| "The Ten Commandments" series Arthur Dove first exhibited in 1912 is renowned for its early, extreme demonstration of abstraction in the United States. His precocious achievement commonly has been attributed to either an emulation of European style or an independent transformation of natural form directed by the artist's devotional absorption in that order. These romanticized interpretations misrepresent Dove's involvement with the vanguard and fail to recognize the seminal sources and significance of his early abstraction.; Stylistic analysis of Dove's formative development, 1908-20, serves to identify his hallmark style and abstracting processes. It shows that his abstraction evolved from a visually-based distillation to a nonillusionistic, metaphoric synthesis and that "The Ten Commandments" represent the embryo of his mature style.; The second part of this inquiry addresses formal sources. Chapters II and III evaluate Dove's contact with modern European movements during his months abroad, 1908-09, and early years of affiliation with Alfred Stieglitz, 1909-12. This review indicates Dove's general acquaintance with Picasso, Braque, the Italian Futurists, and Kandinsky by 1912. His formal response, however, was confined to the Cubist propositions he saw at the 191 Picasso exhibition at Stieglitz's gallery; and the resultant geometric compositions testify to the higher authority the American accorded decorative models of abstraction.; Chapter IV considers the guidance Dove found in the applied arts. During 1908-09, Matisse's "Notes of a Painter" and ornamental treatments of still-life delivered the initial insight. Between 1910-12, Dove's decorative sensibility turned toward abstraction, aided by the reformist aesthetics and formal principles of Arthur Wesley Dow's art education manuals Composition (1899) and Theory and Practice of Teaching Art (1908) and Owen Jones's The Grammar of Ornament (1856).; The concluding chapter assesses the content and overall significance of Dove's early art. Survey of his pictorial imagery and writings established "the reality of the sensation" as the mainstay of his abstraction. He exploited his stream-of-consciousness, "the reality of the sensation," for the process and content of his art. The resultant images represent his experiential sensations of being. They register fugitive effects of time, motion, and natural process at the same time they recreate the montage of memory, perception, and anticipation that is human consciousness. His pictures thus affirm progressive views of art and existence notably popularized in the vitalist philosophy of Henri Bergson. In pursuing "the reality of the sensation" and consulting the decorative tradition, Dove allied his endeaveor with two major generative forces of early 20th-century art. Hence, his abstract style of 1912 belongs neither to the province of naive genius nor provincial imitator, but to the cosmopolis history reverse as avant-garde. |
