / on a red / firetruck / moving / tense / unheeded / to gong clangs / siren howls / and wheels rumbling / through the dark city.” Williams of course famously declared in “Paterson” (1926) that there are “no ideas but in things.” The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol. 1, 1909–­1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christo-

pher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 263, 174. For Williams and objecthood, see Brown, A Sense of Things, 1–­19, 124–­26. 59. Mazow, “John Covert, Tetraphilia, and the Game of Time.” 60. For a discussion of Stein, repetition, materiality, and the objecthood of words that inspired my thinking here, see Ulla Haselstein, “Gertrude Stein and Seriality,” in Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture: A Companion to Modern United States Fiction, ed. David Seed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 229–­39, and Haselstein, “Tender Buttons: Stein et ses portraits des choses (1914),” in Carrefour Alfred Stieglitz, ed. Jay Bochner and Jean-­Pierre Montier (Rennes, Fr.: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012), 339–­48. 61. See, for example, Ann Blair, “Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53/4 (Oct.–­Dec. 1992): 541–­51; William Clark, “On the Ministerial Archive of Academic Acts,” Science in Context 9 (1996): 421–­86; Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–­1875 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Earle Havens, Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 2001); Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Anke te Heesen, “News, Paper, Scissors: Clippings in the Sciences and Arts around 1920,” in Daston, Things That Talk, 297–­327; Rachael Z. DeLue, review of The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Culture, ed. Barbara Larson and Fae Brauer (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press / University Press of New England, 2009), Darwins Korallen: die frühen Evolutionsdiagramme und die Tradition der Naturgeschichte, by Horst Bredekamp (Berlin: Wagenbach, 2005), Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science, and the Visual Arts, ed. Diana Donald and Jane Munro (Cambridge, UK: Fitzwilliam Museum; New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), and Darwin’s Pictures: Views of Evolutionary Theory, 1837–­1874, by Julia Voss (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), Art Bulletin 92/4 (Dec. 2010): 390; Anna Sigrídur Arnar, The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, the Artist’s Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Pamela H. Smith and Benjamin Schmidt, eds. Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400–­1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 62. Seitz, The Art of Assemblage, 25. 63. Leo Stein, The A-­B-­C of Aesthetics (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927), quoted in Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in Brown, Things, 4. 64. Heidegger, “The Thing,” 170, 171, 178. See also Hans-­ Georg Gadamer, “The Nature of Things and the Language of Things” (1960), in Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 69–­81. 65. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962); Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Appadurai, The Social Life of Things. See also Daniel Miller,

Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); Gell, Art and Agency; Fred R. Meyers, The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2001); Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); and Annette B. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping While Giving (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992). 66. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? Matters of Fact, Matters of Concern,” in Brown, Things, 151–­ 73; Bruno Latour, “On Technical Mediation—­Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy,” Common Knowledge 3/2 (Fall 1994): 29–­64; Bruno Latour, “Technology Is Society Made Durable,” trans. Gabrielle Hecht, in A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology, and Domination, ed. John Law (New York: Routledge, 1991), 117; Nigel Thrift, “Beyond Mediation: Three New Material Registers and Their Consequences,” in Miller, Materiality, 235, 236; John Frow, “A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole,” in Brown, Things, 353–­54, 357. For further discussion of things and the subject/object or animate/inanimate binary, see Jessica Riskin, “The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life,” and Jonathan Lamb, “Modern Metamorphoses and Disgraceful Tales,” both in Brown, Things, 99–­133, 193–­226; Brown, introduction to A Sense of Things, 1–­19; and Daniel Miller, “Materiality: An Introduction,” and Suzanne Küchler, “Materiality and Cognition: The Changing Face of Things,” both in Miller, Materiality, 1–­50, 206–­30. For relevant discussion of art objects and the fetish, see Brown, A Sense of Things, 185–­88; Laura Mulvey, “Some Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture,” October 65 (Summer 1993): 3–­20; William Pietz, “Fetishism,” in Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd ed., ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 306–­17; Emily Apter and William Pietz, eds., Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), chs. 4, 6, 8; and Jonathan Lamb, The Things Things Say (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). Also influential to my thinking about works of art as autonomous-­ seeming objects has been Victor Stoichita, The Self-­Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-­Painting, trans. Anne-­Marie Glasheen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 67. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?,” 167–­68; Miller, “Materiality: An Introduction,” 38; Brown, “Thing Theory,” 7; Yve-­Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Hubert Damisch, “A Conversation with Hubert ­Damisch,” October 85 (Summer 1998): 8; Hubert Damisch, The Judgment of Paris, trans. John Goodman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Ernst Van Alphen, Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), ch. 1; Daston, “Introduction: Speechless,” in Daston, Things That Talk, 12, 15, and passim; Joel Snyder, “Res Ipsa Loquitur,” and Peter Galison, “Image of Self,” both in Things That Talk, 195–­221, 257–­94; Matthew C. Hunter and Francesco Lucchini, “The Clever Object: Three Pavilions, Three Loggias, and a Planetarium,” Art History 36/3 ( June 2013): 475. Latour developed his actor-­ network theory in Science in Action, Pandora’s Hope, and We

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Have Never Been Modern and revisited it in Reassembling the Social, a critique of the methodologies of social science as well as a set of recommendations for proceeding with the study of society. In “Thing Theory,” his introduction to the essay collection of the same name, Brown provides a useful survey of various strands of thinking about things from the nineteenth century onward, Latour’s work included. Jennifer Jane Marshall’s Machine Art 1934 presents a model approach to the analysis of material and visual culture through the ideas of thing theory, and Jennifer Roberts’s Transporting Visions has been essential to my thinking about Dove and things, as well. 68. Kelly, “The Anthropology of Assemblage,” 30; Foster, Prosthetic Gods; Mileaf, Please Touch; Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” in The Originality of the Avant-­Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 87–­118; Amelia Jones, Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon, eds., The Duchamp Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Thierry De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); David Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp, 1910–­1941 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Jennifer Mundy, ed., Surrealism: Desire Unbound (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Amy Lyford, Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post–­World War I Reconstruction in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Leah Dickerman, Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005). 69. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 4, 7–­8, 23, 37, 71, 88–­91; Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme, ed. John Mullarkey and Michael Kolkman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 70. Dove to Stieglitz, prob. July 25, 1922, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 80. 71. Christopher Pinney, “Things Happen: or, From Which Moment Does That Object Come?” in Miller, Materiality, 258 and passim; Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 1–­34. Peter-­Paul Verbeek also directs attention away from human use by focusing on the “operativity” of objects, technology in particular, and their role as mediators within human existence; in suggesting what he terms a postphenomenological point of view, Verbeek replaces consideration of human perception and experience with an analysis of material relations that assumes humans and objects to be equally constitutive of “reality.” Verbeek, What Things Do, 8–­11, ch. 3. 72. Janine Mileaf’s discussion of gravity in relation to the work of Joseph Cornell has been particularly useful to my understanding of Dove’s “gravitation.” Mileaf, Please Touch, 164. 73. Diary entry for Apr. 24, 1929, Dove Papers, 3:2:3. 74. Dove, “Pencil Notes on a Boat,” in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 194–­95. Stieglitz believed that the conditions of the boat decisively shaped Dove’s work, as reported by Edward Alden Jewell in “Dove Again,” New York Times, Mar. 15, 1931, 12. 75. Diary entry for Apr. 25, 1929, Dove Papers, 3:2:3.

282

Notes to Pages 217–224

76. Dove would have agreed with Robert Rauschenberg who in 1961 insisted, “Paint is itself an object, and canvas also. In my opinion, the void which must be filled does not exist.” Rauschenberg, Arts, May 10, 1961, 18, quoted in Seitz, The Art of Assemblage, 25. 77. Douglas Kahn, “Concerning the Line: Music, Noise, and Phonography,” in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, ed. Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 178–­94. 78. Arthur Dove, undated typewritten essay [1928 or 1929], Dove Papers, 3:3:2. 79. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1934); Ezra Pound, “The Serious Artist” (New Freewoman, 1913), in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 41–­57; Ezra Pound, “Cavalcanti: Medievalism” (Dial, 1928), in Literary Essays, 149–­220. 80. Pound, ABC of Reading, 36, 37; Pound, “The Serious Artist,” 47–­48, 49, 50, 56. For an extended discussion of Pound and energy in writing, see Ian F. Bell, “The Real and the Ethereal: Modernist Energies in Eliot and Pound,” in Clarke and Henderson, From Energy to Information, 114–­25. For Pound and the New Freewoman, see Bruce Clarke, “Dora Marsden and Ezra Pound: ‘The New Freewoman’ and ‘The Serious Artist,’ ” Contemporary Literature 33/1 (Spring 1992): 91–­112. 81. Pound, “Cavalcanti: Medievalism,” 154. The phrase “mezzo oscuro rade” appears in Cavalcanti and translates as “in the midst of darkness [light] shines infrequently.” Peter Makin, Provence and Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 181. 82. Jeremy Munday, Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008), 167–­68; Lawrence Venuti, “American Tradition,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 2nd ed., ed. Mona Baker and Babriela Saldanha (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 324–­25. For Pound on translation, see Ezra Pound, “Guido’s Relations” (1929), in The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2004), 86–­93. 83. Pound, “Guido’s Relations,” 92; Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995), 34. Pound’s translation of The Seafarer dates to 1912. 84. Edward Alden Jewell, “Concerning Mr. Dove,” New York Times, Mar. 30, 1930, 12. 85. Robert Gober et al., Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum; Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2009), 140–­41. Karl Kusserow discusses another example of a work of art that takes as its subject telegraphy in “Technology and Ideology in Daniel Huntington’s Atlantic Cable Projectors,” American Art 24/1 (Spring 2010): 94–­113, and “Memory, Metaphor, and Meaning in Daniel Huntington’s Atlantic Cable Projectors,” Picturing Power: Portraiture and Its Uses in the New York Chamber of Commerce (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 319–­75. 86. Paul Dove, “Facts pertaining to the life of Arthur G. Dove,” Dove Papers, 1:1:1. For coronas and St. Elmo’s Fire, see, for example, Alexander McAdie, Man and Weather (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926); and Charles Fitzhugh Talman, The Realm of the Air: A Book about

Weather (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1931), 200–­209. For telegraphy and sound, see W. J. Humphreys, Weather Rambles (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1937), 39–­40, 47–­48; and Talman, The Realm of the Air, 206–­8. 87. Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, ed. Hilla Rebay, trans. Hilla Rebay and Howard Dearstyne (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1947; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1979), 101–­3. 88. Quoted in Hapgood, “The Live Line,” 7. 89. I discuss these associations in chapter 1. See also Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 36; and Alexander Nemerov, “Ground Swell: Edward Hopper in 1939,” American Art 22/3 (Fall 2008): 50–­71. 90. Diary entries for Nov. 1, 8, 1924, Dove Papers, 3:1:51. 91. For star charts, see also Ellison Hawks, The Boys’ Book of Astronomy (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1914). For photographic illustrations, see also George F. Chambers, Astronomy (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1913); Edmund W. Price, The Essence of Astronomy: Things Everyone Should Know about the Sun, Moon, and Stars (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1914); Harold Jacoby, Astronomy: A Popular Handbook (New York: Macmillan, 1915); and David Peck Todd, Astronomy: The Science of the Heavenly Bodies (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1922). For photography and astronomy, see Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), ch. 5. 92. Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, 38–­39, figs. 5 and 6. 93. Starry Heavens was itself not exhibited publicly until 1955. Morgan, Arthur Dove, 135. 94. “News and Notes of the Art World,” New York Times, Mar. 3, 1912, 15. 95. For an extensive bibliography of period writing on Dove, including exhibition reviews, see Morgan, Arthur Dove, 320–­25, 360–­63. Some critics poked fun at Dove, especially early on. In 1912, in response to the Chicago exhibition of “The Ten Commandments,” the Chicago Daily Tribune columnist Bert Leston Taylor penned a series of teasing poems that included the lines “I cannot tell you how I love / the canvases of Mr. Dove / Which Saturday I went to see / In Mr. Thurber’s gallery”; “This thing, which you would almost bet / Portrays a Spanish omelette / Depicts instead, with wondrous skill / A horse and cart upon a hill”; “But Mr. Dove is much too keen / To let a single bird be seen / To show the pigeons would not do / And so he simply paints the coo”; and “Dove is the cleverest of chaps / And, gazing at his rhythmic maps / I wondered (and I’m wondering yet) / Whether he did them on a bet.” And three years later: “Arthur Dove is raising chickens / He has put his paints away / Tell me, Chronos, where the dickens / Are the Cubes of Yesterday?” B.L.T. [Bert Leston Taylor], “A Line-­O’-­Type or Two: Lines Written after Viewing Mr. Arthur Dove’s Exposition of the ‘Simultaneousness of the Ambient,’” Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar. 25, 1912, 10; B.L.T., “A Line-­O’-­Type or Two: The Brooding Dove,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar. 24, 1915, 6. Other writers had nothing but praise for his work including, of course Stieglitz, Phillips, and Rosenfeld, especially beginning in the twenties. More typical of criticism throughout Dove’s career was the combination of excitement and perplexity expressed by a critic who wrote in response to “The

