DOCSLIB.ORG

Journalist Charles Lummis Advised California-Based Maynard Dixon That He Must ‘Travel East to See the Real West’

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Journalist Charles Lummis Advised California-Based Maynard Dixon That He Must ‘Travel East to See the Real West’ Journalist Charles Lummis advised California-based Maynard Dixon that he must ‘travel east to see the real West’. My journey began further east, in London, England, then west to homes in Texas and SW Colorado. The journey to find my truth in the West meant exploring the dialogue between myth and reality. Like Dixon, who feared how his illustrative work romanticized the West, I struggled with the plethora of paintings that depicted what people thought ‘The West’ should look like or what it used to look like. I saw a different truth, a different beauty. So, like Dixon, I headed outdoors to immerse myself in direct observation, to discover the authentic spirit of the place, what Dixon called ‘The Real Thing’. The Big Bend region in west Texas was my first experience of the desert, and I found a spiritual home there. The Big Bend became my escape to reality, my refuge from city life. It’s a startling place - the acute silence, the scale, and the extraordinary range and complexity of the geology, from volcanic molten mountains, tectonic uplifts, to eroded oceanic strata. Dixon helped me understand the desert’s geological forms and quality of light. He has claimed our visual imagination of the desert: light, heat, scale, geometric weather-worn shapes, and expansive time. Dixon embraced depicting geological complexity and in certain works – favorites of mine, such as ‘Volcanic Cones’ and ‘Fortification Butte’ - he made it the central motif. I wanted to echo that sentiment in my painting, ‘Big Bend Geology’. Though I have explored Dixon’s Utah and Arizona, for me, meaningful work comes from land that I have an ongoing dialogue with. The Four Corners, close to my home, is a diverse landscape that includes mountains, high desert plains, juniper and pinyon pine-clad mesas (technically Mesa Verde is a cuesta), ancient dwellings, vistas of scattered uplifts, valleys and canyons containing groves of spectacular cottonwoods. Dixon’s poignant depictions of lonesome cottonwood trees inspired my second piece in the show, ‘Canyon Cottonwood’, sourced from McElmo Canyon to the west of Cortez. Dixon knew that the inclusion or focus upon an isolated tree or homestead said so much about the essence of a place and our existence within it. With the foundation that mural and illustrational work provided, Dixon was an impeccable technical designer. Both of my paintings combine the use of gridding with selected principles from dynamic symmetry to establish strong vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines. This helped contain the Big Bend mountain peaks, manage the butte angles, and place the triangular dynamic of the cottonwood tree. Dixon was a contemporary of some of my favorite artists in Britain, Paul Nash, David Bomberg, Walter Sickert, C.R.W. Nevinson, and Francis Cadell. The period between the two world wars and the evolvement of modernism produced incredible landscape art. Not all artists embraced the implications of modernism, but they, including Dixon, were inspired and influenced by the language created by movements such as, fauvism, surrealism, and cubism. It expanded their ‘vocabulary’. They now had a variety of languages through which they could make bold expressive personal statements. Dixon was a master of simplification and amplification. His paintings had purpose, with a motif clearly defined. Yet the methods and techniques he adopted were subservient to the statement. He struck the right balance between seeking the truth and representing that authenticity while incorporating personal artistic expression. .
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Bideford Bay (1946) David Bomberg
    Chapter 5: Compositional Effects of Color Color (hue, chroma and value) effect the perception of space… …both 2D… (shapes can be made to seem larger or smaller by altering color) …and 3D (advancing and receding). The size of colored regions also effects the perceived color (larger areas seem brighter). Aerial Perspective or Atmospheric Perspective • (both phrases refer to the same phenomena – they are interchangeable terms) • Several color effects can be described in terms of Aerial perspective. • — Colors tend to be lighter and lower in chroma in the distance. (color moves closer to sky color) • — Contrast in value diminishes in the distance. (value range diminishes in distance) • — Sharp contrasting edge tends to bring (at least) one surface forward. (sharp detail or edges advance forms; blurred forms recede) The Space Between • The physical cause of atmospheric perspective in nature is dust and moisture in the air. • These scattered particles diffuse light, thereby softening the appearance of distant objects and causing their color to move closer to the prevailing sky color. • The Moisture-filled Space Between • Fog is an atmosphere densely filled with moisture – atmospheric perspective can be apparent at a very short distance. • Albert Bierstadt’s 19th c. paintings of the American West were composed to express the vast space open to expansion. • Aerial Perspective • Lighter values, reduced contrast, lower chroma all tend to establish a sense receding (distant) space. • Limited structure and detail are present — there are David Bomberg no linear perspective clues to structure, location, size or distance. Yet there is a definite sense of space— near regions and far regions.
