Chicago-born Manierre Dawson (1887-1969) was a major early American modernist painter — perhaps the Windy City’s most progressive spirit.  It is generally believed that this civil engineer and self-taught artist achieved a non-objective abstraction with no knowledge of the activities of Kandinsky, whose work Dawson’s resembles.  He began painting in 1903 or 1904: nature studies that recall Whistler’s “nocturnes” (Gedo, 1977).  By 1906, he painted figural compositions, such as < (showing 500 of 8579 characters).