Maynard Dixon Country

He stood under the blazing June sun at Needles, California, looking eastward across the Colorado River at receding rows of desert mountains. The young San Francisco artist knew he had found what he was looking for: Maynard Dixon country.

The year was 1900. Maynard Dixon was about to pay his first visit to Arizona.

Born in Fresno, California, in 1875, he grew up on the open plains of the San Joaquin Valley. At sixteen he sent some drawings to Frederic Remington, who responded with praise and encouragement. In 1893 Dixon began a career as a magazine and book illustrator. “But my work dealt with an imaginary West until 1900,” he wrote in a letter to editor Charles F. Lummis. He would laugh: “I had to go east to see the West.” Once initiated, Dixon made many trips through the West, from Montana to Mexico, over almost half a century. Nowhere did the West mean more to him than in Arizona-sun and shadow on the red walls of Canyon de Chelly, clouds stretched like a sapphire tent above the Colorado Plateau, the yellow flame of autumn cottonwoods. All became memories he would re-create in his paintings and poetry.

Dixon's first journey into Arizona established what would become a long and sympathetic searching of a region-a place of challenge, inspiration, and, ultimately, refuge. He sketched Mohave Indians at Robert's Ranch, rode the cattle ranges of the Agua Fria River Valley, and mingled with cowboys, prospectors, and adventurers on Phoenix's streets. Dixon sensed Indian ghosts befriending him as he wandered the cream-colored cliffs near Montezuma Castle. In his unpublished autobiography, he wrote, “I knew them at Old Oraibi, Walpi, Mishongnovi, and at Betatakin. Through them I reached to something I cannot name, yet more than half believe. You can't understand Indians until you make friends with the ghosts.” He returned in 1902, heading for Old Oraibi, on the edge of the Hopis' Third Mesa. From there he traveled into Navajojoland. Thirty thousand Navajos, Dixon was told, lived on a landscape of magnificent extremes. In the February, 1942, Arizona Highways he remembered the singing Indians. As they rode across the long valleys or through echoing canyons, their high-keyed lilting songs could be heard from far off through the clean high air. With their sheep and goats and ponies; their cornfields and shelters of juniper

MAYNARD DIXON

twentieth century American West in transition-cowboys, cattle ranges, roundups, plunging horses in the dust-filled air of corrals, Indians, and trading posts. Dixon seemed the embodiment of the Westerner as he walked toward his studio on cool, gray San Francisco mornings. A black narrow-cut suit, Stetson hat, and handtooled cowboy boots heightened his theatrical image. "He walks like a deer," someone once remarked. Each step was answered by a faint buzzing; the rattle was still attached to his rattlesnake hatband. He flourished an ebony sword cane, with his professional signature - a thunderbird -carved in silver on its top.

In 1922 and 1923, Dixon made several excursions to the Navajo and Hopi reservations. He was accompanied by photographer Dorothea Lange, whom he had married in 1920 after the breakup of his first marriage. Lange was to gain renown of her own for her photographs of Depression-era America. Dixon traversed the remote network of

canyons and mesas between Tuba City and Monument Valley. Guided by Indian trader John Wetherill, he crisscrossed the roadless expanse of Monument Valley, watching as the soaring buttes seemed to dart in and out of passing cloud shadows. He sketched and painted the colorful drama of trading posts at Red Lake, Kayenta, and Black Mesa. As he walked through the silent ruins of Betatakin, he encountered his Indian ghosts again. Dixon stayed four months with the Hopi Indians at Walpi, making friends with the living past. Again from his unpublished biography: "I knew time no more, only seasons and the world suspended in eternity. A little feathered kachina and bits of turquoise hung against a pearl-white wall; my friend Namoki telling stories to his son, the swaying arc of costumed figures in the Basket Dance-the moving sunlit poetry of the Flute Dance. I never worked at higher levels."

