Maynard Dixon Transcript

MAYNARD DIXON:
In those days ..being an artist was something you just had to endure - or be smart enough to explain why. It was incomprehensible that you were just out "seeing the country." If you were not working for the railroad, considering real estate or scouting for a mining company, what the hell were you? The drawings I made were no excuse and I was regarded as a wandering lunatic.

NARRATOR: ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, A SOLITARY FIGURE ROAMED THE DESERT SEEKING TO CAPTURE THE ENDLESS SKY AND TOWERING MESAS IN PAINT AND POETRY. HIS VISION OF THE WEST WAS MATCHLESS.

LINDA GIBBS:
I think Dixon to a degree greater than any other western artist captured the subtleties of the west, the kind of intangible feelings, and was able to convert it miraculously into paint.

DON HAGERTY:
When we see the western landscape we see a Maynard Dixon painting.

He survived the destruction of his city by earthquake and fire, the great depression and the civilizing of the west. He spent over two decades sketching it for fanciful books and magazines-- and then decades more painting the “real” west. His last years brought him to Utah on a quest to find and portray this west. To explore the vast space, intense silence, and profound spirit of the land and its people.

LINDA GIBBS:
It was an unending journey and one that he was on until his last day.

DON HAGERTY:
Maynard Dixon got to a point he didn’t know where Maynard Dixon ended and the West began

NARRATOR: YOU MAY NOT KNOW HIS NAME, BUT YOU’VE SEEN HIS INFLUENCE A THOUSAND TIMES.

IN HIS LIFETIME, HIS BROADEST REACH WAS AS AN ILLUSTRATOR. BUT TO A GENERATION OF ARTISTS, PHOTOGRAPHERS AND WRITERS WHO WERE REDEFINING THE AMERICAN WEST, HE WOULD LEAD THE WAY IN HOW WE WOULD SEE THIS LAND AND REGION.

MAYNARD DIXON:
As often before, I went again to the desert to find an answer - and it was not far to seek... I must find in the visible world the forms, the colors, the relationships that for me are the most true of it, and find a way to state them clearly so that the painting may pass on something of my vision.

ANSEL ADAMS:
Dixon...like few I have known, appreciated the whole of the land, as well as its parts and their interrelationships. For him, the West was uncrowded, unlittered, unorganized, and above all, vital and free.

DANIEL DIXON:
He was witty and he was highly literate even though I don’t think he got past the eighth grade. As a child he was very frail and was kept home from school because he didn’t feel well and that’s when he started to draw to amuse himself.

LINDA GIBBS:
... and as is the case of many artists’ stories they’re in bed with some ailment and in that time their mind wanders and he imagined, as he looked out his window in the San Joaquin Valley, what might be happening over those mountains, and his imagination got very fired up.

NARRATOR: IN 1875, MAYNARD DIXON WAS BORN INTO THE WEST OF UNLIMITED OPPORTUNITY.
CALIFORNIA’S SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY WAS A PLACE WHERE A YOUNG CONFEDERATE VETERAN, HARRY ST. JOHN DIXON, CAME WITH OTHERS OF THE “ALABAMA COLONY” TO REBUILD THEIR DREAMS OF PLANTATIONS AND THE GENTILITY OF THE OLD SOUTH.

DANIEL DIXON:
Fresno at that time was a rip roaring frontier town with train robbers and lynchings and range wars.

DON HAGERTY:
The old west was still there, there were still people who had participated in the California Gold Rush in the 1850s. And this was something I think had a great impact on young Dixon at that time.

WILL SOUTH:
He spends his time like a lot of kids do out in the middle of nowhere, reading a lot of books. And he’s captivated by stories.

NARRATOR: BOOKS AND PERIODICALS WERE FILLED WITH HEROIC STORIES, RICHLY ILLUSTRATED WITH ENGRAVINGS. IN A TIME BEFORE TELEVISION, RADIO OR EVEN PHOTOGRAPHIC PRINTING, THE ILLUSTRATORS WERE HEROS. THEY BROUGHT THE WORLD TO LIFE. AND THE WILD WEST WAS BUILDING AS THE CONSUMMATE NATIONAL STORY.

DON HAGERTY:
There's this really strong romantic streak in Maynard Dixon, very strong and very deep. And I think he became enamored of western adventure, the concept of the west.

NARRATOR: IT DIDN’T HELP THAT DIXON WAS HAMPERED BY ASTHMA AND HAD TO BE INSIDE ALONE. BY THE AGE OF SEVEN, HE BEGAN SKETCHING THE WORLD AROUND HIM. AT 16 HE HAD THE CONFIDENCE TO SEND HIS DRAWINGS TO ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS ILLUSTRATORS OF THE DAY, FREDERICK REMINGTON.

REMINGTON:
You draw better at your age than I did at the same age - if you have the "Sand" to overcome difficulties you could be an artist in time - Be always true to yourself - to the way and the things you see in nature…and above all draw -draw-draw
Fredrick Remington

NARRATOR: DIXON TOOK REMINGTON’S ADVICE. EARLY IN 1893, HE ENROLLED IN THE CALIFORNIA SCHOOL OF DESIGN. AT EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD HE WAS JUST TOO FREE SPIRITED FOR THE SCHOOL’S STRICT DIRECTOR, ARTHUR MATHEWS.

MAYNARD DIXON:
His method was to pounce on our work, like a growling dog he scared me out of my boots. He had me too scared to know what he was talking about.

DON HAGERTY:
And he couldn't handle a sort of formal art education where you had to learn from drawing from plaster casts or going to courses, so he and his friend Jimmy Swinnerton, at that time, would run off from classes and go down to Chinatown or along the Barbary Coast and raise hell, and do their sketching down there.

NARRATOR: THE TRANQUIL WORLD OF RURAL CENTRAL VALLEY EXPLODED FOR DIXON IN A VISION OF OPIUM DENS AND ---THE DEVIL’S ACRE…FILLED WITH HARLOTS, SAILORS, DANCE HALLS, AND SALOONS.

