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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming revision of the Arthur Dove Catalogue Raisonné, under the direction of Debra Bricker Balken.
Translating one of the most popular musical compositions of the twentieth century into a visual homage, while combining the all-over flatness of abstract painting with three-dimensional assemblage and glints of metal, Arthur Dove’s George Gershwin—“Rhapsody in Blue” paintings stand among the most radically experimental works of an artistic career known for its innovation. Lots 19 and 20 belong to a series of six paintings by Dove inspired by music and exhibited together at Alfred Stieglitz's The Intimate Gallery in 1927. The related works are another George Gershwin-inspired painting I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts), An Orange Grove in California—Irving Berlin (Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain), Rhythm Rag (lost) and Improvision (Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado). Created in the middle of the Roaring Twenties, these paintings vividly evoke the vibrant, improvisational spirit of American jazz. Gershwin himself described “Rhapsody in Blue” as “as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America—of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our blues, our metropolitan madness.” (as quoted in I. Goldberg, George Gershwin: A Study in American Music, New York, 1961, p. 139) In this way, Dove’s musical paintings transcribe not only the feeling of Gershwin’s songs, but moreover distill into color and line the essence of the dynamism of the American Jazz Age.
In 1924, George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” debuted at New York’s Aeolian Hall as the star composition of popular band leader Paul Whiteman’s An Experiment in Modern Music. The occasion marked one of the first times modern jazz music was performed in the formal setting of an orchestral hall. Gershwin recalled of his inspiration behind the song, “It was on the train [to Boston] with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty-bang that is so often so stimulating to a composer…And there I suddenly heard–and even saw on paper–the complete construction of the rhapsody from beginning to end…” (as quoted in George Gershwin: A Study in American Music, p. 139) The resulting composition fused this modern mechanical element with the rhythmic syncopations and harmonies of jazz into the traditional format of a rhapsody. Gershwin also added an element of synesthesia to his composition with the subtitle “in Blue,” suggesting a visual element to the aural experience, as well as a reference to the old-time musical “blues.” This amalgamation of influences reflects the unique experience of American culture during this era, as embodied by Gershwin’s statement, “And what is the voice of the American soul? It is jazz…It is all colors and all souls unified in the great melting-pot of the world.” (as quoted in B.L. Leach, Looking and Listening: Conversations between Modern Art and Music, Lanham, Maryland, 2015, p. 17)
During this period, visual artists, including Arthur Dove and other members of the Stieglitz Circle, were similarly striving to express the uniqueness of twentieth-century America in their art, seeking inspiration from the rapidly changing cities and cultures around them, and also often in the jazz music of their contemporaries. Donna M. Cassidy explains, “By painting jazz Dove not only stamped his art as native but did so using a modern style. He rejected the descriptive realism of American Scene painting and fashioned instead a form of abstraction rooted in native, nationalistic sources.” (Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, Washington, D.C., 1997, p. 81) Dove himself was an amateur musician and singer, and his interest in jazz was likely peaked when he attended one of Paul Whiteman’s concerts in December 1925. The following year, he purchased five jazz albums, including “Rhapsody in Blue,” and began to regularly listen to them at home and with friends. By December 1926 and into the next year, he was painting works specifically inspired by the records. His partner Helen “Reds” Torr wrote in her diary on December 1, 1926: “After supper A. did handsome spirited ‘music’ with almost everything in sight to Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’” (Archives of American Art, Arthur and Helen Torr Dove papers)
For this series of works, Dove would listen to the musical piece over and over again while working, creating ticker-tape-like long pieces of paper filled with notations transcribing the musical rhythms. This linear style transfers into the final works as well, in which swathes of broader color are overlain with gestural cross-hatched lines and swirls. Rachel Z. DeLue describes, “Sweeping and spiraling lines and sizzling color mark the quick and deft cadences and the brash energy of the compositions in question, while linear couplings call to mind the call-and-response effects typical of jazz. This includes…the clock spring and its painted almost-shadow in Rhapsody in Blue, Part I, and the staccato slashes welded over wending lines in Rhapsody in Blue, Part II....Quick-seeming and all-over brushwork engenders a sense of improvisation in each of the canvases…something Dove probably associated with jazz even if the recordings were not themselves the products of improvisation.” (Arthur Dove: Always Connect, Chicago, Illinois, 2016, p. 158)
Through such techniques, in the present works Dove not only references “Rhapsody in Blue” by utilizing the color blue and conveying the overall feeling of the music, but also seemingly translates the specific notes and rhythms into visual form. Harry Cooper writes, “few other modern paintings have so directly referenced specific jazz compositions, let alone particular performances or recordings.” (“Arthur Dove Paints a Record,” Notes in the History of Art, vol. 24, no. 2, Winter 2005, p. 70) Based on the paintings’ designations into Part I and Part II, scholars have deduced that Dove must have been listening to one of the early 78 rpm recordings of “Rhapsody in Blue,” which featured 2-3 minutes of music on each side of the album: Part I, the allegro opening, and Part II, the slower middle section and quick finale. Thus, the long vertical lines of Dove’s George Gershwin—“Rhapsody in Blue,” Part I have been related to the famous clarinet glissando which opens the song, and the sweeping whirlwind of George Gershwin—“Rhapsody in Blue,” Part II to the building crescendo of the finale.
