Tag Archives: Amon Carter Museum

Red Cannas

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Red Cannas by Georgia O'Keeffe

Red Cannas by Georgia O’Keeffe

Red Cannas is a painting which deals with formal elements and principles such as color, shape, scale, and value. One of the most visually arresting elements of this work is the intense red hue of the flower petals, which cover almost the whole canvas. Because there is such a great deal of red, value becomes more important for creating dimension. The shapes in this piece are rounded and overlapping, which gives the painting a certain fluid softness, and even a sense a visual rhythm. O’Keeffe manages to convey the organic nature of her subject matter through her use of curvilinear forms and gradual shading. She also takes an interesting approach to scale, going so far as to push her image outside the picture frame. This large-scale yet also focused and close-cropped approach is what gives Red Cannas the incredible sense of spatial immediacy that was one of the artist’s hallmarks.

An Indian Trapper

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An Indian Trapper by Frederic S. Remington

An Indian Trapper by Frederic S. Remington

Frederic Sackrider Remington is considered one of the greatest illustrators of the late 19th-century American West. The artist acted as a correspondent and illustrator for various Eastern magazines, including Harper’s Weekly and Outing, and made some 3,000 views of Western life over a 25-year period, striving for visual accuracy and authentic reporting on the people and customs of the West. Remington possessed the sensitive Easterner’s perspective on the Western life, full of fascination and nostalgic concern. He traveled with military campaigns, worked as a cowboy, visited prospectors panning for gold, painted respectful portraits of Indians, and wrangled cattle and sheep for ranchers.

The Fall of the Cowboy

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The Fall of the Cowboy, Frederic S. Remington, 1895

The Fall of the Cowboy, Frederic S. Remington, 1895

Ole Man Winter holds most of the country in his icy grip. It has been bitterly cold in Saint Louis. Intellectually, I know that there are many colder places in North America than here, but I can viscerally feel the chill here. This makes the cold here much more real. I know that talking about the weather is small talk, but I wanted to write about this wintry weather, it has become so omnipresent, so oppressive.

As is my want, I first began casting about for an image, a focal point, a rock upon which to build this post. I recalled Remington’s “The Fall of the Cowboy”. I had photographed this painting several years ago while visiting the Amon Carter Museum, in Fort Worth. The following text is part of the museum’s description of this artwork:

Beneath leaden skies of gun-metal gray, two cowboys have halted their horses in a bleak wintry landscape. One of them has dismounted to remove the rails of a fence gate so they can pass through. The whole scene is infused with the slow rhythms and somber tones of an elegy; a lament for something that has gone forever.

Remington’s motivation for creating this somber picture was not driven by some Arctic high pressure system. Remington, like his friend Theodore Roosevelt, loved the Western United States and worked to popularize the West in this period. They both viewed the cowboy as the last great figure of America’s frontier history; hardy and self-reliant, but doomed to extinction in the wake of civilization’s steady progress. This sounds rather bleak and full of foreboding. Much like the iciness of this cold snap that has affected me.

While visiting Yellowstone, Remington met Owen Wister, a writer for Harper’s Monthly. Wister wanted to describe the American “Cow-Puncher” through a series of articles for the magazine. Remington agreed to illustrate his series. One of these illustrations by Remington was the painting shown here. This mythic image was soon immortalized in the pages of Wister’s “The Virginian”, which was later published to wide acclaim and is arguably the first western novel.

For Supremecy

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For Supremecy, Charles M Russell, 1895

As he conversed with his Indian friends, Russell heard many accounts of intertribal warfare among the Blackfeet, Crow and Sioux earlier in the century. One bloody conflict occurred in 1866, when the Piegan Blackfeet were said to have killed more than 300 Crow and Gros Ventres near the Cypress Hill, exacting revenge for the murder of a prominent chief. Such conflicts usually involved a mounted charge into close combat, as Russell shows here. The warriors fought with a variety of weapons, and valor and victory were viewed as the sum of individual efforts. Although Russell’s painting is remarkable for its wealth of detail, it ignores the fact that warriors generally stripped down to the bare essentials for battle. Objects such as the painted buffalo robe or those with beadwork decoration are left behind.

Through the Smoke Sprang the Daring Soldier

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I love Frederic Remington’s paintings. He and Charles Russell are two of my famous painters. They both create pictures that tell a story and the stories that they tell are of the American west. One of my favorite Remington paintings, pictured below, is Through the Smoke Sprang the Daring Soldier. Painted in 1897, this work resides today, as part of the collection of the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, TX. I liked the painting as soon as I saw it, being full of action and all that, but when I read its back story, I fell in loved with it. The following text is this painting’s story, again courtesy of Amon Carter.

At the time his artistic career was flourishing, Remington continued to develop his skills as a writer. Drawing on his personal contacts and his own observation, he created his stories as vehicles for his illustrations. This painting is an example of this. It appeared in the pages of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in August 1897 to accompany a story by Remington titled “A Sergeant of the Orphan Troop.” The story centered on one of the artist’s old friends, Sergeant Carter Johnson, who had related the exploits of his army career to the artist during an assignment with the Tenth Cavalry in New Mexico in 1888. In the story, Johnson relates an incident that occurred near Fort Robinson, Nebraska, when his unit fought a number of skirmishes with a band of Northern Cheyenne led by a chief named Dull Knife. “It was January; the snow lay deep on the ground, and the cold was knife like as it thrust at the fingers and toes,” Remington wrote. “For ten days the troops surrounded the Indians by day, and stood guard in the snow by night, but coming day found the ghostly warriors gone and the rifle pits empty.”

Finally the remaining Cheyenne retreated to well-fortified bluffs for a last stand. “Within nine feet of the pits was a rim-rock ledge over which the Indian bullets swept, and here the charge was stopped,” Remington wrote. “It now became a duel. Every time a head showed on either side, it drew fire like a flue hole.” Suddenly, Sergeant Johnson “sprang on the ledge, and like a trill on a piano poured a six-shooter into the entrenchment, and dropped back.” He soon found himself in a duel with a warrior named White Antelope, who answered the sergeant volley for volley, until “through the smoke sprang the daring soldier” to deliver the fatal bullets to his worthy adversary. Remington considered Johnson’s bravery the high point of the bloody conflict and immortalized it in this painting, but his story also goes on to record Johnson’s disgust at a victory over an embattled, outnumbered enemy that included many helpless victims. He was repelled by the many bodies laying “writhed and twisted on the packed snow, among them many women and children, cut and furrowed with lead.”