Zulma Parker Steele and Arthur Wesley Dow
Spanierman Gallery, New York
March 17 - April 23, 2005
Spanierman Gallery presents Zulma Steele and Arthur Wesley Dow, an exhibition and sale featuring over fifty works that introduces the paintings and monotypes of Zulma Steele (1881-1979), while also presenting a complementary group of paintings and woodcuts by her mentor, Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922). The show is accompanied by a brochure with a scholarly essay by Dr. Carol Lowrey.
Building on the extensive exhibition held at Spanierman Gallery in 1999-2000 that considered Dow’s art and influence, this show also augments the exhibition organized by Cornell University and currently traveling, entitled Byrdcliffe: An American Arts and Crafts Colony that features the art colony in Woodstock, New York, of which Steele was a member.
Steele is probably best known for her pottery, and this exhibition is the first to concentrate on her brightly colored landscapes and her lyrical monotypes, revealing how her stylistic approach was informed both by modernism and by its impact on the arts and crafts movement.
Born in Appleton, Wisconsin, Steele was raised in Vermont and in the Catskill region of upstate New York. In 1899, after periods of study in Chicago and Boston, she enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she came into contact with Dow, an avid proponent of the arts and crafts, who suggested that she join Byrdcliffe, the utopian arts and crafts colony established a year earlier on the outskirts of Woodstock by the Englishman Ralph Whitehead and the American painter-lithographer Bolton Brown.
Arriving at Byrdcliffe in 1903, Steele spent the next two years drawing decorative designs for mission furniture and other objects, incorporating indigenous flora in her work. Although Byrdcliffe’s furniture concern closed in 1905, she stayed on in Woodstock, going on to make monotypes, pottery, and picture frames. She also studied painting with the Tonalist painter Birge Harrison, who urged his students to explore the pictorial potential of local scenery. By about 1910 Steele had evolved a lively Post-Impressionist style that she applied to depictions of the regional landscape, in particular a series of stunning views portraying the Ashokan Reservoir in all phases of its construction--several of these works are included in this exhibition.
Steele’s involvement with advanced strategies of form and color did not go unnoticed: in 1914 several of her paintings were included in The Exhibition of Contemporary Art, a controversial show of cutting-edge art held at the National Arts Club that had been organized by the New York Times critic J. Nilson Laurvik, known for his sympathetic outlook to progressive modes of painting. There, Steele’s oils hung side-by-side with those of Arthur Dove, John Marin, and Marsden Hartley.
Painting and printmaking also occupied the attention of Dow, an artist, teacher and theoretician whose interest in the design principles of Eastern art helped pave the way for the development of Modernism in the United States. A native of Ipswich, Dow studied in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Paris, before returning to his native town in 1889. There while painting of the low-lying salt marshes near his home, he developed the views on mass, line, and color that became the basis for his influential book of 1899 entitled Composition.
In 1895 Dow moved to New York, where he taught at the Pratt Institute, the Art Students League, and Columbia University’s Teacher College. His influence was far-reaching, encompassing both the fine and decorative arts; his notion that artists should work in an “imaginative manner” set an especially important example to painters such as Max Weber, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Steele.
Dow was engaged in printmaking until 1907, when he turned increasingly to oil. After his first visit to the Grand Canyon during the winter of 1911-12, he began exploring the expressive potential of color, creating vivid, light-filled views of the canyon with a lush Fauvist palette that reflect his belief that “the Canyon is not like any other subject in color, lighting or scale of distance. It forces the artist to seek new ways of painting.”
Dow is represented in this exhibition by intimate, Barbizon-inspired canvases from the late 1880s and 1890s and by a selection of his views of the Grand Canyon. A group of color woodcuts and cyanotypes are also included, underscoring the artist’s interest in a wide range of media.
SPANIERMAN GALLERY
45 East 58 Street, New York, NY 10022
www.spanierman.com
