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Manierre Dawson
The Struggle, 1912
This dynamic, nearly nonobjective painting by the Chicagoan Manierre Dawson aptly crystalizes the struggle of many young American artists to reconcile the traditional and revolutionary ways of seeing in the early 20th century. Despite his status as one of the country's first pioneers of abstraction, Dawson is less known than his New York-based modernist contemporaries -- particular those associated with photographer, gallery owner, and tastemaker Alfred Stieglitz (for example, Marsden Hartley, Max Weber, Arthur Dove, and Georgia O'Keeffe, whose works hang nearby).
Dawson worked in an architectural firm until 1914, when he turned exclusively to painting. Like many young artists, he was inspired by the 1913 Armory Show, recording in his journal. "These are without question the most exciting days of my life." Dawson's introduction to the work of European and American modernists encouraged him to develop an abstract pictorial language. This striking figural abstraction belongs to a series the artist termed "museum" paintings. Inspired by his European discoveries and echoing Cezanne's famous wish to make pictures "like those found in the museums," Dawson sought to update traditional Old Master subjects (drawn from antiquity and the Renaissance) with avant-garde compositional strategies. |