Edwin Dickinson ‘In Retrospect’ Babcock Galleries

Babcock Galleries' mini-retrospective of painter’s painter Edwin Dickinson affords an opportunity to view an under recognized American pioneer. Rarely shown and discussed less, Dickinson’s position as an underground painter’s best kept secret deserve to finally come to a close. Born in Seneca Falls, New York in 1891 (nearly contemporaneous with Dickinson’s spiritual doppelganger Giorgio Morandi), Dickinson’s thinking was strongly influenced by both the teacher and artist Charles Hawthorne, whom Dickinson studied under in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the suicide of his beloved brother Burgess, in 1913. Joining the Navy during World War I, Dickinson would later visit Paris, falling under the influence of French Classicism, including Poussin, and, more profoundly, the Greek painter El Greco. Working for most of his career in Provincetown, upstate New York, New York City and Europe, Dickinson’s career and reputation suffered disproportionately by both the depression and being slightly out of step with mainstream and avant-garde American thinking. Neither bellicosely regionalist like Thomas Hart Benton, nor a part of the Modernist circle around Steiglitz, Dickinson’s sensibility harkened back to a haunted American past stylized by Poe and Washington Irving. Unlike the slightly older and better recognized Edward Hopper, Dickinson does not address the contemporary urban world. Instead, as seen in the pictures at Babcock, which speak for his larger output, are pictures of small, depopulated beaches and houses, gaunt self-portraits or singular portraits of stricken women. Painted with a  full spectrum that has been mixed down to a pewter grey, Dickinson’s paintings maintain a chromatic intensity despite a color range that travels from dioxidine purple and sap green to lamp black. Warm despite the preponderance of grey, Dickinson practiced an immediate form of painting in the smaller paintings, many of which can be viewed at Babcock. Dickinson termed the small paintings premier coups, or ‘first cuts’. Painted quickly and in one sitting, these paintings were greatly admired by the Abstract Expressionists. Jack Tworkov, whose writings were collected in The Extreme of the Middle, edited by Mira Schor, wrote in his journals about a 1961 exhibition of Dickinson’s:

Dick’s retrospective is truly beautiful. The Fossil Hunters, Man with the Cello, your portrait are the three stars of the show for me. For the rest, I love those green landscapes. The more I look at his work the greater I think Dick’s stature is. He is truly great in an idiom where he has no equal—nor even his like.   

Missing from the Babcock exhibition are two bodies of important work. The first is the large series of imaginative paintings (including the Fossil Hunters mentioned above by Tworkov) that Dickinson produced throughout his career. Richly textured and contrapuntally composed, these grande machines stand as marble pillars that hold up his direct and ephemeral premier coup quicksilver studies. Whereas de Kooning and Tworkov admired the Existential immediacy of Dickinson’s spontaneous and fragmentary smaller work, Dickinson’s larger imaginative murals speak to contemporary concerns of narrative and time in painting. Michaël Borremans and Neo Rauch (both of whom have presently concurrent exhibitions at David Zwirner) grow from the gothic manses and forlorn seascapes that Dickinson images. The second group is his drawings. A draftsman truly without peer in American art history, Dickinson’s drawings, rarely exhibited, are missed in this exhibition. Made with a graphite pencil and smudged with the side of his finger, these drawings channel Seurat’s conté drawings and Ingres’ crystalline portraits. Regardless, seeing Dickinson in person and in number reveals not only what he thinks, feels and believes about painting, but assists in illumining your own private thoughts on the practice. Jack Tworkov, writing in his journal a few months before he died in 1982, reflected on a a lifelong passion towards Dickinson’s art:

This has been one of the better days for me. No pain at all. More mentally awake. Spend much less time resting. Attend to various chores. At 4 p.m. Michael Jacobs came to interview me. He is doing a book on art colonies all over the world. He just returned from Provincetown. We talked about my first stay from 1923 to 1935. And my return in the middle 50s. I talked a lot about Dickinson. It’s become a passion with me. 

Locust Woods and Grass, Truro, 1934

26 x 30 ¼ inches

Oil on Canvas

Nude Figure, Marie, 1939

20 x 23 inches

Oil on Canvas

Self Portrait

24 1/8 x 29 ½ inches

Oil on Canvas

Villa Zingarella, 1938

23 ½ x 28 ½ inches

Oil on Canvas

X-Cliff, 1926

24 x 20 inches

Oil on Board  

Francis Blazer 1937

30 x 25 inches

Oil on Canvas