"Watchin' the Girls,"
Nelson Boren, circa 1998. Watercolor from the collection of Mr
and Mrs Thomas Davies, on view at the Bruce Museum.
By Stephen May
GREENWICH, CONN. - Few movements in human history have captured
the popular imagination more than the taming of the American
West. From the time of our nation's beginnings, the region west
of the Mississippi has been viewed as a land of mystery and
promise, a place to project dreams and ambitions, a symbol of the
unknown and the future. The same zeal for freedom, opportunity
and land that incited Europeans to settle the East Coast impelled
their descendants to push westward into uncharted areas -- and
stimulated artists to add impetus to that movement in the
Nineteenth Century.
After the opening up of the West gave rise to the idea of
Manifest Destiny, artist-explorers were inevitably drawn to the
grand drama and tremendous panorama of the western frontier.
Able and daring artists responded at first with careful
renderings of the flora, fauna, terrain and Indians of this
unknown region. They were followed by increasingly skilled
painters whose robust depictions of the natural wonders and
courageous settlers taming an immense continent helped shape
America's sense of itself.
Westward expansion, encouraged by our painters and sculptors,
became a Nineteenth Century article of faith, molding our
democratic values of rugged individualism, self-reliance,
ingenuity, and optimism about the future. By the time historian
Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared more than a century
ago that our frontier days had ended when we reached the Pacific,
the West was fully ingrained in the national spirit and psyche.
In recent years, revisionist historians have challenged those
time-honored beliefs, pointing to the conflict, despoliation and
Native American displacement that accompanied westward expansion.
Few have contested, however, the significance of the artwork that
emerged from this central chapter in America's history.
"Buffalo Bill Standing by Wild West Stagecoach," circa 1891.
Photograph from the collection of Michael and Pat Del Castello,
on view at the Bruce Museum.
The enduring appeal of imagery of the American West is reflected
in a string of exhibitions this spring along the East Coast,
ranging from Maine to Connecticut to New York. Each features
artwork of timeless interest and importance to our national
heritage.
Two exhibitions at the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science in
Greenwich offer comprehensive overviews of Western art, not only
as interpreted by fine artists and sculptors, but in our popular
culture. It is a nice combination.
"In Search of the Dream: The American West," on view through June
2, features more than 150 paintings, drawings, sculptures,
photographs and artifacts by an impressive roster of important
American artists. The valuable accompanying catalog was written
by exhibition curator Deborah Brinckerhoff.
The companion show, "The West in Popular Culture," on view
through June 23, utilizes more than 100 objects to explore how
advertising, media, entertainment and other forms of popular
communication have helped create mythologized Western legends and
heroes. A useful brochure/catalog accompanies this exhibition as
well.
The fine arts show is divided into two sections: "The People of
the West" and "New Visions of the West." The former "approaches
its expansive topic from a socio-anthropological point of view,"
writes Peter C. Sutton, the Bruce's executive director and chief
executive officer in the exhibition catalog. It does this by
means of subsections devoted to Native Americans, Spaniards,
explorers, miners, settlers, ranchers, cowboys and tourists.
The peoples of the Southwest, early inhabitants of the region,
are represented by handsome pottery works, while the Spanish,
whose search for "God, gold and glory" began in the Sixteenth
Century, are reflected in a mid-Eighteenth Century santo and a
photograph of a mission in Tucson founded in 1792, among other
images.
Artists accompanying various early expeditions and
government-sponsored scientific survey teams conveyed the first
views of the West to the rest of the nation. Examples on view
include pioneering watercolor landscapes of the Rocky Mountains
by Samuel Seymour, dating to around 1820, and Baltimore painter
Alfred Jacob Miller's accomplished depictions of Indians he
encountered in the Rockies in the late 1830s.
For much of the Nineteenth Century, Native Americans were assumed
to be a dying race, increasing the urgency with which artists
sought to document their manners and customs. Starting in the
early 1830s, Pennsylvania lawyer-turned-painter George Catlin
executed portraits of individual Indians and scenes of Indian
activities. Karl Bodmer, who joined German Prince Maximilian on a
scientific expedition up the Missouri River in the early 1830s,
recorded Native American life in accurate, ethnographic detail.
