Manierre Dawson likely was the first artist in the United States—and one of the first in the world—to create purely abstract, nonobjective paintings drawn from his imagination rather than from the natural world. In 1910 Dawson, inspired by his college civil-engineering and mathematics studies and his work at a Chicago architectural firm—but with no formal arts education—created a series of paintings that incorporated symbols, signs, grids, and curvilinear lines.

Soon after, Dawson traveled throughout Europe. In Paris he visited the writer and patron Gertrude Stein and viewed works by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. Back in the United States, Dawson turned from pure abstraction to a series of Cubist-Futurist reinterpretations of famous works by European masters. His painting Venus, which depicts the Roman goddess of love, represents one of the oldest subjects in European art—the female nude—but is rendered with a multifaceted modernist vocabulary that endows it with new life.