Preston Dickinson

Preston Dickinson (1889-1930)

Preston Dickinson was born in New York's Greenwich Village. His father, Watson Edwin Dickinson, who was a sign painter and an interior decorator, died shortly before his son turned eleven. Preston, as he was known throughout his life, attended public school in New York until he was almost sixteen, when the family's straitened financial circumstances made it necessary for him to leave school and find a job. Dickinson was working as an office boy for a firm of marine architects when one of the partners noticed his sketching talent and offered to underwrite his tuition to the Art Students League of New York and later his first trip to Europe.

For four years, beginning in April 1906, Dickinson took classes at the League and attended its summer school in the city or in Woodstock, New York. Among his teachers were William Merritt Chase, John Carlson, and Birge Harrison. His school record was distinquished by two honorable mentions in Chase's portrait classes and a scholarship award. Dickinson's student works alternately show the influence of Chase's dark Impressionism and the lighter Impressionist palette of Harrison.

Late in 1910 or 1911 Dickinson left for Paris. There he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at the Académie Julian and in 1912 exhibited at the Salon des Indepéndents and at the Salon des Artistes Françaises. He also traveled to Belgium, Germany, and England. Although little is known about Dickinson's activities abroad, he later said that he learned more from the art he saw in the museums and galleries than he did from his classes. (1)

Dickinson returned to New York in September 1914. He began exhibiting almost immediately at the Daniel Gallery, which championed such modernist artists as Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, and Niles Spencer. Dickinson's Harlem River scenes of about 1915-16, in which he synthesized realism and a Cubist-inspired abstraction, received favorable reviews. Along with his contemporaneous Catskill farm scenes, these are among the earliest depictions in American art of the American city and landscape in well-ordered geometric terms. On the basis of these works Dickinson is regarded as a founder and leader of the Precisionist movement.

During the later teens Dickinson turned to vividly colored and expressively rendered figural studies, nudes, and landscapes that showed his knowledge of Cézanne, Fauvism, Japanese prints, and German Expressionism. These pictures did not achieve the critical success of his more controlled compositions of the mid-teens. Like many of his fellow Precisionists, Dickinson's work generally took a somewhat more realistic approach during the 1920s. Some of his factory subjects, Harlem River views, grain elevators, still lifes, interiors, and Quebec scenes from this period have long been identified with Precisionism. Although his more realistic works were usually praised by the critics, his occasional forays into greater abstraction were often less favorably received.

By the early 1920s Dickinson's work was beginning to achieve wider exposure through exhibitions at such venues as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Dallas Art Association. Daniel Gallery mounted its first solo exhibition of Dickinson's work in 1923, followed by a second in 1924. Dickinson spent a few months during the summer of 1924 in Omaha, Nebraska. There, the grain elevators, which he claimed rivalled the beauty and romance of the castles along the Rhine, provided the subject for a series of pastels.

Since the late teens Dickinson had lived primarily with his sister Enid in Valley Stream, Long Island. When she moved to the West Coast in 1925, he went to Quebec, where he painted the crooked streets of the old city. Late in the summer of 1926 Dickinson left Quebec, stopping in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, and Connecticut before returning to New York at Christmastime.

Dickinson's work received increasing recognition during the second half of the 1920s as museums, such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Gallery, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, purchased his pictures. He won a bronze medal at the Sesquicentennial International Exposition in Philadelphia in 1926 for a Harlem River drawing. Daniel Gallery gave him a third solo exhibition in 1927. The Museum of Modern Art's 1929 exhibition “Paintings by Nineteen Living Americans” included four pictures by Dickinson, a signal that he ranked among the top American modernists.

In June 1930 Dickinson and fellow painter Oronzo Gasparo sailed for Europe. They settled in Irun, Spain, on the French border within view of the Pyrenees. Dickinson found the countryside beautiful and did several landscapes and still lifes in pastel.

By October 1930 Dickinson and Gasparo had run out of money and were trying to return to the United States. Dickinson became ill, and on the twenty-fifth of November he died of pneumonia in Irun, where he is buried.

