ART/SNEAK PEEK : EASTERNER REMINGTON'S ART SHAPED VISION OF THE WEST.

As Americans, we never seem to tire of hearing how the West was won - and lost. But as PBS' current 12-hour docu-saga reminds us, the West is not a fixed spot somewhere between the Missouri-Illinois border and the Pacific Ocean. It's a complex collage of boasts, broken promises, speculations and hopes that may or may not have anything to do with historical reality.

Frederic Remington, the Yale-educated Yankee, deserves as much credit, or blame, as any artist for shaping the way we think about the West. His craggy Indians, weather-beaten cowboys and windswept prairies inevitably spring to mind whenever we picture the conquest of the continent. No adobe-style suburban hacienda would be complete without one of his bronzed horses, American artifacts that have become almost as recognizable as Mickey Mouse - and, unfortunately, almost as much of a cliche.

A new exhibition at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, ``In Search of Frederic Remington,'' looks beyond the iconic bronze sculptures and into the soul of the dapper Victorian who cast them. Produced by the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyo., it consists of about 175 objects.

Drawing on Remington's diaries and studio artifacts, plus a generous sample of his oils, watercolors and drawings, the exhibition provides a humanizing view of Remington's career and his wide-ranging travels west of the Mississippi. The show also surveys Remington's evolving reputation, as successive generations of art critics have sung his praises or clamored for his head.

Whether you revere him as a poetic realist, or revile him as a sentimental apologist for history's greatest land grab, you could wind up having second thoughts. ``In Search of Frederic Remington'' continues through Dec. 1. The museum is located at 4700 Western Heritage Way in Griffith Park. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Admission is $7.50 for adults, $5 for seniors and students with valid ID, $3 for children ages 2-12. For information, call [phone].

Promised land: For artists like Remington and painter William Keith, the West was like a giant movie screen, a place to project the ongoing national drama of discovery and expansion.

Like Remington, the Scotland-born Keith was a transplanted Easterner, drawn west by reports of natural wonders and ``exotic'' lifestyles. A self-tutored follower of the Hudson River School, Keith arrived in San Francisco in 1859 and within seven years had completed enough landscapes of the Yosemite Valley to stock his first one-man show. Later, he met naturalist John Muir, striking up a lifelong friendship cemented by numerous treks to Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada.

Reflecting the popular 19th-century notion of the West as a kind of second Eden, Keith infused his landscape paintings with an aura of holiness. Keith's West - particularly in the final phase of his career - is a place of preternaturally shimmering skies and picturesque oak groves, a frontier where Manifest Destiny receives a divine blessing. For better or worse, that visual style would be echoed by contemporaries like Albert Bierstadt and later affect the way photographers such as Ansel Adams pictured America to the world.

Through Oct. 5, some 140 of Keith's rapturous visions of California's high country can be seen at the Loyola Marymount University's Laband Gallery, at the Fritz B. Burns Arts Center, 7900 Loyola Blvd. in the Westchester area of Los Angeles. Hours for ``William Keith: Scenographer of the Sierra Nevada'' are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays, noon to 4 p.m. Saturdays. Admission is free. For information, call [phone].

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Photo: ``Coming Through the Rye'' is one of many iconic ima ges of the West by Frederic Remington, whose career is being explored in an exhibition at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage.