A wonder that never ceases

THE majestic landmarks of Yosemite National Park have been so often photographed, by amateurs and professionals alike, that overexposure threatens to obscure what made them compelling subjects in the first place.

Even before Ansel Adams took his iconic Yosemite photographs in the 1920s and ‘30s, visual artists had shifted away from head-on depictions of Half Dome and El Capitan, partly because of the general trend away from realism but also because so many of their predecessors had weighed in that it was difficult to avoid cliches.

“Yosemite: Art of an American Icon,” on view at the Autry National Center’s Museum of the American West through Jan. 21, traces the progression from the first ecstatic Yosemite sketches and oil paintings of the mid-19th century to the increasingly abstract photography of the late 1960s. It is the first installment of a two-part show; the second segment, which runs from Nov. 10 to April 22, will cover Yosemite-themed art from 1970 to the present.

The exhibit, with objects on loan from the Huntington Library, Yosemite National Park and elsewhere, contains most of the important depictions of Yosemite -- from the first illustrations and photographs to Adams’ 1935 masterpiece, “Clearing Winter Storm.” Altogether, the two-part show will display 140 paintings, baskets and photographs.

Adams and Yosemite are nearly synonymous in the public imagination. But Adams can also be seen as just one in a long line of artists who set up shop in Yosemite, creating endless themes and variations on the majestic rock formations, tall waterfalls and mercurial sky.

“It’s hard to get around Adams. He was so amazingly influential,” said Amy Scott, the museum’s curator of visual arts and the curator of the Yosemite exhibit. “There were a lot of people before him who made his achievements possible, and everyone after him was figuring out how to deal with him in one way or another, whether it was reacting against him or doing something different or imitative.”

The first published image of Yosemite, an 1855 lithograph by Thomas Ayres, is of Yosemite Falls towering above a group of people and grazing horses. Other early painters, such as Albert Bierstadt, conveyed a similar sense of scale, with tiny figures in the foreground to show the immensity of the landmarks, and bathed their works in the lush peaches and golds of the Hudson River School.

Early photographers such as Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge lugged their primitive equipment up steep trails with teams of mules, creating what were among the first landscapes in the medium.

As these images got back to the East Coast, where they were so outside the realm of people’s experience that they seemed almost a figment of the imagination, Yosemite soon supplanted Niagara Falls as the country’s most awesome natural wonder. That drew tourists, which in turn drew more artists, so that some of the pioneering photographers found themselves in fierce competition to supply the public with fresh images.

“Whereas Niagara’s grand falls had been central to the conception of American nature prior to the Civil War, Yosemite usurped this position in the national psyche in the postwar years, and it did so very quickly,” wrote USC historian William Deverell in his essay for the book published in conjunction with the exhibit.

By 1874, William Hahn was painting a series of oils showing a group of hikers who had despoiled the valley’s natural beauty by littering newspapers and empty bottles of wine.

In the early 20th century came cars and the sine qua non of the modern tourist: the hand-held camera. At the same time, artists were applying techniques pioneered elsewhere, moving away from grand landscapes toward close-ups of rocks, trees or creeks.

Nude photographs by Anne Brigman, the Asian-influenced paintings of the Japanese American artist Chiura Obata and Edward Weston’s juniper tree photographs are among the many pieces in the show that chronicle this trend.

The Autry show also gives a prominent place to the crafts of the Yosemite Valley’s Native American people, the Miwok and Paiute, which were made for practical purposes but marry function with decorative symmetric forms.

Though many of the straw baskets and sifting trays on display were made primarily to prepare acorn flour or gather pine, others were intended to impress. Demand from tourists and collectors turned basket weaving into an industry, and the “Indian Field Days” competition, held from 1916 to 1929 and offering cash prizes, pushed local craftsmen and craftswomen beyond traditional examples.

The post-1960s half of the show, which opens next month, will take visitors through a period when artists have been using contemporary techniques such as color block painting and video installations to say more than simply that the park is beautiful. Instead, the works comment on the relationship between man and nature, or even, as does Jerry Uelsmann’s 1973 “Ansel Adams in Half Dome,” on the omnipresence of Adams himself.

“There’s a return, a resurgence, a revitalization, a revival of artistic interest in the park,” curator Scott said of this period. “Artists are exploring this landscape without resorting to cliches or visual expressions of romanticism.”

weekend@latimes.com

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‘Yosemite’

Art of an American Icon

When: Part 1, covering 1855 to 1869, through Jan. 21; Part 2, covering 1970 to the present, Nov. 10 to April 22

Where: Autry National Center, Museum of the American West, 4700 Western Heritage Way, L.A.

Price: $7.50, adults; $5, students and seniors; $3, children

Info: (323) 667-2000, autrynationalcenter.org