Go West! Representations of the American Frontier
Saturday, January 14, 2012 - Sunday, September 23, 2012
The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin presents "Go West! Representations of the American Frontier," an exhibition exploring the pioneering American West as both a physical terrain and an idea deeply rooted in the American psyche. On view January 14 through October 14, 2012, the exhibition features paintings, sculptures and works on paper made in, and about, the American West by Henry Farny, Charles Russell, Maynard Dixon, and other artists from The Blanton’s celebrated C.R. Smith Collection of Art of the American West, in the largest installation of this collection in over a decade.
Works of related content from the museum’s holdings by Jerry Bywaters, Frederic Remington and others, and a selection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century American prints supplement the installation, along with borrowed works from the university’s Harry Ransom Center and Briscoe Center for American History.
“Go West! presents works from The Blanton’s collection by some of the most illustrious artists of the period such as Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Remington,” states Blanton director Simone Wicha. “Visitors will learn about their lives, their artistic styles, the historical moments and subjects they depict, and come away with an appreciation of the rich heritage of the great American West.”
"Go West!" is organized thematically and chronologically, with investigations of the country’s westward expansion in the nineteenth century, including: contested territories and the ensuing battles of the U.S. Army cavalry, representations of Native Americans, cowboys and ranchers, ideas of Manifest Destiny, the industrialization and urbanization of the land, and the ever-changing American landscape as witnessed and portrayed by artists living and working in the Western United States.
A second installment of "Go West!" provides a twentieth and twenty-first century response to and interpretation of the Western genre. Opening late April 2012, the presentation includes works in multiple mediums by Jeremy Blake, Ed Ruscha, Lordy Rodriquez, Luis Jimenez among others.
This exhibition is organized by the Blanton Museum of Art. Generous funding for the exhibition is provided by the T. J. Brown and C. A. Lupton Foundation and the Amon G. Carter Foundation with additional support from Mary Ann and Larry Faulkner, Ginni and Richard Mithoff, Kay M. Onstead, Dana and Gene Powell, and the Taconic Charitable Foundation.
Gallery TextWorks of related content from the museum’s holdings by Jerry Bywaters, Frederic Remington and others, and a selection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century American prints supplement the installation, along with borrowed works from the university’s Harry Ransom Center and Briscoe Center for American History.
“Go West! presents works from The Blanton’s collection by some of the most illustrious artists of the period such as Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Remington,” states Blanton director Simone Wicha. “Visitors will learn about their lives, their artistic styles, the historical moments and subjects they depict, and come away with an appreciation of the rich heritage of the great American West.”
"Go West!" is organized thematically and chronologically, with investigations of the country’s westward expansion in the nineteenth century, including: contested territories and the ensuing battles of the U.S. Army cavalry, representations of Native Americans, cowboys and ranchers, ideas of Manifest Destiny, the industrialization and urbanization of the land, and the ever-changing American landscape as witnessed and portrayed by artists living and working in the Western United States.
A second installment of "Go West!" provides a twentieth and twenty-first century response to and interpretation of the Western genre. Opening late April 2012, the presentation includes works in multiple mediums by Jeremy Blake, Ed Ruscha, Lordy Rodriquez, Luis Jimenez among others.
This exhibition is organized by the Blanton Museum of Art. Generous funding for the exhibition is provided by the T. J. Brown and C. A. Lupton Foundation and the Amon G. Carter Foundation with additional support from Mary Ann and Larry Faulkner, Ginni and Richard Mithoff, Kay M. Onstead, Dana and Gene Powell, and the Taconic Charitable Foundation.
The Artist's Journey: The Hudson River School in the West
The paintings featured in this section were made by artists associated with the Hudson River School, a loose affiliation of painters who revered nature's magnificence and found a sense of spirituality in its stillness. Though the Hudson River school was centered primarily in New York state and nearby New England, many of its artists traveled west for a variety of reasons. Some, like Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and Worthington Whittredge, were hired as surveyors or draftsmen for government-sponsored expeditions; Alfred Jacob Miller recorded "visual souvenirs" for a fur-trading enterprise. Other artists, in response to urbanization in the East, sought new vistas to paint in the yet unspoiled terrain of the West. These artists returned home with sketchbooks filled with studies from which they produced paintings that offered audiences a first look at sites such as Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon.
