K nown for his distinctly modern approach to the world around him, Arthur Dove expressed himself through nonobjective shapes and carefully applied color even as early as 1910. Although Dove is widely considered the first abstract American artist, it was only after developing an illness in the 1940s that he began to work with “renewed intensity” (William C. Agee, “New Directions: The Late Work, 1938-1946,” in Arthur Dove: A Retrospective, edited by Debra Bricker Balken, Andover, Massachusetts, 1997, p. 133). According to William Agee, Dove produced his most mature abstractions during this period (Agee, ibid). Conceived in 1940, Nuns showcases the artist’s small-scale yet masterful treatment of form and color from this distinctive and highly productive period.

In the last two decades of Dove’s career, he produced dozens of watercolors each year in the hopes of capturing specific moments in time (Melanie Kirschner, Arthur Dove: Watercolors and Pastels, New York, 1998, p. 36). He perceived a synergy between the swift and fluid medium of watercolor and the increasingly fast pace of modern life; in Dove’s eyes, watercolor enabled him to capture the spontaneity of American society. When Alfred Stieglitz first saw Dove’s works on paper, he enthusiastically requested “a hundred more” (Debra Bricker Balken, Arthur Dove Watercolors, New York, 2006, p. 9). Through Dove’s consistent engagement with watercolor and pastel, he joined the ranks of Georgia O’Keeffe and John Marin in elevating the status of watercolor in the increasingly modern art world.

With Dove primarily drawn to nature and the local landscape - weather patterns, the moon, and waves - Nuns offers a rare example of the artist’s engagement with an animate subject. From his cottage in Centerport on the North Shore of Long Island, Dove had a view of a monastery inhabited by Franciscan Brothers. From 1939 to 1942, concurrent with the creation of Nuns, Dove completed ten watercolor sketches entitled The Brothers in relation to his observations of the monastery. True to Dove’s abstract language, though, his concentration on nonrepresentational geometric forms and lines is as much the focal point of this work as his perceived subject. The vibrancy and dynamism present in Nuns stems from Dove’s mastery of color. In a diary entry dated 11 October 1939, the artist noted that he was “putting down one color after another in formation” (Agee, ibid, 140). Alternating light and dark shades of green, Dove employs sharp black lines to delineate between the various hues. Ultimately, it is Dove’s freedom of line and thoughtful differentiation between areas of cool and warm tones that creates such a thought-provoking composition captured within the small confines of a 5 by 7-inch sheet. Now seventy years since Nuns last traded hands, the colors remain bright and the lines as sharp as Dove originally intended.