AFTER THREE MONTHS OF STUDY, DIXON COULDN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE AND BOLTED FROM THE SCHOOL, JOINING THE WORKING WORLD OF JOURNALISM. HE KICKED AROUND UNTIL FINALLY LANDING A JOB AS A CUB ILLUSTRATOR WITH THE SAN FRANCISCO MORNING CALL IN 1895. SOON HIS WORK CAUGHT THE EYE OF CHARLES FLETCHER LUMMIS, EDITOR OF “LAND OF SUNSHINE” A MONTHLY JOURNAL THAT EXPLORED THE MYSTIQUE OF THE DESERT SOUTHWEST.

CHARLES LUMMIS:
The World’s wonderland is not in Europe, not in Egypt, not in Asia, but in the West of our own United States. Area for area no other land on earth is half so crowded with marvels of the first magnitude and of such range of antiquities, scenery, anthropology, and picturesqueness in every sort.

LINDA GIBBS:
Lummis gathered around him this whole assemblage of artists, essayists, anthropologists, educators. They saw in the American west the chance to have a civilization that was untainted by European decadent ideals

NARRATOR: LUMMIS WOULD BECOME A SURREGATE FATHER TO THE YOUNG DIXON, WHO HAD WATCHED HIS OWN FATHER TAKEN AWAY TO THE CALIFORNIA INSANE ASYLUM JUST 2 YEARS EARLIER.

DON HAGERTY:
And his father eventually died at Agnew State Hospital in San Jose, I believe in 1898. And I think that was a big loss to Maynard, to lose his father.

NARRATOR: DIXON THREW HIMSELF HEADLONG INTO THE NONSTOP WORLD OF A NEWSPAPERMAN. LUMMIS SAW DIXON’S POTENTIAL AND TOOK THE YOUNG ARTIST UNDER HIS WING. LUMMIS EVEN CALLED DIXON “KID”. AND DIXON CALLED LUMMIS “POP”.

CHARLES LUMMIS:
DEAR KID,
Do your damnedest. So live that you can look every damn man in the eye and tell him to go to hell. Sell drawings, but don't sell yourself.
Charles Lummis

NARRATOR: IN 1899 DIXON WAS PROMOTED TO ART DIRECTOR FOR THE SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER’S SUNDAY MAGAZINE. THE STRESS OF THE JOB WAS JUST TOO MUCH.

LINDA GIBBS:
He almost had a nervous breakdown and Lummis sends him into the southwest. It was really Lummis who was the first person to send him into that part of the country.

MAYNARD DIXON:
Arizona - The magic name of a land bright and mysterious, of sun and sand, of tragedy and stark endeavor. So long had I dreamed of it that when I came there it was not strange to me. Its sun was my sun, its ground my ground.

NARRATOR: DIXON WAS, FOR THE FIRST TIME, GROUNDED IN THE UNTOUCHED WEST. 1900, ARIZONA WAS STILL A TERRITORY-- A FEW SETTLEMENTS STRUNG TOGETHER BY DIRT TRACKS. PHOENIX WAS MERELY A FRONTIER TOWN OF 5500 RESIDENTS.

DON HAGERTY:
I think the several months that he spent traveling through Arizona and New Mexico, sometimes in the company of Lummis, was an extremely important event in his life. He had actually seen the West, and it wasn't just an imaginary place, it was a real place. And I think his work began to reflect that.

DON HAGERTY:
There was just a whole movement of people going into the desert and trying to find something there.

LINDA GIBBS:
They were trying to find authenticity in life and real people

DON HAGERTY:
America was becoming more urbanized, more industrialized, and I think a lot of artists feared that. And they saw the desert as some sort of way of moderating that, that problem.

NARRATOR: DIXON KNEW TIMES WERE CHANGING AND THAT TO GET TO THE ESSENCE OF THE TRUE WEST HE HAD TO KNOW THOSE WHO REFLECTED THIS MYSTICAL PLACE BEST, THE INDIANS OF THE REGION.

MAYNARD DIXON:
Crawling through the tiny rooms …picking up bits of pottery, dreaming of a far and forgotten past; the enchantment of moonlight on Montezuma's Well--and dreams, more dreams…Somehow, it seems, you may not understand Indians until you make friends with the ghosts.

DON HAGERTY:
I think that he felt that there was an aboriginal ghostliness in the West, among not only the past groups, but the living groups at that time, there was something, again that romantic streak begins to surface in his life. He begins to sense and feel things that he can't always put down on a piece of paper or a canvas or write about as well as he would like.

MAYNARD DIXON:
Dear Pop,
Indians have a silent way of being not sketchable when they so will it, though they remain in plain view.

NARRATOR: A TWO DAY RIDE BY HORSEBACK TO THE NEAREST RAILROAD, DIXON WANDERED INTO GANADO, ON THE NAVAJO RESERVATION IN NORTHWESTERN ARIZONA. THERE HE MET ANOTHER PIVOTAL FIGURE IN HIS LIFE-- TRADING POST OWNER LORENZO HUBBELL.

HUBBELL HAD BUILT A TRADING EMPIRE, AND WAS A MAJOR PROMOTER OF INDIAN ARTS AND CRAFTS TO THE ENTIRE COUNTRY.

DIXON STARTED COLLECTING NAVAJO ARTIFACTS AND RUGS CARRYING THEM BACK TO SAN FRANCISCO TO SELL ON CONSIGNMENT. MORE THAN JUST A WAY TO EARN EXTRA CASH, THIS WAS ART TO DIXON.

DON HAGERTY:
Navajo textiles are paintings, and they actually reflect the Navajo landscape through Navajo eyes, through the weaving. So I think he was able to take this part of it and adapt it to his own use. Look what he did with the great November 1903 cover of Sunset Magazine, with the robed Navajo. I mean that was so totally different from any illustrator at that time. But that came from his trips to Navajo country and the Navajo landscape.

NARRATOR: NO MATTER HOW LONG DIXON SPENT IN WILDS OF NAVAJO COUNTRY, HE WOULD ALWAYS RETURN TO THE CITY.

