Maynard Dixon (1875-1946)
Born on a ranch near Fresno in California's Central Valley, Maynard Dixon spent his early years immersed in the lore of the Old West. A frail child, he occupied his time drawing Western subjects and at one point sent his sketchbook to his idol, Western painter and sculptor Frederic Remington, who encouraged the boy's efforts. Dixon's family moved in 1893 to the San Francisco Bay Area, and he enrolled briefly at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, where he studied with Arthur F. Mathews. Dixon described Mathews's teaching as follows: 'His method was to pounce upon our work, so like a growling dog he scared me out of my boots.' Except for private study with landscapist Raymond Dabb Yelland, Dixon was largely self-taught. After only three months at the MHIA, he went to work as an illustrator for the San Francisco dailies and the Overland Monthly until 1907, when a Southern Pacific Railroad mural commission took him to Tucson. During this first period in California, Dixon had begun his regular travels to the Southwest and Northwest to sketch the landscape and the people there. These forays were to provide the inspiration and subjects for the works of his later career.
After several years in New York doing illustrations for Century and Scribner's, Dixon returned in 1912 to California, settling in Los Angeles, where he shifted his concentration from commercial illustration to easel and mural painting. After his marriage to photographer Dorothea Lange ended in 1935, he married artist Edith Hamlin in 1937. The following year they moved for his health to Tucson, where Dixon died nine years later.
In his later career, Dixon achieved an international reputation for his Western subjects, which he signed with an Indian thunderbird logo. In addition to desert landscape, cowboy and Spanish-American subjects—and representations of Apache, Hopi and Blackfoot Indians--Dixon painted in the 1930s a series of social realist works, such as No Place to Go (1935). Moving after 1920 from a post-Impressionist to a simplified, Cubist-Realist style, Dixon represented a typically conservative American response to European modernism. However, he did still harbor an impulse to self-expression and stylistic experimentation, hallmarks of modernist sensibility, as demonstrated in a handful of little-known paintings from the 1920s, as well as his personal commitment to being both a painter and a writer of poetry.
​With Ray Strong and other progressive artists, Dixon revived the San Francisco Art Students' League in 1935. He then worked as a muralist for the WPA/FAP (1936–7) and the Treasury Department Section of Painting and Sculpture (1942). A member of numerous professional and social organizations, Dixon was recipient of a bronze medal at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in 1915.
1. Gallery of Dixon's Art: Nature and the American Indian
2. Theme: Connection to Nature \ Dixon's poems: "Shaman's Song"; "Interpreter"; The Sweat-Lodge"
3. Theme: The Great Depression \ Dixon's poems: "Industrial"; "1934"
4. Dixon's poem: "Thoughts"
5. Dixon's poem: "La Canción Mexicana"
6. Dixon's poem: "My Country"
7. Dixon's poems: Two songs: "Navajo Song"; "Hill-Song"
8. Dixon's poem: ​"Pueblo de los Muertos"
Biography adapted from Paul J. Karlstrom. "Dixon, (Lafayette) Maynard ." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web.<http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T096248>.
Artwork behind title: Maynard Dixon's Cloud World (detail)