From Our Community:
Note: The following is a response from community member Joan Carpenter Troccoli in response to Jorge S. Arango’s Art review: Portland Museum of Art exhibit puts Remington in context (Portland Press Herald, October 4, 2020).
Joan Carpenter Troccoli, Ph. D., was a Curator of Art and subsequently Director of Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She became Deputy Director of the Denver Art Museum in 1996 and founding Director of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art at the DAM in 2001. Since her retirement from the Denver Art Museum in 2012 she has worked as an independent scholar and curator; she recently joined the Collections Committee of the Portland Museum of Art.
Mr. Arango states upfront that his opinion of Frederic Remington has been shaped in large part by the New York Times critic John Russell’s review of “Frederic Remington: The Masterworks,” a retrospective held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1989. Russell devoted much of that review to denouncing Remington’s racism, anti-semitism, and virulent prejudice against all but Northern European immigrants. To his credit, Russell acknowledged that many celebrated artists, including the German composer Richard Wagner, have held reprehensible views. However, Russell argued, the work of Wagner and his artistic peers is of such exceptional genius that our discomfort with their character should be set aside. Remington did not deserve such lenient treatment, because he was a bad artist as well as a bad man. As Russell put it, Remington held “horrible opinions” and painted “despicable pictures.”
Like Mr. Arango, I remember Russell’s review well, but my reaction to it was quite different. As a Northeasterner by heritage and education, I once shared Mr. Arango’s contempt for Remington. Indeed, I judged all practitioners of American western art to be second-rate illustrators who endlessly repeated the same clichéd subjects in formulaic compositions in a tired realist style.
As it happened, a few years before Mr. Russell’s review was published, I was living in Oklahoma and completing my doctoral degree at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, where my studies had centered on European, principally French, art. I no longer had the easy access to significant collections of French painting that I had enjoyed in New York City and in Paris, where I had researched my dissertation.
Frederic Remington (United States, 1861–1909), The Fall of the Cowboy, 1895, oil on canvas, 25 x 5 1/8 inches. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas. Amon G. Carter Collection, 1961.230.
European art was not plentiful in Oklahoma, but I discovered other treasures there, especially at Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, which holds the world’s greatest collection of art, artifacts, and documents associated with the Native peoples of North America and the steady advance of Euro-American frontiers. Gilcrease was founded by a descendant of the Indian communities brutally removed to Indian Territory (the future State of Oklahoma) beginning in the 1830s. Armed with considerable knowledge of 19th-century French art, but, like many easterners, ignorant of the history and peoples of the American West, I saw Remington’s art in person for the first time. What seized me immediately was not how illustrational and stereotypical it was, but how abstract, in the manner of French painters like Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas. Knowing nothing about Remington—including exactly what some of his pictures represented—enabled me to bypass his subject matter and concentrate instead on his form and color. I was fascinated in particular by Remington’s nocturnes, the haunting moonlit works of his late career.
By the time John Russell’s notorious review appeared a few years later, I’d learned that his simplistic reading of Remington was more an artifact of British snobbery and New Yorkers’ disdain for the hinterlands west of New Jersey than a considered examination of the artist’s work.
Mr. Arango is not wrong to call attention to Remington’s abhorrent views. However, such sentiments were commonplace among Americans of his age and background, including Theodore Roosevelt, who propagated them far more widely than Remington. Like many Americans, they viewed the expansion westward of their country as a series of triumphs over hostile nature and natives. Few citizens dwelled on the unspeakable injustice of Indian dispossession and the environmental degradation inflicted by runaway development of natural resources in the West. I certainly do not condone Remington’s opinions, but our condemnation of his hateful views should not unilaterally blind us to the strengths of his art, just as we don’t dismiss out of hand all the good that President Roosevelt achieved as a conservationist, which included the establishment of numerous National Parks, National Monuments, and wildlife preserves.
Mr. Arango notes approvingly that in his art Homer “tackled serious issues” including racism, citing his sympathetic depictions of African-Americans in the Reconstruction South. Mr. Arango seems to suggest that Remington failed on that score. However, the exhibition includes one of Remington’s most iconic paintings, The Stampede, which happens to center on one of the many Black men who worked the cattle range after the Civil War. They joined the ranks of America’s quintessential hero, the cowboy. Cowboys commanded their mounts and the semi-wild cattle they drove across the plains with dazzling strength and skill. In the popular mind, cowboys were men of courage, grace, and independence who chose a physically challenging life in the open air over soul-crushing confinement to corporate offices and factory floors.
The Stampede depicts a moment of supreme peril on the trail, when a thunderstorm panics a sleeping herd. A Black cowboy on night watch races at literally breakneck speed to slow and contain the maddened cattle. One false step of his horse could have fatal consequences. Remington painted The Stampede late in his career, by which time he had perfected the fusion of evocative atmosphere and concise distillation of form that grabs our attention and lingers long in memory.
To be sure, Homer was undeniably a greater artist than Remington. In the name of fairness, however, we must note that Homer had a 25-year head start. Homer painted The Veteran in a New Field in 1865, when Remington was just four years old. Not only did Homer begin his painting career when Remington was a little boy; he outlived Remington by a year. Homer produced much to admire in every decade of his career, but he did not paint his truly transcendent works, such as Fox Hunt (1893) and Weatherbeaten (1894), until he was in his late fifties. Remington died at 48, just as he was settling into a similarly transformative phase of his career. Remington perfected his nocturnes in that period, producing works of subtlety and mystery derived from his intense observation of moonlight to the point of self-torture. For me, Remington’s nocturnes are freighted with a sadness that memorializes the horrific losses entailed by the “winning of the West.”
Go see the show, even if only to see paintings by Homer that you might not otherwise have an opportunity to view. While you’re there, please look at a Remington or two. This exhibition is incredibly rich in Remington’s best work, especially his nocturnes. Even John Russell liked the nocturnes. Also, you might glance for a moment at Remington’s bronze The Cheyenne. Sculpture is usually associated with stasis and weight; Remington attempted to defy gravity by maximizing movement and minimizing the points of connection between his subject and its base. Remington also involved himself in the casting process to an unusual degree, especially in the final stages of a work’s production. Remington varied the texture and patination of his sculptures’ surfaces as well as such accessories as arrows, lances, bridles, and horse whips, which were fashioned separately from the main body of the cast and attached at the end. There is considerable distinction in color and detail from one lifetime cast to the next; the version of The Cheyenne on view at the PMA is one of the very best.
To my eye, this exhibition demonstrates beyond all question that the works of Homer and Remington represent a remarkable confluence of formal and thematic interests. Above all, they were united in their devotion to rigorous study of nature in all its conditions and in their determination to harness their observations to the service of poetry. Both Remington and Homer created works that will sustain renewed interpretation for generations to come.