Big Country, Big Art
"In this country, nothing can be small or elaborate..."
By: TW Editors 09/25/2009
In 1920, a young reporter for the Indianapolis News purchased his first Western painting, Olaf Wieghorst’s Cutting Horse. “Among the contemporary painters, Olaf Wieghorst has to be my favorite. I bought paintings from Olaf when he and his good wife, Mae, carried them around in the trunk of their car,” remembered Harrison Eiteljorg.
In 1924, a sculptor left her mark on Western art when her statue Buffalo Bill—The Scout was unveiled on July 4 in Cody, Wyoming, with thousands in attendance. Newspapers often called Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney “America’s princess,” but she had forged her way through societal expectations and carved a name for herself as an artist. In fact, her own ambition led her to accept the commission. “I have always wanted, more than anything else, to have my work distinctly American,” she told her biographer, “and [Buffalo Bill] is certainly the one man whom we think of as representing the most romantic and adventurous period in the history of the West.... In that country, nothing can be small or elaborate. It is a great responsibility to be the first person to sculpt Buffalo Bill.”
For WWII, the U.S. Army drafted an Iowa-Kansas farm boy who would return from the war an artist. George Phippen moved to the Southwest to study art and draw the humor he saw in ranching life. He went on to serve as the first president of the Cowboy Artists of America (CAA) in 1965. “In his paintings and drawings and bronzes, one can feel the heat and smell the dust; shiver to the bite of the cold and the howl of the wind; hear the pounding of the hoofs or the creak of saddle leather. George lived these things, and was sensitive to the details,” wrote Dick Spencer, publisher of Western Horseman, in the foreword for 1966’s The Life of a Cowboy Told Through the Drawings, Paintings and Bronzes of George Phippen.
In 2009, we celebrate the anniversaries of three museums that were formed because of these first efforts in collecting or creating Western art: The 50th anniversary of the Whitney Gallery of Western Art at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming; the 25th anniversary of the Phippen Museum in Prescott, Arizona; and the 20th anniversary of the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Whitney Gallery of Western Art
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney would later forgive the debt owed her for her Buffalo Bill statue, and she also donated 40 acres of adjacent land to the Buffalo Bill Memorial Association, which had hired her to create the sculpture. When she scouted out the location for the statue in 1922, her son Cornelius, better known as Sonny, came with her to Cody. The Yale graduate was on his way to work in a Nevada mine his father owned. In 1954, Sonny donated $250,000 to the Association in memory of his mother, who had died 12 years earlier. Then Robert Coe, the son of W.R. Coe, who had been among the summer locals who nominated Whitney as the sculptor, donated his father’s Frederic Remington Studio collection in 1957. It came with a stipulation—that a new building be built to showcase the collection. That same year, the plan for the Whitney Gallery of Western Art was approved, with the museum’s windows facing the Buffalo Bill sculpture. Sonny donated an additional $250,000 for the building, plus $50,000 for acquisitions.
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