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Arthur Dove
Mars Orange and Green, 1935
Like his colleague and friend Georgia O'Keeffe, whose White Iris hangs nearby, Arthur Dove found his subject in the natural world. His biomorphic landscapes of the Finger Lakes region of Geneva, New York, where this work was painted, was suffused with an organic abundance not unlike O'Keeffe's floral imagery. Mars Orange and Green reveals a specificity of place that resonated for many of Dove's contemporaries. O'Keeffe once explained that Dove was among her favorite painters because "he would get the feel of a particular place so completely that you'd know you'd been there."
During Dove's Geneva residency, from 1933 to 1938, he devoted himself to a systematic focus on medium and technique. The title of this picture refers to two specific paint colors the artist favored in the mid-1930s and underlies his emphasis on artistic process over basic landscape elements of trees, hills, a bird, and a cottage -- reduced here to vivid, if schematic, motifs. |