How Modernism Found Its Place in the American West

In some hundred paintings, watercolors, and photographs, The Modern West: American Landscapes 1890-1950 contends that the art inspired by the Western United States played a much greater role than commonly supposed in the formation of modernism. Austen Bailly, assistant curator of American Art, finds the evidence persuasive.

What ideas in the show do you most identify with?
Fundamentally what is so strong about the show is that it's rooted in the artworks, in very close looking at what these artists are trying to do with the Western landscape in their art.

What are the characteristics we should look for?
They have to do with the aesthetics of modernism, such as the flattening of perspectival space, for example, where you might have a high horizon line; or visible and vigorous brushwork; or abstracting spaces, taking something literal and interpreting the form of it. And also the works may have a very personal or psychological interpretation of a place, where the artist is not simply documenting it but actually kind of communing with it, or trying to make it surreal.

If all these things are going on, why hasn't the American West been regarded as an influence on modernism?
Because modernism, broadly speaking, is about change, and about dealing with things that come with change—progress and also loss—and notions of change were associated mainly with urban environments. Because our art centers are historically located on the East Coast—and almost exclusively in New York City, with its congregation and concentration of artists there—the kind of dynamic change that the skyscrapers of urban New York represented really came to dominate what was considered modern.

Yet the show asserts that land-survey photography from the West became a model for contemporary art at MOMA in the 1930s. How did that happen?
MOMA in the 1930s, interestingly enough, was very active in trying to create a history for American art that spoke to modernist tenets of the day: geometric composition, angular abstracted forms, light and structure within the composition, the framed image. For example, the survey photographs of Timothy O'Sullivan—which were given to Beaumont Newhall, who was running the photography department at that time, actually by Ansel Adams—were appropriated as being proto-modern, and as something that could be distinctively American. One has to remember that modern art was actually considered something European, and how could young America ever begin to compete with the history of art? So here were these images that actually had, to the modern eye, characteristics of modern art, and that had been produced in the nineteenth century in the United States.

So it was like, "What about this?"
Yes. This was obviously very ahistorical: you're putting aesthetics of the 1930s onto art that wasn't coming from this sort of mindset or formal approach. But the photographs do bear very modern characteristics. For example, in the Timothy O'Sullivan photograph, Sand dunes, Carson Desert, Nevada (1867), the wagon is going off to the right, so there's this very strange sense of balance; and you've got these dunes—he's actually just trying to document the place, but in the front are his footprints in the sand, from his running back to the camera to capture this image. So there's a very strong presence of the artist. You're aware of the picture being made and that the artist may intend to make you aware of his role in producing the image.

Do you think the artist, if presented with this idea at the time, would have said, "Gee, what are you talking about?"
I think these artistic ideas are basic enough that if one were to have engaged him with them, he probably would have understood: that yes, his footsteps were visible, and that does reveal his role in making that image. But by the same token the rhetoric—the idea of having to create an American art in the 1930s for a new museum like the Museum of Modern Art, which we have to remember was only founded in 1929—would have been a little bit foreign.

Talk about the role of Native American art, in the show and in the creation of modernism.
In the prologue to the show—in the 1860s and '70s—works of art created by Native Americans are dealing with the way that the spaces that they lived in (and which they identified with as individuals, not just as tribes and peoples) were fundamentally changed by the presence and attacks of U.S. forces. For example, there's a ledger drawing where you see troops amassed in a very graphic, sort of tight, linear way; and on the opposite side, using the spine as the divider, there's just this complete disjuncture: there are people all over. It shows a battle, a massacre, and a complete dissolution of orderly space. The work is not operating under formal tenets of modernism studied at an art school, but the idea that an artist is expressing his experience of a destruction of place and space as he knows it, through this visual cause and effect, is something quite modern.

Later, in the 1920s and '30s, American Indians like Julian Martinez are producing watercolors that are not landscapes in a traditional sense but are innovative interpretations of sacred symbols associated with the land. These artists influenced other modern painters, such as John Marin, whose watercolors are on view with Martinez's in the show. And they were also influenced by the art deco styles and motifs then in vogue. The modern artistic and cultural intersections visible in all of these works are not that well known and are really striking to see.

What was physically different about the Western landscape, compared with landscapes in Europe or in the eastern U.S., that would make artists think in a new way?
I think the characteristic that is the most different is the sense of expansive space—that you have either very very flat land, for seemingly forever, or huge mountain ranges that abrubtly emerge. And you also have incredibly intense effects of light on these vast spaces, on dramatic declivities or rising spires, and a very difficult sense of ascertaining near versus far. The sense of perspective is troubled by the length at which you view, the light in which you view, and the height or depth of, say, the Grand Canyon or the Grand Tetons . . .

