Manierre Dawson
oil on canvas
22 by 28 inches
Gift of Dr. Lewis Obi, Frank McKeown and Lefferts Mabie, 1980
Collection of the Illinois State Museum
The period between 1913 and 1920 was a time of artistic and personal transition for Manierre Dawson.
In 1914 the artist was included in two major exhibitions. The first, organized by Arthur B. Davies, was sponsored by the Montross Gallery in New York . It traveled to Detroit, Cincinnati, and Baltimore. Entitled The Fourteen, the exhibition was assembled to highlight the best of American abstract painting as defined by Davies who, according to a journal entry by Dawson, “. . .thinks Stella and I are the most abstract.” (The reference is to Joseph Stella, an important early 20th century American abstract painter. A digital image of his painting circa 1935-43, Smokestack, can be seen in the Reforming Formal Elements section.
Soon after Davies had contacted him about exhibiting in The Fourteen, a high-school friend, Dudley Crafts Watson, was named director for the Milwaukee Art Society and sought-out Dawson to help him organize Paintings and Sculptures in “The Modern Spirit” at the Society. The exhibition was a sort of recap of the Armory Show. It opened in April and included contemporary European and American work from Midwest collections. It drew Dawson’s only mention in print during his lifetime (see Adam and Eve: The Garden on the Manierre Dawson - a pioneer page.).
A life-altering event occurred during the summer following these two exhibitions. Dawson met and fell in love with a young woman ten years his junior — Lilian Boucher — whose father owned a farm neighboring the family vacation retreat in Ludington, Michigan. By this time Dawson had actively abandoned the idea of continuing as an architect. He was discouraged by his lack of recognition as an artist and had begun seriously considering farming as an alternative to a professional career. “I know there is work to be done on a farm in winter, yet I have the hope that if the bridge is crossed I can find painting or carving time in that season,”1he wrote in a late April entry to his journal. With his father’s help, he purchased 50 acres of additional land and began an arduous journey toward what would become a successful fruit farming operation. He and Lily married on July 29, 1915, and Dawson noted in his journal on December 1st that he and his bride were expecting a child. Gera
During this time Dawson found moments for “painting and carving time,” but, due to commitments to farm and family, was sporadic in his working habits and not as productive as the period between 1908 and 1915. By 1920, he was deeply involved in the business of his fruit farm. There weren’t any exhibitions in the offing (he would exhibit once more as a young man at the Milwaukee Art Society in 1922 and then not until 1966 at the Grand Rapids Art Museum after a “re-discovery”). Still, he continued to make paintings and explore spatial relationships in what, by the standards of artwork that was being created around the rest of the American heartland, were startlingly original works. The rifts in space which are articulated in Desert enfold upon themselves, imploding as if being sucked into a vacuum. Allusions to trees and even to the fruit of the farm seem to be present as the artist looked out into what he may have perceived as a future with limited creative opportunity.
1Manierre Dawson journal entry, April 26, 1914; Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution as quoted in Manierre Dawson: American Pioneer of Abstract Art; Hollis Taggart Galleries; New York, New York; 1999; Appendix I, p. 176.