PROVO — Daniel Dixon didn't know how famous his father and mother were when he was a child.
In a new DVD that documents their lives, their sons offer up details that illuminate the lives of the pair of famous painters through ordinary circumstance.
"Paintings and Photographs, Memories of Maynard Dixon and Dorothea Lange," is produced by Diana Turnbow of Brigham Young University's Museum of Art, which may own the largest collection of Dixon's works in the world, including more than 100 paintings and drawings.
Turnbow interviewed the brothers in 2003 with then-BYU filmmaker April Chabries as an oral history. She finished up the DVD last spring.
"Not many people are still living who knew the artists," she said.
The late Herald R. Clark, former dean of BYU's College of Commerce (now the Marriott School of Management), purchased most of the collection from the artist in 1937, said museum spokesman Christopher Wilson.
The museum funded the project with the BYU Media Projects Committee, and the DVD is available at the museum.
It offers intimate insights into the life of Southwest artist Maynard Dixon and his wife, photographer Dorothea Lange, as told by their sons, advertising and marketing executive Daniel Dixon and former building contractor John Dixon. Not intended as a major piece, the title feature is 11 minutes long. Other short segments offer more detail about their lives and work.
The DVD also includes biographical sketches of both artists.
Lange was an established portrait photographer in San Francisco when she met and married Dixon in 1920. He was 20 years her senior.
A commercial artist in San Francisco, Dixon longed for the frontier — the rural West. With Lange's support, he was able to go to the desert where he painted hundreds of landscapes and paintings of native Americans.
John Dixon remembers some of those "sketching" trips and how they would take their food with them, build a fire and then watch their father draw and paint and their mother shoot photographs.
Lange worked in her portrait studio until the Great Depression when she went into the streets to photograph the large numbers of unemployed and destitute laborers. Her work caught the attention of Paul Taylor of the University of California, Berkeley, who was preparing reports for the federal government.
She took some of her most famous photographs while working with him, including "The Migrant Mother" that put a face on the suffering during the Great Depression after it appeared in major newspapers across the country.
Lange also worked with famed photographer Ansel Adams, including a Life magazine assignment to photograph lifestyles in three small Utah towns in the 1950s — Gunlock, Toquerville and St. George.
She later divorced Dixon and married Taylor. Lange and Taylor collaborated on the book, "An American Exodus," which documented the migration of farm workers to urban areas and western states in the 1930s.
She was also an active documentary photographer stateside during World War II.
Dixon died in 1946 and Lange in 1965.
E-mail: rodger@desnews.com