Colorado Experience: Western American Art

[Music] there's a large cultural cachet for Western Americana people recognize cowboys and Indians they recognize the dramas of the American West and these have root in Western American art of the 19th century it reveals a lot historically about American identity about who we still think we are there's something magical about the landscape and the air and the sunlight here Western art is popular all over the world because Western movies are popular all over the world Western art from the beginning was this mixture of documenting the West but then also infusing it with emotion and beauty and things that the artist saw and experienced you are getting a view of what the West was like the evolution of the West these artists they're observing the changes they're observing the barbed wire the railroads the telegraph wires the people coming in and enclosing this once wide open space and they're celebrating this very brief moment in time when men could be men and good guys were good and bad guys were bad all you needed was a horse and a saddle and a blanket and your own sense of self-worth and Reliance to make a really good life so you can be an art snob and appreciate the brushstroke you can be a lay person and love the story or you can be some kind of political analysts and understand that when you're looking at a 19th century work you are looking at the roots of contemporary political ideology there's a little bit of something for everybody because it's American it's us this program was generously made possible by the history Colorado State Historical fund supporting projects throughout the state to preserve protect and interpret Colorado's architectural and archaeological treasures history Colorado State Historical fund create the future honor the past with support from the Denver Public Library history Colorado and the Colorado Office of Film television and media with additional support from these fine organizations and viewers like you thank you [Music] you [Music] you for centuries art has been created in and about what we now call Colorado from paleo-indian art to contemporary art understanding the social context behind what is widely defined as Western American art provides a deeper understanding and appreciation for that art Western artists of genres know Western art is a state of mind isn't it Western art is about our emotional connection to the American West to our stories as Westerners that we want to convey to the world Western American art is part of American art as a whole a Western American art tends to focus on three primary themes that we associate with the American West its landscapes its diverse cultures and its wildlife I define Western art as a feeling I don't believe Western art has to be illustrative in a sense that it has to have cows or horses though a lot of people really believe that that's Western art Western or it's a very broad subject it depends whether we're talking about the 19th century 20th century 21st century it changes based on the style the subject matter and their vision of the West which is not always the same Western art is far more than paintings and sculpture some people might distinguish it between fine art and folk art or decorative art but really American art in the West can include quilts it can include woodworking and furniture as well as utilitarian vases like van Bruegel there's so much about Western art beyond what people think is high art or classically trained artists well placing a Western art in the art landscape is a difficult question if you're east of the Mississippi it's sort of a nice curiosity but it's not really part of our vital east of the Mississippi culture for those who live in the west of course this is who we are what we are where we've been where we're going part of the problem is it hasn't been documented very well we don't have the number of publications let's say that you have on Midwestern and Eastern art centers but when you look at Colorado we have a 200 year heritage prior to the state being a state and we have visiting artists Explorer artists these are all big names then if you start to consider how many those truly important artists came West produced work in the West or of the West and then took that back Eastern nationally do you understand that the American West has been a driver of American art since the early 19th century Western American art is more complicated than people realize it appears to be documentary but the works they're producing are very much a product of their imagination and of their context political and historical and social oftentimes people think about art as not as powerful as some other mediums like writing but in truth those visual qualities of art are very powerful when you understand when the art was made and you kind of look at the social and economic and political and religious things going on at the same time they very much are all connected Western American art is crucial for helping us better understand American culture even in the contemporary moment a type like the Cowboys still resonates to a profound degree with Americans because of the virtues that are associated independence ruggedness self-reliance these are still qualities that many of us consider American and these have root in both the myth and the fact of the American West that continues into the present day Western American art is not a niche Western American art is part of what drives American art full-stop [Music] the American West as a region has been populated for centuries the people who have populated it have certainly had their own productions of visual culture art in the West begins more than 10,000 years ago at paleo-indian archaeological sites and you can find evidence of rock art of figurines of small bone flutes human beings were expressing themselves through art for as far back in the west as you want to go if you think