Introduction

Almost two decades ago, I walked through the Artists of America Show, a major exhibition sponsored by the Denver Rotary Club, held at the Colorado History Museum. Since I was not familiar with all the artists – mostly realist painters and sculptors from across the United States – I was eager to hear the thoughts of the small group of artists and collectors who brought me to the show. Though their comments were mostly held to nominal critiques of form and style, I was amazed at the turn in the tone of our discussion when we came to an approximately six foot tall bronze sculpture depicting what appeared to be a man wrapped in fabric, very abstractly executed, and to me, quite intriguing. As we approached the sculpture, one man in the group blurted out, “It looks like an abortion!”

Certainly the sculpture titled Shrouded Man by pop-expressionist Fritz Scholder (1937-2005), a celebrated artist of Native American heritage, was a bit out of place among the predominately narrative subjects on display; however, in my opinion, it was an appropriate inclusion in that, like the other works in the show, this sculpture was based in reality and it too told a story. I just didn’t know what, nor, it seems, did anyone else. In retrospect, that lack of understanding made all the difference.

Still, whether we had the narrative details behind the sculpture or not, I have often thought back to that fall afternoon and wondered why Scholder’s bronze elicited such a provocative response from an intelligent, well-traveled collector whose home was literally covered floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall in art. Over the years, as curator of the Coors Western Art Exhibit and Sale, I have been challenged and confronted by other strong opinions about western art; how the genre is defined, where its boundaries lie, and its relevance in the art world. This writing is an analysis of the divergent thoughts that have formed the basic dialogue on the topic starting with an historic look at traditional western themed art, then moving into a discussion of how it has influenced the current thinking and the popular ideals of contemporary art of the American West. I believe western art is an important, uniquely American style that deserves recognition, and that the reason it has not gotten its due lies in the way we define this genre and, ultimately, the West.

The Basic Problem: Art vs. Illustration

I just wanted to purge myself of illustration. I owe it a lot, but there is something bad about illustration. Sometimes it’s hard to jump and really be an artist. –George Carlson¹

Defining any kind of art is a complicated undertaking and one that requires some historical distance. Before delving into the boundaries of contemporary western art, however, we should start with a basic understanding of the difference between “illustration” and “fine art”, since these terms are frequently used to bar western artists from mainstream acceptance and museum representation.

The line between fine art and illustration is often blurry, but for this paper I consider illustration to be commercial – commissioned for a magazine or advertisement, for example – and not entirely of the artist’s whim, but as directed by the buyer. Although it can be argued that all art is commercial – the artist’s end goal is to make a living off the sale of his work – the difference lies in the intent, or the purpose behind the work. Illustration is commissioned for a specific reason: to help make a point or tell a story; it is a craft and has a job to do. It is not personal, and doesn’t tell us much if anything about the creator of the work, nor does it add to and advance art for art’s sake. Some illustration has become quite collectible, such as paintings by N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966) and a few others. Yet even in these cases it is the artists’ work farthest from illustration that is most desirable for museum collections.

Fine art comes from the opposite perspective in that the intention behind it originates with the artist. Fine art goes beyond elucidating a story, and though it may be representational, it strives to convey the artist’s perspective, thoughts, and feelings about the subject matter. Furthermore, fine art relates to viewers in unexpected ways, and its meaning is open for interpretation. The financial gains are frequently speculative in that the artist hopes to get paid when someone else relates to their work and then buys it.

Intent is the defining factor. Never easy to pin down, intentions are either to fulfill a contract (illustration), or to pursue one’s personal philosophies; to further the movement and evolution of art; and to leave a lasting mark on society (fine art). Though illustration may not always be for specific commercial endeavors, it tends to appeal to a more commercial audience. In writing, one could compare Ernest Hemingway’s commissioned magazine articles from his experiences in World War I with his novel A Farewell to Arms: all are beautifully written, and his war correspondence clearly informs his fiction writing, but the novel goes beyond adroit reporting and rises into the realm of fine art.

