Maynard Dixon: Thoughts About Art and Modernism

During the three generations since the California Argonauts who struck it rich had become its most lavish patrons of the fine arts, San Francisco is reputed to have foster-mothered more than twelve hundred artists, most of the first generation being of European birth and training. Her first gilded nabobs, with callouses still on their palms, went in for social climbing and gaudy culture.

They crowned Nob Hill with gimcrack palaces and, having been told that art galleries were the thing, “blew themselves” without stint on marble statuary and very large paintings-- panoramic and grandiose. Art was what they yearned for and they proceeded, as one of them put it, “to exhaust its possibilities”; vastly to the profit of the group of earthly academic painters of brilliant yardage who painted Yosemite or the California hinterland or Roman mythology in a big way. Non-conformists, progressives, impressionists or romanticists-- few of the next generation of painters would qualify as radicals in their day.

Of those San Franciscans, who form the link in time and in art between the orthodox old-timers and the young third generation of followers of sundry “modernist” movements, there is at least one painter who, like all progressive, self-taught creative workers, has too much of the unique and solitary in his character to be easily classified. That one is Maynard Dixon, painter of the primitive Far West.

That is a fine essay about Maynard Dixon. I knew next to nothing about him, but really like him after reading that. Thanks for posting it.

“I was born and raised an American. My people came from England to Virginia before the Revolution; fought in that conflict and did their part in forming the new Republic; went west to the Mississippi in 1820 and prospered with the country; lost everything in the Civil War and in 1868 came to California to make a new start. My boyhood home was a raw California boom town where men drank, gambled in land values and shot one another over irrigation rights.
“For us, history began (almost), with Bunker Hills and the Declaration. All our guarantees were set forth in the Bill of Rights, and that meant what it said. Under it, people could live and move; could look one another in the eye and freely discuss matters of the public interest, in open difference of opinion. This was assured to all men. It was American.
“Friendships were genuine, based on character-- not money. A man’s word could be in fact as good as his bond-- and the average was high. The subservient ‘white collar’ class was not evident; the ‘yes man’ of the big corporations had not yet become a national figure; and that bootlicking phrase, ‘the customer is always right,’ had not yet been invented….”

A TRUE westerner, not the posers who inhabit California today. And this from Western writer, Wilbur Hall in Sunset Magazine, January 1921:

“Dixon is a man well worth knowing, well worth describing, because he is part of the vital West of today and tomorrow, part interpreter, historian and perpetuator of its best truth on canvas…. If there is anything of a western type, not only of mind, bearing, physique, habit, nature, temperament and viewpoint but of heart and soul, it expresses Maynard Dixon and is expressed in him.
“He is frank, blunt, outspoken. He is untrampled by tradition, yet a respecter of sound laws; he is free from guile, intolerant of narrowness, bigotry and hypocrisy. He was born in California and has been over almost every state of the West, not in a Pullman but on the trail. And he knows it and its people, and loves it, rather defiantly and somewhat jealousy. Moreover he is typical of its best kind of men, because he knows the faults of his country and blurts them out in meeting, when there is a chance that blurting will do some good. But sneering at the West, or misrepresenting it, either as to its character or its limitations, sets him afire.”

He sounds like a guy you would love to have a beer with on the trail. He is, in short, the anti-Hillary, anti-Obama, anti-bitter-clinger, true blue American. My kind of man!

This captures perfectly the places I like to traipse over here in California:

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