about Mesa Verde they have beautiful white and black slips ceramics slip being the decoration that was used on the outside that our geometric patterns that are abstract even there are many artists already living in the West whether they're Hispanic artists or American Indian artists from clothing to beadwork to utilitarian things making beautiful art we have pictographs and petroglyphs and wonderful examples of art and pottery and weaving so those were our original artists the first non hispano artists to come into the American West were arriving with it American military explorers Lewis and Clark came into the West and as talented as they were they did not bring artists and the sketches they made of animals and of their pirogues and canoes were the best that they could do and subsequent supporters like Stephen long realized that they needed to bring artists into the West that an artistic representation of the American West was just important for Americans to visualize their Western landscape as the scientific measurements that these explorers made Stephen long when he began exploring the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains brought the first euro-american artist Stanley Seymour an English born artist and city and Ramsey Peale a very talented nineteen year old artist accompanied him they took artists along because it was pre photography and they wanted to bring back images that could be conveyed to people in Washington and policymakers and to the general public and so those early periods were very important in shaping perceptions about the West and creating curiosity of the West [Music] from roughly 1800 1850 the most common subjects really are of Native Americans and of the Western landscape the plants the geology that they saw on their travels and bring that back and these documents were often pencil on paper watercolor on paper but in terms of having a visual record of artists impressions of the landscapes and the people they typically start around the 1820s and 1830s and in the collection of the Petrie Institute of Western American art we have one of the earliest oil paintings produced by an artist who went west and that was George Catlin and he went West in search of subjects that would sell but also because he really felt compelled to record the people already living in the American West when Catelyn first went west in 1830 he was travelling West in the same year that Congress passed the Indian Removal Act an act that authorized the forcible relocation of all of the American Indian tribes east of the Mississippi River and so he traveled West who document the Indian people and the Indian cultures who thrived in the West in the 1830s and 40s but who Catlin felt would not survive American expansion and Catlin went west around a region of the Montana North Dakota border he befriended the Mandan tribe immersed himself in this tribal culture and the Mandan wound up embracing that in 1832 George Catlin painted the Okita ceremony it's a coming-of-age ceremony it was a very controversial painting the ceremony itself was a test of endurance where young men had their pectorals pierced with bones and then the bones suspended up through the rafters of a special building and they would dance and they would sing they would blow bone whistles and basically endure the pain until they had a vision and sometimes passed out what he was able to witness he tried to get down in this documentary way so he rapidly painted on sight as it was happening which was not really traditionally how paintings were created during this time period and so his works actually wound up looking almost on finished in some cases because they were done so rapidly and he is painting in oil as he's witnessing a ceremony that is even today difficult to see and understand it's it's very violent it's it's gruesome certainly by many standards but it's rooted in the sacredness of that ritual and in the idea of sacrifice personal sacrifice in the Mandan culture but that is exactly what it looks like it looked like then it was a difficult ceremony for people to understand and stomach Catelyn ultimately took his paintings and displayed them on the east coast at what he called his Indian gallery educating and shocking audiences at the same time when he displayed this painting the ceremony was so alien to the sensibilities of European Americans that a lot of Americans didn't even believe that this has happened that Catelyn had made this up and he had to acquire testimonials from famous explorers like Alexander von Humboldt to testify that that this ceremony actually existed among the Mandans Western art and western paintings are cultural documents are layered with cultural meaning and the art is in one sense documentary an artist like George Catlin was trying to represent a realistic portrayal of individual American Indians but at the same time it's celebratory its romanticized Albert Bierstadt was of German extraction and he lived in the East and he studied in Europe in Germany beer stock came out to Denver and he painted he did a lot of sketching because these were large canvases so we couldn't walk around and paint on the canvases and they really were in any art studios at galleries in Denver in the 1860s so a lot of times artists would make either sketches or they would make small online oil paints that they could carry in a paint box and then they would go back to New York or wherever they were from and they would translate these into large canvases and that's what Bierstadt did and his work was very well recognized at the time his training came when he lived in Germany and Switzerland and so when you look at Bierstadt's paintings of the Rocky Mountains the peaks are a little steeper they're more like Swiss Alps than they are Rocky Mountains but of course beer stop wanted these mountains to look majestic and Olympian as if the the gods themselves could live in the Rocky