The fast-paced grind of illustrating on deadline forces an artist to perfect his base skill-set. In fact, when illustrators turn away from commercial art for a career in fine arts, they are among the most talented for this reason. However, it is necessary, as George Carlson stated, to make the jump into fine art, to go beyond illustrating to create something so unique – personal yet universal – that it takes viewers beyond their own understanding, perhaps even out of their comfort-zone, and shows them the world in a new way. Only then, in my opinion, does an artist cross the line from illustration to fine art.

Historical Western Art: Myth vs. Reality

The category of western art has been commonly framed as topical – depicting images of the American West – representational and often narrative.² When applied to works by deceased artists such as Frederic Remington (1861-1909), Charles M. Russell (1864-1926), and the artists known as the Taos Founders: Ernest Blumenschein (1874-1960), Bert Phillips (1868-1956), Eanger Irvine Couse (1866-1936), Joseph Henry Sharp (1859-1953), and Oscar Berninghaus (1874-1952), this definition works just fine. It is only when we try to apply it to modern and contemporary artists that the term loses focus.

Over the last forty years there have been a number of major exhibitions and auctions selling and promoting western art, most of which have been either ignored or roundly, and at times, vociferously panned by critics. However, the genre thrives among patrons with record sales and auction results. This year, for example, the C.M. Russell Auction reported nearly $3 million in sales. Similar record-breaking exhibitions were held in Scottsdale; in Los Angeles at the Autry National Center’s, Masters of the American West, which received an astounding bid of $1.25 million for a painting of Indians by Howard Terpning (born 1927); and even at the Coors Western Art Exhibit where receipts surpassed last year’s totals by ten percent.³

Although sales are a superficial estimation of credibility, they do speak to western art’s popularity. Even the New York Times took notice of the trend in a rare article that reviewed the 2007 Coeur d’Alene Auction, in which they highlighted one of the night’s biggest sellers.

At 79 Howard Terpning may be the most successful living artist in America that you’ve never heard of. He’s never been included in the Whitney Biennial or a big international art fair. You won’t find his work in a Chelsea Gallery…But the crowd of 850 or so art collectors and dealers who assembled last month at the Coeur d’Alene Art Auction…all knew who he was. For them he is “the storyteller of the Native American.” ⁴

Though at times tongue-in-cheek, Jori Finkel, author of the Times article, goes on to point out the problems with western art, and in doing so cuts to the heart of the matter by stating that it trends to “sentimentality: mythologizing or romanticizing Indian life, cowboy culture and the West.”

As for contemporary western painters, especially Terpning, Finkel points to scholars who have argued that “21^st-century painters revisiting 19^th-century themes can be the worst offenders” and, goes on to state that “the few art experts outside the Western art field who know [Terpning’s] work at all question his relevance to contemporary art. And some insiders question his authenticity, pointing out that he worked as a magazine and movie-poster illustrator for years before turning to Western themes.”⁵

Though Finkel focused her attention on the more illustrative painters like Terpning, the undercurrent of distrust of western art that she expresses, shadows almost all artists working in some realistic manner in the West today. But is it fair to blame Howard Terpning for the overall rejection of western art, or more specifically, art of the West? Perhaps, but such a firmly held prejudice actually took root long ago.

New York City in the 1950s saw the rise of a new art movement called abstract expressionism. As artists embraced the free-flowing, non-objective approach of abstraction, representational art actually came to be regarded as “fundamentally un-American”, with some museum directors going so far as to equate realism with totalitarianism, believing that since abstract art was “forbidden by [the Nazis and the communist regime of the Soviet Union]…but championed in America as both innovative and a veritable badge of democracy… [it was] nothing short of ‘symbolic demonstrations of freedom.’”⁶

Arguably, declarations such as this started the fire that has left an entire category of art in the dustbin of historical reference material and superficial narrative illustration. Yet a closer look finds that the western paintings and sculpture of the 19^th- and 20^th -centuries were inline with common artistic styles of their time. The only difference was that America’s western artists used ‘western’ themes as their subject matter.

When we compare, for example, Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) with other artists of his era, we see that he was painting grand visions of America’s newly expanded landscape employing the style of his formal training at the Düsseldorf academy. Englishman, Thomas Moran (1837-1926) painted in the manner of his fellow countrymen, particularly J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), and Frederic Remington followed the French military and impressionist painters of his day.⁷ To hold these artists up to the glaring light of the abstract expressionists – artists who did not come to prominence until after these artists had died – is ludicrous even in retrospect. Yet this is commonly done, even today.