Ten Commandments” that Dove “is another of the young American artists who have seen a new and strange light, and have come out with something absolutely original and quite incomprehensible. But whether Mr. Dove is comprehensible or not, there is an extraordinary fascination about some of these decorative squares which he calls paintings.” Similarly: “We are not liberated enough for more than a smile for the watch springs, saws, files and other media that Arthur Dove utilizes for his compositions, but we can stand all day in awe before his storm clouds and abstractions.” Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, “Pattern-­Paintings by A. G. Dove,” Evening Mail, Mar. 2, 1912, 8; “Art,” New Yorker, Mar. 28, 1925, 17. 96. Dove to Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, May 3, 1941, Aug. 23, 1928, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 457, 152–­53; Dove to Duncan Phillips, after Dec. 19, 1927, in Elizabeth Hutton Turner and Leigh Bullard Weisblat, eds., “Selected Correspondence,” in In the American Grain: Dove, Hartley, Marin, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner (Washington, DC: The Phillips Collection, 1995), 148. For similar remarks on Dove’s part, see Dove to Stieglitz, 1929, July 5, 1931, Mar. 10, 1942, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 163, 227, 464; and Dove to Duncan Phillips, after Dec. 12, 1927, in Turner and Weisblat, “Selected Correspondence,” 147. 97. Dove to Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, Mar. 31 / Apr. 3, 1929, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 168–­69. The bracketed titles were inserted by Morgan. For a valuable analysis of Stieglitz’s gallery space, see Kristina Wilson, “The Intimate Gallery and the Cosmos,” ch. 2 in The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition, 1925–­1934 (New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, 2009). One gleans from Dove’s correspondence and diaries that O’Keeffe often had a hand in installing Dove’s shows, and she was fully responsible for the selection and layout of his 1945 exhibition. Maude Riley, “Latest Doves Make Strong Impression,” Art Digest, June 1, 1945, 14. 98. Dove to Stieglitz, Dec. 3, 1937, Feb. 22/26, 1938, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 392, 396. In 1937 Dove wrote to Elmira Bier, assistant to Duncan Phillips, with whom he and Torr had become friendly, saying that he hoped “the feeling of space” provided by his quarters in the Dove Block “will creep into the coming paintings.” Dove to Elmira Bier, 1937, Dove Letters, Library and Archives, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. 99. Dove to Duncan Phillips, Apr. 14, 1943, and Dove to Elmira Bier, n.d., Dove Letters, Library and Archives of the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. 100. Diary entries for Aug. 5, 20, 1942, Dove Papers, 3:2:13. 101. Dove to Stieglitz, Dec. 3, 1937, Aug. 9, 1931, early 1929, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 392, 227–­28, 163. See also Dove to Stieglitz, Mar. 25, 1938, in ibid., 399. 102. Mark Guthrie, “Time Frame” (interview with Suzanne Smeaton), Picture Framing Magazine, Jan. 2003, 135; Suzanne Smeaton, “Modernist Frames: A Unique and Divergent Chapter in American Frame Design,” Picture Framing Magazine, May 1994, 11. An unpublished conservation report prepared by the Art Institute of Chicago describes the copper strip frame as original, but not the wood frame that surrounds it. The current frames of Clouds and I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, are reproductions of Dove’s originals. I am grateful to both

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institutions for facilitating access to this information. K. Lister, incoming examination report, object file, Art Institute of Chicago; Conservation report, object file, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Mentions of Dove “silvering” or coating his frames appear throughout the diaries; see, for example, Feb. 23, 24, 28, Mar. 3–­5, 8–­12, 1935, Dove Papers, 3:2:8. Dove described making panels for painting out of grocery crates in a 1922 letter to Stieglitz, and William Dove reported that Dove dedicated a good deal of time in the 1920s and 1930s to learning to silver frames correctly, and he also reported that his father described himself as a frame maker in the marriage registry when he and Torr were wed. Dove to Stieglitz, prob. July 25, 1922, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 80; Anne Cohen DePietro interview with William Dove, in Arthur Dove and Helen Torr, 65, 67. Alfie’s Delight is in the collection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University. 103. Arthur Dove, “Addenda,” in “Arthur G. Dove: New Paintings (1931–­1932)” (New York: An American Place, Mar. 14–­Apr. 9, 1932), 2. 104. Jonathan Lamb’s discussion of the manner in which things sidestep language, in particular his consideration of Hobbes and representation as a strategic diversion from things, helped shape my ideas in this section. Lamb, prologue to The Things Things Say, xi–­xxix. 105. “Arthur Dove: Intimate Gallery,” Art News, Jan. 16, 1926, 7; “Exhibitions Presented by Stieglitz, 1905–­1946,” in Greenough, Modern Art and America, 548. 106. John Bender and Michael Marrinan, The Culture of Diagram (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 7. 107. Paul Rosenfeld, “Arthur G. Dove,” in Port of New York: Essays on Fourteen American Moderns (1924; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 170, 171. 108. Dogs Chasing Each Other is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago; Goat is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Blackbird is in the collection of the Thyssen-­Bornemisza Collection, Madrid. 109. Morgan has described the creatures as monsters, noting a possible link to Surrealism, especially to the work of Joan Miró or Jean (Hans) Arp. Morgan, Arthur Dove: Life and Work, 72n68. 110. Ann H. Sayre, “New Exhibitions of the Week: Arthur G. Dove Seeks Cosmic Rhythms,” Art News, May 9, 1936, 8. Green, Black, and White is in a private collection. 111. Innis Howe Shoemaker, Adventures in Modern Art: The Charles K. Williams II Collection (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009), 137. 112. Something in Brown, Carmine, and Blue is in the collection of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. 113. Rosenfeld, “Arthur G. Dove,” 168, 169, 171, 172. 114. From Cows is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. 115. See, for example, Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, ch. 10; Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); Alex Potts, “Natural Order and the Call of the Wild: The Politics of Animal Picturing,” Oxford Art Journal 13/1 (1990): 12–­33; Nato Thompson, ed., Becoming Animal: Contemporary Art in the Animal Kingdom (North Adams, MA:

284

Notes to Pages 232–241

MASS MoCA, 2005); Louise Lippincott and Andreas Blühm, Fierce Friends: Artists and Animals, 1750–­1900 (London: Merrell; Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum; Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 2005); Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, ed., Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Richard Nash and Ron Broglio, eds., “Thinking with Animals,” special issue, Configurations 14/1–­2 (Winter–­Spring 2006); Martin Kemp, The Human Animal in Western Art and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Critical Inquiry 28/2 (Winter 2002), 369–­418; Donald and Munro, Endless Forms; Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Eric L. Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); and essays by J. M. Bern­ stein, Carolyn Dean, and Dario Gamboni in “Notes from the Field: Anthropomorphism,” ed. Karen Lang, Art Bulletin 94 (Mar. 2012): 13–­15, 15–­16, 20–­22. The Bernstein, Dean, and Gamboni essays are useful for underscoring the distinction between anthropomorphism and Dove’s practice, which, rather than involving a projection of human qualities onto the nonhuman (animal, thing, or nature), entails a transfer or exchange of properties among entities and, importantly, a de-­centering of the human. The Derrida text, one portion of a much longer address presented at Cerisy-­la-­Salle in 1997, is a foundational one within animal studies; it pivots on a hypothetical encounter between a (nude) human and an animal—­“an animal looks at me” (374)—­and addresses the question of the distinction between the human and the animal and the complexity of maintaining any such distinction given the slippery multiplicity of the animal as a being and a category. Derrida’s Cerisy remarks appear in their entirety in Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-­Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Although its focus is neither the American context nor the question of the animal, Devin Fore’s Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), deserves mention here for its relevant consideration of techniques of anthropomorphism and the recalibrating of models of human subjectivity in literature and the arts in Germany in the interwar period. 116. Dove to Stieglitz, Jan. 18, 1937, Mar. 7, 1938, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 365, 397; Catalogue of Hobart College, Geneva, New York, 1922–­1923, Hobart College Bulletins 21/2 (Geneva, NY: Hobart College, Jan. 1923), 12. Dove configures another such merger in Snowstorm (1935), in this case between an animal and a machine. He noted in a 1935 letter to Elizabeth McCausland that the chief motif in the painting represents his and Torr’s dog, John, running ahead of their car, a 1930 Ford Sport Coupe, on a road near their home. In a previous letter, Dove had described the dog’s speed as he raced ahead, estimating that he moved at around twenty-­five miles per hour. In Snowstorm, the motif to which Dove referred suggests both the unruly hair and warm flesh of an animal and the crisply metallic parts of an automobile, with all components—­animal and machine—­in exuberant motion. Dove to Elizabeth McCausland, Dec. 12,

1934, Dec. 28, 1934, Apr. 17, 1935, Elizabeth McCausland Papers, 2:5:12. 117. Dove to Stieglitz, mid-­June 1940 and late Mar. 1941, in Morgan, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, 445, 452. 118. Constance Areson Clark, God—­or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1–­4, ch. 8. Dorothy Rylander Johnson mentions in passing a possible connection between Monkey Fur and the Scopes trial in Arthur Dove: The Years of Collage (43). One might want to compare Monkey Fur to Francis Picabia’s Still Lifes: Portrait of Rembrandt, Portrait of Cézanne, Portrait of Renoir (1920), which features a monkey pinned to a paperboard support surrounded by handwritten text, but the spirit of the two works is decidedly different, and no discernible historical connection exists between the two. Sara Ganz Blythe and Edward D. Powers, Looking at Dada (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 23. For Darwin and the arts, see Linda Nochlin and Martha Lucy, eds., “The Darwin Effect: Evolution and Nineteenth-­Century Visual Culture,” special issue, Nineteenth-­Century Art Worldwide, 2/2 (Spring 2003), www.19thc-­artworldwide.org; Horst Bredekamp, Darwins Korallen: Frühe Evolutionsmodelle und die Tradition der Naturgeschichte (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2005); Donald and Munro, ed., Endless Forms; Barbara Larson and Fae Brauer, eds., The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Culture (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2009); Julia Voss, Darwin’s Pictures: Views of Evolutionary Theory, 1837–­1874, trans. Lori Lantz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Phillip Prodger, An Annotated Catalogue of the Illustrations of Human and Animal Expression from the Collection of Charles Darwin: An Early Case of the Use of Photography in Scientific Research (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1998); Phillip Prodger, Darwin’s Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and DeLue, review essay of Larson and Brauer, Bredekamp, Donald and Munro, and Voss (see above), Art Bulletin 92/4 (December 2010): 386–­91. 119. Brown, A Sense of Things, ch. 3. 120. Stephen Christopher Quinn, Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural ­History (New York: Abrams / American Museum of Natural History, 2006), 8–­23; Douglas J. Preston, Dinosaurs in the Attic: An Excursion into the American Museum of Natural History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986); Hugh Davies, Toby Kamps, and Ralph Rugoff, Small World: Dioramas in Contemporary Art (San Diego, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000); Rachael Z. DeLue, “Art and Science in America,” American Art 23/2 (Summer 2009): 2–­9; and Melissa Milgrom, Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 68–­89. 121. Stewart, “Death and Life.” In this way, Dove’s attempted reformulation of relationality as mapped out in his paintings, sketches, and assemblages—­especially his privileging of the inanimate as a model for the animate and sentient world—­might be described as quite unlike other contemporaneous attempts to animate paintings, including attempts to make works of art embody the capacities of a human being, including the efforts of Arthur B. Davies to make his paintings breathe as described recently by Robin Veder. Robin Veder, “Arthur B. Davies’ Inhalation Theory of Art,” American Art 23/1 (Spring 2009): 56–­77.

122. Arthur Dove to Duncan Phillips, prob. May 16–­18, 1933, in Turner and Weisblat, “Selected Correspondence,” 151. Spyros Papapetros maps this broader context of thinking about animation, animism, and empathy in On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), characterizing the late nineteenth century as deeply and fondly concerned with a blurring subject-­object divide and the early twentieth as increasingly worried about object animation as a potential form of nefarious agency. See also Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, introduction to Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–­1893, ed. and trans. Mallgrave and Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 1–­85. 123. Mark A. Meadow, “Quiccheberg and the Copious Object: Wenzel Jamnitzer’s Silver Writing Box,” in Melville, The Lure of the Object, 39–­58; Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995); Katie Whitaker, “The Culture of Curiosity,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 75–­90. 124. Daston, “The Glass Flowers,” in Daston, Things That Talk, 228–­31. 125. Dove to Elizabeth McCausland, Aug. 11, 1933, Elizabeth McCausland Papers, 2:5:11. See also the headline clipped from a newspaper inserted by Dove into a letter to McCausland; the headline reads “2 Convicts Shot 5 Fleas,” which Dove annotated with the words “Cat & Dog News” and “Extra.” Dove to Elizabeth McCausland, Jan. 1934, Elizabeth McCausland Papers, 2:5:11. 126. There Was a Cat Somewhere is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Face on a Bank is in the collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, in Fort Worth, Texas. 127. Diary entry for Jan. 30, 1926, Dove Papers, 3:1:54. 128. Lewis Mumford, “The Art Galleries: Surprise Party—­Wit and Watercolors,” New Yorker, May 5, 1934, 56; Lewis Mumford, “The Art Galleries: The Independent Show,” New Yorker 12, May 2, 1936, 59. One of Thurber’s more well-­known cartoons, which depicts the profile of a three-­ story home morphing into the angry visage of woman who looks with scorn at a diminutive male figure, presumably her husband, as he approaches the front steps, puts one in mind of the abstract shapes that transmute into creaturely profiles in Dove’s Lake Afternoon. A 1935 essay on fantasy in art by E. M. Benson reprinted the Thurber cartoon on the page immediately preceding an illustration of one of Dove’s assemblages, Miss Woolworth (1924). E. M. Benson, “Forms of Art III: Phases of Fantasy,” American Magazine of Art, May 1935, 297, 298. 129. Hound is in a private collection. 130. Elizabeth McCausland, “Dove’s Oils, Water Colors Now at An American Place,” Springfield Sunday Union and Republican, Apr. 22, 1934, 6E; Elizabeth McCausland, “Authentic American Is Arthur Dove,” Springfield Sunday Union and Republican, May 5, 1935, 6E; Edward Alden Jewell, “In the Realm of Art: An April Shower of Exhibitions; Off the ‘Literal’ Trail,” New York Times, Apr. 6, 1941, 9. 131. Brennan, Painting Gender, Constructing Theory, ch.

