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THE POSTER PORTRAITS IX: ARTHUR DOVE (Cont.) Despite Dove’s apparent happiness, life was far from easy for him. He did occasional illustrations, though jobs were increasingly hard to find, and he disliked the work. It was not until 1929 that he met his second patron, Duncan Phillips, the Washington, D.C., art collector who had transformed the drawing room of his home into an art gallery for visitors. Phillips began paying Dove $50.00 a month in return for his choice of a Dove painting, a stipend later increased to $1,000.00 a year. Even so, Dove and Reds Torr were often desperate and sometimes down to only enough food to last a week. While many other artists searched for various ways to express the American experience by painting American subjects, Dove preferred to show how the artist felt about American objects, not what they looked like. He wanted to paint restlessness, inventiveness, speed, change - all abstractions. In addition, he was expanding his methods, turning sometimes to collages, or assemblages as he called them, using metal, glass, wood, jeans denim, bamboo, and other bits and pieces that came to hand. Sometimes a Dove collage served as a kind of portrait by assembling objects associated with the subject. Charles Demuth had begun his series of poster portraits at about the same time, some of them never completed, but his homage to Arthur Dove proved to be one of the most successful of the series. Prominently, it feature is a huge scythe arching across what could be sky. It has been variously interpreted as a rainbow, a farm implement, or a tool of Father Time. A bit of red ribbon, tied around the scythe, may symbolize Reds Torr, whom Demuth knew better than Dove, inscribing the poster portrait on its reverse side, "For Helen with love from Demuth." There is no record of friendship between Demuth and Dove, although other poster portrait subjects were similarly people Demuth did not know, or knew only slightly or exclusively through their work. He never referred to Dove in his correspondence, except in passing on good wishes to him through Stieglitz one Christmas, but the poster portrait surely reflects Demuth's his admiration. When Dove’s wife finally died, in 1930 – she had steadfastly refused to divorce Dove – he and Reds were able to marry. They lived wherever they could find cheap rents in New York until 1933, when Dove’s mother’s death prompted their move to Geneva to settle her estate. Any hope Dove might have had of an inheritance was dashed when he discovered that there was barely enough money to settle debts and pay taxes. He and Reds lived on part of the family farm, which gave them vegetables and plenty of back-breaking work in summer but little money to see them through the rest of the year. Nevertheless, Dove made time to paint, many of the works of this period reflecting the power and joy he had always felt in nature. Even an inanimate subject like his Hardware Store he imbued with vitality, and the title didn't matter to him: "You either get it or you don't," he later wrote, and the title made no difference.
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