Christmas Meat, by Charles Marion Russell (1915)

Though it may not be entirely true that deep in the breast of every aesthete beats the heart of a cowboy, it is certainly true of Your Correspondent.  Thoughts of Christmas always seem to carry with them thoughts of the Wild West – it’s the way my brain is wired.  For many Bing Crosby is the voice of Christmas; at The Jade Sphinx, it’s Gene Autry.  (By the way, there is no better way to feel elderly – if not prehistoric – than by trying to explain who Gene Autry was to a young person.)

We have written about self-proclaimed ‘cowboy artist’ Charles Russell (1864-1926) before.  When we reviewed his letters and diary snippets, we were delighted to learn how wonderfully boyish and enthusiastic Russell was in person.  Russell never fully grew-up and he often approached his life, like his art, with a child-like sense of wonder.

So it comes as no surprise that Russell loved the Christmas season.  He would often retreat into his studio weeks before the holiday, designing his Christmas card(s), writing letters to close friends and oft-times painting a holiday-themed picture.

Today’s beautiful watercolor, Christmas Meat painted in 1915, is a picture of great warmth, despite the presence of snow.  In it, a Westerner brings a fresh-killed stag to a lone homesteader for Christmas dinner.  Russell painted many Christmas pictures with greater whimsy (Westerners coming across Santa during a snowy night, for example), but here he chooses instead to illustrate the holiday with a simple act of kindness.

In these days of easy consumption and near-instant gratification, we forget the every-day difficultly of the lives of previous generations.  Distances in the West were vast; a simple motor trip today would last several days on horseback.  People were extremely isolated on the countryside, with no phones, electronic entertainment, news, or, very frequently, neighbors. 

Russell, who went West in the waning days of the frontier, lived among the cowboys and knew how isolated it could all be.  But, he also loved the West, and was continually moved by the neighborliness, the open-handed generosity and many acts of human kindness he encountered there.

Let’s take a look at Christmas Meat.  As always, Russell’s command of anatomy is sketchy, at best (where, for example, is the rest of the cowboy’s left leg?), but he more he is more than able to pose his figures dramatically in the composition of narrative.  The outstretched hand, the visible smile, the bow-legs, and upheld rifle speak volumes – here’s Christmas dinner, pard, I got it myself.

And look at the homesteader!  Hand in his pants (so, clearly, a bachelor), complete with pipe and red union suit underwear, this man is clearly a character.  And his head leans forward in thanks, in appreciation, and admiration. 

Marvel at Russell’s sense of color.  Blue is the dominant color … and wonderfully suggests the cold.  The frozen trees in the distance are just impressionistic dabs of blue, as is the wooden smokehouse to the left.  Even the smoke from the cabin’s fireplace has a blueish tint … rest assured, it is cold outside.

Also, Russell uses the mountains of his backdrop to illustrate the expanse of the Western terrain.  There is no one for miles around; however, he undercuts the feeling of cold waste by a smart use of yellow.  The yellow light in the distance, along with the warm yellow of the window and doorway of the cabin, illustrate the warmth of human kindness at Christmas time.

The partially cut wood in the foreground may seem superfluous, but Russell, a master of composition, knew that something was essential there to keep the eye moving through the picture.  (It also serves to illustrate the cold … the homesteader does not tread far to get his firewood!)

This is a lovely little grace note of a picture, filled with honest feeling and a great deal of warmth.  It doesn’t descend into the overly sentimental, and it shows people at their best.

As such, it makes for a hell of a Christmas picture.

More Christmas books tomorrow!

Waiting and Mad, by Charles Marion Russell (1899)

We finish our brief look into the internal workings of the mind of Charlie Russell, Cowboy Artist Extraordinaire, with this witty and wonderful picture, Waiting and Mad (1899).

People who have known Your Correspondent for some time have surely heard me say, “I’ve been married for 26 years and I’ve spent 23 of them waiting.”  As someone who regularly waits by the door, waits by the shower and waits in the car while my Much Better Half does whatever it is that he’s doing, the feeling in this picture is very familiar.  And I’m sure the look on my face is much the same.

Just to be upfront about it – I love this picture.   Though Charlie was merely a capable draughtsman of the human form, every detail of this picture speaks volumes.

The story is clear from the surroundings and the look of … sultry disgust on the Indian woman’s face.  Here is a beautiful and sexualized woman – notice the nearly exposed breast and the provocative curve of hip.  Her pallet is ready for company, but the fire in the foreground has grown cold (a witty joke), the dinner bowl is now empty, and the long pipe is cast aside and unused (ditto).  Like the wispy smoke from the dead fire, there is only a dissipating trace of something that was once hot.

Most delicious of all is the look on her face: a mixture of disappointment, fury, resignation and bored familiarity.  One has the distinct impression that this has happened before, and will probably happen again in the future.  And she knows it.

So … why do I like this painting so much?  Mainly because Charlie’s views on humanity were much smarter and commonsensical than the ways we are taught to think today.  Charlie knew many Native Americans in his time in the West, and genuinely liked them.  He was one of nature’s democrats – he judged people as individuals, and knew that, as groups, people are more alike than they are different.

Today, we are taught that our differences matter more than our similarities, and that our cultural peculiarities are some sacred carapace that protect us from being more like one another.  Charlie would’ve thought we were crazy (and I’m with Charlie).  This picture works so well because Charlie was able to capture the look of everyone who has ever waited for their wife or husband to show up.  It would be the same picture if the woman was in an Asian setting, or a Middle-European one, or in a contemporary American home: and that is Charlie’s point.  We’re all people, and we’re all more alike than we are different.

Charlies notions don’t have much currency in today’s world, but how much of commonsense does, nowadays?

