Arthur Wesley Dow: Democratizing Art

Art in America, Nov, 2000 by Leah Ollman

Dow began to work for Fenollosa at the museum, and was formally hired as his assistant in 1893. Two years later, in the museum's Japanese corridor, Fenollosa staged an exhibition of Dow's own, color woodblock prints, which adhered to the same narrow, vertical proportions as certain Japanese formats and echoed many of their compositional properties. While the coziness of this arrangement didn't raise hackles then as it would now, Fenollosa's 1895 divorce and swift remarriage did. The unacceptability of divorce in New England's closely knit social circles effectively brought Fenollosa's influence there to an end. He resigned from his post at the museum, returned temporarily to Japan, and later moved back to the U.S., setting in Indiana as an independent scholar and popular itinerant lecturer (by then using slide examples from Dew's Composition). Dow briefly filled the curatorial slot left vacant at the museum, then followed his own rising star, becoming, as Fenollosa had been to him, a prophet to art missionaries around the country.

The Dow method (sometimes referred to as the Fenollosa-Dow method) linked practical exercises in art-making and art appreciation with a broader elevation of the quality of life in general. Art appreciation, Dow stated in an 1894 address, is "a step on a track which leads forever upward."(5) If, as he believed, expression and individuality were the keys to freedom, a harmonious life and a rich civilization, what he offered was a manual for achieving those ends. His set of instructions began with the basics of putting line down on paper, a first step toward global consciousness-raising.

A tremendous social force, art had the power to usher in progress, but also to inhibit it, Dow felt. The future depended on a deeper appreciation of beauty in everyday life. Dew's teachings echoed not only Fenollosa's words but those of William Morris, who catalyzed Britain's Arts and Crafts movement. Well-conceived decoration sharpened dull senses, Morris preached; it endowed both labor and leisure with meaning. Conversely, bad design has a degrading effect on society. Upon crossing the Atlantic, the Arts and Crafts movement rooted itself first in Boston, where its core belief in social betterment through art was seasoned by New England-style transcendentalism. Better living through good design was just the start, and just an outward manifestation of these ideas. Art was hailed as an inner, ethical necessity, primary nourishment for the soul. To Dow, alluding here to Emerson, art was "the expression of the highest form of human energy, the creative power which is nearest to the divine."(6)

The Arts and Crafts movement sought to restore that power to the individual after industrialization had stripped it away, separating and alienating workers from their products. Dow didn't frame his efforts in the same socialistic terms as Morris; his crusade fused the esthetic and the moral while deemphasizing the political. In many ways a typical American Arts and Crafts devotee, Dow supported the ideal of democratic access to things of beauty. His teachings, especially at the Ipswich summer school, promoted reconnection to work of the hand as well as to the specifics of place. He encouraged his students in weaving, woodworking and textile design to gather local plants and other native materials for use in their art, and to use familiar surroundings as inspiration for their designs. In woodblock printing he felt strongly that the artist should be responsible for the entire production process--the design, the carving of the block and the printing--even though those tasks were separated in Japan. Only in this way, he believed, could the artist be assured a sense of connection to the final print.