SAN FRANCISCO AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY WAS A PORT CITY, WHERE TALL SHIPS ROLLED IN FROM CHINA. IT WAS CONSIDERED “THE PARIS OF THE WEST” -- A CULTURAL ENCLAVE WITH A GROWING TASTE FOR FINE ART.

DIXON COULD OFTEN BE SEEN STROLLING DOWN THE CITY STREETS DONNED IN BLACK COWBOY BOOTS, A STETSON HAT, AND A HAND-ROLLED CIGARETTE.

HE INVENTED AN IMAGE OF THE WESTERN ARTIST, COMPLETE WITH HIS OWN COSTUME AND PERSONAL SYMBOL—THE THUNDERBIRD.

DON HAGERTY:
I think he wanted something to set him apart from other artists, not just a signature, not just the style, per se, he wanted something else that would say this is Maynard Dixon.

DEBBIE RASIEL:
He walked into a room, people noticed. He had that, he really played that cowboy. When he was in the art world, he was more of a cowboy than ever. Very confident.

NARRATOR: DIXON HAD GOOD REASON TO BE CONFIDENT. HIS DRAWINGS WERE ON THE COVERS OF SUNSET MAGAZINE, AND HE ILLUSTRATED BOOKS BY JACK LONDON AND MARY AUSTIN, —AT 30 YEARS OLD, HE EVEN FOUND TIME FOR ROMANCE. MAYNARD MET SAN FRANCISCO ARTIST LILLIAN WEST TOBEY, AND ON MAY 7, 1905 THE TWO WERE WED AT CHARLES LUMMIS’S HOME. ALONG WITH MARRIED LIFE, MAYNARD WAS AT THE CENTER OF A VIBRANT BOHEMIAN SCENE. THIS WAS A CLUB MADE UP OF WRITERS, ARTISTS AND THINKERS. MEN WHO OFTEN MET IN THE REDWOODS OF CALIFORNIA TO PRACTICE ART AND EXPLORE AVANTE GARDE IDEALS. UNFORTUNATELY, THAT IDYLLIC LIFE WOULD NOT LAST. EARLY IN THE MORNING OF APRIL 18TH, 1906 AN EARTHQUAKE LEVELED SAN FRANCISCO. THE GREATEST DEVASTATON CAME FROM FIRES FUELED BY RUPTURED GAS MAINS

DONALD HAGERTY:
Probably two-thirds of San Francisco was wiped out, two-thirds. All of the great buildings were destroyed, I mean, it was total.

NARRATOR: AS FIRE BORE DOWN ON HIS STUDIO, DIXON RUSHED TO SALVAGE WHAT HE COULD.

MAYNARD DIXON:
The fire in our part of the town started only two blocks away from the studio, and we saved only what my wife and I could carry on our backs. I lost a lot of my Indian things, all my canvases, and a great many books and sketches, but rescued a few - the pictures can be repainted some day—We don’t feel a bit discouraged. I would not have missed that experience for what it cost me - it was one of a lifetime. It was an education. I learned more in those three terrible days than in any ten years of ordinary life.

NARRATOR: IN A MATTER OF A FEW DAYS EVERYTHING HAD CHANGED FOR DIXON. THE WEST COAST PUBLISHING CENTER HAD BEEN DESTROYED. THERE WAS JUST NO WORK FOR AN ILLUSTRATOR. DIXON WOULD NEED TO TURN TO THE EAST

MAYNARD DIXON/”QUEST”:
Power and Force -
Smoke-giants and steam, …Din and confusion,
Millions of people, pouring over and over,
Rushing, crowding, contending...

CHARLES LUMMIS:
DEAR KID,
I am sorry to see you go to New York, it is like a peach - not that you are one - going from the twig to the cannery. ….The trouble with any such alleged metropolitan center is that it wants to use you. Don't be used.

DON HAGERTY:
New York was the center of American art, at that time, certainly illustration art. And Dixon cracked it easily. With his talent, he'd already been well-known by then, by 1907, he was extremely well-known nationally as an illustrator, and got commission after commission by all of the great, legendary magazines of that time.

NARRATOR: FINANCIALLY SECURE, THE DIXONS WERE EXPECTING THEIR FIRST CHILD. THAT AUTUMN CONSTANCE DIXON WAS BORN. IT SEEMED DIXON HAD IT ALL—SECURE WORK AND A NEW LITTLE FAMILY-- BUT DIXON WAS UNHAPPY IN THE EAST. HE WAS INCREASINGLY IMPATIENT WITH HIS ASSIGNMENTS TO DRAW A WILD WEST THAT HAD NO RESEMBLANCE TO THE PLACE HE LOVED. KIDS ALL OVER AMERICA WAITED IN ANTICIPATION FOR THE NEWEST WESTERN NOVEL, AND THIS DEMAND NEEDED TO BE FED WITH ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE HEROIC DEEDS OF COWBOYS AND THE IDEALIZED VANTAGE ON THE WEST.

DON HAGERTY:
And I think it began to make Dixon uncomfortable because, remember, he had seen the West. But he was asked to draw and paint a West that was not a West that he had seen. And it ended up being a West of steely-eyed outlaws, and a few strong-willed women.

MAYNARD DIXON:
I'm being paid to lie about the West. I'm done with all that. I'm going home where I can do honest work in my own way.

NARRATOR: TAKING A RISK, DIXON RETURNED TO SAN FRANCISCO

MAYNARD DIXON:
Dear Pop,
I have just landed a job which will net me about 6000 - the most money yet for me, and a big opportunity with it. It is a series of decorations for a private house; - a hall, Indian subjects…high grade fluff. This will give me a chance to show some people what I can do.

NARRATOR: IT WAS A MURAL COMMISSION FROM AN ECCENTRIC CALIFORNIA HEIRESS, ANITA BALDWIN MCCLAUGHRY. ON THE STRENGTH OF THIS SINGLE COMMISSION, IN 1912 AT THE AGE OF 37, DIXON DECLARED HIMSELF A PAINTER. HE DECIDED THAT PAINTING, RATHER THAN COMMERCIAL ILLUSTRATION, WAS THE PATH HE NEEDED TO TAKE TO EXPRESS THE INDEFINABLE WEST HE’D GROWN TO LOVE.

