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The Near, the Far, and the Modern
The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890–1950, takes visitors on an epic journey through the American West that touches on the subjects of history, time, geography, geology, and ethnography. Through one hundred and ten paintings, photographs, watercolors, and pastels, by artists from Frederic Remington to Jackson Pollock, The Modern West explores the definitive impact of the Western landscape on modern art in America, a story that has never been told in a major museum exhibition before.
The main storyline in American art has always emphasized the importance of urbanism, especially machine-age technology, in the development of modernism in the United States. Yet the vast, rough land of the West, and what had taken place on it for thousands of years, also left its indelible mark on modern art in America.
The West's overwhelming expansiveness, which writer Willa Cather called "the great fact," is defined by rugged mountains, steep canyons, rolling prairies, rocky coastlines, bleached deserts, and disorienting optical effects. The "great fact" of the Western landscape has served as a powerful catalyst for artistic change and innovation. For example, Jackson Pollock, born and raised in the West, sought in his carefully controlled drip paintings to visualize American Indian concepts of a closer relationship between humans and nature, one in which they simply fuse. In the surface of his drip paintings, space and place merge, unframed. Pollock's unprecedented technique was both inextricable from the postwar New York cultural climate and inseparable from his Western experience.
Prologue: Landmarking the West
During the nineteenth century, the seemingly limitless spaces of the American West began to assume their contours. In the years following the Civil War, railroads raced across the continent, the telegraph accelerated communication, Native Americans were moved from their homelands to reservations, herds of American bison dwindled dangerously near extinction, and the United States government accounted for its western territories through systematic surveys. These surveys measured the West's utility, its physical and cultural variety, and its vast spaces.
Euro-American artists and photographers, including those represented in the Prologue gallery of The Modern West, served on these survey expeditions that made the geological wonders, sublime scenery, treacherous deserts, and expansive vistas of the American West (as well as the peoples who had lived there for thousands of years) more accessible and legible to the American public at large.
 The Development of Photography in the Nineteenth Century
The technology of photography rapidly evolved after it was introduced to the public in 1839. The daguerreo-type was supplanted by the wet-plate (collodion) technology that dominated photography in the 1860s and 1870s. In the wet-plate method (the process used to create the photographs on view in the Prologue gallery) the photographer coated sheets of glass with light-sensitive chemicals, loaded a camera, then exposed and developed glass negatives, all before the light-sensitive surface dried. Despite the cumbersome nature of the process, it yielded vivid images of exquisite detail.
Because the exposures were so long, skies are flat and white expanses and rolling waters appear still. Photographers could retouch their photographs with paint or manipulate their prints by adding a second negative of clouds, but usually they left the sky a void. Against the colorless sky, the landscape becomes an even greater presence.
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The End of the Frontier: Making the West Artistic
In 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau declared that the western frontier was closed, the period of westward expansion over. With this "end" came a flourishing of paintings and photographs of the West that no longer measured, landmarked, and recorded the vast western territories, but instead used them for personal ends, as sites reflective of emotional states—introspection, nostalgia, loss, psychological release, and exhilaration.
These developments resulted, in large part, from new artistic experiments taking place in Europe. Neatly ordered representations of the physical world were giving way to new artistic priorities: flickering color, dissolving forms, and fleeting atmospheric effects, emphasizing the ability of color and form to express mood and emotion. The physical characteristics of the West—the optical illusions created by the desert and the broad, empty spaces, otherworldly colors, and sharply angled landforms—offered concrete examples of modernist tendencies that catalyzed artistic experimentation.
Further, there was the belief that "vanishing" American Indian cultures represented a preindustrial ideal of all that was then lost to modern civilization. This belief informed the American search for national meaning in art produced during the early decades of the twentieth century.
California
California contains the highest (Mt. Whitney) and lowest (Death Valley) points in the continental United States. Artists, photographers, and writers gloried in the diverse terrain of the Golden State, promoting California's natural abundance as the region's ultimate mark of identity. Many drew parallels between ancient Greece and California because of such similarities as the gentle climate and the pastoral landscape.
Artists were inspired by these qualities to create a new vision of a modern Arcadia, one that was reinforced by the pioneering conservation efforts of naturalist John Muir in the face of California's rapid emergence as a powerful economic region, from the agricultural sector to the tourist industry. Some artists celebrated California's distinctive geography by producing dreamy, ethereal landscapes, while artists in the San Francisco Bay Area group known as the Society of Six registered their joyful response to nature by painting with thickly applied, exaggerated colors.
