At the turn of the 20th century, artistic
representations of American Indians, cowboys and cavalry, pioneers and
prospectors, and animals of the plains and the mountains served as visual
metaphors for the Old West and, as such, were collected eagerly by an
urban-based clientele. Through some 65 bronze sculptures by 28 artists, the
traveling exhibition The
American West in Bronze, 1850–1925, opening at The Metropolitan
Museum of Art on December 18 (last day April 13, 2014), will explore the aesthetic and cultural impulses
behind the creation of statuettes with American western themes so popular with
audiences then and now. It is the first full-scale museum exhibition devoted to
the subject and brings together examples from public and private collections
nationwide.
In addition to
representative sculptures by such archetypal artists as Frederic Sackrider Remington (* 1861 Canton † 1909 Ridgefield) and Charles Marion Russel (* 1864 Oak Hill † 1926 Great Falls), the exhibition will explore the work of sculptors who
infrequently pursued western subjects - such as James Earle Fraser (* 1876 Winona † 1953 Westport) and Paul Howard Manship (* 1885 St. Paul † 1966 New York) - yet profoundly informed widespread appreciation of the American bronze
statuette. The American West
in Bronze, 1850–1925 will offer a fresh and balanced look at
the multifaceted roles played by these sculptors in creating three-dimensional
interpretations of western life, whether those interpretations are based on
historical fact, mythologized fiction, or, most often, something in-between.
Although the 28 artists represented in the exhibition are bound together by
their use of bronze, they are distinguished by varying life experiences. Alexander Phimister Proctor (* 1860 Bosanquet Townskip † 1950 Palo Alto) and Solon Hannibal Borglum (* 1868 Ogden † 1922 Stamford) for instance, grew up
in the West, and that first-hand experience informed their work, even after the
artists had moved to cosmopolitan centers, especially New York and Paris. Some
resided in the West their entire lives - notably Russell, who settled in
Montana - punctuated only by brief travels east or abroad. Others, such as Edward L, Kemeys (* 1843 Savanah † 1907 Washington D.C.) and Charles Schreyvogel, were transitory explorers, ethnologists, and
front-line recorders of the western experience. Still others rarely traveled
west of the Mississippi River - Frederic William MacMonnies, for example, spent
most of his career in France.
Despite inherent differences, these sculptors
collectively glorified an Old West past of Indians and wildlife, cowboys and
pioneers, in marked contrast to the gritty realities of industrialization and
immigration then altering East Coast cities and pushing inexorably westward.
Remington no doubt spoke for many of his colleagues when in 1907 he stated, “My
West passed utterly out of existence so long ago as if to make it merely a
dream. It put on its hat, took up its blankets and marched off the board; the
curtain came down and a new act was in progress.”
Many of these sculptors were rigorously trained in
academies in New York and Paris, and they applied sophisticated French-inspired
sculptural techniques to depicting human and animal subjects in statuettes that
were celebrated at home and abroad as authentically American. Those artists who
were self-taught similarly achieved a naturalistic treatment of form and a lively
play of light and shadow in their bronze representations of life in the western
states and territories. Indeed, the confluence of thematic, technical, and
aesthetic innovations resulted in bronze sculptures that mediated between
eastern and western, old and new, cosmopolitan and roughhewn.
The development of fine art bronze casting in America
is traced through the works displayed in this exhibition. Unlike marble, which
was quarried in Europe and shipped across the ocean at great expense, bronze - an
alloy composed of copper, with lesser amounts of tin, zinc, and lead—became
readily available in the United States following the establishment of the
earliest art bronze foundries around 1850. Because of its accessibility and
relatively low cost, bronze came to be considered both as an American material
and a democratic one. The exhibition will include many compositions that would
not be possible in marble, featuring such extremely challenging depictions in
bronze as the astonishingly realistic representation of a bison’s furry coat or
a fleet-footed horse and rider suspended in mid-air, supported only by a
trailing bison hide. Bronze was particularly well suited to the complex
compositions, textural variety, physical action, and narrative detail of these
western works.
Popular appreciation of the bronze statuette was
cultivated by familiarity with other art forms reproduced in multiples.
