NORMAN, OKLAHOMA.- The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art presents through September 8, an exhibition surveying the career of Maynard Dixon (1875-1946), a painter of the American West with a distinctive modernist vision. Maynard Dixon’s West: Space, Silence, Spirit will include over thirty paintings and drawings spanning all periods of the artist’s 50-year career.

Complementing the exhibition will be photographs by Dorothea Lange, Dixon’s wife from 1920 to 1935. Lange is well known for her black and white photography that illuminated the human condition in early 20th-century America. Also included will be a watercolor and pen & ink postcard by Charles M. Russell, which the artist sent to Dixon in 1917.

Most of the works in Maynard Dixon’s West: Space, Silence, Spirit are from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. A.P. Hays of Scottsdale, Arizona. A.P. Hays, curator of the exhibition, will present an informative gallery talk about Maynard Dixon prior to the opening reception on June 14. The talk will begin at 6:30 p.m. and will be held in the museum’s lower gallery. On June 19 at noon, the museum’s Curator of Education Susan Baley will present a 30-minute focus tour exploring the paintings in the exhibition.

Born into a ranching family in Fresno, California, Dixon decided early in life to become an illustrator of the Old West. He demonstrated great artistic promise when young but received, in San Francisco, only brief formal art training, which ended, according to some accounts, after only three months. He nevertheless found work as an illustrator for a number of San Francisco newspapers and for books by authors such as Jack London, John Muir, O. Henry, and Clarence Mulford, who was known for his books about Hopalong Cassidy.

A visit to Arizona and New Mexico in 1900 whetted Dixon’s appetite for roaming the West. He then joined another emerging Western artist, Edward Borein, on a trip through several Western states. Back in California, Dixon continued to illustrate Western books and magazines, though by the 1910s he was growing tired of portraying the West in the immensely popular yet unrealistic fashion of the day.

The Panama Pacific International Exposition—the 1915 World’s Fair held in San Francisco—exposed the West Coast art community to Impressionism and various modernist movements such as Fauvism. Dixon began experimenting with Impressionism and Postimpressionism while continuing to pursue a career in commercial design, particularly posters.

In 1919, Dixon met Dorothea Lange (1895-1968), then a portrait photographer who had moved west to San Francisco and who would become Dixon’s wife in 1920. Rigorous composition was a key element in Lange’s photography, and following his marriage to Lange, Dixon used composition as a primary means of conveying his artistic message, with a modernist emphasis on the simplified, abstract elements of painting. For the rest of his career, Dixon remained greatly interested in modernism, though he dismissed the pretentious notion that modernism was the only legitimate style for his time.

During the Great Depression Dixon and Lange both focused their art on the social and political issues. In this period, Lange produced works such as Migrant Mother, 1936, a photograph which depicts a poor Oklahoma woman surrounded by her children and which would become one of the most iconic images of the 20th century.

Volcanic Hills, a recent gift to the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art from Jon and Dee Dee Stuart of Tulsa, dates from this time. In 1934, Dixon was commissioned by the federal government to document the construction of the Boulder Dam on the Colorado River in southern Nevada. While there, Dixon painted Volcanic Hills, a fresh, plein air (painted outdoors directly from nature) landscape, no doubt at a single sitting. It is inscribed to "old Snakebit Bob," Dixon’s affectionate nickname for Dorothea Lange. Dixon and Lange, who had had two sons together, divorced in 1934.

Dixon moved to mount Carmel, Utah, from San Francisco in 1939, two years after marrying prominent muralist Edith Hamlin. That region had inspired some of Dixon’s greatest paintings during his travels, and Dixon relished the quiet of the area. The couple spent winter months in Tucson, Arizona, where Dixon died in 1946. In his final years, Dixon continued creating works that merged modernism with Western subjects.

Dixon’s meanderings in life and art culminated in hundreds of works conveying the space, silence, and spirit of the American West.