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Modern Regions
In the early twentieth century, the monolithic West as a symbolic and psychic space, as seen in the art of the End of the Frontier gallery, divided into distinct regions—or many Wests—with local characteristics. Artists and photographers helped to define these regions, such as the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest, and the Midwest, often in association with the tourist and development industries, the railroad, or on their own terms. Beginning in this gallery, which focuses on art produced in California, and continuing into the next three rooms, visitors encounter the ways in which artists and photographers gave visual form to these increasingly recognizable regions of the United States.
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The Southwest
Few visitors who traveled to the Southwest for the first time in the late nineteenth century, particularly to New Mexico, failed to be astonished by the area's vast empty spaces, sharp geological contours, vivid colors, and intense sunlight. Many were also startled by the distortions of perception that made it difficult to determine distance—what some artists referred to as the problem of the near and the far. The ways in which Pueblo and Navajo Indians appeared to relate so harmoniously to the landscape fascinated city-weary artists. Together with the modern qualities of the physical landscape that reinforced new aesthetic ideas about the concept of space, these enduring cultures became a vital resource for artists who were intent on developing a more authentic "American" art.
 The railroads extended their lines into the area in the 1880s and mounted an intense promotional campaign to attract visitors. Yet among the most innovative promoters of the Southwest were the founders of the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe, who were architectural preservationists, archaeologists, and promoters of artists. Seeking to preserve, understand, and draw attention to the region's picturesque adobe architecture and its indigenous cultures, they offered free studio space to nationally known artists such as Marsden Hartley and Stuart Davis. The founders also joined forces with the archaeological community to ensure that art and archaeology were joint ventures—not separate endeavors—that could achieve the shared objective of helping preserve Native American culture.
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 American Indian Watercolor Painting
American Indian watercolor painting on paper, as opposed to the American Indian tradition of painting on ceramics, dates back to nineteenth-century ledger drawings (examples are on view in the first gallery). The "modern" development of watercolor painting begins around the early twentieth century at Hopi in northeastern Arizona and San Ildefonso, New Mexico. There, with the support of white patrons (many of them activist women), a number of first-generation, self-taught American Indian artists, like Julian Martinez (1885–1943) and Alfonso Roybal (1895–1955) from San Ildefonso Pueblo, produced a body of work widely celebrated for its assertion of Indian culture.
Dorothy Dunn (1903–1991), perhaps the best known of the teachers and promoters of American Indian watercolor painting, founded the Studio of the Santa Fe Indian School in 1932, where young artists were carefully guided to record their native traditions using watercolor. As she wrote in the very first sentence of her extensively researched and groundbreaking book, American Indian Painting (1968), "American Indian painting not only is the first painting the continent produced—it is the first American painting in which abstract style and certain other characteristics now commonly associated with contemporary art were developed to an advanced degree."
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The Dust Bowl Era: Plains and Other Places
The decade of the 1930s marked a departure from the centuries-old belief in the land as the definitive marker of national identity and promise. The blighted landscape during the Great Depression served as a rallying cry for reform as increasingly critical, ironic, or paradoxical portrayals of the American land appeared in paintings and photographs. Through the Resettlement Administration (RA), later the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the government hired photographers to document the devastating effects of the Depression throughout various regions, especially the Great Plains.
 Photographers were witnesses to the unraveling ties between people and place in the modern world. While these artists provided a great deal of information in their photographs, they remained attentive to aesthetics of modern photography. The subjects of these photographs are often twofold: on the one hand, the geometry, form, composition, and divisions of space that the modern landscape offered an artist and imposed on its inhabitants; on the other, the human displacement in the wake of mechanization, the ongoing droughts of the 1930s, and the dust and sand storms of the Great Plains that resulted from widespread overcultivation of the land.
In the midst of this turmoil and social suffering, which consistently kept the limelight focused on America's interior, artists such as Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and Alexandre Hogue staked their claims on heartland painting, which filtered the problems of the United States from a regional point of view.
Epilogue: The Abstract West
| Jackson Pollock and Native American Art
Presented at the entrance to The Modern West are two films, one by photographer Hans Namuth showing Jackson Pollock working in his Long Island studio, and his wife, the artist Lee Krasner, interacting with him; the other, a Navajo healer gathering natural materials to create a sacred ceremonial sand painting to bring back the balance and health of a patient—to restore hózhó (roughly translated as harmony, beauty, health, and moral goodness).
Jackson Pollock's abiding interest in Native American art sustained him throughout his career. While he was undoubtedly familiar with the religious tradition of Navajo sand painting, Pollock's first documented encounter with it was at a 1941 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he observed Navajo artists making sand paintings on the gallery floors. The ceremony clearly had an effect on Pollock, who eventually moved his canvases to the floor of his studio and released a steady stream of pigment on them in a sequence of layers.