MAYNARD DIXON:
My object has always been to get close to the real nature of my subject as possible - people, animals and country. The melodramatic Wild West idea is not for me the big possibility. …the big thing is this --that there is something of the West that sings in us - both of the life and of the country - that demands to be expressed... That sense of sun and space and silence - of serenity - of strength and freedom -

WILL SOUTH:
But suppose you want to express deep space. Suppose you want to express intensity, angularity, roughness, the drama of just being in a place that was this dramatic as the American west was. You have to have some strategies to do that. You just can’t pull that out of your hat.

NARRATOR: IN 1915 THE WORLD CAME TO SAN FRANCISCO FOR THE PANAMA-PACIFIC INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION. IT WAS A WORLD’S FAIR WITH ART FROM ACROSS AMERICA AND EUROPE.

PAUL BINGHAM:
That show made all art change on the West Coast. And you know the, as they hurried back to their studios after they’d been down there, partying, looking, looking, I suspect that Dixon probably went every day to look at the art. And hurried back to his studio and thinking what can I make. What can I do, what statement can I make…

WILL SOUTH:
He was a sponge in some ways in his ability to take from very diverse sources and bring them together in interesting ways and mix them up, which I think is, is really his great formal contribution.

DON HAGERTY:
And I think you immediately see it in his 1915 trip to Arizona where, if you compare the paintings he did there with some he did before, a remarkable difference, became more impressionistic, more color and light in there as he began to see what was going on...

PAUL BINGHAM:
And if you look at What an Indian Thinks, and all of those paintings between nineteen fifteen and nineteen twenty, you will find that it is a unique approach, they are different than others. He looks like Maynard Dixon’s approach.

NARRATOR: BUT IF THE ARTIST WAS CONFIDENTLY WORKING TO REDIFINE A NEW VISION FOR THE AMERICAN WEST—THE MAN WAS STRUGGLING TO HOLD HIS WORLD TOGETHER.

MAYNARD DIXON:
Dear Pop,
Christmas Day I came down here to write you - but I did not have the heart - The news was too bad. Lillian has been drinking secretly for 2 years. Ever since I succeeded in keeping real booze out of the house she has been taking diluted alcohol and witch hazel - sometimes even Listerine

LINDA GIBBS:
Around 1917 his first marriage is dissolving. It was very difficult. She was very difficult to live with and at the same time on the grander scale of things you have the outbreak of World War I. It’s hard for us, even though we’ve lived through turmoil in our day and age, to imagine how absolutely devastating that was for people to think that something so horrific could happen on such a grand scale.

There were many, many artists who at that time, responded in one way or another to the war. Some turned to modernism because they didn’t want to paint anything that resembled in any way the world, this corrupt world that we lived in. Dixon, however, that’s when he becomes all the more determined to go back into that landscape that feeds his soul

NARRATOR: AS THE FIRST WORLD WAR WAS RAGING, DIXON TURNED TO THE RUGGED, WILDS OF MONTANA IN 1917. THERE HE VISITED WITH THE GREAT COWBOY PAINTER, CHARLIE RUSSELL AT HIS LODGE IN GLACIER NATIONAL PARK. HE EVEN TRAVELED OUT TO PAINT AMONGST THE BLACKFEET INDIANS.

DON HAGERTY:
And I think it was a form of therapy. When things got him down, the only way to recover was to go out there in the Western outback.

MAYNARD DIXON:
the coned teepees with sharp crowns of poles pointing skyward -
All distinct, inescapable, sharp - Face down, under the sky,
I hide my tears in the honest grass of the prairie.

NARRATOR: MONTANA RESTORED DIXON SPIRITUALLY, BUT HE WASN’T MAKING ENDS MEET AS A PAINTER. THE REAL MONEY WAS IN THE NEW FIELD OF OUTDOOR BILLBOARD ADVERTISING.

MAYNARD DIXON:
It gave me not only new experience in design and color but some working knowledge of area and attention value, also an insight into the publicity angle and customer psychology - mighty valuable experience.

NARRATOR: IDEAS FROM ADVERTISING BEGAN TO EMERGE IN HIS PAINTING. HIS STYLE TOOK ON A NEW SIMPLICITY. IT WAS ANGULAR, AND GRAPHIC. HE HAD FINALLY FOUND A WAY TO PORTRAY THAT ELUSIVE QUALITY OF THE LANDSCAPE.

PAUL BINGHAM:
He had then discovered something else by 1920. What he discovered was simplicity in the landscapes, simplicity in the approach that the composition was more important than the paint.

DON HAGERTY:
One of the things that he says that, oddly enough, that influenced him was going out on his porch of his apartment one night and seeing cloud forms, and just seeing how they were formed, and how the aesthetics of them, it was just something he had to deal with.

DON HAGERTY:
But if you look at his art at that time, you begin to see something going on - less is better. That is, he's taking things out of the painting, rather than putting more in. So he's looking for that underlying structure, and I think that's the search for the West too.

WILL SOUTH:
So he layers his paintings with flatness, drama, intense color, this mathematical creation of deep space and the next thing you know, you have a still frame. He’s frozen time here and what you experience in that canvas are all of those things, intensity, space, quiet, but a certain harshness and a certain angularity, and it starts to come together for you that this place was not like any other place. It wasn’t like the coast of California. Wasn’t like the countryside in North of France. This was infinity and this was intensity and this was the American west.

NARRATOR: JUST AS DIXON WAS EXPANDING HIS VISION, HE MET A YOUNG PHOTOGRAPHER WHOSE LENS WOULD EVENTUALLY DEFINE COMMON PEOPLE AND HARD TIMES IN AMERICA.

DAN DIXON:
She was short, but she could fill a room. She was quiet, but when she spoke, everybody else shut up. She was an immensely powerful person, original.

NARRATOR: MAYNARD DIXON MET DOROTHEA LANGE IN 1919, SHE HAD COME FROM NEW JERSEY AND THOUGH SHE WALKED WITH A LIMP AS A RESULT OF CHILDHOOD POLIO, SHE HAD CHARMED THE BAY AREA ELITE.

