Painting from the Past: Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Charles Sheeler

As they attempted to create new American paintings, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Sheeler drew inspiration from old designs and techniques. While living abroad between 1913 and 1915, Hartley painted simplified versions of American Indian teepees, headdresses, and other representations of an imagined “Old West.” Starting in the 1920s, Sheeler collected Shaker furniture and photographed 18th-century architecture. Following descriptions of historical painting methods published in the mid-1930s, Dove began mixing his paint with wax and resin—materials that had been used centuries earlier. Learn how these modern artists interpreted the art of the past and stretched the limits of oil on canvas from Layla Bermeo, Kristin and Roger Servison Assistant Curator of Paintings, Art of the Americas.