Shadow and Substance
The A.P. Hays Family Maynard Dixon Collection is now on view at Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West.
020 will be remembered for many things, but in the Western world, 2020 will go down as the year Maynard Dixon became the star of Scottsdale, Arizona. Throughout the year, Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West presented its hit exhibition Maynard Dixon’s American West. Then, in the summer and just around the corner and down the street, the Scottsdale Art Auction offered more than a dozen Dixon works to bidders.
Now, completing a trinity of Dixon showings in the Arizona city—scottsdale’s appropriate nickname: the West’s Most Western Town—is Western Spirit’s A.P. Hays Family Maynard Dixon Collection. Hays, a prominent collector and supporter of the museum, has been a vocal advocate for Dixon and his work, and is excited to bring a selection of Dixon work to the museum’s visitors. “I started collecting art when I was 16 years old and my interests in art go on and on,” Hays says. “But why Dixon? He represented truth in art to me. He didn’t paint tricks. He just painted what he saw.”
Over the years, Hays has led numerous discussions and made presentations on Dixon and his work in the Southwest. A major turning point for the artist’s work came in 1976, when the artist’s Cloud World, widely regarded as his greatest masterpiece, was included in the exhibition The Natural Paradise: Painting in America, 1800-1950 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
“In his essay ‘The Primal American Scene’ [from the catalog for the exhibition], Robert Rosenblum cited Dixon as one of the few artists after the turmoil of [World War I] to make a ‘retreat into private, pagan mythologies that sought out the mysterious secrets of nature as eternal truths that might oppose the grim facts of man-made civilization which, between 1914 and 1918, had collapsed under its own weight,’” Hays says. “Cloud World…was pointed out by Rosenblum, the New York University professor of fine arts, as one of great early merit, which was completed before other, more honored and later works by O’keeffe, Avery, Dove, Hartley and Marin. Rosenblum also noted that Dixon’s reduction of the landscape in Cloud World to jagged patterns that mixed tree and mountains, desert and sky, shadow and substance, were advancing American art into the modern age.”
Cloud World, once owned by Hays, is not in the exhibition—it is in Maynard Dixon’s American West, just one gallery over at the museum—but it helps put Hays’ pieces, especially his many great 16-by-20-inch works, into context within the artist’s career.
“In paintings such as these, Dixon used desert light to visually flatten forms and collapse distances. His paintings do not rely on the illusion of linear or aerial perspective. He records form and space with the language of modernism,” Hays says. “Dixon did not resort to trite images of Southwestern themes that