Notes to Pages 241–246

285

3; Paul Lewis, Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989), ch. 2; Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, eds., A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1997); Ted Cohen, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Leonard Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2003), chs. 3–­4. 132. Martha Ward, “Art in the Age of Visual Culture: France in the 1930s,” in Melville, The Lure of the Object, 86–­100. 133. Arthur Dove to Helen Torr, Oct. 2, 1936 (postmarked), Dove Papers, 2:1:37. The feathers are included with the letter in the Archives of American Art. 134. For a relevant discussion of animals as generative of alternate models of relationality or temporality, see Ajay Sinha’s contribution to the “Notes from the Field: Time,” ed., Karen Lang, Art Bulletin 95/3 (Sept. 2013): 371–­75. 135. Quoted by Lee Krasner, Oral history interview with Lee Krasner, 1964 Nov. 2–­1968 Apr. 11, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Session One, Nov. 2, 1964; Tina Dickey and Helmut Friedel, Hans Hofmann (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1998), 82; Gene R. Swenson, “What Is Pop Art? Answers from Eight Painters, Part I: Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol,” Art News, Nov. 1963, 26. According to Krasner, Pollock’s statement was prompted by a question from Hans Hofmann, who asked Pollock whether he worked from nature. Warhol declared his interest in being a machine as a way of explaining his overall motivation as a painter and, more generally, his sense of the state of painting in the postwar period. 136. Helen Molesworth’s exhibition Part Object, Part Sculpture offered an incisive dismantling of analogous interpretive categories in the postwar period, one that has shaped my thinking about Dove. Helen Molesworth, Part Object, Part Sculpture (Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts / Ohio State University; University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005). See also Kate Nesin, Cy Twombly’s Things (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), for a relevant reconsideration of postwar sculpture and, in particular, questions of medium, intermedia, and materiality. Jo Applin, Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), characterizes the revision of the fundamental precepts of sculpture that occurred in the 1960s with artists like Lee Bontecou, Claes Oldenburg, and H. C. Westermann. Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, chs. 5–­9, offers a thorough account of the questions and problems that drove sculptural practice and theory during the postwar period. 137. Red Barge was acquired by Duncan Phillips in 1933, and Phillips purchased Sand Barge in 1931. Both works are in The Phillips Collection.

Epilogue 1. Martha Candler Cheney to Dove, Jan. 8, 1938, Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2:1:9 (hereafter cited as Dove Papers). 2. “Arthur Dove and Helen Torr: An American Place,” Art News, Mar. 25, 1933, 5.

286

Notes to Pages 247–254

3. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1984), 93. My thanks go to the unidentified audience member who drew my attention to this passage on the occasion of my lecture, “Arthur Dove Paints the Weather,” at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, April 14, 2010. 4. Arthur Dove, unpublished note, quoted in Frederick S. Wight, Arthur G. Dove (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), 58. 5. Arthur Dove, undated typewritten essay, Dove Papers, 3:3:3. 6. For a recent exception to this rule, and for an interpretation of O’Keeffe that resonates with my own claims about Dove and communication (and that also considers technologies such as flight and telephony), see Alexander Nemerov, “The Madness of Art: Georgia O’Keeffe and Virginia Woolf,” Art History 34/4 (Sept. 2011): 818–­37. See also Kathleen Pyne’s Modernism and the Feminine Voice: O’Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), which brings to light the broader artistic context of Stieglitz’s promotion of O’Keeffe; DeLue, “Against the Circle,” in Inventing Abstraction, 1910–­1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, ed. Leah Dickerman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 188–­90; and Alan Braddock’s unpublished manuscript “Gun Vision: The Ballistic Imagination in American Art,” which includes a chapter on O’Keeffe and the First World War. 7. Paul Rosenfeld, Port of New York: Essays on Fourteen American Moderns (1924; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 201, 202, 203.

Selected Bibliography

Archival Collections Arthur and Helen Torr Dove Papers, 1905–­1974. Archives of American Art, Smith­ sonian Institution, Washington, DC. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. Elizabeth McCausland Papers, 1838–­1965, bulk 1920–­1960. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Geneva Historical Society, Geneva, NY. Graphic Arts Collection, Firestone Library, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. Heckscher Museum Permanent Collection and Newsday Center for Dove/Torr Studies, Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY. New York Public Library, New York, NY. The Phillips Collection, Library and Archives, Washington, DC. Suzanne Mullett Smith Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Selected Exhibition Catalogs and Brochures (in Chronological Order) Catalogue des ouvrages. Paris: Grand Palais des Champs-­Elysées / Société du Salon d’automne / Librarie Administrative Paul Dupont, Oct. 1–­Nov. 8, 1908. Catalogue des ouvrages. Paris: Grand Palais des Champs-­Elysées / Société du Salon d’automne / Société Anonyme d l’Imprimerie Kugelmann, Oct. 1–­Nov. 8, 1909. Arthur G. Dove. Geneva, NY: Hobart College, Oct. 7–­9, 1909. Exhibition: Contemporary Art. New York: National Arts Club, Feb. 5–­Mar. 7, 1914. The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters. New York: The Anderson Galleries, Mar. 13–­25, 1916. Catalogue of the First Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. New York: The Society / William Edwin Rudge, Apr. 10–­May 6, 1917. Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans. New York: The Anderson Galleries, Mar. 9–­28, 1925.

287

Exhibition of Paintings by Eleven Americans. Washington, DC: Phillips Memorial Gallery, Feb. 1–­28, 1926. Dreier, Katherine S. International Exhibition of Modern Art, Assembled by the Société Anonyme. New York: Société ­Anonyme / Brooklyn Museum, Nov. 19, 1926–­Jan. 1, 1927. Arthur G. Dove: Paintings, 1927. New York: The Intimate Gallery, Dec. 12, 1927–­Jan. 11, 1928. Dove Exhibition: List of Paintings and Some Notes by Arthur G. Dove. New York: The Intimate Gallery, Apr. 9–­28, 1929. Arthur G. Dove: 27 New Paintings. New York: An American Place, Mar. 22–­Apr. 22, 1930. First Exhibitions. Washington, DC: Phillips Memorial Gallery, Oct. 5, 1930–­Jan. 25, 1931. Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans. New York: Museum of Modern Art, Dec. 2, 1930–­Jan. 20, 1931. Second Exhibitions. Washington, DC: Phillips Memorial Gallery, Feb.–­June 1931. Arthur G. Dove: 27 New Paintings, Abstractions, Landscapes & Etc. & Etc. & Etc. New York: An American Place, Mar. 9–­Apr. 4, 1931. Phillips Memorial Gallery: Exhibitions. Washington, DC: Phillips Memorial Gallery, Feb.–­June 1932. Arthur G. Dove: New Paintings (1931–­1932). New York: An American Place, Mar. 14–­Apr. 9, 1932. First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, Nov. 22, 1932–­Jan. 5, 1933. Arthur G. Dove: New and Old Paintings, 1912–­1934. New York: An American Place, Apr. 17–­June 1, 1934. Harshe, Robert B. A Century of Progress: Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture. Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago, June 1–­Nov. 1, 1934. Second Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, Nov. 27, 1934–­Jan. 10, 1935. Abstract Painting in America. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, Feb. 12–­Mar. 22, 1935. Arthur G. Dove: Exhibition of Paintings (1934–­1935). New York: An American Place, Apr. 21–­May 22, 1935. New Paintings by Arthur Dove. New York: An American Place, Apr. 20–­May 20, 1936. Third Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, Nov. 10–­ Dec. 10, 1936. Barr, Alfred H. Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. New York: ­Museum of Modern Art, Dec. 7, 1936–­Jan. 17, 1937. Arthur G. Dove: New Oils and Water Colors. New York: An American Place, Mar. 23–­Apr. 16, 1937. Retrospective Exhibition of Works in Various Media by Arthur G. Dove. Washington, DC: Phillips Memorial Gallery, Mar. 23–­Apr. 18, 1937. Arthur G. Dove, Exhibition of Recent Paintings, 1938. New York: An American Place, Mar. 29–­May 10, 1938. Trois Siècles d’Art aux États-­Unis. New York: Museum of Modern Art; Paris: Musée du Jeu de Paume, May 24–­July 31, 1938. Arthur G. Dove: Exhibition of Oils and Temperas. New York: An American Place, Apr. 10–­May 17, 1939. Arthur G. Dove: Exhibition of New Oils and Water-­Colors. New York: An American Place, Mar. 30–­May 14, 1940.

288

Selected Bibliography

Exhibition of New Arthur G. Dove Paintings. New York: An American Place, Mar. 27–­May 17, 1941. Arthur G. Dove: Exhibition of Recent Paintings (1941–­1942). New York: An American Place, Apr. 14–­May 27, 1942. Arthur G. Dove: Paintings, 1942–­1943. New York: An American Place, Feb. 11–­Mar. 17, 1943. Arthur G. Dove: Paintings, 1944. New York: An American Place, Mar. 21–­May 21, 1944. Advance Trends in Contemporary American Art. Detroit, MI: Detroit Institute of Arts, Apr. 4–­30, 1944. Arthur G. Dove: Paintings, 1922–­1944. New York: An American Place, May 3–­June 15, 1945. Recent Paintings (1946): Arthur Dove. New York: An American Place, May 4–­June 4, 1946.

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Chamberlin, Joseph E. “Pattern-­Paintings by A. G. Dove.” Evening Mail, Mar. 2, 1912, 8. Chambers, George F. Astronomy. New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1913. Cheney, Martha Candler. Modern Art in America. New York: Whittlesey House and McGraw-­Hill, 1939. Cheney, Sheldon. A Primer of Modern Art. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924. Cook, Charles Emerson. “Pictures by Telegraph.” Pearson’s Magazine, Apr. 1900, 345–­48. de Zayas, Marius. “Caricature: Absolute and Relative.” Camera Work 46 (Apr. 1914): 19–­21. ———. How, When, and Why Modern Art Came to New York. Edited by Francis M. Naumann. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Doerner, Max. The Materials of the Artist and Their Use in Painting, with Notes on the Techniques of the Old Masters. Translated by Eugen Neuhaus. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934. Originally published in German as Malmaterial und seine Verwendung im Bilde (Munich: F. Schmidt, 1921). Dove, Arthur. “A Different One.” In America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait, edited by Waldo Frank, Lewis Mumford, Dorothy Norman, Paul Rosenfeld, and Harold Rugg, 243. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1934. ———. “An Idea.” In Arthur G. Dove: Paintings, 1927, n.p. New York: The Intimate Gallery, Dec. 12, 1927–­Jan. 11, 1928. ———. “Some Notes by Arthur Dove.” In Dove Exhibition: List of Paintings and Some Notes by Arthur G. Dove, n.p. New York: The Intimate Gallery, Apr. 9–­28, 1929. ———. “291.” Camera Work 47 ( July 1914): 37. ———. “A Way to Look at Things.” In Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans, 4. New York: The Anderson Galleries, Mar. 9–­28, 1925. ———. “What Does Photography Mean to Me?” MSS, December 1922, 9. Dunwoody, H. H. C. Weather Proverbs. Signal Service Notes, no. 9. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883. Eastman, Max. “The Tendency toward Pure Poetry.” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, July 1929, 222–­30. Eddy, Arthur Jerome. Cubists and Post-­Impressionism. Chicago: McClurg, 1914. Frank, Waldo. “The Art of Arthur Dove.” New Republic, Jan. 27, 1926, 269–­70. ———. In the American Jungle. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937. Frank, Waldo, Lewis Mumford, Dorothy Norman, Paul Rosenfeld, and Harold Rugg, eds. America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1934. Grafly, Charles. “Art and Artists Pass in Review.” Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 17, 1915, 8. Graham, Andrew J. Handbook of Standard or American Phonography. Rev. ed. New York: Andrew J. Graham, 1894. First published in 1858. Gregg, John Robert. Gregg Shorthand: Light-­Line Phonography for the Million. Anniv. ed. New York: Gregg, 1929. Hapgood, Hutchins. “The Live Line.” Globe and Commercial Advertiser, Mar. 8, 1913, 1. ———. “The Trend of the Time.” Globe and Commercial Advertiser, Mar. 12, 1912, 4.

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“Local News.” New York Evening Post, Jan. 19, 1942, 3. Longstreth, T. Morris. Reading the Weather. New York: Macmillan, 1920. Luckiesh, M. The Book of the Sky: A Résumé of Personal Experience and Observation. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1922. Lyman, Robert Hunt, ed. The World Almanac and Book of Facts for 1924. New York: New York World, 1924. Martin, Edwin C. Our Own Weather: A Simple Account of Its Curious Forms, Its Wide Travels, and Its Notable Effects. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1913. Mayer, Ralph. The Artists Handbook of Materials and Techniques. New York: Viking, 1940. McAdie, Alexander. Man and Weather. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926. McBride, James. Symmes’ Theory of Concentric Spheres. Cincinnati, OH: Morgan, Lodge & Fisher, 1826. McCausland, Elizabeth. “Arthur G. Dove’s Showing of Oils and Water Colors.” Springfield Daily Republican, Mar. 28, 1937, 6E. ———. “Authentic American Is Arthur Dove.” Springfield Sunday Union and Republican, May 5, 1935, 6E. ———. “Dove: Man and Painter.” Parnassus 9/7 (Dec. 1937): 3–­6. ———. “Dove Retrospective at An American Place.” Springfield Sunday Union and Republican, Apr. 2, 1939, 6E. ———. “Dove’s Oils, Water Colors Now at An American Place.” Springfield Sunday Union and Republican, Apr. 22, 1934, 6E. Moore, Willis Luther. Descriptive Meteorology. New York: D. Appleton, 1910. ———. Moore’s Meteorological Almanac and Weather Guide, 1901. Chicago: Rand, McNally, 1900. Mumford, Lewis. “The Art Galleries: Surprise Party—­Wit and Watercolors.” New Yorker, May 5, 1934, 56–­58. ———. “The Art Galleries: The Independent Show.” New Yorker, May 2, 1936, 59–­61. “New Method of Transmitting Pictures by Telegraph.” San Francisco Call, July 31, 1898, 25. “News and Notes of the Art World.” New York Times, Mar. 3, 1912, 15. “New York by Cubist Is Very Confusing.” New York Sun, Mar. 18, 1913, 9. Ostwald, Wilhelm. Letters to a Painter on the Theory and Practice of Painting. Boston: Ginn, 1907. Pemberton, Murdock. “The Art Galleries.” New Yorker, Dec. 24, 1927, 57–­58. ———. “The Art Galleries.” New Yorker, Apr. 20, 1929, 106–­10. ———. “The Art Galleries.” New Yorker, Apr. 5, 1930, 93–­94. Pitman, Sir Isaac. A Manual of Phonography, or, Writing by Sound. London: S. Bagster and Sons, 1845. Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and Related Tales. Edited by J. Gerald Kennedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1934. ———. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Edited by T. S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1954. Price, Edmund W. The Essence of Astronomy: Things Everyone Should Know about the Sun, Moon, and Stars. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1914.