The gestural physicality of the works is augmented by the collage element of the clock spring in Part I. In the 1920s, while focusing on music, Dove was also working on a series of assemblages of everyday objects, which not only formed the visual effect he was seeking but also added inherent metaphor. For example, he employed a spring, lens and photographic plate in his abstract Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz (1924, Museum of Modern Art, New York) to form a head-and-body arrangement but also to suggest his subject’s photography career. The metal spring in George Gershwin—“Rhapsody in Blue,” Part I similarly elevates the work beyond its design to include several meanings related to its physical material. The metal spring, and metal paint in both works, recall the train tracks that inspired Gershwin’s composition, the spring-driven motor and hand crank of the phonograph by which Dove listened to the music, and more generally the spirit of the Machine Age. The spring also brings an element of time into the painting—of course, a key element of music—as Dove wrote to Stieglitz in 1925: “The future seems to be gone through by a spiral spring from the past. The tension of that spring is the important thing.” (as quoted in Arthur Dove: Always Connect, p. 161)
Exploring these deeply intellectual and spiritual themes by relating them to approachable, popular music, Dove was perhaps seeking a means by which to expand the appreciation of his revolutionary abstract art to a broader audience. As he wrote to Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, “[Friends] have waxed enthusiastic over a ‘thing’ of mine being done from Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ not as yet completed, but I feel it will make people see that the so called ‘abstractions’ are not abstract at all…It is illustration.” (Undated letter, Dove to Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz Archive, YCAL) While he may not have fully succeeded in relating to his contemporary viewers, who described the 1927 exhibition of his music paintings as “so largely fourth dimensional that ordinary standards of judgment fail when applied to them” (E.A. Jewell, “Arthur Dove’s New Work,” The New York Times, December 18, 1927), this supremely innovative series helps unveil some of the key inspirations of Dove’s profound career in abstraction—namely, the rhythm and beat of the American Jazz Age. As Judith Zilczer declares, “With his jazz paintings, Dove evoked the fast-paced tempo of twentieth-century life, and, in so doing, he came as close as any American modernist to achieving visual music on the two dimensional canvas.” (“Form Modern to Postmodern in Visual Music,” The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Western Art, Oxford, England, 2016, p. 22)
Translating one of the most popular musical compositions of the twentieth century into a visual homage, while combining the all-over flatness of abstract painting with three-dimensional assemblage and glints of metal, Arthur Dove’s George Gershwin—“Rhapsody in Blue” paintings stand among the most radically experimental works of an artistic career known for its innovation. Lots 19 and 20 belong to a series of six paintings by Dove inspired by music and exhibited together at Alfred Stieglitz's The Intimate Gallery in 1927. The related works are another George Gershwin-inspired painting I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts), An Orange Grove in California—Irving Berlin (Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain), Rhythm Rag (lost) and Improvision (Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado). Created in the middle of the Roaring Twenties, these paintings vividly evoke the vibrant, improvisational spirit of American jazz. Gershwin himself described “Rhapsody in Blue” as “as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America—of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our blues, our metropolitan madness.” (as quoted in I. Goldberg, George Gershwin: A Study in American Music, New York, 1961, p. 139) In this way, Dove’s musical paintings transcribe not only the feeling of Gershwin’s songs, but moreover distill into color and line the essence of the dynamism of the American Jazz Age.
