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!

Harlem’s Franco the Great

Readers yesterday were momentarily concerned by my advocacy of some genre fiction.  Has The Jade Sphinx abandoned high artistic ideals?  Is junk now art?

Well, no.  My point is simply that sometimes the keenest satisfaction is to be found in art in its humblest forms.  However – that does not change the fundamental proposition that there is good art and there is bad art.  And also that -- somewhat lower in stature than bad art -- we find much of graffiti and street art.

This brings us to a quick look at Harlem, New York celebrity Franco the Great.  Self promotion does not seem to be a problem for Franco the Great – if you don’t think he’s great, he’ll be the first to correct you.  A quick look at his Web site reveals his own tagline, Franco the Great.  Known as Harlem’s Picasso.  Artist Extraordinaire. 

Franco Gaskins was born in Panama.  After a rather tragic accident in his youth (he fell on his head), he became an amateur magician while maintaining an interest in the arts.  He came to the United States at the urging of his grandmother in 1958, where he established himself in New York as muralist.  Since the 1960s, Franco has been painting pictures on the iron security gates that protect many Harlem storefronts at night.  His images are often of celebrities (Mr. T, Michael Jackson, various basketball players), or turgid representations of angels, heaven or some other syrupy strain of mysticism.

There is very little that can be said of Franco’s art that hasn’t already been said about the work of the child or younger relation adorning your refrigerator: it’s not actually good, but if you like that sort of thing, that’s the sort of thing you like.  To my eye, his lack of composition, unsteady anatomy, bad coloration, parochial worldview and vapid technique does not make him a master of folk art; rather, it makes him a practitioner of something much more insidious: non-art.

Non-art is the sort of thing that vandals scrawled all over subway cars and on the sides of abandoned buildings throughout the 1970s.  Non-art is often a crypto-criminal act, a defacement making a political statement or a desperate cry to improve self-esteem.  Non-art is forging an identity at someone else’s expense; usually made by the artistically and intellectually unengaged.  Non-art is the repulsive “community projects” erected by amateur artists for tasteless bureaucrats as a sop to the aesthetically impoverished.

Harlem is also the site of another wonderful example of non-art: the mural on the side wall of the Adam Clayton Powell Plaza at West 125^th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Blvd.  By no aesthetic yardstick could this be called good work (see below); but it does seem to draw both tourists and locals.  One amusing trick learned in long contemplation of this work is how to tell tourists from Harlem natives: tourists pose in front of it for photos, residents stand in front of it to urinate.  (My New York readers are welcome to visit the site themselves lest I be accused of yellow journalism.)

Many of Franco’s security-gate murals would have been mercifully removed by a new city law concerning gates; however, his works have been preserved for removal to an outside art gallery at the East River.  One can only hope the critics there don’t stream in so regularly as those at Adam Clayton Powell Plaza.

Non-Art and Public Restroom

at Adam Clayton Powell Plaza