Maynard Dixon

Maynard Dixon’s West is the one with the marching clouds and bold, angular shapes and shadows. It has gold and pink mesas, horses in motion, and the long horizontal lines and rhythms of the desert and its people – a West that Dixon loved before he ever walked it.

From the tip of Dixon’s brush, the paint is rarely so thick as to betray brushstrokes, and the detail is not obviously wrought. But neither is it lacking. The colors are vivid and muted, simultaneously. The light is sometimes quiet, sometimes not.

The paintings are like Dixon himself, a bit of an enigma, with two sides as opposite as light and shadow, among them being a San Francisco bohemian who settled among the Mormon farmers in Mount Carmel, Utah.

Now widely considered a premier artist of the Southwest, Dixon spent the summers in the early 1940s on an expanse of cottonwoods, cliffs and meadow east of Zion National Park. He and his artist wife Edie Hamlin designed the cabin that remains, a simple, sturdy log and stone structure, the logs hauled off Cedar Mountain, the chinking matching the sandstone hills, the doors painted red ocher and turquoise. 

The buildings have been restored by art dealers Paul and Susan Bingham, who offer tours and hold artist retreats here, and who live above the gallery they built on adjoining acreage.

This is where Dixon found peace in the final years of his life, away from the noise and crowds of the city. This is where he and Hamlin – “the light of his life,” according to Paul Bingham – could paint undisturbed. Dixon’s emphysemic lungs might struggle, but he would sit in his favorite chair and paint small oils, maybe 12-by-16-inch canvases. On better days, the two might head afield, to Zion or the Navajo lands.

Hamlin would say later these were happy years for the two of them, although poignant, too, because they both knew Dixon’s time was running out.

A photograph of Hamlin, taken by Ansel Adams, sits on a shelf in the cabin. A volume of Dixon’s poems – biographers say his poetry at times equaled the quality of his artwork – is open on a desk in the bedroom.

Dixon believed in men who kept their word and had integrity. He was a gregarious man who liked his friends around him. Fellow artists would gather in his San Francisco studio for Chinese takeout and robust discussions. Somewhere along the way, Dixon and Ansel Adams became good friends.

“My father fit Ansel’s notion of what an artist should be – theatrical, he was principled, and he was faithful to himself,” said Dixon’s son Daniel in a 2006 PBS Utah documentary. “Also, they entertained each other. When they got together it was … a celebration of outrageous hilarity.”

And both Dixon and Adams revered the American landscape. Born in 1875 in California, Dixon felt a spiritual kinship with the Southwest long before he visited the area. He adopted the attire, dressing in cowboy hat, boots and bolo tie – a man out of place on the streets of San Francisco, said Ken Hartvigsen of the Brigham Young University Museum of Art.

Upon Dixon’s first trip to the Southwest, at age 25, he found it everything he expected: “So long had I dreamed of it that when I came there, it was not strange to me,” he was quoted in the PBS Utah documentary.

Dixon’s first exposure to Utah appears to have been in 1933, when he and then-wife (and noted photographer) Dorothea Lange spent the summer exploring Zion National Park and its environs, camping or staying in the homes of local families. He reportedly painted 40 canvases during that time.

Although animated in the company of others, he also had a solitary side, prone to heading off to experience the country or alone to paint. He joked about being seen as a “wandering lunatic.”

Dixon didn’t come to live permanently in Utah until 1939 or ’40, on his third marriage and borrowed time. Dixon had been a sickly, asthmatic child, and the disease had developed into full-blown emphysema by 1935, cultivated by his affection for hand-rolled cigarettes.

Married in 1937, Dixon and Hamlin bought 20 acres in Mount Carmel, north of Kanab. They spent their winters in Tucson, Arizona, their summers in Utah.

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

Art came so naturally to Dixon that he never completed formal training. Lange marveled at the ease with which the lines and strokes flowed from his slender left hand. He was a working artist his entire life, making a living for years from magazines like Sunset, book illustrations and commissions for murals. He lived in New York City four years, but grew disenchanted with the big city and commercial work, complaining that he was portraying the West untruthfully, in an overly romanticized fashion. He cast off much of that work in 1912 in favor of the honesty of painting.

He was tired of perpetuating the image of a Wild West. He wanted to make art from the perspective of an inhabitant, an interpreter, one so drawn to the land that he puts a piece of himself in it. He said he felt compelled to capture the colors and shapes so as to pass along his vision of it all, to convey the expanse, the freedom and the loneliness.

