‘Lure of the West’ Is Far From Pioneering

A young family--one of many in a bustling caravan--rests on a precipice overlooking a vast, sun-drenched plain. The mother, a classic Madonna figure in teal and pink drapery, cradles an infant in her arms and folds her hands passively, as if in prayer. An eager girl leans on her knee like a young John the Baptist and an angelic male figure looms behind her, gesturing auspiciously toward the expanse.

Though it sounds a bit like a Renaissance depiction of the holy family’s flight into Egypt, this scene actually comes from a secular 19th century American painting called “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” (1861) by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. The angel is clad head-to-toe in leather and buckskin; the caravan is a band of covered wagons led by rifle-waving prospector types; and the landscape looks a lot like Utah.

The biblical allusion, however, isn’t accidental: These figures--pioneers on their way to claim, settle and civilize the great Wild West--are the holy family of American mythology.

The painting epitomizes the romantic fervor that fuels nearly all of the work in “Lure of the West: Treasures From the Smithsonian American Art Museum,” a basic but thoughtful survey of Western American painting and sculpture now on view at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens.

The show begins in the first half of the 19th century--around the time that James Fenimore Cooper began publishing his Leatherstocking Tales--with three artists whose work embodies that writer’s adventurous notions of the West: Charles Bird King, George Catlin and John Mix Stanley. Slightly predating the pioneers, these artists focus primarily on the Native Americans they encountered on their own expeditions west, whom they clearly view with some fascination as noble savages: dignified but fearsome, awe-inspiring but dangerous.

More concerned with embellishing exotic scenes and accurately capturing basic features than with conveying elaborate landscapes or complex emotional states, these three artists worked in a quick, simple and often cartoonish style reminiscent of early American portraiture and folk art. The paintings are not great by any formal standard, but it’s interesting to note how directly their flat, sensational imagery seems to have influenced later visual traditions like pulp fiction illustration, comic books, films and television.

With the latter half of the 19th century come the almost ridiculously sublime landscapes of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, in which towering, cloud-skirted peaks dwarf all human life, native or nonnative. If the earlier works were limited by their formal simplicity, these are, at least to contemporary eyes, overburdened with extravagant virtuosity. Still, they embody the spirit of fantasy that drove the wheels of Manifest Destiny and are bound to be at least a little intoxicating to all but the most cynical American viewers.

Around the turn of the century, after the long battle between the U.S. government and the Native American population had come to a tragic close with the near complete annihilation of the latter, a wave of cultural regret set in, evidenced here by the rich, sad portraits of Elbridge Ayer Burbank, Joseph Henry Sharp and Eanger Irving Couse. It’s hard to say whether the sentiment of these images is any less exploitative than the noble savage model of the earlier period, but they’re far better paintings, and infinitely more moving.

With the formation of the Taos art colony by East Coast-and European-trained artists in the early 20th century, Modernism began to infiltrate the classic Western motifs, largely for the better. In this work, which makes up about a quarter of the exhibition, the grandeur of the landscape and the romance of the Native American figure begin to equal out, perhaps because the environment that these artists portrayed was their own home as well as that of their subjects. Their landscapes aren’t fantastical compilations but very specific renditions of form, color and light. Their thick, expressive brushstrokes, if occasionally derivative, reveal an aspect of sensuality in the land that makes the cold, crystalline surfaces of the earlier landscapes seem not only less appealing but downright unrealistic.

Perhaps the most beautiful of these late works is E. Martin Hennings’ “Homeward Bound” (1933), a wonderfully humble painting that portrays two blanket-draped Native American women walking past a wall of dried sunflower stalks that form a delicate Art Deco-like pattern against a lemon sherbet sky. The low mountains and snow-covered fields beyond the stalks are cast in a wintry blue that one can almost smell.

“Lure of the West” is a fine, straightforward show, staged on a simple premise and stocked with a number of excellent works--which is to say, it’s a fairly typical exhibition of Western art. It will encourage those with a particular propensity for the stuff to continue enjoying it and those who claim the high road of sophistication to continue scorning it. The artistic and cultural issues at stake in this era, however, are so much more complex than this or most exhibitions let on that one is left hoping for a curator with a broader vision to grant them the critical context they deserve.

*

The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. (626) 405-2100. Through Dec. 16. Closed Mondays.