Arts and Letters

Edwin Dickinson was one of the strongest and most original American painters. Fortunately his work is unclassifiable owing to its dramatic surprises. He was born in 1891. He was counted among the avant-garde in 1971!

When young he had a solid academic schooling under William Merritt Chase and later under Charles Hawthorne. For this he found use. For instance, he always had a plumb line in his studio. The rules of perspective gave him great pleasure, yet he made free with them, and even turned them inside out to suit his expressive purpose. Lloyd Goodrich, whose essay I draw upon with his permission, says that when Dickinson was using a high ceilinged old barn as a studio, one of the first things he did was to construct and hang a Foucault pendulum to demonstrate the rotation of the earth. When one mentioned this, he said, "Yes, of course." He believed that an artist should be aware of his precise relation to the physical world. He once said to a student, "Start working as though you were jumping on a moving train."

In a small self-portrait owned by the National Academy, he makes a simple situation complex by painting himself in profile and placing the eye level at the bottom of the picture and as a gesture, drawing on the pictured studio wall a diagram of a cube projected in perspective—a diagram which is in itself placed in perspective. The imaginative use of perspective becomes part of the content.

As Lloyd Goodrich points out, perspective is the governing principle of his most remarkable composition, Ruin at Daphne, owned by the Metropolitan Museum. He worked on this picture for ten years from 1943 to 1953. The subject of the picture was entirely invented. The basic theme is "an imaginary Roman ruin in Syria built in 40 A.D." Its style, a "concoction of corrupted Corinthian, Doric, and Ionic forms." Over the years, the painting went through transformations as his imagination added towers and pools later destroyed in his painting as they might have been by time. The painting offered endless problems of perspective. Originally it was laid out from one viewpoint, but this was changed. "It has three station points," Dickinson says, which means that the viewer takes three positions in relation to the picture at once.

The largest in this series of large pictures, Composition with Still Life, was begun in 1933 in Provincetown and finished in 1937 in Buffalo, taking four years and about four hundred sittings and going through many changes. The subject matter is as follows. At the bottom is rippling water, then steps on which lie two blue and white china pitchers resting on their sides. Next to them, a blue rose is falling, above comes an ornate gilded mirror, then a large screw-like object culled from a junk yard which looks like an enormous auger bit. Beyond these objects appear two nude women, their faces hidden in shadow—one lying prone, the other suspended head down. The naturalistic treatment of the vases and other still life objects contrasts with the mysterious and other-worldly character of the nudes. Yet the picture has unity.

When asked by Katherine Kuh if the large paintings are symbolic, Dickinson replied, "I wouldn't be able to say."

Although his use of strange juxtapositions superficially connects him with the Surrealists, he was never classed with them.

Another large picture named The Fossil Hunters occupied two years. It was begun in Provincetown in 1926 and completed in 1928 after about two hundred sittings. According to Dickinson, "Three figures were painted from life, the old man, a fisherman, the upper female, a friend and the lower figure, my sister. At one time there was a seated nude female at the top… the drapery at the right was never completed and by the time two years had passed, the piece no longer pleased, but I could not stop as I had wanted to, and begin a new one, because I lived by my work and could not set aside and not use that much work." Here, again, the combination of real and unreal creates an atmosphere of hallucination.

Dickinson said, "I like good big canvasses. I wanted to handle big amounts of paint as well as I could small amounts. Technique is not a manual thing, but the ability to maintain discrimination on a big scale. As bulk increases, sensitivity should not decrease."

In addition to the large pictures, Dickinson throughout his career painted many less intricate works, including many landscapes. These are often small, ten by twelve, or twelve by fifteen inches. In striking contrast to the large compositions, many were painted out of doors, direct from nature, many in a single sitting of two to four hours and untouched again. He said, "A picture I like very much is Dune at Wellfleet. It was painted early in March, and March is a heavy boisterous month on the Cape…. I was right in the middle of a vortex of a good deal of difficulty. I was highly concentrating and excited by the conditions around me, I was wearing oil skins…. It was the kind of wind which would have etched an initial (in glass) in five minutes. I was happy painting that picture. I was in an elevated state of mind and that's painting for pleasure. Ahh, the trouble I've taken to paint for pleasure."