Everywhere stretched a vast panorama, reformed and recolored by cloud shadNows. Clouds and sky. They would dominate his paintings as much as the earth. In May and June, pale clouds, slender mile-high ghosts, twist, twirl, and dissolve into blue emptiness. But in July, Dixon knew, the thick white cumulus clouds come, marching over the horizon. Domes of gleaming vapor appear, drifting in silent rhythmical ranks, ascending, building into thunderheads, darkening, trailing their deepening shadows over the land until the mesas disappear under descending veils of rain. Where many had looked at this country, few had seen. Dixon was one of the few. In the 1920s, his painting took on bold structure with bright color, sharp angles, and deep shadows projecting powerful shapes. He grasped the sense of Arizona's big sky and clouds, the complex geometry of mesas and canyons and the wide-openness of the broad valleys. Artist and subject were appropriate one to another, an abstract landscape meeting someone who understood the power of abstraction.

In 1929 Dixon received a commission to execute a mural, The Legend of Earth and Sun, for Phoenix's newly built Arizona Biltmore Hotel. The clear patterns, well-defined forms, and architectural compositions emerging in his painting at that time are evident in the mural. The design itself was drawn from his intense, mystical experiences with Hopi religion.

By 1935 the Dixon and Lange marriage had ended. In 1937 Dixon married Edith Hamlin, a talented young painter who shared his love of the Southwest. About this time, in declining health and uneasy about San Francisco's art scene, Dixon decided to move.

"We chose Tucson," Hamlin explains, "for the spirit of the place because it still retained a definite historical character. We moved there in 1939, purchasing two acres on Prince Road from Gilbert Ronstadt and building an adobe house with an attached studio."

They also acquired twenty acres near Mount Carmel, in southwestern Utah, to escape the Sonoran Desert's summer heat. There they constructed a small house of native stone and logs.

Dixon was slowing down physically, but he still enjoyed throwing a bedroll in the car and rambling around the country-side. Their station wagon, with Dixon's large red thunderbird on its sides, was a familiar sight from Tucson south to Sasabe on the Mexican border. They explored the sprawling Papago (now Tohono O'odham) Indian Reservation, painting the cactus and mesquite country around the Baboquivari Mountains. "We had other favorite places," relates Hamlin, "the Rin-con and Tucson ranges, Patagonia, Bisbee, and Sells with its annual Indian fair."

Summer and fall months were spent painting the quiet towns, secluded valleys, and piñon and juniper-dotted mesas near their Mount Carmel retreat.

Between 1940 and 1945, Dixon produced some of his best work, drawing upon a lifetime of experience in Arizona.

Austere, angular landscapes; a solitary Indian outlined on the horizon; architectural cloud worlds-testaments on canvas to Arizona's places and people.

Dixon received his last mural commission in 1946, producing a striking Grand Canyon scene for the Santa Fe Railroad's Los Angeles ticket office. By now Dixon was waging a gallant but losing fight for his health. He gathered together every shred of remaining energy to pour into his art. The mural was delivered five days before his death. The station was eventually razed, and several years ago the mural found its way to the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix.

Dixon died November 14, 1946. A simple bronze plaque was set into a boulder atop the mesa overlooking his Mount Carmel home: "In Memoriam, Maynard Dixon, 1875-1946." Standing next to it, one can look west and see the bright rock walls of Zion; to the south, toward Arizona, the vast expanse of the Colorado Plateau unfolds.

Maynard Dixon country.

Note: More of Maynard Dixon's art can be viewed at the following shows: The Drawings of Maynard Dixon: The Edith Hamlin Collection, March 1-April 12, Scottsdale Center for the Arts, Scottsdale, 994-2301. A Personal Vision: The Art of Maynard Dixon, a collection of Dixon's drawings, March 5-March 31, Collier Gallery, Scottsdale, 947-2787. Portraits of the Southwest, an Arizona traveling exhibit of drawings and watercolors, Pueblo Grande Museum, May 28-June 29, 275-3452.

Selected Reading

Maynard Dixon, Artist of the West, by Wesley M. Burnside. Brigham Young University Press, Provo, Utah, 1974.

Maynard Dixon, Images of the Native American. California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, 1981.

Rim-Rock and Sage: The Collected Poems of Maynard Dixon with Drawings, by Maynard Dixon. California Historical Society, San Francisco, 1977.

Maynard Dixon, Portraits of the Southwest, by Adeline Lee Karpiscak. Published by and available from The University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, 85721 ($5.50 postpaid), 1984.