    [Show full text]
  • The Joan and Lester Avnet Collection in the Museum of Modern Art : Exhibited, Apr
    A Treasury of modern drawing : the Joan and Lester Avnet Collection in the Museum of Modern Art : exhibited, Apr. 27-July 4, 1978 William S. Lieberman Date 1978 Publisher The Museum of Modern Art ISBN 08707060980 Exhibition URL www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2355 The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition history—from our founding in 1929 to the present—is available online. It includes exhibition catalogues, primary documents, installation views, and an index of participating artists. MoMA © 2017 The Museum of Modern Art A TREASURY OF MODERN I DRAWING THE JOANAND LESTER AVNET COLLECTION Archive MoMA 1210 ft TREASURY OF MODERN DRAWING A TREASURY OF MODERN DRAWING THE JOANAND LESTER AVNET COLLECTION IN THE MUSEUMOF MODERNART WILLIAMS.LIEBERMAN THE MUSEUM OFMODERN ART, NEW YORK 4«-CH'«C lAOrf/) 12-10 MUSEUM OF MODERNART LIBRARY Copyright © 1978 by The Museum of Modern Art All rights reserved The Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53 Street New York, N.Y. 10019 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 78-50658 ISBN: 0-87070-609-8 Designed by Steven Schoenfelder Printed by Meriden Gravure Co., Meriden, Conn. Bound by Sendor Bindery, Inc., New York, N.Y. Printed in the United States of America cover Matisse: The Necklace. 1950. Brush and ink, ioVz x i6Vi" frontispiece Feininger: The Town ofLegefeld. 1916. Pen and ink, charcoal, 9 Vi x 12V2" INTRODUCTION 7 ILLUSTRATIONS 35 CA TALOG OF THE COLLECTION 108 Lester Avnet was a devoted son, brother, husband, and father. His life was dedicated to his family; indeed he thought more often of them, always with pride, than he did of himself.
    [Show full text]
  • Elements of Innovators' Fame
    Elements of Innovators’ Fame: Social Structure, Identity and Creativity Mitali Banerjee Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Columbia University 2017 © 2017 Mitali Banerjee All rights reserved Abstract Elements of Innovators’ Fame: Social Structure, Identity and Creativity Mitali Banerjee What makes an innovator famous? This is the principal question of this dissertation. I examine three potential drivers of the innovators’ fame – their social structure, creativity and identity. My empirical context is the early 20th century abstract artists in 1910-25. The period represents a paradigmatic shift in the history of modern art, the emergence of the abstract art movement. In chapter 2, I operationalize social structure by an innovator’s local peer network. I find that an innovator with structurally and compositionally diverse local network is likely to be more famous than the one with a homogenous local network. I find no statistical evidence for creativity as a link between social structure and fame. Instead, the evidence suggests that an innovator’s creative identity and access to promotional opportunities are the key drivers of her fame. In Chapter 3, I find that the creativity identity resulting from an innovator’s creative trajectory can lead to obscurity despite early fame and acclaim. The drastic change in the nature of a producer’s output can dilute her identity and cost her her niche. In combination with her peer network characteristics, these dynamics can mean obscurity even for talented and prolific innovators. In chapter 4, I undertake a large-scale analysis of the relationship between creativity and fame.
    [Show full text]
  • Wyndham Lewis and Nihilism
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Groningen University of Groningen Theo van Doesburg and Wyndham Lewis Renders, Hans; van Faassen, Sjoerd Published in: The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies IMPORTANT NOTE: You are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's PDF) if you wish to cite from it. Please check the document version below. Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Publication date: 2018 Link to publication in University of Groningen/UMCG research database Citation for published version (APA): Renders, H., & van Faassen, S. (2018). Theo van Doesburg and Wyndham Lewis: An Aborted Attempt at Collaboration’. The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies, 8, 30-56. Copyright Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Take-down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Downloaded from the University of Groningen/UMCG research database (Pure): http://www.rug.nl/research/portal. For technical reasons the number of authors shown on this cover page is limited to 10 maximum. Download date: 13-11-2019 The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies Wyndham Lewis Society Volume 8 (2017) ISSN 2052-5168 THE JOURNAL OF WYNDHAM LEWIS STUDIES PUBLISHED BY THE WYNDHAM LEWIS SOCIETY EDITORIAL ADDRESS The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies c/o Dr Nathan Waddell Department of English Literature, Arts Building University of Birmingham, Edgbaston Birmingham, B13 2TT EDITORS Zoe Gosling, Louise Kane, Michael Shallcross, Nathan Waddell REVIEWS EDITOR James Hirst EDITORIAL BOARD Rebecca Beasley, Peter Brooker, Peter Caracciolo, Edward Chaney, Paul Edwards, C.