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Richardson, Lewis Fry. Weather Prediction by Numerical Process. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922. Riley, Maude. “Latest Doves Make Strong Impression.” Art Digest, June 1, 1945, 14. Rosenfeld, Paul. By Way of Art. New York: Coward McCann, 1928. ———. Port of New York: Essays on Fourteen American Moderns. 1924. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961. ———. “The World of Arthur Dove.” Creative Art 10/6 ( June 1932): 426–­30. Rosenfeld, Paul [Peter Minuit, pseud.]. “291 Fifth Avenue.” Seven Arts, Nov. 1916, 61–­65. Rosten, Leo [Leonard Q. Ross]. The Education of H * Y * M * A * N  K * A * P * L * A * N. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1937. Rotch, A. Lawrence. Sounding the Ocean of Air. New York: E. and J. B. Young, 1900. Sayre, Anne H. “New Exhibitions of the Week: Arthur G. Dove Seeks Cosmic Rhythms.” Art News, May 9, 1936, 8. Seaborn, Adam [ John Cleves Symmes Jr.]. Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery. 1820. Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1965. Seligmann, Herbert J. Alfred Stieglitz Talking: Notes on Some of His Conversations, 1925–­1931. New Haven, CT: Yale University Library, 1966. Stein, Gertrude. “Composition as Explanation.” Dial, Oct. 1926, 327–­36. ———. “A Long Gay Book.” Dial, Sept. 1927, 231–­36. ———. The Making of Americans: The Hersland Family. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934. ———. Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997. Stein, Leo. The A-­B-­C of Aesthetics. New York: Boni & Live­ right, 1927. Stieglitz, Alfred. “How I Came to Photograph Clouds.” Amateur Photographer and Photography 56/1819 (1923): 255. ———. “The Origin of the Photo-­Secession and How It Became 291.” Twice-­A-­Year 8–­9 (Spring/Summer, Fall/ Winter, 1942): 114–­27. Strand, Paul. “Alfred Stieglitz and a Machine” MSS, Mar. 1922, 6–­7. First published privately in Feb. 1921 in New York. ———. “Photography.” Camera Work 49/50 ( June 1917): 3–­4. Talman, Charles Fitzhugh. The Realm of the Air: A Book about Weather. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1931. Taylor, Bert Leston. “A Line O’ Type or Two.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar. 21, 1920, 8. ———. “A Line-­O’-­Type or Two: Lines Written after Viewing Mr. Arthur Dove’s Exposition of the ‘Simultaneousness of the Ambient.’ ” Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar. 25, 1912, 10. ———. “A Line-­O’-­Type or Two: Post-­Impressionism.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov. 5, 1912, 6. ———. “A Line-­O’-­Type or Two: The Brooding Dove.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar. 24, 1915, 6. Taylor, Frederick Winslow. The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1913. Originally published in 1911. “Theosophy School.” Theosophy 14/12 (Oct. 1926): 562–­63. Toch, Maximilian. Materials for Permanent Painting. New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1911.

Todd, David Peck. Astronomy: The Science of the Heavenly Bodies. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1922. Verne, Jules. Journey to the Centre of the Earth. 1864. Translated by Frank Wynne. Edited by Peter Cogman. London: Penguin Books, 2009. Warren, Richard F. Reading the Weather. New York: Macmillan, 1920. Weber, Max. “The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View.” Camera Work 31 ( July 1910): 25. Webster, H. Effa. “Artist Paints Rhythms of Color: Works Are Most Strange and Confusing; Need No Titles.” Chicago Examiner, Mar. 15, 1912, 5. Whatham, Richard. Meteorology for Aviator and Layman. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1930. “Which Animals Resemble One Another Most? Rabbit and Duck.” Harper’s Weekly, Nov. 19, 1892, 1114. Williams, William Carlos. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. Vol. 1, 1909–­1939. Edited by A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1986. Wilson, Edmund. “Opéra Comique.” New Republic, Jan. 20, 1926, 240–­41. Wright, Willard Huntington. “The Forum Exhibition.” Forum, Apr. 1916, 457–­71. ———. Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning. New York: John Lane, 1915. Wright, Willard Huntington [S. S. Van Dine, pseud.]. The Bishop Murder Case. Middlesex, UK: Echo Library, 2006. Originally published in 1929.

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Armstrong, Carol. Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–­1875. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Arnar, Anna Sigrídur. The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, the Artist’s Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Arnheim, Rudolf. Radio: An Art of Sound. Translated by Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read. Salem, NH: Ayer, 1986. Bachelard, Gaston. Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Translated by Edith R. Farrell. Dallas, TX: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture / The Pegasus Foundation, 1999. Bailey, Craig R. “The Art of Marius de Zayas.” Arts Magazine, Sept. 1978, 136–­44. Baird, Davis. Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Baker, George. The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Baker, James. “Prometheus in America: The Significance of the World Premiere of Scriabin’s Poem of Fire as Color-­ Music, New York, 20 March 1915.” In Over Here: Modernism, The First Exile 1914–­1919, 90–­109. Providence, RI: David Winton Bell Gallery / Brown University, 1989. Baker, Mona, and Babriela Saldanha, eds. Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2009. Balken, Debra Bricker. Arthur Dove: A Retrospective. Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art; Washington, DC: The Phillips Collection; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. ———. Arthur Dove: Watercolors. New York: Alexandre Gallery, 2006. ———. Debating American Modernism: Stieglitz, Duchamp, and the New York Avant-­Garde. New York: American Federation of Arts, 2003. ———. Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2009. Barr, Alfred H. Cubism and Abstract Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936. ———. Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. 3rd ed. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1947. Barthes, Roland. Image/Music/Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Beer, Gillian. Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Belting, Hans. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Translated by Thomas Dunlap. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Bender, John, and Michael Marrinan. The Culture of Diagram. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Walter Benjamin. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Bergson, Henri. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by T. E. Hulme. Edited by John Mullarkey and Michael Kolkman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Berman, Avis. “The Quiet Man of American Modernism.” Smithsonian Magazine, Nov. 1997, 122–­32. Bielstein, Susan M. Permissions: A Survival Guide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 110 (Fall 2004): 51–­79.

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Bishop, Janet, Cécile Debray, and Rebecca Rabinow, eds. The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-­ Garde. San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. Blair, Ann. “Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book.” Journal of the History of Ideas 53/4 (Oct.–­Dec. 1992): 541–­51. Blythe, Sara Ganz, and Edward D. Powers. Looking at Dada. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006. Bochner, Jay. An American Lens: Scenes from Alfred Stieglitz’s New York Secession. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Bochner, Jay, and Justin D. Edwards, eds. American Modernism across the Arts. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Bochner, Jay, and Jean-­Pierre Montier, eds. Carrefour Alfred Stieglitz. Rennes, Fr.: Presses Universitaires Rennes, 2012. Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Boime, Albert. The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, circa 1830–­1865. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1991. Bois, Yve-­Alain. Painting as Model. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Bois, Yve-­Alain, Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Hubert Damisch. “A Conversation with Hubert Damisch.” October 85 (Summer 1998): 3–­17. Bois, Yve-­Alain, and Rosalind E. Krauss. Formless: A User’s Guide. New York: Zone Books, 1997. Bonnard: The Late Paintings. Washington, DC: The Phillips Collection; Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, 1984. Botar, Oliver A. I., and Isabel Wünsche, eds. Biocentrism and Modernism. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Dijon, Fr.: Les presses du réel, 2009. Braddock, Alan. “Gun Vision: The Ballistic Imagination in American Art.” Unpublished manuscript. Braddock, Jeremy. Collecting as Modernist Practice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Bredekamp, Horst. Darwins Korallen: Frühe Evolutionsmodelle und die Tradition der Naturgeschichte. Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2005. ———. The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine. Translated by Allison Brown. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1995. Bremmer, Jan, and Herman Roodenburg, eds. A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1997. Brennan, Marcia. Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Brilliant, Richard. Portraiture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Brougher, Kerry, Jeremy Strick, Ari Wiseman, and Judith ­Zilczer. Visual Music: Synaethesia in Art and Music since 1900. London: Thames and Hudson, 2005.

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Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. ———, ed. Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Brückner, Martin. The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Burns, Eric. Invasion of the Mind Snatchers: Television’s Conquest of America in the Fifties. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010. Burns, Russell W. Communications: An International History of the Formative Years. London: Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2004. Buskirk, Martha, and Mignon Nixon, eds. The Duchamp Effect. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Bynum, W. F., and Roy Porter. Medicine and the Five Senses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Cadava, Eduardo. Emerson and the Climates of History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Calarco, Matthew. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Campbell, Lawrence. “Dove: Delicate Innovator.” Art News, Oct. 1958, 57–­58. Campen, Crétien van. The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Cardinal, Serge. “Radiophonic Performance and Abstract Machines: Recasting Arnheim’s Art of Sound.” Liminalities 3/3 (Nov. 2007): 1–­23. Carr, David. Interpreting Husserl: Critical and Comparative Studies. Dordrecht, Neth.: M. Nijhoff, 1987. Cassidy, Donna M. “Arthur Dove’s Music Paintings of the Jazz Age.” American Art Journal 20/1 (1988): 5–­23. ———. Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, 1910–­1940. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997. Chanan, Michael. Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music. London: Verso, 1995. Chave, Anna C. “O’Keeffe and the Masculine Gaze.” Art in America 78 ( Jan. 1990): 114–­24. Clark, Constance Areson. God—­or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Clark, T. J. Picasso and Truth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Clark, William. “On the Ministerial Archive of Academic Acts.” Science in Context 9 (1996): 421–­86. Clarke, Bruce. “Dora Marsden and Ezra Pound: ‘The New Freewoman’ and ‘The Serious Artist.’ ” Contemporary Literature 33/1 (Spring 1992): 91–­112. Clarke, Bruce, and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, eds. From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Cogdell, Christina. Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Cohen, Ted. Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Cohn, Sherrye. Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol. 1982. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985.

———. “Arthur Dove and Theosophy: Visions of a Transcendental Reality.” Arts Magazine, Sept. 1983, 86–­91. ———. “The Image and the Imagination of Space in the Art of Arthur Dove, Part I: Dove’s ‘Force Lines, Growth Lines’ as Emblems of Energy.” Arts Magazine, Dec. 1983, 90–­93. ———. “The Image and the Imagination of Space in the Art of Arthur Dove, Part II: Dove and ‘The Fourth Dimension.’” Arts Magazine, Jan. 1984, 121–­25. Collier, Peter, and Robert Lethbridge, eds. Artistic Relations: Literature and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-­Century France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. Connor, Celeste. Democratic Visions: Art and Theory of the Stieglitz Circle, 1924–­1934. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Cooke, Lynne, and Peter Wollen, eds. Visual Display: Culture beyond Appearances. New York: New Press, 1998. Cooke, Roger. The History of Mathematics: A Brief Course. New York: Wiley, 1997. Cooper, Harry. “Arthur Dove Paints a Record.” Source Notes in the History of Art 24/2 (Winter 2005): 70–­77. ———. “Speak, Painting: Word and Device in Early Johns.” October 127 (Winter 2009): 49–­76. Corbin, Alain. The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750–­1840. Translated by Jocelyn Phelps. Cambridge: Polity, 1994. Corn, Wanda M. The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–­1935. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Corn, Wanda M., and Tirza True Latimer. Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Corwin, Sharon. “Picturing Efficiency: Precisionism, Scientific Management, and the Effacement of Labor.” Representations 84 (Autumn 2003): 139–­65. Cosgrove, Denis. Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World. London: I. B. Tauris, 2008. ———, ed. Mappings. London: Reaktion Books, 1999. Cox, Christoph, and Daniel Warner, eds. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York: Continuum, 2004. Cronan, Todd. “Merleau-­Ponty, Santayana, and the Paradoxes of Animal Faith.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18/3 (2010): 487–­506. Crowe, Michael J. Theories of the World from Antiquity to the Copernican Revolution. 2nd rev. ed. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001. Curry, Kathy, and Esther Adler. American Modern: Hopper to O’Keeffe. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013. Damisch, Hubert. The Judgment of Paris. Translated by John Goodman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. ———. A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Daston, Lorraine, ed. Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. New York: Zone Books, 2004. Daston, Lorraine, and Gregg Mitman, eds. Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Davenport, Guy. Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998.

Davidson, Abraham A. Early American Modernist Painting, 1910–­1935. New York: Harper and Row, 1981. Davies, Hugh, Toby Kamps, and Ralph Rugoff. Small World: Dioramas in Contemporary Art. San Diego, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000. Davis, W. Bowdoin. Duchamp: Domestic Patterns, Covers, and Threads. New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2002. Dayan, Peter. Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. De Duve, Thierry. Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Deepwell, Katy, ed. Women Artists and Modernism. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. DeLue, Rachael Z. “Art and Science in America.” American Art 23/2 (Summer 2009): 2–­9. ———. “Arthur Dove, Painting, and Phonography.” History and Technology 27/1 (Mar. 2011): 113–­21. ———. “Diagnosing Pictures: Sadakichi Hartmann and the Science of Seeing, circa 1900.” American Art 21 (Summer 2007): 42–­69. de Mille, Charlotte, ed. Music and Modernism, c. 1849–­1950. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. DePietro, Anne Cohen. Arthur Dove and Helen Torr: The Huntington Years. Huntington, NY: Heckscher Museum of Art, 1989. ———. Out of the Shadows: Helen Torr, A Retrospective. Huntington, NY: Heckscher Museum of Art, 2003. Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Critical Inquiry 28/2 (Winter 2002): 369–­418. ———. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-­ Louise Mallet. Translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Dickerman, Leah. Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005. ———, ed. Inventing Abstraction, 1910–­1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012. Dickey, Tina, and Helmut Friedel. Hans Hofmann. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1998. Didi-­Huberman, Georges. Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art. Translated by John Goodman. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Diepeveen, Leonard. The Difficulties of Modernism. New York: Routledge, 2003. Dillon, Diane, and Christopher Reed. “Looking and Difference in the Abstract Portraits of Charles Demuth and Duncan Grant.” Yale Journal of Criticism 11/1 (1998): 39–­51. Di Palma, Vittoria. “Blurs, Blots, and Clouds: Architecture and the Dissolution of the Surface.” AA Files 54 (Summer 2006): 34–­45. Doherty, Brigid. “See: We Are All Neurasthenics! Or, The Trauma of Dada Montage.” Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997): 82–­132.

