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Creating the West in Art

By Medicine Man Gallery on

Creating the West in Art

Published courtesy The Magazine Antiques, July 2009

By Peter H. Hassrick

 

Alexander Phimister Proctor (1860-1950), The Pioneer Mother, 1927, Bronze, 56 x 82 x 28.5.Santa Barbara Museum of Art, gift of the A. E. Clegg family. Fig. 1

 

For about two generations now, a group of American museums has been exploring the nature and significance of western art. It was exactly fifty years ago, in the dusty but prim and busy town of Cody, Wyoming, near Yellowstone National Park, that the Whitney Gallery of Western Art (sister institution to New York's Whitney Museum of American Art) was founded with that charge as its mission.1 About five hundred miles south of Cody, in the more cosmopolitan setting of Denver, the broadly based Denver Art Museum in about 1954 embarked on building a collection of representative early western works and mounting western art exhibitions.2 Other museums-among them the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art (now the Gilcrease Museum) founded in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1949; and the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art (now the Amon Carter Museum), which opened in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1961-also embraced a mandate of studying, preserving, exhibiting, and interpreting the American West through the art that had shaped its identity.

 

 

Dean Cornwell (1892-1960), Gold Rush II, 1926, Oil on Canvas, 32 x 68, Image is cropped, Denver Art Museum, William Sr. and Dorothy Harmsen Collection, Fig. 2, 2a

 

What motivated the nascent ballooning of interest in examining the West through its art is unclear. It may be that, following World War II, the nation was searching for cultural attributes that could explain its uniqueness and greatness. The history of the West would have provided at least a few ways of formulating an answer.

Today there are more than a dozen American museums devoted to the art of the West. To celebrate the semicentennial of this trend, the Whitney Gallery and the Denver Art Museum are presenting special exhibitions of their permanent collections, supplemented with some spectacular loans, as a way of reconsidering the place of western art in American cultural history. The Whitney Gallery, in newly refurbished galleries, is focusing on fresh interpretations of the western scene by integrating the work of historical and contemporary artists who address themes from both the past and modern day. The Denver Art Museum, which revived a serious interest in western art following the 2001 gift of more than seven hundred works from the remarkable collection of William Sr. and Dorothy Harmsen, has recently opened an exhibition titled Creating the West in Art, which spans over eight-thousand-square feet of newly appropriated and remodeled galleries.

 

 

E. Martin Hennings (1886-1956), Rabbit Hunt, c. 1935, Oil on Canvas, 35.5 x 39.5, Denver Art Museum, Harmsen Collection, Fig. 3

 

The past fifty years of studying and exhibiting western American art have witnessed a multitude of interpretations, all of which are explored in Creating the West in Art. Two works dominate the exhibition's introductory gallery, which has as its theme "The West Defined as Movement": Alexander Phimister Proctor's 1927 maquette-sized bronze of the Kansas City monument The Pioneer Mother (Fig. 1); and Dean Cornwell's painting Gold Rush II (Figs. 2, 2a), which illustrated an article entitled "The Days of 49" in the October 1926 issue of Cosmopolitan Magazine. These works emphasize the notion that the West is not only a physical place identified by coordinates on a map, but was also at the heart of an experience known as "westering," a place to move through on the way to opportunity. The Amon Carter Museum's initial mission statement claimed that its primary goal was to explore the cultural attributes of a "westering America," so the idea has served as an intellectual construct for museum interpretation for decades.

Had these two works been included in the Whitney Gallery's inaugural display in 1959, they would have been selected primarily for their accurate rendering of historical events and details. The founding director of the museum, Harold McCracken (1894-1983), wrote at the time that its objective was to acquire and exhibit objects "for their documentary faithfulness as accurate portrayals of life as it was in the Old West."3 The two works would have also been positioned to symbolize the hope of the Anglo- American settlers and the potential of the region's bounty, and they would have been vaunted for portraying nineteenth-century expansion of American democracy and economic opportunity.

 

 

John Mix Stanley (1814-1872), Group of Piegan Indians, 1867, Oil on Canvas, 27 x 41, Denver Public Library, Western History Department, Fig. 4

 

These works, as they were created in the mid-1920s and as they were initially interpreted by the earliest western art museums, underpinned a political agenda that employed art as an analogue to history and viewed that history as the foundation of the democratic and capitalist systems that had made the United States a world leader by 1950. Many of the founders of the early western art museums, like Thomas Gilcrease (1890-1962) and Amon G. Carter (1879-1955), recognized themselves in the works they collected. They were, in a sense, parodying their own experiences as ambitious, entrepreneurial captains of fortune prospering at the midpoint of what has come to be called "the American century."

