SCARCE STEIN, EX-COLLECTION ARTHUR DOVE STEIN, GERTRUDE. Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia. 8vo, original hand-made floral Florentine wallpaper wrappers, neatly split along fold, small creasing to upper front wrapper; printed paper label on front cover, faint foxing; small finger smudge at margin of one page. (Florence: Privately Printed, [1912])
first edition, one of 300 unnumbered copies and ex-collection artist arthur dove with his signature in pencil on the recto of the rear wrapper. This copy with the printer's imprint at the foot of page [12]. Often cited as the first American abstract painter, Dove was well acquainted with Stein and they moved in the same circles in New York and Paris, and Stein's language experiments may be seen as a linguistic corollary to Dove's early experimental oil abstractions. The present copy was acquired by Eva Ingersoll Gatling, director of the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, Long Island, New York, as part of a larger archive bequethed to her by Dove (upon her death in 2000, the bulk of this important collection was then retained by Yale University Art Gallery), thence by descent to current owner. A fine association copy concerning two very important figures in American Modernism.