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Donald, Diana, and Jane Munro, eds. Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science, and the Visual Arts. Cambridge, UK: Fitzwilliam Museum; New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Dorrian, Mark, and Frédéric Pousin, eds. Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture. London: I. B. Tauris, 2013. Doty, Robert. “The Articulation of American Abstraction.” Arts Magazine, Nov. 1973, 47–­49. Douglas, Susan. Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Drohojowska-­Philp, Hunter. Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Norton, 2004. Dudley, Sandra H., Amy Jane Barnes, Jennifer Binnie, Julia Petrov, and Jennifer Walklate. Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories. London: Routledge, 2012. Dunn, J. “Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis: A Critical Review.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76/4 (Aug. 1995): 723–­38. Dupree, Mary Herron. “ ‘Jazz,’ The Critics, and American Art Music in the 1920s.” American Music 4/3 (Autumn 1986): 287–­301. Dydo, Ulla E., ed. A Stein Reader. 1993. Reprint, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003. Dydo, Ulla E., with William Rice. Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923–­1934. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003. Eburne, Jonathan P. Surrealism and the Art of Crime. New York: Cornell University Press, 2008. Eco, Umberto. The Infinity of Lists. Translated by Alastair McEwen. New York: Rizzoli, 2009. Edgerton, Gary R. The Columbia History of American Television. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Edwards, Brent Hayes. “Louis Armstrong and the Syntax of Scat.” Critical Inquiry 28/3 (Spring 2002): 618–­49. Egan, Susan Chan. “Painting Signs: Demuth’s Portrait of Charles Duncan.” American Art 22/3 (Fall 2008): 90–­101. Eldredge, Charles C. Reflections on Nature: Small Paintings by Arthur Dove, 1942–­1943. New York: American Federation of Arts, 1997. Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996. ———. Six Stories from the End of Representation: Images in Painting, Photography, Astronomy, Microscopy, Particle Physics, and Quantum Mechanics, 1980–­2000. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Ellenbogen, Josh. Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: Bertillon, Galton, Marey. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012. Ellenbogen, Josh, and Aaron Tugendhaft, eds. Idol Anxiety. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Erlmann, Veit, ed. Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Fer, Briony. On Abstract Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Fillin-­Yeh, Susan. “Dandies, Marginality, and Modernism: Georgia O’Keeffe, Marcel Duchamp, and Other Cross-­ Dressers.” Oxford Art Journal 18/2 (1995): 33–­44. ———. “Innovative Moderns: Arthur G. Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe.” Arts Magazine, June 1982, 68–­72.

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Findlen, Paula, ed. Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500–­1800. London: Routledge, 2013. Fisher, Margaret. Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–­1933. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Fleming, James Rodger. Meteorology in America, 1800–­1870. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Fleming, James Rodger, Vladimir Jankovic, and Deborah R. Coen, eds. Intimate Universality: Local and Global Themes in the History of Weather and Climate. Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications / USA, 2006. Florman, Lisa. “The Flattening of ‘Collage.’ ” October 102 (Fall 2002): 59–­86. Fore, Devin. Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Foster, Hal. “An Art of Missing Parts.” October 92 (Spring 2000): 128–­56. ———. Prosthetic Gods. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Frank, Robin Jaffee. Charles Demuth Poster Portraits, 1923–­1929. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. Fried, Michael. Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Friedman, Robert Marc. Appropriating the Weather: Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Construction of a Modern Meteorology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. Frisinger, H. Howard. History of Meteorology to 1800. New York: Science History Publications, 1977. Fryd, Vivien Green. “Georgia O’Keeffe’s ‘Radiator Building’: Gender, Sexuality, Modernism, and Urban Imagery.” Winterthur Portfolio 35/4 (Winter 2000): 269–­89. Gadamer, Hans-­Georg. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated and edited by David E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Gage, John. Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Galison, Peter. Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time. New York: Norton, 2003. ———. How Experiments End. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Galison, Peter, and Alex Roland, eds. Atmospheric Flight in the Twentieth Century. Dordrecht, Neth.: Kluwer Academic, 2000. Gallati, Barbara D. “Arthur G. Dove as Illustrator.” Archives of American Art Journal 21/2 (1981): 13–­22. Gamboni, Dario. The Brush and the Pen: Odilon Redon and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. ———. Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Gamwell, Lynn. Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Garvey, Ellen Gruber. Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. ———. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Geimer, Peter. “Picturing the Black Box: On Blanks in

Nineteenth-­Century Paintings and Photographs.” Science in Context 17/4 (Dec. 2004): 467–­501. Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Gentile, J. “Wrestling with Matter: Origins of Intersubjectivity.” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 76/2 (Apr. 2007): 547–­82. Gibson, Andrew, ed. Joyce’s “Ithaca.” Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. Gitelman, Lisa, and Geoffrey B. Pingree, eds. New Media, 1740–­1915. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Gober, Robert, Cynthia Burlingham, Dave Hickey, Tullis Johnson, and Nancy Weekly. Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum; Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2009. Goddard, Linda. Aesthetic Rivalries: Word and Image in France, 1880–­1926. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. Goldwater, Robert. “Arthur Dove: A Pioneer of Abstract Expressionism in American Art.” Perspectives USA 2 (Winter 1953): 78–­88. Gombrich, Ernst H. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Originally published in 1960. ———. The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art. 2nd ed. London: Phaidon Press, 1984. Originally published in 1979. Gooding, David, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer, eds. The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1976. Grafton, Anthony. The Footnote: A Curious History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Greenberg, Clement. Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Edited by John O’Brian. Vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–­1969. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Greenblatt, Stephen. Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: Norton, 2011. Greenough, Sarah, ed. Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2000. Grootenboer, Hanneke. “Treasuring the Gaze: Eye Miniature Portraits and the Intimacy of Vision.” Art Bulletin 88/3 (Sept. 2006): 496–­507. Gross, Jennifer R. The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press / Yale University Art Gallery, 2006. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds. Materialities of Communication. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Gurney, Alan. Compass: A Story of Exploration and Innovation. New York: Norton, 2004. Guthrie, Mark. “Time Frame” (interview with Suzanne Smeaton). Picture Framing Magazine, Jan. 2003, 135–­36. Hacking, Ian. Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Haines, Robert E. “Alfred Stieglitz and the New Order of Consciousness in American Literature.” Pacific Coast Philology 6 (Apr. 1971): 26–­34.

Halford, Pauline. Storm Warning: The Origins of the Weather Forecast. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2004. Hankins, Thomas L., and Robert J. Silverman. Instruments and the Imagination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. ———. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–­1936.” Social Text 11 (Winter 1984–­1985): 20–­64. Harman, Peter Michael. Energy, Force, and Matter: The Conceptual Development of Nineteenth-­Century Physics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Harper, Kristine C. Weather by the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Harrell, Anne. The Forum Exhibition: Selections and Additions. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1983. Harrison, Helen A. “Arthur G. Dove and the Origins of Abstract Expressionism.” American Art 12 (Spring 1998): 66–­83. Harwood, Keith. The Float. Shropshire, UK: Medlar Press, 2003. Haselstein, Ulla. “Gertrude Stein’s Portraits of Picasso and Matisse.” New Literary History 34/4 (Autumn 2003): 723–­43. Haskell, Barbara. Arthur Dove. San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1974. ———. “Arthur G. Dove (1880–­1946).” American Art Review 2/1 ( Jan.–­Feb. 1975): 131–­41. ———, ed. Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2009. Haskell, Barbara, and Stephanie Lynn Schumann. “Oscar Bluemner: Suns and Moons.” Magazine Antiques, Nov. 2005, 122–­27. Havens, Earle. Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 2001. Hayes, Jeffrey R. “Oscar Bluemner’s Late Landscpes: ‘The Musical Color of Fateful Experience.’ ” Art Journal 44/4 (Winter 1984): 352–­60. Heidegger, Martin. Off the Beaten Track. Edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: HarperCollins, 1971. ———. What Is a Thing? Translated by W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967. Heilbron, J. L., ed. The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Hemingway, Andrew. The Mysticism of Money: Precisionist Painting and Machine Age America. Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope, 2013. Henderson, Carrol L. Birds in Flight: The Art and Science of How Birds Fly. Minneapolis, MN: Voyageur Press, 2008. Henderson, Linda Dalrymple. The Fourth Dimension and Non-­Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. ———. “Francis Picabia, Radiometers, and X-­Rays in 1913.” Art Bulletin 71/1 (Mar. 1989): 114–­23. ———. “The Image and Imagination of the Fourth Dimen-

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Jones, Jan. Billy Rose Presents . . . Casa Mañana. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1999. Jonkers, A. R. T. Earth’s Magnetism in the Age of Sail. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Jordan, Glenn. “Re-­membering the African-­American Past: Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, and Black Art of the Harlem Renaissance.” Cultural Studies 25/6 (Nov. 2011): 848–­91. Jordan, Jim. “Arthur Dove and the Nature of the Image.” Arts Magazine, Feb. 1976, 89–­91. Joselit, David. Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp, 1910–­1941. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Katz, Mark. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Keeling, Kara, and Josh Kun, eds. “Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies.” Special issue, American Quarterly 63/3 (Sept. 2011). Kellner, Bruce, ed. A Gertrude Stein Companion: Content with the Example. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988. Kelly, Julia. Art, Ethnography and the Life of Objects, Paris, c.  1925–­35. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007. Kemp, Martin. The Human Animal in Western Art and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–­1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Kimble, James J. Mobilizing the Home Front: War Bonds and Domestic Propaganda. Dallas: Texas A&M University Press, 2006. Kirschner, Melanie. Arthur Dove: Watercolors and Pastels. New York: George Braziller, 1998. Kirwin, Liza. Lists: To-­Dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. New York: Princeton Architectural Press; Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2010. Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. Knorr-­Cetina, Karen. The Manufacture of Knowledge. Oxford: Pergamon, 1981. Koerner, Joseph Leo. The Moment of Self-­Portraiture in German Renaissance Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Kornhauser, Elizabeth Mankin. Marsden Hartley. Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Koss, Juliet. “On the Limits of Empathy.” Art Bulletin 88/1 (Mar. 2006): 139–­57. Kramer, Hilton. “Abstraction in America: The First Generation.” New Criterion 18/2 (Oct. 1999): 10–­17. Krauss, Rosalind, E. The Originality of the Avant-­Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. ———. Passages in Modern Sculpture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981. ———. The Picasso Papers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. ———. “Stieglitz/Equivalents.” October 11 (Winter 1979): 129–­40. Kroiz, Lauren. Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the

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Leja, Michael. Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Lenoir, Timothy, ed. Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Leonard, Anne. “Picturing Listening in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Art Bulletin 89/2 ( June 2007): 266–­86. Levin, Gail, and Marianne Lorenz. Theme and Improvisation: Kandinsky and the American Avant-­Garde, 1912–­1950. Boston: Little, Brown, 1992. Lewis, Michael, and Tanja Staehler. Phenomenology: An Introduction. London: Continuum, 2010. Lewis, Paul. Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature. New York: State University of New York Press, 1989. Lichtenstein, Jacqueline. Blind Spot: An Essay on the Relations between Painting and Sculpture in the Modern Age. Translated by Chris Miller. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008. Lightman, Bernard, ed. Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Lippincott, Louise, and Andreas Blühm, Fierce Friends: Artists and Animals, 1750–­1900. London: Merrell; Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum; Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Museum of Art, 2005. Livingstone, David. The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Lomas, David. “ ‘Modest Recording Instruments’: Science, Surrealism, and Visuality.” Art History 27/4 (Sept. 2004): 627–­50. Loughery, John. Alias S. S. Van Dine. New York: Scribner, 1992. Lowe, Sue Davidson. Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography. Boston: MFA Publications / Museum of Fine Arts, 2002. Lyford, Amy. Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post–­World War I Reconstruction in France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Lynch, Peter. “The Origins of Computer Weather Prediction and Climate Modeling.” Journal of Computational Physics 227 (2008): 3431–­44. Mallgrave, Harry Francis, and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds. and trans. Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–­1893. Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994. Malt, Johanna. Obscure Objects of Desire: Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Mancini, J. M. Pre-­Modernism: Art World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. ———. “ ‘The Safeness of Standing Alone’: Alfred Stieglitz, Camera Work, and the Organizational Roots of the American Avant-­Garde.” Canadian Review of American Studies 28/2 (1998): 37–­79. Marshall, Jennifer Jane. Machine Art 1934. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Mayer, Lance, and Gay Myers. American Painters on Technique. Vol. 2, 1860–­1945. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013. Mazow, Leo G. “John Covert, Tetraphilia, and the Language of Time.” Winterthur Portfolio 41/1 (Spring 2007): 21–­42.

