The art developed concerning the Wild West during the period when it was preoccupied with cowboys and indians was akin to what happened at a similar time when Impressionist Paris was preoccupied with gardens and boulevards.The same scenes in each of those movements were done over and over as if doing it again would accomplish a meaning not previously achieved but somehow still elusive. It is very different in structure and meaning from the art crafted in the East and West coasts of the United States and in its Mountain states, not least that the art not about the Wild West seems definitive in that each of the related paintings are complete. Durants’ landscapes are about hills and trees and rocks but each one is assembled into a different arrangement, a different balance of its elements,while Remington’s are repetition in that they just replicate whatever motif of the Wild West that he has identified. Once you know the type, that is all there is, while each Monet is different. It is not a compliment to say that Remington is akin to Andy Warhol in being engaged in an age of reproduction where multiplication is an appeal to the market rather than to have a subtly different perspective on the same themes. Past art was to sell each portrait or landscape as a distinctive gem while reproducible art is to remind the viewer that the atifact is an example of a type.
The art in those American areas other than that of the Wild West are vertical rather than horizontal, looking at how you go up and down, even if of a slight incline up a road to a house, as in George Inness, departures from that are dramatic as in Cole’s “View From Mt. Holyoke” where you see what amounts to a flat map of the oxbow of a river, though even in that the perspective is vertical, from above to below, so that the artist and the viewer can take on that perspective. Bierstadt, the late Hudson River School, goes up to the tops of rocky mountains from a clearing or a gap in the verticals. Even more recent west coast painters, like David Hockney who shows how a road climbs up a Los Angeles hillside even as he constructs the artifice that this is a flat surface. On the other hand, the American West was showed a view of the vertical, sparse of people, background flat undetailed or full of browns with tufts of grass,a dusty plain, as the foreground showed conflicts between humans and other humans, holstered pistols to the ready, and also the conflict between animals and their human masters, struggling with one another, an athleticism of quick draws and bucking animals and twisted riders, actions without contemplations. There is no divide as there is in the East between landscape painters and portraitists because there are no distinctive or contemplative Western painters, only enigmatic and stone faced riders and trekkers outlasting or quickly accomplishing their physical feats.
Unlike the East, which portrays the eternal nature and the ever interesting distinctiveness of character, and so a tribute to the essentially human, the American West is constrained in time by the fascination with roping cattle and taming horses during that time when America as a whole was transfixed by those activities, just as gangster stories held sway during a later era that was only a quarter century later. Remington’s iconic representation is the sculpture of “The Bronco Buster”, the arch of the horse just right, though there are many similar paintings of that motif whichthe b do not render the bronco so aesthetically arched. Do it again.
One of those many paintings Remington did that is most successful is “The Color of Night '' which does capture a night sky that is dark but has in it numerous points of starlight while the grass on the ground shines from the reflection of moonlight. That is a neat reversal, a fresh vision, even if most of Remington seems the work of an illustrator in that it gives an aid to viewing the prose story conveys about the scene rather than presenting its own view with freshness or feeling. Of all those many Remington paintings, few of them meet the standard of art.
Moreover, the time of the Wild West is always shrouded by nostalgia because it is always about a time about to end or past its peak, as people move westward to find unsettled land while that lasts and an economy sure to end when cattle drives are replaced by railroads and Indians put in reservations, until there comes a time when there is nothing left of the West except a memory which itself comes to dissolve, even the long run of the western, from the days of Buffalo Bill who hired Indians to serve as stage extras for his wild west show and created the western as a movie subgenre, gives way to science fiction, perhaps when sean connery is a sheriff in charge of a moon of jupiter, playing at the plot of “High Noon” in a future rather than in a past.
Western heroes may be lonely and laconic, perhaps because they are unleavened from full humanity because they live in bunkhouses and so see women only as saloon girls, and so they do not seem very introspective, Doc Holiday a drunk rather than a philosopher, and maybe that gives rise to a sense of the American as also lacking in introspection and so coarse in thought and feeling, even as was not the case in the East, where the founding fathers are ever intellectually fertile and sophisticated, as are the people on both sides of the Civil War. The Wild West, instead, seems callous, rugged and unrefined, not given to the ideological niceties found in europe.
