"The Modern West".

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston TX October 29, 2006 * January 28, 2007

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA March 4 * June 3, 2007

A formidable undertaking, "TheModern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950" and its book-length catalogue include a number of riveting works of art, some familiar and many not, strung together by a highly creative thesis. Emily Ballew Neff, Curator of American Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, proposes that the more than 100 works included make a case for the unacknowledged but nevertheless major contribution of painters and photographers in the western U.S. to the development of American modernism. In contrast to the widely held view that modern art in this country evolved from Parisian experimentation and New York urbanism in the context of an industrialized society, Neff argues that the vast emptiness and flatness of the western landscape along with an embrace of primitivism represented by American Indian cultures are responsible for a truly modern aesthetic. Along with abrupt transitions in the chronological organization of the exhibition, faulty logic undercut several significant assumptions; but for viewers like me, who are more attuned to contemporary developments in the western rather than the eastern U.S., this revisionist notion is so compelling that it ultimately redeems the show.

In Neff's argument for the modern west, formal concerns shared with mainstream modernists are frequently observed. Thus, the inclusion of letters, words, and signs by Thomas Hart Benton and Russell Lee is seen as analogous to cubist devices. The use of bright unnatural colors by the San Francisco-based Society of Six is associated with fauvism. Primitivism, in any form, is almost automatically equated with modernism. Neff also cites the clarity, eccentricity, and stark geometric compositions in photographs by Timothy O'Sullivan, who was not an artist but worked on government-sponsored land survey teams in the 1860s and '70s. In the visible footprints left by the photographer in his dash away from the wagon to set up his camera for Sand Dunes, Carson, Nevada (1867), Neff observes a process-oriented self-consciousness. Perhaps the least convincing argument for the transformation of his documentary work into (proto-)modern art is the fact that the Museum of Modern Art, under the influence of Ansel Adams, exhibited O'Sullivan's original prints in 1937. A similar attempt, at any rate, to legitimize O'Sullivan's photographs was previously and persuasively dismissed by Rosalind Krauss in her well-known 1982 essay, "Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View."

The exhibition opens with a towering landscape painting by Thomas Moran, Mountain of the Holy Cross (1875). A symbol of the concept of Manifest Destiny, the painting depicts a distant Rocky mountain, looming out of the clouds, with snow-filled perpendicular crevices in the shape of a Latin cross on its highest face. The mountain is warmly illuminated in contrast to the cool shadowy hues of rocks and plants in the foreground and middle distance, where a waterfall tumbles across boulders and bare, fallen trees. Moran's painting introduces the exhibition's first section, "Prologue: Landmarking the West," which primarily includes examples of survey photography. Two Cheyenne "ledger drawings," created with materials given to the artists by soldiers and settlers, depict infiltration and imprisonment by the military in the 1870s. The tragic subject matter drawn by Bear's Heart and Little Chief is patternlike, non-perspectival, and diagrammatic but thoroughly legible.

"The End of the Frontier: Making the West Artistic" documents the closing of the frontier and the vanishing of the west. Following the line developed in the first section of the exhibition, the inclusion of paintings by Frederic Remington comes as no surprise. The icy, vacant landscape in The Scout: Friends or Foes? (1902-05) contains a lone mounted Indian scout, peering at a tiny illuminated village on the horizon. Neff considers the abstract qualities of space as justifying the claim of Remington's involvement with modernism. A master of moonlight, Remington subtly modulated his pale colors to represent hoof prints in the snow, the horse's frozen breath, its harsh purple shadow, and twinkling stars in an azure sky. Although it would seem to make sense to include in the same gallery Georgia O'Keeffe's Evening Star series, painted in Texas in 1917, encountering her abstract watercolors near the Remington is jolting. Rather than a convincing line of development, two directions emerge: one leading to the Dust Bowl images of Benton and Alexander Hogue, the other to the photographs of Edward Weston and, ultimately, the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock.

"The Modern West" includes some impressive, lesser-known paintings, such as Gottardo Piazzoni's The Land and The Sea (1915) in the section on California. Emigrating from Switzerland to the Carmel Valley as a teenager, Piazzoni completed the two ten-foot-wide canvases as a commission for a vintner's dining room. In luminous pastel oil paint, one depicts a rolling hill beneath a cloudy sky, the other a foggy seascape. The abstract sense of rhythm and light recalls Rothko (but not at all Clyfford Still, who is included in the exhibition's final section). Representing the southwest is the Taos Society of Artists who are--I would have to agree with Marsden Hartley's quote in the catalogue--"impossible, dreadful painters." Hartley is represented by six paintings or drawings of the roiling NewMexican landscape. An extensive selection of Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration photographs complement paintings of the "Dust Bowl Era."

Pollock dominates "Epilogue: The Abstract West." Displayed on a monitor next to a documentary of a Navajo sand painting ritual are the famous films of Pollock's painting process, inspired by sand painting. Including pictographic figures and images reminiscent of bone fragments and floating eyes embedded in tangled scrawls, the dark and mysterious NightMist (1945) advances on his American Scene nightmare, GoingWest (1934-35). The palette, in particular, of Number 13A: Arabesque (1948) retains a western feel as does the freewheeling spaciousness of the canvas. This breathtaking but relatively unknown drip painting aptly concludes the show, expressing the openness, forward-looking vision and sense of liberation that is the mythical west.