19th century AD

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1997 by Wendell Garrett

Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.... I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west.

Henry David Thoreau, "Walking," Atlantic Monthly, 1862

When the historian Frederick Jackson Turner spoke of the closing of the American frontier in 1893, he was convinced that "American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West." Beginning with the Lewis and Clark expedition overland to the Pacific Ocean and back in 1805 and 1806 and ending in 1901, when Theodore Roosevelt became president, the West was a landscape of dreams and desires.

Sometimes a metaphor, the American West is a place millions can visualize. It serves as popular myth and national symbol. Icons of the frontier are a collage of Texas cattle-ranch hands, mountain men, boom-town prostitutes, families trekking overland, California gold miners, Plains Indians, and cavalry soldiers.

Hollywood's West is almost always a dry place dotted with sagebrush that is fixed at a moment distantly resembling the 1870s or 1880s. In this setting an armed cowboy on his horse rides past the false-fronted buildings of a town where he will enact the eternal stuggle between good and evil while defending the national code of honor. No great thinker, this champion of the open range was guided by a few simple principles: He would always right a wrong, save a lady in distress, and defend the underdog. Earlier frontiers - the West of Daniel Boone or the Canadian voyageurs, the prairie farmers or Mississippi slaves - have no such hold over the popular imagination.

Our western past is emphatically visual as well as literary. The earliest Anglo-American artists to work in the West traveled ahead of the line of settlement and thus provided instructive and accurate visual reports to a distant audience in the East. These depictions were characterized by a didactic tone and realistic style and were essentially images of men and animals in unspoiled natural settings. Then, around 1890, nostalgic sentimentality began to dominate as the West of the frontier began to fade into history.

The rule that art devoted to the American West excludes women, both as subjects and artists, has one grand exception: Georgia O'Keeffe. She is the only woman included in most representative collections of western art, and one of the few western artists represented in most collections of modern American art. O'Keeffe has been called a "visionary realist," a description that far from setting her apart, makes her the perfect exemplar of the western artist.