Edwin Dickinson

Dickinson spent time teaching painting in Buffalo and working as a telegrapher in New York City until his naval service from late 1917 to 1919. World War I had interrupted Dickinson's plans to visit Europe with his close friend and fellow painter, Herbert Groesbeck, and while Dickinson served in the navy off the coast of New England, Groesback traveled to Europe as a soldier and died in the Argonne Forest in one of the last battles of the war. His death seemed to reawaken Dickinson's pain over earlier losses of his mother and brother and to affect subsequent paintings. A trip to Paris to study art followed between December 1919 and July 1920, financed by a gift from Groesbeck's widow and parents of the insurance money paid on his death. Dickinson made a side trip to visit his grave in northern France and then to Spain; two paintings by El Greco in Toledo he declared the best he had ever seen, an admiration that persisted throughout his life. The subject of one was especially meaningful to Dickinson, having visited Groesbeck's grave so recently, The Burial of Count Orgaz.

A few of Dickinson's early works garnered recognitions, most notably Interior, which was exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington in 1916 and three other major venues, and Old Ben and Mrs. Marks, 1916, which was shown in New York in 1917 and in the Luxembourg Museum in Paris in 1919, where Dickinson saw it. However, this recognition did not continue after his return from Europe. Despite the financial support of a patron, Esther Hoyt Sawyer, Dickinson struggled financially. In 1924, Dickinson reached a low point after an inheritance from his mother and some money from his father ran out. He was unable to sell An Anniversary, a major painting on which he had worked steadily for thirteen months, and two commissioned portraits, one of his uncle Charles Evans Hughes, and one of Charles D. Walcott, painted during an eight-week stay in Washington the previous year, were rejected. The sale of another major painting (The Cello Player, 1920–21) to a friend, for $500 in installments, was not enough to enable him to continue as an artist. However, in July 1924, Sawyer's husband arranged to pay Dickinson a monthly salary in exchange for the right to choose paintings of his equivalent in value. This arrangement continued for twenty-one years, ending only when Dickinson secured steady teaching jobs at the Art Students League and Cooper Union in 1945. In 1928 Dickinson married Frances "Pat" Foley, shortly after the completion of The Fossil Hunters, an 8-foot-high (2.4 m) painting on which he spent 192 sittings and that achieved considerable notoriety when exhibited at the Carnegie International of 1928, because it was hung sideways, a mistake perpetuated by subsequent exhibitions in 1929 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (where the error was caught before the opening) and in New York at the National Academy of Design, where it created an even greater uproar by winning a prize in its disoriented condition.) Esther Sawyer arranged for the sale of Dickinson's works, especially drawings, portraits, and landscapes to her wealthy friends, and in 1927 she and her husband purchased Dickinson's painting An Anniversary, 1920–21, and donated it to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Dickinson devoted more time to his landscapes in the 1930s because they were easier to make and sell than his larger works, which he was having greater difficulty exhibiting in major exhibitions. In a letter to Sawyer in 1933 he wrote that he hoped to live by the landscapes he was painting. In February 1934, he was invited to participate in the first Depression-era program for artists, the half-year Public Works of Art Project, which offered him weekly pay and an exhibition of the painting in Washington in May. He finished the work on time by reworking an abandoned painting, one of a small group done from imagination on a favorite subject, polar exploration, and changing its title to Stranded Brig. The major paintings of this period were Woodland Scene, 1929–1935, which Esther purchased and gave to Cornell University, and Composition with Still Life, 1933–1937, which the Sawyers gave to the Museum of Modern Art in 1952. A second trip to Europe with his family followed in 1937–38, where he painted landscapes in southern and northern France and visited Rome, Florence, and Venice until concerns about Nazi Germany cut short his stay. While still abroad Dickinson had his first one-person show in New York City at the Passedoit Gallery. It included The Cello Player, The Foss