Mountains these lofty soaring peaks were intended to uplift the viewer to inspire them with the ruggedness of this mountain scenery he captured something that America needed at the time a romanticized version of what the West was this was really new and stunning and it wasn't something that you could google or you saw pictures of in a book but this was unbelievable he put his emotional response into those paintings and they are glorious now these are on view to large publics in these coasts of the United States and also abroad in continental Europe and the UK and these works are also reproduced as prints his first paintings from which he gains his largest Fame are done in the late 1850s into the 1860s so just before the Civil War starts now over the course of the Civil War people in the East Coast are seeing Mathew Brady's photographs of bloated corpses on battlefields they're literally living in the area that is being torn apart by the strife during the Civil War the Homestead Act is also passed which encourages people to go west and settle so if you're seeing their sets landscapes which emblematic of hope and progress and possibility and then you have the government encouraging you to go westward to settle Bierstadt's paintings absolutely play a crucial role in that general wave that impetuous into the American West [Music] William Henry Jackson was an artist who worked with Ferdinand V Hayden survey in the 1860s and 1870s and for decades there had been rumors of this mountainside in Colorado that had a perfect crucifix on the side of it William Henry Jackson's very accomplished photographer made it his mission to find the cross and and after climbing deep into the Rocky Mountains and not too far from the current location of Vail today he finally found this mountain with with a perfect cross of snow that lay in the crevice of the mountain Jackson worked in partnership with an artist named Thomas Moran who was a wonderful artist of the Romantic school and Moran took Jackson's photograph and repainted it as this wonderful scene this painting represented two Americans that God smiled on Western expansion Thomas Moran was probably the most influential artist that contributed to people's understanding of what the West looks like because of the time spent in Yellowstone so his paintings and drawings that he completed on those trips to Yellowstone ultimately convinced Congress to set aside that land as a national park Thomas Moran was also sponsored by the railroad and so his paintings had this direct influence on the public by encouraging traveling and advertising really for the Santa Fe Railroad here in Colorado the arrival of Thomas Moran was huge news he would go out to paint with local artists Helen Henderson chain was someone who went out to paint with Thomas Moran initially a number of artists were visiting artists and tourists artists would come out for the summers there were a lot of wonderful places to paint and to visit but the first resident artist was Charles Partridge Adams he came here as a youngster in 1876 and of course his view of Denver at that time dead was pretty rough there were trappers Cowboys covered wagons he did a whole series of images of Denver and of the mining towns they were printed back in New York and were sold he came as a youngster because this is dried tuberculosis and he got his first employment with the chain and Hardy bookstore and Hellen chain was the wife of the owner and that was the first bookstore and also art gallery he became really kind of the premier landscape painter in Colorado because he lived here from 1876 to 1920 and so he was really the first resident artist in addition to mrs. chain who preceded him by a few years and she was important too she was the first resident woman artist in Denver and she had a number of students and she was quite a hiker she was one of reputedly the first woman to paint the amount of the Holy Cross [Music] art has served different purposes over time it always serves to inspire and move people and document things to a degree around the Civil War people found hope through arts people who've never been to the West get the opportunity to experience the West and develop their own ideas based on what they see in the imagery settlers visualized the West because of the landscape art of people like Thomas Moran or Albert Bierstadt their majestic paintings of this mountain scenery this wild and uncivilized mountain scenery was a challenge and an invitation for Western settlers to move into the West to conquer this wild land and make it part of the United States our concept of Western art starts with Remington and Russell and 1880s 90s which was really the heyday of the cowboy didn't last very long lasted 20 or 30 years really but they were romanticized because it was the lone cowboy that comes into town and mysterious guy and does something heroic and then he rides out of time but you know that whole Romantic tradition is based on a very short period of time and it's just caught on all over the world the amount of time cattle were actually free ranging in the American West was only a number of decades really from the mid 19th century towards the end of the century roughly 1890 but these artists they're observing the barbed wire the railroads the telegraph wires the people coming in and enclosing this once wide open space and they're celebrating this very brief moment in time when men could be men and good guys were good and bad guys were bad and all you needed was a horse and a saddle and a blanket and your own sense of self-worth and Reliance to make a really good life the images they produced of Buffalo hunts of Bronco busting the have become so powerfully iconic thinking to a moment in time when life seemed somehow nobler and even a little bit simpler they were great storytellers and this is exactly what they set out to do was either to illustrate stories write novels or serials