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.
The Whitney Gallery opened in 1959, and to this day, studio collections are its beating heart. From the 1957 Remington donation followed the studio collections of W.H.D. Koerner in 1978, Joseph Henry Sharp in 1986 and Alexander Phimister Proctor in 2006. The museum reopened in this 50th anniversary year with its newest studio collection of sculptor Proctor ready for visitors. Ironically, Proctor had been nominated by Teddy Roosevelt to sculpt Buffalo Bill after Cody’s death in 1917, but that plan for a statue in Colorado never materialized. Proctor went on to sculpt On the War Trail and Rough Rider (of Roosevelt). Included in the Proctor collection at the Whitney this year is the plaster used in the modeling of the Roosevelt bronze.
Phippen Museum
The Cowboy Artists of America never forget their own. When the organization’s first president George Phippen died at age 50 in 1966, a group of artists banded together to form a museum in his name. George hadn’t even lived long enough to attend the first CAA exhibition in Oklahoma City in 1966 (held in the Phoenix area since 1973). The tragedy of his death was that his art most likely killed him. George died of cancer, and his son Lynn suspected that toxic fumes from polysulfides, which George had used to coat the molds for bronze castings, might have caused the cancer. Lynn’s brother Ernie also died from it. After her husband George’s death, Louise wanted to celebrate the humor and storytelling showcased in Western art, just like that created by George. His Caught Napping is a great example, showing a cowboy napping on his hunting trip, while his alert horse watches deer pass by. Even John Wayne appreciated Phippen’s humor and attention to history; the actor hired him to illustrate the movie book for 1960’s The Alamo. And George even illustrated the pages of our magazine True West.
In 1974, the artists hosted the first annual Memorial Day art show in Prescott, Arizona, to raise funds for the museum. In the early 1980s, the trust that represented Harold James and Family, owners of the Deep Well Ranch, donated a five-acre plot of land near the legendary Granite Dells for the museum, which opened in 1984.
In its 25th anniversary year, the Phippen Museum dedicated a new entrance on Highway 89 with Frederic Remington’s 1895 bronze statue The Bronco Buster. This entrance is the first phase in expanding the museum. The expansion will house the Phippen family’s private collection of George Phippen’s art and the Abe Hays art collection, which will feature illustrative art, such as those done by Will James, among other Western art. The Phippen has already raised $2.4 million, with less than a million more dollars needed to double the size of the museum.
Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art
Some may wonder how Indianapolis became home to one of the premiere Western art institutions in the nation, but they would only have to look to its founder to understand. Through marriage, Thomas Eiteljorg would leave behind his news reporting and advertising sales career to become president of the coal brokerage firm Morgan Mines. In the 1950s, he leased coal deposits from Colorado and began making trips west to investigate other sites. An avid collector of art from around the world, he only had a “few Westerns” by 1961—half a dozen Nicolai Fechins and, of course, Olaf Wieghorst’s Cutting Horse.
Before long, Eiteljorg became one of the earliest collectors to discover the artists in Taos, New Mexico, with Victor Higgins as his favorite. Eiteljorg never would acquire a Charlie Russell or Thomas Moran, which he said he would only want for the sake of a more comprehensive collection. The romance of the West exhibited by Taos artists was truly what he preferred. “In these paintings, there is very little evidence of the violence which marked the settling of the West,” he said. When commenting on his collection being featured in a Florida museum, he told The Evening Independent in 1984, “My real love is for the Taos painters. They were exciting artists, with unquestioned technical competence, who were fortunate enough to catch the spirit of the West, the romance of the Indians and the mystery of the vast space while it was still visible.”
Featured temporarily at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1976, his collection would earn recognition thanks to events that unfolded in the 1980s. Indiana’s capital city lost the opportunity to acquire the more than a million Indian art and artifacts collected by George Gustav Heye; it is today’s National Museum of the American Indian run by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. and New York City. At the same time, Indianapolis’s existing Indian art collection, acquired from James H. Lawton, needed a new home. The Lilly Endowment, formed by the local pharmaceutical company, had allowed the use of its summer house to store the collection since 1978, but it was not providing adequate protection. To save Lawton’s Indian collection and to showcase Eiteljorg’s Western art, the first board of directors of the Eiteljorg museum convened in 1985. The museum opened four years later.
This year, to highlight the 20th anniversary, the museum offers special exhibits that culminate with a showing of works by artists accepted by Eiteljorg’s Fellowship for Native American Fine Art on November 14.
Whitney, Phippen and Eiteljorg are just a few art aficionados who have enlarged our enjoyment of Western art. Oilman Thomas Gilcrease is credited by art historians as the first to open a museum devoted to Western art, in Texas, ultimately moving his museum to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Newspaper publisher and oilman Amon Carter collected more than 400 works by Remington and Russell, which remain the core of the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The Jolly Rancher Candy Co. founders, Bill and Dorothy Harmsen, traveled the West after retiring in 1966 and donated their 3,500-piece collection that included 750 Western paintings to the Denver Art Museum in 2001; this year, the museum reopened the seventh floor for “Creating the West in Art,” an exhibit of the Harmsen collection.
From some of our nation’s best museums, we bring you the biggest Western art of 2009.
Post A Comment