Brush Strokes That Invented the West

They lived as if in two separate yet parallel universes, drawn together by a single fascination: the rugged American West.

Paragons of popular Western art, Frederic Remington was a Yale University-trained artist who lived and worked in New York and Charles M. Russell was a Montana wrangler and self-taught artist.

Their work illustrated the tales of cowboys, soldiers and Native Americans while molding a nation’s visual impression of itself from the late 1800s to the present.

A showdown between the two goes on view today at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana with the exhibition “Remington, Russell and the Language of Western Art.” A hundred works of art comprised of paintings, bronze sculptures, sketches and historical memorabilia are on display.

Remington, who made extended visits to the West, is generally characterized as an aloof, effete artist. He mostly painted in his studio in Manhattan, and he was the established leading American painter and scholar of Western art before Russell arrived on the scene.

Russell was shy and provincial, a humorous raconteur who wore high-heeled boots and had bowed legs. He sketched live action in the field. Less savvy with the ways of the New York art scene, Russell was snubbed during his visit there.

As Russell gained an audience, controversy sprang up. Remington was a fake, it was said, and Russell was the genuine Western artist. Russell was this unspoiled, untainted native genius of the West, unexposed to the academy and the industrial world.

The culprits who fueled the competition were photographer Erwin E. Smith and writer Emerson Hough, both who had their motives to discredit Remington and align themselves with Russell’s growing recognition.

Any rivalry “was fabricated by people outside their milieu,” said the exhibition’s curator, Peter H. Hassrick, calling from his residence in Coty, Wyoming. “It was a false rivalry that never really existed between the two men.” But the lore only grew given that the artists were familiar with each other; they are believed to have met once but were never known to correspond.

The men actually had more in common in their lives and art than the controversy allowed for, said Hassrick.

“It was blown out of proportion to the degree that Russell was embarrassed,” he said. “He didn’t want to be compared with the great Remington. He didn’t want to be compared to anyone. He was his own man. And Remington was so angered by an article written by Emerson Hough, which named him as a Western faker that he burned a bunch of his paintings, because he was so despondent.”

Such duels seemed common for artists in those days. Remington’s and Russell’s predecessors George Catlin and John Mix Stanley were pitted against each other in the early 1850s, and Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran were rivals a generation later.

The truth is that despite their differences in personality, lifestyle and artistic technique, both artists portrayed a similar version of the West. Scholars say they were crucial in creating and perpetuating the myth of Western lawlessness and violence, and that the West was a place of self-discovery and freedom from social restraint.

Both men were born to well-to-do, conservative families and raised in the post-Civil War era. Remington, three years older than Russell, was the son of a journalist and cavalry officer. Russell was the son of a businessman. Both had nascent artistic talents, which their families supported. Russell dropped out of high school to seek his fortune in Montana in 1880. The following year, Remington left Yale’s School of Fine Arts after a year and put in his own time on a ranch in Montana. Their experiences fueled their imaginations.

*

“The great American Western life and cowboy culture were increasingly becoming obsolete even in their day, and they were looking to capture and preserve it before it became a thing of the past,” said Amy Scott, curator of visual arts at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, one of 52 lenders to the exhibition, including the Frederic Remington Art Museum and the Charles M. Russell Center at the University of Oklahoma.

Their artistic efforts also pumped new life into art. They breathed action and more realistic depth into their art, which was novel then. Remington captured the interaction between horse and man with remarkable keenness.

“It was a breakthrough not only for Western art but in the history of American art,” Scott said.

With the encroachment of “civilization,” including developments in transportation and communication, the artists grew disenchanted with the changing West, scholars say. They painted with a degree of urgency and turned more to their imagination than reality.

“They exercised huge amounts of fantasy that romanticized and idealized the way of life of cowboys and Native Americans,” Hassrick said. Russell, for instance, experienced the cowboy era, but never the buffalo days, which he also painted. “Even though he was a factual artist, he worked from imagination the way Remington did.”

Russell, however, outlived Remington by 17 years to be the leading Western art figure until his death in 1926 at age 62. Many of the paintings in the exhibition by Russell were inspired by Remington, Hassrick said. “So Russell followed on Remington’s coattails.”

Interest in Western art has been gaining momentum since the 1970s with the return of Realism in the contemporary art scene as a relevant means of expression, Scott said.

The Wild West continues to fascinate. The exhibition already has traveled to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, the Society of the Four Arts and Portland Art Museum. Bowers will host a lecture series on the American West, a classic film series and family events.

The allure of open spaces tugged at the imaginations of Remington and Russell and they in turned captured an nation’s identity.

“It’s uniquely American,” Hassrick said. “Because they both became idealists later in their life and work, they created what our impressions of the West is, and those images were more dreamy and ethereal than what was really true. The only universal for the two artists were the landscape and the light and color and the quality of the clouds.”

*

Remington, Russell and the Language of Western Art,” Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana. Open today through Sept. 16. Hours: Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. $10 to $16. (877) 250-8999 or (714) 567-3600.