Footnotes

• Provenance:
  Private Collection, Beverly Hills, California
  
  Exhibited:
  An Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Drawings by Maynard Dixon, Wichita Art Association, Wichita, Kansas, April 15 - 29, 1928
  
  Note:
  Maynard Dixon began his artistic career as an illustrator. Many of his earlier works incorporate figures into the compositions. Interestingly, by the mid 1920s, the figure disappears from many of his plein-air landscapes, those works completed during Dixon's numerous excursions around the Southwest. He focused on the desert landscape, its changing light and the solitude of the vast Western scenery.
  
  Tired of big city life, Dixon left San Francisco in the summer of 1927 to begin a four-month journey through Nevada. His wife Dorothea and son Daniel remained in San Francisco. He explored numerous abandoned and remote regions of the state, driven by a local cattle rancher and former policeman named Frank Tobin.
  
  According to Dixon's personal records, he completed 56 paintings during this trip. He later exhibited several at the Riverside Hotel in Reno in October of 1927. He also presented some at the Galerie Beaux Arts in San Francisco, from November through December 1927, and at the Biltmore Salon in Los Angeles in February 1928.
  
  An art critic, representing The Argus art magazine, wrote a review about the paintings hanging at the Galerie Beaux Arts show in November 1927. In it he describes the thoughts that must have been going through Dixon's mind during this Nevada painting trip:
  
  "Approaching his subjects with an attitude of absolute submission to it, Maynard Dixon, who recently spent four months in Nevada, shows paintings which are direct renditions of the country visited and seen. In these the artist has not attempted to compose, to organize his subject matter. He has not tried to create problems for his brush, or even to express his own individuality through his work. He sat in front of his models: strangely shaped mountains...There lay something greater than his 'ego', he thought, something masterly in design and composition, and, letting it guide him, he tried to render it as it is, not to interpret it.
  
  Fifty-one oils of mountains, desert and fertile valleys, abandoned mining camps, bits of curious cities, are here to testify to this attitude and manner. It is the work of a man who is conscious of what he is doing and who knows how to restrain his emotions, who has dignity and poise".
  
  Footnote:
  Desert Dreams, The Art and Life of Maynard Dixon, Donald Hagerty, Gibbs Smith, Layton, Utah, 1993, pg. 155
  
  We are grateful to Donald Hagerty for providing the exhibition history and book notes for this catalogue entry.
  

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Category: Fine Art / California and Western Paintings

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