Early Adopters
In 1912, Walter Lippmann proclaimed: “Instead of a world once and for all fixed . . . we have a world bursting with new ideas, new plans, and new hope. The world was never so young as it is today, so impatient of old and crusty things.”1 Far from just the overenthusiastic ravings of a twenty-three-year-old aspiring journalist and critic, Lippmann’s optimism seemed to capture something essential about the spirit of the day. The revolutions that had propelled much of the world into the Industrial Age and altered every aspect of daily life—in communications, engineering, manufacturing, transportation—had in turn sparked concomitant revolutions in nearly every aspect of human endeavor. The era saw seismic developments that ranged from Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity to Sigmund Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, and in the United States as in Europe, the fever seized artists as well, who rejected academic realism in favor of styles that expressed their subjective responses to the dynamism of the modern age. As painter William Zorach recalled, “We entered a whole New World of form and color that opened up before us.”2 No country epitomized the modern era more than the United States, with its headlong embrace of everything new, from skyscrapers to subways. Yet as a relatively young nation, it was still something of a cultural backwater in the decade prior to World War I. To experience the latest avant-garde trends firsthand, American artists with progressive ambitions went to Paris. But among the country’s emerging avant-garde who remained at home, many found inspiration in the ideas of the Massachusetts-born Arthur Wesley Dow, either by studying directly with him at the various institutions he taught at in New York from 1896 until 1922 or through his widely distributed book of art exercises Composition, first published in 1899. Dow