Next week: New and Noteworthy Books  

Loops and Swift Horses are Surer Than Lead, by Charles Marion Russell (1916)

Here is a wonderful action painting by our friend, Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), the Cowboy Artist.  Charlie is a good saddle pal to us here at The Jade Sphinx, and Your Correspondent has been trying to get a sense of the man and his philosophy through his pictures. 

We can start with the obvious: the title of this work, Loops and Swift Horses are Surer Than Lead.  In the survey of Western Art we have done here over the years, we have had occasion to look at several pictures that include bears in an attitude of menace.  In fact, after Native Americans, bandits and over-zealous lawmen, perhaps the bear is the most frequently represented foeman in Western Art.

However, most any of Charlie’s contemporaries would take the obvious route, and paint a picture of Western figures shooting and killing the bear.  (Or, reaching for their rifles to do so, or putting them down after they have done so.)  Not Charlie.  His cowboy heroes, though obviously well-armed, rope and scare the bear away to safer climes.  Always more Roy Rogers than Clint Eastwood, Charlie didn’t see the West as a vast panorama of hardship and cruelty, but, rather, a boyish paradise of freedom and fun.

This is where Charlie differs most significantly from the artist frequently associated with him, Frederic Remington (1861-1909).  For Remington, the West was unending hardship, merciless desert and physical exertion, a battle for survival to be won or lost.  It is Remington, of course, who created in his work the now-familiar Western trope of the bleached steer skull that can still be seen in countless depictions of the West.  Make a wrong move, Remington implied, and you’ll end up the same.

If this picture is any indication, perhaps Charlie’s vision was the truer one.  Loops and Swift Horses now hangs in the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and is based on a true-life incident.  This painting came about by way of his friends, the Coburn brothers of the famous Circle C Ranch in eastern Montana, where they described the roping of a giant brown bear. Artistic license was taken when Charlie turned the bruin into a Grizzly, but the rest of the story was true right down to the landscape in the background: the scenic Coburn Buttes.

The dominant color of the picture is blue, but Charlie manages to mute or pop shades of it to represent everything from trees to sky to mountains, to foreground scrub.  Yes, the color never becomes monotonous or gimmicky. 

Charlie was also the master of figures in motion.  His horses move.  Many of our greatest artists have been able to depict horses of majesty, of size, of monumentality, but Charlie’s horses are seen in dramatic action, twisting or jumping with a febrile life of their own.  I can think of no finer painter of American horses than Charlie Russell

Finally, Charlie underscores the tumultuous action of the picture with a rainstorm in the middle-distant horizon.  Like all Western landscape pictures, the view-horizon is vast, going on for miles.  Thus the far-off rain storm underscores the ‘storm’ of action going on between cowboys, horses and bear. 

Speaking of movement, take a moment to look at the bear.  It twists and pivots on unsteady ground … you can almost feel the weight of the animal as it is pulled and slides down the natural incline.  The cowboys, too, move as if in motion, alternately pulling or swinging their lariats.  And notice the cowboy on the right, looking over his right shoulder, with right leg raised as counter weight to keep in saddle.

This is a really good picture, and something mysteriously akin to the essence of Charlie – not only is his West a world of action, freedom and camaraderie, but it can be a fairly bloodless one, too.  Charlie loved the animals he found out West (when visiting cities, he always went to the local zoo, where he said he felt most at home), and it’s not surprising that he would depict his heroes scaring away the threat of a grizzly, rather than killing it. 

Perhaps we should all take a page from Russell’s notebook, and produce work that preserves the best parts of ourselves (or, at least, the myth of the best part of ourselves).  The more I look at Charlie’s work, the more convinced I become that we need more artists like him now.

Laugh Kills Lonesome, by Charles Marion Russell (1925)

It’s no secret that we here at The Jade Sphinx love the work of Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), the cowboy artist.  The boyish Russell went West in his early youth, and worked as a cowboy, watching the waning days of the American West with an artist’s eye.  He didn't seem to be very effective in the saddle, but it was all he wanted and he was happy.

Charlie not only loved life, he loved his life.  He wanted to be a cowboy in his earliest boyhood, and went West as soon a he had the chance. 

Charlie’s vision of the West was a boyish one, full of endless prairies and freedom.  His was an eternal boyhood – both promise and nostalgia at the same time.  The West (and his boyhood) became to him a Lost Eden which he missed and to which he could never return.

The sense of loss, though, was not a bitter nor astringent one.  In fact, it grew into some of a sweet wistfulness.  Charlie was too happy a man – too content with life and his place in it – to allow loss to play to great a part.  It’s a lesson we can all take from this maddeningly simple yet complex man.  The more I read about Charlie, the more I think I know him, the more I feel some vital core essence of the man is slipping through my fingers.

This week, we will look at three of Charlie’s pictures.  (I only think of him as “Charlie,” it’s almost impossible to think of him under his full moniker.)  They are not necessarily his best (nor most representative pictures), but they illustrate something of his philosophy, I think.

Exhibit A: Laugh Kills Lonesome, painted in 1925 and now in the Mackay Collection in Helena, Montana.  It was painted just a year before Charlie went to the Last Roundup, and if ever an artist painted an end-of-life farewell, it is this.

Charlie paints the figures in a markedly sketchy manner: it’s not verisimilitude he is after, but mood.  The sky and surrounding landscape are simply laid out in muted, cool colors.  The moon shines brilliantly in the distance, and the stars seem almost heavenly, but they do no wash the picture with cool light – they are distant and fairly unobtainable.

The realm warmth of the picture comes from the campfire, which brings a warm glow to the chuck wagon, a few simple tools, and the cowboys themselves.  There is nothing of particularly high mark in their attitudes or actions; it is simply a group of men content after a hard life of labor, loving the outdoors, their lives, and one another.  One of them smokes a contemplative cigarette, another pours the last of the coffee, and two of them share a game of cards.

