TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/051391/0513400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.7 KB | 163 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 79

How the West Was Spun


A big, controversial show in Washington stirs revisions of
frontier art

By ROBERT HUGHES


    The first photograph in the catalog of "The West as
America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920," the
large and deeply interesting show now on view at Washington's
National Museum of American Art, has to be one of the funniest
ever seen in a museum. It is of Charles Schreyvogel, a
turn-of-the-century Wild West illustrator, painting in the open
air. His subject crouches alertly before him: a cowboy pointing
a six-gun. They are on the flat roof of an apartment building
in Hoboken, N.J. Such was the "authentic West" of Schreyvogel
and other painters like Frederic Remington and Charles Russell,
circa 1903.

    It is the right emblem for this show. Religious and
national myths are made, not born; their depiction in art
involves much staging, construction and editing, under the eye
of cultural agreement. Whatever the crucifixion of a Jew on a
knoll 2,000 years ago looked like, it wasn't Tintoretto. And the
American West of the 19th century was rarely what American
artists set out to make it seem.

    What they left, instead, is a foundation myth in paint and
stone. Its main character is God, the approving father, as
manifested in the landscape that he had created and that white
migrants were now taking for themselves. Its human actors are
frontier scouts and settlers, cavalrymen and trappers, and the
American Indians -- noble at first, then seen as degenerate
enemies of progress as the century went on and their resistance
grew, and finally (by the 1890s) turning into doomed phantoms.
Its landscapes are prodigious. Its stage material includes the
Conestoga wagon, the simple cabin, the tepee, the isolated fort,
the deep perspective V of the railroad -- and at the end, symbol
of absolute victory over nature, the California sequoia with a
road cut through its trunk.

    Among the painters of this myth were George Catlin, friend
of the explorer William Clark and indefatigable painter of
native tribes; George Caleb Bingham, that vigorous orderer of
American genre scenes; the landscapists Albert Bierstadt and
Thomas Moran; and a host of lesser figures, who also played
their part in the creation of a heroic imagery of national
conquest. And here the difficulty rises, for Americans still
wish to believe in the "historical" truth of their icons, which
is what such pictures have become.

    "The West as America" comprises hundreds of items --
paintings, sculpture, prints, photographs, caricatures -- and
is an enlightening exhibition, though not a consoling one. John
Wayne would have disapproved. The exhibition shows how the vast
exculpatory fiction of Manifest Destiny wound its way round the
facts of conquest and turned them into art. It therefore does
a valuable service, even in the banal aesthetic quality of much
of the work in it -- those earnest efforts of small, provincial
talents whose work would not be worth studying except for the
clarity with which it enshrines the obsessive themes of an
expansionist America.

    The American West of Hollywood was there in art, 70 years
before, in most of its shades of triumphalism and moral
uncertainty. It is the nature of big subjects to produce floods
of bathos, as well as a few masterpieces, and to foster works
of singular political equivocation.

    It is fascinating to see how prototypes from older art
were adapted to the artists' ends. Thus the motif of Moses
leading the Exodus becomes Bingham's image of Daniel Boone
escorting settlers through the Cumberland Gap toward the
promised land; thus the buckskin-clad immigrant and his family
are consciously meant to evoke Joseph, Mary and Jesus on the
flight into Egypt. The religious imagery sometimes amounts to
a suffocating pietism, but that was America too. It still is.

    But when you have seen the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny in
the paintings of, say, Albert Bierstadt -- the tiny wagons
advancing into those golden floods of light from the westering
sun, the absence of opposing Indians, the implicit approval of
Jehovah himself -- you still have to decide how good they are
as art. This is why the dubious orthodoxy of art-historical
deconstruction is so popular. It aborts the problem by
collapsing everything into ideology and fatuously claiming that
the idea of "quality" is either meaningless or oppressive. It
appeals to sanctimony and makes the stuff easy to teach. It lets
academics feel radical. Above all, by recognizing how full of
social messages bad art as well as good can be, it expands the
range of available thesis subjects and thus brings relief to the
eaten-out pastures of American academe.

    We then come to imagine that all works of art carry
sociopolitical messages the way brown bags carry sandwiches:
open the flap and there they are. When one reads a cultural
historian like Simon Schama reflecting on the art and society
of 17th century Holland, one sees what deep access a contextual
approach can give to culture. But this is a very far cry from
the ritual indictments of the past on the grounds of racism,
sexism, greed and so forth that increasingly substitute for
thought among our academics. Lo, the Native American! See, he
is depicted as dying! And note the subservient posture of the
squaw! And the phallic arrow on the ground, emblem of his lost
though no doubt conventionally exaggerated potency! Eeew, gross!
Next slide!

    Is "The West as America" free from this? By no means. Its
tone is prosecutorial, and often unfairly so. The walls are
laden with tendentious "educational" labels, seemingly aimed at
14-year-olds. The catalog essays are mostly better than this,
but not always. Thus Julie Schimmel, writing of Charles Bird
King's 1822 portrait of Omahaw and other Indian chiefs who
visited Washington -- an image that could hardly be exceeded in
straightforwardness and respect for the sitters -- claims that
"they represent a race that could perhaps be persuaded by
rational argument . . . to abandon tribal tradition." There is
not a shred of evidence in the painting for this sanctimonious
interpolation. Elsewhere one reads that "rectilinear frames .
. . provide a dramatic demonstration of white power and
control." Sure, and gilt rococo ovals would mean drag queens had
taken over the Senate.

    The two best catalog essays are by William H. Truettner:
they set out the propagandistic themes of most Western art and
are especially good on the ideology of "enlightenment" that
supported and sugared the cruel facts of European conquest and
expansion. Solid thought and research lie behind them, and
though the conservative would complain that we know the story
of Manifest Destiny's barbarous self-interest, the point is that
until this show, we did not know (or certainly not in such
detail) about its ramifications in painting and sculpture.

    Yet even Truettner pushes too far. For instance, he sees
Emanuel Leutze's The Storming of the Teocalli by Cortez and His
Troops, 1848, as a celebration of Christian virtue conquering
Aztec barbarism. But the image is far more melancholy and
ambiguous than that: the Spanish conquistadors are presented as
brutes, one flinging a baby from the temple top, another tearing
loot from a corpse; and Leutze's intent to provoke pity for the
Aztecs is summed up in an upside-down torch, nearly out, which
lies on the steps in the foreground, an adaptation of the
classic funerary image of the reversed torch of extinguished
genius. Even mediocre artists like Leutze, it seems, can
sometimes be a little more complex than their interpreters might
wish.