His poetry shows that he was drawn to the idea of painting the West even before personally experiencing it. KH: One of the reasons I wanted to include the poetry in the exhibition is that the poetry gives us a better understanding of why this landscape was so important to Dixon and what he felt when he stood and looked over the Western expanse. How do Dixon’s paintings and poetry complement each other? So he went back to California, but he moved around several times, until he permanently moved to the Southwest in the last five years of his life.ĬA: Dixon was also a poet, and the exhibit includes many of his poems.
But he felt like it was kind of phony - he decided he’d rather go back west and paint the story that he knew as opposed to someone else’s story. He spent several years in New York illustrating stories about the West for newspapers, after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 leveled his studio in California.
I think it’s important to remember that Dixon grew up in an America that had just been recently stitched back together, and he very well may have felt like he didn’t fully belong where he was living. KH: Dixon’s father had been a Confederate soldier the family was in ruins after the war, so they left the South and went to California, where Dixon was born in 1875. For example, when his first marriage dissolved, he went into a deep depression and went to the Southwest to paint he returned again when his second marriage was breaking up, and from that period we see one of the great peaks of his painting career.ĬA: How did Dixon’s background figure into his love for the desert? Often he would go on these trips during times of personal difficulty. Dixon lived in San Francisco for most of his life, and he would periodically leave California and journey to New Mexico, Utah and Arizona. The desert was a place Dixon returned to when he needed strength, when he felt like he needed to be reborn. But from my perspective, one of the things that sets Dixon apart from his contemporaries is that he was emotionally moved by his experiences in the region. KH: Dixon was one of many artists in the first half of the 20th century who was engaging with a kind of myth of the American West and Southwest as untouched wilderness. According to the (possibly apocryphal) story, they sealed the deal at Dixon’s favorite bar, Dixon with a glass of whiskey and Clark with a glass of milk.ĬA: Why was Dixon drawn to painting the American West? It was the middle of the Great Depression, and Dixon was in a position where he needed to sell some work. So he went to San Francisco, met with Dixon and basically offered to buy everything available. He saw a Maynard Dixon painting in a magazine and fell in love with it. Clark, felt strongly that BYU students needed to learn from world-class art. Kenneth Hartvigsen: In the 1930s, the dean of the then-College of Commerce, Herald R. Brigham Young University Museum of Art, 1937.Ĭhristie Allen: BYU has the largest museum collection of Maynard Dixon artwork in the world.
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