To mark the publication of Ann Lee Morgan’s Arthur Dove: Life and Work, With a Catalogue Raisonné,[1] three New York galleries—Dintenfass, Mathes, and Salander-O’Reilly—recently joined in mounting what was described as “an overall view” of Dove’s paintings, watercolors, drawings, and collages.[2] It is welcome news that at long last— nearly forty years after his death—we have been given a catalogue raisonné of the work of this distinguished American painter. Unfortunately, the publication itself is no masterpiece. Its design is pedestrian, its paper and printing are just barely respectable, and its prose is of that academic, lackluster variety which is guaranteed to discourage the interest of all but professional researchers and the most ardent devotees of Dove’s art. Among knowledgeable insiders, moreover, there are already some complaints about omissions and factual errors, and on that score as well as others we are likely to hear more in the future. But the basic task would appear to have been begun, anyway, in establishing a reliable guide to the artist’s oeuvre and to the literature that has gathered around it since Dove first exhibited his work in the Salon d’autumn in Paris in 1908, and for that at least we can be truly grateful. And all the more so, of course, because serious, comprehensive scholarship in the field of early American modernism is still the exception rather than the rule.

In a more perfect world, to be sure, it might have been expected that one of our museums