and journals or magazines they bring this sense of excitement and this sort of visual dynamic with their paintings masculine powerful effort at taming West and taming the Broncos and living outdoors and everything that comes with that wealth Remington and Russell made their careers by illustrating four very popular weeklies and periodicals so their work was disseminated throughout the United States as an illustrator you need to be able to tell an entire story in one dramatic moment so both Russell and Remington were really good at knowing exactly how to compose their painting to tell a much longer story both the before and the after and that makes their work so compelling it's ironic Charles M Russell and Frederick Remington that they were painting at the same time and their careers came from two very different places Remington was educated at Yale and he spent a little time as a sheep rancher and a saloon keeper but he made his name as an illustrator for Theodore Roosevelt's works on first century magazine and covering military conquests in this American Southwest when you look at a lot of Remington's work there's a lot going on in that work and there's stories about how Native Americans hunted or how trappers came through the land and stagecoaches being robbed and stories that he'd heard about and when database of a Remington was done and there were about 3,000 paintings Remington did it from the age of eighteen to the age of 48 when he died I think charted Russell was one of the most amazing painters there ever was he was an incredible artist and I have tremendous admiration for his work Charlie Russell was born in st. Louis and his parents were fairly well-to-do the family owned of Brickyard and and some other mineral properties his grandmother I believe on his father's side was a sister to the bent brothers Charles Breton and William Brennan so Charlie in growing up heard many stories from his grandmother about her brothers his great uncles Charles and William Ben he had a great deal of difficulty in school he really didn't like the discipline the school required he failed in school repeatedly he played hooky he ran away so all of that resulted in their deciding to send him to military school and the deal was do well at Burlington Military Academy in the coming year and next summer you could go to Montana see what it's like to be a cowboy three months later they sent him a ticket to come home and it was a one-way ticket school didn't want him back within a few more months just before his 16th birthday he arrived in Montana his folks had a friend of the family who had a sheep ranch but Charlie really didn't like sheep ranching as he liked to say the Sheep and I didn't agree and within a matter of a few days or two of a couple of weeks Pike Miller was so disgusted with his inability to hold the Sheep and his more greater interests in sketching the landscapes then he fired him this is in the early summer of 1888 our Lee's bad reputation with sheep had not caught up with him and he managed to get a job as a cattle rancher he found the cattle much more friendly to him then he found the cheek and during all that time he was always sketching he had a lot of great experiences actually with Indians some of his greatest paintings were inspired by some incidents dealing with Indians who were horses dealing between the Blackfeet and the crow Indians and it was while he was a knight Wrangler and the nice thing was in the morning when he came in to wake up the Cowboys who had to go out and deal with the cattle during the day he'd have breakfast and he'd take a little nap and then he had the rest of the day to paint after eleven years he'd had a couple of experiences where he became nationally famous during the great storm of 86 87 there was a fellow who owned the herd in Helena and he sent a message out a month or two into that huge storm and Charlie happened to be in the cabin when the fella said I can't believe I got to write this message and the guy was really kind of depressed about it and Charlie said well I'll draw a picture that you can put in with a letter and he was inspired is one very skinny emaciated cow standing there alone you can see the rib cage and the wolves are just waiting for him to pass away and become meat for them so when he hands it to the foreman performance says heck I don't need to write a letter I'll just send that and he sent it like that the story then goes that the recipient takes it with him goes to the bar and gets drunk and shares it with several people and when he shares it with him somehow it finds its way even in those days and remember this is 1880s late 86 early 87 and it literally goes national and it appears all over the country and Charlie becomes nationally known as the cowboy artist long way to being a rich artist but that comes after he meets Nancy Charlie Russell would have never been the successful artist that he was if it wasn't for his wife he was a real rounder a drinker and he was trading his artwork for drinks at the bar and his wife she once he got married to her she straighten him out in a hurry a year after they're married he was out of money and Charlie and Nancy talked about it they've been asked by the mayor's wife for a painting that showed Buffalo crossing the Missouri River holding up a paddle wheeler that was trying to go upstream so he painted a masterpiece Nancy said Charlie thought we could get $25 for this but we needed hay for the horses and I wanted a new cook stove so I asked if I couldn't deliver painting as I'm going out the door Charlie says I mean make sure you don't ask more than $25 if you do she won't take it and we need the money so she gets there she says but the lady saw the beauty of the painting she said how much does mr. Russell want for it and with a choking sensation I said $35 she said just a minute I'll get my checkbook and she says hooray I had $10 toward the new