Photographs, lithographs, and other types of illustrations, especially those
circulated by the ever-expanding popular press, familiarized Americans with
majestic scenery, native people, and western wildlife. Editions of small bronze
sculptures, beginning with the midcentury work of Henry Kirke Brown and John
Quincy Adams Ward, were logical extensions of this vision-shaping. Bronze
statuettes were
collected by a clientele who vicariously participated in adventures on the distant western frontier by installing sculptures in their parlors, libraries, and gardens.
collected by a clientele who vicariously participated in adventures on the distant western frontier by installing sculptures in their parlors, libraries, and gardens.
The exhibition
will also explore how the sculpture was marketed, and which sculptures attained
particular popularity. In two instances, casts of the same subject will be
shown side by side. Examples of Frederic Remington’s Broncho Buster (1895), issued in
an authorized edition of more than 275, will display vividly the differences
that evolved in his sculptures. Comparison of a sand cast and a lost-wax cast
will illustrate the compositional experimentation and variation in which
Remington delighted. One was cast by 1898 when it was presented to Theodore
Roosevelt from his Rough Riders (Sagamore Hill National Historic Site). The
other, featuring the rider’s virtuoso “wooly” chaps, was cast in 1906 and
purchased by brothers Will and Mike Hogg, who were prominent Remington
collectors (The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston). Cyrus Edwin Dallin’s Appeal to the Great Spirit, an
American Indian on his horse making a post-bellum plea for peace, was cast in
three different sizes, with more than 400 authorized statuettes produced. The
exhibition will present the medium-sized and large versions (1913 and 1912,
respectively, private collection and the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth
College).
The exhibition covers the period 1850 to 1925 (with
several later exceptions) and centers on four specific themes: the American
Indian, wildlife, the cowboy, and the settler. While the American Indian and
animals were favored subjects throughout this 75-year period, the cowboy was
not portrayed in sculptural form until the 1890s, and the pioneer not regularly
until the turn of the 20th century. Among the historical figures represented in
the exhibition will be Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé, frontiersman Kit Carson,
silent-film actor William S. Hart, and humorist Will Rogers.
The section on
American Indians presents a range of sculptures that convey the changes endured
by Indian nations. The documentary impulse to record individual American
Indians had begun in the 1820s with painted portraits and extended to bronzes
by the 1870s. However, the majority of sculptural representations of American
Indians are records of their ways of life, from day-to-day activities such as
hunting to sacred ceremonial rituals, melding storytelling narrative with
universal themes. Hermon Atkins MacNeil’sMoqui
Prayer for Rain (1895–96, private collection) was inspired by his
visit to Arizona in 1895, where he witnessed the Moqui (Hopi) people’s annual
prayer for rain at the top of the mesa at Oraibi. MacNeil’s swift runner
carries writhing snakes coiled around his arms and even in his hair, symbols of
the lightning that brings rain to the arid climate.
The nostalgia
and regret projected in many of these statuettes are symptomatic of the
complicated response by Euro-American artists to the so-called march of
progress. James Earle Fraser’s iconic End of the Trail (1918, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) was
based on his experiences growing up in Dakota Territory. The weary Indian,
slumped dejectedly on his windblown pony, is a stirring comment on the damaging
effects caused by the confinement of American Indians on reservation land. Paul
Manship’s Indian Hunter and His Dog (1926, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art), rendered in a streamlined modernist aesthetic,
reflects the carefree spirit of young adulthood, a metaphor for an American
Eden before displacement by Euro-American settlers.
Representations
of animals as visual records of disappearing indigenous wildlife were completed
as many species were brought to near extinction during the closing of the
frontier. Whether bison, panthers, bears, elk, or wolves, animal sculptures
served as powerful reminders of the Old West, emphasizing physical accuracy as
well as emotional resonance. Some works were based on sculptors’ trips to the
West to observe animals in their natural habitats, while others were simply
inspired by trips to the zoo. Alexander Phimister Proctor’s Stalking Panther (1891–93, Corcoran
Gallery of Art) was based on a specimen shot during a game hunting expedition
in Colorado and refined during his stay in Paris. Proctor records the
stop-action drama of a stealthy hunter slinking close to the ground, reflecting
psychological tension and technical sophistication.
