by Jon Lackman | 21 April 2010 | Americas, Modern
A catalogue raisonné will appear this fall for the early American abstract artist Manierre Dawson. According to its author, Randy Ploog, Dawson
had never traveled further than Michigan, had no contact with progressive artists in Europe, New York or even his native Chicago … What prompted this young civil engineer to produce these groundbreaking paintings has been one of the great mysteries of modern American art … According to conventional histories, modernism, including non-representational abstraction, originated in Europe and spread to the United States. But Ploog points out that Dawson’s paintings of April-June 1910 defy this accepted canon. “Every attempt to link Dawson’s paintings to his European contemporaries has proven unsuccessful,” Ploog said. “Consequently, art historians have not known how to explain his early accomplishments. For this reason alone his work has not received the recognition it deserves.”