cook stove Charlie got as much of a thrill out of that piece of paper as he did in 1926 when I handed him a check for $30,000 for the murals and when he said to me I can't read that many zeroes what do they say so she took him a long way within a year after they were married she had him up to $100 a painting a decade later she had him up to $1,000 a painting the following decade $10,000 of painting and that was the highest price being paid to a living American artist at that time he had several categories of paintings he had paintings that are called predicament paintings predicament paintings usually don't fully resolve the outcome and then you get other situations cowboy situations where there's cowboys in in what I call cowboy train wrecks but they're really cowboy Rex with with cattle there's the classic story for cowboys just when you look at a Russell painting I understand it's it's before barbed wire he very rarely depicted barbed wire Remington did one called the passing of the cowboy or something like that and it was the cowboy him coming up to a gate and the barbed wire fencing in the West and it's a it's a true artistic statement but Russell would tend to want to deal with the pre barbed wire period and so this was just over 4,000 paintings in the Charles M Russell catalog it's a great body of work for somebody who basically did it from the age of 15 to the age of 62 yes he is romanticizing a particular feeling and era and even historical moment of the American West the open range era the Old West but he's also close friends with the Native American tribes who lived near him he has very close relationships with the farmers and ranchers of Great Falls Montana and cascade Montana he sees lives including his own changing in face of a country that is very quickly being settled by homesteaders you can read some sadness a real sense of loss it becomes articulated as a kind of nostalgia I think in in Russell's work and for some people that nostalgia is is false it's overdramatic it's you know harkening to an era that never really existed and for other people it's a way of accessing via a beautiful painting these really hard questions about what's happening to Native Americans he had a really good personality he had a really sound set of values he made fantastic friendships way before they were environmentalist he was in environmentalist way before there was the kind of respect for the Native American culture he was there as their friend and for every one painting he did of cowboys he did between two and three depending on the eras thereafter of Native Americans so while he's known as the cowboy artists he was a very faithful depict er of his take of Indian culture of the Plains Indian culture you also see exhibitions like Buffalo Bill's Wild West which arguably harnessed the the power of the best parts of the West right the most dramatic the the most potentially sensational aspects of the West and market them abroad and that results in a wide swath of Western Americana that we might now consider pop culture Buffalo Bill Cody certainly understood that blurring the lines between the reality and the art made for good theater and make you a lot of money the first full-length Western film in 1903 and the Wild West Show of Buffalo Bill and mass printing and communication and pulp fiction all of these came together to create this Renaissance of pop culture and so much of that culture was based on Western subjects as a result of that Americans really began to cement in their mind the symbols of of what it meant to be Western and those symbols are so powerful to cowboy the Indian settlers and homesteaders though wide-open landscapes the great vistas that they're still very strongly stuck in our minds today if you think about Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows or other Wild West shows going on at the time he was employing American Indians they've been pushed off their land they are getting rations from the US government that are often inadequate so as much as people love the Wild West and they love this idea of the Wild West oftentimes they're not really wanting to look at the reality for American Indians and Hispanics [Music] and that selling and marketing of the West is from the homesteading time period right up to the president and a great example of that is if you think about Thomas Moran people often think of he is one of those big names from Western art but in truth his images were used to even sell coffee cowboys and Indians and stagecoaches and westward expansion and settlement were sold on bubblegum cards on tobacco cards that were sold but at the same time it's selling those products it's also continuing that legacy of icons of the West during the 1930s was a Great Depression so a lot of artists did not have an income galleries close collectors stop by and the government started various government supported programs to help artists the federal government stepped in the Great Depression led to the formation of federally sponsored cultural organizations like the Works Progress Administration and the Civil Works Administration which actually paid unemployed artists and sculptors and muralists and diorama makers to represent the history of the American West in art WPA artists especially in Colorado and in the West a lot of what they're doing is that same idea of capturing the disappearing West the WPA which most people talk about and think of the Works Progress Administration really were under this bigger umbrella of the New Deal for Colorado the biggest projects were in the 40s it's dioramas paintings including murals a variety of projects most of the murals ended up in post offices schools libraries Louise Ronnie Beck was born back east and she met her husband Otto Ronnie Beck and Taos New Mexico and they got married and came to Denver and he was one of the directors of the Denver Art Museum and she won several commissions