COMPOSITION AND STUDENTS OF DOW 1 COMPOSITION AND STUDENTS OF DOW 2 Copyright Mary Battiata, 2014 COMPOSITION AND STUDENTS OF DOW 3 Acknowledgments This thesis was developed under the guidance of the faculty of the graduate program in Art Education at the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington, D.C. I am especially grateful to my primary readers Dr. Pamela Lawton, Director of Education Studies and Associate Professor of Art Education, and Dr. Annie V. F. Storr, the program’s founder and former chair. I also would like to extend thanks to Stephanie Gaskins, curator of the Dow Collection at the Ipswich Museum in Ipswich, MA, for her insights and for the generous access she provided to the Dow student records there; and to Susan Futterman, co-curator of the 2010 Frances Gearhart exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, for sharing her scholarship and enthusiasm. In the early months of my research, I relied upon and am indebted to the scholarship of the distinguished Dow biographers, curators and art historians Frederick C. Moffatt, Joseph Mascheck, Nancy E. Green, Jessie Poesch and Elizabeth H. Turner; to Lawrence W. Chisolm’s masterful cultural biography of Ernest F. Fenellosa; and to the numerous biographers of Georgia O’Keeffe. For a crucial understanding of the history of art education, I benefited greatly from the vivid and detailed scholarship of Mary Ann Stankiewicz, Peter Smith, Elliot W. Eisner and Michael D. Day, as well as Maurice Brown and Diana Korzenik’s and G. James Daichendt’s inquiries into the relationship between classroom teaching and the teacher’s own studio practice. I am grateful to the librarians R. Sean Evans at Northern Arizona University and Paul Schlotthauer at the Pratt Institute for their assistance and ideas. I also owe thanks to the research librarians at The Gottesman Libraries at Teachers College, Columbia University, for their help arranging access to the archive of Dow student works there. Finally, I extend my deepest gratitude to my parents, Fulvia Battiata and the late Dr. Salvatore V. Battiata, for their unstinting support, interest and encouragement as I researched and wrote this paper. COMPOSITION AND STUDENTS OF DOW 4 ABSTRACT This thesis is a study in educational lineage. It examines three related topics: the influence of Arthur Wesley Dow’s Composition on the theory and practice of art education; how that influence has been transmitted over time in the teaching, textbooks and art of the first generation of Dow’s students; and the relationship of that influence to the recent revival of interest in Composition on the part of online and classroom art educators. The methodology includes close reading of primary sources, archival research, integrated studio practice and visual analysis of Dow’s students’ art. The results show the importance of Dow’s students’ teaching in the carrying forward of his ideas to the present day. They also demonstrate the continuing relevance of Dow’s method to the 21st century art educator and suggest that Composition may be of particular interest to the field of art education given a current emphasis on state-mandated standards of learning. Keywords: Arthur Wesley Dow, Dow’s Composition, students of Arthur Wesley Dow, history of art education, standards of learning. COMPOSITION AND STUDENTS OF DOW 5 Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction ……………………………..…………. p. 6 Chapter 2: Pedagogical Biography and Literature Review ……… p. 16 Chapter 3: Methodology …………………………………………. p. 79 Chapter 4: Results Overview……………………………………………………..… p. 88 Part 1: De Lemos, Gearhart, Seegmiller, O’Keeffe ………….... p. 90 Part 2: Blome, DARK AND LIGHT, Dow Student Prints …....... p. 151 Chapter 5: Dow Now …………….……………………………… p. 179 Chapter 6: Conclusions…………………………………………… p. 201 References ……………...………………………………………… p. 211 Appendix: Illustrations …..………………………………………. p. 231 COMPOSITION AND STUDENTS OF DOW 6 Chapter 1: Introduction Composition, Arthur Wesley Dow’s classroom manual for art teachers, is widely regarded as one of the most influential art education books of the 20TH century (Stankiewicz, Amburgy & Bolin, 2004, p. 45). Although, Dow (1857-1922) was never a household name, his book, first published in 1899, was quickly and enthusiastically adopted by art teachers and the teachers of art teachers, and within a few years of its appearance, was the “dominant influence” in American art classrooms (Mock-Morgan, 1976, p. 2) (Green, N. E. & Poesch, J., 2000, p. 55). That dominance continued well into the 1940s, and in a few areas of the U.S., beyond that, in part because of the saturation of the art teaching profession by the first generation of Dow’s students (Logan, 1955). Composition (the full title of its first edition Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers) went through three printings in its first year alone (Peters, 1991, p. 83). There were 20 editions in all (Masheck, 1997, p. 20) and