ARTHUR WESLEY DOW Photographs - Arts and Crafts Period

James L. Enyeart. Santa Fe, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2001. First edition, first printing.

Hard cover with dust jacket, 9.5" x 11", 166 pages, color and black & white photographs.

Condition: Fine / New. A brand new, unread copy. No remainder mark. Gift quality.

Beautifully illustrated and printed. Lots of large images. Great look at this Arts & Crafts period artist and photographer.

From the dust jacket:

Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922) is a celebrated name in American art history, associated with woodblock printmaking and painting, with the American Arts and Crafts movement and its promulgation, and with innovative and influential theories in art education. Harmony of Reflected Light for the first time presents and reveals Dow as an important figure in modernist photography, both a precursor to Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession and a significant exponent of the modernist ideas developed beginning with Stieglitz's gallery "291."

In his lifetime, Dow was given to very limited exhibition of his photographs, even during his period of greatest exposure at the Montross Gallery in New York. Contemporary exhibitions of Dow's art, including that of his prominent students, typically feature works by Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Kasebier, and others. Dow's contribution as a photographer has generally been restricted to repeated examples of cyanotypes. This has been due in part to the lack of a known body of his photographic work until Dow's descendants recently made the collection reproduced here available for exhibition and publication.

Through this body of work, we discover that Dow was an accomplished photographer who directly influenced select major art photographers of his day and may have had an important proto-modernist influence on the development of photography as an art form at the beginning of the twentieth century. Stieglitz's eager embrace of abstraction presaged photography's break with pictorialism, but modernism also centrally involved elements of the Symbolists and the Arts and Crafts movements, and in this Dow was a central influence on Kasebier, Clarence White, Coburn, and others. Dow's early acceptance of photography, and the period in which he made the majority of his photographs (1890-1912), found him exploring modernist directions in a variety of printmaking media, a vision first refined in his drawings and paintings executed in France at the Academic Julian in Paris and the artists' commune at Pont-Aven prior to 1890. At the same time, it was his study of Japanese woodblock at Pont-Aven that laid the groundwork for his serious interest in photography, which at the time was just another, newer printmaking medium. Dow's first trip to the Orient in 1903 provided for the pursuit of this direction in his photographs. Especially in images made in Japan, Dow abandoned all impulse toward pictorialism and ventured in a modernist direction from which he would never retreat.

Dow was exploring the massing of lights and darks, a concept known in Japan as "notan," but throughout his life he maintained an affinity as well for the romantic: the sensual character of line and the emotional power of landscape. Subjects included Dow's birthplace of Ipswich, Massachusetts, an austere New England town that reflected the craftsman's understanding of harmony of line and proportion. Photographs made in Paris in 1904, and those executed in India the year before, show the artist's preference for form and abstraction over romantic content, resulting in an expressive abstraction. His work following his 1889 return from France took up the challenge of aligning the idea of abstraction with a structured sense of design. More central still was the question of identifying the spiritual essence of his subjects. He also explored the principle of variation, which he could apply to photography as well as to woodblock printmaking.

The final phase of Dow's development as a photographer began in 1911 with the first of three trips to the Grand Canyon, where Dow made images that explored photography's unique language of geometry, line, and space. With this period, his work in photography was concluded, his mark on modernism now indelible.