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Maynard Dixon (January 24, 1875
– November 11, 1946) was a 20th-century American artist whose body of work
focused on the American West. He was married for a time to American
photographer Dorothea Lange.
Dixon was born in Fresno,
California, into a family of aristocratic Virginia Confederates who had found a
new home there after the American Civil War. His mother, a well-educated
daughter of a Navy officer from San Francisco, shared her love of classic
literature with the young boy and encouraged him in his writing and drawing.
Dixon later studied briefly with the tonalist painter Arthur Mathews at the
California School of Design where he became close friends with Xavier Martinez
and others of the Bohemian Club. To support himself he accepted numerous
illustration jobs. Great illustrators were plentiful around the turn of the
century, yet Dixon obtained work from the Overland Monthly and several San
Francisco newspapers.
In California, he illustrated
books and magazines with Western themes. Some of his most memorable work from
these early years appeared in Clarence Mulford’s books about Hopalong Cassidy.
For a time he lived in New York with his young wife and baby daughter
Constance, but soon returned to the western United States where he said he
could create “honest art of the west” instead of the romanticized versions he
was being paid to create. Shortly after he began a new life in San Francisco,
his first marriage ended. Dixon developed his style during this early period,
and Western themes became a trademark for him.
Influenced in part by the Panama Pacific
International Exposition of 1915, Dixon began to search for a new expression,
moving away from impressionism and into a simpler, more modern style. Meeting
and marrying Dorothea Lange, a portrait photographer from the East, had a great
influence on his art.
By 1925 Maynard’s style had changed dramatically to
even more powerful compositions, with the emphasis on design, color, and
self-expression. A true modernist emerged. The power of low horizons and
marching cloud formations, simplified and distilled, became his own brand and
at once were both bold and mysterious.
During the Great Depression,
Dixon painted a series of social realism canvases depicting the prevailing
politics of maritime strikes, displaced workers, and those affected by the
depression.