But the arresting figure is the man standing on the right, hat back, coat open, body receptive to capture the campfire’s warmth.  Who is it but our old friend, Charlie Russell, the Cowboy Artist.  We have seen in the past that Charlie was not averse to putting himself into his own work, and there he is, holding his lariat, smoking a cigarette, and perhaps looking at the fire die down as his own life draws to a close.

Charlie was in ill health for the final years of his life, and he is evidently looking at his own past in this painting.  But it is not a look of regret or of loss; if anything, it’s a look of satisfaction.

Perhaps the truest nugget of the real Charlie Russell can be found in the picture’s title:  Laugh Kills Lonesome.

There, in a nutshell, is the essence of Charlie Russell.

Meat’s Not Meat Till It’s In the Pan, by Charles Marion Russell (1915)

Here it is, a New Year, and already we at The Jade Sphinx are thinking about the past.  To be exact, the past that makes up our great American Western Myth.  We spent the holiday season happily listening to Christmas carols, reading some of our favorite seasonal texts, and, of course … thinking about Westerns.

You mean you didn’t?

This Christmas we made our way through more of the Zane Grey (1872-1939), corpus, reading more of the letters of cowboy artist Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), watching a western with both (and I kid you not!) Ronald Colman (1891-1958) and Gary Cooper (1901-1961)… and thinking about Randolph Scott (1898-1987).

We will look at all of these this week, but let’s open with a droll evocation of where winter is heading this year with Russell’s wry and wonderful Meat’s Not Meat Till It’s in the Pan, painted in 1915.  The work is oil on canvas, mounted on Masonite, and it currently resides in the Gilcrease Museum of Tulsa, OK.

It’s no secret that we here at The Jade Sphinx love the work of Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), the cowboy artist.  The boyish Russell went West in his early youth, and worked as a cowboy, watching the waning days of the American West with an artist’s eye.  He didn't seem to be very effective in the saddle, but it was all Charlie wanted and he was happy.

Charlie spent his artistic life drawing and painting the West that loomed so large in his personal myth.  This delightful picture from 1915 is Charlie at his puckish best.  A man of expansive, genial good humor and a delight in a good joke, Charlie was not immune to including humor in his work.  Indeed, humor is one of the integral human experiences, and any aesthete is bereft if he does not fully embrace the lighter side of life.

Clearly our cowboy has done some winter hunting, but he was just a little too close to the edge of a gorge.  He’s bagged his meat, but how will he get it from the outcropping on which it fell?  Aside from the simple narrative of the painting, there is the sound emotional tenor of the work, which is … yeah, I’ve had days like that.

It was part of Charlie’s genius to set the work in the dead of winter; it would not nearly be as witty as a picture depicting a summer scene.  The cold, the snow and the barren quality of the landscape all conspire to make the hunter’s challenge all the more grueling.

Again, let’s look at Charlie’s simple mastery of the medium.  The dominant color is blue, but … look at what he does with it.  Various shades of blue depict everything from cavernous depths, stony distances, cloudy skies, ice on the precipice, and the snow itself.  There are even hints of blue in the rifle-barrel and upon the lighter-colored horse.  Such versatility of shade, warmth and cold, and gradation of a single color is remarkable.

Charlie is also a master of body language.  The vexation of the hunter is comically rendered without being over-the-top; the horses merely indifferent or simply miserable at being out in the weather.

Look at the circle formed by the horse’s nose pointing at the hunter, the gun butt pointing at the ram, the ram pointing to the scrub, pointing back at the horses.  Charlie’s sense of composition was unerring.

It is astonishing that a painting that so deals with death can also be so light-hearted.  Charlie creates a pyramid shape to draw attention to his hunter by having a dead steer create the left foundation, and a tangled mass of withered scrub form the right.  But it is never gloomy or dour; in fact, it only calls to mind the quote by Mark Twain, who wrote, life is just one damn thing after another.

Tomorrow: Zane Grey!

The Art of Alfredo Rodríguez, Part III: A Golden Moment (2013)

We conclude our look at Alfredo Rodríguez (born 1954) with this, A Golden Moment, painted just one year ago.

Though the last two pictures we looked at were of American Indians, Rodríguez spends nearly as much time painting miners, prospectors and Wild West bad men.  He also paints children of the plains, as well as Mexican and Indian women in a manner that could only be called Sanitized Cheesecake.

Rodríguez is a conundrum – a painter of undeniable skill and talent, but without any taste or point of view.  He too often relies on pyrotechnics to achieve his effects, and short-changes his own considerable abilities.

Today’s picture is certainly not Rodríguez at his best; though correct enough in its component parts, they don’t seem to fit together in any real way.  The prospector is wonderfully drawn, but there is no real sense of his weight or bulk upon the rocks.  The gun in his belt looks more like something drawn on his shirt than a real weapon, and I’m not quite sure where the back of the man’s body is hiding.

More egregious is the dog, who looks like he was stenciled onto the background, like one of those sets we got as children where we rubbed figures into pre-painted pictures.  The poor hound seems to hang there, not really in this picture at all, and obediently looking off to the side to see if its time to get out of it. 

How can this happen?  Again – look at the man, divorced from the rest of the picture.  Or, better yet, look at the pickaxe, bucket and pan.  All are executed with a sure hand; even the dog -- the component of the picture that screams “kitsch” with bruised lungs – is competently done.  It’s just that all of these pieces look like they were stitched together, a painting more Frankenstein than Buffalo Bill.

Alfredo Rodríguez clearly wants to be a modern Charles Marion Russell or Frederic Remington; but his passion is commercial, not personal.

Buffalo Bill Cody With Children (Date Unknown)

It is rare that we look at photos here at The Jade Sphinx, but this photo has always touched me; so much so that a copy hangs on the wall over my desk.  It is of frontiersman, scout, Pony Express Rider and showman William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody (1846-1917) in a tent on the grounds of his Wild West Show, telling yarns to his little pards.

