Maynard Dixon (1875-1946)
According to noted authority Donald Hagerty, “By the early 1940s, Maynard Dixon had achieved considerable acclaim as one of the West’s leading artists. His long, productive life was a work of art in its own right. From the beginning Maynard Dixon was different, an authentic, iconoclastic, self-created individual. Born in 1875 in Fresno, California, he had no formal academic art training except for three miserable months at San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in early 1893. He did not, as so many American artists would, make an obligatory pilgrimage to Paris for study. He was an active, outspoken, if sometimes ambivalent participant in California’s cultural life. Disdainful and bothered, yet intrigued and involved by the self-absorbed onslaught of modernism in the art world, he developed by the 1920′s two enduring themes: the timeless truth of the immense western landscape and the religious mysticism of the Native American.”
“Dixon discovered a difference between the frontier and the West. The frontier, a historical concept concerned with certain American values, had all but disappeared, while the West itself seemed timeless, impervious to change, even spiritual. Ultimately he would conclude the West’s landscape held the answers to his searching arguing that American painting could best work its influence on the lives and thought of people when painters based their work upon native material and their native reaction to it. Maynard Dixon was a regionalist long before the term arrived, with a confirmed belief in the vitality of regional America. His region was the arid terrain of southern California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.” Maynard Dixon died in 1946.
biographical information courtesy of the Coeur d’Alene Art Auction.
Maynard Dixon’s Montana Period
According to Larry Len Peterson, “When the Great Northern Railway offered Maynard Dixon (American, 1875 to 1946) a commission to come to Glacier National Park to paint, he jumped at the opportunity. Although this 1917 trip proved to be his last visit to Glacier country, Dixon continued to paint memorable scenes of the area for the rest of his life.”
“He camped at Cutbank Creek with Curly Bearl, Owen Heavy Breast, Two Guns White Calf, Old Beaver Woman and Lazy Bear. He thought they were “the best Indians I have seen yet.” The crisp September days were appealing, and he watched the “smoke-tanned cones of teepees stand sharp in the sun, sending their blue-white breath into the breathless morning.”
Donald J. Hagerty notes that Dixon’s “Montana paintings show Maynard moving into a post-impressionist painting style, with vigorous, bold brushstrokes and a virile, forceful presentation…(they) have a raw vitality, capturing the picturesque and colorful elements of their subject. There is a physical vigor, even a gusto in the paintings with the paint anchored by strong composition.”
According to Donald Hagerty in ‘Desert Dreams: The Art and Life of Maynard Dixon’, “In July of 1917, the Great Northern Railway, through the efforts of [publishers] Foster and Kleiser, offered Maynard an opportunity to paint in Montana’s Glacier National Park and among the Blackfeet Indians, the region’s two principal tourist attractions. According to the railroad, some of Maynard’s paintings were intended for exhibit at Glacier National Park Lodge while others would be reproduced as promotional posters throughout California. Maynard accepted the Great Northern’s offer.
“…Maynard worked hard for nearly a month at the Blackfeet Indian encampment, admiring the courtly manners and hospitality of his hosts and their response to his interest in stories about old times. He also traveled to agency headquarters at Browning, Montana, to draw and paint the Blackfeet who congregated there. Their leaders invited him to Grass and Scalp dances, and to the initiation of new members into the Brave Dog Society, an unusual privilege. He and Constance [his daughter] were the only white guests at a Beaver Medicine ceremony. Maynard made many small oil sketches and drawings in the mountains and among the Blackfeet, notes for future work in his studio.”