Some twenty years later, in the mid-1970s a new generation of art historians and museum professionals began to explore Western art in terms of its formal qualities, raising the question: "What is the art in western art?"4 They felt that western art, having been separated from the larger canon of American art, had been left out of the formalist art historical dialogue. They would have wanted to consider a work such as The Pioneer Mother for its French Beaux-Arts style, and for its relationship to the works of Proctor's mentor, the American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), who called for artists to produce objects that expressed nobility, simplicity, and dignity. Proctor had spent at least three years studying and working in Paris at the Académie Julian, and he made The Pioneer Mother while at the American Academy in Rome. Likewise, the exciting colors and vigorous delineation of the figures in Gold Rush II would have been discussed in terms of Cornwell's debt to the British muralist Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956), with whom he studied.

 

 

Top: Fig 5, James Earle Fraser (1876-1953) End of the Trail, Bronze, 11.75, Collection of Diane, Daniel and Mathew Wolf, on loan to the Denver Art Museum in honor of Diane Wolf. Bottom Left: Fig 6, Frederic Remington (1861-1909) Broncho Buster, 1895, Bronze, 23.25 x 22 x 13, Private collection. Bottom Right: Fig 7, Alexander Phimister Proctor (1860-1950) Indian Warrior, 1898, 1898 Gold Medal Paris Expedition, Bronze, 38.75 x 8.375 x 27.5, Denver Art Museum, gift of Sharon Magness

 

One of the most ambitious projects to focus on the formalist qualities of western art was the 1988 retrospective exhibition Frederic Remington: The Masterworks, which was organized by the Saint Louis Art Museum in conjunction with the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody. The curators claimed to be searching for "a higher level of critical discourse" and projected that their work would mark "a turning point in the historiography of the art of Frederic Remington." They were, in their estimation, "righting an art-historical wrong."5

Then in the early 1990s there was a swing back to emphasizing the social, historical, and political aspects of western art, prompted by an exhibition organized in 1991 by the National Museum of American Art (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum) in Washington titled The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920. This time scholarly interpretations were not tinged with patriotic zeal, as they had been in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, the story, according to the museum's director Elizabeth Broun, was "disturbing rather than ennobling."6 In a quest for revisionist truths, the curators, perhaps as a reaction to the emerging unbounded entrepreneurialism and self-satisfied Americanism of the Reagan era, searched for images, such as Proctor's and Cornwell's, that would testify to the avaricious, racist, and imperialist imperatives of nationalist ideologies such as Manifest Destiny.

 

 

Charles Deas (1818-1867) Long Jakes, The Rocky Mountain Man, 1844, Oil on Canvas, 41.875 x 37, Jointly owned by the Denver Art Museum and the Anschutz Collection, purchased in memory of Bob Magness with funds from 1999 Collectors' Choice, Sharon Magness, Mr. and Mrs. William D. Hewit, Carl and Lisa Williams, Estelle Rae Wolf - Flowe Foundation, and the T. Edward and Tullah Hanley collection, by exchange, Fig 8

 

In addition, scholars interested in issues of gender would have focused on the blue-clad female figure at the right in Cornwell's painting as evidence of sexist typecasting, exemplifying in their minds the male artist's perception of women as inert participants in the westering experience, helplessly dragged along by their fathers, brothers, and husbands. Proctor's bronze, on the other hand, would have forwarded the argument of these feminist art historians that women were often not passive bystanders at all, but rather driving forces in the pursuit of new homes in the West. Proctor wanted his women to be active, self-determined partners with men, and he often quoted Mark Twain (1835-1910) when discussing this piece: "The women had to endure everything the pioneers did, and then they also had to endure the pioneers."7

In the current evaluation of this western material, the Denver Art Museum has taken the position that none of these earlier perspectives should stand alone. Instead, visitors to the galleries should consider the full range of ideas when analyzing these artworks. As the curator of The West as America, William Truettner, recently concluded, "I'm arguing for aesthetic strategies that are timely and local and can be seen in terms of a historical context" because that is what now "enriches our appreciation of western art."8 This suggests a combination of formalist as well as semiotic and relativist considerations. The very multiplicity of interpretations is fascinating in and of itself and reveals the full measure of elements that may have informed the creative response to the American frontier.

