Sagebrush and Solitude

"Here’s the first comprehensive publication on the paintings, letters, photographs, and poetry made by Maynard Dixon (1875–1946)." — CURATED TEXAN 

"Maynard Dixon remains one of the most famous painters of the American West. From his first Nevada sketching trip with Edward Borein in 1901 to his month-long commission documenting the construction of the Boulder Dam in Las Vegas in 1934, he made frequent trips from San Francisco to sketch and paint Nevada’s open spaces and developing landscape in the face of a changing economy and world. This is the first comprehensive exhibition to document these visits — it features nearly 150 of Dixon’s paintings of the Sierra Nevada region and Great Basin, many of them rarely or never seen before. Old homesteads, wild horses and stands of cottonwood trees are recurring subjects — images that conjure memories of a romanticised bygone era before modernisation forever changed Nevada’s pristine landscapes. Historian Kevin Starr noted that a driving impulse for Dixon was ‘a sense of imminent loss’ of the geography, history, folklore and culture of the Old West, and that he sought to record it before it vanished.  The show is accompanied by the publication of a major book co-published by Rizzoli and Electra in New York and the Nevada Museum of Art." — CHRISTIES MAGAZINE