Escape to Reality: The Western World of Maynard Dixon
by Linda Jones Gibbs

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Book Reviews of Escape to Reality: The Western World of Maynard Dixon

Book Review: Images of the Southwest & the streets of San Francisco
Summary: 5 Stars

This book was assembled to accompany an exhibition at BYU, which has a large collection of Dixon's paintings, acquired from the artist in the 1930s by the University. There are a great many color plates and related black and white photographs, and the authors have provided an extensive written commentary describing Dixon's career, his work, and his relationship with the young photographer Dorothea Lange, to whom he was married 1920-1934. A central chapter in the book concerns his paintings of Native Americans, whom he ennobled while at the same time turning away from the conditions of poverty, desperation and government oppression in which they lived.

Lange emerged as a documentary photographer in the early years of the Depression, photographing the growing labor unrest and the unemployed that filled the streets of San Francisco. Returning from the "reality" that he preferred in the desert Southwest, Dixon joined her in creating a series of paintings portraying these same themes, concentrating on the dark, despairing, and often violent struggle between the out-of-work and the police. The book gives side-by-side examples of her photographs and his paintings from this period.

The book does not provide a comprehensive study of Dixon. While he denegrated his work as a commercial illustrator, it would be interesting to see his style and treatment of Western subject matter in that medium by contrast with his "artistic" work. The authors obviously respect Dixon's work as an artist, but they also raise questions about the authenticity of his vision, particularly of Native Americans, and the domestic role into which he placed Lange, whose own career went on hold for several years as she kept house and tended to children. You put the book down at the end, marveling at the images, while feeling a sense of ambiguity about the artist himself. All that aside, it's an informative and beautifully designed book and I recommend it highly.

Readers may be also interested in the journals of Everett Ruess, who also loved the deserts of the Southwest, was an amateur watercolorist, and visited Dixon and Lange in San Francisco before his disappearance in 1934.

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