    [Show full text]
  • David Bomberg Interior of the Armenian Church Sources and Further Reading Berger, John, Permanent
    Gallery Short: David Bomberg Interior of the Armenian Church Sources and Further Reading Berger, John, Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing, Methuen & Co Ltd, London, 1960 Cork, Richard, Young Bomberg and the Old Masters: Curator’s Introduction, streamed live at the National Gallery, 20 January, 2020 https://youtu.be/-hh2nJPT7DQ Dickson, Rachel and MacDougall, Sarah, Bomberg, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London, 2017 Hallman, Lee, Curving Round: David Sylvester and the Rediscovery of David Bomberg, Tate Papers no. 21, Spring 2014, ISSN 1753-9854, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/21/curving-round-david-sylvester- and-the-rediscovery-of-david-bomberg Lipke, William, David Bomberg: A Critical Study of his Life and Work, Evelyn Adams & Mackay Ltd, 1967 Oxlade, Roy, David Bomberg: The Climate is Changing from Art Without Art: Selected Writing from the World of the Blunt Edge, ed. Marcus Reinhert, Ziggurat Books, London, 2008 David Bomberg: Spirit in the Mass, Abbott Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, 2006 Gallery Short: David Bomberg Interior of the Armenian Church Works discussed David Bomberg, Washing of the Feet, Church of St James, Jerusalem, Oil on Wood c. 1925 The Sarah Rose Collection at London South Bank University https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/washing-of-the-feet-church-of-st-james-jerusalem- 194345/search/makers:david-bomberg-18901957/page/4/view_as/grid David Bomberg, In the Hold, Oil on Canvas, 1913-4 Tate https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bomberg-in-the-hold-t00913 David Bomberg, Hezekiah’s Pool, Oil on Board,
    [Show full text]
  • Aspects of Modern British Art
    Austin/Desmond Fine Art GILLIAN AYRES JOHN BANTING WILHELMINA BARNS-GRAHAM DAVID BLACKBURN SANDRA BLOW Aspects of DAVID BOMBERG REG BUTLER Modern ANTHONY CARO PATRICK CAULFIELD British Art PRUNELLA CLOUGH ALAN DAVIE FRANCIS DAVISON TERRY FROST NAUM GABO SAM HAILE RICHARD HAMILTON BARBARA HEPWORTH PATRICK HERON ANTHONY HILL ROGER HILTON IVON HITCHENS DAVID HOCKNEY ANISH KAPOOR PETER LANYON RICHARD LIN MARY MARTIN MARGARET MELLIS ALLAN MILNER HENRY MOORE MARLOW MOSS BEN NICHOLSON WINIFRED NICHOLSON JOHN PIPER MARY POTTER ALAN REYNOLDS BRIDGET RILEY WILLIAM SCOTT JACK SMITH HUMPHREY SPENDER BRYAN WYNTER DAVID BOMBERG (1890-1957) 1 Monastery of Mar Saba, Wadi Kelt, near Jericho, 1926 Coloured chalks Signed and dated lower right, Inscribed verso Monastery of Mar Saba, Wadi Kelt, near Jericho, 1926 by David Bomberg – Authenticated by Lillian Bomberg. 54.6 x 38.1cm Prov: The Artist’s estate Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London ‘David Bomberg once remarked when asked for a definition of painting that it is ‘A tone of day or night and the monument to a memorable hour. It is structure in textures of colour.’ His ‘monuments’, whether oil paintings, pen and wash drawings, or oil sketches on paper, have varied essentially between two kinds of structure. There is the structure built up of clearly defined, tightly bounded forms of the early geometrical-constructivist work; and there is, in contrast, the flowing, richly textured forms of his later period, so characteristic of Bomberg’s landscape painting. These distinctions seem to exist even in the palette: primary colours and heavily saturated hues in the early works, while the later paintings are more subtle, tonally conceived surfaces.
