American West in Art

DENVER ART MUSEUM

THE AMERICAN WEST IN ART

THE AMERICAN

W EinSArtT

FOREWORD

From the dramatic landscapes of Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon to the austere deserts and plains and the cool waters of the Pacific, the West is iconic in both reality and imagination.The region—its geography and ideas—occupies a complex place in the nation’s consciousness.

On the one hand a projection of popular ideas of nation building, it is also a reminder of the hardships and struggles of those who called the West their home, including the Indigenous peoples who lived here for centuries. Since the early 1800s, European and American artists have pictured stories of the West, oftentimes idealizing and romanticizing the landscapes and peoples found here and other times providing much-needed correctives to the myths that grew around it. The picturing of the West has much to tell us about changing American attitudes as well as the transmission of artistic ideas across states and continents.

The art of the American West holds a special place at the Denver Art Museum as a visual manifestation of the place we call home. Denver has long been the cultural capital of the Rockies, and it is with a sense of regional pride that the museum has developed an institute and collection of western American art. The first seeds of what is today the Petrie Institute of Western American Art can be traced back more than sixty years, when the museum collected its first paintings of the western frontier. Over the ensuing decades, especially with the founding of the institute in 2001, the Denver Art Museum has become a national leader in scholarly research and programming in the field. In the past decade, the department and collection soared to new heights with transformative gifts and groundbreaking exhibitions.

This collection catalog accompanies a traveling exhibition of highlights from our western American collection that will be presented at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee. I am delighted that the Petrie Institute’s collection will gain a national audience and help open the public’s eyes to the quality and diversity of the region’s artistic production. We are pleased to share our collection with these distinguished institutions and thank them for their partnership.

1. Birger Sandzén (American, born in Sweden, 1871–1954), A Mountain Symphony (Longs Peak, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado), 1927. Oil paint on canvas, 48 x 60 in.

(121.92 x 152.4 cm). Denver Art Museum: Funds from the DAM Westerners, 2017.28.

Likewise, this book celebrates the reinstallation of the collection in the museum’s newly renovated galleries in the Martin Building. For the first time, patrons can now see the western American art collection on a single floor, in stunning top-floor galleries with beautiful views of the Front Range.

I am pleased that our local community will experience its favorite paintings anew in the permanent galleries. The renovation of these new spaces would not have been possible without the support of the Helen K. and Arthur E. Johnson Foundation, LAARK Foundation, Lori and Grady Durham, Jane and Tom Petrie, Vicki and Trygve Myhren, and the Berger Collection Educational Trust, among others.

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FOREWORD

From the dramatic landscapes of Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon to the austere deserts and plains and the cool waters of the Pacific, the West is iconic in both reality and imagination.The region—its geography and ideas—occupies a complex place in the nation’s consciousness.

On the one hand a projection of popular ideas of nation building, it is also a reminder of the hardships and struggles of those who called the West their home, including the Indigenous peoples who lived here for centuries. Since the early 1800s, European and American artists have pictured stories of the West, oftentimes idealizing and romanticizing the landscapes and peoples found here and other times providing much-needed correctives to the myths that grew around it. The picturing of the West has much to tell us about changing American attitudes as well as the transmission of artistic ideas across states and continents.

The art of the American West holds a special place at the Denver Art Museum as a visual manifestation of the place we call home. Denver has long been the cultural capital of the Rockies, and it is with a sense of regional pride that the museum has developed an institute and collection of western American art. The first seeds of what is today the Petrie Institute of Western American Art can be traced back more than sixty years, when the museum collected its first paintings of the western frontier. Over the ensuing decades, especially with the founding of the institute in 2001, the Denver Art Museum has become a national leader in scholarly research and programming in the field. In the past decade, the department and collection soared to new heights with transformative gifts and groundbreaking exhibitions.

This collection catalog accompanies a traveling exhibition of highlights from our western American collection that will be presented at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee. I am delighted that the Petrie Institute’s collection will gain a national audience and help open the public’s eyes to the quality and diversity of the region’s artistic production. We are pleased to share our collection with these distinguished institutions and thank them for their partnership.