DAN DIXON:
She became San Francisco’s foremost portrait photographer; her portrait studio was the place to go.

DAN DIXON:
And my mother one time was working down in her, in her darkroom. This was in about 1920. And she heard a kind of a click, click, click, click, click on the floor above, which were the heel of my father’s cowboy boots. And she asked somebody later on who was wearing those shoes. She didn’t even know they were cowboy boots. And her friend said, “Oh, that was Maynard Dixon. He’s a most interesting fellow, you’ll have to get out of your darkroom and meet him sometime.”

NARRATOR: THEY MARRIED IN 1920. LANGE WAS 24, DIXON 45. WITH HER SUPPORT DIXON WAS ABLE TO DISTANCE HIMSELF FROM COMMERCIAL WORK. HE THREW BODY AND SOUL INTO HIS PURSUIT OF PAINTING, AND AT THE SAME TIME, HE BROUGHT LANGE ALONG INTO HIS WORLD.

DEBBIE RASIEL5:
I mean she’s been out into the landscape, out into the west, but now she’s going out, really out there with this person who breaths it, who feels it. And there she is, photographing side by side watching him paint, just blown away by what she’s seeing and how he can nail it down to that canvas.

LANGE 1923 ARIZONA TRIP:
We went into a country which was endless, and timeless, and way out and far off from the pressures that I thought were part of life. The earth, and the heavens, even the change of seasons, I'd never really experienced until that time. Then I became aware.

NARRATOR: BUT THE UNTOUCHED WEST WAS QUICKLY DISAPPEARING. THE SANTE FE RAILROAD WAS EXPLOITING THE WONDERS OF THE SOUTHWEST AND ITS INDIGEONOUS PEOPLE AND DIXON HAD TO EXPLORE MORE REMOTE PLACES TO FIND WHAT INTERESTED HIM.

LINDA GIBBS:
As Dixon traveled in the west and saw that it was changing I think he felt very sad about it and helpless about it and I think he realized it was inevitable. And maybe a fervent desire because of it to try to get on paint those aspects of it that were still so beautiful and untouched before they too fell prey to civilization

NARRATOR: IN THE SUMMER OF 1923, DIXON TRAVELLED TO THE REMOTE HOPI VILLAGE OF WALPI, IN NORTHERN ARIZONA. HE LIVED AT THE PUEBLO FOR FIVE MONTHS.

MAYNARD DIXON:
These Hopis are remarkable people…//There lingers something of remote antiquity about them - they feel of the stone age... when you see one of their ceremonies - there for an hour something fine flashes out clear; there is a savage beauty in them, - they have imagination. They have dignity and form.

LINDA GIBBS:
There’s no doubt that Maynard Dixon idealized the Native Americans in his paintings. He was highly selective on what he chose to paint. The Native Americans are never shown in the reality of their circumstance, in terms of the efforts by the government to acculturate them. They took their children out of their homes, they sent them to boarding schools. They cut their hair. There was tuberculosis rampant. You don’t see a hint of this in any of his art. What you see is what he wanted to see and what he wanted to preserve.

MAYNARD DIXON:
I do not paint Indians or cowboys merely because they are picturesque subjects, but because through them I can express that phantasy of freedom of space and thought, which will give the world a sentiment about these people which is inspiring and uplifting. To bring out the poetic, rather than the harsh, brutal part of their lives, or merely the wild and woolly. The supernatural in the life of the Indian interests me greatly. They breathe, practice its teachings, and thrive on it.

WILL SOUTH:
The relationship between spirituality and landscape has a long history, in American art especially, and a reason for that is from the beginning in this country immigrants to America saw it as the new Eden. But Dixon, Dixon was well aware of it. He was aware of it from other artists and looking and talking about it, but he was really first and foremost aware of it from nature itself. He was convinced by his own experience of being in the land.

NARRATOR: WHEN HE WASN’T AWAY ON PAINTING TRIPS LANGE & DIXON WERE BUILDING A LIFE TOGETHER. SONS, DANIEL AND JOHN WERE BORN. DIXON’S STUDIO BECAME A GATHERING PLACE FOR ARTISTS, SUCH AS PHOTOGRAPHER ANSEL ADAMS. THE TWO SHARED A COMMON VISION EACH IN THEIR OWN MEDIUMS.

DANIEL DIXON:
Each of them was a worshipper of the landscape. My father fit Ansel’s notion of what an artist should be - theatrical, he was principled, and he was faithful to himself. Also they entertained each other. When they got together it was a, it was a celebration of outrageous hilarity.

NARRATOR: BUT THAT LAUGHTER SOON FADED AS THE NATION CRASHED INTO THE GREAT DEPRESSION.

MAYNARD DIXON:
Without any sense of personal failure, I had a growing feeling of oppression --of something ominous and unavoidable impending-- of being caught in the slowly closing jaws of a vise of complete helplessness in the grip of fate.

LINDA GIBBS:
Shapes of Fear, I think is one of his most powerful images. It’s almost monochromatic, so we are really looking at the form and the feeling of that painting. There’s nothing in the background to speak of. It came out of his angst over the depression.

DIANA TURNBOW:
I think the 1930s is one of the really key decades of the 20th Century. There was a great deal of social upheaval, there's a great deal of economic upheaval. People were displaced, they were asked to live different lives than they had lived for generations previously.

NARRATOR: THE ARTS SOON BECOME AN UNAFFORDABLE LUXURY. DIXON AND LANGE LEFT BEHIND THE CITY AND MOVED THEIR FAMILY TO TAOS, NEW MEXICO.

DIANA TURNBOW:
Maynard had always wanted to go to Taos. It was a gathering place for artists and thinkers. And it had been for, you know, several decades. And so I think there was an excitement and an interest and a curiosity in going to Taos. That it was a period of time in which Maynard was able to dedicate himself solely to his painting.

