About This Exhibition

Arthur Dove: Reality and Abstraction features works by one of WAM’s most beloved artists. The exhibition includes large oil paintings as well as miniature watercolors taken from the artist’s sketchbooks. Each work reflects Dove’s lifelong practice of observing natural elements–including the sun, moon, ocean, and landscape—and then simplifying them into basic shapes and colors. The resulting paintings exist, as Dove described them, “where reality and abstraction meet.”

The Dove paintings will be on view during Georgia O’Keeffe: Art, Image, Style, WAM’s major spring exhibition. Like his friend and colleague O’Keeffe, Dove is a legend of 20th-century American art.

Abstract dark shapes in front of a yellow sun.

Arthur Dove, Forms Against the Sun, about 1926. Oil on metal, 29 x 21 inches. Wichita Art Museum, Roland P. Murdock Collection