About this work
Horses and bison collide in a surge of compressed motion — this is *Buffalo Hunt*, painted by Maynard Dixon in 1937, a canvas that strips the drama of the hunt down to its essential forces. Mounted riders bear down on a dark, thundering herd across an open plain, the composition built on diagonals of muscle and speed rather than any decorative flourish. Dixon's landscapes are girded by stark geometric landforms, surreal tracts of cumulus sky, and diaphanous atmospherics — and here, those same formal instincts lend the scene an almost mythic clarity. The palette carries the dust and amber of the high prairie, with the sky doing what Dixon's skies always do: pressing down, asserting presence, making the land feel both vast and enclosed. There is no sentimentality in the brushwork. The hunt is rendered as fact — kinetic, irreversible, and elemental.
*Buffalo Hunt* was painted by Maynard Dixon in 1937 — a year of profound personal and professional transition. Dixon's health had continued to decline; he underwent prostate surgery and a nervous breakdown in 1937, and was plagued by emphysema. He had also just sold 85 paintings, sketches, and drawings spanning his entire career to Brigham Young University , a kind of reckoning with his own legacy. Yet even amid these upheavals, his commitment to Indigenous subjects held firm. Dixon's love and respect for the Native Americans he met and lived with for a time were the inspiration for the majority of his paintings of the West, and works like this one represent his sustained effort to record a way of life he understood as irretrievably vanishing. Dixon himself said his aim was "to bring out the poetic, rather than the harsh, brutal part of their lives, or merely the wild and woolly." *Buffalo Hunt* sits at the intersection of that poetic impulse and the bold, design-forward modernism that had become, by his late career, entirely his own.
On the wall, this print demands a room with breathing room — a wide hallway, a study with natural light, or a living room anchored by warm woods and earth tones. By 1925, Dixon's style had changed dramatically to even more powerful compositions, with the emphasis on design, color, and self-expression; the power of low horizons and marching cloud formations, simplified and distilled, became his own brand — at once bold and mysterious. That combination of raw energy and formal restraint makes *Buffalo Hunt* equally at home in a spare, modern interior as in a more traditionally appointed Western space