He painted himself in a wind so strong, a shingle flew past his head. The shingle is included in the picture.

These pictures painted "au premier coup" nevertheless are designed. A favorite motif includes a window, painted from the outside or the inside. In this image, he plays with the verticals and the horizontals, tilting them so that there are no main lines parallel to the four edges of the canvas. He causes the whole structure to lean a little, avoiding right angles. As Lloyd Goodrich pointed out, these hardly perceptible alterations created a vital interplay. These paintings particularly show a kinship to the avant-garde tendencies of the 1940s. Dickinson's stimulating dislocations of reality are also effected by adopting unusual angles of vision. He said, "Most of our experience in seeing is connected with our own eye level, but you can get tired of always seeing things from the same height.... It is diverting to look at nature from viewpoints that are not the usual ones."

I believe that Dickinson's invaluable contribution lies in those large, extremely complex pictures, none of which he considered finished. "There comes a time when I stop because to go on would mean reorganizing the canvas from the bottom up. I cannot throw away the investment of so many years, nine years in Ruin of Daphne… but even so, I would prefer doing long ones to short ones."

Edwin told me he had kept a journal for many years and in this journal he noted each day the length of the sitting and the weather! He knew the date and the circumstances of the start of every picture and the day and place of its completion.

I feel Edwin Dickinson's love affair with perspective expresses his love of extreme accuracy in combination with his fantastic inventiveness. In 1926 he painted a small picture of two ships abandoned in the ice in Antarctica. In his notes on the picture, he gives the ships their names, ports of origin, and the longitude and latitude of their abandonment. The notes conclude, "All made up. Dr. Parmenter [a friend who was an oceanographer] and I concocted this. All perfectly accurate; but there was no such event."

Edwin and I had a delightful comradeship as colleagues. We occasionally had lunch in a snack bar under my studio. One day, having had lunch, we approached the cashier to pay the bill. It was a strict tradition that each pay his own. I paid mine, whereupon Edwin took out of his pocket a piece of paper and began to sing a Greek song in Greek. The cashier joined in the chorus, and when they finished the song, no one could remember whether Edwin had paid or not.

It was characteristic of Edwin to make surprising observations at surprising times. Once at a somewhat formal occasion, Edwin said to me earnestly, "I have observed that the hair in a beard is the same as pubic hair."

About subject matter he said, "I have painted a great deal from the nude and the female eye, one of the most beautiful things to paint. Another favorite subject is looking down at water, calm, clear water about seven or eight feet deep. You focus your eyes to strike the surface of the water, then you change the focus to see the bottom. Then if you squint at it, you won't see anything clearly enough to know just whether you're at the surface or the bottom. I found it was nice to have the surface and the bottom both. I've made many experiments with that and they were quite successful."

Edwin taught in many schools, first for pleasure and secondly to earn a living. He said he would quit the minute he stopped enjoying it. His students were very devoted. The first thing the students did was to take out their plumb lines. To Ruth Hatch he said, "If you draw a house, it should be so solid a dog could lift his leg on a corner of it." Loren Mclver remembers that Dickinson brought to the class a "chain or something from a garage… something you had never drawn and had never seen anyone draw." Another student said of the subject matter in the class, "One of the damnedest things was a tire shrinker, a hell of a looking object."

Mrs. Dickinson quotes her husband as saying, "Given time there isn't anything I can't draw and paint as well as I can another. A locomotive on its back in angular perspective is as accessible to me as a shoebox."

Ruth Hatch remembers asking how long it took him to memorize Shakespeare's sonnets (he knew fifteen). He said with scorn, "I didn't make it a matter of discipline and calculation, I just say them to myself and… gradually I know them."

All remember that he never spoke harshly of any living painter. He thought highly of artists whose work was not affected by having buyers on their minds. He didn't like the others, but he never mentioned their names.

Norman A. Geske, in writing about the 1968 Venice Biennale, made this observation: "His [Dickinson's] is a visual sensibility of extraordinary scope. It is reactive to experience in objective ways that are as close as anything we have in our art to purely formal achievement. At the same time, the subjectivity is such that he is one of the few Americans to have realized in his work the innocence, the surreality, the exaltation of children, madmen and poets."