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he has a profound love of nature and a great capacity for jokes, witness "Hound" in the current exhibition, the black and brown dog "which came with the house" where he is at present living in Geneva, N.Y. He sees life as an epic drama, a great Nature myth, a fertility symbol, witness the "Sowing Wheat." He has an appreciation, of the wonder and the mystery of color, the subtle and mystic relations of intimated tones. He has, in fact, what any number of contemporary artists, American or otherwise, do not have, a deep individual quality and expression. Yet he does not command the public eye; this is a truth which cannot be evaded. 

EXPLANATION
One might seek to resolve this enigma by remarking that excellence never has the public franchise. This is true enough, no doubt. The painting of Dove is excellent, and his conceptions are sincere and honest conceptions. This is part of the explanation. Probably, however, it is truer to say that Dove lacks the fashionable note, the stylish touch. He is American, but he does not paint the "American scene." He is a child of Nature; but he is not a primitive. He anticipated the surrealists; but he has been an abstract painter for more years than one can offhand mention; but he has never subscribed to the gospel according to Picasso, simply because a man who is really himself does not have to ape another man. These are admirable qualities, spiritually speaking; they produce admirable results esthetically. But they scarcely make for worldly success. 
All last summer and fall the circumstances of his life kept Dove from painting. It is a scant dozen oils done this spring which represents his 1934 mood, all scenes from around Geneva, where he has made his home for the past year. Except for "Sowing Wheat" and "train," these canvases are abstract conceptions, transcripts or remembrances of experience translated into designs which somewhat resemble the natural objects from which they are taken but which have taken on, also, a higher order and organization than the accidents of Nature permit. 
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"Tree," "Tree Trunks." "Approaching Snow Storm," particularly illustrate this point. If one were to look only at the oils, one would experience them chiefly as abstract entities, color and form and volume and rhythm interrelated and integrated to produce a deep esthetic effect. The value of seeing the slight water colors from which they have been evolved is that one gains a deeper knowledge into the intricacies of the creative process, as well as a useful blue print by which the structure of the abstract design can be more easily apprehended.
In the water colors, too, one gets very close to an essential part of Dove's nature, his gentleness and tenderness, his lyric love of Nature. Coupled with this quality is his humor which is always prevalent and pervading his work. This emphasis on the laughter of life, as well as the loveliness of life, may be what has thrown off the public in regard to his work. We are accustomed to demand a high seriousness of our poets, to think that a deep love of the fun of existence is apt to be disconcerting, to make people feel as if they had given themselves away. Yet precisely this attribute makes Dove's work so important, this laughter raised to a Meredithian pitch. 

SUBLIME HUMOR
This is best expressed in such a picture as "Cow," 1914, or "Goats," in 1922, or again in the "Hound" before mentioned. One gets hints of it in other pictures, as in the anthropomorphic faces of the trees in "Sowing Wheat" or in the hippity-hop rhythm of "Train," as it bounces along a high railroad embankment. "The Highest Place on Long Island" is of a piece with this mood, gentle raillery at the foibles and pretensions of Nature, which extends also to making. One cannot imagine Dove all hot and bothered over the school of Paris, as the gentlemen to be overly enthusiastic about a painter who makes their vogues seem so inconsequential. In some of the earlier paintings Dove achieved an impersonality which is magnificent. As in the "Telegraph Pole with Flying Leaves and Silver" of 1929.
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