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©
The Estate of Arthur G. Dove, courtesy Terry Dintenfass, Inc.
Arthur G. Dove

Orange Grove in California, by Irving Berlin

1927
Oil on Cardboard.
51 x 38 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Inv. no.
531
(
1975.52
)
ROOM 46
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room
Arthur Dove was the first American artist to experiment with abstraction. Between 1906 and 1909 he travelled around Italy, Spain and France, where he struck up a friendship with a group of Americans residing in the French capital. Shortly after returning from Europe, in 1912 he exhibited at Alfred Stieglitz gallery in New York what were the first fully abstract paintings to be executed in America before the exhibition of the work of the European avant-garde artists at the famous Armory Show of 1913. These works combine an interest in representing abstract forms with the pursuit of capturing fleeting effects such as sound. While in Europe artists such as Wassily Kandinsky sought to convey musical sounds in their abstract compositions, synesthesia spread through the Modernist circles of America, where it nonetheless acquired certain nationalistic connotations that led the artists to exalt the music characteristic of the new continent, such as jazz. The word jazz had begun to circulate at the beginning of the twentieth century and became popular in the 1920s, especially in the nightclubs and dives of Harlem.

As Judith Zilczer comments, after his wife Helen Torr bought various fashionable records, Dove began to model his painting on jazz and devoted some of his compositions to Gershwin, Louis Armstrong and, as in this case, Irving Berlin. Orange Grove in California, by Irving Berlin is a tribute to the composer’s famous piece, which was first performed in 1924. Dove’s set of paintings depicting visual analogies of American popular music are an allusion to the frenzied pace of modern life in America. As Donna Cassidy suggests, for Dove, incorporating jazz music into his compositions was a manner of “going native.”

Dove also conveys this dynamism through line and colour, once again recalling Kandinsky. The artist stated this clearly in the catalogue of the exhibition in Stieglitz’s gallery at the end of 1927: “As the point moves it becomes a line, as the line moves, it becomes a plane, as the plane moves, it becomes a solid, as the solid moves, it becomes life and as life moves it becomes the present.” However, although Dove’s calligraphic style in Orange Grove in California, by Irving Berlin may evidently be linked to Kandinsky’s improvisations, his loose, vibrant brushwork and his colours are clearly intended to be a pictorial equivalent of the energetic rhythms of jazz. Dove reproduces the syncopated rhythms of jazz music through a series of thick zigzagging strokes of predominantly orange tones (in reference to the title) and splashes of black, with surprising spontaneity.

After being shown at The Intimate Gallery in New York, at the beginning of 1928 the painting was given by Stieglitz to New York Times art critic Edward Alden Jewell, a fan of the painter’s. Jewell wrote to Dove in January 1928: “Mr. Stieglitz says you already know that he has given me your Orange Grove in California. It is a very beautiful picture, and seemed to me one of the finest things in your recent show... I want you to know how deeply I appreciate having it and how genuinely interested I am in the work you are doing.” Shortly afterwards Jewell exalted Dove’s Americanism by including Orange Grove in the frontispiece of his book on the particular features of American art.

Paloma Alarcó
20th Centurys. XX - Primeras vanguardias norteamericanasPaintingOilCardboard
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Orange Grove in California, by Irving Berlin. Orange Grove in California, de Irving Berlin, 1927
Orange Grove in California, by Irving Berlin
Arthur G. Dove

©

The Estate of Arthur G. Dove, courtesy Terry Dintenfass, Inc.

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Orange Grove in California, by Irving Berlin. Orange Grove in California, de Irving Berlin, 1927
Orange Grove in California, by Irving Berlin
Arthur G. Dove

©

The Estate of Arthur G. Dove, courtesy Terry Dintenfass, Inc.

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