Arthur Wesley Dow and American Arts & Crafts
Cantor Center for the Arts at Stanford University
July 14 - September 19, 1999
Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago
October 9, 1999 - January 2, 2000
Blanden Memorial Art Museum, Fort Dodge
July 7 - October 1, 2000
Arthur Wesley Dow and American Arts & Crafts is the first exhibition to examine the far-reaching effects of Arthur Wesley Dow's (1857-1922) influence as both an innovative artist and one of America's greatest art educators. It begins its national tour at the new Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University before traveling to the Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, and the Blanden Memorial Art Museum, Fort Dodge, Iowa.
The exhibition, organized by The American Federation of Arts with guest curator Nancy Green, chief curator, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, comprises eleven prints and four photographs by Arthur Wesley Dow and over 110 works in a variety of mediums by his students, disciples, and colleagues. Arthur Wesley Dow's influence extended to some of the leading painters, printmakers, photographers, ceramicists, and furniture-makers of the first half of the century. Those represented in the exhibition include painters Georgia O'Keeffe and Max Weber; printmaker Pedro de Lemos; photographers Alvin Langdon Coburn and Gertrude Käsebier; ceramicist Adelaide Alsop Robineau; Newcomb and Overbeck potteries; and the Byrdcliffe Colony, Woodstock, New York.
Throughout his lifetime, Arthur Wesley Dow developed a personal style that assimilated the influences of Japonisme, synthesism, and Impressionism, with a simplification of forms and a flattening of color. The exhibition is arranged chronologically to highlight the development of Arthur Wesley Dow's ideas and practices and their reflection in the work of his students.
In 1899, Arthur Wesley Dow produced Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers. The manual, a 1913 edition of which is included in the exhibition, was widely read and changed the way art was taught--from grade school to college level--for the next five decades. It is widely recognized as having laid the stylistic foundation for the American Arts & Crafts movement.
During a 30-year teaching career at such institutions as Columbia University Teachers College, the Art Students League, the Pratt Institute, and his own Ipswich Summer School of Art, Arthur Wesley Dow stressed the integration of mediums and, as he wrote in a preface to Composition, that the "study of composition of Line, Mass and Color leads to appreciation of all forms of art and the beauty of nature." His tenet, to create beautiful, finely crafted objects for both practical use and aesthetic contemplation, resonates in each work on view.
Arthur Wesley Dow and American Arts & CraftPublished by The American Federation of Arts
PUBLICATION - The catalogue accompanying the exhibition addresses Arthur Wesley Dow's influence on turn-of-the-century art, his contribution to the Arts & Crafts movement, and his commitment to teaching. Nancy Green's essay examines Dow's printmaking and the origins of the American Arts & Crafts style. Jessie Poesch, Professor Emerita, Tulane University, discusses American art pottery. Arthur Wesley Dow and American Arts & Crafts is published by The American Federation of Arts. 208 pages, 91/2 x 9", 142 color illustrations; hardcover.
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