1. Birger Sandzén (American, born in Sweden, 1871–1954), A Mountain Symphony (Longs Peak, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado), 1927. Oil paint on canvas, 48 x 60 in.

(121.92 x 152.4 cm). Denver Art Museum: Funds from the DAM Westerners, 2017.28.

Likewise, this book celebrates the reinstallation of the collection in the museum’s newly renovated galleries in the Martin Building. For the first time, patrons can now see the western American art collection on a single floor, in stunning top-floor galleries with beautiful views of the Front Range.

I am pleased that our local community will experience its favorite paintings anew in the permanent galleries. The renovation of these new spaces would not have been possible without the support of the Helen K. and Arthur E. Johnson Foundation, LAARK Foundation, Lori and Grady Durham, Jane and Tom Petrie, Vicki and Trygve Myhren, and the Berger Collection Educational Trust, among others.

7

first curator of western art—and with grants from the Boettcher Foundation, the Frederick G. Bonfils Foundation, the Fred E. Gates Fund, and the Lawrence Phipps Foundation—the museum purchased a group of seminal works by early artists in the American West.These initial acquisitions included Herd of Buffalo by William Jacob Hays, America’s leading nineteenth-century animalier painter, and Alfred Jacob Miller’s masterwork Shoshone Indians at a Mountain Lake. James Walker’s popular Cowboys Roping a Bear soon followed Hays’s work into the collection. With remarkable historical paintings such as these, the museum began to develop a program of exhibitions.The 1955 Building the West was the second-ever exhibition by an art museum dedicated to the artistic legacy of the American West. With The Western Frontier exibition in 1966, the museum began to position itself as a serious venue for western American artistic expression and culture in the Rocky Mountain region and nationally.

From the mid-1960s through the 1970s, the museum’s priorities revolved around creating a worldclass institution housed in a new building designed by Gio Ponti and James Sudler. Not long after the opening of the new museum building, the 1974 exhibition Picturesque Images from Taos and Santa Fe was among the first to reexamine the artists who settled in New Mexico in the early 1900s.

Important acquisitions continued throughout the 1980s, with significant gifts such as Thomas Moran’s watercolor Mount of the Holy Cross, which was given anonymously and complemented Albert Bierstadt’s large early canvas Wind River Country from the Charles H. Bayly Collection. These new acquisitions provided museum visitors an opportunity to enjoy signature icons of Rocky Mountain scenery by the nation’s two leading masters of western landscape painting. Thanks to William D. Hewit, the museum acquired in 1981 an extraordinary bronze, The Cheyenne, by Frederic Remington.

When Lewis I. Sharp became director in 1989, he termed this sculpture “the single most important Remington bronze in existence,” owing to its innovative composition and exceptional cast quality.4 In the 1990s, through the generosity of Bob and Betsy Magness, the museum added one of Charles Marion Russell’s most exceptional paintings, In the Enemy’s Country, which is a tribute to the American Indians of the northern plains. Hosting a number of single-artist exhibitions focused on key artists such as Russell, Remington, and Andrew Dasburg served to accentuate the department’s collecting activities. The museum also acquired one of America’s most popular images of the 1840s, Charles Deas’s iconic Long Jakes—The Rocky Mountain Man. The painting singlehandedly created one of America’s first and most enduring western archetypes—the mountain man. It likewise became symbolic of the Denver community’s growing interest in its cultural heritage, as many contributors stepped forward to help acquire the single most expensive work of art yet purchased by the museum. It would later be the signature painting for the 2009 exhibition Charles Deas and 1840s America. With this acquisition, the museum established a reputation for collecting exceptional examples of some of the West’s most important artists, yet its nascent western collection numbered only a few works that were part of the former American art department.

