Arthur Garfield Dove (1880 – 1946) was an American artist. An early American modernist, he is often considered the first American abstract painter. Dove used a wide range of media, sometimes in unconventional combinations, to produce his abstractions and his abstract landscapes. In 1907, Dove and his first wife, Florence, traveled to France and moved to Paris, then the world’s art capital. They made short trips to both Italy and Spain. While there, Dove joined a group of experimental artists from the United States, which included Alfred Henry Maurer. Dove and Maurer remained friends until Maurer’s suicide in 1932.

While in Europe, Dove was introduced to new painting styles, in particular the Fauvist works of Henri Matisse, and he exhibited at the annual Autumn Salon in 1908 and 1909. Me and the Moon from 1937 is a good example of an Arthur Dove abstract landscape and has been referred to as one of the culminating works of his career. Dove did a series of experimental collage works in the 1920s. He also experimented with techniques, combining paints like hand-mixed oil or tempera over a wax emulsion as exemplified in Dove’s 1938 painting Tanks, in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Source Wikipedia.