Maynard Dixon

Maynard Dixon embellished themes that encompassed the timeless truth of the majestic western landscape, the humanity of its memorable people, and the religious mysticism of the Native American. In an attempt to uncover the spirit of the American West, Dixon roamed its plains, mesas, and deserts—drawing, painting, and expressing his creative personality in poems, essays, and letters. Written in a very personal style, this biography includes anecdotes from Dixon’s children, historical vignettes, and interviews with those who knew the artist.

In these visual, historical, and analytical historical essays of an all-too-frequently overlooked artist, Gibbs begins with an account of the Dixon collection at Brigham Young University, then explores the reality, ideology, and abstraction at work in Maynard Dixon's images of Native Americans and the western landscape. In the final essay, photo historian Deborah Brown Rasiel grapples with the complex artistic influences at play between Dixon and his second wife, photographer Dorothea Lange.

Presents reproductions of the 42 black-and-white drawings by Maynard Dixon owned by the University of Museum of Art, accompanied by an essay on the artist by Adeline Karpiscak.

This second volume in Kevin Starr's passionate and ambitious cultural history of the Golden State focuses on the turn-of-the-century years and the emergence of Southern California as a regional culture in its own right. "How hauntingly beautiful, how replete with lost possibilities, seems that Southern California of two and three generations ago, now that a dramatically diferent society has emerged in its place," writes Starr. As he recreates the "lost California," Starr examines the rich variety of elements that figured in the growth of the Southern California way of life: the Spanish/Mexican roots, the fertile land, the Mediterranean-like climate, the special styles in architecture, the rise of Hollywood. He gives us a broad array of engaging (and often eccentric) characters: from Harrision Gray Otis to Helen Hunt Jackson to Cecil B. DeMille. Whether discussing the growth of winemaking or the burgeoning of reform movements, Starr keeps his central theme in sharp focus: how Californians defined their identity to themselves and to the nation.