Arthur Dove: Watercolors and Pastels

The first book to focus exclusively on the luminous watercolors and pastels of Arthur Dove (1880-1946), this volume explores the contributions of these mediums to the development of Dove's distinctive images of the American landscape. Dove's landmark pastel series of 1911-12, "The Ten Commandments," represents American modernism's first breakthrough into abstraction. His subsequent pastels of the 1910s and 1920s provided him with the stylistic innovations he later adapted in his oil paintings. Watercolor became the primary medium of Dove's summer months in the early 1930s and remained so throughout his career. Bringing together watercolors and pastels from collections across the country, this book will be of deep interest to both scholars and admirers of twentieth-century American art.