Space Divided by Line Motive

1943

Arthur Dove

Artist, American, 1880 - 1946

This horizontal, abstract painting is made up of flat areas of red, yellow, blue, green, brown, and orange to create shapes with curving, scalloped edges, zigzagging, teeth-like edges, or straight edges. Three rays seem to emanate from the bottom left corner with bands of pine green at the top, brown at the center, and yellow at the bottom. An opposing diagonal band of shapes crosses the rays from the top left to bottom right corner. That band is cherry red across the green and brown, and royal blue next to the yellow ray. The left border of the band is curved like scallops, and the right-hand edge is narrow, long zigzags. The rays change color past this band to be blue across the top, yellow at the center, and orange below. A tall brown form, like an abstracted tree trunk, extends up along the right edge of the painting. Fields of green to either side could suggest a tree’s canopy and grass. There are yellow speckles in one of the red areas, and green speckles in one of the yellow areas. The artist signed the work across two field of color at the bottom center. His name, “Dove,” is painted with blue letters “DOV” against a yellow background and the final “E” in yellow against the blue field.
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Living and working on Long Island, Arthur Dove always tied his images to the land and sea he loved, calling them “extractions” from nature. Nonetheless, his works became increasingly abstract during the 1940s. In Space Divided by Line Motive, 13 interlocking planes of opaque, saturated color—bright red and blue contrasting with tones of olive green, ocher, and brownish plum—animate and unite the composition. The artist’s title for the painting may refer to the straight, undulating, curvy, and jagged lines that divide these spaces of color. The overall positive-negative effect conveys a strong sense of movement across the canvas’s surface, as if to suggest a seismic shifting of tectonic plates. This interest in shifting planes of color recalls the artist's 1913 statement that he “remember[ed] certain sensations purely through their form and color . . . by certain shapes, planes of light, or character lines determined by the meeting of such planes.”

Dove belonged to a pioneering group of artists whose increasingly abstract style radically changed the course of American art. A protégé of the influential promoter of modern art Alfred Stieglitz, who showed Dove’s work and gave him his first solo exhibition, Dove nonetheless struggled to attain critical success and was never financially stable. Even Stieglitz noted that some of his paintings were “above the heads of the people.”

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Artwork overview

More About this Artwork

Scholarly Article:  American Paintings, 1900–1945: Space Divided by Line Motive, 1943

This nearly square painting shows an industrial area with buildings, storage silos, a smokestack, and railroad tracks. A mound of brown dirt or other material is in shadow in the lower left corner of the painting. Next to the mound, railroad tracks extend diagonally from the lower center of the painting into the distance to our right. The tracks end at a white building with staggered gray rooflines to our right in the distance. A tall terracotta-red smokestack rises high beyond the white building, smoke pouring out of its top and blending into the clouds above. Just beyond the mound of dirt, piles of white material, perhaps in unseen bins, line the railroad track to our left and lead back to a row ten interconnected, coral-orange silos. The horizon comes about halfway up the painting, and it is lined with a row of long white and gray warehouses. The artist signed and dated the work with brown paint in the lower right corner: “Sheeler 31.”

Scholarly Series:  American Paintings, 1900–1945

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

The artist [1880-1946], Centerport, New York; by inheritance to his wife, Helen S. Torr Dove [1886-1967], Centerport; her estate;[1] (Downtown Gallery, New York); purchased April 1968 by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; acquired 2014 by the National Gallery of Art.
[1] Arthur Dove Artist Files, Downtown Gallery Records, 1824–1974, reel 5547, frames 869–871, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1944

  • Arthur G. Dove; Paintings - 1944, An American Place, New York, 21 March - 21 May 1944, no. 6.

1947

  • Paintings by Arthur Dove, San Francisco Museum of Art, 22 April - 18 May 1947.

  • Loan, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, perhaps between 1947 and 1963.[1]

1963

  • Then and Now: Early and Mature Examples of the Work of Twenty-five Twentieth Century Artists, Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York, 21 July - 11 August 1963, unnumbered checklist.

1964

  • 39th Anniversary Exhibition, Downtown Gallery, New York, 6-31 October 1964, unnumbered catalogue.

1965

  • Six Decades of American Art, Leicester Galleries, London, 14 July - 18 August 1965, no. 29.

1976

  • Corcoran [The American Genius], Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 24 January - 4 April 1976, catalogue with no checklist, as U.S.A.

1978

  • The William A. Clark Collection, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 26 April - 16 July 1978, catalogue with no checklist.

2005

  • Encouraging American Genius: Master Paintings from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte; John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, 27 August 2005 - 29 April 2007, checklist no. 95 (shown only in Washington).

2008

  • The American Evolution: A History Through Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 1 March - 27 July 2008, unpublished checklist.

2009

  • American Paintings from the Collection, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 6 June - 18 October 2009, unpublished checklist.

2013

  • American Journeys: Visions of Place, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 21 September 2013 - 28 September 2014, unpublished checklist.

Bibliography

n.d.

  • Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Downtown Gallery Records 1824-1974, Arthur Dove Artist Notebooks, reel 5570, frames 349-350.

  • Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Arthur and Helen Torr Dove papers, Diary Entries for 10,12,13,14,16 October 1943, reel 725, frames 993-996..

1947

  • Barefoot, Spencer. "The Art Galleries [exh. review]." The Art Galleries (27 April 1947): 22.

1973

  • Phillips, Dorothy W. A Catalogue of the Collection of American Paintings in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Vol. 2: Painters born from 1850 to 1910. Washington, 1973: 105, repro., 106.

  • Morgan, Ann Lee. "Toward the Definition of Early Modernism in America: A Study of Arthur Dove." 2 vols. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, Iowa City, 1973: 1:326.

1984

  • Morgan, Ann Lee. Arthur Dove: Life and Work, With a Catalogue Raisonné, Newark, London, and Toronto, 1984: 303, 304, repro.

2000

  • Cash, Sarah, with Terrie Sultan. American Treasures of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. New York, 2000: 161, 206, repro.

2002

  • Cash, Sarah. "Space Divided by Line Motive (U.S.A.)." In A Capital Collection: Masterworks from the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Edited by Eleanor Heartney. London, 2002: 256, 257, repro.

2011

  • Cash, Sarah. "Arthur Dove, Space Divided by Line Motive." In Corcoran Gallery of Art: American Paintings to 1945. Edited by Sarah Cash. Washington, 2011: 252-253, 283, repro.

Inscriptions

lower center: Dove; top center of frame reverse: ARTHUR G. DOVE / care of ALFRED SEIEGLITZ / 509 MADISON AVE., (Rm. 1710) New York; top of frame reverse in black crayon: 1944, SPACE DIVIDED BY LINE MOTIF

Wikidata ID

Q46635564

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