the book did not disappear from the art education curriculum until the late 1940s. Composition profoundly shaped teaching practice in the American art classroom for nearly 50 years, half of them after Dow’s death. This paper examines selected parts of that long span of influence, in particular how Dow’s ideas and methods were transmitted and diffused in the profession over time through the work of his students and how, after a mid-century eclipse, it survives and is undergoing a revival today, a revival due in large part to the work of some of those students. Its first half is an investigation of how four art teachers, and possibly a fifth, in the first generation of Dow’s students adapted his methods in their own classrooms, textbooks and art making, and in doing so preserved Dow’s ideas and carried them forward. It then moves to the present day to examine a COMPOSITION AND STUDENTS OF DOW 7 recent revival of interest in Dow and his method in contemporary textbooks and online in classroom curricula and blogs. It is believed this inquiry will be useful to the contemporary art teacher for several reasons. First, a half-century is a long time in any field, but perhaps especially so in education, where a long teaching career might last 20 years and the turnover in textbooks is rapid. To the contemporary eye, Composition, with the blurry thumbnail photos and drawings of Coptic textiles, Japanese kimonos and Cluny Abbey metalwork that illustrated its early editions, may look quaint and out-of-date (Dow, 1920, p. 58). Yet the influence of Composition outlasted Dow’s lifetime and that of his students and, as this paper will document, it endures today. And it does so despite periodic shifts in art education’s rationale that have at times seemed to consign Dow and his method to obscurity. How can this be? What did Dow’s admirers see in his system and what might its value be to contemporary art educators? And what, in turn, might enduring influence have to tell us about the importance of teacher-student networks over time, across decades and generations? As the art education historian Peter Smith noted in his 1996 study, The History of American Art Education, “The work of the teacher, like that of the stage actor, is ephemeral. Its survival comes about mainly through influence on its subject” (p. 97). Thus it is hoped that a study of the influence of Dow, the great teacher of art teachers, upon his own students, will be instructive. Dow’s students, the majority of them females of varying age and classroom experience enrolled at teacher training schools, occupy a unique position in the history of art education. In effect, they were foot soldiers on the rising slope of a new discipline, entering the field at a time when popular interest and respect for the visual arts was at its peak and an American ideal of art instruction as something beneficial and appropriate for the entire population was gaining COMPOSITION AND STUDENTS OF DOW 8 currency. As authoritative art education histories (from Logan to Efland to Stankiewicz et al) have documented, Dow’s method for unleashing creativity in the classroom appeared at a time when teachers, faced with increasing demand for art instruction and crowded classrooms, were particularly receptive to it. Art education has a long history of “shifting rationales,” and until recently, these rationales have been understudied (Eisner, E. W. & Day, M., 2004, p. 5). If Dow’s ideas were an important step on the path to good, developmental art and have had surprising longevity, it follows that an understanding of what they were and how they were transmitted over time would be a small but important contribution to “the roots of art education practice” examined by the art education historian Mary Ann Stankiewicz in her history of the field by the same name (Stankiewicz, 2001). Composition also can be read as a record of what an experienced teacher of the early 20th century considered worth teaching after three decades of classroom experience, scholarly world travel and his own art practice (in Dow’s case, landscape painting, woodblock prints and photography). Thus, a close look at Dow’s lessons and how subsequent teachers used and adapted them cannot help but be instructive and even inspiring to a contemporary classroom art teacher. Dow’s close collaboration with the remarkable American philosopher, teacher and Asia scholar Ernest F. Fenellosa, his travels in Japan and China and his admiration for the way non- western cultures placed the so-called craft arts – ceramics, wood sculpture, textile art – on an equal footing with the “fine arts” of painting, drawing and sculpture, shaped his curriculum choices in ways that still resonate in the contemporary art classroom. In between semesters at Pratt, the Art Students League and finally, at Teachers College, Columbia University, Dow COMPOSITION AND STUDENTS OF DOW 9 traveled widely to learn non-western techniques of pottery and printmaking.