In 2001, the museum received an important gift of western American art from William Sr. and Dorothy Harmsen that substantially broadened the museum’s holdings. Virtually overnight, the gift—the first of its kind for the department—transformed the museum’s holdings of western artworks into a sizable collection. Their large, encyclopedic collection included many important works, ranging from Charles Bird King’s Hayne Hudjihini (Eagle of Delight) from 1822, the collection’s earliest work, to exceptional examples of modernism in the early 1900s. Marsden Hartley’s New Mexico Recollection #6 and Raymond Jonson’s Pueblo Series, Acoma demonstrate 12

how the American West—with its wide-open spaces, angular mesas, vivid colors, and intense light—appealed to modern artists, with their preference for using bold colors and patterns, radically simplifying and abstracting shapes, flattening three-dimensional space, and tilting perspectives. Through these works and others one can see clearly the impact the West had on a key aesthetic moment in American art. The Harmsen Collection also contains important works

by George Catlin, Alfred Jacob Miller, N. C. Wyeth, E. Martin Hennings, and Robert Henri, all of which quickly became staples of the collection for a newly founded department helmed by Joan Carpenter Troccoli, who had previously been director of the Gilcrease Museum, joined by associate curator Ann Daley. Under their guidance, the new Institute of Western American Art set out on a course to further increase awareness and knowledge of western art. They initiated the scholarly annual publication Western Passages and a series of exhibitions, including The Masterworks of Charles M. Russell: A Retrospective of Painting and Sculpture (2009), about which Barrymore Scherer of The Wall Street Journal declared, “The Denver Art Museum’s current exhibition of the paintings and sculpture of Charles M. Russell may just inspire a new appreciation for western art as a whole.”5 In 2005, longtime museum director Peter H. Hassrick (son of Royal B. Hassrick) came out of retirement to “finish some family business” by becoming curator and director of the institute, and ultimately the museum would jointly acquire with the American Museum of Western Art—The Anschutz Collection the painting Cowboy Singing by Thomas Eakins in Hassrick’s honor. He brought with him the exciting exhibition In Contemporary Rhythm: The Art of Ernest Blumenschein (2008) and developed an annual symposium to further discussions in the field.The symposium remains a signature program for the institute and has become a platform to analyze western American art in a broad and often unexpected context, changing people’s perception of the genre.

In light of the department’s success and growing programming, in 2006 the galleries expanded into the Frederic C. Hamilton Building, thanks to a major contribution from trustee Cortlandt Dietler.

The western collection also returned to a portion of the seventh floor of the Martin Building in the Betsy Magness Galleries, allowing the museum to tell the story of the art of the West with even greater resonance. A year later, the institute received a new title, the Petrie Institute of Western American Art, following an extraordinary lead gift from Tom and Jane Petrie to partially endow the department. As Tom explained, “Over the decades my interest for western art grew tremendously, and I am delighted to be able to share that enthusiasm with others through funding and supporting the institute.” Petrie, a longtime collector of the artwork of Charles Marion Russell and his peers, also lent significant portions of his collection for exhibition.

In 2009, Thomas Brent Smith became curator and director of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art. A year later, the fundraising effort to fully endow the Petrie Institute was completed with donations from dozens of contributors, once again illustrating the community’s interest and commitment to art of the American West.

Denver collector Henry Roath made one of the most important gifts of art in the history of the museum when he donated more than fifty western paintings and sculptures in 2013. Characterized by its high quality, the collection includes paintings by renowned landscape painters Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, sculptures by Frederic Remington and Alexander Phimister Proctor, and numerous impressive examples of work by the Taos Society of Artists.The collection includes 13

first curator of western art—and with grants from the Boettcher Foundation, the Frederick G. Bonfils Foundation, the Fred E. Gates Fund, and the Lawrence Phipps Foundation—the museum purchased a group of seminal works by early artists in the American West.These initial acquisitions included Herd of Buffalo by William Jacob Hays, America’s leading nineteenth-century animalier painter, and Alfred Jacob Miller’s masterwork Shoshone Indians at a Mountain Lake. James Walker’s popular Cowboys Roping a Bear soon followed Hays’s work into the collection. With remarkable historical paintings such as these, the museum began to develop a program of exhibitions.The 1955 Building the West was the second-ever exhibition by an art museum dedicated to the artistic legacy of the American West. With The Western Frontier exibition in 1966, the museum began to position itself as a serious venue for western American artistic expression and culture in the Rocky Mountain region and nationally.

