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MAYNARD DIXON
1875-1946
Maynard Dixon was born in Fresno in 1875. As a young boy, he was influenced by images of the rough frontier life and boom times of the southern San Joaquin Valley and by the endless flat horizontal of his valley world. Encouraged by Frederic Remington, after sixteen-year-old Dixon sent him two sketchbooks; he resolved that art was to be his calling.
Self-trained, Dixon moved to San Francisco and began to produce illustrations in the early 1890's for the OVERLAND MONTHLY, Charles F. Lummis' LAND OF SUNSHINE, and the San Francisco CALL and EXAMINER.
In the early 1900's, Dixon had become an established illustrator. Many trips into the Southwest in the early part of the century, particularity the Navajo and Hopi country, added to his knowledge and development. These periodic trips were continued for the rest of his life as a means of personal and artistic renewal. Following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, he left for New York where he became one of the most successful book and magazine illustrators, in an era considered the "Golden Age of Illustration."
In 1912, Dixon disillusioned about his involvement in what he considered the arbitrary demands of his editors in the myth of the "sensational west," returned to San Francisco and began to undertake easel and mural painting. From 1912 to 1920, a time of personal and artistic triumphs and disasters, Dixon was developing his creative life.
In 1920, and after the failure of his first marriage, Dixon married Dorothea Lange, a photographer who would gain renown for her documentary work during the Depression a decade later.
The 1920's firmly established Dixon as an artist. He produced outstanding easel paintings and magnificent murals with a bold, flat style, highly developed color, and strong draftsmanship. The mural in the Reading Room of the California State Library is an example of one of these major works.
During the Depression years, Dixon's work included a new direction toward social themes. Shaken by his observations on the dislocation of American culture during the Depression, Dixon developed a series of powerful paintings depicting hobos, migrant farm workers, and city-dwellers uprooted by the faceless pressure of Depression-era economics over which they had no control or understanding.
Murals and easel painting dominated Dixon's work throughout the 1930's. He painted murals for the post offices in Martinez and Canoga Park, "The Arrival of Freemont in California" for the John C. Freemont High School in Los Angeles, oils on the construction of Boulder Dam, and Indian panels for the entrance to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior in Washington, D. C.
After a divorce from Dorothea Lange in 1935 and his subsequent marriage in 1937 to Edith Hamlin, an established San Francisco artist, Dixon turned more to easel paintings, sketching, and writing. Poetry had always been Dixon's companion, and he wrote strong, often lyrical verse.
In 1939, he and Edith Hamlin moved to Tucson, Arizona where Dixon hoped the climate would relieve a life-long respiratory ailment. They alternated between living there during the winter and summering in a great log house at Mt. Carmel, Utah, near Zion National Park. Although often dependent upon administration of oxygen, Dixon continued to paint major mature works dealing with the skies and landscapes of Arizona and Utah.
Maynard Dixon died at Tucson in 1946, recognized as an outstanding American artist.
From: Hagerty, Donald J. THE INDIANS OF CALIFORNIA AND THE SOUTHWEST, 1875-1905: DRAWINGS OF MAYNARD DIXON. Sacramento Science Center and Junior Museum: Sacramento, 1980.
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