Later in the century, such artists as Joseph Henry Sharp and
Eanger Irving Couse and photographers such as John K. Hillers and
Edward S. Curtis continued to record the look and activities of
the so-called "vanishing" people. Sharp drew on experiences
living on a Crow reservation for evocative canvases such as "Crow
Summer Encampment Along the Little Bighorn" (circa 1905).
Eventually settling in Taos, N. M., Sharp teamed up with other
Paris-trained artists to form the celebrated Taos art colony. His
distinguished colleague Couse specialized in dramatically lit,
dignified depictions of Indians going about their daily tasks, as
in "Indian Bead Maker" (circa 1910). "The Indian as a picturesque
subject -- often isolated in time and place -- was of more
concern to Couse than ethnographic accuracy," observes curator
Brinckerhoff in the catalog.
Perhaps the most familiar image of the fate of the American
Indian is James Earle Fraser's sculpture, "The End of the Trail"
(1918). "The stooped, vanquished Indian on his downtrodden,
windblown horse said the Indian was finished, or at least the
Plains way of life was over," writes Brinckerhoff.
The phenomenon of the Gold Rush of 1848, when hordes of
prospectors and get-rich-quick adventurers filled with dreams of
overnight wealth descended on California, offered many subjects
for artists. Famed illustrator Frederic Remington's "Prospectors
Making Frying-Pan Bread" (circa 1893-97), created years after the
fact for a magazine cover, showcases his talent for rendering
crisp, detailed evocations of our western past.
For many, the most memorable images in the exhibition are likely
to be those appropriately grouped under the rubric "Splendid
Vistas." Displayed are a variety of the idealized, romantic views
of the untamed, beautiful West for which Americans yearned in the
wake of the trauma of the Civil War.
Leading the charge was German-born and trained Albert Bierstadt,
who applied dramatic techniques learned in Dusseldorf to
breathtaking, albeit invented, panoramic western landscapes. In
"Valley of the Yosemite" (1864), a golden atmosphere envelopes
Alp-like mountain peaks towering over deer drinking from a lake.
Bierstadt "created a Gothic German romantic stage-set composition
in the operatic tradition," writes Brinckerhoff, "- a vast space
where large masses of rock loom up dramatically and a dreamlike
haze casts a mood over the entire scene."
Equally, if not more, striking than Bierstadt's expansive,
colorful depictions of the region are those by British-born
Thomas Moran, who somewhat later in the century applied J.M.W.
Turner's swirling mists and romantic hues to an endless series of
mountainscapes. For decades, Moran painted panoramic views of the
Grand Canyon, exemplified in the Bruce show by a late version,
"Grand Canyon of the Colorado" (1911).
Another subject that attracted Moran was the scenery around the
Green River in Wyoming, famed for its magnificent, multihued
buttes theatrically framing the river. Like Moran, German artist
Rudolf Cronau, in "Green River, Wyoming" (1882), emphasized the
beauty of the idyllic setting by leaving out the railroad
terminus that by this time had defaced the once pristine place.
Such "idyllic scenes," Brinckerhoff notes, "became sacred images
of the West that have endured in our collective imagination to
this day."
Images by William Henry Jackson, Eadweard Muybridge, Andrew
Joseph Russell and Carleton Watkins demonstrate how these
intrepid photographers overcame such obstacles as rugged terrain,
heavy equipment and laborious printing techniques to produce
awesome views of pristine western vistas. Standouts are Watkins's
"Mirror View from the North Dome" (1865), an albumen silver print
featuring the watery reflection of Yosemite mountains that is
worthy of Ansel Adams, and Muybridge's "Yosemite, Teneya Canyon
from Union Point" (1872), a marvelous albumen print that captures
with detailed clarity the rocks and trees of a dramatic
landscape.
This saga of wagon trains carrying homesteaders seeking land and
opportunity in the West inspired painters, sculptors and
photographers for much of the Nineteenth Century. Some emphasized
the hardships along the trail, while others focused on intimate
human dramas that inevitably developed during this movement. A
Russell photograph, "Mormon Family," likely taken in the 1860s or
70s, captures the resiliency of pioneer women grouped around a
roughhewn frontier cabin.
