To the Editors:
Despite Hilton Kramer’s first-paragraph sideswipe at the “academic, lackluster” prose of my book, Arthur Dove: Life and Work, With a Catalogue Raisonné, I read his essay (“A Catalogue Raisonné for Arthur Dove,” February, 1985) with interest. As he has in the past, Hilton Kramer writes about Dove’s work with insight and, if I may say so, an admiration that seems no less ardent than that which he ascribes to me.

Nevertheless, because Mr. Kramer and I do not reach the same conclusions about the artist, I would like to raise a few points in relation to his review. For one thing, I would like to comment on Mr. Kramer’s statement that I “simply cannot accept the fact of Dove’s isolation from precisely the kind of history that, as an historian of modern art, obviously means the most to her.” True. I am sorry that my book has not converted Mr. Kramer from the ahistorical view that he has promoted in all his writings on the artist for some twenty years. I would agree that Dove’s art often has an idiosyncratic quality. But quite honestly, I was consciously trying to rescue Dove from the homely, down-on-the farm, island-unto-himself image that Stieglitz invented (as I point out) and that has been the official line on Dove ever since Paul Rosenfeld published the first major appreciation of his work in 1924.. My desire to reveal the artist in history—as belonging to a context of ideas, particularly—does