Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers, by Arthur Wesley Dow; with introductory essay by Joseph Masheck.

First published in 1899, Arthur Wesley Dow's Composition probably influenced more Americans than any other text to think of visual form and composition from the modern point of view. Today, Dow (1857-1922) is best known as mentor to Max Weber and Georgia O'Keeffe, but his legacy as an enormously influential proponent of modern art in he United States has suffered undeserved neglect, especially concernig the influence of this particular book.

In Composition Dow develops a system for teaching students to create freely constructed images on the basis of relations between forms, especially in dark-and-light patterns. Greatly influenced by Japanese decorative art, he makes flat formal relations the basic principle of telling pictorial creation. Generations of teachers and their public school pupils learned from Dow's orientalism through this sort of workbook, sharing basic postimpressionist principles well before that term was even formulated. Reprinting Dow's practical and well-illustrated book in facsimile form, accompanied by Joseph Masheck's discussion of its historical ramifications, is an important contribution to the intellectual antecedents of American modernism.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998

ISBN: 9780520207493