 

William Ranney (1813-1857) The Wounded Trapper, 1852, Oil on Canvas, 35 x 29.25, Private Collection, Fig. 9

 

Beyond the introductory gallery focusing on the western movement, there are eight other thematic galleries in the exhibition that interpret nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century ideas in broad aesthetic as well as socio-political terms. One of the most important topics is the way in which American Indians were portrayed by Anglo-American artists over the years. Proctor is brought into the story again, this time with his 1898 bronze The Indian Warrior (Fig. 7),an idealized symbol in the McKinley era of the United States as proud, bellicose, and masculine. This is contrasted with James Earle Fraser's 1915 bronze End of the Trail (Fig. 5), which alluded to the epic tragedy of the near extinction of native cultures in the nineteenth century and posed the United States as a classic provocateur of racial genocide. On a more positive note, E. Martin Hennings's canvas The Rabbit Hunt (Fig. 3) of about 1935 demonstrated how American Indian cultures in the Southwest could coalesce as productive, functioning modern entities, neither idealized in grandeur nor diminished in loss, but rather revealed in an identity of their own, quotidian though it may have been.

 

 

Thomas Moran (1837-1926) Mount of the Holy Cross, 1894, Watercolor on paper, 13.75 x 24, Denver Art Museum, anonymous gift, Fig 10

 

Some of the earliest artistic renditions of the West, beginning in the 1820s, were the product of artists who went on exploratory expeditions, or who recorded American Indian delegations when they visited Washington and other cities in the East. In an effort to document native people of the West before the pioneer incursions, these artists were compelled by the tenets of Humboldtian science to collect a broad range of information that might help to reveal a divine order to the universe. In works like John Mix Stanley's 1867 Group of Piegan Indians (Fig. 4) such motives are exposed in the painter's close observation of costumes, customs, and landscape background. The animal painter William Jacob Hays (1830-1875), by contrast, showed more of a penchant for romantic moralizing in works such as Herd of Buffalo (c. 1862, Denver Art Museum). His message, which he shared with the earlier painter of American Indians, George Catlin (1796-1872), was that the ubiquitous bison of the prairies would soon be extinct.

In the 1840s a new symbol of the United States had emerged: the mountain man of the West. Recognized for their independence and enterprise, these figures were quintessential personifications of the quest during the Polk era to extend American control over the entire continent. Painters such as Charles Deas and William Ranney celebrated the mountain man's ascendancy in the early 1840s with paintings like Long Jakes (Fig. 8), and his unceremonious demise the following decade (occasioned by changing tastes in fashion which led to the demise of the beaver hat) in The Wounded Trapper (Fig. 9). Both artists drew liberally from the literature of the day, but each had experienced the West firsthand and had direct knowledge of the type of people they were transforming into national heroes.

 

 

Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) Estes Park, Long's Peak, 1877, Oil on Canvas, 62 x 98, Denver Public Library, Western History and Genealogy Department, Fig 11

 

Following the Civil War Americans once again looked to the West to provide a symbol of national identity and unity, this time in the region's magnificent landscapes. Two of the most heralded artists of the day, Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt, painted scenes that were at once redemptive, such as Moran's Mount of the Holy Cross (Fig. 10), and monumental, such as Bierstadt's Estes Park, Long's Peak (Fig. 11). The public's reverence of iconic western landscape imagery remained strong well into the 1890s.

With the generation that followed Bierstadt and Moran, the pendulum swung back to finding in the West a human figure who could represent the American spirit, and the mountain man of two generations past became the cowboy of the new century. Somewhat more complex as a symbol than his predecessor, the cowboy was in one interpretation an epic male who dominated nature and tamed the frontier, as in Remington's Broncho Buster (Fig. 6), and, in an opposing version, a freewheeling carouser whose contempt for civilization was untempered by any sense of humanity, as in A Dude's Welcome by Olaf Seltzer (1877-1957) (1909, private collection). Both interpretations have enjoyed lasting resonance with American audiences.

 

Charles M. Russell (1864-1926) In the Enemy's Country, 1921, Oil on Canvas, 24 x 36, Denver Art Museum, gift of the Magness family in memory of Betsy Magness, Fig 12

 

In the work of at least one prominent artist of the early twentieth century, Charles M. Russell, the American Indian also reemerged as an emblem of the American saga. Many of Russell's images of the Northern Plains Indians revealed a sense of passing, suggesting that the West was slipping into the pages of history. His painting In the Enemy's Country (Fig. 12) is exemplary. The figures, while commanding in presence, are cast in shadow. The backdrop, an opalescent Montana sky, hints at reverie rather than the present tense. It was a lament brimming with reverence for, rather than indignation about, the Indian's role as a symbol of the American West. Russell was quite nearly a lone voice out west in his time for such sentiments.

