34. Miscellaneous Interpreters and Institutions
ARTISTS
ART MAY BE SUBSTANTIVE, but more than being its own excuse for being, it lights up the land it depicts, shows people what is significant, cherishable in their own lives and environments. Thus Peter Hurd of New Mexico has revealed windmills, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri has elevated mules. Nature may not literally follow art, but human eyes follow art and literature in recognizing nature.
The history of art in the Southwest, if it is ever rightly written, will not bother with the Italian "Holy Families" imported by agent-guided millionaires trying to buy exclusiveness. It will begin with clay (Indian pottery), horse hair (vaquero weaving), hide (vaquero plaiting), and horn (backwoods carving). It will note Navajo sand painting and designs in blankets.
Charles M. Russell's art has been characterized in the chapter on "Range Life." He had to paint, and the Old West was his life. More versatile was his contemporary Frederic Remington, author of Pony Tracks, Crooked Trails, and other books, and prolific illustrator of Owen Wister, Theodore Roosevelt, Alfred Henry Lewis, and numerous other writers of the West. Not so well known as these two, but rising in estimation, was Charles Schreyvogle. He did not write; his best-known pictures are reproduced in a folio entitled My Bunkie and Others. Remington, Russell, and Schreyvogle all did superb sculptoring in bronze. One of the finest pieces of sculpture in the Southwest is "The Seven Mustangs" by A. Phimister Proctor, in front of the Texas Memorial Museum at Austin.
Among contemporary artists, Ross Santee and Will James (died, 1942) have illustrated their own cow country books, some of which are listed under "Range Life" and "Horses." William R. Leigh, author of The Western Pony, is a significant painter of the range. Edward Borein of Santa Barbara, California, has in scores of etchings and a limited amount of book illustrations "documented" many phases of western life. Buck Dunton of Taos illustrated also. His lithographs and paintings of wild animals, trappers, cowboys, and Indians seem secure.
I cannot name and evaluate modern artists of the Southwest. They are many, and the excellence of numbers of them is nationally recognized. Many articles have been written about the artists who during this century have lived around Taos and painted that region of the Southwest. Some of the better-known names are Ernest L. Blumenschein, Oscar Berninghaus, Ward Lockwood, B. J. O. Nordfeldt, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ila McAfee, Barbara Latham Cook, Howard Cook. Artists thrive in Arizona, Oklahoma, and Texas as well as in New Mexico. Tom Lea, of El Paso, may be quitting painting and drawing to spend the remainder of his life in writing. Perhaps he himself does not know. Jerry Bywaters, who is at work on the history of art in the Southwest, has about quit producing to direct the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Alexandre Hogue gives his strength to teaching art in Tulsa University. Exhibitions, not commentators, are the revealers of art.
A few books, all expensive, reproduce the art of certain depicters of the West and Southwest. Etchings of the West, by Edward Borein, and The West of Alfred Jacob Miller have been noted in other chapters (consult Index). Other recent art works are: Peter Hurd: Portfolio of Landscapes and Portraits, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1950; Gallery of Western Paintings, edited by Raymond Carlson, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1951 (unsatisfactory reproduction); Frederic Remington, Artist of the Old West, by Harold McCracken, Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1947 (biography and check list with many reproductions); Portrait of the Old West, by Harold McCracken, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1952 (samplings of numerous artists).
In February, 1946, Robert Taft of the University of Kansas began publishing in the Kansas Historical Quarterly chapters, richly illustrated in black and white, in "The Pictorial Record of the Old West." The book to be made from these chapters will have a historical validity missing in most picture books.