Arthur Wesley Dow: Democratizing Art

Combining japonisme with Arts and Crafts design, this American artist and educator helped lay the groundwork for modernist abstraction in the U freshly three shows highlighted Dow's influence upon painters and decorative artists of his day.

In the hundred that has passed since Arthur Wesley Dow factored prominently in the American art exhibition scholars have tended either to distressed status of a cult figure--dismissed to the fringe by means of most, revered as prophetic by means of a few. A painter, photographer, printmaker, educator and author of the 1899 philosophical/instructional treatise, Composition, Dow (1857-1922) has been largely relegated to footnotes and passing mentions since his death. Typically identified as an influential teacher of Georgia O'Keeffe and Max Weber, Dow plant the compositional ground rules for more than single generation of American artists. In the early decades of the hundred art instructors across the political division broadly disseminated his pedagogical approach, which wove together ultimate parts of japonisme, the Arts and Crafts change and turn-of-the-century social reform. For those who made the leap to modernist abstraction, Dow's teachings provided a whole foundation from which to launch themselves.

Three exhibitions that lay opened in 1999 reintroduced Dow in his various parts and comprised an unprecedented opportunity to assess his work and influence. "Arthur Wesley Dow and American Arts and Crafts," a traveling exhibit curated by Nancy Green for the American Federation of Arts, made a persuasive case for Dow's congruence with the Arts and Crafts movement's campaign to restore beauty to the percepts of everyday life and, by the agency of extension, dignity to the mind His own prints and photographs hung among earthen ware furniture, paintings, photographs and prints by dint of nearly 50 of his scholars and fellow-travelers.

sum of two units New York galleries featured Dow in their fall shows: Hirschl & Adler focused upon Dow's extensive work in color woodcuts--a medium he's credited with reviving in the U.S.--while Spanierman cast a wider snare highlighting Dow's paintings, but also showing his prints and photographs, as well as numerous works by dint of his students and contemporaries. The publications that accompanied each exhibit together with a 1997 reissue of Composition (which had been without of print for over 50 years), more than doubled the existing literature upon Dow.

How well does Dow, in like manner long ensconced on the periphery, clinch the center? His own art--landscapes, exclusively--can be quietly commanding. His small-format prints, in mut tones of eucalyptus, brick and slate, are the greatest in quantity enduring of his works. They encompass seamlessly Dow-the-teacher's greatest in quantity fundamental lessons regarding the dynamism of line, the arrangement of tonal masses and the tricky spark ignited by asymmetrical composition. The prints throw out a sense of serenity in keeping with Dow's larger philosophical agenda of educating the public to make choices, in life as in art, that deliver harmonious originates Though he intended only single specific group of his prints to be used for instructional designs all of Dow's work invites reading [i]or[/i] part of to the other the lens of his compositional theories, as elegant still demure illustrations of what, at the time, were relatively valiant concepts.

Dow's teachings evolv from sum of two units seminal experiences in the course of his have education as an artist, single a gradual disillusionment and the other an epiphany. Like many aspiring artists at the time, Dow (born in Ipswich, Mass.) made the requisite pilgrimage to France to application of mind He enrolled in 1884 at the Ecole Nationale de Arts Decoratifs and the Academie Julian, the popular, more accessible alternative to the Ecole de Beaux-Arts, supplementing his education with a sojourn to Brittany, where Gauguin and Emile Bernard were working, in 1886 individual of his Barbizon-style landscapes was accepted into the Salon of 1887 and another in 1889 In 1888 a Boston gallery mountained the first solo show of his work.

When Dow mov back to the U in 1889 his training was consummate by traditional, academic standards, on the contrary he was plagued by a lingering disappointment above what his education had proffered him. Imitation, through relentless copying after the antique and sketching from the model--making "maps of human figures," as Dow called it(1)--the was the standard at the Academie, the means to achieving "truth" a goal with which Dow gradually realized he was without of sympathy. Truth in the form of representational accuracy has no relevance in art, Dow came to have feeling Only beauty matters, beauty realized end expression, not imitation.

To unlearn the sways drilled into ]aim in France, Dow immersed himself in private close attention of art both foreign and ancient--Egyptian, African, Oceanic and Aztec. He place his inspiration in 1891 at the Boston Public Library, in a work of Hokusai prints. "One evening with Hokusai," Dow wrote to his wife, "gave me more light upon composition and decorative effect than years of research of pictures. I surely ought to make in an entirely different manner and paint better."(2) The revelation was startling, on the other hand not unique, as Japanese woodcut had already begun to deluge the American field of vision the way they had in Europe for the previous sum of two units decades. Like Dow, Frank Lloyd Wright also marked the day when his collision with ukiyo-e changed his life. "I shall probably at no time recover," he remembered decades later. "I trust I shan't. It was the great revelation by christ of simplification and that came above me, the elimination of all that was insignificant."(3)