Visions of the West : * ‘Desert Dreams: The Art of Maynard Dixon’ will feature the painter’s Southwest landscapes and drawings, poems and letters.

Dan Dixon remembers the day he knew he would never be an artist.

He was 6 years old, and his father, painter Maynard Dixon, stopped en route to Taos, N.M., to sketch the desert.

No matter how hard young Daniel squinted at the landscape, he simply couldn’t see the forms and relationships that his father so effortlessly translated into brush strokes. It wasn’t until Dan looked at his father’s finished sketches, he recalls, that he realized “those mountains were so blue, and those shadows so violet, and that the cactus there in the foreground had something important to say, and that the sky climbed in deepening, darkening levels to the infinite vault of heaven.” At that moment, Dan, now 68, decided he better try writing.

“Desert Dreams: The Art of Maynard Dixon” opens Saturday at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum in Griffith Park. The first major show of Dixon’s evocative Southwest landscapes, it features 70 works, including many never exhibited publicly before, as well as drawings, poems and letters by the artist. There are also photographs of the eccentric artist at work, extraordinarily good photographs since his second wife (and Daniel’s mother) was the legendary Dorothea Lange.

Donald J. Hagerty originally organized the show for the Museum of Fine Arts and Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe (the show travels next to the Charles M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Mont., then to the Fresno Metropolitan Museum). A former administrator and teacher of American studies at UC Davis, Hagerty has been studying the artist and his work for more than 15 years and is the author of a lavishly illustrated book called “Desert Dreams: The Art and Life of Maynard Dixon,” published last year.

Born in Fresno in 1875, Dixon was still a teen-ager when he sent work to Frederic Remington to critique. “You draw better than I did at your age,” the great Western artist wrote back. By the age of 18, Dixon was a commercial artist and quickly became known for his Sunset magazine covers and other scenes of Western life. But, in Hagerty’s view, the mature Dixon had a vision, both mystical and modern, that transcended genre. “One of the things I really tried to do in the book was show he wasn’t just a cowboy and Indian painter,” Hagerty says.

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Hagerty theorizes that Dixon’s early experience as a poster and billboard designer had a major influence on his later paintings, with their compelling colors and simplified, sculptural shapes. “You can really see how his painting changed after 1920,” says Hagerty. “He realized he could eliminate nonessential detail and strengthen the power of the painting by doing so.”

Dixon genuinely loved the desert and would disappear into it, all alone, for long periods of time. “He would tell Dorothea he’d be gone for two weeks and be gone for two months,” Hagerty says. (According to son Dan, Dixon much preferred building himself a sweat lodge to taking a conventional bath.)

Although Dixon was a regionalist in the best sense, he was never provincial, Hagerty says. He never studied in Europe or even visited it, but he was, by nature, in sympathy with the Europeans who were exploding the conventions of academic art. Dixon was especially interested in Cubism, says Hagerty, who sees the movement’s influence in the thrusting angles of “Wild Horses of Nevada” (1927). Obviously linked thematically with Remington and the other creators of the common vision of the West, Dixon is also kin to such contemporary artists as Georgia O’Keeffe and Helen Frankenthaler, Hagerty says.

Ultimately, Dixon’s vision was unique. “He was never derivative,” says Hagerty. “You could tell a Maynard Dixon through a brick wall, the style is so much his own.”

Dixon was a genuine character, who dressed for years all in black, wore high-heeled cowboy boots and carried an ebony sword cane, topped with a silver thunderbird (his trademark). As independent as any Gary Cooper cowboy, Dixon never hesitated to call a critic a bozo or otherwise speak his mind. “There was nobody dull behind the painting,” says Hagerty.

Now an advertising executive in Pasadena, Dan Dixon recalls his parents with enormous respect and some residual pain. He chuckles at the memory of figure-study classes Dixon taught in Southern California, attended by men who spent their days at Disney, animating Snow White. As Dixon sketched the nude model in front of him, his left hand was infallible. “The crayon would never leave the paper,” Dan recalls. “It was all one uninterrupted instinct.”

Dixon was never a cuddly parent, even before he and Lange were divorced in 1935. But he could be wonderful, his son says. When Dan and his brother John were young, they treasured visits to their father’s studio. Dixon would make up stories for his boys, illustrating the tales as he told them, on huge rolls of brown butcher paper he unfurled on the studio floor.

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“I think my father was a very gifted man, but I believe my mother was an authentic genius,” says Dan. Which is not to say they were perfect parents. Dan and his brother were boarded out during some of their childhood--it was the Depression and their parents were professionals trying to make a living. That experience, says Dan, “left wounds that in some ways have never healed.” Today Dan is a partner in Older & Wiser Ltd., a firm that markets goods and services to people over 50. He is able to offer unique insights into his parents and their work.

Lange, who died of cancer in 1965, will always be remembered for her haunting images of the Great Depression. But, as Dan reminds, she started out as a portrait photographer in San Francisco. He thinks one strain on his parents’ marriage was that Lange spent years taking pictures of the rich to support the family while Dixon catered only to his talent. An occasional collaborator with his mother, writing text for her photos, Dan ascribes some of the evocative power of her pictures to an unlikely source--a case of polio in childhood that left her with a permanent limp.

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There were “no grab shots” in Lange’s portfolio, Dan says. Her subjects always had time to compose themselves, to find their dignity, because “she never snuck up on nobody.” The people in front of her lens “trust her, and I think that’s why those photographs tell us the truth.”

Clearly, Dixon and Lange influenced each other. Some of Lange’s Southwestern images--a weathered Hopi face, an abandoned adobe--could be studies for his paintings. And, during their years together, Dixon did a series of paintings of the urban poor and oppressed that are like the rest of his work only in their power. Dan is in the process of organizing an exhibit for 1996 that will bring together both Lange’s socially conscious images and the less famous work his father did on the same populist themes.

Dixon’s last years were spent with third wife, Edith Hamlin. Strangled by emphysema, he died in 1946. Hamlin was Dixon’s tireless champion until her own death in 1991. Both Lange and Hamlin left oral histories of their years with Dixon, and Dan and John Dixon have also reminisced for posterity.

It was Dan’s idea to weave all four voices together in a book on Dixon, called “The Thunderbird Remembered.” The Autry has just published the new book, which is full of photos, sketches and memories of the man who looked at the desert and saw what others could not.

WHERE AND WHEN

What: Exhibit: “Desert Dreams: The Art of Maynard Dixon.”

Location: Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Griffith Park, next to the Los Angeles Zoo.

Hours: Opens Saturday and continues through June 4. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday.

Price: $7 for general, $5 for seniors and students with valid ID, and $3 for children 2 through 12.

Call: (213) 667-2000.