under the federal art projects in the 1930s and did a very fine piece called the harvest and it was done for the post office in Grand Junction and it depicts the peach harvest which is a part of Mesa County in the western slope of Grand Junction area and the center of the piece has a man and a woman picking peaches but on the left side you have the new immigrants the white settlers coming into the valley and on the right side of the painting you have the ute Indians who were being Deepa's estin relocated to Utah and the right side of the painting so without being a strong social criticism it tells you what's going on in that and she's trying to reflect the history of the area and bringing it into for a modern viewer Alan true was born in Colorado Springs he's the Colorado native and he went to do you he did a lot of illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post for other magazines based on Western subject matter which he grew up with because he was here in Colorado and he represents that generation that wanted to preserve the West in their work but wasn't the remington and russell generation and he also did a number of other murals here in denver at the CenturyLink building and the Brown Palace Hotel and the State Capitol Allen Tupper Tru was a prolific muralist in Denver in the 1920s and 30s he worked for the federal government but he also worked for private commissions and his murals captured scenes of the West in many ways he was a romanticist trying to capture realistic scenes that celebrated the spirit of the American West it's very appropriate because he's leading into a new era he's leading into the modern era a modern style of painting he's still painting Western subject matter but doesn't have all the detail his palette is very straightforward and uncomplicated and there's a lot of movement a wonderful flow in his pieces Frank may show was born in Kansas but his family came here when he was quite young and he grew up in Glenwood Springs which at that time was very small when the western slope it gave him a good chance to really see nature and also to see the remains of Indian culture and cowboy culture on the western slope and he studied initially at do you but he had a real problem with art schools they were too stuffy too stilted he was a also a prizefighter he won fifty dollars in a prize fight and he took that money and hopped on the train and went to New York for several years and he met his wife who was Russian born in Palo Roscoe and they ended up going to Paris which at that time was the place to go to for art education and he lived in Paris for several years and he and his wife came back to the United States in the middle of the depression early thirties which everyone said stay in New York you're not gonna make it in Colorado and he said well Colorado's my home he said I really feel my subject matter is the west and he came back and he initially taught at the Kirkland School so he had quite a quite a career he died very young he had a heart attack he was here in Denver a drop dead he was I think they're 43 or 44 so I had a very short career but he taught at Columbia University and he exhibited widely and won a number of prizes and commissions he did a lot of murals for under the federal art programs so he in a short time achieved a lot all art is interpretive all art means both less and more than that the documentary reality that it purports to represent so that means that art can distort our perceptions of the west art is reductionist for one thing it there's a lot of subjects in the West that don't get portrayed often in Western art and in the 19th century those subjects included very often women or african-americans or the Chinese farmers didn't get the same kind of celebration that the Cowboys received and as a result of that art gives us kind of a distorted view of the West but at the same time that art is celebratory and it's popular cities were cropping up everywhere highways and all that kind of stuff that was happening there was really no wild west anymore it was all gone it was all done in the 30s and so then people started to romanticize it I started with AR Mitchell in 57 and studied with him for two years and he was pretty tough I mean he wasn't what I'd call a great teacher he was very opinionated and he wasn't really encouraging a couple of students he encouraged and towards the end he encouraged me but he was kind of a flinty old guy he's studying under Harvey Dunn Harvey Dunn was an amazing painter from South Dakota and he did western paintings primarily kind of Plains you know from the South Dakota Plains and and he was apparently a very charismatic teacher in New Jersey in New York Mitchell really kind of fell under his spell I mean there's a lot of artists that fell under Harvey Dunn spell and Harvey was very French impressionistic used a lot of broken color and Mitchell picked up Impressionism from Harvey and he worked as a cowboy for a while in northern New Mexico across the border from Trinidad and then he was in the army first world war did cartoons and great cartoons and then he decided to be a serious artist so he went to New York's Art Students League Mitchell knew von Schmidt and he knew some of these established illustrators a new NC Wyeth and Norman Rockwell was going great guns through the grapevine he found out that publishing houses like Street and Smith were doing all these pop westerns and that's right down his alley so he started doing the covers and I think at one time he was walking down a street in New York and past a newsstand and he had like 20 of his covers on the newsstand Harvey Dunn was a great artist but he couldn't paint horses like Mitchell I think he just didn't know the anatomy that well Mitchell could paint him upside down sideways doing anything I always called him mr. Mitchell people around Trinidad would call him Roy or Mitch that were his age Mitchell had