Between 1936 and 1942 Dickinson exhibited annually in the Passedoit Gallery in New York City. This was made possible because he painted no large, time-consuming works between the time he left off work on Composition with Still Life in 1937 and began work on Ruin at Daphne January 1, 1943. The relationship ceased because Dickinson, still struggling to support his family, did not generate enough income from sales and needed to find "earning work". In 1944 he moved the family to New York, believing that it would help him secure a teaching job. During the first year he received some commercial work, including drawings for a French magazine that were rejected and a copy of a photograph of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-Shek. His wife, Pat Foley, found employment at the Hewitt School that lasted until her retirement in 1966, and in 1945 Dickinson was hired to teach at three schools, beginning a period of teaching that lasted until his retirement, also in 1966. The other reason for discontinuing the connection with Passedoit was that he wanted time to work on a new painting, Ruin at Daphne, on which he continued to paint, with periodic interludes and lapses in enthusiasm, until 1953, for a total of 447 sittings (about 1341 hours). A donor purchased Ruin at Daphne and gave it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1955. The Whitney Museum of American Art purchased The Fossil Hunters in 1958, and in 1988 the M. H. de Young Museum purchased The Cello Player, the last major painting of Dickinson's to enter a museum (and, along with Ruin at Daphne, one of the few Dickinson paintings usually on view to the general public). In 1948 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1950.

Dickinson remained active as a teacher into the 1960s, by which time his painting output had sharply diminished following the removal of a tubercular lung in 1959 and the increased demands imposed by his growing reputation. These included participation in numerous one-person and group shows, the most important of which were a large retrospective of his work in Boston in 1959, another in New York in 1961 that included 157 works and was reviewed by thirteen critics, followed by an exhibition of his work organized by the Museum of Modern Art that traveled to twelve venues in eleven states, another retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1965, covered by nine critics, and inclusion in the American exhibition at the 34th Venice Biennale, where he was the featured painter. Various honors, awards, interviews, and lecture requests followed. There is no record of his having painted after 1963. By 1970 he was displaying symptoms indicative of Alzheimer's disease and died in Provincetown on December 2, 1978.

Dickinson's art, always grounded in representation, has been compared to Surrealism, but the resemblance is superficial. His sensibility and emotional ties lie closer to Romanticism and Symbolism, and he was included in the Museum of Modern Art's 1943 exhibition Romantic Painting in America. But Dickinson generally avoided being grouped in any art movement, which contributed to his being somewhat marginalized, and he adamantly refused to take sides in the controversies between traditional representational painters and the avant-garde artists of the New York School, both groups of whom respected him. The tendency of his larger works toward monochrome, as well as the darkness of many of them, have also contributed to some observers' bewilderment and disapproval. Another complaint was that the strange juxtapositions and imagery in these works hint at underlying narratives or situations but their purpose is unclear, and Dickinson generally avoided explanation except to describe procedures, technical problems and formal concerns. Even when he mentioned the underlying subject or theme of a painting or identified figures or objects in it, he acted mystified about some of its particulars. But if some observers were frustrated and put off by the elusive character of the large paintings' content others have been moved by them and have attempted explanations to account for the power they experienced. The frequently voiced view among critics, museum directors, and artists that Dickinson deserved greater recognition, led one critic to call him "perhaps America's best-known, underknown artist." Notable artists who studied under Dickinson include Lennart Anderson, Francis Cunningham, and Denver Lindley.

The earliest of what John Driscoll calls Dickinson's "major symbolical paintings", The Rival Beauties, 1915, resembles Ashcan School paintings such as George Bellows's Cliff Dwellers in the crowded humanity that swarms through the space. But in Dickinson's picture many particulars are not brought to completion, and curving lines break free from descriptive duties with their own rhythmic life, most notably the left contour of the white skirt in the foreground that continues upward in the trousers of a doorman standing at attention and in the radically incomplete figure standing before a piano in the left foreground. The piano, inexplicable in an exterior scene, used by a cellist to tune his instrument, seem to signify a tacit approval of Hawthorne's advice: "Real painting is like real music, the correct tones and colors next to each other; the literary and sentimental factors add nothing to its real value." The intentionality of this reference is confirmed by the fact that Hawthorne was himself a cellist. Yet already, in the picture's strange assortment of subjects, including what he intended as a dead horse, Dickinson takes Hawthorne's statement, voicing an idea that was widely accepted in this period, as permission to sabotage narrative coherence by including imagery that defies the observer to account for its presence, a practice that he continued in many of his larger studio paintings. Driscoll noted that the artist's notation on the back of an old photograph of the painting—"Ref.: Lascado Hern and the Swedish girl friend"—referred to the writer Lafcadio Hearn and argued that it offered a clue to the picture's symbolical content. Ward discovered several entries in Dickinson's journals that identify the Swedish girl friend as Alie Mörling, a fellow art student Dickinson sometimes dined with, who admired Hearn's writings and, as his notation of 3 March 1966 indicates, sent him a note upon Burgess's death, perhaps quoting Hearn. Ward suggests that the picture's title may refer to an essay of Hearn's, "Fair Women and Dark Women," in which he contrasted "the beauty of the Druidess and of the Viking's daughter" with the dark-eyed beauty of the women of Spain, Israel and India. In Dickinson's picture the pair of fair-skinned girls in the center play off against a Latin pair, suggestive of the mixed race Portuguese women of Provincetown, another pair of women in white dresses in the distance, one a redhead and one dark-skinned, and a fourth pair, less distinct, to the left of them with bowed heads that Ward sees as Japanese.