From the mid-1960s through the 1970s, the museum’s priorities revolved around creating a worldclass institution housed in a new building designed by Gio Ponti and James Sudler. Not long after the opening of the new museum building, the 1974 exhibition Picturesque Images from Taos and Santa Fe was among the first to reexamine the artists who settled in New Mexico in the early 1900s.

Important acquisitions continued throughout the 1980s, with significant gifts such as Thomas Moran’s watercolor Mount of the Holy Cross, which was given anonymously and complemented Albert Bierstadt’s large early canvas Wind River Country from the Charles H. Bayly Collection. These new acquisitions provided museum visitors an opportunity to enjoy signature icons of Rocky Mountain scenery by the nation’s two leading masters of western landscape painting. Thanks to William D. Hewit, the museum acquired in 1981 an extraordinary bronze, The Cheyenne, by Frederic Remington.

When Lewis I. Sharp became director in 1989, he termed this sculpture “the single most important Remington bronze in existence,” owing to its innovative composition and exceptional cast quality.4 In the 1990s, through the generosity of Bob and Betsy Magness, the museum added one of Charles Marion Russell’s most exceptional paintings, In the Enemy’s Country, which is a tribute to the American Indians of the northern plains. Hosting a number of single-artist exhibitions focused on key artists such as Russell, Remington, and Andrew Dasburg served to accentuate the department’s collecting activities. The museum also acquired one of America’s most popular images of the 1840s, Charles Deas’s iconic Long Jakes—The Rocky Mountain Man. The painting singlehandedly created one of America’s first and most enduring western archetypes—the mountain man. It likewise became symbolic of the Denver community’s growing interest in its cultural heritage, as many contributors stepped forward to help acquire the single most expensive work of art yet purchased by the museum. It would later be the signature painting for the 2009 exhibition Charles Deas and 1840s America. With this acquisition, the museum established a reputation for collecting exceptional examples of some of the West’s most important artists, yet its nascent western collection numbered only a few works that were part of the former American art department.

In 2001, the museum received an important gift of western American art from William Sr. and Dorothy Harmsen that substantially broadened the museum’s holdings. Virtually overnight, the gift—the first of its kind for the department—transformed the museum’s holdings of western artworks into a sizable collection. Their large, encyclopedic collection included many important works, ranging from Charles Bird King’s Hayne Hudjihini (Eagle of Delight) from 1822, the collection’s earliest work, to exceptional examples of modernism in the early 1900s. Marsden Hartley’s New Mexico Recollection #6 and Raymond Jonson’s Pueblo Series, Acoma demonstrate 12

how the American West—with its wide-open spaces, angular mesas, vivid colors, and intense light—appealed to modern artists, with their preference for using bold colors and patterns, radically simplifying and abstracting shapes, flattening three-dimensional space, and tilting perspectives. Through these works and others one can see clearly the impact the West had on a key aesthetic moment in American art. The Harmsen Collection also contains important works

by George Catlin, Alfred Jacob Miller, N. C. Wyeth, E. Martin Hennings, and Robert Henri, all of which quickly became staples of the collection for a newly founded department helmed by Joan Carpenter Troccoli, who had previously been director of the Gilcrease Museum, joined by associate curator Ann Daley. Under their guidance, the new Institute of Western American Art set out on a course to further increase awareness and knowledge of western art. They initiated the scholarly annual publication Western Passages and a series of exhibitions, including The Masterworks of Charles M. Russell: A Retrospective of Painting and Sculpture (2009), about which Barrymore Scherer of The Wall Street Journal declared, “The Denver Art Museum’s current exhibition of the paintings and sculpture of Charles M. Russell may just inspire a new appreciation for western art as a whole.”5 In 2005, longtime museum director Peter H. Hassrick (son of Royal B. Hassrick) came out of retirement to “finish some family business” by becoming curator and director of the institute, and ultimately the museum would jointly acquire with the American Museum of Western Art—The Anschutz Collection the painting Cowboy Singing by Thomas Eakins in Hassrick’s honor. He brought with him the exciting exhibition In Contemporary Rhythm: The Art of Ernest Blumenschein (2008) and developed an annual symposium to further discussions in the field.The symposium remains a signature program for the institute and has become a platform to analyze western American art in a broad and often unexpected context, changing people’s perception of the genre.

