Dove's importance lies less in any single picture than in the priority of his decision: to commit American painting to pure abstraction at a moment when no native tradition for it existed and no American audience expected it.
Dove came to abstraction by way of the most conventional possible American art career. He grew up in a comfortable upstate New York household, was educated at two private colleges, and supported himself in his twenties as a successful magazine illustrator working for the leading mass-circulation publications of the period. The decisive break came with his European trip, where the Salon d'Automne exposed him directly to Cézanne, Matisse, and the broader Fauvist current, and where time spent among the American expatriates in Paris loosened his sense of what painting could be.
Back in the United States, he gave up illustration, took up subsistence farming on the North Shore of Long Island, and began the small, dense, organic abstractions for which he is now remembered. Stieglitz, already the central impresario of American modernism, invited him into his orbit in 1910, and from his first 291 show onward Dove remained one of Stieglitz's core artists, alongside Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Paul Strand. The relationship gave him a steady, if always modest, exhibition platform for the rest of his life.
Dove preferred the term "extraction" to "abstraction", the act of distilling the essential form, color, and feeling of a natural subject rather than departing from nature altogether. The resulting paintings sit at a permanent middle distance: pulses of light, weather, plants, water, sound translated into color, machinery, never quite legible as objects, never quite indifferent to them. In the 1920s he extended the practice into a remarkable run of small experimental collages constructed from found materials, an idiom almost without precedent in American art at the time.
His circumstances were never easy. He spent much of the 1920s living on a yawl on Long Island Sound with the painter Helen Torr, known as "Reds", whom he married in 1932, and he depended throughout his career on the steady, sometimes singular, support of the collector Duncan Phillips. Phillips's purchases, advances, and stipends kept Dove painting through periods when little of his work was selling, and Phillips's institutional commitment to him is the reason that the largest single body of his work resides in his namesake collection in Washington today.
Dove worked steadily through declining health in the 1940s and produced some of his most distilled paintings in the final years before his death. His position in twentieth-century American art has continued to grow since, and his organic, nature-rooted abstraction is now read both as a parallel, and in important respects an anticipatory, current to the European nonobjective painting that emerged in the same decade and to the Abstract Expressionist generation that followed.