Arthur Wesley Dow: Democratizing Art

Art in America, Nov, 2000 by Leah Ollman

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

In the century that has passed since Arthur Wesley Dow factored prominently in the American art scene, scholars have tended either to vexed status of a cult figure--dismissed to the fringe by most, revered as prophetic by 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 set the compositional ground rules for more than one generation of American artists. In the early decades of the century, art instructors across the country broadly disseminated his pedagogical approach, which wove together elements of japonisme, the Arts and Crafts movement and turn-of-the-century social reform. For those who made the leap to modernist abstraction, Dow's teachings provided a sound foundation from which to launch themselves.

Three exhibitions that opened in 1999 reintroduced Dow in his various roles, and comprised an unprecedented opportunity to assess his work and influence. "Arthur Wesley Dow and American Arts and Crafts," a traveling show 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 objects of everyday life and, by extension, dignity to the soul. His own prints and photographs hung among pottery, furniture, paintings, photographs and prints by nearly 50 of his students and fellow-travelers.

Two New York galleries featured Dow in their fall shows: Hirschl & Adler focused on Dow's extensive work in color woodcuts--a medium he's credited with reviving in the U.S.--while Spanierman cast a wider net, highlighting Dow's paintings, but also showing his prints and photographs, as well as numerous works by his students and contemporaries. The publications that accompanied each show, together with a 1997 reissue of Composition (which had been out of print for over 50 years), more than doubled the existing literature on Dow.

How well does Dow, so long ensconced on the periphery, hold the center? His own art--landscapes, exclusively--can be quietly commanding. His small-format prints, in muted tones of eucalyptus, brick and slate, are the most enduring of his works. They encompass seamlessly Dow-the-teacher's most fundamental lessons regarding the dynamism of line, the arrangement of tonal masses and the subtle spark ignited by asymmetrical composition. The prints exude 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 results. Though he intended only one specific group of his prints to be used for instructional purposes, all of Dow's work invites reading through the lens of his compositional theories, as elegant yet demure illustrations of what, at the time, were relatively bold concepts.

Dow's teachings evolved from two seminal experiences in the course of his own education as an artist, one 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 study. He enrolled in 1884 at the Ecole Nationale des Arts Decoratifs and the Academie Julian, the popular, more accessible alternative to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, supplementing his education with a sojourn to Brittany, where Gauguin and Emile Bernard were working, in 1886. One of his Barbizon-style landscapes was accepted into the Salon of 1887, and another in 1889. In 1888, a Boston gallery mounted the first solo show of his work.

When Dow moved back to the U.S. in 1889, his training was complete by traditional, academic standards, but he was plagued by a lingering disappointment over what his education had offered 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 out of sympathy. Truth in the form of representational accuracy has no relevance in art, Dow came to feel. Only beauty matters, beauty realized through expression, not imitation.

To unlearn the rules drilled into ]aim in France, Dow immersed himself in private study of art both foreign and ancient--Egyptian, African, Oceanic and Aztec. He found his inspiration in 1891 at the Boston Public Library, in a book of Hokusai prints. "One evening with Hokusai," Dow wrote to his wife, "gave me more light on composition and decorative effect than years of study of pictures. I surely ought to compose in an entirely different manner and paint better."(2) The revelation was startling, but not unique, as Japanese woodcuts had already begun to flood the American field of vision the way they had in Europe for the previous two decades. Like Dow, Frank Lloyd Wright also marked the day when his encounter with ukiyo-e changed his life. "I shall probably never recover," he remembered decades later. "I hope I shan't. It was the great gospel of simplification and that came over me, the elimination of all that was insignificant."(3)