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Index

Abbott, Bernice, 258n15 A-­B-­C of Aesthetics, The (Stein), 215 ABC of Reading (Pound), 222 ABC of Relativity, The (Russell), 22 Abstract Expressionism, 4, 129 “Abstraction” (Dove), 76 actor-­network theory, 6–­7, 256n11 Adorno, Theodor, 162 Africa, 138 After the Storm, Silver and Green (Vault Sky) (ca. 1923) (Dove), 100, 105 Agee, William C., 255n1 agency, 8, 217 Agricultural Experiment Station, 118 Aisen, Maurice, 98 Akeley, Carl, 244 Alfie’s Delight (1929) (Dove), 232 Alfred Stieglitz (1923) (Dove), 194, 220 Alien Phenomenology (Bogost), 218 almanacs, 121–­22, 124–­25 America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait (Frank et al.), 30, 98 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 243 American Communist Party, 98 American modernism, 4 American Museum of Natural History, 244–­45

303

Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 255n3, 277n9 An American Place, 85, 108, 133, 173, 187, 232, 246, 275n106, 277n9 Anderson, Katharine, 117, 121–­22 Anderson, Margaret, 270–­71n150 Anderson, Sherwood, 3, 8, 98 Anderson Galleries, 3, 57, 192, 231, 274n6 Andrews, E. C., 51–­52, 68, 72, 89–­91, 115 Another Arrangement (1944) (Dove), 45, 96, 273n59 anthropology, and embrace of materialism, 244 Appadurai, Arjun, 215 Archives of American Art, 24, 270n139, 286n133 Aristotle, 142 Armory Show (1913), 257n2, 277–­78n21 Armstrong, Louis, 182–­84, 189 Arnheim, Rudolf, 174 Arp, Jean (Hans), 28, 284n109 Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Gell), 215 Art as Experience, 98 Art Institute of Chicago, 261n69, 284n108 Artists and Models (film), 182 Art of Assemblage, The (exhibition), 214 assemblages, 145–46, 156, 164–65,

assemblages (continued) 191–­92, 196–­97, 199, 206, 217, 233, 240, 251, 254; agency, as form of, 203; animals in, 234; biographical meaning of, 193; curiosity cabinet (Kunstkammer) effect, 245; as defined, 276n1; as diagrams, 234; as diary-­like, 194, 214; everyday quality of, 214; gathering effect of, 231; human and nonhuman, collaboration between, 219–­20; immobilizing effects of, 204; and intersubjectivity, 203; list-­like structure of, 213; metal-­based pigments in, 221; precedents of, 195; reality, transposition of, 205; repurposed material for, 218; and substitution, 39; taxonomy, evoking of, 244; as “things,” 198, 201, 205, 215 Atom and the Bohr Theory of Its Structure, The (Kramers and Holst), 22 Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, The (Stein), 29 Babbage, Charles, 270–­71n150 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 84, 174 Baekeland, Leo, 200, 278n32 Balken, Debra Bricker, 255n1 Ballets Russes, 149 Barn IV (1935) (Dove), 209 Barn Here and a Tree There, A (1940) (Dove), 210 Barn Next Door (1934) (Dove), 209, 237 Barnyard Fantasy (1935) (Dove), 237 Barthes, Roland, 256n8 Bartram, William, 254 Beach with Sun Drawing Water (1872) (Richards), 263n102 Beckett, Samuel, 28 Belting, Hans, 257–­58n14 Bement, Alon, 271n10 Bender, John, 234 Benjamin, Walter, 6, 157, 278n29 Ben Pollock and His Orchestra, 173 Benson, E. M., 285n128 Benton, Thomas Hart, 28, 165, 259–­60n39 Bergson, Henri, 217 Berlin, Irving, 149, 157, 174 Bernstein, J. C. ( Jake), 138–­39, 246 Bernstein, Julia, 138, 246 Beyond Abstraction (1946) (Dove), 264n13 Bier, Elmira, 232, 283n98 Bishop Murder Case, The (Van Dine), 88 Blackbird (1942) (Dove), 234, 284n108 Black Sun, Thursday (1932) (Dove), 232 Bluemner, Oscar, 280n57 Bogost, Ian, 218 Boltz, Oswald H., 200 Bonnard, Pierre, 267n68 Bontecou, Lee, 286n136 Book of the Sky, The (Luckiesh), 123, 133 Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 246 Boswell, Foster Partridge, 241 Bourdieu, Pierre, 215 Bourne, Randolph, 75, 98 Brancusi, Constantin, 257n2, 277n9 Braque, Georges, 195, 197 Brennan, Marcia, 79, 234 Breton, André, 28, 206 Brooks, Charles F., 141 Brooks, Charles Van Wyck, 187, 204, 210

304

Index

Brooks, Van Wyck, 3, 98, 187 Broom (magazine), 274n62 Brothers, The (1942) (Dove), 39 Brown, Bill, 216, 244 Burchfield, Charles, 224, 238, 254, 259n25, 266n54 Burchfield Penney Art Center, 266n54 Camera Work (magazine), 29–­30, 98, 195 Canada, 247 “Can a Photograph Have the Significance of Art?” (Dove), 28 Cane (Toomer), 259n37 “Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass, A” (Stein), 29–­30 Car in Garage (1934) (Dove), 237 cartography, 129 Cassidy, Donna, 148, 155, 158, 170, 177, 182, 273n59, 274n62 Cavalcanti, Guido, 222 “Cavalcanti: Medievalism” (Pound), 222 Cézanne, Paul, 163, 257n2 Chantes de Maldoror, Les (Ducasse), 206 Cheney, Sheldon, 66 Chinese Music (1923) (Dove), 168, 170–­71 Church, Frederic, 9, 44 Cinder Barge and Derrick (1931) (Dove), 248 City Moon (1938) (Dove), 62, 180 Clark, Constance Areson, 243 Clouds (1927) (Dove), 131, 193, 232, 283–­84n102 Clurman, Harold, 98 Cohn, Sherrye, 22, 91, 162, 176 Cole, Thomas, 9 College Art Association, 98 Color and Its Application to Printing (Andrews), 51, 68, 89–­91, 115, 214 “Composition as Explanation” (Stein), 29 Composition in Green and Gray (Untitled) (ca. 1930) (Dove), 237. See also Green, Black, and White (1938) (Dove) Connor, Steve, 165 Cooper, Harry, 148, 155, 158, 165 Cornell, Joseph, 191, 195, 244, 278n29, 280n57, 282n72 Cosgrove, Denis, 129, 268n113 Cosmos (Humboldt), 131 Covert, John, 214, 259n22, 280n57 Cows in Pasture (1935) (Dove), 96, 234, 237 Cozens, Alexander, 269n128 Crane, Hart, 28, 98, 270–­71n150 Craven, Thomas, 28 Critic, The (1925) (Dove), 192, 194 Crosby, Bing, 173 Cross and Weather Vane (1935) (Dove), 225 Cubism, 195, 197, 230, 253 Culture of Diagram, The (Bender and Marrinan), 234 Dada, 8, 28, 216–­17, 257–­58n14; sewing, as motif of, 206 Damisch, Hubert, 216 Darwin, Charles, 243 Daston, Lorraine, 216 Davies, Arthur B., 285n121 Dawn III (1932) (Dove), 53, 55 December Storm (1941–­1960) (Burchfield), 266n54 Deep River Orchestra, 149 Deleuze, Gilles, 217 de Meyer, Baron Adolph, 75

Demuth, Charles, 4, 75, 195, 280n58 DePietro, Anne Cohen, 34, 261n67 De rerum natura (Lucretius), 162 Derrida, Jacques, 284n115 Descartes, René, 257–­58n14 Descriptive Meteorology (Moore), 142 Dewey, John, 98 de Zayas, Marius, 28, 195, 254 Diaghilev, Serge, 149 diagram, 22–­23; as term, 234 Dial (magazine), 29, 222 “Different One, A” (Dove), 30 diorama, 244–­45 Di Palma, Vittoria, 269n128 Doerner, Max, 178, 258n13 Dogs Chasing Each Other (1929) (Dove), 234, 246, 284n108 Doppler, Christian, and Doppler effect, 184 Dorsey, Florence, 3 Douglas, Aaron, 98, 254 Douglas, Susan, 68 Dove, Arthur Garfield, 1, 14, 16, 20, 77, 138, 248, 257n2, 258n8, 258n10, 258n15, 259n25, 259–­60n39, 263n106, 264n8, 264n12, 264n13, 264–­65n33, 265n35, 266n50, 270n139, 271n10, 280n57, 280n58, 283–­84n102; and abstraction, 26, 28, 158, 201, 203, 218; abstraction, as term, rejection of, 89, 134; and anthropomorphism, 284n115; artistic theory of, 96; astronomy, interest in, 230; automatic procedures, attentiveness to, 252; avant-­garde press, contributions to, 28; background of, 3; Beaufort Wind Force Scale, 113; body and machine, collaboration of, 220; cartography, as conceptual model for, 219; collectivity, idea of, 98–­99; on color, 90–­91; communication, interest in, 26–­27, 30–­31, 53, 62, 69, 73–­74, 79, 81–­84, 97, 99–­100, 111, 115, 125, 129, 133–­34; condition of light, 89–­ 90, 95–­96, 99–­100, 115, 162, 163, 223, 261n59; connection and interchange, system of, 220; as craftsman, 200; curiosity of, 8; diagramming impulse of, 22–­23; diary keeping, everyday quality of, 214; diary of, as analog for work of, 115–­16; dioramas, effect on, 244–­45; and Dove Block, 174–­75, 232, 283n98; draughtsman, as goal of, 207, 209; extraction, operation of, 134, 136, 203–­4, 218; extrahuman, embrace of, 253; failure to connect, embracing of, 198; first one-­man show of, 3; friendships, importance of, to, 97; geometry, interest in, 26; and gravitation, 218; health of, 186; humans and things, as two-­way street, 218; ideas (small-­scale studies) of, 39–­ 40; as idiosyncratic, 2; image, as system, 85; influences of, 4, 28–­30, 195, 230, 277–­78n21; inspiration of, 11–­12; instruments, use of, 198; interlinking network, vision of, 92, 96; intersubjectivity of, 84, 99–­100, 115–­16, 125, 165, 171–­72, 203, 215, 217, 247, 249, 252–­54; and jazz, 158; Joyce, influence of, on, 28; language, interest in, 6, 23–­29, 44, 53, 73, 75, 78, 80, 83, 97, 111–­12, 114–­15, 129, 198; lightning, study of, 224; list making of, 213–­14, 219–­20; magic lantern, use of, 261n67; manual labor of, 199–­201; materiality, investment in, 198, 200–­201, 215–­16, 219, 226, 240; media, experimentation with, 200; media boundaries, blurring of, 191; meteorology, interest in, 8, 82, 100, 114, 124–­27, 135–­36, 142, 217–­18; mistranslation, possibility of, 251–­52; mundane, value of, 254; music listening, habit of, 164–­65; nature, interest in, 9; notational systems,

experimentation with, 33–­34, 50–­51, 78–­79, 115, 182, 222; objects, as medium for connection, 217; occult, interest in, 31, 98, 162, 175–­76; and O’Keeffe, 283n97; paint, properties of, preoccupation with, 51; painting, as kind of formation, 86; pantograph device, use of, 40, 261n67; pastel series of, 92–­96; pathological individualism, 88–­ 89; and phonographs, 174; photography, importance of, to, 57, 59–­60, 127; as pioneer, 4; poetry of, 8, 27–­30; radio, interest in, 129, 173–­80; relationality, reformulation of, 285n121; and representation, 203; rhythm, reference to, 85–­88; self-­acting painting, desire for, 136–­37; self and object, interweaving of, 137; shorthand, use of, 34, 76–­78; sidereal, allusion to, 27; signature, use of, 35, 42, 44–­45, 50, 75, 79–­80, 183, 210; signs, use of, 25–­26; sketch-­to-­ painting translations of, 41–­42; sky, as medium of transmission, 181; and sociability, 97–­99, 125, 140, 195, 220, 245–­47; speedwriting, practice of, 34; Stein, influence of, on, 29–­30, 277–­78n21; Stieglitz, devotion to, 97; “Sweets” doodling of, 24–­25, 27, 75, 172, 234, 246–­47; technology, interest in, 30–­31, 33; telegraphy, interest in, 30–­31, 226; tempo, evocation of, 86; theosophy, attraction to, 91, 98, 162; translation, preoccupation with, 6, 23, 30–­31, 33, 44, 52–­53, 56, 62, 69, 72–­74, 79, 81–­84, 96–­97, 99, 111, 115, 129, 133–­34, 147, 158–­59, 217, 251–­52; utopianism, link to, 98, 100; on war, 188; weather, interest in, 2, 81–­84, 100, 105, 108–­14, 116, 121–­24, 136, 140–­41, 214, 252; white light, 90–­91; wit of, 246–­47; wordplay of, 25, 28; World War II, effect on, 139–­40; on writing, 27; on writing and painting, 26. See also Dove’s art; and individual works Dove’s art, 129; abstraction of, 23, 26; abstract paintings of, 9; abstract vocabulary of, 22; animalism in, 238–­41, 243; animals in, 234, 237–­38, 240–­41, 243, 246–­47; assemblages of, 4–­5, 9, 39, 145–46, 189, 191, 201, 203–­6, 213–­14, 217–­19, 249, 278n27, 279n42; barometer, metal parts of, 127; body and machine, collaboration between, 221; charging of, 225; circle motif in, 17, 22, 45, 51–­53, 55–­56, 60, 62–­63, 65–­66, 68, 71–­73, 81, 127, 140, 142, 145, 160–­61, 217–­18; critical responses to, 230–­31; equivalency and substitution in, 79; and forecasting, 128–­29; geography, as form of, 83, 129; as instrumental terrain, 129; landscape, as geography in, 131; lines, theorization of, in, 202–­3, 209–­11, 226; mark making in, 177; materiality of, 164; metal-­based pigments, use of, in, 221; musical compositions, based on, 147–­48; music paintings, 156, 158–­61, 163–­66, 168, 170–­72; nonobjectivity of, 11; painting, and navigation, akin to, 126–­27; painting, and translation, act of, 156; pigments, experimenting with, 89; poetry and prose, listing effect of, 212–­13; as proposition, 112; radio paintings, 173–­84, 188; record paintings, 148–­49, 154–­55, 166, 178; registration, as form of, 158; sawtooth motif in, 170–­72; sewing, as subject matter of, 206–­7, 211–­12; spiral motifs in, 160–­61; staged viewings of, 231; substitution and recombination, use of, in, 201–­4, 219; and telegraphy, 127; translation, exploration of, in, 34–­35, 129; unseeable forces, 12, 17, 21–­22; viewer’s experience of, 231–­33; visual language of, 164; war paintings, 188; watercolor, feel of, 11–­12; wave forms in, 62–­63, 66, 68–­69, 71–­74, 79, 81, 131, 133, 142; weather in, 81, 100, 105, 108, 126–­28; weather in, as inspiration, 124, 140–­41; weather in, as metaphor for art, 116; zoomorphic forms, use of, 181, 234, 237, 240, 243, 245

