Statement, ca. 1913
Oil on wood panel
Gift of Peter Lockwood, 2006
In his journal (January 1913), Dawson tried to describe the “peculiar feelings” that his abstract paintings evoked: “awe, mystery, reverie (I can’t find the words). Whatever they are, these feelings are produced entirely by shapes and colors that are not those of any visible or external objects.” While his shapes and colors may have been nonrepresentational, his imagery was not entirely abstract. Here, as in many of his paintings of the period, Dawson incorporated figurative elements. In the center of the composition is the suggestion of a standing figure in profile, its angled and compact shape reminiscent of the African sculptures that inspired the French Cubist and German Expressionist painters circa 1905 to 1920 that Dawson could have seen in Europe or reproduced in periodicals.
Meditation, ca. 1913
Oil on wood panel
Gift of Peter Lockwood, in memory of his grandfather, the artist, 2005.
Dawson completed this Cubist-inspired painting the same year that another of his abstractions was included in the Chicago venue of the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art (The Armory Show). Showing in the company of such artists as Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Wassily Kandinsky, who were “breaking open the avenues of freedom of expression,” validated his own work. As he wrote in his journal: “I had thought of myself as an anomaly and had to defend myself, many thimes, as not crazy; [but] here now . . . many artists are . . . showing these very inventive departures from the academies.” “These are without question the most exciting days of my life.”
Meeting (The Three Graces), 1912
Oil on canvas
In 1910 the young Chicago artist spent six months traveling throughout England, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, were he visited museums, collectors, and archaeological sites. Following this sojourn, he created a series of modernist works in 1911-12 based on images from classical art and Old Master paintings. Here, his reinterpretation of a first-century Pompeian fresco transformed mythological maidens into emblems of Cubo-Futurist modernity. Although Dawson did not receive the same recognition during his lifetime as some of his American contemporaries in the Stieglitz and Arensberg circles, his avant-garde work was in the forefront of American modernism at the time.