In light of the department’s success and growing programming, in 2006 the galleries expanded into the Frederic C. Hamilton Building, thanks to a major contribution from trustee Cortlandt Dietler.

The western collection also returned to a portion of the seventh floor of the Martin Building in the Betsy Magness Galleries, allowing the museum to tell the story of the art of the West with even greater resonance. A year later, the institute received a new title, the Petrie Institute of Western American Art, following an extraordinary lead gift from Tom and Jane Petrie to partially endow the department. As Tom explained, “Over the decades my interest for western art grew tremendously, and I am delighted to be able to share that enthusiasm with others through funding and supporting the institute.” Petrie, a longtime collector of the artwork of Charles Marion Russell and his peers, also lent significant portions of his collection for exhibition.

In 2009, Thomas Brent Smith became curator and director of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art. A year later, the fundraising effort to fully endow the Petrie Institute was completed with donations from dozens of contributors, once again illustrating the community’s interest and commitment to art of the American West.

Denver collector Henry Roath made one of the most important gifts of art in the history of the museum when he donated more than fifty western paintings and sculptures in 2013. Characterized by its high quality, the collection includes paintings by renowned landscape painters Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, sculptures by Frederic Remington and Alexander Phimister Proctor, and numerous impressive examples of work by the Taos Society of Artists.The collection includes 13

PROLOGUE

THE WEST WAS OLD BEFORE ITS ART WAS NEW

Dan Flores

For European and American artists journeying into the West in the nineteenth century, the region past the centerline of the United States was plains and mountains, deserts and seacoasts, people and animals, and for them that whole stood as the absolute distillation of John Locke’s famous line: “In the beginning all the World was America.” The West in that artistic moment loomed as a planetary touchstone of everything wild and new. It was a high-drama country awaiting a high-drama destiny.

But for a corrective to nineteenth-century myopia, sometime in your life do this. Drive across the remote San Rafael Swell country of Utah to a detached piece of Canyonlands National Park.

Descend into a specific canyon of the many thousands of beautiful slickrock erosional cuts in the American West, then stroll along under shimmering cottonwoods a little more than three miles until you come to a particular sandstone alcove.There, in a grand wildland of stone, sand, and blue sky, a mural-like painted wall will silence all your prior internal dialogue within seconds of turning to look.The Great Gallery—the name by which we know this pictograph panel of round-shouldered, armless, enigmatic, ghostly beings—seems to possess the truly odd ability to enfold gobsmacked visitors into its lineup of figures (Fig. 5). Those figures stretch across sixty feet of wall. They await the modern gaze, adorned in red and white, some solid, others festooned with snakes and other torso designs. Most of them are as tall as you are.

The Great Gallery’s reigning protagonist appears in a cluster on the far left.There are other figures almost as large, but this sort-of-humanoid, sometimes called the “Holy Ghost,” with a lightbulb head, glowing eye sockets, and geometric body patterning, is the only figure who appears to be served by a robed retinue. The consorts were painted with red hematite, and the ancient artist who rendered the scene portrayed them in various sizes to create the 3-D effect of a powerful king—or god—trailing followers at every remove of distance. And perhaps of time.

4. Thomas Moran (American, born in England, 1837–1926), Indian Pueblo, Laguna, New Mexico, 1905.

Oil paint on canvas, 20¼ x 30¼ in.

(51.44 x 76.84 cm). Denver Art Museum: Funds from Henry Roath, 2020.195.

