?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 50,000
ARTHUR DOVE Patent Cereals Company, Geneva, New York.
Watercolor on paper, circa 1938. 140x230 mm; 5 1/2x9 inches. Signed in black ink, lower center recto. Ex-collection Peter Deitsch Gallery, New York, acquired from the above by the currents owners parents, thence by descent.
Dove (1880-1946) is among the foremost American modernist artists and considered by many to be the first American abstract painter. After attending Hobart College and Cornell University, Dove worked as an illustrator in New York for Harper's Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, despite objections from his parents who wanted him to pursue a professional career on par with his Ivy League education and discouraged his artistic pursuits. In 1907, he traveled with his first wife to Europe, visiting Italy and Spain and spending time in Paris, where he immersed himself in the avant-garde art in the city, notably Henri Matisse and the Fauves.
Dove met the important gallerist and photographer Alfred Stieglitz on his return to New York in 1909, through an introduction from the American modernist painter Alfred Maurer, whom Dove had befriended in Europe. Stieglitz took Dove under his wing, encouraging his fledgling creativity and forays into abstract art. Dove exhbitied at Stieglitz's 291 Gallery, New York, from 1910 into the 1940s, gaining prominence through Steiglitz's constant promotion of his work. Another consistent supporter of Dove's work was the patron Duncan Phillips, founder of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Phillips encountered Dove's work through Steiglitz's gallery and was a frequent purchaser of his paintings; ultimatey Phillips paid Dove a commission of $50.00 per month in exchange for first choice of paintings from each of his exhibitions.
Dove's family was from upstate New York and the artist would have known the prominent Patent Cereals Company factory in Geneva, nearby his hometown of Canandaigua, while he was growing up and from visits back home. He used similar imagery in his paintings Building Moving Past a Sky, 1938, now in the Tucson Museum of Art, and Tanks, 1938, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