DANIEL DIXON:
But at Taos he was actually, put down some roots. We lived in a house, we developed some neighbors, he formed friendships with the Indians there. He did portraits of those friends and they are clearly portraits of friends, not just strangers. They’re not at all symbolic, they’re intimate and personal and that’s because he knew them in a different kind of way

LINDA GIBBS:
He really put himself literally in the middle of their life, and - whereas the Taos School, for example, really saw the Indians as objects to pose, We the viewer, I think, feel like an outsider, whereas Dixon pulls us right inside. When you look at Round Dance you are in that circle of dancers. You’re seeing that firelight flickering in the faces right across from you. He wanted to bring us along for that ride.

DON HAGERTY:
I think Maynard Dixon was very worried about the Depression and he felt, he felt very strongly that America had to adopt or certainly return to the concept of living in harmony with the land like the Native American did and that we had fouled up the land with our industrial might.

MAYNARD DIXON:
I tried to express this idea in Earth Knower. He is a sage, calm Indian who stands against his own background of mountains, from which he draws his health, wealth, religion and pattern of living... I like the Depression principally because it brings us back to a realization that integrity is the one thing on which social life can be built.

NARRATOR: THE DEPRESSION WAS A GOOD LESSON FOR DIXON, BUT NOW CASH WAS RUNNING LOW. HIS RHEUMATISM HAD FLARED-UP IN THE COLD NEW MEXICO WINTER. SO THE FAMILY DECIDED TO RETURN TO SAN FRANCISCO.

DOROTHEA LANGE:
When we came back we were confronted immediately with the terrors of the Depression at that time. Not that we didn't have enough to eat, but everyone was so shocked and panicky. No one knew what was ahead.

NARRATOR: BY 1933, UNEMPLOYMENT HAD SWOLLEN TO 25%, AND CALIFORNIA WAS FLOODED WITH PEOPLE FROM AMERICAS BREADBASKET DESPERATE FOR WORK. SOUP LINES FORMED NEAR LANGE’S STUDIO AND ONE DAY SHE TOOK HER CAMERA OUT ON THE STREET. THE FIRST CLICK OF HER SHUTTER WOULD FOREVER CHANGE HER CAREER, AND AMERICA’S VIEW OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION.

NARRATOR: BUT IF THE DEPRESSION OPENED A NEW AND POWERFUL WINDOW OF EXPRESSION FOR LANGE – IT WAS AT A DEAR PRICE—ESPECIALLY FOR DIXON.

MARK SUBLETTE:
Between nineteen thirty and nineteen thirty-five, he only sold less than a dozen paintings in five years. There was nobody buying anything. It was the Great Depression. There was no interest in art. Survived by literally getting commissions or painting walls. He did whatever it took.

NARRATOR: MAYNARD DIXON, LIKE MANY ARTISTS, WAS DESPERATE FOR WORK. RELIEF CAME THROUGH FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT’S “NEW DEAL”-- HIRING ARTISTS TO CREATE PUBLIC WORKS, DOCUMENTING THE STORIES AND FACES OF THE COMMON MAN. IN 1934 DIXON WAS HIRED TO CHRONICLE THE CONSTRUCTION OF BOULDER DAM IN NEVADA. AS HE WATCHED THOUSANDS OF MEN WORKING LIKE ANTS ON A CONCRETE WALL HE SENSED THAT THERE WAS SOMETHING DEHUMANIZING ABOUT THIS NEW WEST. HE REALIZED, HIS WEST WAS CHANGING.

MAYNARD DIXON:
The men seemed like robots to me. I didn't have enough time to get near enough to them to know them. But there they worked in the blazing sun, 140 degrees. High-scalers working on the face of stupendous cliffs. Men riding cement buckets in the middle of space, over canyons nearly a thousand feet deep. Flesh and blood men opposed to immutable rock. America doesn’t realize what a dangerous undertaking it is. Four were killed while I was there and the hospital was full all the time. All these things merged in a sense of the tragedy of men's labor; the great treadmill of lost endeavor - but in the long run, the desert will have the last laugh.

DON HAGERTY:
Oh I think his reaction was one of rage and dismay. Very negative against what he felt was happening to the west, and that there was no efforts being made to alleviate these problems.

NARRATOR: PROBLEMS THAT WERE BUILDING DURING THE MARITIME STRIKES IN THE SPRING OF 1935. BY JULY 5TH VIOLENCE FLARED BETWEEN UNION DOCKWORKERS AND POLICE ON WHAT WOULD BECOME KNOWN AS “BLOODY THURSDAY”. DIXON SAW IT ALL AND COULD NOT GET THE VISION OF THE WORKING MEN OUT OF HIS MIND. THAT YEAR HE PAINTED HIS “STRIKE “ AND “FORGOTTEN MAN” SERIES.

WILL SOUTH:
The Forgotten Man series I think shows us in a way that side of Dixon that had been there since he was a young man, that fierce independence, you know the willingness to stand up for things like free speech, you know, the willingness to address things like unions and strike breakers. I mean the ‘30s were rife with antagonisms and factions. Things were desperate. Are those appropriate subjects for a painter? His answer is yes, they are. Can paintings make a difference in people’s lives? Obviously he thinks so and I think we still believe that today, that images will affect our way of thinking.

MAYNARD DIXON:
Like other artists, I had dodged the responsibility of facing social conditions. The depression woke me up to the fact that I had a part in all this, as an artist. This would seem to have developed a more direct method of expression in my painting, for my pictures of the water front strike and kindred subjects have awakened an immediate and lively response from those who have seen them.

Painting, as I see it, must be human rather than arty. Painting is a means to an end. It is my way of saying what I want you to comprehend. It is my testimony in regard to life, and therefore I cannot lie in paint.

NARRATOR: SIMILARLY, LANGE’S STARK PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE DEPRESSION WERE SOON KNOWN WORLD WIDE. ART HISTORIANS HAVE ARGUED FOR YEARS OVER WHO WAS THE DRIVING FORCE OF SOCIAL CONCIOUSNESS, DIXON, OR LANGE?

DANIEL DIXON:
She went one way, he went another and sometimes they found themselves on parallel tracks and sometimes not. And they were both, you know, very forceful personalities. I never heard them quarrel ever. Never heard a sharp word exchanged between them ever. But they lived in some ways apart, apart.

