HUNTINGTON, NY.- Summer visitors to the Heckscher have a special treat in store for them: Arthur Dove Watercolors, a jewel-like installation featuring the very strongest available examples of watercolors by this important American Modernist. Organized by the Alexandre Gallery in Manhattan, in association with the Heckscher, the exhibition focuses on of Dove’s watercolors from 1930 through the mid-1940s, with special emphasis on work from the mid-thirties through the early 1940s.

Arthur Dove first explored the medium of watercolor in a meaningful way right in Halesite, where he lived for nine years with his life companion and second wife, Helen Torr. Although his earliest efforts date from 1927 or 1928, the medium became a regular part of his painting process around 1930, when he began including watercolors in annual exhibitions at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, An American Place. Examples created in Halesite include the Heckscher’s own Boat from 1932 – an image that may actually represent Dove’s own sailboat, the Mona.

Dove moved back to his hometown of Geneva, NY in 1933, and he first began exploring the rural upstate terrain in the medium of watercolor. These studies often served as the basis for larger oils, the images enlarged to canvas size with the assistance of a pantograph or magic lantern. As the first expression of the painter’s creative impulse, the watercolors have an immediacy and freshness that still remain compelling today. Yet as prolific as Dove was in Geneva, it was not until his relocation with Torr to Centerport, NY, to the small one-room cottage now owned by the Heckscher, that he entered into a final phase of exploration of the watercolor medium. Taken ill almost immediately upon moving back to Long Island in April 1938, Dove remained an invalid but he created a significant body of more than three hundred small watercolors. Often inspired by the views out his window, across Titus Mill Pond, or down toward Camp Alvernia, this last body of work, even as it approaches total abstraction, relates closely to Dove’s physical surroundings.

Several watercolors from the Heckscher’s own collection are included in the exhibition, as are archival materials from the collections of the Newsday Center for Dove/Torr Studies, including the artists’ own paintbrushes and paints, his paint box, and Max Doerner’s Materials of the Artist, a book that served as Dove’s primary resource as he experimented endlessly with his painting mediums.