Manierre Dawson: A Chicago Pioneer of Abstract Painting

In the spring of 1910, Manierre Dawson (1887-1969) experimented with a variety of abstract compositions, including what are apparently the first non-objective paintings produced by an American artist. What makes the creation of these paintings even more remarkable, and problematic, is that Dawson painted them when he was only twenty-two years old, having had no academic art training beyond a high school art class, and before he had traveled far from his native Chicago. The precociousness of Dawson's development, while working in the relative isolation of Chicago, has caused some skepticism about the dates on his first abstractions. The goal of this study has been to identify the sources of influence which aided Dawson in this conceptual development, thereby demonstrating that his arrival at pure abstraction in Chicago in 1910 was possible and to validate the dates inscribed by the artist on these paintings. An early source of influence on Dawson's paintings was Arthur Wesley Dow's Composition, a manual for secondary school teachers. Dow's exercises were directed toward representational imagery but stressed pictorial structure at the expense of subject-matter. Dawson's earliest surviving paintings reflect his knowledge of Dow's illustrations and principles of design by the time he graduated from high school in the spring of 1905. By 1908 Dawson formulated a purely formalist aesthetic philosophy, portions of which he recorded in his personal journal, and his paintings reflect a dramatic change in his approach to his art. A significant source of many of Dawson's ideas was probably Arthur Jerome Eddy's book Recollections and Impressions of James A. McNeill Whistler (1903). However, the catalyst which altered the way he approached painting appears to have been Denman Waldo Ross's book A Theory of Pure Design (1907). Not only does Dawson's development toward abstraction concur with Ross's theories, but his pivotal paintings from 1908 and 1910 resemble Ross's illustrations. Without the advantages of an artistic mentor, a proper studio or living models, Dawson relied on published sources for his aesthetic ideas and formal motifs.