NARRATOR: AND IT WAS THIS APARTNESS THAT FINALLY CAUSED THEM TO DRIFT AWAY FROM EACH OTHER.

DOROTHEA LANGE:
I wasn't really involved in the vitals of the man, not in the vitals. … [Eventually,] it became myself and the little boys…not so much he and I, and the boys.

DANIEL DIXON:
I know that the break up of the marriage was very painful to him. It was just after the breakup of the marriage that, or approaching it, that he did these wildly surrealistic paintings which nobody ever would identify as his work. They’re not whimsical paintings. They’re serious stuff, and they suggest turmoil and rage and agony. Nobody will ever know the real story of those paintings. But if you want to speculate about something, go speculate about those.

MARK SUBLETTE:
So, they were very, very personal things and they’re very un-Dixon like unless you’re very familiar with Dixon and you look at them and you go – I can see it, I can see it. But a he would sign most of them Nvorczk. So they’re very rare and very interesting components of a man who was very complex individual.

NARRATOR: BY 1935 AT THE AGE OF 60, DIXON HAD DEVELOPED ADVANCED EMPHYSEMA. BUT HIS PASSION FOR PAINTING HAD NOT DIMINISHED. HE THEN MET EDITH HAMLIN, WHO WAS ALSO RECENTLY DIVORCED, WHEN SHE SAILED INTO HIS LIFE.

SUSAN BINGHAM:
Edith said that they were like two ships that were washed up on the same beach and they found one another and the time was right and the rest is history.

DANIEL DIXON:
If there’s a heroine in this piece it’s certainly is Edith Hamlin Dixon…best friend my father ever had. She above everybody else, I think, is responsible for his reputation having been maintained, preserved, and enlarged.

EDITH HAMLIN:
We were married in Carson City. Maynard was 62 years old, and I was 33. That was quite a gap, but we'd known each other almost two years, and we felt it would work! We were very congenial, and very devoted. It was a very happy event. It made a rich and fulfilling life for both of us.

DANIEL DIXON:
She made him feel desirable, which is a nice thing to happen when you’re in your 60s and 70s and she loved him. And he wasn’t always easy to love.

EDITH HAMLIN:
They were very happy years, but there was an undercurrent of sadness, too. There was a poignancy, because we knew it couldn't last forever. Of course nothing lasts forever, but considering Maynard's age and health, it gave an extra preciousness to those years.

NARRATOR: THEY DECIDED TO LEAVE SAN FRANCISCO, THIS TIME TO LIVE IN THE DESERT.

DON HAGERTY:
The cool climate was, was not doing well for his health, but he also felt that the art scene had changed in San Francisco. He just felt that the old bohemian, you know camaraderie had changed and there was more back-biting among the artists and he didn’t like that.

NARRATOR: DIXON AND HAMLIN WANDERED THE SOUTHWEST IN 1939. FINALLY SETTLING ON A WINTER HOME IN TUCSON, ARIZONA, AND A SUMMER HOME IN MT. CARMEL, UTAH, OUTSIDE ZION NATIONAL PARK.

NARRATOR: DIXON HAD FIRST TRAVELLED TO ZION IN 1933, WHERE HE MET THE SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF THE ORIGINAL SETTLERS, MEMBERS OF THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS OR MORMONS.

LINDA GIBBS:
Maynard Dixon loved Utah. He loved it not only for its diverse and beautiful landscape, but he loved the Mormon people. He had tremendous respect for their industry, for their independence, for their sense of community, which is something that he also admired about the Native American tribes that he visited.

MAYNARD DIXON:
Mormons are simple honest farming people. We like them…Don’t know if we can make a living there, but take a gambler’s chance.

NARRATOR: DIXON HAD ESTABLISHED TIES IN UTAH WHEN HE WAS LIVING IN SAN FRANCISCO. IN THE SPRING OF 1937, HE WAS APPROACHED BY A SMALL RELIGIOUS COLLEGE IN PROVO, UTAH, RUN BY THE MORMON CHURCH. THEY WANTED TO BUY SOME OF HIS PAINTINGS.

LINDA GIBBS:
People are very surprised to learn that Brigham Young University owns the largest Dixon collection in the United States and it’s quite a wonderful story as to how that came to happen. There was an individual at BYU in the 1930s, by the name of Herald R. Clark, who was dean of the business school. He saw, in the St. Louis Dispatch, reproductions of the Forgotten Man series and the Maritime Strike paintings.

CAMPBELL GRAY:
The works that he was seeing were some of Dixon's most potent and emotional field works that were of the Depression - the Forgotten Man series, which now are some of his valued and most valuable works. And so there's this deep pathos and deep kind of appreciation in Dixon's work of the conditions of the Depression. So of course he was attracted, and then touched by that. I don't doubt that for a minute.

NARRATOR: HERALD CLARK WIRED DIXON THAT HE WAS HEADING TO SAN FRANCISCO TO BARGAIN FOR ARTWORK. HE ASKED DIXON TO “SOFTEN HIS HEART”. DIXON REPLIED, “HEART SOFT IN THE CENTER”. HE WAS READY TO DEAL.

DON HAGERTY:
Remember Dixon could not sell any of his Depression era paintings. Nobody would buy them. Nobody wanted the reminder of the Depression on their walls. In fact it was an ugly time for Dixon, in terms financially.

NARRATOR: DIXON CUT CLARK A DEAL AND SOLD 85 WORKS OF ART, FOR $3,700 DOLLARS, AVERAGING UNDER $50 EACH. HE WROTE A FRIEND LATER, “THE SLAUGHTER WAS G-G-G-GHASTLY”

NARRATOR: IN THE END, THE DEAL WORKED FOR BOTH DIXON AND HERALD R. CLARK.

LINDA GIBBS:
He establishes a lifelong correspondence with Maynard Dixon. They’re very fond of each other. Their letters back and forth until Maynard’s death really are just full of affection.

HERALD R. CLARK:
I found him much bigger than anything he had created. He was a great forceful, imaginative character, one who loved life and people.

