The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts announces Dale Nichols. Transcending Regionalism an exhibition on view March 17 to June 10, 2012
Dale Nichols, While the Sun Shines, 1936; oil on canvas. Courtesy Dayton Art Institute.
Artist Dale Nichols was born in David City, Nebraska on July 13, 1904. He studied at Chicago’s Academy of Fine Arts, and remained in Chicago for approximately fifteen years.
Nichols, succeeding Iowa artist Grant Wood, was art editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1942 to 1948, and in 1930-40, served as Carnegie visiting professor to the University of Illinois. As an early champion of good art in advertising and illustration, he created artwork for direct-mail industrial advertising in the 1930s and 40s. In 1935, his book elaborating his theories of art, A Philosphy of Esthetics, was published, and in 1957, he completed his book Figure Drawing, published by Watson-Guptill.
Nichols’s primary subjects were evocations the farm life he experienced in his early years in Nebraska. He stated, “I feel that an artist paints best what he has been exposed to during his youth. I think my memory paintings of my home state may be my only creations that I sign with full confidence.”
This exhibition is sponsored in Montgomery by Corinna and Barry Wilson; Winifred and Charles A. Stakely; Dawn and Adam Schloss – www.mmfa.org