By all reports, Cody was a lovely man.  He never refused an old friend, a hard luck story, or a child.  Cody was extremely open-handed, friendly and willing to take care of others (except, perhaps, his wife, Louisa). 

You may remember that we have previously covered the story of cowboy artist Daniel Cody Muller (1889-1976), who was born in Choteau, Montana.  Muller’s father was killed by a horse when the artist was nine years old, and he was soon after adopted by Buffalo Bill.  In his memoir, Muller writes of the 18 years he spent with Cody and of his time on both the Cody ranch and working the Wild West shows.  The Cody in Muller’s memoir is a warm-hearted man of deep compassion and sympathy.  Muller would not be Cody’s only unofficially-adopted child: he also raised Johnny Baker (1869-1931), a sharpshooter with the Wild West, as his own son, and his love for children was nearly legendary.  Indeed, in a tumultuous life of adventure, fame and cowboy-high-spirits, the sole tragedy of Cody’s life seems to be the loss of his son, Kit Carson Cody (1870-1876) to scarlet fever.

To get a flavor of the real man, there is a story that during the 1915 season, when Cody no longer owned the Wild West and was working for the Sells-Floto circus, the show was menaced by a flash flood in Fort Madison, Iowa.  Most of the show’s four hundred crew fled the scene, leaving the aged and infirm Buffalo Bill to rescue women and children with the help of five crewmembers.  Also while working for Sells-Floto, he would later grow enraged when he learned that executives had advertised a twenty-five cent admission fee and charged fifty cents at the door.  Not long after, Cody pulled his gun on the owners and demanded out of his contract.

In more than 15 years of reading obsessively about the Old West, there are only two figures who I desperately wished to have met: cowboy artist Charlie Russell (1864-1926) and Cody.  And when I picture him in my mind’s eye, it is more often in photos like the above rather than imagining him in his more perilous endeavors.

Though today’s photo was obviously staged, look at the avuncular Cody in full Wild West regalia, head slightly bowed so the sun catches his oversized Stetson and glistening white beard.  The camera catches him mid-story, holding what appears to be a piece of Native American embroidery.  Though the little girls are dressed in white and organdy pinafores, things are rough in the back area of the Wild West Show.  This is a place for play and fun and myth.  As usual, Bill is making time for everyone.

I cannot help but think of later photos of other Western Icons surrounded by children.  A quick search on the Internet would yield photos of Tom Mix, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy surrounded by children – but, as usual, Cody got there first.  I believe that it was he that created and fostered the myth of the Western Hero as the friend of childhood, a trope that has been with us for over 100 years.

Take a moment and imagine ourselves back there.  We’ve seen the Wild West (or are about to), and sneak behind to the performer’s tents.  There is the great man himself, impossibly tall and romantic in his colorful western clothes.  He beckons us over and we sit, while he unfolds a tale of Western Adventure, of days gone by and pioneer adventure.  We listen as he talks, his aged voice rich and dramatic, and the whole pageantry of the West opens before us.  And we know that once that great voice and great heart are stilled, the West will really be gone forever.

Who Is Your Santa, Part IV: The Santa Claus of Charles Marion Russell

Well, of course we here at The Jade Cactus The Jade Sphinx could not let the Christmas season pass without a nod from our favorite cowboy artist.

We have written about self-proclaimed ‘cowboy artist’ Charles Russell (1864-1926) before.  Last year were read his letters and diary snippets, and was delighted to find how wonderfully boyish and enthusiastic Russell was in person.  Russell never fully grew-up and he often approached his life, like his art, with a child-like sense of wonder.

So it comes as no surprise that Russell loved the Christmas season.  He would often retreat into his studio weeks before the holiday, designing his Christmas card(s), writing letters to close friends and oft-times painting a holiday-themed picture. 

This holiday Christmas painting showcases Russell’s most whimsical side: a cowpuncher riding a storm at night and seeing, faint in the distance, Santa Claus and his sleigh.

For true Santaologists like your correspondent, perhaps one of the most fascinating things about Big Red (as we call him in our household) is just how fleeting and ephemeral a figure he can be.  As we have seen from the different interpretations of Santa Claus, the great man is a great many things to a great number of people.  It is this elusive quality of Santa – this inability to pin him down and fully get a view of him, that keep him so mysterious, so compelling and so powerful a figure.

Charlie plays with this idea in his 1918 painting.  Santa can be seen – just – in the snowy distance.  Maybe.  Even our cowboy hero in the foreground, startled by this visitation of the fantastic on the cold plains, is uncertain of what he sees.

As with all things Russell, the composition, coloration and emotional impact of the picture are stunning.  Even with a holiday jape, he is nothing short of masterful.

And, the psychology is just correct – Santa is always best seen in the distance.  Tantalizing enough to be almost there, but never enough to be captured, measured and diminished by our science.

And that, more than anything else, is the mystery and magic of Santa Claus.

Sacred Visions: Nineteenth-Century Biblical Art from the Dahesh Museum Collection

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Proving once again that they are the country’s premiere museum-without-walls, the Dahesh makes its treasures available to New Yorkers in one of the most stunning shows I have seen in years.

Housed in the Museum of Biblical Art, Sacred Visions: Nineteenth-Century Biblical Art from the Dahesh Museum Collection features some 30 works from the Dahesh collection, all masterful pictures by leading 19^th Century French academicians.  The exhibition traces the renewed interest in Biblical myths following the expansion of biblical archeology and the advent of photography, which produced travel books with pictures of the Holy Land.