Chief among the Hudson River School's concerns was the careful observation of the effects of weather, season, and time of day on the landscape, with the intent of capturing nature's ever-changing and elusive face. Artists of the Hudson River school sought to preserve in their paintings the pure, untouched wilderness, itself a symbol of America's identity as a young country. Indeed, the artists' public acclaim and the power of the landscape images they created contributed to the eventual establishment of the National Park System. Yosemite, one such site, is depicted here in three views by Thomas Hill, complemented by photographs by Calreton Watkins. Both artists returned to Yosemite many times; their representations heloed make national icons of the site's distinctive landscape features.
Works by Hill and Whittredge, in addition to those of seventy other artists associated with the Hudson River school, are featured in American Scenery: Different Views in Hudson River School Painting, on view downstairs in the Butler Family Foundation Gallery, February 26–May 13, 2012.
Land of the Free? Representing Native Americans
All of the works featured in this room created after the Indian Appropriations Act of 1851. a congressional act that designated funds to relocate Native American tribes living in the West onto reservation lands. By 1871, Congress no longer recognized any group of Native Americans as an independent nation, and the U.S. government actively sought to control native populations whose territories bordered the settlements of white Americans. The government sanctioned the wholesale slaughter of buffalo–the main food source of many Native American tribes–by the U.S. Army and the railroad industry, which brought the animal to brink of extinction by 1884.
This section of the exhibition takes its title from the William Gilbert Gaul painting Land of the Free and presents scenes of Native American experience as interpreted by Gaul, Albert Bierstadt, Henry F. Farny, Ransome Gillet Holdredge, and Joseph Henry Sharp. Each of these artists, save Bierstadt and Holdredge, spent time among Native Americans with the intention of creating sensitive and accurate portrayals. There is no evidence of tension or aggression between artist and subject in these works. Instead, Native American daily life is depicted as docile and unthreatening, supporting the Department of the Interior's 1890 Census claim that "Indians" were hardly the "warlike savages" they were once reputed to be. In many of these works, Native Americans are portrayed as tragic, solitary figures whose solemn gazes acknowledge their dwindling populations.
Home on the Range
From boomtowns to ghost towns, homesteads to suburban developments, the final section of Go West! explores the imprint of human habitation on the American landscape. By the mid-1930s, when the earliest work in this section was made, industry and urbanization had irrevocably altered the wild, virginal landscape the Hudson River school artists encountered less than a century before. Following the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, highway builders installed a network of paved roads that connected the entire nation by the 1880s. Great expanse of prairie and field were plowed and furrowed with crops to feed the country's expanding population. In the early twentieth century, after the oil boom hit, derricks became a common visual feature across the skyline. America's landscape came to be valued less for its visual beauty than the agricultural, mineral, and energy resources that would fuel the growing nation.
Paintings by Lafayette Maynard Dixon and Ogden Pleisnner and a print by Blanche McVeigh investigate the phenomenon of ghost towns: former boomtowns that were quickly built and abandoned when the land failed to yield resources or those resources were depleted–gold in the case of all three of these art works. A rotating suite of works on paper by members of the Dallas Nine, a group of painters and printmakers interested in establishing a distinctly Texan aesthetic, chronicles the destruction of the wilderness and construction of suburban developments. A lithograph by Merritt Mauzey documents the documents the process of road building, while works by other artists record the appearance of new types of housing–tract houses and trailer homes–in the landscape. Jerry Bywaters, James Brooks, and J. Jay McVicker focus on oil drilling. Though Bywaters is the only artist to include human figures–two young women who stand at a crossroads within a bleak and exploited terrain–the presence of the human population is palpable in each artist's interpretation of the altered landscape.
Reimagining the Old West
By 1890, the U.S. Census announced the western frontier "closed" to further exploration and settlement. The census also reported that Native American populations had been reduced to half their former numbers, with the majority of remaining tribes living on federally established reservations. These statistics prompted the phasing out of the U.S. Cavalry, as the white settlements no longer required much protection from "Indian territories." Later, in the early part of the twentieth century, when automobiles began replacing horses as a primary means of transportation, artists Frederic Remington and Charles Schreyvogel glorified the former era, depicting the U.S. Cavalry at the height of dramatic action in epic battle scenes. Remington and Schreyvogel's paintings pay tribute to the mythology and legends of the West, embellishing historical reality or departing from it entirely for dramatic effect.
Like film, painting explored broad characterizations of western archetypes and gave form to subtle interpretations that complicate the legends and documentation of historical incidents. William Gilbert Gaul, another renowned painter of battle scenes, questions the assumed "us versus them" narrative in a rare painting that depicts a Native American working in collaboration with a fur-trapper and a cavalryman. And Narjot de Francheville's On the Warpath tells a story of conflict from the Native American perspective.
