Arthur Wesley Dow

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Arthur Wesley Dow (around 1890)

Arthur Wesley Dow (born April 6, 1857 in Ipswich , Massachusetts , † December 13, 1922 in New York City ) was an American landscape painter , printer , photographer and an influential art theorist and teacher.

Life

Arthur W. Dow was the eldest son of Mary Patch and David Dow. As a young man he became interested in the colonial history of Ipswich, about which he, together with the Reverend Augustine Caldwell , created the series Antiquarian Papers from 1875 to 1880 , which contained Dow's drawings of the local colonial-style architecture. From 1880 Dow took art classes in James M. Stone's Boston studio.

Arthur Wesley Dow: August Moon , 1905
Arthur Wesley Dow: View of Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada , 1919

Between 1884 and 1889 Dow stayed in Paris , where he studied at the Académie Julian . In Brittany he practiced plein air painting . His landscape paintings were shown in the Paris Salon . After returning to the United States, he opened his own studio in Boston, where he began his long-standing, successful teaching career.

Dow taught for over 30 years at various American art schools, such as the Art Students League , Teachers College, Columbia University at the Pratt Institute , as well as at his own Ipswich Summer School of Art . His ideas and teaching methods were revolutionary in his time. He dealt with Chinese and Japanese art , came to a rejection of traditional realism and was of the opinion that the artist should not imitate nature, but rather express its ideas and moods, which is achieved through a harmonious arrangement of lines, colors and contrasts could be. He referred to the Japanese design principle Nōtan , which can be found in Sumi-e , and which provides a "hard" contrast through the arrangement of lights and shadows.

Dow presented his teaching methods and theories in the book Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers published in 1899 . He was a teacher for numerous well-known artists, such as Alvin Langdon Coburn , Georgia O'Keeffe , Max Weber or the Byrdcliffe Colony .

literature

  • Nancy E. Green, Jessie Poesch: Arthur Wesley Dow and American Arts and Crafts . The American Federation of Arts / Harry N. Abrams, 1999, ISBN 0-8109-4217-8 (English)
  • Arthur W. Dow, Frederick C. Moffatt, Marilee Boyd Meyer, Richard Boyle: Arthur Wesley Dow, 1857-1922: His Art and His Influence . Spanierman Gallery, 1999, ISBN 0-945936-24-9 (English)

Web links

Commons : Arthur Wesley Dow  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Barbara Buhler Lynes: Georgia O'Keeffe in: Modern art and America , Bulfinch Press (= Little, Brown and Company), 2001, ISBN 0-8212-2728-9 , p. 263
personal data
SURNAME Dow, Arthur Wesley
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American landscape painter and art theorist
DATE OF BIRTH April 6, 1857
PLACE OF BIRTH Ipswich , Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH December 13, 1922
Place of death New York City