Whether historic western artists were entirely honest in their art and choice of subject is another matter and one that I will explore later in this paper, however, in their day many of these artists were thought to be depicting what they knew and experienced; that they were capturing a quickly disappearing way of life. Michael Duty, Executive Director of the National Western Art Foundation in San Antonio, Texas noted:

Authenticity was important to both [Remington and Russell]. That is, both built their early reputations on the perception that they “had been there and done that.” Remington…cultivated an image of someone who could ride and shoot with the best of them. The fact that he was neither cowboy nor soldier did little to dim his reputation as someone who intimately knew the territory he portrayed…In the minds of much of his public, there was very little difference between the life Remington drew and the life that he lived.⁸

Though this may have been the common belief at the time, the reality that these artists were illustrating scenes that in some cases they did not actually witness is often cited today as a reason to trivialize all of western art. Even though, at 16 years of age Charlie Russell, for example, moved from St. Louis to Montana to work as a cowboy, and his paintings were of cowboys and horses he knew, later in his life he grew more interested in painting Indians and created a number of scenes of buffalo hunts years after they no longer existed; in fact, at a time when buffalo herds of the plains were nearly extinct, and most Indians confined to reservations.⁹ To the south, in New Mexico, Taos Society artists painted the natural landscape and people of the area, but also hired Pueblo Indians to sit as models in posed situations that were mostly romanticized scenes of a bygone era.

Indeed for artists of the 19^th century who hoped to capture the West and its indigenous people, the window on that world closed rather quickly. The determination of manifest destiny, no matter whom or what got in the way, proved a strong and rapid transformer across the landscape and even surpassed President Thomas Jefferson’s prediction that western lands to the Pacific Ocean would take one hundred generations to settle; in reality it happened in just five generations. Many other glorified aspects of the West happened and dissolved even faster: the fur trade lasted all of fifteen years; the forced relocation of Indians took a little over a decade, and; connecting the Central Pacific with the Union Pacific railroad took but seven years to complete.¹⁰

Remington’s own writing in Collier’s magazine recounts his first trip west in 1881 and illustrates the rapidly changing landscape:

Remington…told of sharing a campfire with a grizzled wagon freighter and telling the old timer of wanting to meet trappers and cowboys and to revel in the frontier experience. The freighter’s reply was that he was too late. “That West,” he said, “is already gone.”¹¹

Perhaps western artists of the past were spurred on by an intrinsic American ethos to wax nostalgic. Or it could be as Emily Ballew Neff, curator of American Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, suggests, that a “form of cultural primitivism, [and] the belief that American Indian cultures represented a preindustrial ideal of all that was then lost to America” took hold, and that “artists who feared that the machine-age technology would erode the human spirit, chose to reinvestigate the American landscape on their own terms”.¹²

The reasons why historic western artists chose to paint what they did were undoubtedly varied, however, what is clear today is that many works of art depicting such scenes as Indians in full regalia or pioneers bravely making their way west were primarily based on lore and creative editing. And even when artists offered actual eye-witness accounts, such as those of Indians and ceremonies painted by George Catlin, the first artist of the 19^th century to travel and attempt to faithfully document tribes throughout the Midwest, the artwork was called into question at the time it was displayed in the 1830s. As a portrait artist Catlin was called “utterly incompetent” by a fellow artist who went on to “mock his choice of subjects, noting a dearth of critics ‘among the Black Hawks and the White Eagles…to ruffle his mind.’”¹³

Distinguished nature writer and landscape photographer, Barry Lopez pondered the intentions of these first painters and sculptors of the American West in his essay “Out West,” and questioned the responsibility of those who “write the histories upon which we so often stake our political and spiritual lives.” He suggests “the intractable problem of what one remembers.” Of the removal and slaughter of Indians across the United States, he wrote: “Who now recalls what happened during those years of warfare? And how does forgetfulness work in the service of illusions of national destiny?”¹⁴

