EDWIN WALTER DICKINSON: AN ICONOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE MAJOR SYMBOLICAL PAINTINGS.

摘要

Edwin Walter Dickinson was a major American artist who lived from 1893 until 1978. He generated more than four hundred pictures among which there is a small group of eight paintings, which includes The Rival Beauties 1915, Interior 1916, An Anniversary 1920-1921, The Cello Player 1924-1926, The Fossil Hunters 1926-1928, Woodland Scene 1929-1935, Composition with Still Life 1933-1937 and Ruin at Daphne 1943-1954, that are here identified as the major symbolical paintings. The chronology of these eight paintings spanned his career, and yet in their large size, style and subject matter they are clearly different from the rest of his oeuvre. The importance and quality of these eight paintings has always been recognized, as is witnessed by their entry into such major collections as the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and other important collections. These paintings have also been the center of controversy as many writers have attempted without success to explain their meaning. This thesis offers resolutions to the meanings Dickinson associated with them.; The major symbolical paintings are derived from events in Dickinson's life which include the suicide of his brother Burgess, the death in World War One of his friend Herbert Groesbeck and his life-long interests in the music of Beethoven, in the exploration of the Arctic and in the poignant lives of humble fishermen. The intertwined celebration of life and the drama of struggle and death which the major symbolical paintings represent has been discovered in the paintings themselves and in a series of letters Dickinson wrote, over a fifty year period, to his patrons the Ansley Sawyers. These have been supplemented with interviews of several people who knew Dickinson and by the application of Erwin Panofsky's soundly defined methodology for understanding iconological meanings in art.; The literature which was accrued to the major symbolical paintings over the past half century is discussed in the first chapter. The second chapter considers Dickinson's life and discusses his preferences in art, music, literature, history, and science. The next four chapters investigate each of the eight paintings and discuss events and issues from which their imagery rose. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)