TV Reviews : PBS’ ‘Remington’ a Warm Portrait of Artist

PBS’ ever-absorbing biographical series “American Masters” tonight looks at the career of Wild West artist Frederic Remington(KCET Channel 28, 10 p.m.). “Frederic Remington: The Truth of Other Days” is a surprisingly timely hour, considering its subject died in 1906.

For Western art buffs, he is the Michelangelo of cowboy artists, the great original. Traditional art history dismissed him as a mere illustrator, then embraced him as a master and recently scorned him as a villainous perpetrator of the white man’s myth of the West.

The television profile is as warm and evenhanded as Gregory Peck’s narration. Remington comes across as an ebullient Romantic utterly and innocently in love with himself and his fantasy of the Wide Open Spaces. There was a lot of Teddy Roosevelt in him.

Remington-bashers jeer him as an Eastern greenhorn who studied art at Yale and painted yelping cowboys long after the frontier was closed. They forget the old observation that Rubens probably never saw an angel, either.

The program provides more interesting snippets of insight. A vintage photo shows his Civil War-hero father as the real prototype for Frederic’s leathery heroes.

The boy came West and opened a saloon. His teen-age bride, Eva Caten, hated it and temporarily left him. Remington drank up the inventory, went broke and got serious about his art.

He went on to paint the familiar images--galloping troopers, warily waiting cowboys. As time went on, his color grew subtle in moon and firelight effects.

Remington’s universe was one of Darwinian challenge where only the fittest survive. There was a lot to the corpulent Remington. He left more than 3,000 illustrations and paintings, 22 vigorous sculptures and wrote more than 100 literary works. He was protean.

When the Spanish American War came, Remington rushed to cover it as an illustrator. He’d never seen a war. He found it appalling.

He was only 48 when he died. He left behind something even more potent than his own legacy. The program cites Remington’s influence lurking behind all Western movies and his specific influence on John Ford’s films. Clips from “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” are virtually direct quotes from Remington.

Implicitly, the program asks about the present status of American individualism. Many a cultural vector points to its decline. But just as it seems to be guttering out, America responds to the “Desert Storm” adventure with delirious enthusiasm.

Remington’s romance, apparently, lives.