Western art exhibits come east to Atlanta, Cartersville seeking converts

“Today’s West: Contemporary Art From the Buffalo Bill Center of the West”

10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays (until 8 p.m. Thursdays), 1-5 p.m. Sundays. Through April 13. $10; 65 and over, $8; students, $7; free under age 12. Booth Western Art Museum, 501 Museum Drive, Cartersville. 770-387-1300, www.boothmuseum.org.

WORTH A CLOSER LOOK

“Ironically the theme of downfall translated to the artist as well,” High American art curator Stephanie Heydt noted.

“The Last of the Buffalo,” though ambitious, was Bierstadt’s “last but failed effort to win back public favor at a moment when, to his great displeasure, his moody, grandiose, romantic style was losing favor to the brighter palettes and edgier compositions of impressionism,” Heydt said.

Adjacent to it in the exhibit is a prime example of where art was heading: Frederic Remington’s looser yet more focused and more lively evocation of a buffalo hunt, completed in 1890.

Heydt calls the juxtaposition a visual allegory of how “representations of the frontier changed just as the frontier ceased to exist.”

There seems no middle ground when it comes to Western art. People are either lassoed in by all the majesty and mythologizing or consider it so much treacle that needs to be blown away like tumbleweeds.

Count no less a critic than Mark Twain among the latter. Assessing an Albert Bierstadt painting of the Yosemite Mountains in 1867, Twain snidely dismissed its atmospheric artifice as “so enchantingly beautiful that I am sorry the Creator hadn’t made it instead of him.”

Ouch.

Though that might have made Bierstadt feel like he’d sat on a cactus, he was beloved by many for the sumptuous sweep and almost supernatural wonder he brought to the Western landscape. And though his embrace of the epic had fallen out of favor by his death in 1902, his works are again appreciated, when many Americans feel far removed from purple mountain majesties in their day-to-day lives.

So the half of the audience that gets Western art should have some extra giddyap in its step with the opening of complementary fall exhibitions in Atlanta and Cartersville of riches from an important Western art museum in Cody, Wyo. Some from the other half might even be swayed.

"Today's West: Contemporary Art From the Buffalo Bill Center of the West," tracing Western art developments from 1960 to today, is early in its run at the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville. On Sunday, the High Museum of Art opens "Go West: Art of the American Frontier From the Buffalo Bill Center of the West," covering the period from 1830 to 1930.

The expansive High exhibit comprises 208 paintings, sculptures, Native American-made objects and more, while the Booth presents another 60 works, mainly large-scale paintings.

Given that, it’s reasonable to wonder if the Buffalo Bill Center’s walls are bare. But the institution, 60 miles east of Yellowstone National Park, has a deep collection. It also helps that Cody turns into something of a ghost town, at least in terms of tourism, during the cold months, so the masterworks are less likely to be missed.

The High exhibit boasts the name-brand historic spoils, including Frederic Remington bronzes and paintings, an "Indian Gallery" of 24 Henry Inman portraits of early 1800s tribal leaders, George Catlin's Plains Indians depictions, N.C. Wyeth illustrations and sweeping landscapes by John Frederick Kensett, Thomas "Yellowstone" Moran and, of course, Bierstadt. Photographs, frontier firearms and Native American-made objects are displayed, as well.

But it would be a mistake to shortchange the Booth’s haul, an exhibit that reflects the changing West and evolving depictions of it, including some works informed by social concerns or a sense of humor, even irony. For instance: Wyoming artist Robert Seabeck’s oil painting “American Dream,” in which a jacked-up Ford Bronco, appearing nearly as big as the house it’s parked in front of, replaces the bucking horse variety of bronco Remington captured in bronze at the High.

Remington, it turns out, had a lot to do with the Atlanta museum bringing such a substantial Western display east. Michael Shapiro, the New York-bred, Harvard-educated High Museum director, wrote his dissertation on sculptors and the foundries that cast their works based on an early-career fascination with Remington.

Shapiro initiated talks with the Buffalo Bill Center not long after taking the High’s reins in 2000. When plans for the exhibit finally began gaining traction in recent years, High American Art Curator Stephanie Heydt acknowledged she voiced concerns that many think of Western art as “stuffy and old-fashioned.”

She asked Shapiro, “Are we really going to energize Atlanta to come and see this?”

Shapiro said he thought the High could do exactly that.

For her part, Heydt said the genre was not covered in her classes at Cornell University, the University of Chicago and Boston University. She said the emphasis in early 20th century American art studies then was on “deconstructing modernism,” examining the work of artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe and John Marin who pushed that brave new frontier.

“Then you have these other people, slightly older contemporaries such as Remington and (Charles Marion) Russell, reconstructing history in a way,” Heydt said. “How do you reconcile it? It’s too messy.”

After seven visits and a two-week stay in Cody while organizing “Go West” with Buffalo Bill Center curator Mindy Besaw, the High curator said she has an enhanced perspective. She came to appreciate, for instance, the varied representation of cowboys over time — more as American icons than as, well, cowboys. And she developed a higher regard for Remington, whom she had thought of as merely a cowboy artist and illustrator. He is represented by 25 works in “Go West.”

“I guess my learning curve for this was you don’t have to take sides,” Heydt said. “The history of the West is the history of America. We’re all involved in this.”