Edwin Dickinson: waking visions: known equally for his single-take landscapes and his shadowy, "symbolical" machines, Edwin Dickinson was the dark horse of American representational painting well into the 1950s and `60s. A traveling retrospective provides an in-depth look at this idiosyncratic artist

A poet writes always of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness; he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria.

--W.B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions

The looming, spooky compositions with their somnolent figures, studiously deployed drapery and arcane scatterings of still life in spaces seemingly seen or remembered or imagined in moonlight take a long while to register. They took a very long while--as many as seven years--for Edwin Dickinson (1891-1978) to paint. The symbolical paintings, as they have come to be called, adumbrate a dark dream world where what seem dimly recollected circumstances, caught in their own nocturnal inertia, remain cryptic and mystifying. These obsessional works, as large as 8 by 6 1/2 feet--"none ... really finished," he said (1)--attest to Dickinson's academic training and a romantic, literary sensibility with roots in the 19th century.

While deliberating over these slow, introspective pictures, he also made direct, fluent, on-site oil studies of a wide-awake daytime world. These premier coup paintings, with their uncannily accurate renderings of light, temperature and seashore subjects, rarely took more than a few hours. He scratched his signature, the date and sometimes the place name through the wet paint, as though to capture the very moment and inscribe himself within it. It was these on-site recordings, all daring and nuance, that astonished de Kooning, Tworkov and other Abstract Expressionists and also exemplified the viability of representational painting for Porter, Katz and many others (this author included), as the mainstream flowed elsewhere during the 1950s and `60s.

Somewhere between these contradictory tendencies, each with its distinctive set of technical procedures, lie the self-portraits, painted from his mirrored reflection yet psychologically and symbolically loaded through their compositions, lighting, dress and other signifiers of identity and mood. A number of other portraits and smaller paintings also occupy this intermediate zone.

Most artists of any complexity are driven during their lives by antithetical impulses: tensions between instinct and philosophy, spontaneity and discipline, clashes of passion and the will to control. A look at the early efforts of many painters shows what, in effect, they will spend their mature years battling, or at least turning to another sort of account. Think of Cezanne's early, sexually driven expressionism, or Mondrian's romantic Dutch realism or the design-based Art Nouveau of early Bonnard. In each case the youthful impulses are not so much reversed or denied or vanquished as they are subsumed into the seemingly antithetical work that follows.

"Dreams and Realities," the touring retrospective of 67 paintings and 27 works on paper by Edwin Dickinson, provides, in addition to the abundant gratifications of its excellent initial installation at Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery, a good occasion to ponder the artist's seemingly disparate sides and to take note of important correspondences between them. What has long intrigued and perplexed Dickinson enthusiasts is that his ostensibly opposite tendencies, what this show's curator, Douglas Dreishpoon, calls his "bipolar inflection," persisted throughout his long career. No less than Gerhard Richter, he refused to choose one mode over the other (though Dickinson, unlike Richter, never set out to problematize his contradictions as a provocation to his public). (2)

How to reconcile the painstakingly constructed symbolical "machines" with the informal, empirical, swift studies from direct perception? How does the dreamy undertow of longing and sorrow that pervades the big pictures relate to Dickinson's pedagogical stress on "seeing everything for the first time," so evident in his onsite paintings, and his citing his chief influence as "being alive and awake?" (3)

A word first about the show's catalogue, expansively conceived by the curator: Dreishpoon's essay, "Striking Memory," recounts the artist's life and career, focusing on the work's cultural milieu and its critical reception, along with relevant asides on matters such as the history of premier coup painting in Europe and America. An interpretive essay by Francis V. O'Connor focuses on the symbolical paintings and the self-portraits, drawing on the artist's crucial early experiences for the psychoanalytic insights they afford. Two entries by Mary Ellen Abell on Dickinson's teaching and esthetic philosophy will be read avidly by painters and whoever else appreciates the fundamental import of process in painting. Excellent shorter pieces by Elaine de Kooning and John Ashbery are reprinted for the occasion, along with a note by Norman A. Geske (who was responsible for Dickinson's inclusion in the 1967 Venice Biennale) and an astute appreciation by artist Michael Mazur. Helen Dickinson Baldwin, the artist's daughter, has provided a chronology that in itself will make the catalogue indispensable to future studies. A generous selection of photographs from the Dickinson Family Archives further enriches the publication. Dickinson's large paintings pose serious problems for photographing and printing because of their size, dark tonal range and subtle color, and the catalogue's reproductions are as good as we have any right to expect.