W.H.D. Koerner's tender canvas "The Homesteaders" (1832), showing
Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House series,
being held as an infant by her homesteader parents standing in a
field with their horses and plow, illustrated a Saturday
Evening Post article. The painting is on loan from the
Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyo., which preserves
Koerner's studio. Filled with artifacts collected on trips out
West, the studio was moved from is original site in New Jersey.
Arthur Rothstein's powerful "Farmer and Sons Walking in the Face
of a Dust Storm" (1936), taken for the Farm Security
Administration, captures the harsh experience of Dust Bowl living
during the Depression. More recently, Harry Jackson's animated
bronze sculpture, "Pony Express" (1967), depicts an indomitable
equestrian figure from that short-lived but legendary, chapter
from the West's past.
Even more lively is Remington's iconic "Bronco Buster" (1895),
the best known of the illustrator-turned-sculptor's bronzes.
Paintings by such stalwarts of Western art as Carl Rungius,
Charles M. Russell and Oleg Wieghorst helped perpetrate the
romanticized view of the cowboy as the daring, undaunted, noble
hero of the American West. Less expected is "Rawhide, Part I"
(1904), a book illustration by the prolific Maxfield Parrish,
better known for his fantasy-world images. It is an appealing
view of a cowboy on horseback looking off into the distance under
a sun-baked sky.
The role of British immigrant Fred Harvey in promoting tourism in
the West by means of guided tours and souvenir shops, starting in
the 1870s, is suggested by a photograph of his Grand Canyon gift
shop. An extensive display of watercolors, jewelry and ceramic
work by Native Americans, purchased at Harvey outposts and given
to the Bruce Museum, amplifies the place of tourism in the
Twentieth Century West.
"Indian Bead Maker," Eanger Irving Crouse, circa 1910. Oil on
canvas from a private collection, on view at the Bruce Museum.
Changes in the western landscape and population, along with
altered aesthetic assumptions are showcased in the section
entitled "New Visions of the West." "Contemporary painters of
western subjects," observes Brinckerhoff, "share new visions,
while responding to the same stylistic influences as American
painters who depict other subjects."
On view here are works by such well-known artists as John Sloan,
who adapted his Ashcan School style to capture the beauty of the
landscape and rituals of the native populace around his summer
home in Santa Fe, and Marsden Hartley, the great early Modernist,
who painted abstract images of Native American symbols even
before he visited the Southwest.
Georgia O'Keeffe, who became a legendary figure after moving to
New Mexico, is represented by a small landscape and a large
floral abstraction that only hint at the grand, advanced images
she created of her beloved Southwest.
Watercolorist Nelson Boren (born in 1952) creates large close-ups
of jeans, glove, boots and spurs in figures whose heads are often
cropped out, in perpetuating the tradition of cowboy art. An
example in the Bruce show is "Watchin' the Girls" (1998).
Of particular interest are highly accomplished, intriguing works
by contemporary Chicano and Indian artists who deserve greater
recognition. Mexican American artist Carmen Lomas Garza utilizes
a deliberately naïve style to convey aspects of her experiences
in the Southwest. Her "Nopalitos Para Ti" (1989), a color-filled
gouache, puts one in mind of Mexican icon Frida Kahlo's art.
Chippewa/Lakota artist David Bradley's "American Indian Gothic"
(1983), a wonderful lithographic takeoff on Grant Wood's familiar
"American Gothic," is from the Bruce Museum's collection. Skilled
Hopi painter Dan Namingha is represented by an engaging,
shimmering, acrylic tour de force, "Dreamstate #28" (2001).
In a humorous work that concludes the Bruce show, 38-year-old
Cochiti potter Diego Romero utilized stylized heads from
prehistoric Mimbres art to bring us right up to date with his
ceramic view of "Chongo Brothers Watching the Simpsons" (2001).
It is a fitting coda to this ambitious and entertaining survey of
the art and cultural heritage of the West.
Curator Brinckerhoff's fully illustrated, 77-page catalog is
perceptively written and informative. Produced by the Bruce
Museum, it will be especially useful to those seeking an overview
of ways in which artists, over the past century and a half, have
interpreted the American West.
