Manierre Dawson
oil on canvas
36 by 28 inches
Gift of Dr. Lewis Obi, Frank McKeown and Lefferts Mabie, 1980
Collection of the Illinois State Museum
Hercules I is the first of a series of three paintings on the mythological theme that Dawson completed in the wake of his transcendent experience visiting The Armory Show in Chicago. He had purchased two paintings: Marcel Duchamp’s Nude (Study), Sad Young Man on a Train (Nu [esquisse], Jeune homme triste dans un train), 1911-12, and Return from the Chase (1911) by Amadéo de Souza Cardoso. The Duchamp painting was taken home and hung over the mantle.
Dawson’s recent work had included a series of abstract figurative paintings based on works by European masters in which he had demonstrated a sure hand in emphasizing composition and structure. Here he seems to be challenging himself, searching for something he was seeing in the Duchamp and attempting to understand.
The painting, now in the Illinois State Museum’s collection, is composed of analogous colors: browns, taupes, and soft grays. We see Hercules striding forward in a three-quarter view. Whereas Duchamp’s Sad Young Man saunters through the frame, Dawson’s Hercules I shatters his surroundings as he moves forward, compressing space until it breaks against itself.
Dawson’s father, a Latin scholar, undoubtedly made his son aware of the story of Hercules and his twelve labors. No other single theme in Dawson’s oeuvre was subjected to such a thorough treatment and it is tempting to speculate that Dawson chose this subject because he saw himself in a Herculean struggle as he continued to obey his need to paint abstractly.