Moth Dance is a playful, inventive image painted at the end of a decade of personal and professional transitions for the artist. In 1929 Arthur Dove married his longtime partner, Helen Torr, reconciled with his son, and exhibited regularly with Alfred Stieglitz. He completed this painting of a swaying moth while he and Torr lived on their boat in Halesite, New York.

Moths and butterflies both belong to the insect order Lepidoptera, and Dove was likely inspired by the butterflies he had seen at the American Museum of Natural History when conceptualizing Moth Dance. His insect has reptilian eyes with vertical black lines for pupils that slash outward beyond the top and bottom rims. Waving antennae emerge from the thorax like arms (rather than from the top of the head) and drift off beyond the picture plane. The moth has two brilliantly colored sets of wings: the top set are a dark bluish-green spotted with white and abstracted into one continuous oval; the bottom wings extend from the body in a bright teal that darkens to black at the tips. Two delicate black feet swerve to the left from the lower end of the moth’s body, completing an S-curve that begins with the antennae. Dove used the moth’s vibrant color to convey an abstract idea. He was striving to document exactly how the insect’s fluttering movements evoked joy and passion, or as he put it, “the life going on in that individual entity.”