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So, the West was wild and new, awaiting nineteenth-century artists to color in its destiny? The Great Gallery is between 1,000 and 2,000 years old. Its artist, or (more likely) artists, were Archaic, older than the Ancestral Puebloan Basketmakers, the “Old Ones” of the Southwest. Ancient Rome was likely at its height when the Great Gallery appeared in this canyon. England and France had centuries to go to realize their destinies when American art had its first exhibit of the glowing-eyed being and its companions.

Three grand ideas distinguish the art of the American West in the centuries and millennia prior to the nineteenth century. One, as exemplified by the Great Gallery and thousands of other pictographs and 19

PROLOGUE

THE WEST WAS OLD BEFORE ITS ART WAS NEW

Dan Flores

For European and American artists journeying into the West in the nineteenth century, the region past the centerline of the United States was plains and mountains, deserts and seacoasts, people and animals, and for them that whole stood as the absolute distillation of John Locke’s famous line: “In the beginning all the World was America.” The West in that artistic moment loomed as a planetary touchstone of everything wild and new. It was a high-drama country awaiting a high-drama destiny.

But for a corrective to nineteenth-century myopia, sometime in your life do this. Drive across the remote San Rafael Swell country of Utah to a detached piece of Canyonlands National Park.

Descend into a specific canyon of the many thousands of beautiful slickrock erosional cuts in the American West, then stroll along under shimmering cottonwoods a little more than three miles until you come to a particular sandstone alcove.There, in a grand wildland of stone, sand, and blue sky, a mural-like painted wall will silence all your prior internal dialogue within seconds of turning to look.The Great Gallery—the name by which we know this pictograph panel of round-shouldered, armless, enigmatic, ghostly beings—seems to possess the truly odd ability to enfold gobsmacked visitors into its lineup of figures (Fig. 5). Those figures stretch across sixty feet of wall. They await the modern gaze, adorned in red and white, some solid, others festooned with snakes and other torso designs. Most of them are as tall as you are.

The Great Gallery’s reigning protagonist appears in a cluster on the far left.There are other figures almost as large, but this sort-of-humanoid, sometimes called the “Holy Ghost,” with a lightbulb head, glowing eye sockets, and geometric body patterning, is the only figure who appears to be served by a robed retinue. The consorts were painted with red hematite, and the ancient artist who rendered the scene portrayed them in various sizes to create the 3-D effect of a powerful king—or god—trailing followers at every remove of distance. And perhaps of time.

4. Thomas Moran (American, born in England, 1837–1926), Indian Pueblo, Laguna, New Mexico, 1905.

Oil paint on canvas, 20¼ x 30¼ in.

(51.44 x 76.84 cm). Denver Art Museum: Funds from Henry Roath, 2020.195.

18

So, the West was wild and new, awaiting nineteenth-century artists to color in its destiny? The Great Gallery is between 1,000 and 2,000 years old. Its artist, or (more likely) artists, were Archaic, older than the Ancestral Puebloan Basketmakers, the “Old Ones” of the Southwest. Ancient Rome was likely at its height when the Great Gallery appeared in this canyon. England and France had centuries to go to realize their destinies when American art had its first exhibit of the glowing-eyed being and its companions.

Three grand ideas distinguish the art of the American West in the centuries and millennia prior to the nineteenth century. One, as exemplified by the Great Gallery and thousands of other pictographs and 19

138. B. J. O. Nordfeldt (American, born in Sweden, 1878–1955), Santa Fe Landscape, about 1930.

Oil paint on canvas, 27 x 38 in.

(68.58 x 96.52 cm). Denver Art Museum: Gift of Charles Francis Hendrie Memorial Collection, 1973.59.

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138. B. J. O. Nordfeldt (American, born in Sweden, 1878–1955), Santa Fe Landscape, about 1930.

Oil paint on canvas, 27 x 38 in.

(68.58 x 96.52 cm). Denver Art Museum: Gift of Charles Francis Hendrie Memorial Collection, 1973.59.

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DENVER ART MUSEUM

THE AMERICAN WEST IN ART

THE AMERICAN

W EinSArtT