In Interior, 1916, Dickinson's most ambitious painting to this point, he again shows the influence of Hawthorne, particularly in his use of the "Hawthorne stare," in which the eyes look toward the viewer but seemed unfocused, as if dreaming, and in the prominently placed bowl, in keeping with Hawthorne's advice to paint white china. But the combination of images defies understanding as a coherent naturalistic description, with six figures packed together in a tight, vertical mass topped by a man in a green mask yelling at a cat he holds up, an action at odds with the introspective mood of the other figures, all of whom, despite their proximity, seem emotionally disconnected from one another. The picture's title does not relate to its setting, but, as Driscoll notes, is almost certainly taken from the title of the 1895 play by Maurice Maeterlinck, performed in New York in 1915, and refers, as does his, to the inner feelings of the characters. Driscoll observes that Maeterinck's play deals with a suicide, and the shared title supports the view that Dickinson's picture is about the death of his brother, represented by the guitarist and also by the screaming figure behind him, who embodies Burgess's interior doubts and uncertainty. Ward suggests that this exploration of psychological states may have been indebted to Edvard Munch and Ibsen, whose play Ghosts he read sometime between 1913 and 1915 and may have associated with his brother's suicide.

Although Inland Lake, 1919, is the darkest picture that Dickinson had yet painted, it appears to represent a happy band of women, children, and men—four in sailor's uniforms—at sunset. But the whimsical incident scattered through the picture is offset by a partially merged group or stack of three women to the right of the picture's center, a device not unlike the arrangement and effect of the figures in Interior and one that creates a similarly haunting presence, although embedded in a context that demands greater attention. He painted it two months after his discharge from the navy at war's end at the family cottage at Sheldrake, on Cayuga Lake, where, according to a journal entry written after a visit on leave in 1918, he had had a "happy time". Like The Rival Beauties, it was painted entirely from imagination. Driscoll did not include it among the major symbolical paintings, and it received little attention until O'Connor and Ward each independently identified it as having symbolic characteristics. Ward points to the contrasting women, one in light-colored clothes welcoming the viewer into the scene, a second, in black, turning away to the left. He sees this pair as representing Dickinson's mother as both alive and dead, leading to a scene both present and remembered. A third woman is visible behind the brightly lit one, seen in right profile, but her contours, hues, and values fit the surrounding context so closely that she seems to disappear and may suggest the dematerialized aura of Dickinson's mother, felt in the surroundings rather than directly observed. Memories of his mother would have been aroused by his return home. By 1922 there is evidence that Dickinson had developed an interest in Marcel Proust, probably in Paris in 1920. While Proust's ideas must have influenced Dickinson's thinking in his later works, his initial enthusiasm was probably aroused because he recognized ideas in the French writer's explorations of memory that already played an important part in his own work.

