Maynard Dixon’s American West
MAYNARD DIXON WAS BORN IN 1875 IN FRESNO, CALIFORNIA, 10 years before the San Joaquin Valley frontier railroad town was incorporated. The son of well-to-do Confederates who left Mississippi after the Civil War and made a home out West, he exhibited an artistic bent from a young age. By 1892, before he was 20, Dixon had made his way to San Francisco to study art, traveling thereafter to Monterey and Carmel with tonalist painter Xavier Martínez, visiting Arizona and Mexico, and journeying by horseback around the West with fellow California painter Edward Borein.
A striking interpreter of the American landscape and the country’s diverse cultures, Dixon would go on to do everything from illustrate Clarence E. Mulford’s Hopalong Cassidy to advocate for the red of the Golden Gate Bridge. But it was his painting that would make him one of the most important figures in American art.
Dixon’s iconic paintings at the Scottsdale Museum of the West in Arizona. One of the most comprehensive exhibitions ever mounted on Dixon — including more than 200 works and the easel he painted them on — the wide-ranging show illustrates the artist’s deep sense of place in the West. Also featured is important artwork by well-known artists Dorothea Lange and Edith Hamlin, who were both Dixon’s wives and companions.
