Arthur Wesley Dow: Democratizing Art

Art in America, Nov, 2000 by Leah Ollman

The integration of art and life that was basic to the Arts and Crafts movement was perceived by Dow and Fenollosa as fundamental to Japanese culture. Dow idealized the Japanese, ascribing to them "perfect taste" and a culture permeated with beauty. Enthusiasm for things Japanese had risen steadily in the U.S., beginning in the 1870s and fueled by the display of Japanese objects at galleries and international expositions, the publication of articles and books about Japanese art, the assimilation of Japanese architectural devices and the impact of European artists who had already embraced Japanese influence. Japonisme peaked in the U.S. toward the start of the 20th century, concurrently with the full blossoming of the American Arts and Crafts movement, whose products bore the unmistakable imprint of Japanese design and decorative pattern. Boston once again led the way, being home to many of the nation's most vigorous collectors of Japanese art--Bigelow, Edward Sylvester Morse and Denman Ross among them--and its largest museum holdings in the field.

Dow didn't ride the craze for Japanese motifs as much as he mined it for tenets of greater depth and complexity. He found these in the principles of composition at play in Japanese art, principles that he considered to be universal, though they were more readily apparent in Japanese art than in the art of other cultures. Japanese woodblock prints, especially, epitomized the linear energy, harmonious arrangement of masses and dynamic space-cutting that Dow saw as fundamental. Ukiyo-e had the bonus appeal, among the democratically minded, of being an art of the masses--popular, accessible, affordable. Dew's teachings significantly widened the audience for Japanese prints in the U.S. and popularized a useful vocabulary for their appreciation. Other Americans, such as the painter, muralist and stained-glass pioneer John La Farge, collected the prints and wrote about them earlier than Dow, but the effect of Dew's interest spread farther.

The dynamic line, high horizon, flattened space, asymmetry, radical cropping and broad empty areas that gave Japanese prints their immediacy were all applicable to other art forms, including works in the round. Many of Dew's students emerged as prominent potters, working with the Overbeck and Newcomb studios, to name just two. Photographers were likewise able to adapt Dew's lessons with ease, as their practice of framing and organizing space lent itself quite naturally to the compositional basics he propounded. Alvin Langdon Coburn studied with Dow at Ipswich, internalizing well his space-cutting lessons, and traces of Dew's influence can be felt throughout the generation taught by Clarence White, who operated his own school after serving under Dow at Teachers College.

To Dow, all art was a matter of harmonious spacing, no matter the medium or subject. His emphasis on structure over representation was, he said, "a return to the natural method of pre-academic days. It was the method practiced in Europe from ancient times down to the Renaissance, is still used by the Orientals and by all who are independent of scientific domination.... The purpose is the development of power in the individual."(7) The approach may have had roots in the past, but it also foreshadowed the future, modernist abstraction in particular.