Posted on 11/14/2006 5:37:12 AM PST by Utah Binger
One hundred years ago, a solitary figure roamed the desert seeking to capture the endless sky and towering mesas in paint and poetry. His vision of the West was matchless.
Maynard Dixon survived the destruction of San Francisco city by earthquake and fire, the Great Depression and the civilizing of the West. He spent over two decades sketching it for western novels, and then decades more on a quest to find and portray it: the “real” West—the vast space, intense silence, and profound spirit of the land and people of the American Desert.
KUED-Channel 7 profiles the life and art of Maynard Dixon (1875-1946), one of the most influential, yet lesser known, western artists of the early 20th century, in Maynard Dixon: To the Desert Again,” airing November 22 at 8:00 p.m.
Geologically isolated from the mainstream, Dixon’s modernist style depicting sparse desert landscapes opened the way for other American painters such as Georgia O’Keefe, Conrad Buff and Ed Mell. During a time when most people were content to buy dime novel depictions of the land and people, Dixon spent much of his life on a quest to discover the heart and spirit of the West. Through his images and words, he uniquely captured the complex character, color, intensity and vastness of the region.
“No painter has ever quite understood the light, the distances, the aboriginal ghostliness of the American West as well as Maynard Dixon,” says Thomas McGuane. “The great mood of his work is solitude, the effect of land and space on people. While his work stands perfectly well on its claim to beauty, it offers a spiritual view of the West, indispensable to anyone who would understand it.”
Dixon’s long, productive life was, in itself, a work of art, according to producer Nancy Green. “From the beginning, Dixon was different: an authentic, iconoclastic, self-created individual,” she says. “He refused to join any one school of art; instead, he created his own distinctive style.”
Dixon spent months roaming the western mesas, plains and deserts. Yet he created deep friendships with fellow dignitaries such as Ansel Adams. Primarily known for his landscape paintings, Dixon also was an outspoken social critic. With his wife Dorothea Lange, the famous Depression-era photographer, he chronicled victims of the Depression and the social unrest of the times. He felt an affinity with Native Americans, creating powerful portraits reflecting their spiritual nature.
Art curator Will South, who is interviewed in the film, notes, “Dixon was a man of the West, not because he painted Western scenes, but because he embraces what the West was and represented: mobility, freedom, possibility and the sense of the infinite.”
The film also includes interviews with Donald J. Hagarty, who wrote the definitive Dixon biography; art dealer Paul Bingham, founder of the Thunderbird Foundation, dedicated to the preservation of Maynard Dixon’s legacy and his Mt. Carmel, Utah home; and Daniel Dixon, the son of Maynard Dixon and Dorothea Lange.
Green and her crew traveled to California, New Mexico and Arizona, using high-definition video to show the play of light on the land -- the colors and formations that Dixon brilliantly manipulated to compose his paintings. These images are combined with interviews, archival footage, stylized recreations and Dixon’s own art, poetry and writing to bring to life the spirit of Maynard Dixon. The sounds and images of Southwest come to life through videographer Gary Turnier and audio engineers Kevin Sweet and William Montoya.
Maynard Dixon To The Desert Again is funded in part by the Cleone Peterson Eccles Endowment Fund, the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation, the Dr. Charles .Bieber Family Trust, Terence K. Stephens, Grant and Betty Hagestad, the Thunderbird Foundation for the Arts, the Lawrence T. Dee – Janet T. Dee Foundation, the C. Comstock Clayton Foundation, and the contributing members of KUED.
Maynard Dixon: “To the Desert Again” airs Wednesday, November 22 at 8 p.m. on KUED-Channel 7. A free sneak preview of this documentary will be shown to the public Tuesday, November 14, at 7 p.m. at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts located on campus at the University of Utah
Last year I heard a wonderful lecture by Daniel Dixon entitled "Growing Up With Giants", about his childhood and life as the son of Maynard Dixon and Dorothea Lange. It was illustrated entirely with Dixon's paintings and Lange's photographs. Two hours of spell-binding narrative and art.
Thanks. I did not know of this man, or his work. Beautiful. The search begins.
We have produced this two times. Once here in Southern Utah and last June in Salt Lake City. I spent the night with Daniel last night. We threw down a few and laughed a lot. Liberal, but very bright. As the founder of a non profit, I have to keep my politics neutral in such situations.
"Home of the Desert Rat", is now at the Phoenix Museum. In my lecture, Maynard Dixon: Approach to Modernism, we call this one out as his final masterpiece. I live in and own his Southern Utah home.
When you come, we will have dinner at his home and throw down a few. He never made it to Canada but came very close a few times. In 1917 he spent the summer at Glacier park with Charlie Russell.
This one is coming up at Bonhams and Butterfields in San Francisco/LA in December. Estimate is 600,000-800,000. It will bring half again that number. Painted near the Grapevine in the Tehachapi Range. It is 36x40 inches. His record price is 1700 per square inch.
I've been over that pass many times. Once was the editor of a newsletter named for "what once was a winding two lane ribbon of blacktop", The Grapevine.
Mr. Dixon shows what true talent and determination can accomplish.
Ah, don't we though! Mrs. Reo and I attended the presentation in Kanab in August of '05. If that was one of the presentations you put on, thank you very much!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.