Manierre Dawson is considered one of the first American painters to embrace pure abstraction in the early years of the 20th century, independent of modern trends taking place in Europe at the same time. Born in Chicago, Dawson lived most of his life in Michigan. He began his career studying civil engineering at the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago, completing his degree in 1909. He was producing his first abstract paintings by 1910 while working as an architect. Dawson took a leave of absence to travel to Europe, a journey that led him through numerous countries and allowed him to visit Gertrude Stein’s Paris apartment and speak with John Singer Sargent in Siena. On his return to the U.S. he called on Arthur B. Davies in New York City and also met Albert Pinkham Ryder.
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Davies was impressed with Dawson’s work and the older artist invited him to participate in the 1913 Armory Show, though Dawson declined. Afternoon II was painted that year. In 1914, following the Chicago version of the Armory Show in which Dawson did exhibit work, he left his civil engineering job to pursue his art full time, moving from Chicago to his family’s fruit farm near Ludington, Michigan. Having met Walter Pach through the Armory Show, Dawson exhibited in two shows organized by Pach and Davies in 1914, but his art career essentially ended that year. Farm and family eclipsed his painting and the Dawson name did not reach beyond West Michigan until he was rediscovered by the art world in the 1960s.
Dawson called his non-representational paintings “inventions.” His unique vision was drawn in part from the mechanical drawings, mathematical symbols, and geometric motifs of his scientific training. Indeed, his studies in geology and soil mechanics inform the earthy hues of his canvases, steeped in colors of the sandy soil of the Michigan dunes.
Dawson purchased two pieces from the Chicago version of the Armory Show, Return from the Chase by Amadeo de Souza Cardoso and a painting by Marcel Duchamp, Sad Young Man on a Train. Dawson donated Afternoon II and Return from the Chase to the Muskegon Museum of Art in 1968.