colon cancer in New York in the early forties he decided to come to Trinidad and die and he went to the Mayo brothers and they did like a colonoscopy and he said that the Mayo brothers stood him up out of the coffin and so he came back to Trinidad and he started painting and his sisters ranch in Stonewall West to Trinidad and he just loved it he painted and painted and painted and then the president of the college asked him if he would be interested in teaching an art class he was such a neat interesting looking guy that I thought I think I'll take a class he was teaching night classes and as soon as I saw one of his paintings I thought man that's it the painting was so impressive number one it was big number two there was a lot of action going on a lot of color what is it about a painting that really draws you in it's it's like what is it about a song that makes you pull off the highway and listen to it it's something that goes on between you and the painting he was never interested in selling his paintings in New York New Jersey days he would trade paintings with his pals and that's how he amassed a wonderful collection Harvey Dunn's and heroine Schmidt's and so forth but luckily he kept all this stuff all these paintings and drawings in his collection when he died the cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City wandered everything they wanted all that stuff and his sister wanted Trinidad to have his paintings with the help of the Trinidad community Michels sister set up the AR Mitchell Museum of Western art in 1981 in Trinidad where it is now open five months out of the year exposing visitors to a vast collection of Arthur Roy's work as well as art by Harvey Dunn Harold von Schmidt Hispanic colonial folk art and Native American art work artists in the 19th century established these themes of art of sweeping landscapes of masculine romanticized cowboys Indians who are fading away in the post-war era artists began taking those very traditional ideas ideas that had been repeated and repeated and repeated and began to reshape them to rethink them by the 1950s and 60s you have artists like Vance Kirkland who deconstruct traditional landscapes and pull them into an abstract impressionist view take traditional mountain landscapes a kind of which the Bierstadt produced and turned them into these fantasies and even dreamlike or sometimes nightmarish scenes today contemporary Western art speaks of the West and there's a lot going on in the West there are still cattlemen and cowboys but the land is also dotted with a lot of oil and gas mining there's a ton of construction happening out here water rights are huge an agriculture but also people using the land contemporary Western artists are looking at issues such as land-use issues water rights issues energy issues that's a great thing about artists who are living and working in the western United States today art hasn't stopped the contemporary work that's Western in the sense that it's dealing with issues of the West the refugee issue minorities immigration there's an active robust community of artists looking to push the envelope so Amaya Western painter well I live in the West and I do subjects that are around me I grew up on a farm outside of Trinidad and my parents were immigrants they came from Croatia around 1920 my dad was a coal miner and tradesmen then he bought a little farm outside of town our farmhouse didn't have any electricity had outhouse no indoor bathroom there were eight of us going to school at once and we had cows and chickens and pigs and a garden and got through the 30s with no problem my dad also made his own wine in the cellar and junior college is where I met Arthur Mitchell kind of changed the whole course of my life he was always after me that my painting was starving to death I said put some paint on there Manny's starving to death I grew up on the farm and Lamar Colorado southeastern Colorado my parents bought our farm before I was born during the Depression they bought it it was a full section of mile square and my father and my uncle farmed that farm with a one bottom plow on for mules which that doesn't mean much to most people but you have no idea what that really means how difficult that was compared to the way people work today I had a great childhood in my opinion my life as a kid was very much like Little House on the Prairie we were quite poor nobody ever said we were poor we didn't have heat we didn't have electricity or gas and I started doing art when I was like four years old when I was about thirteen we were helping the neighbor move and we went downstairs and here was a print by Charlie Russell I had no idea who Charlie Russell was and I decided okay I'm gonna be the next Charlie Russell so I started doing cowboy and Indian paintings and that's when my design teacher he picked one of them up he held it up he turned around to face me says hey Don do you realize that's not 1890 and a bomb went off in my head and I never pinned at another cowboy an Indian I consider my work contemporary paintings of the West of course everybody thinks differently but I tend to think when I think of Western art I think more of people who like Russell and Remington or people who still think is 1890 what I was really wanting to you will show what rural life is really like because I had experienced it I guess I've done a lot of cows because one time I was down in Boulder and somebody said oh this is Don corn and the latest oh my god you're the cow man I guess I've done a lot of cows his paintings are huge these wonderful paintings that inform us about a lifestyle that if you live in a city or outside of the West you would have no idea what this life is about he's not making up something that's gone it still exists today as he's interpreting it there were private collectors who lived here in Denver Colorado Springs and elsewhere who started their own collections and in 