Impressions From Nature

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 18, 2001 | by Stephen Goode

An ambitious exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington proves that paintings of the American West are an integral part of the national artistic heritage.

It was an accident that landed New York artists Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips in Taos in 1898 and turned them into major painters of the American Southwest. The two men were on their way to Mexico to do some sketching when their wagon broke down near the northern New Mexico town. They took the opportunity to have a good look at what they found around them.

"I was getting my own impressions from nature, seeing it for the first time with my own eyes," Blumenschein later recalled. "Everywhere I looked, I saw paintings perfectly organized ready for paint." Another time he added, "The color, the effective character of the landscape, the drama of the vast spaces, the superb beauty and serenity of the hills stirred me deeply."

Blumenschein wasn't the first artist moved by the beauty of the American West, just one of the more eloquent. Throughout the 19th century, painters picked up their sketchbooks, oils and brushes and turned their talents to the frontier. The Plains, the Rockies, the vast deserts -- no area was left untouched. One attraction was the very size of the region and its pristine state. The American Indians were another lure, and a powerful one: "noble savages" untamed and untouched by the corruptions of civilization (so it was thought), who lived in nature and wore spectacular (and very paintable) outfits of feathers and furs.

The Anschutz Collection -- assembled by Phillip Anschutz of Denver -- is one of the world's great collections of the art of the American West. Seventy-five of its finest works (out of the 650 that make up the collection) currently are on display at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. The earliest are three depicting Mandan tribal ceremonies, painted in 1832 by George Catlin. The most recent dates from 1972, a blurred portrait of an American Indian by Fritz Scholder, intended to remind us of the Indians' ambiguous place in American history. There also are works by Georgia O'Keefe, John Sloan, Jozef Bakos, Childe Hassam and George Bellows -- an impressive list of American artists.

The exhibition sets out to "make the case for art of the West as an integral part of the mainstream of American art history," in the words of curator Joan Carpenter Troccoli of the Denver Art Museum. Indeed, the works on display represent a wide variety of approaches to art -- from romantic landscapes to cubist portrayals of Indian dances. In a very real sense, this is our -- everyone's -- art; it isn't narrowly regional. Viewers can't help but leave with an appreciation of the diversity of American artistic endeavor and its high quality.

Phillips is represented in the exhibit by The Santero (c. 1918), a touching portrait of an elderly maker of "santos," or images of holy persons. The extraordinary Blumenschein has three works: The Peacemaker (1913), a group portrait of three adult Indians and a child; Bend in the River (1941), a vivid landscape; and Sangre de Cristo Mountains (1926), his most stunning picture -- and perhaps the best in the show.

Sangre de Cristo Mountains is divided three ways: The lower section depicts a religious procession with a figure bearing a cross; the middle, bathed in bright sunlight, captures a spread of adobe homes; and the top presents stately mountains rolling into the distance as they gain in height and disappear into mists and clouds. The painting powerfully conveys the beauty of the Southwest, but it also says much about the role of religion in this rugged region. Blumenschein's landscape projects the profound piety of people in a religious procession. Here, nature isn't just aesthetics; rather, it's the medium where people live everyday life that, at times, was very hard.

Thomas Moran's The Cliffs of Green River (1887) looks at landscape very differently. In Moran's work, the grandeur of nature is there to be admired -- the three Indians on horse-back in the painting are doing just that, and those of us looking at the painting join them, overawed by the magnificence of the scene.

The exhibition includes numerous action paintings -- this is, after all, the West of vaqueros, Indians, hunters and wild animals -- none more poignant than Frederic Remington's, A Cold Morning on the Range (c. 1904). It is at once a celebration of the region's greatest icon, the cowboy, and an elegy for the Old West. At the painting's center, a cowboy rides a bucking horse. In the distance, a covered wagon fades into the landscape. Wrote Remington, "I knew that the wild riders and vacant land were about to vanish forever -- and the more I considered the subject, the bigger the forever loomed.... I saw the living, breathing end of three centuries of smoke and dust and sweat."

The exhibition closes July 30.

Dignity and Grandeur of a Land and Its People

Native Land: Photographs From the Robert G. Lewis Collection," a second exhibition now at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, includes 61 images of the Old West assembled by Robert Lewis, a Denver attorney who specializes in natural-resource and energy law.