The lively, complementary exhibition at the Bruce, "The West in
Popular Culture," explores the manner in which advertising,
entertainment, media and other manifestations of popular culture
have influenced -- and generally romanticized -- our view of the
West. Featuring more than 100 objects, ranging from original
"Buffalo Bill" Cody memorabilia to movie clips to Native American
kitsch, the show suggests how our perceptions of the Old West
have been shaped.
Particularly influential was a real life character out of the Old
West, William F. "Wild Bill" Cody, who helped shape his own
legend by turning his experiences as trapper, scout and expert
marksman into a highly successful traveling show. Posters, dime
novels and photographs recall "Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show."
Cody's star performer, the spectacularly accurate marksperson
Annie Oakley, is evoked through a photograph, her gauntlets and
20-gauge Parker shotgun, engraved with her name.
The popularity of the Wild West Show's shooting demonstrations,
stagecoach chases, buffalo hunts and Indian war dances stimulated
decades of films, radio programs and eventually television shows.
Starting in 1903, classic Western movies made icons of cowboy
heroes ranging from Tom Mix and William S. Hart to John Wayne and
Gary Cooper. Film clips document how these actors, and filmmakers
such as John Ford, developed the enduringly popular western movie
genre.
Objects on view underscore the manner in which stereotypical
images of America's Indians have been planted in the public mind.
They show how images of the feathered warrior, featured on
everything from coins to stamps to Tiffany silver spoons to
football helmets, have blurred the identity of our rich Native
American culture. "For the last 150 years," write Deborah
Brinckerhoff, Cynthia Ehlinger and Anne Lanford in the exhibition
publication, "the West has been shaped by the land, its history
and visions of those who made it what they wanted it to be."
Permeating popular culture, the myth of the West "has reflected
changing opinions and aptitudes in American culture," generally
idealizing a region far more complex than it has been depicted.
"Window on the West: Views from the American Frontier: The Phelan
Collection" is at the Nassau County Museum of Art (NCMA) in
Roslyn Harbor, N.Y., through April 28. It consists of some 60
works from the holdings of Arthur J. Phelan of Chevy Chase, Md.,
and additional works on loan from museums and private
collections.
The Phelan display includes early views of the West in the 1830s
and 40s by the likes of John James Audubon, Bodmer and Miller.
There is an intriguing canvas by Alexander Harmer (1856-1925),
who studied under Thomas Eakins in Philadelphia and became one of
Southern California's first significant painters after settling
in Santa Barbara. He specialized in colorful genre scenes of Old
California. Harmer's "Santa Barbara County Club" (circa 1900)
depicting a horse-drawn carriage driving by the low-slung club
puts one in mind of Eakins's celebrated "A May Morning in the
Park (The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand)" (1879-80).
Among the works on view by Native American artists is Lone Wolf's
"Scouts on Watch" (1921) showing two Indian scouts on horseback
surveying a panoramic landscape.
The "Window on the West" section organized by NCMA curators
Constance Schwartz and Franklin Hill Perrell includes paintings
by Bierstadt and Thomas Hill and bronze sculptures by Remington.
Although he became the most enduringly visible delineator of
scenes of the Old West, Frederic Remington (1861-1909) was born
in the North Country of New York State and dropped out of Yale to
pursue his passion for the West. The Frederic Remington Art
Museum, housed in a mansion in Ogdensburg, N.Y., the town in
which the artist grew up, has a large collection of his artwork
and memorabilia, most of it bequeathed in his widow's estate in
1918.
The museum, founded in 1923, contains important Remington
paintings, drawings and bronzes, along with his easel,
paintbrushes, scrapbooks, and even his hockey stick and cigars.
(Brian W. Dippie's The Frederic Remington Art Museum
Collection, published last year by Abrams, offers an
excellent overview of the artist's life and examines more than
100 of the most important works in the collection. In so doing,
it traces Remington's evolution from illustrator to artist.
Dippie, a noted Western art authority, calls the Remington Museum
"the essential beginning point for a study of the man.")
Since the museum is somewhat out of the way for many people, the
current exhibition, "Frederic Remington: Illustrator, Sculptor,
Painter," featuring 28 paintings and sculptures, at the Everson
Museum of Art in more convenient Syracuse, is especially welcome.
It is guest curated by Kevin Moss, an independent museum
consultant.
