About this item
In collaboration with William C. Agee and Elizabeth Hutton Turner The American artist Arthur Dove (1880-1946) , purportedly the first artist to have produced an abstract painting, has always occupied a central place in writings on early American modernism. This book accompanies the first major exhibition on Dove since 1974. The exhibition, organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art and the Phillips Collection, covers the period from 1908, the year after Dove took up painting, through 1946, the year of his death. It is comprised of approximately eighty paintings, collages, pastels, and charcoal drawings. Along with Georgia O'Keeffe and John Marin, Dove was touted for more than three decades by photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz as an American original, one whose work was prescient in its opposition to the materialism of a newly industrialized America.
About the Author
Debra Bricker Balken is an independent curator and writer who has organized numerous exhibitions on subjects relating to American modernism and contemporary art for major museums internationally. Her award-winning books include Philip Guston's Poor Richard (2001) and Abstract Expressionism: Movements in Modern Art (2005) , as well as exhibition catalogues such as Arthur Dove, A Retrospective (1997) , The Park Avenue Cubists (2003) , Dove/O'Keeffe: Circles of Influence (2009) , After Many Springs: Regionalism, Modernism and the Midwest (2009) , John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist (2010) , and John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury (2011) .Recipient of an Inaugural Clark Fellowship at the Clark Art Institute (2001) , a Senior Fellowship from the Dedalus Foundation (2002) , and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (2006) , she is currently completing a study of the American midcentury art critic Harold Rosenberg for the University of Chicago Press with grants from the Getty Research Institute (2002) and Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts (2008) . She has taught at numerous universities, including Brown University, the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2005, she served as the Sterling and Francine Clark Visiting Professor in the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.Her exhibition, Mark Tobey, Threading Light, organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art, opened at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection with the Venice Biennale in May 2017. She is presently working on a revision to the Arthur Dove Catalogue Raisonné (2020) and guest-curating an exhibition, Americans in Paris, Artists in the City of Light, 1946-1968, for the Grey Art Gallery at New York University (2020) .