“To me, the wind of the wastelands has color; the opalescent ranges of the desert seem to me like music, and sometimes the giant clouds of storm, piled far above the mountains, take form as of lost and forgotten gods, serene and terrible,” he said.

By the time he came to Utah, World War II was raging, and artwork wasn’t at the top of most Americans’ shopping lists.

The couple tried renting out the bunkhouse on their Mount Carmel land to bring in some extra income, but that lasted only a single summer. They just weren’t suited to running a dude ranch, hosting young families, their kids running wild. Dixon called it the Brat House.

Still, they managed. By all accounts, Dixon’s two sons from his marriage with Lange adored Hamlin. The country was a “renewing grace” for Dixon, said Hamlin. It fed his soul. Dixon, it seemed, had found that balance between the romantic and the literal in his painting, as well as in his life.

The family left Utah in 1945, as the 5,200-foot elevation became too much for his damaged lungs. Dixon died Nov. 13, 1946, in Tucson, just days after completing a mural of the Grand Canyon for the Los Angeles offices of the Santa Fe Railway.

Edie Hamlin promised she would take his ashes to Mount Carmel, and that’s what she did, when spring came.

Susan Bingham climbs the steep hill to the boulder where Dixon’s ashes are buried, stands for a minute, then sits on a smaller rock, her back turned to the memorial plate on the boulder. Before her, in the distance, are the cedar and mountain juniper, the white and red sandstone cliffs. Extract some of the detail and replace it with inner vision, and it could be a Maynard Dixon painting. She recites Dixon’s 1935 poem “At Last”:

BYU owns largest Dixon collection in the world

The great depression was the catalyst behind Brigham Young University’s ownership of the largest collection of Maynard Dixon art in the world.

In 1937, Herald R. Clark, dean of the BYU School of Commerce in Provo, offered to buy all the works in Dixon’s San Francisco studio for one set price. It was the Depression, so artwork wasn’t exactly flying off the walls.

BYU wound up acquiring 83 pieces, for a reported $3,700, including some drawings and sketches the university wanted as a teaching collection for art students, according to Clyda Ludlow, collections manager at the BYU Museum of Art in Provo. Clark and Dixon also became letter-writing friends. “I found him much bigger than anything he had created,” Clark was quoted in a 2006 PBS Utah documentary. “He was a … forceful, imaginative character, one who loved life and people.”

The university has since purchased or otherwise acquired additional Dixons, bringing its collection to 113. The paintings include a substantial number of Southwestern works, as well as Dixon’s Depression-era series. The latter works were paintings of blank-faced men on city streets, probably the most recognized of which is “Forgotten Man.”

Dixon was married from 1920 to 1935 to photographer Dorothea Lange, who became famous for documenting human suffering during the Depression. Paul Bingham, co-owner of Dixon’s summer home in Mount Carmel, says Lange influenced the simplification of Dixon’s art in the 1920s as he moved toward the modernist, somewhat cubist style that would become his legacy.

Bingham considers Dixon’s Depression paintings derivative of Lange’s work – although Bingham’s wife, Susan, is quick to note the beauty of those paintings and their relevance even today.

Binghams to the Rescue

Without paul and Susan Bingham, painter Maynard Dixon’s summer home in Southern Utah likely would not survive today.

The buildings on the 20 acres in Mount Carmel were deteriorating when the Binghams bought the property in 1998. They repaired and faithfully restored the home and other structures, preserving the original footprint and keeping as many of the original fixtures and furniture as possible. The restoration was meticulous enough to warrant a listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Binghams, who grew up in Utah but operated galleries in California for several years, are “art-diseased” (Paul’s description) individuals who believed strongly in preserving a piece of property that inspired an important artist. Art collectors who became art dealers, they had worked directly with Dixon’s widow, Edie Hamlin, in selling Dixon paintings after his death.

Hamlin sold the Mount Carmel property to Dixon’s friend and fellow artist, Milford Zornes, in 1963. Zornes sold it to the Binghams as he grew too old to maintain it.

The Binghams have continued Zornes’ practice of holding artist retreats there. They also support artists through their Thunderbird Foundation for the Arts and gallery on adjacent property. From mid-March through mid-November, they offer tours of the Dixon home and property.