Maynard Dixon: Art Recapitulates Creation
An exceptional variety of Maynard Dixon works, including major masterpieces, will be offered at the Scottsdale Art Auction.
Cast your mind back to high school biology. Never fear, no pickled frogs or planaria will be harmed in the making of this introduction to the art of Maynard Dixon and to the baker’s dozen of the artist’s works that will be on offer at the Scottsdale Art Auction on April 4.
Short definition: the development of the embryo of an animal goes through stages resembling the evolution of the animal’s ancestors. The human embryo, as an example, starts as a cell, then looks like a fish, amphibian, bird, then looks like various four-legged mammals before becoming a primate and, finally, an example of homo sapiens. Long discredited in biology—so there won’t be a test—the idea has perhaps become even more useful as a metaphor in art history. And it came to me after I wrote recently on Paul Gauguin—that he had started out as a Barbizon painter, like Corot, worked through impressionism—monet and Pissaro—and post-impressionism—van Gogh, Cezanne, et al.—and then sought new pastures in ancient, indigenous, South Seas arts.
Dixon’s trajectory is different, but the idea is sound. Dixon begins in pure illustration, the bread and butter of young American artists at the close of the 19th century, moves through art nouveau and academic realism, takes in impressionism, melds post-impressionism with his interest in Native American forms and assimilates aspects of a number of the modernist currents of his times: dynamic symmetry; expressionism; the Mexican mural movement; Synchronism; Futurism; Cubism.
Cowboy, done in 1907, has an art nouveau feel not unlike the gorgeous poster art produced at the time. Dixon composes the figure out of negative and positive space and abstract shapes, as if the drawing might be a woodblock print. Who is this lean fellow? Is he thinking of something else or just pretending not to notice us? Do his boots fit or is he too big for ‘em? White hat or black?
Titled and dated verso in Dixon’s hand, with “Flathead Res Mont,” Nez Perce Cowpuncher is a product of a 1909 journey to Montana. Still rooted in illustration, the artist strains against its literalness with a new concern for larger and more sculpted shapes, impressionistic
brushwork to capture action, and a vibrant yet restrained palette. The influence here is Brandywine: N.C. Wyeth, Philip R. Goodwin.
Despite his disdain for movements and schools, Dixon’s mature style seems to receive and store the shapes that the desert of the American West presented to his eye as modernist geometries. In Winter Landscape, for example, sweeping draperies of clouds drag across a dominant sky while the shadowed mesa below broods like a slumbering deity over the landscape. But towering cumulus clouds in sunlit relief suggest that the mesa’s dark mood will soon lift. West Walls of Zion, on the other hand, keeps the landscape simple, piling regular and irregular blocks of paint, block on block, letting light and shadow work their own dimensional spells.
Neolithic Afternoon rises out of Dixon’s immediate experience of the Tehachapi wilderness in the spring of 1930, out of his imagined vision—a vision of truth and poetry rather than fact and history—a vision of a simpler, beautiful, remote past rising out of the emotions that swirled around his awareness of the turmoil and pain that the Depression wrought and would continue to wreak. It’s an ultimate vision, one wrought out of his faith, not just in human nature and human spirit but in the spirit of nature—nature’s renewal, adaptation and persistence.
Soft black Gauguin outlines divide rock form from rock form in the mass. They curl around the shapes of the two Indigenous women who sit atop them on a dais carved by time. Cézanne colors in proto-cubist patches create the greens and oranges of lichen—suggesting life’s tenacity, even on bare rock—and indicate the wear of water and wind on this giant jumble of boulders. The jumble itself is shaped like a cairn, a sign of the way, a marker on a difficult path, the kind left by a traveler’s predecessors to this day. The cairn shape is almost human, and the rounded, pelvic Y is a womb or eye opening onto the canyon wall and the larger world. The rocks are far more ancient even than these early, vanished California peoples, the First Peoples of the Americas. At the base of this canyon, the trickle of water that slouches by is perhaps all that is left of a once mighty torrent, a great primordial river. The women winnow seeds, separating the utile from the inutile. Their nakedness—also referencing Gauguin, and perhaps Matisse— reflects their absolute innocence, a state of
nature Dixon often sought out, though never more so than during the Depression, when greed and want showed humankind at its least humane.