As co-curator Sarah Schaefer of the Dahesh (with Alia Nour) writes in her exhibition notes:  One very important way that artists modernized the representation of biblical subjects was by creating what they considered more historically “authentic” images, stimulated by popular interest in the Holy Land beginning in the late eighteenth century.  As travel and communication to the Middle East became more feasible and desirable, artists explored Egypt, Jerusalem, Hebron, and other significant sites in order to produce more “objective” representations of the Bible.  Some sought to depict biblical monuments in their contemporary form, while others saw the people of the Holy Land as living relics of a distant past.  … For those artists who were unwilling or unable to visit the Holy Land, there were countless travel accounts, prints, and eventually photographs that documented the region.  It was thus possible to create what the public considered a “true” image of the biblical past without having actually seen the sites mentioned.

The show, which opens today, is has many stunning pieces.  Oddly, most of them are not the ‘showcase’ pieces, but, rather, things that are remarkable in-and-of themselves.  More important, this exhibition demonstrates how essential the male nude was to the academic tradition, and how drawing the figure led to virtuosic, finished work. 

Very interesting is Alexandre Cabanel’s (1823-1889) Death of Moses.  But while this picture is quite remarkable, more interesting still is the drawing hung along side of it, which is a graph drawing of the finished painting, blocked out in grids for final painting on the massive canvas.  Cabanel actually changed God’s pose from the test drawing to finished painting, and it is a fascinating insight into the creative process.

Also beautiful is Joseph’s Coat Brought Back to Jacob (1841) by Jules Ambroise Francois Naudin (1817-1876), which is a masterful painting combining both the historic and neoclassic strains of art.  The figures are clearly and cleanly depicted, and the emotion telegraphed beautifully, but it is rather cold in the final analysis.

More captivating is what might be the most interesting piece in the exhibition, The Last judgment, a drawing by Paul Chenavard (1808-1895).  Chenavard was an Enlightenment Era freethinker, so his feelings for religious paintings must always be interpreted.  This massive drawing, which must be about 40x80, will happily reward hours of study.  In many ways a meditation on Michelangelo’s Judgment Day painting on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, Chenavard spins his own take on the Christian cosmos.  Christ is paramount, and, like Michelangelo’s Christ, this is a beardless, curiously human Jesus.  (There is no halo.)  In the lower corner of the picture is a crowned figure entwined with a giant serpent.  Is this Satan?  Or the Archangel Michael?  The figure is ambiguous and multi-faceted.  While speaking with co-curator Alia Nour, she told me that “Chenavard delighted in ambiguity.  Being a humanist, he drew very human figures, and it is left to the educated viewer to interpret the meanings of his cosmos.”

For this viewer, however, the most beautiful picture in this exhibition is Abel’s Offering by Hans Andersen Brendekilde (1857-1942), dated 1908.  This picture alone is worth going to this stunning show.  In it, Brendekilde depicts Abel leading a long train of sheep along a sunlit landscape.  On the pyre before him is a sacrifice to God; the sheep watch as he gesticulates towards heaven and the smoke lifts the remains on a fellow lamb towards the heavens.  It is a stunning, pagan note to add to a Biblical exhibition; though created in the early days of the 20^th Century, it is a wonderfully pagan piece of art.  It cuts deep to the heart of a primal paganism, and the composition perhaps borrows something from the painters of the American West, Charles Marion Russell, in particular.

The exhibition was hung and designed with a sure hand by Dean Ebben.  Ebben restored and re-stretched and re-framed the massive Christ and the Children (1894) by Franck Kirchbach (1859-1912), which is a large-scale painting of a type seldom seen today.  It is a wonderful piece of work and a heroic installation.

Sacred Visions: Nineteenth-Century Biblical Art from the Dahesh Museum Collection is the first exhibition under the auspices of the museum’s new Director, Richard P. Townsend, an accomplished art historian and museum professional.  Townsend has previously held curatorial and leadership positions in the Museum of Latin American Art and Price Tower Arts Center.  If the show is an indication of his tenure-to-come, The Museum of Biblical Art has chosen wisely and well.

We here at the Jade Sphinx have had a special relationship with the Dahesh.  Mainly, this is because we share a similar vision: that the artist is the creator of beautiful things, and that art is the celebration of beauty.  It is a position out-of-tune with Modernists and Post-Modernists, but beauty always will win out over time.  Be part of the avant garde and return to the past of Academic portraiture.

The Museum of Biblical Art is at 1865 Broadway at 61^st Street, and admission is free.  For more information, call 212.408.1500.

Joseph's Coat Brought Back to Jacob

When I Was a Kid (1905), by Charles Marion Russell

It’s no secret that we here at The Jade Sphinx love the work of Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), the cowboy artist.  The boyish Russell went West in his early youth, and worked as a cowboy, watching the waning days of the American West with an artist’s eye.  He didn't seem to be very effective in the saddle, but it was all he wanted and he was happy.

 

Charlie’s vision of the West was that of a boy, one of endless prairies and freedom.  His was an eternal boyhood – both promise and nostalgia at the same time.  The West (and his boyhood) became to him a Lost Eden which he missed and to which he could never return.

Charlie spent the rest of his artistic life drawing and painting the West that loomed so large in his personal myth.  He often sketched himself in his wryly funny letters, and sometimes showed up in his own paintings.  This wonderful gouache picture from 1905 is Russell at his relaxed best.  The landscape and figures in the background are effectively accomplished with some broad strokes of color, while Russell reserves the full potency of his representational prowess on himself and his horse.  Russell was not an especially effective horseman in real life, and much of his boyhood West was spent sheep-herding.  But here is Russell’s youth as he saw it in his mind’s eye, with steely eye looking into the distance, rifle over saddle and ready for whatever was over the next horizon.

Remembrances of boyhood and anticipation of what’s over the next horizon hit somewhat somber notes for your correspondent this July 4^th.  Russell’s work remains a poignant reminder of what we have lost in our culture, our national spirit, and, more important, in our civil liberties. 

 

Perhaps we should all take a page from Russell’s notebook, and preserve the best parts of ourselves (or, at least, the myth of the best part of ourselves) along with the vision of the Founding Fathers as we move as bravely forward as we can.