But does this mean, then, if some of the paintings and sculptures of the westward movement and settlement of this country were romanticized and that they were biased toward the white, conquering culture, that as we uncover and more accurately retell our past that we should toss out these historic works of art? Do we completely deny and disregard an entire genre by calling it mere “illustration”? If we say that historic western art is of lesser quality than, for example, that of East Coast artists who depicted and documented (i.e. illustrated) filthy harbors or day laborers hard at work, then must we degrade all works depicting the West, even those by such artists as Thomas Moran, whose paintings of northern Wyoming helped persuade the United States Congress to set aside Yellowstone as the first national park in the world? Many critics would suggest, yes. Others who study and curate western art, however, argue that, as art historian William Truettner suggests, “art doesn’t really tell the truth” anyway, so why not move past this judgmental benchmark and instead allow for a scholarly study of art of the American West as it compares to art of its generation and stylistic approach?¹⁵

Truettner was speaking of historic western art, which is rooted in the first hundred years of the founding of the United States and stands today as a documentation – albeit, with a Euro-centric slant – of the settling of the country as well as the emergence of a uniquely American brand of art. Paintings and sculpture that have also, as Michael Duty suggests, “come to epitomize the art of the American West.”¹⁶

Certainly, historic artists have influenced contemporary artists; however, the nagging question remains: Is western art a dead “language”, studied and repeated but of no relevance for a modern culture so far removed from the days of the “Wild West”? Or is it one of fertile ground yet to be tilled?

Contemporary Western Art: Imagery vs. Intention

What of the present? What is there in contemporary art for those who, offered Destiny’s Eden, cannot relax their suspicions about its foundations? –Barry Lopez¹⁷

When East Coast museum directors said that abstract expressionists were painting “symbolic demonstrations of freedom”, they were trying to, in a didactic manner, cajole the public into appreciating something that made little sense at the time. DADAism? Cubism? Paint thrown, slashed and swirled across surfaces displaying feelings? These were big, crazy ideas; an evolution from depicting stories realistically to expressing ideas through free-flowing, minimal shapes and designs. Of his abstract drip paintings, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), said, “I want to express my feelings, not illustrate them…”¹⁸ This, the public was told, was more difficult than making a photographic representation. It was more important, evolved and higher minded than the obvious, story-telling of realism. This was freedom. This was America.

A quick look through many books on art history shows how great the divide has grown between abstract expressionism and realism, between American art and art of the American West; essentially, there are no references to western art at all. It is as if Remington, Russell, Moran, and Beirstadt never existed, nor did Santos, Indian, and Mexican-American artist or any others working and living in the West. ¹⁹ Peter Hassrick notes in Western Passages that “as early as the 1960s it was virtually impossible to find a college-level studio art program that trained students in traditional academic skills” which meant that if one was interested in learning to paint in a realistic manner, he had to enroll in school for art and design and study illustration.²⁰

Even abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock who was born in Cody, Wyoming and raised in various western states, is more frequently associate with the East. When Emily Neff included Pollack’s work in her exhibition titled “Modern West”, she was harshly criticized. However, looking beyond geography and deeper into Pollock’s intentions, her decision to include him in a show about the West and its artists makes perfect sense:

Jackson Pollack [who]…became the leading Abstract Expressionist painter, and whose work symbolized the new art and shifted the center of the art world from Paris to New York…was inspired by American Indian art and religion throughout his life. Many of Pollock’s works…recall the rich layering of American Indian compositions that he saw in his childhood. ²¹

The reality that the Western United States is more than a conglomeration of hick towns straight out of Zane Grey novels and that this part of the country has had deep and lasting effects on art needs to be recognized. But how do we move past the clichés?

Conclusion: What Is Contemporary Western Art

I’m a western artist; I was born in Wyoming and I live in Santa Fe. I paint what I love. It is East Coast illustrators who have high-jacked western art. – William Shepard²²

Going back to the basic definition of western art as being representational, depicting the West, and often narrative, I would argue that it is time to move past the knee-jerk reaction of totally rejecting any and all realism, and, instead do two things with western art. First, place it, especially historic western imagery, within its proper time frame and evaluate it along with the work of other artists of that era. Consider historic works artistic documents of history and part of America’s overall art history. Then look at these works as a starting point for a discussion of the true struggles, injustices and savagery that took place in the United States, as well as examples of how art shapes and defines a nation.