The Working Man's West
A man atop a horse-the cowboy-was also a frequent subject for Tom Lea, while for Frank Reaugh the longhorn cow was the West's true protagonist. Reaugh claimed that "no animal on earth has the beauty of the Texas steer." Included here is one pastel from Reaugh's series Twenty-Four Hours with the Herd that shows evidence of the artist's prolonged study of the anatomy, character, and habits of cattle and emphasizes harmony between cowboy, cattle, and the land. Lea depicts a herd attended by a cowboy emerging triumphantly from a trek across the expansive landscape.
The paintings featured in this section were made by artists associated with the Hudson River School, a loose affiliation of painters who revered nature's magnificence and found a sense of spirituality in its stillness. Though the Hudson River school was centered primarily in New York state and nearby New England, many of its artists traveled west for a variety of reasons. Some, like Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and Worthington Whittredge, were hired as surveyors or draftsmen for government-sponsored expeditions; Alfred Jacob Miller recorded "visual souvenirs" for a fur-trading enterprise. Other artists, in response to urbanization in the East, sought new vistas to paint in the yet unspoiled terrain of the West. These artists returned home with sketchbooks filled with studies from which they produced paintings that offered audiences a first look at sites such as Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon.
Chief among the Hudson River School's concerns was the careful observation of the effects of weather, season, and time of day on the landscape, with the intent of capturing nature's ever-changing and elusive face. Artists of the Hudson River school sought to preserve in their paintings the pure, untouched wilderness, itself a symbol of America's identity as a young country. Indeed, the artists' public acclaim and the power of the landscape images they created contributed to the eventual establishment of the National Park System. Yosemite, one such site, is depicted here in three views by Thomas Hill, complemented by photographs by Calreton Watkins. Both artists returned to Yosemite many times; their representations heloed make national icons of the site's distinctive landscape features.
Works by Hill and Whittredge, in addition to those of seventy other artists associated with the Hudson River school, are featured in American Scenery: Different Views in Hudson River School Painting, on view downstairs in the Butler Family Foundation Gallery, February 26–May 13, 2012.
Land of the Free? Representing Native Americans
All of the works featured in this room created after the Indian Appropriations Act of 1851. a congressional act that designated funds to relocate Native American tribes living in the West onto reservation lands. By 1871, Congress no longer recognized any group of Native Americans as an independent nation, and the U.S. government actively sought to control native populations whose territories bordered the settlements of white Americans. The government sanctioned the wholesale slaughter of buffalo–the main food source of many Native American tribes–by the U.S. Army and the railroad industry, which brought the animal to brink of extinction by 1884.
This section of the exhibition takes its title from the William Gilbert Gaul painting Land of the Free and presents scenes of Native American experience as interpreted by Gaul, Albert Bierstadt, Henry F. Farny, Ransome Gillet Holdredge, and Joseph Henry Sharp. Each of these artists, save Bierstadt and Holdredge, spent time among Native Americans with the intention of creating sensitive and accurate portrayals. There is no evidence of tension or aggression between artist and subject in these works. Instead, Native American daily life is depicted as docile and unthreatening, supporting the Department of the Interior's 1890 Census claim that "Indians" were hardly the "warlike savages" they were once reputed to be. In many of these works, Native Americans are portrayed as tragic, solitary figures whose solemn gazes acknowledge their dwindling populations.
Home on the Range
From boomtowns to ghost towns, homesteads to suburban developments, the final section of Go West! explores the imprint of human habitation on the American landscape. By the mid-1930s, when the earliest work in this section was made, industry and urbanization had irrevocably altered the wild, virginal landscape the Hudson River school artists encountered less than a century before. Following the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, highway builders installed a network of paved roads that connected the entire nation by the 1880s. Great expanse of prairie and field were plowed and furrowed with crops to feed the country's expanding population. In the early twentieth century, after the oil boom hit, derricks became a common visual feature across the skyline. America's landscape came to be valued less for its visual beauty than the agricultural, mineral, and energy resources that would fuel the growing nation.