Pretty Mother of the Night, by Frederic Remington

We continue our look at Western artist Frederic Remington (1861-1909) with a picture very different from the frenetic and violent A Dash for the Timber: Pretty Mother of the Night.

Following his first commercial sales to Harper’s Weekly, Remington went to rural Peabody, Kansas, to become a sheep rancher.  He quickly found out the life in Kansas was boring, isolated and rougher than he anticipated.  An Easterner at heart, he was never really completely at home in the wilderness. His inheritance dissipated from the failed venture, Remington returned home.

His mother loaned him enough money to go to Kansas City and start a hardware business.  However, some kind of swindle (the details have never really been clear), made the business fail.  He took what money he had left and invested as half-owner in a saloon.  He also married his New York sweetheart Eva Caten and brought her to Kansas City.

Eva was as unhappy in the saloon business as Remington was in the sheep business.  In addition, she showed little interest or appreciation in his art, and left him to return to New York.  This desertion may have served as something of a wakeup call to Remington, who started to sketch and paint in earnest.

His painting created greater success for him than any of his business ventures, and he soon identified as an artist.  He returned to New York and reunited with Eva in Brooklyn.  He studied at the Art Students League in New York and improved his technique.

At this time, there was a fear in the East that the great open spaces of the West were closing down, and that the pageant of the American West was drawing to a close.  Remington was able to capitalize on that by submitting work to Harper’s Weekly and Collier’s, documenting his recent (and largely exaggerated) Western experiences.  Eastern editors took him for the genuine article, and started sending him back to the West to chronicle its final days.

Between 1885 and 1888 Remington made a number of trips to the American Southwest, principally to cover the U.S. Cavalry and its pursuit of the Apaches. He also followed the Cavalry in pursuit of the renegade Indian Geronimo.  The stark landscape and dramatic human events he encountered there greatly influenced his artistic development. Remington filled his diaries with observations, made countless field sketches, took many photographs with the latest equipment, and collected numerous artifacts to use in his paintings.

In the eternal comparisons between Remington and Charles Russell (1864-1926), one of the most interesting points is their respective feelings toward the American Indian.  Russell genuinely liked Indians – to him, they were just as much a symbol of freedom and living-in-nature as the American cowboy.  He learned the exacting sign language (he and his wife used it as both a private code and a party trick), and even camped with them for extended periods.  Though he never shied from depicting the occasional savagery of the Indian, he also reveled in his beauty, capability and stoicism.

It was an entirely different story with Remington.  Most of his interactions with the Indians were while he was covering the Indian Wars in the company of the U.S. Cavalry.  They were never anything less than the enemy – wily, unscrupulous, untrustworthy and … alien.  There are few positive depictions of the Indians in Remington’s work.  That is why Pretty Mother of the Night (oil on board) is such a remarkable picture.  Seldom has he portrayed the Indian with such a sympathetic eye.

Pretty Mother of the Night is best labeled a nocturne – its explores the technical and aesthetic difficulties of painting nighttime pictures.  (It is a feat at which Remington would excel.)  Painted around 1900, this picture was meant to serve as an illustration for a novel he had recently written called The Way of the Indian.  In the novel the hero, White Otter, addresses the moon (Pretty Mother of the Night) after successfully completing a test of manhood. 

Aside from the lack of the frenetic energy in a painting like A Dash for the Timber, look at the other things that Remington does differently.  A Dash for the Timber details man, horse and landscape with an almost photographic attention to detail.  Here, Remington uses a significant change in compositional technique.  Though beautifully rendered, the horses, Indians and landscape are all done with an almost Impressionist lack of detail. 

Also … Just look at how he poses the subjects and what he’s doing with them.  If the landscape is barren and empty, Remington underscores the hardness of the landscape by the lean, almost skeletal sparseness of the Indians.  These are not well-fed warrior princes, but, rather, people of the land barely squeezing a living from it.

Also, too, look at how he compares the barren immensity of the landscape and its two dots of life with the immensity of the heavens with its corresponding dots of light.  Remington here underscores the quiet miracle of life, both here on earth, and in the heavens.

More Remington tomorrow!

 

 

A Dash for the Timber by Frederic Remington

An email crossed our desk wondering why we at The Jade Sphinx have devoted so much time to so many great painters of the American West, yet have paid scant attention to one who is arguably one of the greatest: Frederic Remington.

There are several reasons for the seeming oversight on our part.  First off, Remington’s works are so well cataloged throughout the Web that it seemed a redundancy on our part.  Secondly, I didn’t know if there was anything I could say that was either fresh or interesting.  And finally, in my researches into the man himself … I have to say that no matter how much I admire his work, I don’t like him very much.

Though Remington had several youthful adventures out West, his conception of the time and place were radically different from that of his contemporary, Charles Russell (1864-1926).  Where Russell saw the West as a glorious pageant, a time of freedom and fun and opportunity, Remington saw only the hardship, the brutality and the privation.  Both outlooks are perfectly viable and have more than an element of truth – indeed, either outlook is possible for today’s world – but I could never fully embrace the negativist. 

Frederic Remington (1861-1909) was, if I may slip into the vernacular of the West, born a dude.  He was born in Canton, New York.  His father, Seth Pierre Remington, was a colonel in the Civil War and a businessman who was often absent from the family.  The family moved from Bloomington, Illinois for a brief time, and later resettled in Ogdensburg, New York.

Young Frederic was something of a challenge to his father.  The boy had no great ambition to work too hard, no interest really in the military, and thought he would spend his life as a journalist-illustrator.  While in military school, Remington spent most of his time drawing pictures – he was clearly not soldier material and the older Remington’s dreams of his son going to West Point were squashed.  Instead, young Remington went to art school at Yale, where he was the only male in attendance.  (He also was something of football star.)  After graduating, he used a small inheritance to go West.

