Its own peaks and valleys

Shock and awe. That’s what overcame the early explorers to the Yellowstone region. The landscape’s dramatic features and brilliant coloration served as evidence of God’s creative genius, a wild heaven on earth. Yet the sights disarmed. One visitor described the steamy sulfur pools as “the place where hell bubbled up.” To every new observer, Yellowstone was remarkable, extreme, strange.

Are there any new observers anymore, nearly 150 years after those first formal expeditions? Even those who haven’t traveled to Yellowstone know its celebrated features -- Old Faithful, the falls, terraced mineral pools and grand canyon. They’ve become icons as much as destinations.

“Drawn to Yellowstone: Artists in America’s First National Park,” an exhibition at the Autry National Center’s Museum of the American West, tells the story of the icon-makers who were lured to the area by the appeal of that radical landscape and the commercial opportunities it promised. It’s a compelling story, diligently told by art historian Peter Hassrick in a book by the same title, which served as the basis for the exhibition. The show, curated by the Autry’s Amy Scott, includes approximately 80 paintings and prints from the mid-19th century to the present. It travels to three other venues after its current run.

A compelling back story of personal ambition, commercial enterprise and national myth-making doesn’t necessarily translate into a thoroughly compelling exhibition. In terms of visual interest, “Drawn to Yellowstone” has peaks and valleys and curiosities to match the terrain itself. Too often, though, motives and purposes fade from view and the show feels like a stalled Yellowstone highlights tour: On your left, the Lower Falls. And on your left, the Lower Falls again. And again.

Images played a decisive role in Yellowstone’s evolution as a national landmark and tourist magnet. An expedition in 1870 yielded some modest sketches, which Thomas Moran spruced up for publication in Scribner’s Monthly. Interest in the region ignited, and when another, more extensive expedition set off the following year, Moran was on board, with another artist and photographer, William Henry Jackson. The paintings and photographs produced during the Hayden Expedition were brought to Washington like trophies -- seductive, irrefutable reminders of what America possessed. In 1872, legislation was passed setting aside 2.2 million acres as a protected area, making Yellowstone the country’s first national park.

Depending on their bent, historians emphasize different motivating factors on the part of the government. Certainly there was a commitment to provide some kind of sanctuary, to protect the land from development, but the designation didn’t start as pure environmental altruism nor has it become so since. Yes, Yellowstone was a sacred place to be preserved, but it was also a resource to be exploited -- not through mining or agriculture, but through tourism.

The railroad industry’s interest in spreading the word about Yellowstone’s glories was the catalyst, in fact, for much of the art on view in this show. In the early 1880s, the Northern Pacific laid a track right up to one of the entrances to the park, making Yellowstone easily accessible to tourists.

Before doing so, the company sponsored artists to travel to the area and bring back evidence of furthur investment’s promise. Later, they subsidized artists to make pictures that would entice tourists -- as well as potential settlers to the West -- to keep their trains full.

Moran’s work, which was widely published and sold in print form, anchors the show. His oils aspire to the epic, as was the fashion in mid- to late-19th century American landscape painting. His more intimate watercolors, especially the on-site sketches, vividly affirm his reputation as a superb colorist. “Great Springs of the Firehole River” (1871) is a raw gem and stunning example. The spring is a mere snatch of blue, a small quenching pool set into bleached terrain veined with blazing gold and orange.

The colors of Yellowstone’s unusual landscape, shaped more than half a million years ago by glacial and volcanic forces, verge on the incredible. The landforms too include the spectacular (Old Faithful, the Grand Canyon, the waterfalls) and the grotesquely odd (smelly sulfur pools). Cold water rushing down, boiling water spewing up, reeking water sitting in pools, steaming. Painters brave enough to rise to the challenge of Yellowstone fretted that their pictures would be dismissed as exaggerations. Jackson’s photographs (unfortunately not included) came in handy early on to support the painters’ extravagant claims.

The railroad industry’s cash influence reinforced the artists’ tendency to dwell on the monumental and extreme features of the landscape. Out of what Rudyard Kipling called “a howling wilderness of three thousand square miles, full of all imaginable freaks of fiery nature,” artists focused on a small handful of subjects. And they represented them using an equally narrow range of techniques.

As it turns out, Yellowstone has not been just a sanctuary for unspoiled nature. It also has been a realm sequestered -- quarantined, nearly -- from the churning, challenging art world beyond. Naturalistic representation, with reverential flourishes, has dominated from the start and reigns still.

I heard several visitors to the exhibition register their dismay at a few recent paintings with slightly abstracted forms and vibrant, expressionistic color (one being a gorgeous, Fauvist rendition of the falls by Alyce Frank). Their reaction echoed an incident that Hassrick recounts in his book. When a pair of limestone bears, sculpted in a distilled, simplified style, was installed outside the Yellowstone post office in 1941, workers and park visitors looked askance at them. They were, onlookers concurred, too vague in their resemblance to the real thing.

Yellowstone artists, like Old Faithful, have been expected to perform consistently. The few paintings in the show that deviate markedly from the standard mode provide quenching refreshment. John Henry Twachtman’s are the earliest works to offer respite from the breathless monumentality that permeates the show. His “Edge of the Emerald Pool, Yellowstone” (c.1895) is pure chromatics. A close-up, sensory moment (as opposed to a distant, all-encompassing descriptive view), Twachtman’s painting joins cool water and warm shore. Earth defined by soft dabs of taupe, putty and peach circles a turquoise pool that subtly merges with the sky.

The tipped up, flattened space resonates with Japanese print aesthetics, as filtered through Impressionism.

The bulk of the work in this show was made not just for art’s sake but to promote the park -- to sell the sights, to sell railroad tickets and to sell America an idea of itself as uncharted wilderness. There’s not much irony here, or critique until a few mild satirical pieces at the tail end of the show, though there’s been ample justification for either.

One of the first events on the exhibition timeline is the pressured relinquishment of Shoshone and Crow claims on land in the area, followed by their methodical relocation. The last item on the timeline is the current administration’s welcoming nod to snowmobiles in the park. In between, commercial exploitation has filled the gaps.

Or, as a 1931 Saturday Evening Post ad declares, beneath a painting (in the show) of tourist and bear guzzling soda together: “Of course Coca Cola is there.”

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‘Drawn to Yellowstone’

Where: Museum of the American West, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Los Angeles

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays through Sundays; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays

Ends: Jan. 25

Price: $3 to $7.50

Info: (323) 667-2000