"To make something that is real in itself, that does not remind anyone of any other thing, and that does not have to be explained, like the letter A, for instance.", Arthur Dove
Arthur Garfield Dove (August 2, 1880 – November 23, 1946) was an American painter widely regarded as the first American artist to commit fully to pure abstraction. Born into a prosperous family in Canandaigua, New York, he attended Hobart College and Cornell University and began his working life as a magazine illustrator for Harper's and the Saturday Evening Post. A 1908–09 trip to France brought him into contact with Fauvism at the Salon d'Automne and into the circle of young American painters in Paris, including Alfred Maurer and Max Weber, and the experience set the direction of the rest of his career.
Returning to New York, he became a central figure in Alfred Stieglitz's circle. His first solo exhibition at Stieglitz's 291 gallery in 1912 introduced an audience to a body of pastels and paintings that have since been recognized as among the earliest purely abstract works produced anywhere. His paintings are held in the Phillips Collection, which holds the largest single body of his work, as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.