Second, evaluate contemporary western art as either illustration or fine art, and hold it up along side the work of other living artists. In this manner, we can throw off the stereotypes and, as Truettner implores, have a real discussion about western art and its relevance.

Redefining western art for the contemporary world requires sorting out illustrators from fine artists and then stating that these artists, though quite skilled, do not represent the whole. People who are painting nostalgic scenes, such as those created by Howard Terpning do nothing to advance art for art’s sake; they are reiterating the work created by artists who lived much closer to the time that America. However beautifully painted, works such as those by Terpning and his ilk, perpetuate the myth of the West and keep Americans from learning the truth about our history; they are merely commercial undertakings. As many Native Americans alive today have suggested, why not paint Indians as they really are? I believe it is the monetary gain that keeps western illustrators in vogue at major art exhibits such as the Autry’s Masters of the American West and the Cowboy Hall’s Prix de West, and the desire to feel some ill-placed historic pride that keeps patrons clambering after them.

No, to advance the dialogue of western art and its importance, we should start by comparing artists engaged in creating fine art. The work of Theodore Waddell, born in 1941 near Billings, Montana, for example, could be compared with Jackson Pollock. That would force the discussion to move beyond down-grading Waddell for creating paintings and sculptures, albeit abstractly, based on the ranch animals of his everyday life, and instead delve into the influence that the western landscape has had on each artist, Waddell and Pollock. The conversation could go deeper then into that of form and style, emotion and the conveyance of each artist’s intention. Connections between the two artists who never met would be found and explored. Paintings would be displayed next to one another and critiqued on their individual merit. Where the artist was when he painted each image would be nit-picked to death, and all viewers would leave inundated, yet satiated.

In life and in art, it is hard not to categorize. Categories allow us to create definitions and form opinions. From the art community’s categorization of western art as representational (bad), narrative (worse), and illustrative (horrid), has bloomed a disgruntled, ever growing group of curators and artists willing to face hecklers and stand up for art created from this region of the United States.

It is time to stop deferring to the Eastern establishment and art elite who tell us what art is and that what we produce way out West is not it. Artists run from the moniker, even curators make excuses or flat out deny that an artist is western. James Nottage concluded his essay on George Carlson with the following: “One thing is abundantly clear. George Carlson, with all his many accomplishments, cannot be categorized simply or only as a western artist and he does not want to be.”²⁴ Why not? I suspect that the term, as William Shepherd suggests, has indeed been highjacked by East coast illustrators; a felony so great and so insidious that, like the myth of Buffalo Bill, we seemingly have had no choice but to believe that is our lot in life and then let the few speak for us all.

I believe the onus is on curators like me who are in the position to make statements about western art to do just that. If we continue to allow illustrators to highjack the art of the West or turn a blind eye to regional institutions and exhibitions such as SITE Santa Fe whose curator in 2007 hired a European-based artist-couple to document the West (a superficial effort showing little understanding of the true essence of this region) or Denver’s Mayor Hickenlooper and his team of ‘experts’ who commissioned a multi-discipline art installation titled Dialog: City to appear during the Democratic National Convention in August 2008 but asked not one artist from this region to participate, then we all lose out. Someone else gets to define the West.

It would truly be unfortunate if western art were epitomized as merely ‘revisionist’, as if it followed the thinking suggested by Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes who once wrote: “the United States…is so intent on imagining its future it isn’t troubled by rewriting its past to serve that future.”²⁵

Thankfully, there are many artists in the West who have brought forth their own brand of art based on their experiences and understanding of the country in which they either were born into or have adopted as their home. This is an important aspect to creating honest work about the West and one that I can speak to from first-hand experience. I, like any number of art professionals, have attempted in the past to ask outsiders to create a document of the West – I admit to making this error with the Coors Show when I invited non-western artists to depict western themes. The result, like the SITE Santa Fe film, was purely superficial. And whether the audience knows art or not, they sense that they are being lied to; they know that there is something deeper, yet the artist has missed it and turned the lives of the members of that society into clichés.