A good example of that Western view and experience is Remington's ”Fight for the Waterhole”. Soldiers are pinned down in a depression of the desolate landscape, just a mud hole that gives little protection from the Indians who are out of the scene but are presumably menacing them. Critics say that Remington favors the few isolated soldiers on the defensive rather than the hordes of cavalry and army that faced the Indians and so give a distorted view of the Indian wars. But there is always drama in war when small groups are separated and threatened, as was sometimes the case, and as I remember from Vietnam where the greatest threats to the americans were ambushes of a certain kind where there were likely to be significant casualties and Remember that “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Das Boot'' showed the Germans in the First World War and then in the Second World War as heroic, never mind the morality and ideologies of their sides of the wars. Allow the white men their bravery, crunching down to a rise rather than a parapet, clinging to the mud and sweat and fear. Give them their due: like most wars, it was awful. And Remington tells you facts about army and cavalry life that is accurate rather than romantic. He shows, in “Dismounted”, a cavalry group bringing up the extra horses. That shows that even in the wild west there are logistical issues at work such as the need to replenish and refresh horses so that cavalry can do its more glamorous duty.
But the age of Western nostalgia comes to an end, which means that the types of the west also come to an end, the west absorbed into being the general types of America, full of suburbs and city types, entrepreneurs and professionals, even if thee are some of them who cling very desperately to their nostalgia and so think even to this very modern day that the best answer to a bad man holding a gun is a good man holding a gun. Images persist because images are real.
Remington was heaped in nostalgia. After all, most of his paintings were done in the first decade of the Twentieth Century, the age of the motor car having arrived. He knows that the Wild West is over. In particular, his painting portrays cowboys repairing barbed wire fences, which helped end cattle moving through open ranges where cowboys branded them and curtailed them, and the railroads replacing the need of long distance travel droves. An economic age was over, one that had lasted for only a few generations however its impact on the common culture. Remington is painting what was portrayed as the time of Altman’s “The Wild Bunch”, people no longer with a place for their lives, motor cars viewing with horses.
There are a number of artists other than Remington who painted the Wild West. Some of them did portraits to reveal character or did vertical landscapes but the distinctiveness of the Wild West perseveres. There is Olaf Grafstrom’s “Chippawa Encampment at the Confluence of the Mississippi and St. Croix Rivers”, painted in 1904, which shows some teepees next to a river at night, the strange forms of abode, rather than the colorful and pleasant setting portrayed by Bierstadt. There is William H. Holmes”The Area of the Mouth of the Green River Canyon in the Rock Cliffs of Utah” which is a watercolor representation of some rather even more drab teepees on the flat and dusty ground, a small mountain in the distance. Samuel Coleman’s “Crossing the Plains” shows a wagon train crossing the brown colored plains. It seems dusty and hot, nothing ethereal or epic, as was the case when the Mormons went West, just covering a formidable and threatening vast and empty expanse.
What I can say about Remington and his kinsmen is to denigrate this kind of art by suggesting that it is akin to billboards and advertisements and magazine illustrations, the last of wich was popular at the time and which was best exemplified by Norman Rockwell, while the current New Yorker covers are more like art. That is because Remington and Rockwell are not trying to create new images but rather ask the reader to remind and recognize a cliche as being such. We see a cop and a runaway boy at the soda fountain so as to remind us that this bit of human interest has already been part of our treasure trove of memories, an escape from rather than a portrait of reality because nothing bad is going to happen. Similarly, the point of watching the arched bucking bronco is to remind the viewer that you have already appreciated that event and the perception of it and so the image serves as an icon for indexing the catalog of images and stories that are available to the Wild West. This is a subtle but profound distinction because this creates a separation between art as a permanently lived image, however constrained by its frames, but alive to what is alive, whether Breughel’s “Harvesters“ or Velasquez' “Les Mineras’ where people in a frame still ask you to wonder what each of the ensemble is like, as if they were real and not just a painting, while Remington does not force us to make emotions or meanings, just spectacle. Remington’s figures have no expression because they are not at all meant to be real, just emblematic. Known as only a piece of art and therefore without art, the purpose of these items to be bought and displayed instead of and in the substitution of art. This might seem a harsh judgment, after all, in that art is whatever it does, but to make art that precludes the important attributes of art seems to me to be something other than art.