ART REVIEW : Taking a Journey Into ‘Desert Dreams’

Despite endemic denial, the Southland does have a real history. It’s not always a pretty picture, but one of its happier images involved artist Maynard Dixon. His rarely seen paintings and graphics are on view at the Palm Springs Desert Museum. The traveling exhibition’s title, “Desert Dreams--The Art of Maynard Dixon,” comes from a new biography of the artist by UC Davis scholar Donald J. Hagerty, who organized the 70-work show for the Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico.

The artist was born in Fresno and lived an itinerant life in the Southwest until he died at 71 in 1946. Essentially a rail-thin, elegant self-taught loner, he was encouraged by cowboy artist Frederick Remington and gained an early reputation in the Bay Area as a popular illustrator of stories by everybody from Jack London to O. Henry and Clarence Mulford--of Hopalong Cassidy fame. Evidently Dixon’s early work had some of the fictional, nostalgic, kiss-the-horse flavor of Hopalong’s adventures.

According to one account it was Dixon’s L.A.-aesthetic connection that helped him decide to get serious. He met Charles Fletcher Lummis, one of Lotus Land’s original, self-invented, flamboyant entrepreneurs. Lummis championed preservation of both the Southland’s Latino and Native American legacies. He founded the Southwest Museum. His own house, El Alisal, for which Dixon did the decorative metal work, remains a local landmark. The house’s sculpture was executed by John Gutzon Borglum, an artist cradled in Pasadena’s crafts-oriented Arroyo movement. Borglum, of course, went on to carve the World’s Largest Sculpture, that lovable mountain of kitsch, Mt. Rushmore.

Lummis introduced Dixon to the desert and the artist was hooked. He spent the rest of his days painting the Southwestern landscape and its original inhabitants, whom he revered as living in older and wiser ways. Native American philosophy may have inspired Dixon’s own motto, “So live that you can look every damn man in the eye and tell him to go to hell.”

So far everything about Dixon’s life marks him as the period piece that current fashion would clearly hold him to be if it thought about him at all. But there is another clue. Besides Lummis, Dixon’s other major support and inspiration was his second wife, Dorothea Lange. This great WPA photographer of the Dust Bowl is a decidedly modernist figure. So what was she doing married to a Brontosaurus? The likely conclusion is born out by the evidence of the work. Dixon was no dinosaur.

Although a representational artist, he regularly spoke out in defense of abstract art that clearly molded the clean, dynamic composition of his own work. Going through the show, one picks up whiffs of everything from Art Nouveau to Cubism, from Regionalism to Metaphysical Surrealism. Dixon spontaneously employed the aesthetic recipe that has produced the best art in this part of the world from John McLaughlin to Ed Kienholz and Richard Diebenkorn. He was a synthesizer.

If there are things about this art that put off contemporary viewers, that may tell us more about the eyes than the art. The dryness of Dixon’s surfaces can be a real distraction. Nobody wants a world where even the clouds are made of adobe.

But what of Dixon’s habit of seeing the desert landscape as sublime, its cowboys and Native Americans as stalwart and heroic? If that makes him appear sentimental today, it speaks worse of our cynicism than his idealism.

It’s fun to go through the show imagining which of Dixon’s fellow artists might like particular pieces, finding a bit of themselves in it. Marsden Hartley certainly would have responded to the crackling, symbolic sky of “Mesas in Shadow.” The way “Moonlight Over Zion” hovers on the border of magic and abstraction would have gotten the attention of Georgia O’Keeffe. A quality of gently humorous poetry in the purple clouds descending over an adobe in “Late Afternoon” somehow sends a message to Ed Ruscha, and there is a smart, sonorously decorative screen that would take the attention of Billy Al Bengston.

The most heroic of Dixon’s paintings is “Earth Knower.” The Native American depicted is swathed in a dark blanket. Features and folds take on the topography of the surrounding hills. The hills have the color and weave of tribal patterns, of blankets and baskets that were the unself-conscious masterpieces of this land’s original inhabitants. Like them, Dixon harmonized the human and the earthiness into a single entity.

* Palm Springs Desert Museum, 101 Museum Drive, Palm Springs; through March 20, closed Mondays. Information: (619) 325-0189.