ART REVIEW : Gene Autry Museum Celebrates the Myth of the American West

The wide open spaces have been bound and tied with ropes of blacktopped highway and the great American cowboy has devolved into a red-eyed truck driver with a gut full of bad coffee, but the myth of the American West continues to cast its spell.

That true grit myth has now been burnished to a lustrous glow by the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, which opens this week in Griffith Park.

Giving equal play to TV, movies and artifacts, along with painting and graphics, the museum’s collection, which has James Nottage as curator, includes President Theodore Roosevelt’s personal collection of Western artifacts, Colt Firearms’ official 174-piece collection, and first-rate examples of just about any Western-related item you care to name.

All these lovingly preserved objects (clothes, musical instruments, contemporary Western kitsch, household goods--you name it, they’ve got it), are great fun to look at, but the real meat of the museum is its painting collection.

Charting the history of the American West from the 16th Century to the present, the Autry painting archive includes important works by such Western art stalwarts as Albert Bierstadt, Karl Bodmer, Frederic Remington, Charles Russell, and the beloved illustrator N. C. Wyeth, among others. Landscape was the strong suit of most of these artists and their glorious images of the Old West offer intriguing insights into the genesis of the lone-maverick-against-the-wilderness ideology that has come to be associated with this country.

For the premiere, the main gallery has been given over to 50 pieces on loan from the Gerald P. Peters collection, considered one of the most comprehensive in private hands.

Dating from the 1820s to the early 20th Century and including works by 33 artists, the Peters collection stands as a concise visual lecture on exactly why people love Western art. Though the avant-garde continues to regard this style with disdain, its narrative detail and appeal to nostalgia brings it a huge following. We’re shown why in this selection from Peters’ collection, titled “The West Explored.”

Robust homages to a time when people appeared to live with a simplicity that is scarcely imaginable to urban dwellers caught in a mire of phone machines, Western art depicts a lawless world where every man was free to invent his own code of the road.

In James Walker’s “Roping Wild Horses,” an ambitious cowboy stakes a claim without bothering himself with clearances or permits, while John Mix Stanley’s “The Buffalo Hunt” finds an intrepid adventurer facing nature down square in the face.

The good guys of the Old West were easy to distinguish from the bad guys, as can be seen in Frederic Remington’s “The Signal (If Skulls Could Talk),” an ominous portrait of an Indian brave on a rampage. There was room for a man to move, and a cowboy could always rely on his pistol and his pony. Nature was as yet unspoiled and stood as shining proof that there was indeed a God in heaven. Spectacular landscapes like Albert Bierstadt’s “A Rest on the Ride” and Thomas Moran’s “Mountain of the Holy Cross” convey the overwhelming spirituality of this virgin land that called out like a siren to restless Easterners.

Many artists on view actually traveled with explorers to previously uncharted regions of the West, and they intended that their work be informative as well as aesthetically pleasing. Consequently, deeply private concerns are hard to discern in images focusing on stretches of open land, all manner of wildlife and the entire cast of Western archetypes, from rustler and trapper to Indian brave and gambler. All of these macho types have been immortalized in countless “B” movies, which played a central role in converting this tradition into the popular fairy tale it has become.

Curator Nottage comments that these artists romanticize, and they were, of course, also subject to the prejudices of the period. In a series of portraits of Indians, artist Charles Bird King portrayed his sitters as having the regal bearing of aristocrats. Properly respectful paintings they are, but knowing what we now know, these portraits, along with the other lyrical depictions of interaction between white man and Indian on view, strike one as quaint at best. The savage obliteration of Indian culture that was taking place as these works were being created was obviously not something people were keen to acknowledge.

Another bit of inadvertent editing one sees in these paintings--and in the entire museum for that matter--is the virtual absence of women from this world. There are no paintings by women, few images of women--it’s as though they hadn’t been invented yet. This, of course, is part of what makes the notion of the Old West continue to seem attractive to little boys who yearn to escape to a less complicated time.

Most artists employed stylistic motifs and ideas popularized by the Hudson River School and the Barbizon School, both of which promoted a highly sentimental view of nature. Misty-eyed renderings of mountain ranges and wild horses--even when executed by a master like Bierstadt--occasionally go a bit heavy on the sublime. This, however, can never be said of Remington, whose work is so invigoratingly free of nice parlor manners it fairly leaps off the wall.

Long the most popular artist of the Western genre, Remington was a native New Yorker who went West to work as a cowboy and later became a rancher. He wrote and illustrated articles about life on the plains for the pulp press, and his experience as a graphic artist functioned as the core of his style as a painter; his work bristles with the humor, immediacy and brutal energy of a drawing in a magazine.

In “The Misdeal,” a small black-and-white painting done for a periodical, we see a sorry cowpoke who underestimates the card shark across the table and is reprimanded with a bullet. This sort of Rambo-style vigilantism is still very much a part of our culture, but the finer qualities associated with the Old West that are celebrated in many of these works--self-reliance, modesty, an old-fashioned sense of honor--have unfortunately come to seem coated with the dust of nostalgia.