For me one of the most surprising moments, and what I call my aha! moment, in getting what these artists were grappling with in terms of perspective and space and light, was actually going to Mammoth Mountain for the first time, this past winter, and driving along Highway 395. I was trying to figure out which was Mt. Whitney, the tallest peak in California and in the Lower 48. There's this line of foothills, and it looks like the mountain is jammed up right behind it. But there's a huge gap between those foothills and the peak—we knew from the map that it was fourteen or fifteen miles off the road we were on—but because the peak seems so close, it doesn't look that high, even though it was so sharply silhouetted against a crystal clear blue winter sky. That was really strange. . . Driving further along, as you get closer to Mammoth, you start to get some very dramatic shadows on these extremely steep and sharp-sloped sides of the eastern Sierras. And when I saw that, and the way the narrow angles of the shadows sort of drip down the sides of the mountain, I said, "That's Clyfford Still, I get what he's doing!" In his large abstract paintings, he has these jagged swoops of paint from the top third of the canvas down to the bottom, and they exactly mimic the way that the shadow is being cast by the sharp light on the sides of those mountains. As someone relatively new to the West, it was a complete epiphany for me.

You're a scholar of Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975). What was his role in the transition from regionalism to modernism?
Benton had an interesting role to play in that transition, because a lot of people argue that he is not part of it. He maintained an interest in naturalistic representation and subject matter throughout his career, whereas his primary and most famous student, Jackson Pollock, completely abandoned what Benton painted, which was the figure or the traditional landscape. Pollock's paintings became their own kind of landscape. Though modern in approach and themes, Benton's art didn't represent nearly as radical an artistic style as drip painting. So Benton, as Pollock's mentor, gave him the foundations for exploring rhythmic compositions that are evident in his drip paintings, but not through figuration—Pollock really went in a different direction. But Benton, from Missouri, very likely encouraged Pollock to cultivate his roots in the West, and to think about that in terms of his art.
Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, in 1912; he lived all over the West, in Arizona as a child—his father was a farmer who learned irrigation techniques from American Indians—and American Indians were part of his early childhood on a daily basis. He moved to L.A. in 1928 after having lived in Riverside, and then, when he got to New York in 1930 to study with Benton, he totally adopted a cowboy persona. It became part of his identity, something that people could relate to—actually, in fact, more easily than [they could] to his art. And Pollock always maintained a very strong interest in American Indian art. But one crucial comparison with Benton and Pollock would be Pollock's Going West (1934-35) in the exhibition. Whereas Benton had done going-west images of trains catapulting through the landscape, very fixed on a direct line, Pollock's image is kind of nightmarish: It's dark, it's brooding, it's circular, it looks sort of hellish, and what it shows is Pollock really internalizing a more surreal, dreamlike experience of moving around the West, the nomadic childhood that he had, and a darker notion of what was happening to the West and of what his experience was.

Where does California fit in? What sets it apart?
The exhibition focuses on what the curator who has written the catalogue calls "California's ultimate identity," which is California as an Arcadia. Now, of course, that's debatable and probably has shifted. But you could say that the climate and culture and eternal sunshine really do define the state in many ways. Artists studying these characteristics at the turn of the twentieth century were so attuned to the geography, and to the light, and to capturing those things in ways that were very germane to California's emerging significance in the United States. And California's geography fundamentally faces in two directions: back East, and West to Asia. And so the influence of, say, Japanese art—and not just Japanese prints that were so important to artists in the late-nineteenth century but, actually, Japanese-American artists living in California—is really not to be underestimated. Artists and critics saw California as this independent-minded place where you could step away from New York as the art center and explore in ways that you might not have otherwise. So to think of California in these respects is to acknowledge California as modern.

What else would you like to say about the show?
Barry Lopez's essay for the catalogue is very, how shall I say, probing, about the West as a physical place in our cultural and historical experience and as a space in our imaginations as Americans. He confronts the fact that there are many lost histories in the West. And the way he relates his ideas to the exhibition—by considering how artists use the West as an imaginative space for their art, effectively disregarding its past—is really provocative.

In a way the American West represents an erasure of history.
Yes, but the metaphor of layering to me is a very profound one for this show. Think of the way that paint can be layered on a canvas, say in a Pollock—or, really, in any painting, but especially in a Pollock—and compare that with the idea of the layering of geological time, the layering of history, of who has occupied places and who has come to them, and the West really becomes a kind of touchstone for where we end up. At the end of the show, when you're dealing with the artists painting around World War II, there's a very dark underpinning to what they are grappling with in their art. There's a real sense of death, actually, in some of these works, in the desiccated environments of the West, in the ground where massacres occurred, where today ecological damage threatens that earth, and artists do begin to tap into that. The idea of the monolithic, mythic West has largely evaporated, and there can be a real sense of history buried in specific places—places [that] Lopez, for instance, seeks to uncover in the context of exploring the modern West. But the West remains a place where people invent or come to reinvent. It is a place where they imagine—this is not to say that doesn't happen elsewhere—but the idea that the West continues to be a foment of imaginative possibility —think of Hollywood!—and to have the potential to erase who and what was there before, whether historically, culturally, or artistically, attests to its complexity and its modernity.

Artworks above: Conventionalized Design of Symbols (Sacred Avanyu), 1930–40, Julian Martinez, United States, 1885–1943, tempera on paper, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston; gift of Miss Ima Hogg.

Boomtown, 1927–28, Thomas Hart Benton, American, 1889-1975, oil on canvas, 45 x 54 in., Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, M.S. Gould Fund.

Night Mist, 1945, Jackson Pollock, American, 1912-1956, oil on canvas, 39 x 72 1/8 in., Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, Purchase, the R. H. Norton Trust, 71.14.

The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890–1950