    [Show full text]
  • 'We Discharge Ourselves on Both Sides': Vorticism: New Perspectives
    ‘We discharge ourselves on both sides’: Vorticism: New Perspectives (A symposium convened October 29-30, 2010, at the Nasher Museum of Duke University, Durham, NC) ________ Michael Valdez Moses The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-1918 , the only major exhibition of Vorticist art to be held in the United States since John Quinn and Ezra Pound organized the first American show of Vorticist art at the Penguin Club of New York in 1917, opened at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University on September 30. Curated by Mark Antliff (Professor of Art History at Duke University) and Vivien Greene (Curator of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City), this major exhibition of England’s only ‘home-grown’ avant-garde art movement brings together many of the works exhibited at the three exhibitions organized by the various members of the Vorticist movement during its brief existence: the first Vorticist exhibition at the Doré Gallery in London in 1915, the 1917 Penguin Club exhibition in New York City, and the exhibition of Alvin Langdon Coburn’s ‘Vortographs’ (Vorticist photographs) held at the London Camera Club in 1917. The Vorticists runs at the Nasher through to the 2 nd of January 2010 before moving to the Guggenheim in Venice and then to Tate Britain. The exhibition displays sculpture, paintings, watercolours, collages, prints, drawings, vortographs, books, and journals produced by a group of artists and writers, including Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, David Bomberg, Lawrence Atkinson, Christopher Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Helen Saunders, Frederick Etchells, Jessica Dismorr, Dorothy Shakespear, William Roberts, and Ezra Pound, who loosely comprised, or were closely associated with, the Vorticist movement that briefly flourished in London and (to a lesser extent) New York in the second decade of the past century.
    [Show full text]
  • Of David Bomberg at Christie’S London in November  Proceeds of the Sale Will Benefit Hadassah  the Largest Group of Works by Bomberg Ever to Come to Auction
    PRESS RELEASE | LONDON FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 8 October 2013 WORKS FROM THE ESTATE OF DAVID BOMBERG AT CHRISTIE’S LONDON IN NOVEMBER PROCEEDS OF THE SALE WILL BENEFIT HADASSAH THE LARGEST GROUP OF WORKS BY BOMBERG EVER TO COME TO AUCTION David Bomberg (1890-1957) David Bomberg (1890-1957) Portrait of Dinora Self-portrait Estimate: £30,000-50,000 Estimate: £50,000 – 80,000 London - Christie’s are proud to be offering 32 works from the Estate of David Bomberg (1890 – 1957) in the Modern British and Irish Art sale on 21 November. Proceeds of the sale will benefit Hadassah, a registered charity dedicated to raising funds for Hadassah Medical Organisation in Jerusalem. This diverse group of paintings and drawings by Bomberg come from Fischer Fine Art, Bomberg’s long-time dealer, and come to auction for the first time. This is the largest group of works by the artist ever to be offered at auction. Bomberg was one of the most bold and daring artists of his generation and this collection features works from all periods of his rich and varied career with estimates ranging from £1,500 to £120,000. This sale provides a unique opportunity for both new and established collectors to acquire a work of quality and enormous art historical value from this important British artist and with this unequalled provenance. David Bomberg was born in Birmingham in 1890 to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents and at the age of five moved with his family to Whitechapel in London. In 1911, aided by a grant from the Jewish Educational Aid Society, Bomberg attended the Slade School of Art, where his exceptional talent developed.
