Study for A Reasonable Facsimile

Although he began his career as a commercial illustrator, Arthur Dove became one of America’s first abstract artists following his travels in Europe, where he was particularly taken with the work of Henri Matisse and the Fauves. Here he created what he felt was “a reasonable facsimile” of a landscape, with references to the sun above and the earth below; this study for the painting of the same name exemplifies Dove’s late-career investigation of the line between representation and abstraction. The painting is accompanied by a poem: “There is much to be done— / Works of nature are abstract. / They do not lean on other things for meanings.”