 

Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945) Gunfight, 1916, Oil on Canvas, 33.5 x 24.625, Denver Art Museum, Harmsen collection, Fig 14

 

The popular illustrators of Russell's day typically were somewhat less sensitive, employing popular, sensationalized perceptions about the West, as seen in the brutal Gunfight by Newell Convers Wyeth (Fig. 14). Pictures like this, produced in collaboration with overwrought narratives, helped create the notion that the West was a place where violence was the only way to resolve conflict. Yet there were many other aspects of western life besides bloodshed that commanded the attention of artists and the public. Thomas Eakins's Cowboy Singing (Fig. 15), for example, represents the antithesis of Wyeth's view. In this canvas, a cowboy uses music as a means to alleviate the loneliness of his solitary existence, singing rather than shooting his way through his troubles. Cowboy songs, often laments about lost love or a bygone day, were entering the canon of American music as a novel vernacular art form in the 1880s and 1890s. Eakins celebrated that moment.

 

Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) Cowboy Singing, 1892, Oil on Canvas, 24 x 20, Denver Art Museum and the Aschutz Collection, purchased in honor of Peter H. Hassrick and by exchange from funds from 1999 Collectors' Choice, Sharon Magness, Mr. and Mrs. William D. Hewit, Carl and Lisa Williams, Estelle Rae Wolf - Flowe Foundation, and the T. Edward and Tullah Hanley collection, Fig 15

 

Both Wyeth and Eakins traveled west during their careers and were inspired, for a while at least, by the things they saw and the experiences they had. But another group of artists who went west found that they could not leave, either physically or spiritually, and that the impact of the place was not ephemeral. These were the painters who formed or joined the Taos Society of Artists in the second decade of the twentieth century. For them, the people and atmosphere of New Mexico proved so compelling that it became their home as well as their muse.

 

 

E. Irving Couse (1866-1936) Crouching Indian by a Fire, c. 1910, Oil on Canvas, 11.375 x 15.375, Denver Art Museum, Collectors' Choice benefit fund, Fig 13

 

Many of the Taos painters worked for the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad Company, and so their works promoted what their patron wanted to portray: a Southwest that was vanishing, exotic, inviting, quiet, accessible, and safe. For some of those painters, their vision of the land and its native people (both Pueblo Indians and Hispanics) assumed an idealized character. Artists like E. Irving Couse presented American Indians exactly as the railroad wanted the public to envision them, as timeless residents of an extraordinary world that was colored by reverie and a harmonious interplay of man and nature. In this scenario, the artist imposed his and or her and their sponsor's identity on the subject, as in Crouching Indian by a Fire (Fig. 13). Counterposed with this interpretation were paintings by Walter Ufer (1876-1936) such as From Winter Pasture (c. 1925, Denver Art Museum), which addressed the realities of American Indian life in Taos, just as Hennings did, and afforded the subject of the work his own identity, common and unromantic though it may have been.

The Denver Art Museum's expansion of its western galleries attests to an institutional pledge to find new insight into the art of the West. The museum has accepted the challenge of two generations of enthusiasm for a better, more balanced understanding of why the West mattered culturally and how the region's art fits within the larger canon of American art.

 

1 The Whitney was added to an existing institution, the Buffalo Bill Museum, which had been founded in 1917 and opened in Cody in 1927. In 1969 the Whitney Gallery and the Buffalo Bill Museum were combined into one building and given a new name, the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. 

2 For the catalogue of the Denver Art Museum's first western art exhibition, see Royal B. Hassrick, Building the West (Denver Art Museum, Denver, 1955). 

3 Harold McCracken, Western Americana Art from the Collection of William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody (Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyo., 1966), p. 3. 

4 Peter H. Hassrick, The Way West: Art of Frontier America (Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1977), p. 8. 

5 Michael Edward Shapiro and Peter H. Hassrick, Frederic Remington: The Masterworks (Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1988), pp. 12-13. 

6 The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920,ed. William H. Truettner (Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, Washington, 1991), p. vii. 

7 Quoted in Alexander Phimister Proctor, Alexander Phimister Proctor, Sculptor in Buckskin: An Autobiography, ed. Hester Elizabeth Proctor (University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1971), p. 184. 

8 William H. Truettner, "Old West Meets New Art History: Some Reasons Why the Dust Hasn't Settled," in Peter Hassrick et al., Redrawing Boundaries: Perspectives on Western American Art (Institute of Western American Art, Denver Art Museum, Denver, 2007), p. 43.

 

PETER H. HASSRICK is the director emeritus of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art at the Denver Art Museum.

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