    [Show full text]
  • “Uproar!”: the Early Years of the London Group, 1913–28 Sarah Macdougall
    “Uproar!”: The early years of The London Group, 1913–28 Sarah MacDougall From its explosive arrival on the British art scene in 1913 as a radical alternative to the art establishment, the early history of The London Group was one of noisy dissent. Its controversial early years reflect the upheavals associated with the introduction of British modernism and the experimental work of many of its early members. Although its first two exhibitions have been seen with hindsight as ‘triumphs of collective action’,1 ironically, the Group’s very success in bringing together such disparate artistic factions as the English ‘Cubists’ and the Camden Town painters only underlined the fragility of their union – a union that was further threatened, even before the end of the first exhibition, by the early death of Camden Town Group President, Spencer Gore. Roger Fry observed at The London Group’s formation how ‘almost all artist groups’, were, ‘like the protozoa […] fissiparous and breed by division. They show their vitality by the frequency with which they split up’. While predicting it would last only two or three years, he also acknowledged how the Group had come ‘together for the needs of life of two quite separate organisms, which give each other mutual support in an unkindly world’.2 In its first five decades this mutual support was, in truth, short-lived, as ‘Uproar’ raged on many fronts both inside and outside the Group. These fronts included the hostile press reception of the ultra-modernists; the rivalry between the Group and contemporary artists’
    [Show full text]
  • Old and New in Modernist Art
    Chapter 2: Old and New in Modernist Art Mr. Thomas T. Baxter presents what appears to be a figure of Christ teaching a dickey-bird to chew worms. This work is labelled "St. Francis" (D‟Asise). I cannot concede his background but the face is remarkable; it is painted with very great skill, and the frenetic modernist who rushes by the picture merely because of the demoded subject-matter will miss one of the best pieces of detail in the exhibition. (Ezra pound, writing as B. H. Dias, in The New Age for January 17, 1918--22.12.235, emphasis added) Among the many kinds of artists, it may be that there are some who are hybrid. Some, that is to say, bore deeper and deeper into the stuff of their own art; others are always making raids into the lands of others. Sickert, it may be, is among the hybrids, the raiders. But . he is probably the best painter now living in England. (Virginia Woolf, writing in 1933, The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays, 201-202, emphasis added) In 1918, we find Ezra Pound worrying about "the frenetic modernist" who will miss something of great beauty because its subject matter, which Pound himself has mocked, is "demoded." And, as late as 1933, we find Virginia Woolf, reporting on a conversation in "Bloomsbury" about Walter Sickert, in which a consensus is reached that this derivative painter, whose work is often naturalistic in its content, and might well have been associated by Woolf with her despised Edwardians, is the best that England has to offer.
    [Show full text]
  • Visual Narratives of History a Close Reading Into the Portrayal of World
    International Journal of Art and Art History December 2017, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 44-105 ISSN: 2374-2321 (Print), 2374-233X (Online) Copyright © The Author(s).All Rights Reserved. Published by American Research Institute for Policy Development DOI: 10.15640/ijaah.v5n2p5 URL: https://doi.org/10.15640/ijaah.v5n2p5 Visual Narratives of History A Close Reading into the Portrayal of World War II in the Paintings of Paul Nash, Eric Kennington and Graham Sutherland: Aptitude for Report or Tendency to Mislead. Nada Ben Hammouda1 Abstract The present thesis aims at providing an insight on the extent to which official British war paintings were capable of producing a pictorial record of Britain during World War Two. Through a qualitative research approach and a comprehensive analysis of selected paintings, this dissertation will point out the strengths and weaknesses of using art as a tool of reportage. The focus will be mainly centralized on three painters: Paul Nash, Eric Kennington and Graham Sutherland who signed contracts as official artists for the War Artists Advisory Committee. A comprehensive analysis will allude to both the propagandist as well as the informative task these paintings carried on. The analysis of selected paintings will be the backbone of this dissertation. Iconology will be applied to read artworks and assess their historical value. This study will also involve a comparison between artists in terms of style, backgrounds and experiences. Similarities as well as disparities will be pointed out and their effect on the artistic output will be examined. Despite not being the focal point of this research, this comparison will highlight the reasons why some art may be referred to as a record of events and other may not.
    [Show full text]
  • Borough Conversations Layout 1
    BOROUGH conversations David Bomberg + Frank Auerbach Dennis Creffield Cliff Holden Philip Holmes Leon Kossoff Edna Mann Leslie Marr Dorothy Mead Miles Richmond Garth Scott BOROUGH: conversations The artists who are represented on these pages represent a wide cross section of By the 1940s David Bomberg was a largely forgotten man. His dazzling early success had not British society. Their numbers include a continued during the inter­war period as critics and collectors struggled with his increasingly card­carrying Communist, a Formula 1 expressive and psychologically charged work. He was reduced to begging for commissions as racing driver, an anarchist and a primary a war artist and was routinely refused teaching positions at the mainstream academic col­ school headteacher. They are unified by leges. He held a string of minor posts during the war years before, in 1945, accepting a role their commitment to paint honestly, with­ as tutor to the evening art class at the Borough Polytechnic (now London South Bank out irony or artifice. They are committed to University). describing what they see and feel without filtering it through a prism of academic Among his first students were artists such as Dorothy Mead, Edna Mann and Cliff Holden technique or contemporary criticism. This who had all been taught by him previously at the City Literary Institute in London. They were was why they were uniformly neglected in joined by Miles Richmond and Leslie Marr; the former a conscientious objector and the latter their early careers but equally why many a technician in the RAF (both had already received some art tuition).
    [Show full text]