To the Editors:
Despite Hilton Kramer’s first-paragraph sideswipe at the “academic, lackluster” prose of my book, Arthur Dove: Life and Work, With a Catalogue Raisonné, I read his essay (“A Catalogue Raisonné for Arthur Dove,” February, 1985) with interest. As he has in the past, Hilton Kramer writes about Dove’s work with insight and, if I may say so, an admiration that seems no less ardent than that which he ascribes to me.
Nevertheless, because Mr. Kramer and I do not reach the same conclusions about the artist, I would like to raise a few points in relation to his review. For one thing, I would like to comment on Mr. Kramer’s statement that I “simply cannot accept the fact of Dove’s isolation from precisely the kind of history that, as an historian of modern art, obviously means the most to her.” True. I am sorry that my book has not converted Mr. Kramer from the ahistorical view that he has promoted in all his writings on the artist for some twenty years. I would agree that Dove’s art often has an idiosyncratic quality. But quite honestly, I was consciously trying to rescue Dove from the homely, down-on-the farm, island-unto-himself image that Stieglitz invented (as I point out) and that has been the official line on Dove ever since Paul Rosenfeld published the first major appreciation of his work in 1924.. My desire to reveal the artist in history—as belonging to a context of ideas, particularly—does not mean that I therefore claim for him greater importance than he deserves. Indeed, I would agree with Mr. Kramer’s contention that Dove is not “big.” What Mr. Kramer rather deprecatingly interprets as some desperate compulsion on my part to see Dove in heroic terms seems to me to be his own misreading of my realistic assessment of Dove’s interconnectedness with his times.
Among specific points, I do not understand why Mr. Kramer goes on at such length about the six 1910-11 abstractions, which he says are the “key paintings” in my “claim” for Dove as a “pioneer abstractionist.” Too careful an historian to inflate these undated and unexhibited paintings, I tried to give an evenhanded assessment of their possible importance (which Mr. Kramer describes as “coming down on both sides of the issue”). Mr. Kramer is the one who seems to make too much of them. The question of who did the first abstract painting is a phoney issue. What is important is what the various artists did with the new idea, and in this regard, I said in so many words that the ten pastels that constituted the first public exhibition by an American of non-illusionistic art (seen in New York and Chicago in 1912) were “much more important” than the six oil abstractions. Incidentally, although Mr. Kramer and I may agree that ultimately Dove was not as “big” as Kandinsky, the work Dove showed in 1912 was far more influential for both artists and critics in the United States than was Kandinsky’s work in the early years of abstract painting.
Well, Mr. Kramer and I could speak of many individual issues in the article and perhaps continue to disagree. Which is fine with me. But what is not so fine is Mr. Kramer’s statement that “among knowledgeable insiders … there are already some complaints about omissions and factual errors.” What kind of sleazy statement is that? Anyone who compiles a catalogue of this size would have to be certifiably looney to claim there were no omissions or errors. What appears in print is the best I could do within a finite amount of time, and of course I welcome further and updated information. I have to chuckle about. Mr. Kramer’s mysterious “knowledgeable insiders.” As opposed to . . . myself, I suppose. Anyhow, to accuse my work of shortcomings by means of undocumented innuendo is not only unfair but should be beneath Mr. Kramer’s standards. If Mr. Kramer as a reviewer knows about omissions or errors, then both I and your readers deserve to be told what they are.
Ann Lee Morgan
Chicago, Illinois
Hilton Kramer replies:
First, let’s get the matter settled as to who is, and who is not, to be counted among “knowledgeable insiders” as far as expert information on the Arthur Dove oeuvre is concerned. It was not Ann Lee Morgan whom I meant to exclude from that company, but—myself! I am not a Dove specialist, and do not pretend to be. I assumed it would be clear from the tone and context of my remark that I was deferring, in this matter, to the scholars who know more about the documented facts than I do because it is they who have documented them. It would have been absurd to exclude Ann Lee Morgan from that distinguished company, and it had never been my intention to do so.
Second, the matter of what is missing from the catalogue raisonné itself. I shall mention only one outstanding example. The very first painting which the visitor to the exhibition at the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries encountered upon entering the premises—the painting called Abstraction in Black, White and Brown and believed to have been painted circa 1935-1940— is not in Morgan’s catalogue. No explanation of its omission was offered to the visitors of the exhibition, either. Ann Lee Morgan cannot have it both ways. If she really welcomes further information, she shouldn’t be so touchy about it. After all, she has already done the basic work —as I pointed out most emphatically in my article on her book.
Finally—and, in my opinion, most importantly—there is the question of placing Arthur Dove in relation to the art history of his time. Morgan’s desire, she avows, was “to reveal the artist in history.” But the history which she wishes to place Dove in a significant relation to has little or nothing to do with history as Dove himself experienced it. If she really has reason to believe that it was Stieglitz who “invented,” as she claims, “the homely, down-on-the-farm” image of Dove, and that there is another Dove—a truer, more authentic, more historical Dove—who differs radically from this alleged Stieglitz invention, then she has an obligation to produce some evidence to support the notion. So far she hasn’t. And I daresay, she can’t. For, like it or not, what Morgan condescends to describe as “the homely, down-on-the-farm” Dove was the only Dove ever to exist in real historical time. Is it really the task of art history to “rescue” an artist from the kind of life he persevered in living, often at great personal sacrifice, because it suited his temperament and guaranteed his freedom? The argument here is not between my alleged “ahistorical view” of Dove and Ann Lee Morgan’s avowed interest in “Dove’s interconnectedness with his times.” Morgan’s real argument is with Dove’s decision to live and work the way he did.