Stop and Look – Nature Symbolised by Arthur Dove (1911)

We’re all familiar with the paintings – usually enormous – of the American Abstract Expressionists – Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and the rest – who flourished, and were energetically promoted, in the 1950s. During the Cold War, there were urgent political reasons why these artists were trumpeted so loudly: America needed to be known internationally for having a vigorous avant-garde school of painting. But Abstraction, that ultimate modern style, wasn’t new to America at that time. It had in fact been virtually invented in the United States nearly half a century earlier.

We’re taught that Abstract Art began with the experiments of the Russian Wassily Kandinsky and the Dutchman Piet Mondrian around 1910-12. By some abstruse conspiracy, it seems, American artists’ experiments along the same lines at the same date have received almost no attention outside their native country.

Arthur Dove, a native of upstate New York, lived in Paris between 1907 and 1909, where he came in touch with the Post-Impressionists and got to know the work of Cezanne and Matisse. With that introduction, when he returned to America he suddenly adopted pure abstraction as a valid visual language.

He doesn’t seem to have gone through the stages of gradually shedding representation, as both Kandinsky and Mondrian did, but plunged straight in, producing completely non-representational images without excuse or fuss. He went on doing so during a productive career until his death just after the Second World War.

From the start, Dove’s attitude to abstraction was flexible: he made purely non-representational pictures, but like many other abstractionists he often took hints from his experience of nature: landscapes, plants forms, weather conditions, which he incorporated into patterns that exist principally in terms of rhythm and balanced colour.

Sometimes there’s a symbolic element in the design as well. In this small work from the earliest years of his experiments with abstraction Dove himself asks us to see his picture as symbolic.

But symbolic of what? The symbolism is so generalised that we have to work out for ourselves in what way the forms and colours relate to any external visual experience. Perhaps the experience Dove had in mind was not visual at all, but rather internal, mental.

His imagery relates to the meaning of the picture quite differently from other early abstract work: it’s not an evocation of any specific experience, nor it is an exercise in formal design.

He once explained that while analysing his method of working he reached a point when he “no longer observed in the old way, but ‘began to remember certain sensations purely through their form and colour.”

Myself, I’m inclined to see this picture as synaesthetic: standing for another medium. And that medium is surely music, the only one of the fine arts that reveals itself almost solely in abstract terms. Dove’s shifting patterns of green, yellow and black seem (perhaps it’s my imagination) with their suave rhythms and curves to translate into almost audible musical harmonies.

Even Kandinsky and Mondrian had barely reached such a pitch of independence from the appearance of the external world at this date: Dove deserves recognition as a pioneer not only in America but on the international stage.

Andrew Wilton was the first Curator of the Clore Gallery for the Turner Collection at Tate Britain and is the author of many works on the artist.