Dispatch, 10.16.08:  Maynard Dixon at the Tucson Museum of Art

The Tucson Museum of Art and Historic Block (140 N. Main Ave., 520/624-2333, 10 am – 4 pm Tues. – Sat.; Noon-4 p.m. Sun.,closed Mon., $8 general admission, $6 seniors (60+); $3 students (13+) is currently presenting the largest single gathering to date of artist Maynard Dixon's work.  The show is called A Place of Refuge:  Maynard Dixon's Arizona, and it runs from Oct. 11, 2008 to Feb. 15, 2009.

Dixon, who had a very successful career as an illustrator for magazines, books, and advertising—he was there among the leading lights of the Golden Age of Illustration like Wyeth, Parrish, and, especially, Remington—was a superior painter of the Southwestern landscape and its people.  In his commercial work he wandered, as many illustrators do, among realism, fantasy, and stereotype, and his paintings, mostly oils and water colors, similarly teeter back and forth between pure recordings of bouncing-light landscapes and an almost social realism in some of his portraits of Native Americans.  

 Other of his paintings are mythic and border on a kind of romantic fantasy.  This may not have been intentional, however.  Most of these are of the Hopi, their land, and their architecture, and it is nearly impossible not to reach into a kind of magical realism where the Hopi are concerned.  The Hopi have this effect on many an Anglo's imagination, myself included.  This has been going for a few hundred years, and it continues down through the generations.  I have a tendency to see them as living in a separate timescape, which gives their bare cold mesas in northeastern Arizona a kind of otherworldly feeling.

In 1922, two decades after he first visited Arizona, Dixon lived at Walpi on First Mesa for four months.  His hosts were "two Hopi snake priests, Namoki and his blind brother Loma Himna."  This according to one of the many biographical notes next to the paintings and drawings in this well-designed show.  One of the more powerful and evocative of the paintings in the show is 1923's The Witch of Sikyatki, an arresting scene from Hopi mythology in which the titular witch is locked in an unnerving glance at the viewer. 

I don't think anybody painted the Arizona landscape better.  The overwhelming feeling one gets after spending time with Dixon's work is one of being overwhelmed—by jutting rock, by deep canyons, by endless blue sky.  In his paintings, the desert is nearly always much bigger than the people in it.  And that's as it should be.

If you haven't tired of Dixon after seeing the show (and how could you?) head out to east Tucson to the  Medicine Man Gallery's Maynard Dixon Museum (7000 E. Tanque Verde Rd. 520/722-7798, 800/422-9382, www.medicinemangallery.com) where you can see copies of many of the magazines and books illustrated by Dixon, some his more obscure, abstract paintings, and a lot more.