“Abstraction”, 1922

Watercolor, gouache, charcoal, and graphite on paper, 9 7/8 x 7 7/8 in.(25.1 x 20 cm)

Signed and dated (lower right): P. “Dickinson 22”

Harriet Russell Stanley Fund (1947.15)

During a period of intense exploration and experimentation in the early 1920s, Dickinson created some of his most adventurous works, such as “Abstraction”. For some years Dickinson had been living with his sister Enid at her house in Valley Stream, Long Island, where she had built him a studio.1(1) The interior in “Abstraction”, possibly a room in the Valley Stream house, is the kind of domestic setting filled with familiar, easily arranged objects that Dickinson chose as his subject for many of his most abstract pictures during this time.2(2) The comfortably stylish room is furnished with a matted picture on the wall, a wing chair with modernistically patterned upholstery, and what appears to be a Chinese rug. A table holds a bowl with pipes, books, a vase of cattails, an inkwell, and a blotter with pen and papers. Strong radial lines that converge on the tabletop tilt the space steeply upward toward the picture surface and impose a kind of visual logic on the multiple viewpoints within the composition. Dickinson employed faceted forms, transparent planes, and diverse light sources to further the flattening of the composition and to interrupt spatial recession. Although the analytical Cubism of Picassso and Braque was probably Dickinson's inspiration for these devices, he stopped short of employing them in a consistently Cubist manner. Rather, he adroitly arranged both abstract and realistic elements so that even the realistically rendered objects on the tabletop appear secure, despite the surface's precarious angle.

In this picture, media and color become tools in Dickinson's compositional experimentation. Dickinson often inventively combined media in his works on paper. Here, the varying textures and qualities of transparency, or opacity, of pencil, gouache, watercolor, and charcoal serve to advance the dynamic interplay between reality and abstraction.3(3) In addition, the limited tonal range of the subtle palette of ink blues, grays, peaches, yellows, browns, and blacks helps to unify the picture surface.

Dickinson's highly personal drawing style is fully evident in the New Britain picture. Even in his true Precisionist works, Dickinson exhibited little interest in depicting objects with smooth surfaces devoid of extraneous detail. Instead, his lyrical sensibility delighted in small calligraphically rendered details. The cloud-band motif of the rug, the decoration on the bowl holding the pipes, and the pipes themselves all illustrate his lyrical touch.

Although no images relating directly to “Abstraction” have been located, it is possible that it is preliminary sketch for another work. Dickinson's working method often involved making a series of sketches in which he developed and refined his composition. If Dickinson's development of the New Britain composition followed the same route as certain comparably abstract images from the early 1920s, the New Britain picture is less bold in its faceting and use of transparent planes than a final version of the composition would have been.4(4)

Like most of Dickinson's works, “Abstraction” was probably entitled by his dealer, Charles Daniel, not by the artist himself. However, as one of the most abstract and forward-looking pictures of Dickinson's career, it seems aptly named. Although this work and others like it appear only modestly abstract by today's standards, they often generated puzzled responses from critics of the period, strong evidence of just how far ahead of the taste of his time Dickinson was.5(5)

RHC

Bibliography:

Forbes Watson, "Preston Dickinson, The Arts 5” (May 1924): 284-88; Enid Dickinson Collins, “William Preston Dickinson,” typescript, February 21, 1934, pp. 1-3, Preston Dickinson file, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Mass.; Ruth Cloudman, “Preston Dickinson, 1889-1930”, exhib. cat. (Lincoln, Nebr.: Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, 1979); Richard Lee Rubenfeld, “Preston Dickinson: An American Modernist,” Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1985.

Notes:

1. Collins, “William Preston Dickinson,” p. 1.

2. Other interior still lifes showing similar experimentation with abstraction at this period include “Cubistic Interior (Abstraction)” (Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens); “Still Life” (1924; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); and “Still Life with Vase of Flowers” (University Gallery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis).

3. The media used in “Abstraction” are described in a treatment report from the Northeast Document Conservation Center, March 15, 1984, object files, NBMAA.

4. “Synphonie Domestique Americaine” (Phillips Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.) and its oil sketch (Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, Mass.) are good examples of movement toward greater abstraction between sketch and final work.

5. See, for example, an unsigned review of Dickinson's solo exhibition at the Daniel Gallery in 1924: "From a compositional point of view the only design that does not explain itself is one called "Abstractions" (“New York Times”, May 4, 1924, sect. 8, p. 10).