A Painter’s Painter Comes to the Albright-Knox

By Elizabeth Licata

Blockbusters will always be with us. But the real excitement of the art world happens when a little-known or unknown artist is brought into the spotlight for the first time. Yes, it is thrilling to see Monet’s waterlilies in person instead of on a coffee mug or mousepad, but there’s even more satisfaction in encountering images that are very seldom before the public eye.

Especially when those images are the mysterious and beautiful paintings of Edwin Dickinson.

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Edwin Dickinson, Tom Never’s Head, 1935.

Born in Seneca Falls, and an occasional Buffalo resident, Dickinson (1891-1978) is not easily slotted into any particular category of twentieth century art. One of the first things Albright-Knox Art Gallery curator Douglas Dreishpoon said when I asked him about Dickinson was that he was one of those artists who “walked on different air.” Poet/critic John Ashbery makes a blunter analogy: “It’s strange, this weirdness which seems to be a main ingredient in the greatest works of the American imagination. How can it be that Moby Dick and Leaves of Grass and the Fourth Symphony of Ives are simultaneously so universal and so confoundedly bizarre.”

Ashbery later comments about a Dickinson painting that it seemed as if the subject matter was “being looked at and recorded by a visitor from another planet.”

Many viewers have found Dickinson’s compositions baffling, and the painter always refused to explain any of his works. At first glance, one wonders why the paintings need to be explained. Unlike many of the abstract-expressionists who admired Dickinson’s work and looked at him as a visionary role model, Dickinson’s subjects are usually thoroughly recognizable. A closer look, though, especially at the allegorical works, reveals puzzle upon puzzle. Why are the figures so oddly grouped in An Anniversary? What is the relationship between the old man and the young woman—who almost seems collaged in from another painting—in Two Figures? Why do we so often look down on the figures, giving everything a confusing, foreshortened effect? Edwin Dickinson: Dreams and Realties, a comprehensive retrospective opening in April at the Albright-Knox, will provide fascinating insights into these and other enigmas.
Edwin Dickinson: Dreams and Realities opens at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery April 27 and continues through July 14. A lecture on Dickinson’s life and work will be given by Curator Douglas Dreishpoon on April 28, 2 p.m. It is accompanied by a comprehensive catalog.
Most scholars divide Dickinson’s major paintings into two categories: the premier coup works—filmy, spontaneous landscapes, usually of New England and French countryside sites and the symbolic paintiallegorical juxtapositions. Dickinson also painted a series of self-portraits, usually at important turning points in his personal life and professional career. The upcoming exhibition will contain a generous helping of all of these, as well as a section of drawings.

There are two distinct types of pleasure to be had in viewing these works. The premier coup landscapes are easy to love. Shimmering, indistinct, veils of color remind us of James McNeil Whistler, or even the great landscape painter John Constable. Intent on catching a moment and completed within a couple of hours, Dickinson first began to make these works in Provincetown in 1912, as a student of painter Charles Hawthorne. The translation—“first strike”—refers to the artist’s attack upon nature, a quick, head-on attempt to capture a particular scene. The painting might work, it might not.

Dickinson’s symbolic paintings were made in the studio, often over a period of years, with continual scratching-out, over-painting and much anguished soul-searching. As Dreishpoon comments, some of the symbolic paintings were never really finished, though they’ve made their way into major museum collections nonetheless.

The paintings are ready-made fodder for great English class assignments. I would not hesitate to send a group of students to this show and ask each to analyze the symbolic painting of their choice. The results would be pretty wild, because, as Ashbery implies, these are weird paintings. They’re all the more bizarre because, unlike a canonical surreal painting—and Dickinson predated the surrealists in his career-long use of dream imagery—there is no overtly “impossible” imagery. Dickinson takes “normal” groupings of still life and human elements, but puts a dark, mystifying spin on them. Your overall sense as a viewer is that something really terrible has either just happened or is about to happen—even if the scene is just two people sitting next to a lamp.

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Edwin Dickinson, Woodland Scene, 1929-35.
Even a cursory look at the symbolic paintings reveals obvious sexual tension and repeated use of objects that clearly have deep significance for the painter. But it’s really the formal techniques Dickinson uses which give the paintings their other-worldliness. For example, Ruins at Daphne (1943-53) has its orings—large, laboriously-worked canvases often involving strange, gin in an actual place—and what could be more expected than a painter sketching Greek ruins? It’s almost a requirement. But this is no ordinary ruins painting. The stone arches burst out of their context and then unexpectedly recede—it’s as if Dickinson was aiming at a painterly 3-D effect, but instead of Godzilla stalking toward you, you’re hit in the face by a painted Corinthian capitol. According to Dreishpoon, the painter was a big fan of early cinema, which may account for his continual use of odd cropping and unusual spatial relationships.

The catalog accompanying this exhibition contains essays by some of the great mid-century art critics: John Ashbury, Francis O'Connor, and Elaine deKooning, as well as narratives about Dickinson's life and teaching by Dreishpoon and others. O'Connor takes a heroic stab at explaining how artists who worked before the age of psychoanalysis exposed and expressed their inner beings through allegorical portrayals on the canvas. It's not the kind of explaining Dickinson would ever do, as Ashbery's excerpt from a typical interview succinctly illustrates:

"Interviewer: What was the reason for painting the rose in?

Dickinson: I suppose I thought it would look better."

In the end, as always, it's up to you, the viewer. Prior knowledge of the most significant events of Dickinson's childhood and young adulthood might shed some interesting light on the allegories—but it might be even more fun to create your own, imaginary backstories for these eerie scenarios. The one choice that should not be made is the decision to miss this show. It is one of the most illuminating and distinctive exhibitions the Albright-Knox has ever presented and a very encouraging harbinger or programming to come, as the musuem enters a new century and a newly revised and enhanced programmatic mission.

Many thanks to the Albright-Knox staff for providing galleys of the essays, which have greatly informed this article.

Edwin Dickinson:
In Brief

Dickinson was born in 1891 in Seneca Falls, near Geneva in the Finger Lakes region. As a child, he spent much of his time traveling with his mother, who suffered from tuberculosis and was often in sanitariums, including those at Clifton Springs and Saranac Lake. Summers were spent at Interlaken and Sheldrake. Dickinson studied at the Art Students League in New York, and then moved to Provincetown in 1912, painting landscapes outside in the summer and still lifes and figures in the winter. After naval service in WWI, Dickinson returned to Provincetown, where he remained until 1944. Dickinson’s work was first shown in Buffalo at the Garret Club in 1926 and at the Albright Art Gallery in 1927. He traveled to Buffalo often throughout the thirties and forties for portrait commissions, exhibitions, and teaching. He married Francis Foley in 1928, and had two children, Helen and Constant. Most of their life was spent in Wellfleet and, later, New York City with brief sojourns in Buffalo in 1934 and 1938, where they stayed at art dealer Esther Sawyer’s cottage.

Dickinson was never wildly successful as an artist, but had, for the most part, a steady career of well-received exhibitions and inclusions in many important group shows, including the 1928 Carnegie International, the Museum of Modern Art’s Romantic Painting in America in 1943, and the 1968 Venice Biennale. He taught at various institutions throughout his career, and was a dedicated and gifted instructor. Although the family didn’t realize it until after his death, Dickinson probably developed Alzheimer’s in 1970, and was unable to paint from then on. He died in 1978.

Elizabeth Licata is editor of Buffalo Spree Magazine.


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