A positive step forward for western art can be seen in the collections of numerous museums throughout the West and some to the east, to include the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indiana and the Booth Museum in Georgia. Most notably is the Contemporary Realist Collection at the Denver Art Museum’s Petry Institute of Western American Art, a particularly good collection in that it has avoided the obvious illustrative artists of late and concentrated on artists with unique, individual voices; “artists who have developed a strong sense of personal identity and of their own times [who] hold a special place not only in the regional scene but also in the evolution of American art history in general.”²⁴ Whether playing off themes of post modernism, photorealism, pop and abstraction or taking common themes to make environmental statements, the artists collected thus far give audiences a well-rounded view of contemporary western art.

In closing, I would like to reconsider the work of the late Fritz Scholder, the Native American artist whose sculpture caused great animosity for collectors viewing the Artists of America Show. His paintings of Native Americans were bold, colorful pop-art glimpses at contemporary life as he knew it yet were at times called “disrespectful” to the people they depicted. But his work succeeded on a number of levels. First, Scholder’s art took western and Indian themes beyond regionalism and into the mainstream. Second, it challenged the romanticized versions of Indian life as was the generally accepted notion based on Remington, Russell and the Taos artists. Third, it opened the door for Indian artists across the country to take art seriously, as a career. The Harwood Museum, located in Flagstaff, Arizona houses a large selection of Scholder’s work. On its website they state the artist’s significance quite beautifully: 

The importance of Fritz Scholder along with fellow [Indian Art Institute of America] instructors…lies in how these artists changed Native American Art forever ­allowing for a multiplicity of subjects, styles and methods, which placed their work within the context of not only contemporary Art History but also forming the backbone of contemporary American Indian Art.²⁵

This statement could be used to challenge the importance of western art, too. Does it speak of the West on multiple levels and for the people who live here and who once lived here? Does it include many different styles, methods and subjects? Ultimately, how we define western art is rooted in the past, as all art is rooted in the evolution of art over the last several hundred years. But, art that does not embrace the future, that does not further art and advance society, is of little importance. It is one thing to look back at Russell and Remington and the Taos artists to see from where we have come, it is a problem, however, to look back and copy that work, as if time in the West has stood still. True western art should stand up to any other style of art as a form of speech, as a dialogue on contemporary issues and society. Western art is uniquely American. In my opinion, western art is of the West, narrative and realistic to some degree, and, very much apart from illustrations by artists pedaled as the ‘story-tellers of the Native American”.

End notes

1. In his essay “Drawn from Life: The Art of George Carlson,” James H. Nottage quotes George Carlson from the interview by Chuck Rand, tape recorded June 11, 2005. The interview was conducted by A. Keith Brodkin for the Contemporary Western Artists Project, National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and quoted in Western Passages: Heart of the West: New Painting and Sculpture of the American West, (Denver Art Museum, 2007), 14.

2. Excerpted from Peter Hassrick’s definition of western art, Western Passages: Heart of the West: New Painting and Sculpture of the American West, (Denver Art Museum, 2007) 7.

3. Sales results reported in the Western Art & Architecture article “Holding Strong: Despite a flagging economy, the tenor of the traditional Western art movement is bullish” WA&A Staff, (Spring/summer 2008) 28-32.

4. Jori Finkel, “The Fastest Gavel in the West”, (New York Times, August, 26, 2007). From the website http://www.cdaartauction.com/press/2007nytimes.html, accessed May 9, 2008.

5. Ibid. Finkel smugly depicts the crowd as “wearing a mix of rugged and fancy cowboy boots and ornate belt buckles” as a way to characterize westerners as low-brow and, therefore, lacking in art knowledge and sophistication unlike auction goers in the East.

6. Hassrick is referring to New York City Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr Jr. who was quoted in a 1974 article by Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War”, (Artform 15, no. 10); Western Passages: Heart of the West: New Painting and Sculpture of the American West, 6.

7. Hassrick, Western Passages: Redrawing Boundaries, (Denver Art Museum, 2007), 10.

8. Michael Duty. Western Traditions: Contemporary Artist of the American West. (Albuquerque, New Mexico, Fresco Fine Art Publications, LLC, 2005) 16.

9. Ibid, 24.

10. Emily Ballew Neff cites these rapid changes along with many others as the sociological phenomenon of the West. She suggests that the speed of the change in the West and how artists dealt with this change as a major reason why artists of the region should not be over-looked when considering America’s art history, particularly the Modernist movement. She was still criticized for trying to make this connection. The Modern West: American Landscapes: 1890-1950, (Yale University Press, New Haven: London in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2006), Preface.

