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Lot Essay
Aware that the vast Western territory was rapidly developing into a new age, Maynard Dixon was very sympathetic to the plight of the Native Americans and yearned to capture the peace and tranquility of their vanishing ways. In his masterwork Tradition, Dixon creates a haunting image of a group of tribal elders embracing part of their ancient lore, perhaps for the last time. We see the sadness and resignation in their faces as they face an uncertain future.
Dixon bucked the popular styles of many American Western painters, who romanticized the Western frontier primarily for an East Coast audience. They routinely portrayed the West in terms of conflict, capture and confinement of the Native Peoples on the magnificent Western land. As Wesley M. Burnside writes in Maynard Dixon: Artist of the West, Dixon 'knew that the West was not always in conflict, as eastern myths had too often dictated the cowboy was not always on a bucking horse and the Indian was not always on the warpath . . . . Dixon wanted to realistically portray the more ordinary pursuits of people he knew and admired and with whom he had developed an affinity - people who actually inhabited the West.' (Provo, Utah, 1974, p. 55)
The early 1920's were a turning point in Dixon's artistic method. Always a maverick, he never followed popular artistic styles, and instead maintained his own unique vision and stretched his own boundaries into a simplified modern approach. This shifted his previously conservative and realistic view of subject and composition toward a stronger emphasis on space and form through the rhythm of color and light in a decidedly modern manner. This change is evident in Tradition, painted in 1922, which displays the strong compositional elements of the horizontal bands of light, clouds and of the group of seated Native Americans. The powerful standing figure breaks the horizontal planes and forces the viewer to confront the reality of the pictorial subject. Dixon uses strong lines and broad forms of rich, somber, earth-toned color to create abstractions of the picture plane and to emphasize the emotional impact of the subject.
Dixon bucked the popular styles of many American Western painters, who romanticized the Western frontier primarily for an East Coast audience. They routinely portrayed the West in terms of conflict, capture and confinement of the Native Peoples on the magnificent Western land. As Wesley M. Burnside writes in Maynard Dixon: Artist of the West, Dixon 'knew that the West was not always in conflict, as eastern myths had too often dictated the cowboy was not always on a bucking horse and the Indian was not always on the warpath . . . . Dixon wanted to realistically portray the more ordinary pursuits of people he knew and admired and with whom he had developed an affinity - people who actually inhabited the West.' (Provo, Utah, 1974, p. 55)
The early 1920's were a turning point in Dixon's artistic method. Always a maverick, he never followed popular artistic styles, and instead maintained his own unique vision and stretched his own boundaries into a simplified modern approach. This shifted his previously conservative and realistic view of subject and composition toward a stronger emphasis on space and form through the rhythm of color and light in a decidedly modern manner. This change is evident in Tradition, painted in 1922, which displays the strong compositional elements of the horizontal bands of light, clouds and of the group of seated Native Americans. The powerful standing figure breaks the horizontal planes and forces the viewer to confront the reality of the pictorial subject. Dixon uses strong lines and broad forms of rich, somber, earth-toned color to create abstractions of the picture plane and to emphasize the emotional impact of the subject.