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THE POSTER PORTRAITS IX: ARTHUR DOVE (Cont.) By 1938, Dove wanted to leave Geneva. He and Reds moved to an abandoned post office on Long Island, their home for eight years, at which time his troubles with ill-health seem to have begun. First he had pneumonia; then a severe heart attack in 1946 that left him partially paralyzed. He continued to paint by having Reds hold his hand with the brush and move it where he directed her. He called these works "Beyond Abstractions." Not surprisingly, they seem even more remote from reality than any of his earlier paintings. Finally, his financial worries began to lessen. The general public still did not respond to his art, but he continued to exhibit, and his paintings began to command high fees. Probably this greater financial security contributed to a long-delayed peace of mind, although he seems always to have looked upon even death with serenity. In 1935, when Charles Demuth died, Dove had written to Stieglitz: "When people die I feel that they grow younger until they are born again. It must be something like that or nature could not breathe as it does." Dove died in 1946, after struggling for thirty years to achieve the goal he had set for himself: "I should like to enjoy life by choosing all its highest instances, to give back in my means of expression all that it gives to me: to give in form and color the reaction that plastic objects and sensations of light from within and without have reflected from my inner consciousness." -MCW Bibliography: Sherrye Cohn: Arthur Dove: Nature as Symbol, 1982; Barbara Haskell, Arthur Dove, 1974; Robin Jaffee Frank, Charles Demuth: Poster Portraits, 1923-1929, 1994.
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