How the West Was Drawn : World-class exhibit from the Gilcrease Collection showcases paintings by masters that pay homage to America’s past.

“Western art,” James Nottage mutters. “In some art circles, that’s considered an oxymoron.”

The chief curator at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum emphatically begs to differ. In Nottage’s view there are great works of Western art, even great works of narrative Western art--those often-despised pictures and sculptures that tell a story.

As if to prove Nottage’s point, a major show of compelling Western art will open Saturday at the museum in Griffith Park. Called “Western Masters,” the exhibit will feature treasures from one of the world’s finest collections of art of the West--that of the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Okla.

Thomas Gilcrease, whose mother was of Creek Indian origin, was an oilman who personally amassed more than 350,000 Western artifacts and artworks before his death in 1962. Nearly 50 paintings and sculptures from that unparalleled cache will go on display, including important works by such major figures as Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Frederic Remington and Charles Russell.

Nottage is thrilled that Angelenos will have a chance to study the Gilcrease treasures up close. “Not everybody can go to Tulsa to see this great collection,” he notes. And many of the most important developments in Western art will be represented, from formal portraits of Indian leaders to heart-stopping landscapes that let Europeans know that the Rockies were every bit as majestic as the Alps, from roiling buffalo hunts to remarkably modern work by members of the Taos Society of Artists.

Unlike some critics, many Americans love Western art. The West is the great tragic stage of American expansion, its despoiled Eden, a place of almost infinite geographical and geological variety and a symbol--all at one time--of national ambition, hope and unspeakable loss.

As Canadian historian Brian Dippie writes in an insightful essay in “The Oxford History of the American West,” critical fashions come and go but “Western art continues to appeal to rainbow-chasers everywhere.” The Autry show brings together many of the works that shaped our collective vision of the West. Whatever the historical truth, the West we all know is the one created by artists such as Bierstadt and Russell (and film makers such as John Ford). The show could be called “How the West Was Made.”

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Certain subjects appear again and again in Western art--Native Americans (depicted as doomed innocents or maniacal savages, depending on the decade and the artist’s politics), mountains, mesas, cowboys and thousands and thousands of fierce and shaggy buffalo, our bizarre national beast.

One of the most important pictures in the show, according to Nottage, is John Mix Stanley’s “Buffalo Hunt.” Stanley was one of many Western artists who documented the visual West while traveling with an expedition surveying for a railroad. Stanley knew whereof he painted--his canvas includes a self-portrait of the mighty hunter. Stanley’s work is especially precious because it is so rare.

“Most of his work was destroyed when the Smithsonian burned in 1865 and the Barnum collection burned the same year,” says Nottage. The curator notes that the Autry has three Stanleys in its collection.

Heroic landscapes will be part of the show, including Albert Bierstadt’s “Sierra Nevada Mountains in California,” painted around 1863. For a time the German-born and -trained Bierstadt was so identified with stirring paintings of American peaks that a critic quipped that the artist had “copyrighted all the principal mountains.” One of the surprises of the show is a Bierstadt seascape, “‘Point Lobo, California,” done in 1875.

Thomas Moran’s paintings of Great Hot Springs and the Lower Falls in Yellowstone, both done in 1893, not only documented the look of the West, but also helped shape its history. The English-born Moran was part of a U.S. government-sponsored expedition to Yellowstone in 1871, and the images Moran produced from that experience helped persuade Congress to turn Yellowstone into the world’s first national park the following year.

Another non-native artist who lovingly depicted the West was Henry Farny, who was born in France and trained in Europe before settling in Cincinnati, Ohio. Farny’s 1905 oil “Fording the Stream” shows a scene in the everyday life of the Indians who were vanishing even as Farny observed them as a young man.

The show will include little-known works, such as two tiny canvases painted by Walter Shirlaw, who recorded the cultures of the Northern Cheyenne and Crow as one of five official artists assigned to the census of American Indian tribes undertaken in 1890. “What’s neat about Shirlaw is he was an early Impressionist, and these paintings are startling,” Nottage says.

While the unexpected will be featured, the familiar will not be ignored. Both Frederic Remington and Charles Russell will have an honored place in the exhibit. Historian Dippie thinks that’s a good thing, even a brave thing, given the critical disdain with which these artists are often regarded. Dippie recalls that a reporter once demanded that he tell her why she should like Russell’s work. Dippie felt something akin to despair. “You can’t defend any art when it’s guilty until proven innocent,” he says.

Dippie won’t go so far as to describe the work of the two Rs as great, but it is, he maintains, extremely important art. The men were very different, he observes. Remington “championed the winning of the West, whereas Russell lamented all that was lost.” They were opposed in their sympathies as well. Russell loved cowboys and Indians, while Remington was an equal-opportunity racist, whose views are reflected in his 1899 oil, “Missing.” The title is an ominous reference to the status of the valiant soldier who appears in the center of the canvas, on foot, a rope around his neck, being led by a band of mounted Indians to what we know, with a shudder, will be a hideous death.

In their very different ways, Dippie says, Remington and Russell “represent the nub of the tradition, they really represent the core.” Even now, when we think about the West, we tend to do so in the images created by these two men. It’s fascinating, Dippie notes, “how strongly they impressed their vision on the future.”

As an example of the durable legacy of Western art, Dippie cites the popularity of Kevin Costner’s “Dances With Wolves,” in which images straight out of Remington are recycled into something more in sync with contemporary values. “The key thing in Western art is that it provides all the images, and we can continue to translate them in terms of current concerns.”

Dippie is shamelessly fond of Russell, who is represented in the show by two bronzes, a sculpture of Will Rogers and one of an ursine “Mountain Mother,” and two oils, “Wagon Boss” (1909) and “A Bad One” (1920). Dippie thinks the scornful fail to appreciate the power of Russell’s enduringly popular work, which piles tumbleweed on buffalo skull until the authentic details accrete into “a vision of something lost and wonderful.”

Dippie is one of those who stands in front of a Russell painting and sees, not cowboys or Indians, cattle or wagon wheels, but a Western paradise that may never have existed anywhere except in the artist’s mind.

WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Western Masters: Treasures from the Gilcrease Museum.”

Location: Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Griffith Park, across from the Los Angeles Zoo.

Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Open Saturday through Nov. 27.

Admission: $7, $5 seniors and students with ID, $3 for children 2 through 12.

Call: (213) 667-2000.