Edwin Dickinson at Tibor de Nagy - New York

Edwin Dickinson is often called a "painter's painter," a term implying that his art is an acquired taste, fashionably obscure, appreciated mainly by the cognoscenti. But this exhibition, which might be thought of as a partial summary of the traveling retrospective organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery [see p. 88], demonstrated that Dickinson is really a painter with something for everyone.

Since his death in 1978 at the age of 87, Dickinson has periodically been "rediscovered," and Tibor de Nagy has helped sustain the interest with occasional exhibitions like this one, gathered largely from private collections. Dickinson lived and worked in a variety of places: western New York State, Cape Cod, France. He was hardly less various in his approach to painting, moving freely from a hazy impressionism to homegrown surrealism to thoughtful, even dour, portraiture to Turneresque abstraction and back again, all the while shunning the modernist mainstream, and Abstract Expressionism most particularly. Works from the 1920s up to 1950 were on display in this exhibition, and it was easy to see where the "painter's painter" epithet comes from. The strongly architectural Still Life (1931), for example, demonstrates an affinity with de Chirico's largely ignored late paintings, and also brings forcefully to mind the attack brushwork of de Kooning, one of the many painters who admired Dickinson. Others included Jack Tworkov, Hans Hofmann and Raphael Soyer; the very diversity of Dickinson's fans suggest his mutability. The version of Dickinson currently in vogue is the misunderstood visionary, but the most appealing works in this exhibition were anything but hermetic: misty Cape Cod landscapes, all done in single outdoor sessions, and several delightful pencil drawings.

Does anything tie his oeuvre together, other than an aggressive iconoclasm? Pressed by sometimes puzzled critics, Dickinson seemed to want to turn his complications into an identifiable stance, insisting on a single source for his work but never articulating it. Absent at Tibor de Nagy were the so-called symbolical canvases, which frequently contain swatches of atmospheric color, Daliesque torsos, or sharply delineated architectural elements. By turns sententious and cartoonish, these paintings took him up to 10 years to finish, and they simply embody the mystery, rather than solve it. The landscapes and still lifes in this exhibition provided a more illuminating insight into Dickinson's sensibility. Hovering between anecdote and pure painting, they show an American artist consciously withdrawing from collective practice and perception, whatever he took them to be at the time.

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