Index

305

Dove, Paul, 31, 154, 180, 199, 224 Dove, William, 22, 34, 39, 89–­90, 138, 155, 176, 204, 257n15, 261n67, 266n50, 283–­84n102 Dow, Arthur Wesley, 280n57 Ducasse, Alain, 206 Duchamp, Marcel, 28, 192, 195, 206, 248–­49, 252 Duncanson, Robert S., 9 Dusenberry, Ralph, 193–­94 “Eagle Cloud” (Dove), 105 Eakins, Thomas, 44 Eastman, Max, 259–­60n39 Eco, Umberto, 213 Eddy, Arthur Jerome, 274n62 Einstein, Albert, 2, 8, 22, 26, 29, 88, 91, 142, 176 Electric Peach Orchard (1935) (Dove), 100, 226–­27 Enigme d’Isidore Ducasse, L’ (1920) (Ray), 206 Equivalents series (Stieglitz), 57, 73, 135, 170, 204–­5, 217, 231, 262n80 Ernst, Max, 28 Essai sur la géographie des plantes (Humboldt), 131 Europe, 129, 138, 154, 178, 265n35, 267n68; miniature eye portraits in, 205 Face on a Bank (1949) (Dove), 246 Factory Noise (1925) (Dove), 274n6 Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (exhibition), 195 Faraday, Michael, 63 Farmer’s Almanac for the Year of Our Lord 1820, 121 Federal Arts Project, 98 Ferry Boat Wreck (1931) (Dove), 45 Fields of Grain Seen from Train (1931) (Dove), 14 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 263n98 Finnegans Wake ( Joyce), 28 Fire Bird, The (Stravinsky), 148–­49 Fire in the Sauerkraut Factory (1936–­1941) (Dove), 188 flight, role of, in meteorology, 134 Flight (1943) (Dove), 134, 145, 178, 218–­19, 252; as landscape, 129; propeller-­like shape in, 135–­38 Fog Horns (1929) (Dove), 16, 134, 252; concentric bands in, 184–­85; and synesthesia, 185 Ford Motor Company, 144 Formation series, 88, 96; Formation I (1943) (Dove), 86–­88; Formation II (1942) (Dove), 86; Formation III (Green Landscape) (ca. 1942) (Dove), 86–­88 “Form of the Phonograph Record, The” (Adorno), 162 Four Saints in Three Acts (Stein), 29 France, 139 Frank, Waldo, 98, 134, 200 From a Wasp (ca. 1914) (Dove), 234 From Cows (1937) (Dove), 240 Frow, John, 216 Futurism, 197, 230 Gadamer, Hans-­Georg, 6, 115 Galison, Peter, 216 Gauguin, Paul, 257n2 Geertz, Clifford, 5 Gell, Alfred, 215 geography, 129, 142

306

Index

George Gershwin—­I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise (1927) (Dove), 149, 158, 161, 164, 232, 283–­84n102 George Gershwin—­Rhapsody in Blue, Part I (1927) (Dove), 148–­ 49, 158, 161, 164, 196, 220 George Gershwin—­Rhapsody in Blue, Part II (1927) (Dove), 148, 158, 161, 193, 196 Germany, 284n115 Gershwin, George, 147–­49, 155, 157, 165, 174 Gide, André, 28 Goat (1935) (Dove), 234 Goin’ Fishin’ (1925) (Dove), 193 Golden Storm (1925) (Dove), 100, 194; sawtooth motif in, 171 Golden Sun (1937) (Dove), 17, 53, 54, 55, 60, 62, 73, 80, 126, 134, 180; signature, role of, in, 79 Goodman, Nelson, 5–­6 Graham, Martha, 262n92 Grandmother (1925) (Dove), 192–­93, 206 Great Britain, 139 Green, Black, and White (1938) (Dove), 237. See also Composition in Green and Gray (Untitled) (ca. 1930) (Dove) Greenberg, Clement, 195 Greenwich Village Follies, 65, 262n92 Gregg, John Robert, 34, 261n59 Gregg Shorthand: A Light-­Line Phonography for the Million (Gregg), 34 Gris, Juan, 28 Grootenboer, Hanneke, 205 Gropius, Walter, 259n34 Ground Swell (1939) (Hopper), 68 Guattari, Felix, 217 Gurdjieff, George, 270–­71n150 Handman, Lou, 173 Hand Sewing Machine (1927) (Dove), 148, 164, 195–­96, 200–­ 202, 204, 206–­7, 211, 213, 232, 243; assemblage, as embodiment of, 197; machine, operation of, 221; materiality of, 198; receptor surface, functions as, 199; staccato rhythm of, 197 Hapgood, Hutchins, 99 Hartley, Marsden, 4, 75, 263n106 Harvard Museum of Natural History, 245 Haskell, Barbara, 261n70 Haviland, Paul, 74 Heade, Martin Johnson, 9, 254 Heap, Jane, 270–­71n150 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 6 Heidegger, Martin, 215–­16, 218, 249, 278n27 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 63 Henri, Robert, 98 Herford, Oliver, 29 Hertz, Heinrich, 63 Hirsch, Walter, 173 Hobbes, Thomas, 284n104 Hofmann, Hans, 286n135 Hollyhock (Dove), 210 Homer, William Innis, 168 Homer, Winslow, 44 Hoover, Herbert, 33 Hopper, Edward, 68 Hound (1934) (Dove), 246

Hunter, Matthew C., 216 Huntington Harbor (1924) (Dove), 278n26 Huntington Harbor I (1926) (Dove), 164 Huntington Harbor II (ca. 1926) (Dove), 164 Huntington Lighthouse, 276n112 Husserl, Edmund, 257–­58n14

Long Island (1925) (Dove), 191, 243 Lopez, Vincent, 65 Lower Manhattan (Composing Derived from Top of Woolworth) (1922) (Marin), 206 Lucchini, Francesco, 216 Lucretius, 162, 221

“Idea” (Dove), 204 “Idea, An” (Dove), 27, 84, 156, 159, 163, 192 “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” (Gershwin), 148, 155 Improvision (1927) (Dove), 149, 160 Improvision No. 27 (1912) (Kandinsky), 257n2 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 99 Ingold, Tim, 280n55 Inness, George, 1, 9 Intellectual, The (1925) (Dove), 204, 213, 233, 243 intersubjectivity, 5, 8–­9, 83, 95–­96, 99, 177, 247, 249, 252–­54; and assemblages, 203, 217; as concept, 7; and radio, 175; subject/object relations, 7; as term, 84, 257–­58n14; and weather, 125 In the American Jungle (Frank), 134 Intimate Gallery, 27, 75–­76, 89, 108, 134, 148, 192, 196, 200, 231, 233, 259–­60n39, 277n9 “Introduction to Metaphysics” (Bergson), 217 invisibility, 8 Italy, 139, 188 Italy Goes to War (1940) (Dove), 139, 188

MacDonald-­Wright, Stanton, 88 Machine Art (exhibition), 260n54 Making of Americans, The (Stein), 29 Man and Weather (McAdie), 141 “Manuscripts Number Four New York December 1922” (O’Keeffe), 28 Marin, John, 3, 4, 28, 75, 84, 206, 259n25, 263n106 Marrinan, Michael, 234 Marshall, Jennifer Jane, 281–­82n67 Martin, Edwin C., 134, 136 material artifacts, 205 material culture studies, 240 Materials of the Artist, The (Doerner), 178 Matisse, Henri, 29, 195, 257n2 Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein with Two Shorter Stories (Stein), 29 Maurer, Alfred, 3, 159 Maxwell, James Clerk, 63 Mazow, Leo G., 214, 259n22 McAdie, Alexander, 141 McBride, Henry, 27, 75 McCausland, Elizabeth, 29, 75, 85, 88, 136–­37, 177, 200, 246, 284n116 Me and the Moon (1937) (Dove), 17, 68–­69, 72–­74, 96, 129, 173, 177–­81, 182–84, 202, 206, 252, 274n69; circles and waves in, 65–­66 “Me and the Moon” (Handman and Hirsch), 173, 180 Melville, Herman, 8 Menaechmus, 8, 26 Mental Radio (Sinclair), 176 Mergen, Bernard, 120–21 metal media, 232; and record paintings, 221; weather science, instruments of, 221 meteorology, 82, 117, 124, 252; and automation, 136; circle form, pictorial equivalent of, 140–­41, 142; communication, as science of, 120; and flight, 134; popularization of, 121; registration, as science of, 120; sociability, as network of, 125; and “sounding,” 131; translation, as science of, 120, 123, 125–­26; unseeable, themes of, in, 123; as visual practice, 120, 125–­26; wind, measuring of, 136 Meteorology for Aviator and Layman (Whatham), 142 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 261n66, 263n99, 284n108 Michaels, Walter Benn, 263n105 Michelson, Albert Abraham, 51 Mileaf, Janine, 257–­58n14, 278n29, 282n72 Miller, Daniel, 216 Mills Blue Rhythm Band, 173 Miró, Joan, 195, 284n109 Miss Woolworth (1924) (Dove), 194 Moby-­Dick (Melville), 8, 148 Modern American Painters (Koontz), 26, 89 modernity, 4, 159 Moholy-­Nagy, Lázló, 226, 259n34

Jack the Ripper (Breton), 206 Japan, 138, 140 Jewell, Edward Alden, 26–­27, 34, 76, 164, 212, 223, 246 John Reed Club, 98 Johnson, Dorothy Rylander, 193, 285n118 Johnson, Philip, 260n54 Joyce, James, 2, 8, 26, 28, 142, 214, 252 Kafka, Franz, 28 Kahn, Douglas, 156, 220 Kandinsky, Wassily, 2, 9, 27, 84, 88, 159, 163, 220, 222, 226, 230, 257n2, 259n34, 264n8, 274n62 Kelly, Julia, 217 Kim, Miri, 265n41 Klee, Paul, 28, 84, 195 Kootz, Samuel M., 26, 89, 91, 94, 166, 264n8 Krauss, Rosalind, 170, 205 Lake Afternoon (1935) (Dove), 39, 237, 241, 243, 285n128 Lamb, Jonathan, 284n104 language, 6–­9; communication, 23–­24, 26; notational system of, 5; paintings and assemblages, as forms of, 78–­79; signs, 25–­26; translating operations of, 53; translation, 23, 198 Latour, Bruno, 215–­16, 218, 256n11, 281–­82n67 Lattice and Awning (1941) (Dove), 138 Lawrence, D. H., 28 Lawrie, Lee, 65, 262n90 Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 276n1 Little Galleries, 3 Lobster, The (1908) (Dove), 3, 255n3 “Long Gay Book, A” (Stein), 29

Index

307

Mona (boat), 3, 11, 23, 110, 142, 181, 185, 193–­94, 199, 218–­19, 249 Monkey Fur (1926) (Dove), 2, 204, 233, 243–­44; and Scopes Trial, 285n118 Moon (1935) (Dove), 1, 16, 23, 44, 53, 105, 134, 184, 252 “Moon Is Grinning at Me, The” (song), 173 Moon Was Laughing at Me, The (1937) (Dove), 173, 177–­79, 181, 183–84, 206, 237; Morse code, evoked in, 182 Moore, Willis Luther, 142 Morgan, Ann Lee, 22, 257n15, 263n102, 273n59, 284n109 Moth Dance (1929) (Dove), 234 Mount Chimborazo, 131 Movement No. 1 (1911) (Dove), 166, 168 Mr. Knife and Miss Fork (Answers all the wishes of René Crevel) (1944) (Ray), 206 MSS (magazine), 28, 57, 260n40 Mullett-­Smith, Suzanne, 31, 33 Mumford, Lewis, 246 Murphy, Jessica, 266n47 Murphy, Owen, 65 Museum of Fine Arts, 261n72, 283–­84n102 Museum of Modern Art, 98, 195, 214, 260n54, 270n139 Museum of Natural History, 89 music: as translation, 157; weather, connection between, 171 Music (1913) (Dove), 166 “Music—­A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs” (Stieglitz), 57, 170 Naples Yellow Morning (1935) (Dove), 20, 21, 53–­55, 62, 180 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 98 National Gallery of Art, 261n66 natural history: diorama, use of, in, 244–­45; materialism, embrace of, 244 Nature Symbolized No. 1 (Roofs) (1911–­1912) (Dove), 168 Nature Symbolized No. 2 (ca. 1911) (Dove), 94–­95. See also Wind on Hillside (ca. 1911) (Dove) Nebel, Rudolf, 2, 40, 118 Neighborly Attempt at Murder (1941) (Dove), 2, 140, 187, 241; overhearing, importance to, 188 Nemerov, Alexander, 68 Network of Stoppages (1914) (Duchamp), 206 New Freewoman (journal), 222 Newman, Hugo R. B., 262n90 New York (New York), 97 New York Daily News (newspaper), 121 New York Telephone Company, 262n90 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8 Nikhilananda, Swami, 8 1941 (1941) (Dove), 140, 188 No Feather Pillow (1940) (Dove), 41 North America, 119–­20, 126 “Notes” (Dove), 202–­3 #4 Creek (Dove), 66. See also Penetration (1924) (Dove) objecthood, 8; and agency, 216; as changing and migratory, 215; human-­object relationality, 218; as mode of being, 216; sets of relations, as multiple, 216; things, essence of, 215 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 2, 4, 8, 28, 53, 75, 97, 109, 127, 170, 181, 193–­94, 200, 234, 248, 258n15, 263n106, 271n10, 277n9;

