In May of 1937, Brigham Young University took possession of 85 paintings and drawings by Maynard Dixon, the groundbreaking artist whose images of the American west--created during long travels and lengthy residences with Native American communities--remain some of the most genuine work in Western Art as a genre. This book, lavishly illustrated with expansive color plates, centers on four texts examining very different topics. Gibbs begins with an account of the Dixon collection at BYU, then moves to a pair of essays exploring the reality, ideology, and abstraction at work in his images of Native Americans and the western landscape. In the final essay, photo historian Deborah Brown Rasiel grapples with the complex artistic influences at play between Dixon and his second wife, photographer Dorothea Lange. The resulting volume serves wonderfully as a visual, historical, and analytical history of an all-too-frequently overlooked artist.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5.0
Some striking images:
Maynard Dixon's landscape paintings of the American West are distinctive and instantly recognisable: the bold and rugged terrain below stylised clouds and often rich colours; but there is much more to his work. As a youngster he was enthralled by the work of Charles Russell, so it is not surprising that is interests developed as they did. Dixon, a solitary man, was very taken with the open space of the West, and in turn by the indigenous peoples he found there. His interest in what he found went... more info
Images of the Southwest & the streets of San Francisco:
I first encountered Maynard Dixon in William N. Goetzmann's "The West of the Imagination," a book about how America's picture of the Western frontier was shaped by early painters, illustrators, filmmakers and wild west shows. Born in 1875, Dixon stepped into a tradition defined by Charles Russell and Frederic Remington, but his portrayal of Western scenes falls somewhat closer in style and attitude to an eastern contemporary, Edward Hopper. His paintings of the Southwest are about the vast landscapes and... more info
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