Maynard Dixon

Maynard Dixon (1875–1946) was born in Fresno, California, but spent his life and career traveling and painting the American Southwest — its mesas, storms, and solitary figures — and is among the most important painters of the region in the first half of the twentieth century. Rejecting the picturesque romanticism that characterized much Western painting, Dixon developed an austere, modernist vision: flat planes of color, monumental cloud formations, and indigenous figures rendered with economy and weight. He spent years in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, absorbing the geological drama of the Colorado Plateau. He lived his final years in Tucson, where he continued to paint the desert until his death. His work is held in the collections of the Oakland Museum of California, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Phoenix Art Museum, and other major institutions, and is considered essential to any understanding of the American Southwest in twentieth-century painting.