Pollock worked up the canvases from all four sides of the painting—"akin," he said, "to the method of the Indian sand painters of the West." He buried American Indian-inspired symbolic forms in layers of paint, as if brushing away a sand painting, then repeated the process. As his wife, Lee Krasner, observed, Pollock's method of drip painting (including Number 13A: Arabesque, above and in the Epilogue gallery) "breaks once and for all the concept . . . that one sits and observes nature that is out there. Rather, it claims a oneness."
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In the late 1930s, depictions of Western landscapes appeared increasingly fantastic. Surrealism, which focused on the strange juxtapositions of ideas and concepts arrived at unconsciously or by automatism (spontaneous writing or drawing), spurred this development. In the West, a place of dramatic contrasts where perceptions of time and space shift abruptly, surrealism and geography had a mutually reinforcing effect on modern artists.
Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still were both from the West, and each cultivated the image of a lone, Western frontiersman struggling to make art in a hostile world. Both painters eventually subsumed nature entirely by translating the relationship between land and life into abstracted forms. The art that they and others of their generation produced in the 1940s increasingly emphasized the act of painting.
Despite this emphasis on process and the relationship of forms on canvas, the artworks in this gallery assert that place still mattered in the artistic equation. Many of the works displayed here cannot be called "landscapes" in the traditional sense of the word, but their production is inextricably linked to the land and life that inspired them.
Banner image:
John Henry Twachtman, American, 1853–1902, Emerald Pool, Yellowstone, c. 1895 (detail), oil on canvas, 24 1/4 x 30 1/4 in., Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Conn., Bequest of George A. Gay, by exchange, and the Ellen Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Fund.
Images with article, from top:
Victor Higgins, American, 1884–1949, New Mexico Skies (August Skies), c. 1932–35, oil on canvas, 54 x 60 in., the Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John T. Higgins, 65.53.3.
Carleton E. Watkins, American, 1829–1916, Cape Horn, near Celilo, 1867, albumen photograph, 20 1/2 x 15 3/4 in., Wilson Centre for Photography, London.
Timothy O'Sullivan, American, probably born Ireland, 1840–1882,
Historic Spanish Record of the Conquest, South Side of Inscription Rock, New Mexico, 1873, albumen silver photograph, 8 x 10 in., Robert G. Lewis Collection.
Frederic Remington, American, 1861–1909, Fight for the Water Hole, 1903, oil on canvas, 27 1/8 x 40 1/8 in., the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Hogg Brothers Collection, gift of Miss Ima Hogg.
Louise Deshong Woodbridge, American, 1848–1925, Yellowstone "Grand View," c. 1912, platinum photograph, 3 7/8 x 4 11/16 in., Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, P1981.70.
Clayton S. Price, American, 1874–1950, Coastline, c. 1924, oil on canvas, 40 1/8 x 50 in., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966.
Asahachi Kono, American, born Japan, birth date unknown, died 1943, Untitled (Tree and Hills), late 1920s, gelatin silver photograph, 7 3/8 x 11 7/8 in., Dennis Reed Collection.
John Marin, American, 1870–1953, Storm, Taos Mountain, New Mexico, 1930, watercolor and charcoal on paper, 16 7/8 x 21 3/4 in., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949 (49.70.144).
Raymond Jonson, American, 1891–1982, Cliff Dwellings, No. 3, 1927, oil on canvas, 48 x 38 in., Jonson Gallery Collection, University Art Museum, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, Bequest of Raymond Jonson.
Julian Martinez, North American Indian, Pueblo (San Ildefonso Pueblo, N.M.), 1885–1943, Conventionalized Design of Symbols (Sacred Avanyu), 1930–40, tempera on paper, 16 x 19 3/4 in., the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Gift of Miss Ima Hogg.
Alexandre Hogue, American, 1898–1994, The Crucified Land, 1939, oil on canvas, 42 x 60 in., Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Edward Weston, American, 1886–1958, "Hot Coffee," Mojave Desert, 1937, gelatin silver photograph, 7 7/16 x 9 7/16 in., the Lane Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Jackson Pollock, American, 1912-1956, Number 13A: Arabesque, 1948, oil on canvas, 37 1/4 x 117 in., Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Richard Brown Baker, B.A. 1935.
Laura Gilpin, American, 1891–1979. White Sands, 1945, gelatin silver photograph, 7 1/2 x 9 1/2 in., the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Gift of Clinton T. Willour in honor of Louisa Stude Sarofim.
Ansel Adams, American, 1902–1984, Surf Sequence, 1940, gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 1/8 in., Museum of Modern Art, New York, anonymous gift.
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The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890–1950
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