In 1901 Maynard Dixon, accompanied by fellow artist Edward Borein, set off on horseback from Oakland, California, to seek diversion in the Great Basin. He’d learned to ride horses as a boy, taught by Mexican cowboys in the San Joaquin Valley ranching community where he’d grown up. He would paint horses, too, wild ones, on the journey that skirted Nevada—his first time in the state—and passed through eastern Oregon before concluding in Boise, Idaho. One of his watercolors from the trip, of a cowboy breaking in a mustang in some dusty desert corral, ended up as the cover of the March 22, 1902, issue of Harper’s Weekly. Confidently conceived and executed, it makes a proud addition to the visual tradition of celebrating man’s triumph over nature. But ten years after the closing of the frontier, at a time when automobiles were already beginning to supplant horses in California, the “taming of the West” was beginning to take on new, uncomfortable meanings for Dixon, a tension that would drive him out of his San Francisco home and into the wilderness at frequent intervals for the rest of his life.
Dixon found many of the answers he was seeking in Nevada, returning to the state again and again to paint cowboys, sagebrush-covered plains, mesas, ranches, cottonwood trees, and herds of horses in the years between his 1901 journey and 1939. That story is being told for the first time this summer in Sagebrush and Solitude: Maynard Dixon in Nevada, an exhibition of 150 sketches, ephemera such as manuscript poems by the artist, and paintings—many of which have never been seen before—on view at the Nevada Museum of Art.
Largely self-taught, Dixon’s early work from Nevada bears an unmistakable impressionist stamp. That would change following the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, where Dixon was exposed to a sampling of the post-impressionism, cubism, and futurism then sweeping Europe. Shortly thereafter he met and married the pioneering documentary photographer Dorothea Lange. The pair would become mainstays of the Bay Area artistic and literary scene that also included photographers Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, her printmaker husband Roi Partridge, novelist Charles Erskine Scott Wood, and Japanese American landscape painter Chiura Obata.
Except when Dixon skipped town. “He was always going ‘for a month or six weeks,’ but he never came back inside of four months,” Lange recalled. “His trips were practically disappearances as far as San Francisco life was concerned.” Dixon’s protracted escapes to the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada in search of “sagebrush inspiration,” as he called it, became indispensable as he sorted out his diverse artistic inspirations and influences. The flattened surface and bold, geometrical designs of his mature style, which began to emerge by the early 1920s, pull from modern graphic ideas, but in a way that was carefully integrated with Dixon’s penchant for realism. Strong high-altitude light flashes across his canvases like a strobe, providing justification for the neat, cloisonné-like outlines surrounding and setting off Dixon’s trees, horses, men, and mountains. Painting when the sun was lower in the sky allowed him to reintroduce into his art careful Renaissance-style modeling—such as for the straining muscles of horses or the twisted trunks of golden-leaved cottonwoods—that had been called into question by Edouard Manet fifty years before.
Dixon’s best-known paintings can seem slick and commercial, not as forward-looking as the abstractions of other artists of the southwest, such as Georgia O’Keeffe, or New Mexico’s transcendental painting group of a bit later. This legibility was recognized and patronized by advertisers like Standard Oil and the Public Works of Art Project, which commissioned Dixon to document the construction of the Boulder Dam (renamed after Herbert Hoover years later) in 1934, for which he embarked on a final painting excursion to Nevada before his divorce from Lange the following year. Dixon’s less popular work is harder to place, suffused with a stark melancholy that’s reminiscent of Edward Hopper. Dixon would return to Nevada twice more before 1939, after which he was forced to retire, on account of his emphysema, to the dry heat and mild winters of Arizona, where he died in 1946. His paintings of the Great Basin remain as a testament to a region in which all but the most monumental was in a state of flux.
Sagebrush and Solitude: Maynard Dixon in Nevada • Nevada Museum of Art, Reno • to July 28 • nevadaart.org