Paintings by Lafayette Maynard Dixon and Ogden Pleisnner and a print by Blanche McVeigh investigate the phenomenon of ghost towns: former boomtowns that were quickly built and abandoned when the land failed to yield resources or those resources were depleted–gold in the case of all three of these art works. A rotating suite of works on paper by members of the Dallas Nine, a group of painters and printmakers interested in establishing a distinctly Texan aesthetic, chronicles the destruction of the wilderness and construction of suburban developments. A lithograph by Merritt Mauzey documents the documents the process of road building, while works by other artists record the appearance of new types of housing–tract houses and trailer homes–in the landscape. Jerry Bywaters, James Brooks, and J. Jay McVicker focus on oil drilling. Though Bywaters is the only artist to include human figures–two young women who stand at a crossroads within a bleak and exploited terrain–the presence of the human population is palpable in each artist's interpretation of the altered landscape.
Reimagining the Old West
By 1890, the U.S. Census announced the western frontier "closed" to further exploration and settlement. The census also reported that Native American populations had been reduced to half their former numbers, with the majority of remaining tribes living on federally established reservations. These statistics prompted the phasing out of the U.S. Cavalry, as the white settlements no longer required much protection from "Indian territories." Later, in the early part of the twentieth century, when automobiles began replacing horses as a primary means of transportation, artists Frederic Remington and Charles Schreyvogel glorified the former era, depicting the U.S. Cavalry at the height of dramatic action in epic battle scenes. Remington and Schreyvogel's paintings pay tribute to the mythology and legends of the West, embellishing historical reality or departing from it entirely for dramatic effect.
The legends of these battles persisted within the American popular imagination in part due to paintings like these; the romanticizing of the Old West in its final days was pervasive. In New York Schreyvogel saw The Buffalo Bill Wild West Show, a circus-like attraction that featured reenactments of famous western battles, which influenced him as much as trips he made west to sketch, take photographs, and gather the clothing, weaponry, and stories that gave his paintings their accuracy of detail. Remington, known for his battle scenes, never witnessed one while a correspondent in Arizona in the late 1880s. Instead, he spent time at the camp of the 7th Cavalry and drew his inspiration from their stories.
Hollywood played a key role in defining an aesthetic of the Old West. In his 1934 reimagining of the Thornburgh Battle-painted during the golden age of the Hollywood western-artist Frank Tenney Johnson employed a number of cinematic conventions, depicting cavalrymen in defensive positions warding off attack from Native Americans, who are portrayed as hostile aggressors. Hollywood also borrowed from painting, as when film director John Ford translated the compositions of Remington, Johnson, and Schreyvogel to the movie screen in films such as My Darling Clementine (1946) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and The Searchers (1956).
Like film, painting explored broad characterizations of western archetypes and gave form to subtle interpretations that complicate the legends and documentation of historical incidents. William Gilbert Gaul, another renowned painter of battle scenes, questions the assumed "us versus them" narrative in a rare painting that depicts a Native American working in collaboration with a fur-trapper and a cavalryman. And Narjot de Francheville's On the Warpath tells a story of conflict from the Native American perspective.
The Working Man's West
The cowboy is an integral figure to the history and mythology of the American West. Some artists whose paintings are featured in this room worked alongside cowboys, while those from later generations were more likely to encounter cowboys through popular images.
At age forty, William Robinson Leigh, an artist with a career as a magazine illustrator in New York, first ventured west on a commission from the Santa Fe Railroad. Leigh's cowboy represents an ideal; he manipulates a lariat while simultaneously riding a horse at full gallop and keeping an eye on a herd of stampeding cattle. In contrast, Charles Marion Russell's cowboy is portrayed in the midst of a blunder: his horse balances precariously on a rocky slope as a result of the cowboy having entangled his lasso on a steer. Russell, who was a cowboy, sheepherder, horse-wrangler, satirist, and storyteller in addition to being an artist, frequently portrayed the humorous misadventures of cowboy life in his work.
Artist Ray Rector, who also worked as a cowboy and was from a family of cattle farmers, set up a portrait studio in Stamford, Texas and proclaimed himself a "cowboy photographer." Rector visited nearby ranches with his Kodak Autograph camera to document daily life there, producing over 1,000 photographs in his lifetime. Nick Eggenhofer encountered the West more indirectly, through western pulp novels as a child in Bavaria; he later became one of the leading illustrators for these novels and magazines.
A man atop a horse-the cowboy-was also a frequent subject for Tom Lea, while for Frank Reaugh the longhorn cow was the West's true protagonist. Reaugh claimed that "no animal on earth has the beauty of the Texas steer." Included here is one pastel from Reaugh's series Twenty-Four Hours with the Herd that shows evidence of the artist's prolonged study of the anatomy, character, and habits of cattle and emphasizes harmony between cowboy, cattle, and the land. Lea depicts a herd attended by a cowboy emerging triumphantly from a trek across the expansive landscape.