'Contemporary painters who locate themselves “between abstraction and figuration” — and there are many — can look to the historical example of the early American modernist Arthur Dove. The subject of the inaugural exhibition at Schoelkopf’s new TriBeCa space, Dove (1880-1946) made sensitive and visionary landscapes that gave form (just barely) to natural phenomena like weather and the changes of seasons.
To Dove, nature was essentially abstract and events such as thunderstorms allowed us to see it that way. As he told a writer for The Chicago Examiner in 1912, “Yes, I could paint a cyclone, not in the usual mode of sweeps of grey wind over the earth, trees bending and a furious sky above. I would paint the mighty folds of the wind in comprehensive colors; I would show repetitions and convolutions of the rage of the tempest. I would paint the wind, not a landscape chastised by the cyclone.”
Although there are no extreme weather events in the works on view, spring arrives with a cataclysmic explosion in the vibrant pastel on canvas “March, April,” from 1929. And in “Tanks and Snowbank” (1933), sunlight glinting off two silver industrial tanks on a winter day produces a spiky halo that extends all the way to the edges of the picture.
The show runs up through the mid 1940s, when fully nonobjective painting was the goal for many artists in Dove’s circle. Among these canvases is the last painting he made, a moody and evocative arrangement of angular shapes in red, yellow and green. The title he gave it says a lot about his imaginative and still inspirational elision of categories: “Beyond Abstraction.”' KAREN ROSENBERG
Read the full article here: NYT | What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in November
