Arthur Wesley Dow and American Arts & Crafts
March 10, 2000 - June 18, 2000
Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922) was an artist and photographer as well as
being one of this country’s most innovative and influential art educators.
Over a 30-year period, he taught at Teachers College, Columbia University;
the Arts Students League; Pratt Institute; and his own Ipswich Summer
School of Art.
Many of America’s leading ceramicists, furniture-makers, painters,
photographers, and printmakers were Dow’s students, and the works
of many of them were included in this exhibition. The more than 100 objects
included woodcuts by Pedro de Lemos and Bror Nordfeldt, paintings by Georgia
O’Keeffe and Max Weber, photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn and Edward
Steichen, Overbeck Pottery, and Byrdcliffe Colony furniture. Eleven of
Dow’s prints and four of his photographs were also included.
The collaborative exhibition included both two- and three-dimensional
works by these and many other artists. Paintings, prints, lithographs,
photographs, woodcuts, and other two-dimensional works were on view at
the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, while three-dimensional objects, such
as ceramics, furniture, and textiles, were exhibited at the Museum of
Fine Arts, Santa Fe.
The ideas about art-making that Dow began to develop in the late 1870s
were quite revolutionary for the time. That is, he proposed that copying
nature, a process that had formed the basis of academic art instruction
for more than 400 years, was at a dead end. In his mind, modern artists
should study the elements of composition – Line, Mass, and Color
– to come to a “new appreciation of all forms of art and the
beauty of nature.”
Influenced by his study of various world culture – African, Greek,
Italian, Native American, and, in particular, Chinese and Japanese –
Dow became increasingly committed to the idea that artists should express
their own ideas through the harmonious arrangement of line, color, andnotan (tonal contrasts), the “trinity of power,” as he
described it.
Notan is a Japanese concept involving the placement of lights and
darks next to the other to read as flat shapes on the two-dimensional
surface. This use of lights and darks differs dramatically from the means
by which artists had traditionally manipulated these elements to create
seemingly three-dimensional forms on the picture plane.
Dow and his students rejected the then accepted concept that painting
and sculpture were of a higher level than the applied arts, such as ceramics,
furniture, jewelry, and photography. In their minds, all art forms were
of equal value and should be simultaneously beautiful and functional.
As such, their work conveys the aesthetic and fundamental premise of the
Arts and Crafts movement in America.
Dow’s ideas and theories were published in his book, Composition:
A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers
(1899), and, as this book was re-issued over the next 40 years, it
influenced generations of American art students and teachers.
The exhibition was organized by The American Federation
of Arts (AFA) and guest curator, Nancy Green, chief curator of the Herbert
F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University. Support has been provided
by the National Patrons of the AFA. It is a program of ART ACCESS II,
a program of the AFA with major support from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s
Digest Fund.
This exhibition was funded in part by the City of Santa Fe
Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers’ Tax.