Arthur Wesley Dow: Democratizing Art

Art in America, Nov, 2000 by Leah Ollman

By his own broad definition, Dow was a modernist, one who rebelled against "the accepted and the traditional."(8) But he recognized how mystifying and alienating certain contemporary trends could be to those schooled in the more traditional styles, and also how baffling and discouraging was the critical art-speak that enshrouded the new work. Perhaps Dow's formative role at this juncture in American art would be more widely recognized had it not been for his own insistence that his teachings invoked an art that was not radically new, but continuous with epochs past. As an avowed populist and moralist, Dow makes an unlikely addition to the secular pantheon of modernist pioneers.

Dow traced the roots of 20th-century abstraction to the older, popular art forms of decoration and adornment. Architecture, pottery, metalwork and textile design constitute a larger part of the history of art than the representational arts, Dow asserted, and to label the nonrepresentational arts "minor" compared to the so-called "fine arts" is to establish a false hierarchy. The split, as he saw it, occurred just after the time of Leonardo, when art education was divided into representative and decorative areas of study. "Painting, which is essentially a rhythmic harmony of colored spaces, became sculptural, an imitation of modelling," he wrote in Composition.(9) Decoration, being non-imitative, came to be regarded as secondary. To Dow, this avoidance of similitude is what raises the decorative--a term he thought should be dropped altogether--to the highest, most primary level of creation, that of pure expression. What could be more modern than that?

Those who do credit Dow as a conduit to American modernism see his traces everywhere. Joseph Masheck, author of a critical introduction to the recent reissue of Composition, finds Dow's mark in the esthetic theories of Roger Fry, the cinematography of Sergei Eisenstein, the Zone System of photographer Ansel Adams and the integrative strategies of Discipline-Based Art Education. Consideration of Dow's legacy typically takes the form of a genealogical treasure hunt: an array of artists is surveyed, and Dow is revealed at the end of the rainbow, as the common ancestor.

Ultimately it's a testament to the universality of the principles he taught that they can be identified everywhere, but are very rarely credited. Modernists may have aspired to rhythm, harmony, the pure relations of tone and line, "a purely abstract language--a visible music." But, observed Dow, in an address to the College Art Association in 1916, "exhibition of ancient Chinese painting, say of the works of Ma Yuan, would show that these aims were realized a thousand years ago."(10)

(1.) Arthur Wesley Dow, "Modernism in Art," The American Magazine of Art, January 1917, p. 114.

(2.) Quoted in Arthur Johnson, Arthur Wesley Dow: Historian, Artist, Teacher, Ipswich, Mass., Ipswich Historical Society, 1934, p. 54.

(3.) Frank Lloyd Wright, "The Japanese Print: An Interpretation," in Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings, New York, Rizzoli, 1992, p. 116.