Sagebrush and Solitude - by Ann M Wolfe (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This is the first comprehensive publication on the paintings, letters, photographs, and poetry made by Maynard Dixon (1875-1946) while he was in Nevada. This large, landscape format book accompanies a blockbuster exhibition on this colorful western painter and illustrator.

Although Dixon's contributions as an artist are widely recognized throughout the American West, this significant publication surveys nearly 180 artworks he created in Nevada, Lake Tahoe, and the Eastern Sierra from 1901 to 1944. Dixon first visited the state of Nevada nearly 125 years ago; and while much has changed during the past century, one can still explore many of the same remote locales depicted in these paintings or drive across the state beneath what many like to refer to as a cloud-filled, "Maynard Dixon sky."

Richly illustrated, including a wealth of privately owned paintings never before reproduced, the volume includes by texts by scholar Donald J. Hagerty on Dixon's Nevada journeys, a significant essay on the art of the Boulder Dam (now Hoover Dam), and Dixon's depictions of the workers who built the dam. The book has a 3-piece binding and gilded edges.

Review Quotes

"Maynard Dixon remains one of the most famous painters of the American West. From his first Nevada sketching trip with Edward Borein in 1901 to his month-long commission documenting the construction of the Boulder Dam in Las Vegas in 1934, he made frequent trips from San Francisco to sketch and paint Nevada's open spaces and developing landscape in the face of a changing economy and world. This is the first comprehensive exhibition to document these visits -- it features nearly 150 of Dixon's paintings of the Sierra Nevada region and Great Basin, many of them rarely or never seen before. Old homesteads, wild horses and stands of cottonwood trees are recurring subjects -- images that conjure memories of a romanticised bygone era before modernisation forever changed Nevada's pristine landscapes. Historian Kevin Starr noted that a driving impulse for Dixon was 'a sense of imminent loss' of the geography, history, folklore and culture of the Old West, and that he sought to record it before it vanished. The show is accompanied by the publication of a major book co-published by Rizzoli and Electra in New York and the Nevada Museum of Art." -- CHRISTIES MAGAZINE

About the Author

Donald J. Hagerty is the author of Desert Dreams: The Art and Life of Maynard Dixon, The Life of Maynard Dixon, and Art of Maynard Dixon.

Ann Keniston, PhD, is a Reno-based poet, essayist, and literary critic and professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno.

John Ott, PhD, is Professor of Art History at James Madison University.