Winslow Homer, Frederic Remington, and the Strenuous Life in Art and Culture
This lecture is part of the Bernard Osher Lecture Series
Since 1988, the Bernard Osher Lecture Series has been the PMA's flagship annual event, welcoming visionary cultural leaders, scholars, and thinkers to share their insights and experiences with museum audiences.
Frederic Remington (United States, 1861–1909), The Broncho Buster (Wooly Chaps), modeled 1895 (cast by 1906). Bronze; 23 × 15 × 25 inches. Gift of the Roath Collection at the Denver Art Museum, 2013.92. Photography © Denver Art Museum.
In 1899 then-Governor of New York Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech in which he identified, endorsed, and popularized what he called “the Strenuous Life.” This is an ideal of masculinity that had been visible for two decades in the paintings and wood engravings that Homer and Remington had put before an eager public in exhibitions and in popular magazines. Their heroes were not the contemplative men of science or the dynamic capitalists whose schemes were central to economic and technological life in the late nineteenth century but the cowboys, lumber cruisers, and backwoods guides whose physical prowess, exceptional courage, deep loyalty, and natural savvy offered the patrons of art imaginative models for their own more prosaic lives. This lecture investigates the many ways that these artists understood this major current in their culture, and how their works have imported key facets of this admiration for “strenuousness” into our own era.
Margaretta M. Lovell is a cultural historian working at the intersection of history, art history, anthropology, and museology. She holds the Jay D. McEvoy Chair in the History of American Art at U. C. Berkeley, and studies material culture, painting, architecture, and design of the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. She received her PhD in American Studies at Yale in 1980, and has taught as Visiting Professor in the History of Art departments at Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Having begun her teaching career at Yale, she has also held the Dittman Chair in American Studies at the College of William and Mary, and the Ednah Root Curatorial Chair for American Art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.