Sculptors
sometimes portrayed the playful side of wildlife, but more often they focused
on elemental struggles between rival animals, allowing audiences to imagine,
from a safe distance, the violent drama of these conflicts. Charles M.
Russell’s The Combat (1908,
Amon Carter Museum of American Art) presents two mountain sheep sparring at the
edge of a rocky precipice, heads lowered, horns locked, the outcome of the
tense encounter uncertain.
The North
American bison was the most emblematic of endangered animals, with herds
formerly in the millions wantonly slaughtered to number only in the hundreds by
the early 1880s. It was depicted by nearly every major sculptor of the American
West. Henry Merwin Shrady’s Buffalo (1899,
Amon Carter Museum of American Art) convincingly depicts the stately bearing
and weighty coat of this monarch of the plains. The bison as well as the skull
on the rocky base is redolent with symbolism, poignantly reflecting on the
animals’ demise.
Solon Hannibal
Borglum, who was born in Ogden, Utah, and received his artistic training in
Cincinnati and Paris, looked at the subject of horses afresh, emphasizing their
essential role in the American West for hunting, ranching, fighting, trading,
and transit. His sympathetic portrayals of horses enduring the challenges of
frontier life were supplemented by poignant depictions of intense human-equine
bonds, whether an Indian shielding himself behind his horse in On the Border of the White Man’s Land (1899,
Metropolitan Museum) or a cowboy and his mount huddled together in The Blizzard (1900, Detroit
Institute of Arts).
The
rough-and-tumble vision of the American West is addressed through sculptures
that make vivid the colorful drama and perils of the masculine frontier
experience. The rugged and manly cowboy was a familiar stereotype, an American
hero popularized through illustrations, artworks, literature, and traveling
performances at home and abroad, notably Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. With his
first and most popular sculpture, The
Bronco Buster(1895), depicting a rough-and-ready icon singlehandedly
taming a rearing mustang, Frederic Remington set the standard for how the
cowboy was portrayed in sculpture.
A number of
cowboy sculptures are overt projections of heroes testing their honor and
proving their manhood in forbidding lands, the product of artists who often
cultivated themselves at once as authentically western and also as worldly.
Charles M. Russell, celebrated in his lifetime as “the Cowboy Artist,” provides
an entertaining gaze onto the lawless side of cowboy life in Smoking Up (1904, private
collection) in which a cowboy noisily brandishes a six-shooter, as the horse
rears in response to the sounds of a discharged bullet. From the earliest days
of motion pictures, the American West was a key cinematic subject, with
paintings and sculptures serving as thematic wellsprings for filmmakers and
actors. Charles Cristadoro’s portrait of William S. Hart (1917, Autry National
Center of the American West) shows the actor in the guise that contributed to
his stardom on the silent screen, earning him the nickname “Two-Gun Bill.”
A section that
considers representations of pioneers examines the perseverance of settlers as
they moved westward, interacting with the land, animals, and American
Indians. In particular, the California Gold Rush beginning in 1848 and
the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 hastened the inevitable
exploration of land, coast to coast. The gripping adventures—real and
imagined—of trailblazing settlers, scouts, and traders were thematic fodder for
sculptors. For example, Frederick William MacMonnies’s equestrian statuette of
Kit Carson (ca. 1907–11, Sagamore Hill National Historic Site) pays homage to
the frontiersman who guided explorer John C. Frémont during several excursions
through the Rockies and was mythologized as a folk figure in the popular press
for his daring exploits. This spirited likeness of Carson, attired in a
long fringed jacket with raised right arm beckoning westward, is reduced and
excerpted from his Pioneer
Monument (1907–11; Denver). In his model (1927, Woolaroc Museum)
for the Pioneer Woman monument
for Ponca City, Oklahoma, Bryant Baker spotlights women’s contributions to the
settlement of the American West. Bryant’s young mother strides forward, leading
her son by the hand and holding a Bible and a sack, alluding to both her faith
in the face of homesteading’s hardships and to her status as heroine and provider. (Text: Metropolitan Museum of Art New York)