The Artist - Maynard Dixon
Maynard Dixon was a product of the West. Born in 1875 in Fresno, California, his remarkable paintings of Western landscapes and of American Indians depicted a land and a people that Americans wanted to romanticize.
Dixon's painting career can be divided into three primary phases. During his first phase, he began painting desert scenes in a simplified, almost cubist manner. Later, after marrying his second wife, the Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange, he turned to melancholy, stylized images of the Great Depression and to turbulent views of city life.
In his later years he married fellow muralist and artist, Edith Hamlin, and maintained a successful studio in San Francisco. However, because of Maynard's increasingly poor health, in 1939, he and Edith moved to Tucson, where they established a winter home. During the summers they lived in Mount Carmel, Utah and Dixon returned to studying the landscape of the West, the two of them making painting trips to surrounding areas as Maynard's health allowed. According to art historian Robert Olpin, "Dixon continues to be recognized as the greatest painter to capture the grandeur and monumentality of the Southern Utah landscape."
Dixon's painting manner is difficult to classify. Olpin describes him as a Cubist-Realist, although his life's works show the influence of the Impressionists, the Modernists, the Cubists, the Realists, and painters of the Old West such as Frederic Remington. He was a social critic and a poet, fearlessly painting commentaries on the plight of the Native American, the victims of the Great Depression, and of social unrest. He lived among the figures he painted, spending time among the Hopi, Blackfoot, and Navajo Indians.
Maynard Dixon died in 1946, and in the spring of 1947 his wife, Edith, scattered his ashes near their Mount Carmel home. As author, Donald J. Hagerty, states in Desert Dreams,
Standing there, you can look west toward Zion National Park, beyond which the landscape descends toward the silent vastness of the Great Basin. In every direction, the West unfolds: mesas, buttes, lonely valleys and spectacular canyons. . . . hundreds of other places, named and unnamed, echo back in form, color and light. This is where [the] artist searched for beauty and understanding, revealing the spirit of a time and a place through his work. . . .This is Maynard Dixon country.
The Art
(LAFAYETTE) MAYNARD DIXON (1875-1946) Mount Carmel, Utah
Road to the River, Mount Carmel, Utah, October 1940
oil on board, 16" x l9-5/8" (40.6 x 49.9 cm)
Gift from Springville High School, Class of 1935 by exchange 1988.007
A self-taught painter, Maynard Dixon first visited Zion Canyon in 1938, and in the autumn of the following year he purchased ten acres near Mount Carmel, a small community not far from Zion National Park. The artist returned from a Tucson, Arizona 'winter home' in April of 1940 to supervise the building of a new summer residence in Utah, establishing his living pattern for the remaining six years of his life.
Already a noted artist of his day, Dixon continues to be recognized as one of the best at capturing the grandeur and monumentality of the Southern Utah landscape. Road to the River, Mount Carmel, Utah depicts the view from behind his home, looking toward the dirty Virgin River. He has portrayed nature in a calm manner, contrasting serene, blue mountains with energetic, golden poplars. The subdued foreground colors and strong geometric composition help to create a picture seemingly much larger than its actual dimensions. In addition, Dixon's approach to painting the road and its surroundings has created a relaxing view of the area and has glorified its natural setting. He made no attempt at adding decorative details, but painted it as he saw it, letting the beauty of the landscape stand for itself.
As Author Donald J. Hagerty states in Desert Dreams. "Standing there, you can look west towrad Zion Ntional Park, beyond which the landscape Descends toward the silent vastness of the Great Basin. In every direction, the West unfolds: mesas, buttes, lonely valleys and spectacular canyons...hundreds of other places, named and unnamed, echo back in form, color and light. This is where [the] artist searched for beauty and understanding, revealing the spirit of a time and a place through his work...This is Maynard Dixon country."
Concepts
Visual Art Core Curriculum - Utah State Office of Education
Under the Standard of Making, this print can help the student:
- learn to use one point, linear perspective to create an illusion of depth such as in the fences or the barn.
- learn to portray distant objects higher on the picture plane.
- learn to draw cast shadows to describe the form or surface upon which they fall.
- learn to create a work of art that uses five distinct value changes from light to dark such as in the middle ground trees or in the barn structures.
- use the medium of colored pencil to explore the technique of crosshatching (placing lines of colors crosswise to lines of other colors) in rendering objects in the distance as lighter, grayer and/or bluer than those in the foreground or middle ground.
- learn to manipulate lines and their direction to show the shape or direction of the surface they are describing.
Under the Standard of Perceiving, this print can help the student:
- compare/contrast with another 2D or a 3D work of art ways in which the artists have used elements such as line, shape, color, space, form, value and texture. Strategy example: what elements do each of these works have in common? What elements does one work have that the other does not? How are these elements used in similar ways? In different ways?
- illustrate how to create the illusion of space.
- describe the three properties of color: hue, value, and intensity and discuss how the artist has applied these properties.
- show how to differentiate and identify colors by value and intensity.
Under the Standard of Expressing, this print can help the student:
- select themes or symbols appropriate for describing an idea or personal experience.
- evaluate an artwork in terms of craftsmanship, concepts, objectives, creativity, beauty now and beauty when it was created. Strategy example: What is beauty? How has the concept of what is beautiful in art changed or remained the same over the years? What role do craftsmanship (skillful blending of the elements of art), objectives, and creativity play in the creation of a beautiful work of art? Discuss these questions both generally and in relation to this specific piece.
Under the Standard of Contextualizing, this print can help the student:
- compare/contrast this painting with others past or present in terms of subject matter, culture, and history.
- explain how things such as experiences, values, and cultural settings can influence one's perceptions of this painting.
- explore how various landscapes represent geographical regions.
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