Remington spent time in Montana and New Mexico, watching cattlemen, cavalry and foot soldiers, and Indians.  From this trip, he sold a story and illustration to Harper’s Weekly, and in a very roundabout way, his career as an artist began.

Remington’s first great painting was A Dash for the Timber, and it is easy to see how his reputation as a serious artist started here.  It is his first masterpiece.  The picture was commissioned by E. C. Converse, a wealthy New York industrialist who wanted a painting that portrayed “a life-threatening situation.”  Converse knew of Remington from his work with Harper’s Weekly (by this time, Remington had followed General Cook on the trail of Geronimo, the rebel Apache, to get the story for Harper’s.)  As a journalist out West, Remington, knew it to be a place where hard men managed to live off of a harder, more unforgiving land. 

The painting first appeared publicly at The National Academy of Design in 1889; years later, it was bought by a private individual and donated to Washington University.  In 1945, the university sold it to collector David Findlay Sr. for $23,000 so that they university cold then buy a Picasso and a Matisse.  (They should’ve kept the Remington.)  The picture now resides at the Amon Carter Museum.

Let’s look at this remarkable picture.  The first thing of course that draws our eye are the horses.  Remington’s portrayal of airborne horses was revolutionary in 1889.  He was aided in this not just through personal observation, but through the fast-action sequential photographs of Eadweard Muybridge, who invented a technique for taking such fast photos that he was able to capture the horse while it was actually airborne.

These are horses running hard: each muscle is straining, nostrils are flared, eyes are bulging.  Lariats and canteens are suspended in mid-air under the thundering hoof beats, and a cloud of dust follows in their wake.  Look, too, at the contrast of the purplish shadow thrown by the horses and the stark, sandy-colored earth. 

Each and every one of the participants is a distinct personality: except, of course, for the empty-saddled horse, which has obviously lost its rider.  Look, too, at the rigidity of the vaquero on the left obviously hit by a bullet – one of his comrades leans over the keep in him the saddle.  The hats of the riders fold at the brim in the wind, and some of the hardier souls turn round to return gunfire.

The timber, to the left, looks a little thin, and one wonders how much protection it will provide.  Indeed, these look like doomed men.

Aside from the virtuosity of the composition and execution, what Remington really captures is a sense of action.  Painters from the Renaissance onward have been able to create a sense of movement, but not so much of action.  A Dash for the Timber is the kind of painting that leaves the viewer in a sweat of exhaustion.

More than 100 years of Western films have perhaps removed some of the novelty of this composition, but have not diminished at all its power.  This is a remarkable painting.

More Remington tomorrow!

The Western Art of William R. Leigh Part VIII

One last picture from William R. Leigh (1866-1955) before we allow him to ride off into the great Western sunset reserved for American artists of the first rank.  Above is Leigh’s color study of the Grand Canyon, painted in 1909.  This is a smallish picture, 16 x 12, oil on canvas board.  It is a stunning landscape that perfectly captures the majesty and mystery of the American landscape.

Once again, I’m indebted to artist/author Stephen Gjerston and his magisterial Frontiers of Enchantment: The Outdoor Studies of William R. Leigh for what may be the best summation of Leigh and his work:  Leigh’s artistic legacy rests primarily on his paintings of the West and Southwest which he painted in his New York studio.  The convincing sense of reality that he achieved in the best of them is due, in large measure, to the excellence of the outdoor studies which he used as sources of information.  The majority of these studies are masterpieces of their kind.  They have an intensity and immediacy that can only be achieved by a fine artist, with a sensitive eye, in the presence of nature.  Through unerring draftsmanship and an acute eye for color values Leigh has fixed on these panels the form and atmosphere of the frontiers he loved….

A few words about Grand Canyon.  Many contemporary artists depicting the West fall back on trite-and-true tropes garnered in revisionist Westerns that sought to render the time and place as squalid, muddy and barren.  Actually, the colorful panorama that was the real West would present a challenge to the most extravagant colorist and the most gifted of artists.  The West of Leigh was much like that of fellow-artist Charlie Russell – a place of wonder and of marvels, where nature ran riot with color and the world is once again young.

This color study is the kind of thing upon which Leigh would spend his days out West, painting in the open air and finding just that magical mix of color and light.  His brush is heavily loaded with paint, and the brush strokes are particularly evident in the clouds.  The peaks in the distance merge with the blue of the sky, making the horizon (and our horizon) a thing infinite and mysterious. 

But while Leigh is sketchy, he is also exact.  Never if there a misplaced stroke, a piece of scenery that is unclear or ill-fitting to the composition.  This is nature transformed into art by the hand of a master.

It was somehow fitting to end the celebration of our nation’s birthday with Leigh.  His America is indeed a vanished America, and place that now only resides in the dreams of a lucky few.  When thinking of the settling of this great land, and of the days of brave pioneers and stalwart settlers, heroic Indians and nature-in-the-raw, spare a thought for the great American artists who helped focus this picture in our mind’s eye, turning natural beauty into national legend.

The Western Art of William R. Leigh Part V

I could not help it … I’ve found so many of the pictures of William R. Leigh so beautiful, I had to continue.  And I also thought that there would be no better way to celebrate July 4^th than by looking at some of Leigh’s gorgeous examples of pure Americana.

Many of the pictures of William Robinson Leigh (1866 –1955) depict landscapes of the American West and various scenes from the lives of her native peoples.  However, it was relatively rare that Leigh painted the cowboys who flooded the West and transformed the land into the country we know today. 

There are few myths more potent than that of the American cowboy.  He is the US equivalent of the knights errant of old, our great national hero, and the exemplar of what all boys wanted (at one time) to be.

