On View
On viewObject number2012.50
Mother and Child
Artist
Manierre Dawson
(American, 1887-1969)
Date1912
Mediumoil on canvas
Dimensionsframed: 47 × 39 3/4 × 2 in. (119.4 × 101 × 5.1 cm)
Object: 40 × 32 in. (101.6 × 81.3 cm)
Object: 40 × 32 in. (101.6 × 81.3 cm)
Credit LineGift of Mr. and Mrs. Donald S. Gilmore by exchange
Exhibition History"For and Against Modern Art: The Armory Show + 100," KIA (June 29 - Sept. 29, 2013).
"Lasting Legacy: A Collection for Kalamazoo," Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, Michigan (Sep. 6, 2014 - Jan. 4, 2015).
"Manierre Dawson: Engineering Abstraction," Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon, Michigan (April 30 - August 9, 2015) and Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, Michigan (August 29 - December 13, 2015).
"American Perspectives on Modernism" KIA Traveling Exhibition, University of Mary Washington (Jan. 26 - Apr. 2, 2017).
"Unveiling American Genius," KIA Permanent Collection Exhibition, Traditional, Markin, Nay and Groos Galleries (March 1, 2021 - December 31, 2023).Label TextManierre Dawson is credited with being America’s first abstract artist. He studied mechanical drawing and geometry for a career as a civil engineer, but preferred to paint. He had developed his own geometrical style of abstraction before taking a six-month trip to Europe. There, he saw the work of avant-garde artists like Cézanne and Picasso, but also studied the Old Masters. He responded with his Museum Paintings series.
Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna inspired the underlying structure or “bones” of Dawson’s Mother and Child. We see Dawson’s experimentation with a semi-cubist style in the faceted surfaces that merge the foreground and the background into a single plane of angles and broken lines. The Bruges Madonna is “broken apart” and reassembled in a new and exciting way. While Dawson’s muted color palette is characteristic of early Cubism, he acknowledges Medieval and Renaissance painting conventions by portraying the Madonna and Christ Child in their traditional blue and red robes.
