The American West - traveling exhibition: 'The American West: Out of Myth, into Reality' - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, March, 2000 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

For slightly more than a decade the American West as depicted by nineteenth-and early twentieth-century travelers, explorers, and artists has been the focus of a number of exhibitions and heated scholarly debate. At issue is whether or not those works are accurate depictions of the landscape, Indians, settlers, and flora and fauna, or whether they are romantic interpretations.

The most recent exploration of this topic is a traveling exhibition of more than 120 paintings and sculptures co-organized by the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson and the Trust for Museum Exhibitions in Washington, D.C. The show, entitled The American West: Out of Myth, into Reality, remains on view at the Mississippi Museum until June 6. Peter H. Hassrick, a noted scholar of western American art, is the guest curator of the show and the principal author of its catalogue.

Hassrick notes three aspects of the myth of the American West that were embraced by artists. The first is that progress, or westward expansion, was under stood to be a positive concept. The second was the notion of the West as virgin wilderness, or a Garden of Eden, in which Americans in search of a better life and greater wealth could be amply rewarded. The third aspect of the myth was the West as a masculine domain, where mountain men and cowboys could operate outside the law and without social restrictions. Hassrick has assigned four chronological stages, each lasting about one generation, to the development of the West: the period of exploration, the frontier experience, the celebration of the grandeur of the landscape, and finally the almost total extinction of indigenous people and animals.

Following Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's initial foray into the West in 1803 and 1804, many government sponsored expeditions included artists to record flora and fauna as well as the appearance and customs of the Indians. During the mid-nineteenth century artists began to depict life on the frontier in arresting genre paintings that gave heroic status to mountain men, hunters, and Indians, who were then depicted as noble savages.

The next generation of artists included such seminal figures as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. Captivated by the grandeur of the landscape, they emphasized the potential of the West, which, by the 1880s, they reinterpreted on canvases that lament the loss of many of the West's most arresting features--the virgin territory, the Indians, and the buffalo. The same lament was perpetuated by the next generation of painters, the best known being Frederic Remington, who also decried the exploitation of the natural resources that once abounded in the region. His numerous depictions of cowboys at work, in combat, or at rest, many of which were published as magazine illustrations, did as much to create a romantic image of these legendary figures as document their way of life.

Early modernists were lured to the West between about 1910 and 1930 in search of entirely different and dramatic scenery, the singular light of the region, and new subject matter. During these decades artists influenced by impressionism and abstraction congregated in places such as Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico, painting pen etrating portraits of Indians and landscapes featuring endless skies.

The catalogue of the exhibition maybe obtained from the Mississippi Museum of Art.