Whittled at, mocked, its history rewritten, the American West has taken a battering in recent years. The myth of the 19th century frontier—brave mule skinners and noble cavalrymen bringing civilization across the Great Plains—is dying out like the buffalo. This discovery, leaving a painful hole in America’s stock of self-images, helps explain the recent surge of interest in 19th century frontier art. The latest evidence of it is a delightful show called “The American West,” which drew crowds to the Los Angeles County Museum through the spring and will open June 8 at the De Young Museum in San Francisco.
Between 1820 and 1900, scores of artists went west by wagon, railroad or stage: painters, illustrators, draftsmen. It was, as has often been said, one of the crucial experiences in American culture, and in their work one sees the ideal of Arcadia being identified with an actual landscape. The West was not only a place but a state of imagination, which could invest almost any tract of virgin country between the Appalachians and the Rockies with a kind of epic innocence: nature unspoiled, inhabited by prelapsarian man. One itinerant painter, Worthington Wittredge, met the legendary scout Kit Carson in Santa Fe in 1866. “Nature had made a deep impression on this man’s mind,” Wittredge observed, “and I could not but think of him standing alone on top of a great mountain far away from all human contact, worshiping in his way a grand effect of nature until it entered into his soul and made him a silent and thought ful human being.”
The themes of European romanticism gave form to, even imposed them selves on, the vision of the West: the vast “sanctuary of nature” suited the encyclopedic dialogue between nature and culture that animated the significant painting and writing of the 19th century. Like the Swiss Alps, the West proffered images to sate the most grandiose appetite. Thus paintings like Thomas Hill’s Yosemite Valley, 1889, were much in demand: big studio pieces, full of beetling crags and waterfalls, and filled with a liberating sense of the “otherness” of nature.
Paradise. The most accomplished romantic, and by far the best American painter to go west, was the German-born Albert Bierstadt, who joined an expedition to the Rockies in 1859 and later worked up a series of big landscapes from his sketches. Estes Park, Colorado, 1869, is a magnificently rhetorical painting, but the hyperbole was constrained by Bierstadt’s lyric exactness of eye as it roved across the calm lake and the billowing mist and crags behind. Such, the brush insists, are the lineaments of an earthly paradise.
An interest in anthropological description ran parallel with this taste for the sublime. In 1824 George Catlin saw some Indians in Philadelphia and determined that “nothing short of the loss of my life [a possibility] shall prevent me from visiting their country and be coming their historian.” With immense energy he set out to chronicle every tribe, producing up to six oils a day. They vary greatly in quality, as one might expect. But at his best — as in Head Chief of the Iowas—Catlin’s agile drawing combined with his near worship of Indian ways in images that, in later frontier art, could not be equaled for directness and compassion. Beginning as a pictorial journalist, he transcended his limits. Ironically, this was never true of the later genre painters whose work commands such inflated prices: Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. Their work has some historical interest — though contemporary photos have much more — but it is negligible as art. No whit of pictorial sensibility enlivens Remington’s slickly painted scenes of frontier life, with their walrus-whiskered rustics poking guns at one another or staring into gaudy tin sunsets from the knobby back of a cayuse: they are what they aimed to be, illustrations for magazines like Collier’s, nothing more. The earlier artists had, at least, bequeathed a sense of immanence, of epic landscape and idealism to later American art; Remington and Russell left only a vulgar legacy of bronze broncos. With them, the Decline of the West was accomplished—though the nostalgia rides on.
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