NARRATOR: BUT THE FACT WAS THAT DIXON’S HEALTH WAS CATCHING UP TO HIM. IT WAS 1940 AND HIS PAINTING HAD MATURED TO A POINT THAT HE NEEDED TO BE CLOSE TO THE CHANGING LIGHT OF THE DESERT. TO MAKE A HOME IN THE WEST.

EDITH HAMLIN:
It had been Maynard’s dream for a long time to live in such southwestern areas. The desert had always attracted him. It was a kind of mystique, in a way. The desert to him was a release of a kind, a freedom that he didn’t know in cities. To leave his troubles behind and to really immerse himself completely in his painting in the great outdoors, was a kind of renewing grace—a salvation.

SUSAN BINGHAM:
I think they were just taken with this with this area. It had everything that Maynard loved. It had the big sky, it had the mesas, it had the little rivers, the- Cottonwoods, all of the things that he loved to paint were here. His paintings took on sort of a gentle quality, the paintings that he painted in the last years of his life. They weren’t as strongly geometric.

PAUL BINGHAM:
The fact that he made a painting down here called Peace in October, is a great statement about seeking peace and I think I recall Edith telling me that that painting was him and her, the two ponies under the cottonwood tree.

EDITH HAMLIN:
When Maynard was there, he used to paint at one end of the garage with the doors open, and it had good enough light....If his health had been stronger, we would've gone over into the Navajo country more, and, oh, we would've done lots of things.

MAYNARD DIXON:
I'd about made up my mind to make this summer my last - but Edie came up and persuaded me to go back and make one last try - new treatment - but somehow, thought I'll do it for her, I'm doubtful how much an old guy can do on bought blood and borrowed time. All I ask is to be able to work some.

MARK SUBLETTE:
He can’t breath, he’s on oxygen and he knows he dying. He’s know, he knows he’s at the end of his road. What’s he doing, he’s drawing clouds. He’s trying to get it better. And, I think that sums up Dixon. That he never you know gave up, he always was trying to get to a different level.

NARRATOR: AFTER SIX YEARS, DIXON’S LUNGS COULDN’T HANDLE MOUNT CARMEL’S HIGH ALTITUDE. IN THE FALL OF 1945 EDITH AND MAYNARD LEFT UTAH. FOREVER.
TUCSON SUITED DIXON AND HAMLIN. THEY WOULD ENTERTAIN VISITORS LIKE ANSEL ADAMS WHO ENCOURAGED HIS FRIEND TO KEEP WORKING.

ANSEL ADAMS:
It is the truth that people like you - and there are very few of them - have the power of putting forth that certain magical essence of space and earth, with an implied relation to humanity. You people never seem to realize what you are doing - how far you have progressed.

NARRATOR: MAYNARD CONTINUED TO WORK EVEN ACCEPTING A COMMISSION FROM THE SANTA FE RAILWAY TO DESIGN A MURAL OF THE GRAND CANYON FOR THEIR LOS ANGELES OFFICE.

EDITH HAMLIN:
When the request came for that mural, from the Santa Fe Railway...the question was whether he should turn it down or not. I encouraged him for the reason that when he wasn't absorbed with creative work, he wasn't interested in going on at all, because that had been his life.

NARRATOR: TETHERED TO AN OXYGEN TANK. TOO WEAK TO WALK. DIXON SUPERVISED THE PAINTING FROM A WHEELCHAIR. AS HE WEAKENED, EDITH SENT WORD TO HIS SONS TO
COME VISIT. DANIEL DIXON WAS IN THE ARMY, BUT WAS UNDER ARREST FOR BEING ABSENT WITHOUT LEAVE.

DANIEL DIXON:
And while I was in the stockade in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, I got a message one day saying that the Red Cross had arranged with my step-mother, had arranged for me to be reprieved and I was to go to, I was to go to Tucson to see my father.

NARRATOR: SENSING SOMETHING FINAL ABOUT THE ARRANGEMENTS, YOUNG DIXON SPENT A WEEK WITH HIS FATHER—NOW A SHELL OF HIS FORMER SELF.

DANIEL DIXON:
And he said to me, “Goodbye son. Do good.” Those were his last words to me.

NARRATOR: ON THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 13, 1946, LESS THAN A WEEK AFTER COMPLETING THE MURAL, EDITH CAME HOME TO FIND HER HUSBAND SLUMPED IN HIS WHEELCHAIR, UNCONCIOUS. SEVERAL HOURS LATER, HE DIED.

NARRATOR: THERE WAS NO MEMORIAL SERVICE. EDITH SENT OUT A SIMPLE ANNOUNCEMENT OF HER HUSBAND’S DEATH ALONG WITH ONE OF HIS POEMS TITLED, “AT LAST”. THE FOLLOWING SPRING, SHE TOOK MAYNARD’S ASHES TO MOUNT CARMEL, SCATTERING THEM ON THE HILLS OVERLOOKING THE CLIFFS THAT HE LOVED TO PAINT.

LINDA GIBBS:
I think the legacy that Dixon has left us is this incredible body of work that can take us back to a time and a place that doesn’t exist for the most part. That’s the legacy. We get to take the journey through his art.

MARK SUBLETTE:
He will be remembered as someone who captured America.

SUSAN BINGHAM:
That he distilled in such a wonderful way that no other artist really has done. There’s a loneliness about the desert but there’s also a great deal of hope.

WILL SOUTH:
What he has to impart to us is a poetry, a sensitivity, a sensibility about the importance of open, dramatic, nourishing, spiritual space.

MAYNARD DIXON
AT LAST
At last,
I shall give myself to the desert again,
that I, in its golden dust,
may be blown from a barren peak
broadcast over the sun-lands.

If you should desire some news of me, go ask the little horned toad whose home is the dust,
or seek it among the fragrant sage,
or question the mountain juniper,
and, by their silence,
they will truly inform you.

Maynard Dixon

The Man

Biography

Relationship with Dorothea Lange

The Art

Illustrator

Painter

Poet

Murals

The West

Charles Lummis

Lorenzo Hubbell

The Show

Maynard Dixon Transcript
KUED Press Release

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Maynard Dixon: To the Desert Again is a production of KUED in Salt Lake City, Utah.