The painter Arthur Dove (1880–1946) is an artist whose work has not
been much on view in New York in recent years. The lone watercolor
or painting included in survey
exhibitions has been intriguing, but also puzzling:
seen piecemeal, Dove’s work can seem remote.
His painting The Inn (1942) was on view last year
in a show at the Met honoring the collectors Edith and Milton Lowenthal.
Yet viewed in the context of American modernism, the picture
may as well have
come from Mars. This is
due not only to the singularity—one
might say the solitariness—of Dove’s art, but also to the fact
that it isn’t well known to a lot of us. To be sure,
the name of Arthur Dove is likely to prompt
vaguely recalled historical tidbits: that he was part of
Stieglitz’s circle; that he created collages which were, at the
time, aesthetically radical; and that he may have been
the first artist to paint a nonobjective painting. Dove has, in
other words, entered the canon of art history. But when has that
ever guaranteed a true understanding of an artist’s accomplishment?

It is unexpected, then, that there are no fewer than four
separate museum and gallery exhibitions devoted to Dove currently
on view in Manhattan. (One
of them pairs Dove’s work with that of his wife, the painter Helen
Torr.) Multiple and simultaneous shows are usually devoted to art-world
hotshots, “major” artists whose
work rarely deserves (or sustains) such attention. In contrast,
the paintings