The scene in the magnificent 1936 painting Trail Herd rests on the gentle curve of a hill, a hill that curves from left to right and, when you really look at it, curves toward you as well, toward you the viewer, placing the herd, horses and men in motion, placing the yellow ochre dust, placing the desert itself on the surface of a sphere, a ball, a world. That’s what takes the painting out of the ordinary sequence of events, out of history, out of beginning and ending, out of time. The temporality of it, the painting’s present, what submits to our shared notion of the order of things—the horse’s lifted foreleg; the kicked up dust; the horse’s shadow congruent with the curve of the hill; the cow’s lowered head; the calf looking up, catching the light; the dominant cowboy looking down to his left; the cowboy at far left, behind the passing herd, looking down and to his right; the curve of his hat brim, worked for many hours to make it just right and cast just the right shade on his face; the slant of the dust cloud where it meets the struggling sky—is, ultimately, subordinate to the underlying design, to the ball we all move across, doing what we have to do, going to whatever it
is that destiny has in store for us as it, our Earth, spins beneath us, spinning to its own destiny in the spinning universe.
Deserted Sheep Range came to be after Maynard Dixon visited the dry hills around Coalinga, California in 1935 on a statesponsored fact-finding trip with Dorothea Lange. As told in Donald J. Hagerty’s The Art of Maynard Dixon, Dixon found that “Small ranchers, destitute and unable to cope, had fled the land…where once these hills had hosted numerous cattle and sheep ranches, not one survived.” One thinks of the simplified landscapes of Dixon’s contemporary, Georgia O’keeffe, though here, in Deserted Sheep Range, subtle pinks, oranges and lavenders tint the brown land with something like hope. Life—unvanished—slumbers in apparent lifelessness, in the shadows and in the foreground stubble, waiting on the turn of the seasons, years, times, waiting on rain to bring back the sheep, waiting on the sheep to bring back the shepherds. A work of social realism that is neither social nor especially realistic, Deserted Sheep Range also anticipates Andrew Wyeth’s portraits without people, with the land here standing in as a self-portrait, an emblem of the artist’s all but hollowed out heart.
The horses in Dixon’s 1945 watercolor Saddle Stock might be racing out of a cave painting in France—or sprinting off an Anasazi wall in Arizona. Dixon’s mural work and friendship with Diego Rivera. Don your VR goggles and see grace running alongside power. Light, dust, the sharp shadows under the brush, a simple sky, varied only by the ratio of water to pigment—the mixture, if you will—that Dixon makes. And the horse and rider: what of them? Imagine the coats of the horses, the graininess of the sand—layers of volumes and space as you move from foreground through the herd and rider to the lip of the draw and the sky beyond. Now imagine this in motion.
It is no accident, as I have written elsewhere, that the Dutch word, landschap, refers to a painting or drawing of a scene in nature for a century and a half before entering English as “landscape” and doing dual duty referring to an artwork and the natural scene it represents. To perceive is make art; we are all always making art. Erich Auerbach, in his critical masterwork, Mimesis, speaks of the figura, of the idea proposed by early church fathers that the New Testament fulfills the Old, that the Old Testament isn’t fulfilled until the events of the New take place, that each is a separate reality, bound to the other outside of the relentless forward motion of time. Auerbach finds the figura in Dante’s Divine Comedy, seeing that the souls in the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso are never more themselves, never more human than they are in the afterlife. I think this is true of Dixon’s perceivings of the landscapes of the American West, that his paintings aren’t just of places, that they fulfill the landscape he paints just as the landscape is never more fulfilled than when we see it in his paintings. Each realizes and figures forth the other. Place and painting; each make the other more real, more alive. Art recapitulates creation.