Arthur Dove’s “Long Island” and the Art of Assemblage

Arthur Dove, Long Island, 1925, assemblage

Arthur Dove’s assemblage “Long Island” is something I simply could not resist sharing with you all, the sooner the better, because it is so playful and unique and the joy of creating is so obvious in this artwork. Dove’s paintings of the moon have won me over in the previous weeks and months, but, for now, I decided to write about this assemblage precisely because of the medium. Assemblage is basically a three-dimensional collage. Instead of the cut-out or torn pieces of paper which are used in collages, to create an assemblage the artist needs to go into the world – to collect the things needed for the artwork.

In “Long Island”, Dove had painted some parts but most of what gives the artwork its charm are the objects that he had found in nature around him; twigs, pieces of dried grass, leaves, pebbles and shells which he found whilst combing the beach, a solitary yet pleasant activity he would enjoy doing for hours. The assemblage shows a cut-out picture of a black car going down the hill and the view of the car is through the twigs, a voyeuristic sort of perspective. Were the twigs suppose to represent trees, I wonder. Five twigs assembled in a harmonius way, ending in leaves painted in green and red. Behind the car is a clear blue sky. Here and there some pebbles and grass and in the lowest part of the assemblage a row of seashells carefully arranged. It is a simple composition, but striking nonetheless. Its playfulness is almost contageous! Now I want to assemble little objects and create a world of my own. With these kind of artworks it is definitely about having fun and not about the finished product; the journey of collecting and assembling is what counts.

Assemblage became more widely popular in the 1950s and 1960s, but it was used decades before by artists such as Picasso and Kurt Schwitters. The name ‘assemblage’ came from the butterfly assemblages made by the French artist Jean Dubuffet. Dove’s assemblage is still an early example of the technique, which doesn’t surprise me because he was always one step ahead of his artists-peers, and a very beautiful one as well, in a sense that Dove tried reconstructing the world around him with an emphasis on its most pleasant aspects. Dove’s assemblage is pleasant, playful, in a childlike but still sophisticated way whereas the Dadaist assemblages tend to be strange and even unsettling.