1893 a group of artists led by Emmy Richardson cherry who later went to Houston she was quite a community organizer and a good artist in her own right trained in Europe but despite the economic dislocation at the time she had a number of artists come to her studio in downtown Denver and they organized the artist Club of Denver and that groups eventually morphed with various name changes into what we now know as that environment in 1820 s and they played a very important role and it's interesting they were largely women we are so fortunate to have such variety of art collections and other collections in the state whether it's a Denver Art Museum history Colorado's collection and the Museum of Nature and Science the Kirkland Collection private collections universities have great collections the collection that we've started for the national Western Stock Show we buy every year one piece of art so we have 25 works of art and then collections of them work later vintage are the entrance collection which is a wonderful collection of Western art the American Museum of Western art the Anschutz collection is a collection of paintings that was put together by a private collector over the last 40 or 50 years and they are now housed in a historic building called the navarre so wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling artwork and tongue roughly chronologically so you get this broad sweeping view of Western history as you kind of pan the room and see early works leading up to a turn of the century and Beyond into the present day and you also have the Conrad Springs Fine Arts Center which in the 20th century probably up until about 1950 sort of overshadowed Denver in terms of its activity and its school with a broad mo art academy and then later the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center you people still love the idea of the cowboy and life in the West because of all that it represents those same feelings of hope and independent spirit and the opportunity to start again all of those things that initially settled the West are still relevant today the Western art movement it'll always have an audience but will it be ranked up there oh how high in the art world who knows there are so many voices that still need to be heard there's so many women or immigrants or everyday people who are making wonderful and beautiful art outside of what we consider this high art to explore and learn from Western American art remains relevant it may look old or vintage but the ideas and the histories found in those works remains very crucial to many of the topics we're working out today whether it be immigration or environmental issues or national policy so if you want to think of it in a more metaphorical way Western American art is rooted in ideas that have helped to shape who we are it is that love of nature and that notion of really embracing the sustainability of natural beauty and the interface of human beings with it and that's something that Charlie understood and he and it was in part because he witnessed the excesses of some parts of what happened in the unsettling of the West and there's lots of commentary of that today that's still relevant and that's part of his legacy he was early and honest about observing and so the legacy is going to be how we as people who appreciate the lessons of history continue to look back for lessons that have application to us as we deal going forward you Western American art continues to evolve captivating audiences and inspiring emerging artists Western American art isn't static is not stuck in a time or a place it is in fact a vibrant subject it's a vibrant region full of vibrant diverse people that is constantly moving and exchanging resting and then moving onward returning and so it's going to be a whole new era that we're entering and brings a whole set of new issues that artists will be looking at it's very different than what many people think of Western art as or what Western art should be it's not nostalgic but like artists of the previous time they're also dealing with the reality that they're seeing is just that stylistically thematically it's different but in some ways it's not that different because they're dealing with what was going on at the time if you were a westerner the art that has been produced in the American West for the last 200 or 300 years is your art it represents the sort of the cultural epitome of the Western experience so an Albert Bierstadt landscape meant something to an audience in the 19th century and maybe something different to an audience in the 20th century and maybe something again in the 21st century but as a source of inspiration as a source of spiritual uplift as a source of cultural integrity Western art continues to infuse the dialogue we have as Westerners about who we are and who we want to be their legacy is that it helps keep you sane in what we can daily see on TV is an progressively more insane world visa vie what we once knew I refer to my time with Western art as an opportunity to gather daily visual dividends and fire them far more nourishing to the soul than more financial dividends or other things and I think that's true for people in all walks of life [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Music] [Music] the stories of Colorado come alive each week on Rocky Mountain PBS Colorado experience revisits the richness of our state's history and tells the stories of the fascinating people places and events that make our region unique discover a new story from our state each week on Colorado experience only on Rocky Mountain PBS stories start here

Channel: Rocky Mountain PBS

Views: 18,223

Rating: 4.8881121 out of 5

Keywords: Colorado, History, PBS, Western(genre), Cowboy, Art, Artists, Mountains, Scenic Landscapes, American Experience

Id: N71t9NdcdP0

Length: 56min 42sec (3402 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 20 2017