Today, the myth of the West has been tarnished for a variety of political reasons, not the least of which is political correctness, which would condemn the cowboy (and the entire Western genre) as sexist, racist, exclusionary, and, who knows, even guilty of halitosis.  Critics who dismiss the West (both in art and literature) seem never to have really read Western novels or looked at Western pictures – they never really have a proper understanding of the genre.  A quick look at the works of Jack Schaefer (1907-1991) or Owen Wister (1860-1938) or Zane Grey (1872-1939) would quickly give lie to the racist/sexist canard, and the aesthete can look at the beautiful pictures of Charles Russell (1864-1926) and Frederic Remington (1861-1909) and many others without a pang of guilt – the pictures are magnificent and the “political” message, if there be any, minimal.

There are other, equally pernicious, nails in the coffin of our great American Western myth.  First is the increased urbanization of the US – fewer and fewer people are living in rural areas, and many young people find it easier to relate to myths involving aliens and other planets than the pioneers who lived a rugged life on the frontier.  Another is our sedentary culture, where the idea of vigorous life (outside of the gym, at least) is met with smiling condescension, and, of course, the influx of peoples from other countries who would much rather forget those heroes who built the land and merely accept it benefits.

But, whatever the reason for the decline of the great Western myth, let’s pause to consider Bucking Bronco with Cowboy, painted by Leigh in 1913.  The picture is 30 x 22, oil on canvas, and currently up for auction at the Jackson Hole Art Auction, set for September 15^th, 2012 at the Center for the Arts, 265 South Cache, Jackson Wyoming.  Along with this magnificent Leigh, works by Russell, Remington and Albert Bierstadt will be on hand.  More information can be found at:  http://jacksonholeartauction.com/

Bucking Bronco is unusual in that it is painted in a more Impressionist manner than Leigh’s other works – the cowboy, though realistically depicted, is painted with broader strokes than is usual for the central figures of many of his pictures.  The horse is magnificently rendered, with a great sense of motion and animation.  Here Leigh’s highly trained grasp of anatomy – both human and animal – are a great boon to the overall realism of the scene.  Too often in Western paintings it’s clear that the artist has never seen a horse; Leigh clearly knows horse anatomy and the best ways of realistically manipulating it.

Leigh uses a heavily loaded brush for his impasto effects of the sky and landscape.  His thick application of paint in this picture is particularly luscious, and his vibrant coloration a mini-July 4^th celebration with every look at the picture. 

As is often the case with Leigh, it is little touches that true devotees savor.  Look at the studs lining the back of the cowboy’s saddle, or the completely realized reins held by the cowboy.  Even the cowboy’s quirt is alive with a peculiar animation.

Bucking Bronco With Cowboy is one of those pictures that makes me happy just looking at it.

More William Leigh tomorrow!

The Western Art of William R. Leigh Part III

We continue with our look at the West of William R. Leigh with The Leader's Downfall, painted in 1946.  This is oil on canvas, 78 x 126, a sizable picture.  It is currently housed in the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center, in Oklahoma City.

Leigh would often return to the West for inspiration, making countless color studies and oil sketches to be later developed into larger, more ambitious pictures.  He spent every summer from 1912 to 1926 in the Southwest, often staying at a friend’s ranch.  He also did not mind mixing pleasure with pleasure, spending his honeymoon in 1921 camping and sketching at Monument Valley and Yellowstone.

Leigh observed nature and learned from it, but he was not its slave.  Here is some advice Leigh provided a fellow artist:  It’s all right to be in love with nature, but don’t be fanatical … All our pine trees look like Christmas trees, for instance.  Pick out those to paint that are more striking and picturesque.  If mountains are too somber a color – key it up, etc.  In painting distant hills that are made up of a lot of different colors … lay in the sky, then the hills on the horizon, etc. on down the picture and compare the hills to get their true color and value and so on.  But keep looking to see how much darker one color is to the next and their true color. 

Leigh would spend 1926 to 1935 in Africa, working with Carl Akeley and the American Museum of Natural History.  Much of the work that came from these expeditions is fascinating, but, it is rather a shame that left the sun-kissed landscapes of America for the Dark Continent.  It’s not surprising that once the African excursions were over, Leigh concentrated on Americana once again.

Today’s picture is from later in Leigh’s career (a scant nine year before his death).  It shows Leigh’s skills as a colorist with a vengeance, as well as his inherent sense of drama.  The Leader’s Downfall depicts a group of American Indians pursuing wild ponies and capturing the leader.  Let’s look at some of the things Leigh does so wonderfully well.

The main figure (the Indian on the paint horse with the rope) is in a ‘spotlight’ created by a brilliant white dust cloud.  As a technique for drawing attention to the central figure it would almost seem too obvious, but Leigh makes it work.  Also, in true Leigh fashion, the main figure is depicted in a manner of extreme realism in terms of the draftsmanship.  Look at the wild eyes and flaring nostrils of the horse, let alone the muscular flanks and bone structure.  In addition, look at the feathers and lovingly rendered saddle blanket – here is virtuosity for its own sake. 

The Indian frames his own formidable profile with both his right arm and the dust kicked up by the horse.  More important, look at the line of torso and the precisely detailed capturing of his rib cage and shoulder muscles.  Or look at the fingers holding the bunched coil of rope.  My love for Western artists Charles Russell and Frederic Remington is second-to-none, but this level of exactitude was outside of their purview.  The central figure of this painting is a remarkable performance.

As with the other pictures we have looked at, Leigh renders the supporting figures in softer focus, almost an Impressionist style.  The landscape itself is only the merest hint of actual countryside, and the horses and other Indians are carefully constructed suggestions.

But the real thing about this picture is the coloration.  Looking at The Leader’s Downfall over a protracted period of time may make your eyeballs fat.  Here is a man who loves color and is not afraid to use it.  The overarching blue, purple, violet tones are underscored by the hot white of the upswept dust, and Leigh manages to create “hot” action with “cool” colors.  It’s impossible not to look at this remarkable picture with a deep respect for both the artist’s skill and his audacity. 

More William Leigh tomorrow!