I'm very much looking forward to reading Art of the American Frontier, which has just appeared from Yale University Press. This accompanies an exhibit at the High Museum in Atlanta. Cribbing now from the description on YUP's website:
The visual history of the American West calls to mind iconic artworks and nostalgia for the past. Art of the American Frontier presents more than 300 artworks and artifacts from 1830 to 1930, alongside a group of contemporary Western works, showcasing the premier collections of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. The complicated history of westward expansion is presented through the iconography of the frontier, spanning Plains Indian materials, government survey photographs, and paintings by early artist-explorers. In the 20th century, a growing romance with the West is evident in the theatrics of Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West show, with its blend of popular culture and history that inspired numerous artists.
The dialogue between the historical West and the nostalgia for it can be seen in highlights including Timothy O’Sullivan’s government survey photographs, Frederic Remington’s rare Impressionist landscape studies, and charming wax sculptures by Charles Russell. Featuring three essays and ten brief expositions on a range of art, culture, and history topics, this generously illustrated catalogue provides a comprehensive overview of more than 100 years of art from the American West.
Surely there's talk of Asher Durand's Progress in there. This reminds me that I've been meaning to mention that I'm on a panel of the C19 conference (nineteenth century American literature scholars), which is meeting in Chapel Hill over our spring break. I'll be talking about property (and especially fences) in antebellum art. The theme of the conference is commons, but since I write about conservative ideas I'll be talking about how what was once common has been fenced and how Americans thought about private property as propelling economic and moral progress. Bascially, reprising a lot of "Property and Progress." One of these days I want to write some more about that -- both because there are a lot of great images that didn't make it into that article and because I want to focus even more on how the rhetoric of progress through property appears in judicial opinions and in legislative debates.
I'm going to see if I can set some time to visit Atlanta before the exhibit closes (doubtful). And maybe down the road to visit the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, which put the exhibit together. I've never been to Wyoming and I've been hoping for some time to take in another museum there, the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center.
Comments