On view are Remington's original illustrations for popular
turn-of-the-century magazines, such as the typically vivid action
scene of Indians on the frontier, "A Peril of the Plains" (circa
1890), and an 1895 ink-wash-on-paper depiction for Harper's
Weekly of a group of rifle-toting Indians on horseback posed
amid the splendors of the Tetons in the course of the so-called
"Jackson Hole War."
Two of Remington's magnificent, animated bronze sculptures, the
celebrated "The Bronco Buster" (1895) and "The Mountain Man"
(1903), reflect his unparalleled skill at modeling intrepid
riders precariously perched on feisty Western broncos.
Of particular interest to those who only associate Remington with
views of the American West will be seldom-seen depictions of his
properties in New York State. "Endion" (1908), a small, freely
brushed oil, shows the substantial home set amid trees across a
sweeping lawn, where Remington and his wife lived for nearly two
decades in New Rochelle. In his book, Dippie says the painting is
"reminiscent" of a Claude Monet Rouen Cathedral canvas.
In 1909 the Remingtons moved into a grand new house on an estate
in Ridgefield, Conn., but he died there at the end of the year
following an emergency appendectomy. The New Rochelle house is
long gone, but the Ridgefield home, a substantial stone
structure, survives in private hands.
Remington's ties to his beloved North Country were solidified
during summers at "Ingleneuk," a rustic property he purchased in
1900 on an island in the St Lawrence River near Alexandria Bay. A
series of oil sketches, influenced by his affinity for the work
of American Impressionists, convey his skill as a landscape
painter and affection for the woodsy site. "Boat House at
Ingleneuk" (circa 1903-07), a Monet-like view across water to his
pea-green boathouse; "Studio at Ingleneuk" (1907) and "Pete's
Shanty" (1908) suggest Remington might have achieved considerable
success as a landscape painter had he not died so prematurely.
The Everson show will surely tempt visitors to make the trek to
Ogdensburg to see more of the grand trove of works at the
Frederic Remington Art Museum.
"The Snow Bird," Judy Folwell, 1998. Ceramic bowl from the
collection of Marilyn and Michael Dore, on view at the Bruce
Museum.
"Beyond the Frontier: The Mythic West in American Art and
Culture," which recently closed at the Bowdoin College Museum of
Art in Brunswick, Maine, was organized by Bowdoin professor
Matthew Klingle to stimulate thinking about the history behind
our views of the Old West. Using primarily photographs from the
museum's collection, Klingle suggested that the "idealized
frontier was often wildly, violently out of step with the
historical realities of the West."
Photographs taken by Watkins, Hillers and Edward S. Curtis, as
well as by Adams, Garry Winogrand, Emmet Gowin and Danny Lyon
"illustrate some of the contradictory ways that Americans have
fashioned meaning out of the frontier idea from the seventeenth
century to the present," in Klingle's words.
As documented in the Bruce Museum exhibition, Watkins (1829-1916)
was one of the earliest and finest American landscape
photographers of his time, using rudimentary equipment to
immortalize sublime glimpses of the West. His famous images of
the pristine and then virtually unknown Yosemite Valley, as
exemplified by the awesome yet peaceful "Three Brothers,
Yosemite" (1864-65), helped expose to the world the natural
wonders of this beautiful area.
Adams (1902-84), one of America's most popular photographers and
best-known environmentalists, was represented in the show by his
famous, hauntingly evocative "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico"
(1941). Small and focused, the Bowdoin exhibition offered both
educational insights and aesthetic rewards for students and other
visitors.
All in all, these attractive exhibitions provide rewarding
insights in the variety, quality and messages of art of the
American West. It is a theme that never seems to lose its appeal.
Bruce Museum of Arts and science is at One Museum Drive (just
off I-95, Exit 3) in Greenwich, Conn. For information:
203-869-0376. Nassau County Museum of Art is at One Museum Drive
(just off Northern Boulevard, Route 25A) in Roslyn Harbor, N.Y.
For information, 515-484-9337. Everson Museum of Art is at 401
Harrison Street (off I-81, Exit 18, downtown across from the War
Memorial) in Syracuse, N.Y. For information, 315-474-6064.
Bowdoin College Museum of Art (Walker Art Building) is located on
the Bowdoin College campus in Brunswick, Maine. For information,
207-725-3275.
