Maynard Dixon - Southwest Artist - "Wild Horses of Nevada"

Maynard Dixon
Wild Horses of Nevada, 1927
Oil on canvas
44 x 50 inches
NOT FOR SALE

This important painting by Maynard Dixon has been prominently featured in numerous Museum exhibitions over the years, and was used as the cover image for the essential book, “Desert Dreams – The Art and Life of Maynard Dixon”. This comprehensive publication was written by Donald J. Hagerty and is the product of 15 years of intensive research. The painting is owned by the William A. Karges Family Trust and is not for sale at this time.

“Wild Horses of Nevada” was painted in 1927, during a period when he experimented with the concept of non-objective art and began exploring ideas and techniques related to the more progressive art movement now referred to as “Modernism”. He was aware of European art styles including Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism and his western landscapes began to incorporate broad, clean areas of color, sharp definition of edges, subtle gradations of hues, and the use of nearly monochromatic earth tones. This painting is an excellent example of his increasingly simplified, two-dimensional compositions that included cubist-realist influences.

It is likely that this painting was one of fifty-six works painted during a very productive time in Maynard Dixon's career, during a four month trip through Nevada that began in October 1927.

“Wild Horses of Nevada” has been included in a large and diverse group of noteworthy exhibitions in respected Museums across the United States. Below is a partial list of prominent institutions that have coordinated these shows with themes ranging from the American West to the Role of Horses in the History of the country.

As noted by Donald Hagerty in “Desert Dreams”; “In this large painting, Maynard applied cubist-realist principles to the desert's reality, a scaffold for the angular forms. The painting's unusual angle of vision, a bird's-eye perspective, shows a group of wild horses thundering across an alkaline flat. He composed the canvas with a thoughtful and bold use of pattern, expressive but modest distortion of form, a clean surface unencumbered with unnecessary detail, and a limited color scope massed in large areas”.

2010 The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky staged an exhibition on The Horse in American Art that coincided with the World Equestrian Games that year.

1993 Included in a traveling exhibition organized by Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico in conjunction with the release of the Book “Desert Dreams – The Art and Life of Maynard Dixon”.

1994, “Desert Dreams: The Art of Maynard Dixon” at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum in Griffith Park. 2007 "Dixon's West", Pasadena Museum of California Art featured 106 of Maynard Dixon's paintings and drawings 2007 - 2008 Figge Art Museum "Go West!", Davenport, Iowa

2014 Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento, California

The museum noted that “Horses have played a crucial role in building the United States. They have carried generals into battle, forged the trail of westward expansion, hustled for cowboys, and sprinted under jockeys for cheering fans. As such, horses became a meaningful part of American cultural identity symbolising heroism, wildness, hard work, and prosperity," The exhibition, entitled Hoofbeats and Heartbeats, was the first significant exhibition to critically examine the role of the horse in American art, history and culture.
2012 Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa "The American West as Myth: Art from the Figge and Private Collections"
2013 National Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson Hole, Wyoming
2015 Annual “Maynard Dixon Country” art gathering at the famed artist’s historic home and studio in Mt. Carmel, Utah
2016 Nevada Museum of Art 2019-2020 "Maynard Dixon's American West" at the Scottsdale Museum of the West, described as "the most comprehensive retrospective ever showcasing Maynard Dixon’s life and artistic career."

2021 Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles, California

2020-2021 "Borein and Friends" at the Santa Barbara Historical Society

William S. Schwartz, "Romantic Modernist"

William S. Schwartz
William A. Karges Fine Art

William S. Schwartz (February 23, 1896 – February 10, 1977) was born to a poor family in Smorgon, Russia, where he attended art school on scholarship in adolescence before immigrating to the United States at the age of 17. There Schwartz, who had “chosen his life’s work early on,” managed to support himself as an opera, vaudeville, radio and concert singer and painting houses in order to pursue his ultimate dream as a painter.

After moving to New York to live with his sister and then Omaha to study with J. Laurie Wallace at the Kellom School, Schwartz ultimately ended up in Chicago, where he studied under Ivan Trutnev and Karl A. Buehr at the Art Institute of Chicago. He graduated with honors in life drawing, portraiture, and painting before his career took off in 1926 when he had his first solo exhibition of three at the Institute in 1926.

William Schwartz
"Daydreams"
Oil on canvas, 14 x 11 inches
SOLD

He was well known as a distinctive character who sported a handlebar mustache with long hair and a thick accent and was known to frequent Riccardo’s Restaurant and Gallery with other well-known artists such as Ivan Albright, Malvin Albright, andAaron Bohrod. In 1921, Schwartz met and eventually married Mona Turner—then a married woman and mother of two—who he adored and benefited from greatly as she became both his muse and “least lenient critic.” Together they toured the US by car to visit friends as Schwartz painted the country en plein air.

Throughout the Great Depression he supported himself by painting murals in a regionalist style at numerous post offices for the Federal Art Project. He incited minor controversy with his nude lithographs, and his subject matter moved freely between genres to suit his vision. “I have painted in faith and in freedom,” wrote the artist, “faith that somehow what I have done will reflect the best that is in me—freedom to choose my own themes in my own way.” Ultimately Schwartz was most known for and worked most prolifically in symbolist and abstract styles, but he characterized the American scene as, “more colorful and challenging than I or any artist might hope to record in a hundred lifetimes.”

Identifying himself as a “romantic modernist,” he was heavily influenced by surrealism and incorporated influences from cubism and constructivism into his abstract works. 

William Schwartz
"Figures in a Rocky Landscape"
Oil on board, 10 x 12 inches
SOLD

In the 1920’s he began his series Symphonic Forms, regarded by many as the height of his oeuvre. Marrying his two passions, art and music, the paintings from the series feature surreal biomorphic forms and bright colors recalling the fauvists. Punctuated by jagged cubistic shapes and tonalistic hues, his symphonic scenes evoke the timbre, notes, and compositional scale of the vibrating and evolving musical works they were inspired by, such as Beethoven’s Symphony No. 23. Recalling Kandinsky’s lyrical mysticism, Schwartz’s work seems to capture the spirit of music in its variegated form.

Writing for the Chicago Tribune in 1970, Schwartz put his work into his own words:

My subjects are the beauty and wonder, the laughter and poetry, the pity and terror of the present world, which is the only universe I know. My drawing, composition, color, and techniques are based on the best education I could come by and extended to the limits of my own creative invention and capacities. I do not imitate. Therefore I, and I alone, am responsible for the vision of the world I set before the viewer.”

Swimming between different styles and influences and inspired by the American landscape and subject matter, Schwartz’s surreal visual opuses stand out as stunning reminders of his work as a uniquely abstract modernist.

Schwartz, William S. “An Artist’s Love Affair with America.” The Chicago Tribune. April 5, 1970, Pages 64-65.