“Painters of the Desert: The Arid West” was the title of the Wildling Art Museum’s winter exhibition opening to the public on January 17 and extending through March 25. This was a rare opportunity to see paintings by some of the foremost 20th century artists who became infatuated with the desert landscape of the American southwest and are best known today for their rendition of it: Conrad Buff, Maynard Dixon, Clyde Forsythe, Fernand Lungren, and James Swinnerton. The paintings have been borrowed from other museums, from art dealers, and private collectors.

Marlene R. Miller, Board member of the Wildling Art Museum and owner of the Arlington Gallery, who curated the exhibition, has also written a 16-page illustrated monograph that describes the four different deserts of the southwest and provides illuminating biographies of all five artists. She says that “though none of them were born in the desert, all chose to live in this land of extremes with the highest mountains, the lowest valleys, the deepest canyons, and the saltiest lakes in North America. All of them found their purpose, their inspiration, and their happiness in this vast and arid, sometimes hostile and bewildering, place. They chose to put on canvas the beauty of a wilderness most people never knew existed.”

It is true, as the Museum’s director, Penny Knowles, says in her introduction “that the stark outlines of the buttes and the canyons had an understandable appeal for the modernists among them, but each saw it with a unique eye and brought his own distinctive style to the subject.”

Maynard Dixon is the best known of the five artists. He had a colorful life and was able to fuse a representational approach to his subject with a pared-down modernist painting style. Conrad Buff, Swiss in origin, developed a unique style based on simplified forms and a cross-hatched application of the paint in tiny brush strokes. Fernand Lungren was drawn to the southwest by commissions from the Santa Fe railroad, but moved to Santa Barbara in 1908 and helped to found the Santa Barbara School of the Arts. He was a colorist, and left his entire collection to the Santa Barbara State Teachers’ College which later became UCSB.

It is interesting, and curious, that four of the five artists in the exhibition were experienced as illustrators, Maynard Dixon, Fernand Lungren, Clyde Forsythe, and James Swinnerton. Forsythe and Swinnerton even originated their own comic strips. These last have a tighter style in their rendition of desert scenes and seem to have been particularly drawn to the skies over the desert and to atmospheric effects.

Sponsors of the exhibition were Ted and Sue Dalzell and the Elizabeth Bixby Janeway Foundation.