New agrarian art museum remembers Dale Nichols

This June 2008 essay describes a new art museum providing a venue for artists dealing with historic and contemporary issues of agrarian America. The focus of the essay is a current retrospective exhibition of the artwork of a famous agrarian artist from David City, Neb., Dale Nichols (1904–1995).

By Mark L. Moseman

Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art opened earlier this year in David City, Neb. As far as we know, it is America’s only museum devoted exclusively to agrarian art. Agrarian pertains to fields or land or their tenure. Western art is celebrated in museums around the country. Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art provides a new national focus for both historical and contemporary agrarian art.

The cornerstone of the permanent collection is the work of Dale Nichols. The growing permanent collection includes work by other famous agrarian artists such as Winslow Homer, John Steuart Curry, Robert Gwathmey and Birger Sandzen. Bone Creek is now presenting the first-ever museum retrospective exhibit of artwork by Dale Nichols (1904–1995).

The museum is well suited to show Nichols’ work. Nichols came from David City and is buried there. This agrarian community inspired the art that made him famous. Locally archived paintings and documents are quickly making the new museum a national center for information about Nichols’ artwork. David City artist Ruth Nichols, niece of Dale Nichols, organized the exhibit. It includes 22 paintings, many limited editions, some original drawings, and a variety of personal letters, notes and photographs. It also includes books, magazines and other memorabilia featuring Nichols’ work. With unique David City resources, Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art is able to shed new light on the Nichols art legacy.

Nichols is well known as a Regionalist painter along with Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood. A few years after Wood’s “American Gothic” won first prize at a national contest sponsored by the Chicago Art Institute, Nichols won the same prize with his “End of the Hunt.” Wood was one of the judges. In 1939 “End of the Hunt” was purchased by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Henceforth, Nichols was known as a Regionalist painter from Nebraska.

The Bone Creek exhibit shows for the first time that Nichols’ work is more than Regionalism. Benton, Wood and Curry defended Region­alism after it fell out of favor with the New York art establishment. Nichols neither defended Region­alism nor turned his back on it. He literally moved on, spending winters on a ranchero in Arizona with trips to Mexico, and spending summers in a cabin in Alaska. He joined the Tucson Archeological Society and studied the archeology of the Southwest. He bought most of Tubac, Ariz., and started an art colony. He tried another art colony in Winnemucca, Nev. He was a rolling stone that gathered no moss.

Soon after being labeled a Regionalist, Nichols produced significant Western, Southwestern and Alaskan paintings that are not part of the American Regionalist art movement. For example, “Nav­igating Icebergs,” on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, July 19, 1941, is clearly not a Regionalist painting. It is both a Modernist and Surrealist painting of an uncommon seascape. It reflects Nichols’ changing life experience in the 1940s.

During this time, Nichols became friends with Frank Lloyd Wright, Norman Rockwell and Maynard Dixon. He shared an interest in architecture with Wright. Nichols designed and built much of the expansion of his own home south of Tucson. He and the home were featured on the cover of Better Homes and Gardens. Nichols’ friendship with Rockwell helped with commercial art assignments, including three covers for Saturday Evening Post and one for Woman’s Day. Nichols and Dixon painted in a similar manner. Friendships with these and other artists and intellectuals allowed Nichols’ work to evolve beyond conventional Regionalism.

While the other Regionalists settled into the Midwest that inspired their work, Nichols continued to move. He left Arizona and set up a studio in the French Quarter of New Orleans. He bought and lived on a sailboat based in Pas Christian, Miss. While he continued to meet a demand for Regionalist works, he painted important non-Regionalist landscapes of the bayou and Gulf Coast.

In 1960 Nichols moved to Guatemala. He pursued his interest in archeology, joining professional archeologists studying Mayan ruins and culture. He wrote and published some of his findings. He made rubbing from the ruins for himself and for Brown University. During his 23 years in Guatemala, he painted lush tropical volcanic landscapes inhabited by lightly clad native women.