In 1924, George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” debuted at New York’s Aeolian Hall as the star composition of popular band leader Paul Whiteman’s An Experiment in Modern Music. The occasion marked one of the first times modern jazz music was performed in the formal setting of an orchestral hall. Gershwin recalled of his inspiration behind the song, “It was on the train [to Boston] with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty-bang that is so often so stimulating to a composer…And there I suddenly heard–and even saw on paper–the complete construction of the rhapsody from beginning to end…” (as quoted in George Gershwin: A Study in American Music, p. 139) The resulting composition fused this modern mechanical element with the rhythmic syncopations and harmonies of jazz into the traditional format of a rhapsody. Gershwin also added an element of synesthesia to his composition with the subtitle “in Blue,” suggesting a visual element to the aural experience, as well as a reference to the old-time musical “blues.” This amalgamation of influences reflects the unique experience of American culture during this era, as embodied by Gershwin’s statement, “And what is the voice of the American soul? It is jazz…It is all colors and all souls unified in the great melting-pot of the world.” (as quoted in B.L. Leach, Looking and Listening: Conversations between Modern Art and Music, Lanham, Maryland, 2015, p. 17)
During this period, visual artists, including Arthur Dove and other members of the Stieglitz Circle, were similarly striving to express the uniqueness of twentieth-century America in their art, seeking inspiration from the rapidly changing cities and cultures around them, and also often in the jazz music of their contemporaries. Donna M. Cassidy explains, “By painting jazz Dove not only stamped his art as native but did so using a modern style. He rejected the descriptive realism of American Scene painting and fashioned instead a form of abstraction rooted in native, nationalistic sources.” (Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, Washington, D.C., 1997, p. 81) Dove himself was an amateur musician and singer, and his interest in jazz was likely peaked when he attended one of Paul Whiteman’s concerts in December 1925. The following year, he purchased five jazz albums, including “Rhapsody in Blue,” and began to regularly listen to them at home and with friends. By December 1926 and into the next year, he was painting works specifically inspired by the records. His partner Helen “Reds” Torr wrote in her diary on December 1, 1926: “After supper A. did handsome spirited ‘music’ with almost everything in sight to Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’” (Archives of American Art, Arthur and Helen Torr Dove papers)
For this series of works, Dove would listen to the musical piece over and over again while working, creating ticker-tape-like long pieces of paper filled with notations transcribing the musical rhythms. This linear style transfers into the final works as well, in which swathes of broader color are overlain with gestural cross-hatched lines and swirls. Rachel Z. DeLue describes, “Sweeping and spiraling lines and sizzling color mark the quick and deft cadences and the brash energy of the compositions in question, while linear couplings call to mind the call-and-response effects typical of jazz. This includes…the clock spring and its painted almost-shadow in Rhapsody in Blue, Part I, and the staccato slashes welded over wending lines in Rhapsody in Blue, Part II....Quick-seeming and all-over brushwork engenders a sense of improvisation in each of the canvases…something Dove probably associated with jazz even if the recordings were not themselves the products of improvisation.” (Arthur Dove: Always Connect, Chicago, Illinois, 2016, p. 158)
Through such techniques, in the present works Dove not only references “Rhapsody in Blue” by utilizing the color blue and conveying the overall feeling of the music, but also seemingly translates the specific notes and rhythms into visual form. Harry Cooper writes, “few other modern paintings have so directly referenced specific jazz compositions, let alone particular performances or recordings.” (“Arthur Dove Paints a Record,” Notes in the History of Art, vol. 24, no. 2, Winter 2005, p. 70) Based on the paintings’ designations into Part I and Part II, scholars have deduced that Dove must have been listening to one of the early 78 rpm recordings of “Rhapsody in Blue,” which featured 2-3 minutes of music on each side of the album: Part I, the allegro opening, and Part II, the slower middle section and quick finale. Thus, the long vertical lines of Dove’s George Gershwin—“Rhapsody in Blue,” Part I have been related to the famous clarinet glissando which opens the song, and the sweeping whirlwind of George Gershwin—“Rhapsody in Blue,” Part II to the building crescendo of the finale.
The gestural physicality of the works is augmented by the collage element of the clock spring in Part I. In the 1920s, while focusing on music, Dove was also working on a series of assemblages of everyday objects, which not only formed the visual effect he was seeking but also added inherent metaphor. For example, he employed a spring, lens and photographic plate in his abstract Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz (1924, Museum of Modern Art, New York) to form a head-and-body arrangement but also to suggest his subject’s photography career. The metal spring in George Gershwin—“Rhapsody in Blue,” Part I similarly elevates the work beyond its design to include several meanings related to its physical material. The metal spring, and metal paint in both works, recall the train tracks that inspired Gershwin’s composition, the spring-driven motor and hand crank of the phonograph by which Dove listened to the music, and more generally the spirit of the Machine Age. The spring also brings an element of time into the painting—of course, a key element of music—as Dove wrote to Stieglitz in 1925: “The future seems to be gone through by a spiral spring from the past. The tension of that spring is the important thing.” (as quoted in Arthur Dove: Always Connect, p. 161)
Exploring these deeply intellectual and spiritual themes by relating them to approachable, popular music, Dove was perhaps seeking a means by which to expand the appreciation of his revolutionary abstract art to a broader audience. As he wrote to Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, “[Friends] have waxed enthusiastic over a ‘thing’ of mine being done from Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ not as yet completed, but I feel it will make people see that the so called ‘abstractions’ are not abstract at all…It is illustration.” (Undated letter, Dove to Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz Archive, YCAL) While he may not have fully succeeded in relating to his contemporary viewers, who described the 1927 exhibition of his music paintings as “so largely fourth dimensional that ordinary standards of judgment fail when applied to them” (E.A. Jewell, “Arthur Dove’s New Work,” The New York Times, December 18, 1927), this supremely innovative series helps unveil some of the key inspirations of Dove’s profound career in abstraction—namely, the rhythm and beat of the American Jazz Age. As Judith Zilczer declares, “With his jazz paintings, Dove evoked the fast-paced tempo of twentieth-century life, and, in so doing, he came as close as any American modernist to achieving visual music on the two dimensional canvas.” (“Form Modern to Postmodern in Visual Music,” The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Western Art, Oxford, England, 2016, p. 22)