ART REVIEW : Opening a Window on the West

The real landscape around the Palm Springs Desert Museum takes a role in its thoughtful new exhibition. Don’t be fooled by the title. “Transforming the Western Image in 20th- Century American Art” is a bit turgid. The show is not.

Organized by curator of art Katherine Plake Howe and assistant curator Michael Zakian, the event represents a major effort by the museum’s contemporary art council. Encompassing about 70 works by 40 artists, it comes fully caparisoned with an illustrated catalogue. Oddly, there is no general essay even though the theme calls for one. Never mind. Deft individual profiles on the artists and the art itself illuminate the matter nicely. It’s typical of this show to move large matters with small gestures.

Its leitmotif is an elegantly simple question about what modern art did to the mythos of the Western frontier and vice versa. Since the American West represented the final geographic point of European expansion, the exhibition becomes mantled in an atmosphere of larger questions about the outcome of Western culture. That’s one of the shows great strengths. Its concerns billow beyond mere matters artistic to invite contemplation of the fate of great civilizations.

Civilizations, as a notion, are a bit abstract but they happen in very particular locales. Places encourage behaviors. The American West is vast and grandiose.

Today, the drive to Palm Springs is a comfortably tedious run across what was once a forbidding desert. The way is punctuated with breathtaking views of mountains receding in layers until parched wasteland rises to heights of icy Olympian haughtiness.

Desert terrain once demanded heroism and elemental ruthlessness. By the time the 20th Century got here, it could be imagined as tamed and Arcadian.

Among the artworks on exhibit here, the earliest and most European pictures are by New York artists Arthur B. Davies and the less well-remembered Elliot Dangerfield who depicted the West in the accents of Parisian allegorical nudity a la Gustave Moreau. The works signal a classic instance of an alien culture palming its values off on a terra incognita. The results have a certain risible arrogant quaintness.

Other artists did better, those influenced by modernism, surprisingly well:

Stuart Davis’ 1923 “New Mexico Gate” captures a certain devotional simplicity that can inhabit a human outpost on a hot desert afternoon. Marsden Hartley brought memories of Cubism to his 1919 “Window, New Mexico,” which rings with the sweetness of rugged austerity. There is weirdness in Adolph Gottlieb’s 1938 proto-abstract “Symbols and the Desert” and ominous threat in Jackson Pollock’s “Camp With Oil Rig” from the early ‘30s. This quality of aptness between art and place continues right through Richard Diebenkorn’s 1951 “Albuquerque” paintings. Although purely non-objective, they have the color and sweep of Western landscape.

The harmonic rightness of such blending of avant-garde pictorial notions with Western geography at first produces a kind of aesthetic double-take.

Why does this work so well?

Quite simply, because an extraordinary number of the qualities of vision and sensibility central to the modernist canon pre-existed in the Western landscape. Often the harmonics are so perfect there’s no need to apply modernist tenets to explain the art. Raymond Jonson was a votary of abstraction but his “Light” reads perfectly well as a straight painting of a New Mexico butte. Kenneth Callahan’s “Trail Crew” is at once a dramatic landscape and an Abstract Expressionist composition by this artist of the Northwest.

The Far West was one kind of frontier, modernism another. The landscape--until we mucked it up--was both pristine and primitive. Modernism was a heroic struggle to start art over, to rediscover an essential art that had been lost in civilization’s layers of refinement and hypocrisy. No wonder the avant-garde took so enthusiastically to the patterns and totems of the art of the West’s native peoples. Modernists like Jay Van Everen, George L. K. Morris and Richard Poussette-Dart got fertile inspiration from Western tribal art as Picasso had done from the African.

Some results are a trifle too ethnographic. It’s too bad the show lacks a mature Pollock--or a Lee Mullican, for that matter--to show the final flowering of inspiration from native art. It’s OK, though. This show does its work with an economy of beautifully selected objects.

Those who’ve been to Death Valley or the Painted Desert don’t need Andre Breton to explain Surrealism to them. It’s all there in the landscape. So are strong invitations to hallucination, hyperbole, idiosyncrasy and mysticism.

Once the Far West was domesticated, those things jelled into an impulse to mirage--real illusionism that became everything from Burma Shave signs to the movies. Los Angeles and Las Vegas, the West’s most extroverted cities, became one huge sound stage for popular culture.

A series of portraits by Andy Warhol includes John Wayne, Dennis Hopper and Annie Oakley, all performers. Their ilk made cowboys and cowgirls into mythic heroes worshiped around the world. But the myth changes. Wayne’s resolute macho cowpoke gives way to Hopper’s neurotic saddle bum. Joyce Treiman’s “The Nude Out West” still believes in the liberated Western woman. Alexis Smith’s “Cinderella Story” isn’t so sure.

As the culture replaced firsthand experience with recycled media images, the Western myth curdled into cliche. Disillusionment arrived wafted on the weary wings of satire and irony.

Llyn Foulkes’ brilliant bas-relief assemblage “The Last Outpost” shows a smiling Lone Ranger gunned down by one of his own pint-size fans while Minnie Mouse looks on. Its use of forced perspective and bas-relief make a proper illusion of disillusioned idealism.

Robert Arneson’s “Last of the Great Buffalo Hunters” is an elegiac ceramic homage to Pollock--certainly the patron saint of this whole show. His larger-than-life portrait is attached to a she-wolf from one of his paintings. The work mourns the lost spirit of the Far West but the she-wolf also evokes Romulus and Remus and ancient Rome, so the threnody expands to include Western culture.

This compelling show doesn’t have a happy ending. Ed Ruscha’s 1986 black painting “A Certain Trail” shows a line of covered wagons diminishing into darkening gloom. The painting is so eloquent you can virtually hear the moan of wagon wheels and the terse calls of riders.

Maybe this is a good ending. Ruscha, the master poet of Pop, is not kidding in this painting. If the West is long gone and Pop itself exhausted, this picture is at least evidence of what a mature person does at such an important cultural junction. He doesn’t snicker. He admits that life involves authentic tragedy. That’s when heroism comes back.

Palm Springs Desert Museum, 101 Museum Drive, Palm Springs to April 26, closed Mondays, (619) 235-7186.