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Spanierman Gallery is pleased to announce Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922): His Art and His Influence, an exhibition and sale that showcases the work of a leading figure in the development of American modernism. A communicator of inventive stylistic methods and radical ideals, Dow is remembered today for his ability to synthesize an eastern and a western aesthetic, and for his importance as a teacher--among his best-known pupils were the avant-garde artists represented Georgia O'Keeffe and Max Weber.
Curated by Nancy E. Green, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photography at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University at Ithaca, New York, the exhibition will include paintings, pastels, watercolors, prints, and photographs by Dow and his students, including works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Max Weber, Margaret Jordan Patterson, Zulma Steele, Herman Dudley Murphy, and others. Photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Kasebier, and Clarence White will also be featured.
Many of the works will be borrowed from private and public collections including the Ipswich Historical Society, the Ipswich Public Library, and the Ipswich Public School Department. A fully illustrated catalogue with scholarly essays by Green on Dow and students, Marliee B. Meyer on Dow's influence on the decorative arts, Frederick C. Moffatt on Composition, Dow's landmark teaching manual, and Barbara L. Michaels, noted Kasebier scholar, on photography will accompany the exhibition.
Born into an old, established New England family, Dow received his first art training in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Boston. In 1884, following the career path of many American artists represented of his generation, he traveled to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian. His classmates included John Henry Twachtman, Willard Metcalf, and Edmund Tarbell. During his three years in Europe, Dow spent summers in Pont Aven, Brittany, in the company of the American artists represented, Benjamin Harrison, Arthur Hoeber, and Charles Lazar.
Dow returned to America in 1889 and settled in Boston. Shortly thereafter, Dow rejected academic methods and developed a highly unusual approach reflecting the inspiration of Egyptian, Aztec, and Japanese artifacts and images that he was studying at the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts. His interest in Japanese art was encouraged by the curator of Japanese art at the museum, Ernest Fenollosa, who introduced him to the prints of Hokusai and to the works of other masters of Sumi ink painting and woodblock techniques. Dow shared Fenollosa's view that art should be both pictorial and decorative, and developed his own method for making woodcuts that reflected his study of Japanese techniques. In 1893, Dow was appointed assistant curator of the Japanese collection at the museum under Fenollosa.
Although most of Dow's teaching activities were centered in New York, he returned to his native Ipswich every summer to teach at the school he established there, which attracted nearly three hundred artists represented annually from all over the country and abroad. In 1900-1901, Dow built a new studio on Ipswich's Bayberry Hill from which many of his famous views of "The Dragon" were painted. As the tides came in and receded, the landscape changed radically--islands and rivers formed that were not visible at high tide. It was a magical place, ever changing, and many of Dow's students appropriated the view for their own use in pottery, furniture designs, and photographs. In his art, Dow captured the poetic moods of nature in beautifully arranged images which revealed balances between opposites of darkness and light, smoothness and roughness, line and color. Contrary to academic precepts, Dow championed the beautiful as an end in itself, in any medium, and his new aesthetic became the basis of his own art as well as his teaching.
Although he never claimed to be a modernist, Dow had an ability to break down a work's surface into patterns of lines and spaces that was highly advanced for his era. His aim was to get beyond the mere transcription of an image to perceive its essential form. It was this visionary approach that encouraged his students such as O'Keeffe and Weber to formulate their own experimental and individualistic methods.
In 1922, the year of Dow's death, George Cox started the Dow Association in Los Angeles. The creation of the association underscored the impact which Dow's teachings had on his students and their obvious desire to have his principles and ideas live on after their master was gone.
Dow was a leading figure in the Arts and Crafts revival that surfaced in the early twentieth century. He was a champion of fine craftsmanship in a wide variety of art media, including woodwork, metalwork, ceramics and textiles. The breadth of Dow's influence will be represented in this exhibition with excellent examples of furniture by Frank Lloyd Wright, Stickley, and Byrdcliffe; ceramics by Newcomb, Overbeck, Dedham, Walrath, and Marblehead, as well as other period accessories.
By applying principles of Oriental design to depictions of commonplace locales, Dow created works that were well ahead of their time, anticipating the integration of Eastern and Western approaches that modernist artists represented would attempt as the twentieth century progressed. This exhibition will demonstrate Dow's significance as an artist, thinker, and teacher, establishing his important and influential position in the history of American art.
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