His style of painting, which eschewed details in favor of close attention to the relationships between masses of color, was strongly influenced by the example of his teacher Charles W. Hawthorne.
The strange juxtapositions and perplexing hints of narrative in his large compositions have been compared to Surrealism, and his premier coups often approach abstraction, but Dickinson resisted being identified with any art movement.
[3] From late summer 1916 through year's end Dickinson investigated the possibilities of printmaking in Provincetown with fellow painter Ross Moffett, and made further attempts in the 1920s and '30s, but felt his time was better spent painting.
[5] Dickinson's Self-Portrait of 1914[6] is what Hawthorne's students called a "mudhead",[7] a back-lit figure built up in color patches, working outward from the center, rather than filling in contours.
[14] Dickinson made a side trip to visit his grave in northern France and then to Spain; two paintings by El Greco in Toledo he declared the best he had ever seen, an admiration that persisted throughout his life.
[21] In 1928 Dickinson married Frances "Pat" Foley, shortly after the completion of The Fossil Hunters, an 8-foot-high (2.4 m) painting on which he spent 192 sittings and that achieved considerable notoriety when exhibited at the Carnegie International of 1928, because it was hung sideways, a mistake perpetuated by subsequent exhibitions in 1929 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (where the error was caught before the opening)[22] and in New York at the National Academy of Design, where it created an even greater uproar by winning a prize in its disoriented condition.
[27] In February 1934, he was invited to participate in the first Depression-era program for artists, the half-year Public Works of Art Project, which offered him weekly pay and an exhibition of the painting in Washington in May.
He finished the work on time by reworking an abandoned painting, one of a small group done from imagination on a favorite subject, polar exploration,[28] and changing its title to Stranded Brig.
A second trip to Europe with his family followed in 1937–38, where he painted landscapes in southern and northern France and visited Rome, Florence, and Venice until concerns about Nazi Germany cut short his stay.
Dickinson remained active as a teacher into the 1960s, by which time his painting output had sharply diminished following the removal of a tubercular lung in 1959 and the increased demands imposed by his growing reputation.
[49] Another complaint was that the strange juxtapositions and imagery in these works hint at underlying narratives or situations but their purpose is unclear, and Dickinson generally avoided explanation except to describe procedures, technical problems and formal concerns.
[69] Driscoll observes that Maeterinck's play deals with a suicide, and the shared title supports the view that Dickinson's picture is about the death of his brother, represented by the guitarist and also by the screaming figure behind him, who embodies Burgess's interior doubts and uncertainty.
He painted it two months after his discharge from the navy at war's end at the family cottage at Sheldrake, on Cayuga Lake, where, according to a journal entry written after a visit on leave in 1918, he had had a "happy time".
[80] The underlying idea that O'Connor proposes is that Edwin, unable in his poverty to marry until 1928, envies his father's happiness and sees him as a rival symbolically laid to rest in The Fossil Hunters by his own new love and marriage less than two months after work on the painting ended.
[81] O'Connor argues that the psychological resolution that Dickinson found in The Fossil Hunters he is unable to achieve in Woodland Scene because the symbolic references in it "are to old oedipal states once powerful enough to unify a painting, but now dissipated by his own new and fruitful life.
"[82] The same model posed for the man in An Anniversary and Two Figures II, 1921–23, again accompanied by a young woman, here appearing more mannequin-like because of her smoothed-out hair and features and her Hawthorne stare.
The progressive tipping and enclosure of space can be observed in the sequence of works leading up to this one, a strategy that parallels modernist tendencies toward pictorial abstraction accompanied by spatial flattening.
Ward suggests that Dickinson very likely identified with the death of his brother, whose body he discovered when looking out his apartment window, or that of Herbert Groesbeck, with whom he had tried to enlist in World War I.
In November 1933 Dickinson decided to pause work on Woodland Scene, which he had been unable to bring to a satisfactory resolution, and began a new painting—his largest—that he eventually gave the neutral name of Composition with Still Life, 1933–1937.
[106] Ward suggests that Composition with Still Life is the Dickinson work most explicitly presented as a dream through the combination of solid, detailed forms with passages that melt into gaseous substances or dissolve into one another.
His daughter relates that, because he was bearded and was seen drawing and painting on the beach, rumors spread in 1941 that he was a German spy mapping the terrain, an idea that was not yet squelched in 1943, despite an appeal to the American Legion to intervene on his behalf.
[118] The absence of a weapon is notable, especially in light of the fact that four days before beginning the painting he listed in his journal his collection of six army rifles of roughly World War I vintage.
[124] Ward suggests that Dickinson presents himself as an academician, the profile view indicative of the timeless essence of the man, with a perspective diagram behind him demonstrating command of the rules of pictorial space construction, and his arm raised in the creation of the picture in which he appears (uniquely among his self-portraits).
[126] The frontal head, dramatically lit, partially obscured by a shingle, with mouth open as if speaking, beard windswept, furrowed brow, and with a body seemingly confined, appears overpowered by circumstances beyond his control.
No events in his life can be related with certainty to the expressive effect of this picture, but a notation in his journal links a life-threatening fall of his aged father to concerns about his own changing condition.
In later years Dickinson gave 1950 as the date for the painting's beginning,[129] but on August 2, 1955, he wrote in his journal, "Began a 44+5⁄8 × 33+1⁄4 of the South Wellfleet Inn," giving, as he usually did, the measurement of the width first.
Remarkably, the inclusion of the painting in the depicted scene sets off a chain reaction in which the apparently objective pictorial record has the effect of reenacting the hotel's collapse in fire sixteen years earlier.
[132] Examples of very small premier coup paintings exist from Dickinson's student days, both in Chase's still life class, such as The Book, 1911, and from his study with Hawthorne, such as O'Neil's Wharf, 1913.
This change occurs in works that are done quickly and with great urgency, which increase in number, including landscapes and marine pieces such as Rocks and Water, La Cride, 1938, and some of his portraits, such as Evangeline, 1942.
But it may also be observed in drawings such as South Wellfleet Inn, and Roses, both 1939, and in his larger studio paintings, where blurred areas are combined with more resolved details, as in the 40 × 50 inch Stranded Brig, 1934, and the large Composition with Still Life, 1933–37.