Personal and professional adversity curtailed the career of Torr, one of America’s pioneering modernists. Working alongside her husband, the painter Arthur Dove, Torr was an early proponent of abstract art in the United States, and she created a range of innovative works while living on Long Island, New York. But while Dove gained critical acclaim through repeated shows at An American Place, the esteemed gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, Stieglitz exhibited Torr’s work only once, in a group show, and she eventually gave up trying to secure exhibitions. In 1939, when Dove became ill, she sacrificed her career as an artist to care for him.

Through the Door exemplifies Torr’s unique approach to composition, in which she devised flat, tonally rich arrangements filled with voluminous, carefully structured forms. She rarely identified the sources for her imagery, but this scene may portray a view looking out from inside the hull of the Mona, a sailboat that Dove and Torr lived in seasonally from 1922–33.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)