“Arthur Dove's Fog Horns is the most renowned and historically important painting in the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center's collection,” said FAC Museum Director Blake Milteer. “As a first generation Modern artist, Dove helped to transform the face of American art forever and Fog Horns is among the finest of his work.”

The work is currently on view at the Fine Arts Center in the North Courtyard Gallery, Tues.–Sun., 10a–5p.

In his early paintings, Dove's style reflected the prismatic hues and impressionistic visions of his colleague Ernest Lawson (who later taught at the FAC's predecessor, the Broadmoor Art Academy). Soon thereafter, Dove experienced the exciting abstract inclinations of new European Modern art during an extended stay in France.

When he returned to the United States, Dove applied the flat rendering of space he found in Cubism and the emotive hues of Fauvism to his own work. Fog Horns was painted during a period in the 1920s when Dove lived on a boat in the waters surrounding Long Island.

Yet the painting “does not depict the fog horn apparatus or the seascape as much as it represents the interpenetration of deeply echoing sound into air and land as all become shape and color in the painting,” said Milteer. “It is about a sensory experience. As Dove described it, he wished to weave disparate parts in a scene ‘into a sequence of formations rather than to form an arrangement of facts.’”

Dove's Fog Horns has been on loan to major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim, the Albuquerque Museum, the Clark Institute, the Phillips Collection, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and many more. Fog Horns featured prominently in Robert Hughes's significant PBS series and book American Visions.

Dove's profound contribution is celebrated in the inclusion of Fog Horns among a powerhouse selection of the artist's contemporaries on Modern Art in America, 1913 - 1931. This beautiful USPS stamp set has been released on the 100th anniversary of the 1913 Armory Show, a groundbreaking exhibition that beaconed Modern artistic innovation in America that was organized by another prominent artist in the FAC collection, Walt Kuhn.

Kuhn's magnificent painting Trio, from the FAC collection, was recently sent to New York to be included in DC Moore Gallery's exhibition, Walt Kuhn: American Modern, in recognition of his Armory Show role.