Dove Diaries, 1938-9

These are the diaries of Arthur and Helen Torr Dove. Arthur Garfield Dove was an early twentieth-century painter, collagist, and illustrator who was one of the first American artists to embrace abstraction in art. He was a part of Alfred Stieglitz's Circle of modern American artists introduced at Stieglitz's 291 Gallery along with John Marin and Georgia O'Keeffe. Dove spent his career developing his own idiosyncratic style of formal abstraction in painting based on his ideas about nature, feeling, and pure form, and characterized by experimentation with color, composition, and materials. Around 1920, Dove met an artist named Helen S. Torr, also known as Reds. She was a Philadelphia-born painter who had studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. Torr and Dove eventually left their unhappy first marriages and began a life together, moving to a houseboat docked in Manhattan. In 1922, they moved to Halesite, Long Island, New York, where Dove's artwork once again flourished. By the mid-1920s, he was exhibiting regularly, paralleled by the rise of Stieglitz's new Intimate Gallery in 1925. His work continued to explore abstraction and organic forms, and, in addition to paintings, he produced assemblages made of found materials. Learn more about their life and work in the finding aid for the Arthur and Helen Torr Dove papers. Help us make these handwritten diaries more legible and searchable.