Twentieth-Century Paintings and Sculpture in the new Amon Carter Museum

In 1975 The Magazine ANTIQUES devoted an issue to Texas institutions of regional history and art, affording the still young Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth a chance to show the highlights of its collection to a national readership. [*] The selection of objects in that article focused on historical paintings with western themes, especially works by Frederic Remington (1861-1909) and Charles M. Russell (1864- 1926). Acquired by the museum's benefactor, Amon G. Carter Sr. (1879-1955), these works had prompted the founding of the museum. When the museum opened in 1961, in a classically inspired pavilion designed by Philip Johnson (1906--), Mr. Carter's collection became the foundation of a public enterprise that he had envisioned and provided for with a legacy at his death.

To build a context for its extraordinary holdings of Remington and Russell, the museum determined to present works expressive of America's enduring fascination with the western frontier. "Westering America" was the appropriate title for the 1975 ANTIQUES overview of the museum's collection. Westering defines an essential American impulse toward expansion across the continent, in which the expectations of the migrants were shaped in no small measure by landscape views painted by the adventuresome artists who were always in the vanguard of this advance.

From its founding, the museum has been positioned to build a comprehensive collection of works by early painters of the West, which has fostered both public appreciation of art with western themes and new scholarly and cultural approaches to interpreting the history of the American West. The works in the collection by Seth Eastman, John Mix Stanley, Alfred Jacob Miller, Carl Wimar, Thomas Moran, Worthington Whittredge, and other early painters of the West, are rightly considered landmarks of American art.

The idea of westering has had wide-ranging implications for the development of the collection beyond landscapes of western scenery, for it suggests the contrasts between urban and rural or frontier experiences. It also denotes the rise of cultural centers and important regional schools of art beyond those established in the eighteenth century along the Atlantic Coast.

A broad panorama of nineteenth-century art can enhance our understanding of a nation in flux, which the builders of the museum's collection embraced from the outset. Early acquisitions included mystical works by the landscape painter Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), among them the disquieting Thunder Storm Over Narragansett Bay of 1868 and the spare view of haystacks, Marshfield Meadows, Massachusetts of the 1870s. They also included trompe-l'oeil still lifes by John Frederick Peto (1854-1907) and William Michael Harnett (1848-1892), whose careful, even devotional, studies of well-worn objects convey a sense of one's tenuous ties to the past in the rapidly changing culture of the late nineteenth century Crossing the Pasture by Winslow Homer (1836-1910) of 1871-1872 was purchased in 1976. This charming scene in rural Hurley, New York, depicts a world apart from the urban life of the artist and most of his patrons in the 1870s. Today we recognize Heade's Thunder Storm, Homer's Crossing the Pasture, and Harnett 's Ease as defining the essential spirit of their time. These are paintings that established the Amon Carter Museum as a repository of nineteenth-century masterworks that has grown to include Swimming of 1885 by Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) and a portrait of Alice Vanderbilt Shepard (1874-1950) of 1888 by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925).

The richness of the museum's nineteenth-century holdings is a testament to the foresight of the first trustees and first director, Mitchell A. Wilder (1913-1979). Another remarkable, but little-known story is the museum's collection of twentieth-century art, which has been pursued from the outset and has grown over time.

Now a greatly expanded museum has reopened in the splendid new structure that Philip Johnson and his partner Alan Ritchie designed as a backdrop to Johnson's 1961 building. Visitors will discover there an American art collection far more intriguing than that presented in the pages of this magazine a quarter century ago. It is a collection that documents the evolution of modern art movements in this country through the first decades of the twentieth century.

During the two years that the museum was closed for construction, the staff made significant acquisitions in all areas, particularly in early twentieth-century painting and sculpture. The shift to abstraction by those early modern artists was as revealing to their audience in the early twentieth century as the discovery of a sublime western vista was to the expeditionary artists and their followers in the nineteenth century. Now half of the exhibition space for the permanent collection is devoted to twentieth-century paintings, prints, drawings, sculpture, and photography (the last now numbering nearly 225,000 items and extending to contemporary work).