On Thursday after our morning meeting and after visiting the Forth Worth Water Gardens, Don and I visited the Amon Carter Art Museum.  This would be the very same Amon Carter that endowed the Water Gardens.  The Amon Carter Art Museum is devoted to American art.  Its most valuable pieces seem to be from Fredric Remington, Charles Russell and Georgia O’Keeffe.  The museum is free to all and for almost all works, photography is allowed.  These policies are similar to the Saint Louis Art Museum’s. 

There were a few exceptions.  I was not allowed to photograph visiting pieces.  I also was not allowed to photograph other photographs or prints.  So, I contented myself with photographing only original artwork of the first caliber.  Woo Hoo!!

The dust flies, guns blaze away, the wind whips the big hat brims. There is no time for second thoughts. It is big action in big space.

In A Dash for the Timber, the viewer sees riders being pursued by a group of Indians.  They all gallop toward the viewer across a dusty plain. Some of the eight cowboys or prospectors have turned in their saddles to shoot at the pursuing Indians. On the left side of the painting is the edge of a group of trees where the men might hope to find safety.  The sun is shining brightly, and Remington has made the resulting shadows a deep blue violet.  This painting had strong appeal for the American public who enjoyed the romantic notion of the disappearing world of action and adventure in the untamed West.

Charles Russell like Fredric Remington was one of the greatest artists of the American West.  He was born into an upper-class family in Saint Louis, and as a young man, worked as a hunter, trapper and sheep rancher.  Pictured above is Russell’s action packed scene showing the roping of wild horses, Wild Horse Hunters.  Today’s header features a portion of another Russell painting, Lost in a Snowstorm – We Are Friends.

There are just a couple of  Georgia O’Keeffe’s works in the museum’s collection.  I think that she came along too late in Amon Carter’s life to be fully appreciated.  Both of her works are brightly colored.  I chose yellow over red for this post.

In other news, I checked my status in the Post-Dispatch’s One-Minute Movie Contest.  The good news is that the paper’s critics have again chosen me to be one of the finalists.  The bad news is that I have the least number of votes of all of the other finalists in the reader’s popularity contest.  I am not expecting to winning any prizes.  Voting is already closed.

So far this post has featured art from such American artistic luminaries as Fredric Remington, Charles Russell and Georgia O’Keeffe.  These three artist have a lot in common with the next three artists that I would like to introduce.  Following the rule of three, there are three things that they do not have in common:  Where as Remington, Russell and O’Keeffe are all famous artists and their works fetch large sums, they are all also dead.  Nieman, Axe and Haffner are not famous artists, but they are all alive and their works are all affordable too.  The picture above is the postcard picture for the show.  The following blub is the gallery’s write-up.

Featuring a variety of work from four St. Louis area artists, Accumulated Enemies is a journey through whimsical absurdity. Included are three-dimensional works from Annie Nieman, Daniel Axe and Michael Haffner and prints by Caitlin Ayer. Each of the artists brings their own perspective into the show with humorous undertones and a focus on details in strange imagined worlds.

The opening is on Friday, December 18th, from  6:00-10:00 pm.  The show will be at the Hoffman Lachance Contemporary Gallery, which is located at 2713 Sutton Boulevard, in Maplewood, MO.