Curator, Ann Temkin: Although American artist Arthur Dove spent two years in Paris where he exhibited at the Salon Doum. It was upon his return to New York in 1911 that he saw the nearly abstract Cubist works of Pablo Picasso. Curator Leah Dickerman.
Curator, Leah Dickerman: Picasso's work made a strong impression on Dove, and he saw what some of his European contemporary saw the logical outcome of that work was abstraction. In February, 1912, Arthur Dove showed a series of work that were groundbreaking in their abstraction, like nothing an American audience had ever seen before.
He called the vectors and curvalinear forms that you see within these works force lines, they suggest emergence and disillusion of forms in motion. What he was interested in is capturing the sensation of natural forces like growth and decay rather than depicting something. When he spoke about it, he said, I would like 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 example.