Escape to Reality: The Western World of Maynard Dixon - Tapa dura

In May of 1937, Brigham Young University took possession of 85 paintings and drawings by Maynard Dixon, the artist whose images of the American West - created during long travels and residences with Native American communitites - remain some of the most genuine work in Western art as a genre. This book, illustrated with colour plates, centers on four texts examining very different topics. Linda Jones Gibbs begins with an account of the Dixon collection at Brigham Young University, then moves on to a pair of essays exploring the reality, ideology, and abstraction at work in his images of Native Americans and the western landscape. In the final essay, photo hisotrian Deborah Brown Rasiel grapples with the complex artistic influeneces at play between Dixon and his second wife, photographer Dorothea Lange.