The title of An Anniversary, 1920–21, suggests an event, as do the gestures of the old man and the man with his arm outstretched at the top of the pyramid formed by the picture's three principal figures. But, as in Interior, the densely packed figures appear unaware of each other and the gestures do not contribute to a unified narrative. Only the young, seated woman appears aware of the viewer. Likewise, the objects strung across the bottom of the painting have no narrative purpose. By undermining any coherent narrative, Dickinson frees the observer to experience the picture in terms of its mood and formal interplay and its suggestion of memories evoked by the title (anniversaries were important to Dickinson, who conscientiously noted in his journals the anniversaries of births and deaths of relatives, dear friends, and persons he greatly admired—including Beethoven, Bach, and Proust—as well as American Civil War battles and other major events). The dark moodiness of the picture suggests an anniversary of a death to Driscoll, who thought it was intended as a memorial to Herbert Groesbeck, the second anniversary of whose death occurred only three weeks after Dickinson began the painting—on his own birthday. He believes that the picture's content may have been colored, if not inspired, by Thomas Hardy's poem "An Anniversary," which declares anniversaries to be "the saddest days of the year" and by John Milton's "Lycidas", a poem Dickinson memorized about this time and often quoted. Milton's subject was the death of a young friend of great promise, as was Dickinson's brother Burgess, and the fear of dying before one's work is done, which Driscoll identifies as also the underlying meaning of Dickinson's painting. The presence of sheet music on the floor and stringed instruments—a violin held by the right hand of the man behind the old man's head and a violin or viola (both of which Dickinson played) held behind his head in the left hand of the standing man—again suggest that Dickinson felt an equivance in the play of forms to musical rhythms and harmonies. The instruments are not being played; the suggestion of music in the painting is expressed through the visual play of form. O'Connor sees an overriding theme, pertaining to his father's remarriage to a much younger woman following his mother's death, in the symbolical pictures from 1920 to 1928 and in one begun the following year. He interprets the old man in An Anniversary, Two Figures II, The Cello Player, and The Fossil Hunters, and the androgynous woman in Woodland Scene as his aged father, associated in four of the paintings with a young woman and with the cello substituting for a woman in the fifth. The underlying idea that O'Connor proposes is that Edwin, unable in his poverty to marry until 1928, envies his father's happiness and sees him as a rival symbolically laid to rest in The Fossil Hunters by his own new love and marriage less than two months after work on the painting ended. O'Connor argues that the psychological resolution that Dickinson found in The Fossil Hunters he is unable to achieve in Woodland Scene because the symbolic references in it "are to old oedipal states once powerful enough to unify a painting, but now dissipated by his own new and fruitful life."

The same model posed for the man in An Anniversary and Two Figures II, 1921–23, again accompanied by a young woman, here appearing more mannequin-like because of her smoothed-out hair and features and her Hawthorne stare. Once again the proximity of the figures, now bunched up on the right side of the picture, sharpens the feeling of their psychological separation from each other that their exclusion from the visual field of their partner's gaze creates. Ward suggests that this lack of interaction, the age difference, the placement of the woman behind the man and to the side of the picture, combined with the contrast between the man's depiction in color and the woman's in monochrome may signify that she is the image of a remembered love, perhaps triggered by the smell of a rose that recalls the remembered smell of one she once held (a hard-to-see stem connects it to her hand). Similarly, the strongly lit head of the old man in An Anniversary and the placement of the other figures behind him may indicate that they are people recollected from his past, seen as they were remembered. If so, the age difference may be because of recollected youth. When Dickinson was seventy, he noted in his journal that he had dreamed of his mother as a young woman.

Between 1924 and 1926 Dickinson painted four pictures (one now lost) growing out of his keen interest in polar exploration. His involvement in the subject began with reading Arctic explorer Donald B. MacMillan's book Four Years in the White North. MacMillan was a Provincetown native and Dickinson knew him well. In at least two of the paintings the feeling of melancholic lassitude evident in his larger paintings is gone, replaced by a coherent narrative or scene rooted not in recollection but in the excitement of adventure. However, in one of the paintings, Bible Reading Aboard the Tegetthoff, 1925–26, Ward believes the imagery is more personal. He sees the tipsy, shadowy figures as embroiled in a Manichean struggle between darkness and light, centered on the Bible reader, whom he identified with Dickinson's father, a Presbyterian minister who conducted daily Bible readings at home. He suggests that the feet protruding from a long, curving, cylindrical, dark form descending over them may represent his mother about to be enveloped by death.

The fourth of Dickinson's paintings that Driscoll identified as major and symbolical, The Cello Player, 1924–1926, took the longest to paint of works to that date. Again, the dominant figure is an old man, ostensibly playing a cello in a room littered with objects and seen from above, so that the space tips up to a horizon well above the picture top. The progressive tipping and enclosure of space can be observed in the sequence of works leading up to this one, a strategy that parallels modernist tendencies toward pictorial abstraction accompanied by spatial flattening. Nevertheless, the figure and objects in this picture give up none of their volume or tactile presence as objects. Music from a Beethoven quartet in the foreground, and two keyboard instruments at the right, suggest again the equation of painting and music, although the picture's narrative coherence is undermined, with objects positioned not for use but to create visual rhythms and harmonies. Driscoll sees the painting as a tribute to Beethoven, the composer Dickinson honored above all others, and, through him, to his brother Burgess, a pianist and composer, whom his fellow students at Yale had nicknamed "Beethoven."