308

Index

Dove, installation of shows, 283n97; flower-­movements, 253–­54 Oldenburg, Claes, 286n136 “On Reading the Current Papers” (Dove), 28 On the Radio (Lopez and Murphy), 65 Oppenheim, James, 98 “Orange Grove in California, An” (Berlin), 155 Orange Grove in California, by Irving Berlin (1927) (Dove), 76, 149, 158, 161, 196 “Origin of the Photo-­Secession and How It Became 291, The” (Stieglitz), 97–98 “Other Criteria” (Steinberg), 199 Our Own Weather (Martin), 117, 123, 134, 136 Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu), 215 Over Seneca Lake (1935) (Dove), 209 Ovid, 257–­58n14 Painted Forms, Friends (1925) (Dove), 59–­60 pantography, 136 Parsons, Jennifer Stettler, 274n68 Partly Cloudy (1942) (Dove), 105, 116, 122, 127, 129, 145, 180, 214; as translating device, 128 “Pasted-­Paper Revolution, The” (Greenberg), 195 Peale, Titian Ramsay, 244 Pearl Harbor, 138 Peirce, Charles Saunders, 261n64 “Pencil Notes on a Boat” (Dove), 90–­91, 219 Penetration (1924) (Dove), 68, 71–­72, 74; wave metaphor in, 66, 69. See also #4 Creek (Dove) Phillips, Duncan, 3, 231–­32, 245, 264–­65n33, 283n95, 286n137 Phillips Collection, 1, 286n137 Phillips Memorial Gallery, 232 phonautograph, 272n24 phonograph, 155–­58, 161, 163, 166, 198; materiality of, 162; as stitching together, 220 phonography, 165, 171 photography, 57, 74, 221; reality, as transposition of, 205 Picabia, Francis, 75, 98–­99, 231, 248, 277–­78n21 Picasso, Pablo, 28, 191, 195, 197, 253, 257n2, 278n26 Pierce-­Arrow (Howe), 263n105 Pinney, Christopher, 218 Plaster and Cork (ca. 1925) (Dove), 277n9 Plato, 220 Poe, Edgar Allan, 142 Point and Line to Plane (1926) (Kandinsky), 2, 27, 159, 226, 230 Pollock, Jackson, 158, 195, 247, 286n135 Popular Astronomy (journal), 230 popular music, and association with the moon, 179 Porter, Cole, 262n92 Port of New York (Rosenfeld), 96, 234, 238, 253 Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz (1924) (Dove), 193 Portrait of Ralph Dusenberry (1924) (Dove), 193–­95, 220, 234, 246, 275n106 Pound, Ezra, 252; charge, use of, as term, 221–­22; translation work of, 222 Pozzuoli Red (1941) (Dove), 21–­22, 44 Pratt, A. W., 232 Precisionism, 253 Primer of Modern Art, A (Cheney), 66 Primitive Jazz (1929) (Dove), 166, 273n59

Primitive Music (1944) (Dove), 166; sawtooth motif in, 171 R 25-­A (1942) (Dove), 34–­35, 202 radio: collective experience, condition of, 179; community, form of, 174; connection, as technology of, 179; DX fishing, 180; and intersubjectivity, 179; occult, associated with, 175, 177; radio talk, 182; sound in, as airborne, 179; telepathy, parallel between, 179; water, associations between, 68 Radio: An Art of Sound (Arnheim), 174 Radio Headquarters catalog, 65 Rain (1924) (Dove), 39, 100, 145, 193–­94, 203, 213 Rain or Snow (1943) (Dove), 105, 108, 127, 129, 134, 171, 252; as translating device, 128; vertical lines in, 126 Rathbone, Basil, 88 Rauschenberg, Robert, 191, 195, 199, 282n76 Ray, Man, 28, 206, 280n57 Raye, Martha, 182 Reaching Waves (1929) (Dove), 231, 263n99; waves, metaphor of, in, 72 Reading the Weather (Warren), 117, 122, 125 readymades, 195, 201 “Ready Reference Diary” (Dove), 124 Reasonable Facsimile, A (1942) (Dove), 35, 41, 202 Red, Olive and Yellow (1941) (Dove), 45, 237 Red Barge (1931) (Dove), 249, 286n137 Reds (ca. 1926) (Dove), 233 Red Tree and Sun (1929) (Dove), 231 Rembrandt, 8, 26 Reminiscence (1937) (Dove), 240–­41, 243 Republic (Plato), 220 “Rhapsody in Blue” (Gershwin), 147–­48, 155–­56, 165 Rhythm Rag (1927) (Dove), 149 “Rhythm Rag, The” (Robison), 149 Richards, William Trost, 263n102 Richardson, Lewis Fry, Forecast-­Factory, 142, 144–­45, 233, 249, 270–­71n150 River Bottom, Silver, Ochre, Carmine, Green (1923) (Dove), 69, 72, 74; coextension in, 71 Roberts, Jennifer L., 274n67, 281–­82n67 Robison, Willard, 149 Rose, Billy, 261n59 Rose and Locust Stump (1943) (Dove), 39 Rosenfeld, Paul, 3–­4, 96, 98, 234, 238, 240, 248, 253–­54, 260n40, 283n95 Rosten, Leo, 25 Rotch, A. Lawrence, 131 Rugg, Harold, 98 Ruskin, John, 269n128 Sails (1911–­1912) (Dove), 92, 95, 226 Sand and Sea (1943) (Dove), 96, 134, 178; as assemblage, 133; as landscape, 129, 131; as sounding and mapping device, 133 Sand Barge (1930) (Dove), 249, 286n137 Schwitters, Kurt, 28; Merzbilder of, 195 Sconce, Jeffrey, 175 Scopes, John T., and Monkey Trial, 243 Scott, Nancy, 277–­78n21 Sea I, The (1925) (Dove), 194, 226–­27 Sea II, The (1925) (Dove), 39, 192, 194, 226–­27

“Seafarer, The” (poem), 222–­23 Seagull Motif (Violet and Green) (1928) (Dove), 12, 39, 72, 96, 100, 114, 145, 148, 163, 202, 231. See also Sea Gull Motive (Sea Thunder or The Wave) (1928) (Dove) Sea Gull Motive (Sea Thunder or The Wave) (1928) (Dove), 69, 75, 80, 112, 263n98; Gregg shorthand in, 78; ribbon forms in, 76–­77, 79; waveforms in, 79. See also Seagull Motif (Violet and Green) (1928) (Dove) Sears, Roebuck and Co., 65 Second World War, 138 Seitz, William, 214, 276n1 “Self Portraits by Others” (Dove), 2, 26–­27 Sentimental Music (ca. 1913) (Dove), 166, 168, 184 “Serious Artist, The” (Pound), 222 Seven Americans (exhibition), 3, 28, 59, 192, 195 Seven Arts (journal), 98 Shakespeare, William, 2, 8, 29, 166 Sheeler, Charles, 254 Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y., The (1926) (O’Keeffe), 170 sign: letters, 25; punctuation marks, 25; symbols, 25; types of, 25 Silver Cedar Stump (Dove), 194, 202–­3, 211 Silver Sun (1929) (Dove), 17, 56–­57, 60, 68, 71, 221, 231 Silver Tanks (1929) (Dove), 62, 232–­33 Silver Tanks and Moon (1939) (Dove), 62 Simmel, Georg, 97, 265n35 Simpson, Marc, 72 Sinclair, Upton, 176 “Singing to Tens of Thousands” (Duthernoy), 174 Smith, Pamela Colman, 271n10 Smithsonian Institution, 117 Snowstorm (1935) (Dove), 284n116 Snyder, Joel, 216 Soby, J. T., 270n139 Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, The (Appadurai), 215 Something in Brown, Carmine, and Blue (1927) (Dove), 237 Song of the Telegraph (Burchfield), 224 sound, 162, 185; phonographic effect of, 157; visualization of, 184 Sound (1934) (Lawrie), 65 Sounding the Ocean of Air (Rotch), 131 Soviet Union, 138 Stafford, Barbara, 278n33 Starry Heavens (1924) (Dove), 22, 193–­94, 227; visual notation, forms of, in, 230 Stein, Gertrude, 2, 8, 22, 28–­30, 195, 214, 277n21 Stein, Leo, 215 Steinberg, Leo, flatbed picture plane, 199 Stettheimer, Florine, 75, 254, 263n106 Stewart, Garrett, 263n105 Stieglitz, Alfred, 2–­5, 8, 14, 22, 27–­31, 57, 59–­60, 72–­73, 75–­76, 79, 84–­85, 90–­92, 108–­9, 124, 127, 135, 140, 148, 161, 164–­ 65, 173, 176, 181, 186, 188, 192–­95, 200–­201, 204–­5, 212, 217, 230–­34, 241, 243, 246, 249, 253, 257n2, 260n40, 266n50, 278n32, 283n95; cloud photographs, 170–­71, 262n80, 262n81; collectivism of, 97–­98; cult of personality surrounding, 98; Stieglitz circle, members of, 248, 254, 259n25 Still Life with Chair Caning (Picasso), 278n26

Index

309

Storm Clouds (1935) (Dove), 100, 105, 232 “Straight Streets” (Frank), 134 Strand, Paul, 3–­4, 57, 59–­60, 75, 170, 176, 192, 243, 248, 258n15, 260n40 Strand, Rebecca, 59–­60, 170, 192, 243 Stravinsky, Igor, 147, 149, 157, 163 “Suggested Interview” (Dove), 176 Summer (1935) (Dove), 44 Sun (1943) (Dove), 42, 44, 110 Sun Drawing Water (1933) (Dove), 1, 11–­12, 14, 16, 22–­23, 54, 75, 80, 105, 112, 114, 134, 145, 163, 168, 171, 202, 234, 252; as instrumental work, 73–­74; as landscape, 129; photographs of, and weather map, as parallel, 135; ribbon forms in, 76–­77; signature in, 79; as summary image, 74, 81 Sun on the Lake (1938) (Dove), 44, 261n72 Sunrise, Northport Harbor (1929) (Dove), 17, 56–­57, 60; concentric circle motif in, 68, 71 Sunrise I (1936) (Dove), 17 Sunrise II (1936) (Dove), 17 Sunrise III (1936–­37) (Dove), 17 Surrealism, 195, 216–­17, 230, 252, 257–­58n14, 264n12, 284n109; sewing, as motif in, 206 Swift, Jonathan, 257–­58n14 Swing Music (Louis Armstrong) (1938) (Dove), 170, 182–­84, 188, 237, 275n106 Symmes, John Cleves, Jr., 142 “Task of the Translator, The” (Benjamin), 6 Taylor, Bert Leston, 283n95 Team of Horses (1911 or 1912) (Dove), 93, 95, 168, 170, 226 Telegraph Pole (1929) (Dove), 31, 44, 223–­27 telegraphy, 226–­27 telepathy, 175–­77, 179 Ten Cent Store (1924) (Dove), 194 “Ten Commandments, The” (Dove), 92, 96, 168, 231 “Ten Commandments, The” (exhibition), 3, 12, 99, 283n95 Tender Buttons (Stein), 29 theosophy, and white light, 91 There Was a Cat Somewhere (ca. 1940) (Dove), 246 Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (Daston), 216 thing theory, 240, 281–­82n67 Thompson, Emily, 156 Thoreau, Henry David, 267n68 3 Standard Stoppages (1913–­1914) (Duchamp), 206 Thrift, Nigel, 215 Thunder Shower (1940) (Dove), 44 Thunder Shower, Thunderstorm (1921) (Dove), 100, 105 Thunderstorm (1921) (Dove), 170 Thurber, James, 246, 285n128 Thyssen-­Bornemisza Collection, 284n108 Torr, Helen, 2–­3, 8, 11, 24–­25, 29, 31, 33, 35, 57, 75, 77, 97, 105, 108–­9, 111–­12, 123–­24, 147–­49, 155–­56, 159, 165, 171–72, 173–­79, 180–­81, 187, 188, 192, 194–­95, 199–­201, 204, 206, 214, 231–­33, 241, 246–­47, 249, 253–­54, 261n59, 273n59, 283n98 transition (journal), 28–­29, 259n37 translation, 5–­9, 23, 54, 185; blueprints of, 205; concentric circles motif, 52; as interchange, matter of, 53; and metal, 221; and radio, 175; signature, as function of, 44

310

Index

“Tree” (Williams), 280n58 Tree Forms (1932) (Dove), 225–­26 Tree Forms II (1935) (Dove), 237 Trees on the Pond (1941) (Dove), 209 Turner, Elizabeth Hutton, 255n1 Twain, Mark, 246 “20th Century Limited or the Train Left without Them, The” (Dove), 84, 124 “291” (Dove), 30 “291 Fifth Avenue” (Rosenfeld), 98 Ulysses ( Joyce), 214, 252–­53 United States, 83, 91, 119–­20, 124, 129, 137, 154, 174, 178, 184, 247–­48, 265n35, 267n68; weather reporting in, 117 U.S. (1940) (Dove), 139–­40, 188 US Signal Army Office, 117 US Weather Bureau, 117–­18, 122, 125; as household presence, 120; weather maps of, 119–­21, 220, 267n77, 267n82 Van Dine, S. S. See Wright, Willard Huntington Verbeck, Peter-­Paul, 282n71 Verne, Jules, 142 Vincent Lopez Orchestra, 65 von Freytag-­Loringhoven, Elsa, 28 von Humboldt, Alexander, 121, 131 Walk, Poplars, A (1912–­1913) (Dove), 225 Walkowitz, Abraham, 3 War (1939) (Dove), 139 Ward, Martha, 246 Warhol, Andy, 247, 286n135 Warren, Richard, 122–­23 waves: communication, as motif of, 81; translation, as motif of, 81; transmission, as shorthand for, 81 “Way to Look at Things, A” (Dove), 2, 28, 30, 105, 192, 212 weather, 81–­82; almanacs, 121–­22; as global phenomenon, 117; and intersubjectivity, 125; as irregular process, 123; as network, 116–­17, 119; prediction of, 142; science of, 117–­23, 125–­26, 177; and telegraph, 117–­18; translation, as form of, 118; transnational nature of, 120; as unseeable, 123; weather lore, 125; weather science, circle form, as prominent in, 140–­41; web of relationships, model for, 125 Weatherly, Newton, 2, 22 weather maps, 123, 126; circle form in, 141; as global phenomenon, 120; isolines of, 119, 133, 220; relationships, as image of, 119; symbols of, 120 Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (Richardson), 142, 145 Weather Rambles (Humphreys), 125 Westermann, H. C., 286n136 Whatham, Richard, 142 “When Things Dream” (Tzara), 280n57 Whiteman, Paul, 147–­49, 157 Why the Weather? (Brooks), 141 Wichita Art Museum, 88 Wilfred, Thomas, 164 Williams, William Carlos, 28, 280n58 Wilson, Edmund, 164 Wilson, Kristina, 260n54 Wind (No. 3) (1935–­1936) (Dove), 100

Wind on Hillside (ca. 1911) (Dove), 94. See also Nature Symbolized No. 2 (ca. 1911) (Dove) Winesburg, Ohio (Anderson), 277–­78n21 WLS (radio station), 65 Wood, Grant, 165 World Almanac and Book of Facts for 1924, The, 122 Wright, Willard Huntington, 88 W. Scott Thurber Galleries, 3, 92 Young, Thomas, 63 “Young Americans,” 98 Young Old Master (1946) (Dove), 44 Your Baby (1942) (Dove), 138 Yours Truly (1927) (Dove), 148 Zoler, Emile, 262n81

Index

311