Edwin Dickinson’s (1891-1978) oeuvre is unique among American artists of the 20th century. Although he was thought to have anticipated abstract expressionism with his highly abstracted landscapes, the "irresistible site" is always recognizable. As Joe Shannon said in his essay "The Premier Coup" (Washington D.C. 1980, Smithsonian Press, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Edwin Dickinson – Selected Landscapes, Dickinson was not opting for reduction in a modernist sense. He never desired to have the surface effects subvert the particularity of a site, but the interplay between surface effects and depicted effects excited him.
Although Dickinson was very much a modern painter, he was influenced by Whistler’s muted, tonalist landscapes and was greatly impressed by Velazquez and El Greco. Joe Shannon pointed out Dickinson’s affinity with the great English landscape painter, John Constable. Dickinson’s work falls into two distinct groups, the monumental "subject paintings" like The Cello Player, 1924-26, the Metropolitan Museum’s Ruin at Daphne, 1943-53 and the Whitney Museum’s The Fossil Hunters, 1926-28. These complex, psychologically loaded paintings, worked on over a long period of time, are quite the opposite of the "premier coup" landscapes, which Dickinson started to produce when he was in France from 1937-38. The first strike landscapes were painted quickly, "en plein air," often in sittings of less than two hours. This was painted from the yard of a family named Sandy and looks out on Cayuga Lake. Dickinson’s grandparents built a house on the lake in 1898 at Sheldrake. The cliffs of Cayuga are shale and full of fossils and it was here that the artist first came to love fossils. |
