Arthur Dove

Dove’s Life

Arthur Dove (1880-1946), son of the Dove Block’s builder, William Dove, was born in nearby Canandaigua, New York, in 1880, and moved to Geneva when he was two. Growing up in Geneva provided an experience which would fuel his love of nature and his art for the rest of his life. As a child, he was befriended by a neighbor Newton Wetherby, a naturalist who helped form Dove’s appreciation of nature. Weatherby was also an amateur painter who gave Dove pieces of leftover canvas with which to work. He attended Hobart College for two years before moving on to Cornell University in Ithaca, earning his degree in 1903. During his Cornell time, he took courses in painting and drawing. Upon graduation, he began a career as an art illustrator in New York City. Very successful in this capacity, he soon chaffed at the restrictions of the medium and began to feel a need to create art based on his own vision.

Dove and his first wife, Florence, traveled to France and moved to Paris, then the world's art capital. They made short trips to both Italy and Spain. While there, Dove joined a group of experimental artists from the United States, which included Alfred Henry Maurer. Dove and Maurer remained friends until Maurer's suicide in 1932. While in Europe, Dove was introduced to new painting styles, in particular the the Fauvist works of Henri Matisse, and he exhibited at the annual Autumn Salon in 1908 and 1909. Feeling a clearer sense as an artist, he returned to New York.

Returning to New York in 1909, he immediately set to work in this new vein, becoming America’s first abstract painter in the process. His son, William C. Dove, was born on July 4, 1909. Along with his New York friends, photographer Alfred Stieglitz and artist Georgia O’Keeffe, he became, one of the acknowledged founders of “American Modernism”, along with other innovative artists like John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Thomas Hart Benton. During the mid-1930s, following his mother’s death (his father had died in 1921), and his marriage with Florence now over, he returned to Geneva with his second wife, the artist Helen “Reds” Torr to settle the family estate.

For some time, the couple lived on the nearby family farm while Dove, hoping to make some money in the midst of the Great Depression, tried his hand at various tasks—raising chickens, growing crops. All these eventually proved themselves unsuccessful, which led to Dove accepting the financial support of the art collector, Duncan Phillips (later the founder of the world-famous Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., which houses the largest collection of Dove’s work in the world. Dove and Torr moved to the third-floor of the Dove Block, which, since the late 1870s, his father had operated as a successful commercial building. The move allowed Dove to concentrate exclusively on his painting and drawing. While residing in the Dove Block, he painted nearly a hundred of what are now seen as his most critically-acclaimed works, including what is perhaps his most famous, “Red Sun”; an abstract vision of the sun rising over Geneva’s Lake Seneca, with the area’s surrounding fields in the foreground. 

In 1938, Dove and Torr decided to move to Long Island in order to be closer to the increasingly thriving modern art scene in New York City. There, as his health continued to fail, Dove continued painting until his death in 1946. Torr survived him until 1967.

In the introduction to Arthur Dove: A Retrospective (MIT Press 1998), Dove’s work is characterized as “possess(ing) a radical content that came from the description of intangible elements such as movement, space, and above all, light. These features were suggestive of abstract shapes and lines and quickly developed for the artist [a reputation] that proved international in its scope and practice.” Today, Dove’s paintings are part of the permanent collections of, among many others, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum.

 Helen S. Torr (1886–1967)

With the recent, intense interest in modernist art, the work of many, often lesser, artists has come to the fore. It is only fitting that Helen Torr's work, long overlooked as the product of a fringe member of the Stieglitz circle, should be reevaluated and recognized for its uniqueness and its quality. In the fecund mix of philosophy and aesthetics of this remarkable group of artists, many pursued similar or overlapping paths, but few followed them as instinctively as Helen Torr. Disregarded by her peers yet viewed as an equal and an inspiration by her husband, Reds produced a distinctive body of work that is informed with her own idiosyncratic style, elegance, and sense of color. Her compelling early abstractions, her carefully painted still lifes of shells and flowers, her rhythmic rolling hills and fields, her inspired harbor front scenes from Huntington, and her accomplished charcoals all testify to a potential that was never fulfilled. It is tragic that, despite Dove's strong advocacy, her abilities were not recognized in her lifetime...It is our great good fortune that her work – all the more precious for the modest number of pieces that she evidently considered worth saving – has survived and can now stand, out of the shadows, on its own merit.

Anne Cohen DePietro, “Out of the Shadows: Helen Torr,” Out of the Shadows: Helen Torr, a Retrospective. Huntington: Heckscher Museum of Art, 2003, p. 39.

Helen S. Torr (1886-1967) was an early American Modernist painter. Known as “Reds” because of her hair color, Torr worked alongside other artists, namely her husband Arthur Dove and friend Georgia O’Keeffe, to develop a characteristically American style of Modernism in the 1920s. Torr was born in Roxbury, Philadelphia in 1886. In 1906, Helen Torr won a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied under William Merritt Chase; later, she would go on to study at Drexel University. Her first marriage was to the cartoonist Clive Weed. Torr was reluctant to put her works in exhibitions and found encouragement through her friendships. Most of her work was not shown during her lifetime. Throughout her career, Torr tended to focus on the creation of both oil paintings and charcoal-based drawings.

Torr met fellow artist Arthur Dove in Westport, Connecticut, which resulted in both artists leaving their first marriages. Around 1924, the couple settled aboard a sailboat anchored in Halesite on Long Island. In 1933, they moved to Dove’s hometown, Geneva, New York, where they lived until 1938 when they moved to a cottage in Centerport on Long Island. They lived in the cottage until Dove’ death in 1946. Torr died in Bayshore, Long Island, New York, in 1967.

Torr’s work was exhibited publicly only twice during her life, one of those at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, An American Place, in 1933 as part of a group show. Torr outlived Dove by 21 years but never resumed painting, and requested that all her paintings and drawings be destroyed. Instead, her sister donated much of her work to the Heckscher Museum, which organized a show of her work in 1972. In 1980, the Graham Gallery in New York held a solo exhibition of her work. Some of her works are currently held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The cottage in which she and Dove resided was acquired in 1998 by the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York, and in 2000, was accepted into the Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios Program administered by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.