The Illinois State Museum has announced the dates of showing
of 16 original oil paintings in its collection by Manierre Dawson. “A Journey
to Abstraction.” Dawson, sayeth the curators, was a little-known artist from
Chicago who had virtually no
direct contact with his early 20th century European and American Avant-Garde
counterparts but who independently arrived at the same artistic destination as much
more famous artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Pablo Picasso,
Piet Mondrian and Arthur Dove.
Just so. In a big enough city there will be exceptions to
every rule, and Manierre Dawson was the exception to the rule that Chicago
painters were not innovators. Dawson grew up in Chicago and earned a degree
in civil engineering in 1909 from the
Armour Institute. While employed by the architectural firm of Holabird &
Roche, Dawson—who had had no art training to speak of—produced a series of
non-representational paintings that in the opinion of more than a few critics
made him America’s first abstract artist.
A visionary? Idiot savant? The explanation would seem to be
simply that Dawson‘s early works owed mainly to his engineering training—as
much stylized engineering plans as abstract art. Certainly his early works had
little influence on his later style. He abandoned abstraction after a trip to
Europe, which made him, in the words of one writer, “probably the only American
artist of his generation to return from Europe more conservative than when he
left.”
The Dawsons may be seen in the Temporary/Permanent Gallery
of the museum’s building at Sping and Edwards in Springfield runs from December
10, 2016 through March 10, 2017. M-Sat 9:00 AM – 4:30 PM, Sun 12:00 pm – 4:30
pm. Museum Admission: $5 for adults ages 19-64. ISM Society Members, Youth,
Seniors, Military Personnel, and Veterans are Free.
For more information contact Robert Sill at
Robert.sill@illinois.gov or 217-524-5744.
This article appears in Jan 12-18, 2017.
