‘Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890–1950’

Houston, Texas

:For many art lovers, references to the American West conjure up images of awesome scenery, settlers struggling to tame the land and friction between newcomers from the East and Native Americans. One thinks of epic landscapes by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran and romanticized depictions of the Old West by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell.

Modern art in this country, coming to the forefront at the turn of the Twentieth Century and particularly in the wake of the Armory Show of 1913, is invariably associated with the East and urbanism — crowded cities filled with skyscrapers, technological advances and immigrants. Little attention has been paid to the intersection of Modernism and the land west of the Mississippi.

Indeed, the traditional emphasis on the mythical West, reiterated in art, novels, tourist magazines and movies, has long obscured recognition of the significant role played by the vast, rugged, picturesque land of the American West in defining American Modernism.

For the first time in a major museum exhibition, this relationship is explored in a superbly conceived and brilliantly executed show, "Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890–1950." It was organized by Emily Ballew Neff, curator of American painting and sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH). "The entrenched belief that 'modern West' is an oxymoron," says Neff, "planted the seed for this exhibition…."

It comprises more than 110 paintings, works on paper and vintage photographs by 74 artists, including such stars as Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis, Maynard Dixon, Marsden Hartley, Raymond Jonson, John Marin, Moran, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Remington, John H. Twachtman and Grant Wood. Among the photographers featured are Ansel Adams, Laura Gilpin, Dorothea Lange, Timothy O'Sullivan, Paul Strand, Carleton E. Watkins and Edward Weston.

Rather than presenting an exhaustive survey, curator Neff made a focused selection of works by a wide variety of artists who depicted the West in Modernist terms. The show is organized thematically and roughly chronologically, starting with a prologue titled "Landmarking the West," followed by "The End of the Frontier: Making the West Artistic," "The Many Wests: Modern Regions" — "California," "The Southwest" and "The Dust Bowl Era — Plains and Other Places" — and concluding with an epilogue, "The Abstract West." Within this framework Neff carries out what MFAH director Peter C. Marzio calls "a rigorous effort to comprehend the major role that the American West played in the evolution of American Modernism."

The exhibition begins in "Landmarking the West" with an examination of the manner in which painters and photographers who participated in Nineteenth Century survey expeditions introduced the dramatic landscapes and vistas of the West to eager American and European audiences. The show opens with Moran's enormous and celebrated "Mountain of the Holy Cross," 1875, an epic view of the Rocky Mountains peak with snow-filled crevices forming a cross. It is one of numerous Moran paintings that shaped America's early understanding of the inspiring beauties of the untamed West.