Maynard Dixon

(1875-1946)

Chollas Against the Mountains 25 x 30 in. framed 31 x 36 in.

Footnotes

Provenance
Dennis G. Madsen Estate, Salt Lake City, Utah.
Collection of Lester B. Hurd.
William A. Karges Fine Art, Los Angeles, California.

Exhibited
San Francisco, Gump Galleries, Paintings of the West by Maynard Dixon, September 6-October 6, 1945.
Los Angeles, Biltmore Art Galleries, Maynard Dixon, September 9-28, 1945.
Fresno, Weston Rouge Gallery, 1946.
Fresno, Fresno Art Center, Diamond Jubilee Celebration, October 11- November 5, 1947.
Phoenix, Phoenix Art Museum, Maynard Dixon Retrospective, April 27-June 7, 1970.
Fresno, Fresno Art Center, Maynard Dixon: A Bicentennial Exhibition, December 3-30, 1975.
Pasadena, Pasadena Museum of Art, Pasadena, Maynard Dixon: Masterpieces From Brigham Museum of Art and Private Collections, June 2-August 12, 2007.
Tucson, Tucson Museum of Art, A Place of Refuge: Maynard Dixon's Arizona, October 11-2008 to February 15, 2009.

Literature
Wesley M. Burnside, Maynard Dixon: Artist of the West, Provo, Utah, 1974, p. 188.
Donald J. Hagerty, Desert Dreams: The Art and Life of Maynard Dixon, Layton, Utah, 1993, no. 221, pp. 248, 250-1, illustrated.

We are grateful to Donald J. Hagerty for his kind assistance in cataloging this lot.

Chollas Against the Mountain is an exceptional example of the Arizona landscapes Maynard Dixon executed in his mature period toward the end of his career. Displaying the artist's hallmark "cubist realism", the composition has distinct 1/3 spatial elements from the foreground, to the distant mountains and the cloudless blue sky. ¹ Dixon repeats strong lower left to upper right diagonal layers throughout the landscape that help to lead the eye toward the deepest parts of the composition. Sunlight from the left reflects off the desert floor and mountain slopes creating deep shadows in purple and blue hues that enhance and enliven the craggy cliff faces. The linear mountains and rocky desert floor are in dynamic contrast with the organic, curved branches of the stand of three cholla cacti. The sky along the mountain range radiates in light blue tones that ombre upward into intense values of cerulean blue.

As Dixon's health declined, he and his artist-wife Edith Hamlin made the decision to move to the drier climate of Arizona in 1939, just two years after they had married. They first moved into a home and studio in Mount Carmel, Utah in summer 1940 while a Mexican colonial style home and studio was being constructed in Tucson. ² The Tucson residence was finished in April 1941, and they split their time between the two locations each year, generally spending winter and spring in the Sonoran Desert enjoying views of the Santa Catalina Mountains, and summer and fall in the cooler climate of Utah, until he could no longer tolerate the higher altitudes there. ³ Dixon's Tucson studio "...window looked beyond the Rillito to the Catalinas which he painted repeatedly in the molten light of the dying day. Painters of the desert are innumerable. There has been only one who painted it as Dixon did, 'Where many have looked,' wrote Arthur Millier, 'he is one of the few who have really seen. His vision of the West is so true that we have come to see the region through the forms and colors of his paintings. Thus great artists teach us to see nature.'" ⁴

Despite significant health issues, Dixon "worked every day in his studio, pouring every shred of remaining energy into his art." ⁵ In Chollas Against the Mountain, one can see Dixon's absolute confidence as a painter, and sense the intensity in which he worked, essentially on borrowed time, during this period.

¹ Wesley M. Burnside, Maynard Dixon: Artist of the West, Provo, Utah, 1974, p. 145.
² Donald J. Hagerty, Desert Dreams: The Art and Life of Maynard Dixon, Layton, Utah, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, 2010, p. 235.
³ Mark Sublette, Maynard Dixon's American West: Along the Distant Mesa, Tucson, 2018, p. 350.
⁴ Laurence Clark Powell, "Maynard Dixon's Painted Desert", Westways, "Personalities of the West", May 1974, p. 86.
⁵ Hagerty, p. 251.