11. Duty, 24.

12. Neff, ibid, preface.

13. Brian W. Dippie. Western Passages: Redrawing Boundaries, 22.

14. Barry Lopez’s essay for Neff’s catalogue explores the rewriting of the history of the West. He spent many months traveling the route of retreat taken by the Nez Perce Indians during the summer of 1877 as well as studying and traveling the routes and battle grounds of other Native American tribes. His experience as a photographer and nature writer inform his essay, which ponders the atrocities that happened but were buried or romanticized as our nation expanded west. His essay was included in the beginning of Neff’s catalogue Modern West as a way to confront the issue of rewriting history and the role played by historic artists of the West. The Modern West: American Landscapes: 1890-1950, 1.

15. William H. Truettner argues in his essay “Old West Meets New Art History” that western art should judged on esthetic values, just as other work created outside the western genre is. Western Passages: Redrawing Boundaries (Denver Art Museum, 2007), 43.

16. Michael Duty in Western Traditions, 11.

17. Barry Lopez for Neff, 3.

18. Jackson Pollock as quoted in The Art Book, (London, Phaidon Press, Ltd., 1994), 367.

19. I looked through numerous books to include The Art Book, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, (San Diego, Harcourt Brace, 1986), and a History of Western Art (Brown and Benchmark Publishers, Madison, Wisconsin, 1994) and found no references to Western artists.

20. Hassrick, Western Passages: Heart of the West, (Denver Art Museum, 2007) 7.

21. Peter C. Marzio, Director, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, makes the connection of Pollock and the West. Pollock’s inclusion in this exhibition, the Modern West, was particularly criticized by Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times as being better the other artists exhibited and of having no connection to this selection of art. Many felt that Knight made up his mind and wrote his critique before stepping foot into the exhibition. The Modern West: American Landscapes: 1890-1950, Foreword.

22. From a telephone conversation I had with the William Shepherd on May 15, 2008.

23. Nottage pulls this from his conversation with Carlson as presented in Dignity in Art, 3, Western Passages, 21.

24. Barry Lopez in Neff, 3.

25. From the July 29, 2006 press release from the Harwood Museum announcing a gallery talk, Thursday, August 10th, 2006 with Curator Margaret Bullock on artist Fritz Scholder. Accessed May 9, 2008 from the site: http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/1aa/1aa287.htm.

Selected Bibliography

Bailly, Austen Barron. Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, a Thesis, 2007.

Campbell, Suzan, PhD. Out of the West, the Gund Collection of Western Art. Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, 2005.

Cunningham, Elizabeth. West West West, Major Paintings from the Anschutz Collection. The Anschutz Collection, 1991.

Duty, Michael. Western Traditions: Contemporary Artist of the American West. (Albuquerque, New Mexico, Fresco Fine Art Publications, LLC, 2005.

Gerdts, William H. The Plains States and the West: Art Across America: Two Centuries of Regional Painting 1710-1920. Abbeville Press, 1990.

Harmsen, Dorothy. American Western Art. Harmsen Western Publishing Company, 1977.

Neff, Emily Ballew. The Modern West: American Landscapes: 1890-1950, (Yale University Press, New Haven: London in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2006.

Scott, Amy. The Taos Society of Artists: Masters & Masterworks. Gerald Peters Gallery, 1998.

Charles M. Russell: A Catalogue Raisonné, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, 2007.

Western Passages: Heart of the West: New Painting and Sculpture of the American West, Denver Art Museum, 2007.

Western Passages: Redrawing Boundaries, Denver Art Museum, 2007

The Art Book, London, Phaidon Press, Ltd., 1994

Harwood Museum, August 10th, 2006, from the press release announcing a gallery talk with Curator Margaret Bullock on artist Fritz Scholder. Accessed May 9, 2008 from the site: http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/1aa/1aa287.htm.

Finkel, Jori. “The Fastest Gavel in the West”, (New York Times, August, 26, 2007). From the website http://www.cdaartauction.com/press/2007nytimes.html, accessed May 9, 2008.