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