The exotic Guatemala paintings in the Bone Creek exhibit are clearly not part of the American Regionalism art movement. They are modern abstract pictures of foreign scenes painted in the 1960s and 1970s. The exhibit shows that the painting style started in Guatemala carried back into Nichols’ continuing creative explorations of his native Nebraska.

The painting “Platte Valley Summer” illustrates this point. Nichols was living in Guatemala in the 1960s. In the 1940s and 1950s he had experimented with modeled surrealistic compositions. His oil paintings of Guatemala and of Nebraska during the 1960s tended to have more flat abstract diagonal shapes. In “Platte Valley Summer,” 1969, Nichols achieves dimension in clouds by laying relatively flat planes of color and value over each other at varying heights and angles.

Nichols said that “Platte Valley Summer” is a symbolic painting. Nature’s glory as well as its dominion over man is expressed by luminous clouds above a solitary structure and windmill. The painting turned out to be prophetic. Demolition of farmsteads in recent decades has made these solitary structures a common sight. In the picture, a small lone figure strides toward the structure. The man does not appear to be a farmer. From what we now know of Nichols, he identified with the man in the painting. Nichols emerged from the fields of Nebraska to become an artist, professor, author, poet, musician, archeologist, nu­merologist, philosopher and ambassador. In this painting, Nichols at 65 made a mature artistic expression that he couldn’t conceive of at age 35. This is clearly more than a narrative American Scene painting. “Platte Valley Summer” has some of the same subject matter as Nichols’ early work. However, this painting is a more considered symbolic revision of his early idyllic “red barn” paintings.

The Nichols retrospective shows a lifetime of artistic development. We see movement from early American Scene paintings, to Americana “red barn” paintings, to more somber post-World War II Realism, to Surrealistic modeled work with dynamic diagonals, to more flat geometric Abstract art, and to paintings that integrate at will all or portions of this visual vocabulary. Through it all, including experiments in Tonalism and Colorist artwork, a distinctive Nichols style is apparent in all the work.

The total picture shows an artist who was true to himself. His early paintings were based on fundamental inspiration coming from his childhood on a Nebraska farm. He used a lifetime of travel and new experiences to nurture and enhance that core inspiration. We now know that Nichols did some significant finished oil paintings of landscapes far afield from those of the typical Regionalists. He took risks experimenting with his art and he learned from his efforts. He applied what he learned to an artistic expression that matured like fine wine. Even when his painting skills diminished in the 1980s, Nichols pursued his own vision.

In summary, the Bone Creek retrospective on the art of Dale Nichols makes two main observations. In the 1930s Nichols established himself as one of the big four Regionalist painters. In the following 50 years of travel and experimentation his work grew, developed and transcended traditional Regionalism.

Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art also shows contemporary art inspired by agrarian issues affecting all of America. The premier exhibition in March was “Last Year on the Farm” by Texas artist Virginia (“V....”) Vaughan. The permanent collection features a painting by Canadian artist and environmentalist Robert Bateman. His work expresses his belief that traditional land stewardship is better served by individuals rather than by corporations. The collection also includes “Family Farm in Flux,” a contemporary Social Realism painting by Wisconsin artist Marie App. A forthcoming exhibit by Kansas artist Michael Duane will focus on tornados and dangerous weather. Later exhibits by Colorado and Illinois artists will deal with food and animal production. These are but a few examples of how the museum is presenting contemporary agrarian art.

From coast to coast, over many decades, agrarian America has changed from highly populated areas of family farms and agriculture to depopulated areas dominated by corporations and agribusiness. Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art is providing a much-needed national venue for artistic expression about both historic and contemporary issues associated with this change.

“Remembering Dale Nichols” is on exhibit through August 24 at Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art, 575 “E” Street, David City, Neb., 68632. The fully accessible museum is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and 1 to 4 p.m. on Sunday. Tours can be scheduled by phoning the art museum. Admission is free. Bone Creek is a 30-minute drive north of the I-80 exit for Seward, Neb. It is a 90-minute drive from Omaha or Grand Island, a 60-minute drive from Norfolk, and only a 50-minute drive from Lincoln. Contact the museum at 402-367-4488. The Web site is www.bonecreek.org.
 

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