Art
“THE COMPELLING FRONTIER”
Selections from the John A. and Margaret Hill Collection of American Western ArtThrough Dec. 31 at Cheekwood
When Cheekwood finds itself between new shows, one of its alternatives is to reach into its permanent collection. The last few months have been one of those in-between periods, so the museum is showing its John A. and Margaret Hill Collection of American Western Art through the end of December. The Hills donated this collection in 1991 and 1994, and it contains work by many of the major artists in the genre, especially those associated with New Mexico like Oscar Berninghaus, Eanger Irving Couse, Ernest Blumenschein, Gustave Baumann and Walter Ufer. The exhibit does include one piece by Frederic Remington, but outside of him most regular gallery-goers will not recognize many of the names—Western Art is a genre form that stands stubbornly outside the main currents of the art world.
A Golden Blaze Sheldon Parsons, “Glory of the Aspens”
American Western Art is realistic and figurative to the core. It usually lacks cynicism or ambiguity, and does not shy away from images viewers may see as clichés. Cowboys stop for chow, a scout leads a group of settlers’ wagons, Indians walk their horses through a dramatic canyon. Judged from a conventional perspective, some of these pieces are better than others. Baumann’s woodblock prints create a sense of architectural and geological massiveness within small space using a limited range of deep colors. Blumenschein establishes a strong sense of drama and movement in a gouache-and-ink drawing of Rising Wolf that has the running warrior emerging from the shadows of a wash of ink.
The collection includes works that exemplify classical styles within the Western genre, such as Gerald Cassady’s small oil landscape that uses an American Impressionist style and palette to depict the clear air and tough vegetation of dry range land. The dryness and intense light of the Western lands also come out in Ufer’s painting of the plaza at the Isleta Pueblo, one of several pieces here that draw on the remarkable architecture of the indigenous settlements of New Mexico. Other pieces work variations on the cowboy life, like Theodore van Soelen’s “Cowboy’s Day Off,” in which a couple of riders come into a neat little frontier settlement with its covered wooden sidewalks, or Harvey Johnson’s “Chowtime in Montana,” a scene of men resting around the chuck wagon.
Most of the works date from the early and middle 20th century, meaning they were contemporaneous with developments like Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. This was the sort of art that critic Clement Greenberg contrasted with avant-garde culture in his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in 1939. The Western genre marked out space as a cultural alternative to whatever else was going on at the time in cities, in radical circles, in Bohemia. When I see Western Art, my first thought is that it’s art that would have pleased my conservative grandfather. He was born in the 19th century, saw most of the 20th and now has joined the Church triumphant in the hereafter. He lived his life in Nebraska, mostly in Lincoln, a small town that lies in between Chicago and Denver in most significant ways: geographically, economically, culturally. To him this sort of expression represented what art ought to be: a picture of something you can identify, and consistent with decent values of patriotism, hard work, soberness, strength and modesty.
I assume my grandfather would have approved of John Hill. Very successful in business, he was one of the early leaders of HCA. According to descriptions of the collection, Hill valued Western Art because of his belief in the myth of the American West. As the curators at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Museum put it, that was a myth of “self-reliance and hardy individualism, of reaching for the ever-expanding horizon.” We now know the history of the West is much richer than that; revisionist historians have undercut the myth with facts like the consistent role of government support in building Western fortunes and the preeminence of economic motives. As historian Patricia Nelson Limerick puts it, “If Hollywood wanted to capture the emotional center of Western history, its movies would be about real estate. John Wayne would have been neither a gunfighter nor a sheriff, but a surveyor, speculator or claims lawyer.” Chinatown, with its plot turning on water rights, is the ultimate Western movie.
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Drama and Movement Ernest Blumenschein, “Rising Wolf”
Western Art’s seemingly straightforward myth runs into trouble from a more complicated ethics embedded in its images. You can see the tension in the handling of Native Americans, one of the stock subjects of the genre. George Catlin, the 19th century artist famous for images of Native Americans based on his trips into the Missouri River basin, is represented here with two contemporary reproductions of his prints. One of these shows two views of an Assiniboine chief, Wi-Jun-Jon. In the first, with the caption “Going to Washington,” he stands in full tribal dress in front of the Capitol; in the second, captioned “Returning Home,” he is decked out in a military uniform, a top hat and white gloves, smoking a cigar and carrying an umbrella and fan—a comic dandy. The viewer has to decide whether Catlin plays the Assiniboine for a joke, or sees in him a tragic transformation. The view of the original Americans as fools sneaks into Henry Balink’s portrait of Little Bear, a wizened face buried in a headdress of feathers fanned out like a peacock’s tail. It is extremely difficult for European Americans to treat the members of their conquered peoples with a full measure of humanity.
Even with the genre’s self-sabotaging qualities, it doesn’t take much to remind you why these tropes on the Western experience are so compelling. In a painting by Sheldon Parsons, “Glory of the Aspens,” golden trees flank a curving dirt roadway, with a ridge in purple and orange tones rising behind them. I recognize the scene. During a fall trip to Alaska, I saw aspens burst out across the base of a small ridge, and my heart raced. They charged up the landscape, gave it a brilliant energy. As close as Scooter Libby’s purple-prose love letter to Judith Miller came to ruining aspens for me, even he couldn’t take away my memory of the golden blaze along that ridge and the trees popping up among the spruce all over the landscape. I understand why Parsons wanted to paint the trees. What better aim than to capture the visual joy of those trees, to try to hold onto the sensation and communicate it?
This quest is of course futile. An oil painting can only point dimly to the full range of sensations that you have in the scene. Futility characterizes much of the Western Art genre: the myths fall apart the second they come into contact with the historical record, or with other artists’ experiments with the same images, as in Brokeback Mountain. The genre’s futility is a perfectly conservative one, the endless search to put genies back into bottles and turn back the clock.
The futility of Western Art pushes us toward a view that art can only thrive if it exists within a broader aesthetic and cultural context. Greenberg, with an orthodoxy that would be confirmed for a time by the exceptional clarity of the Abstract Expressionist moment, argued that avant-garde artists “derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in.” Even if his advocacy for nonrepresentational art was quickly outflanked by Pop Art’s alternate radicalism, his point still held: art must be self-aware of its own genealogy, history and structures as part of the whole world of art works. The genre of Western Art suffers because it refuses to acknowledge the full richness of its own forms and its own subject matter.