ART / American / General

In 2014 the Denver Art Museum held a symposium hosted by the Frederick and Jan Mayer Center for Pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial Art and co-organized by Donna Pierce and Emily Ballew Neff, Director of the Brooks Museum, Memphis, who assembled an international group of scholars to present recent research on portraiture in the Spanish colony of New Spain (Mexico) and the British colonies of North America. This volume presents revised and expanded versions of papers presented at the symposium.

One of America’s most popular and influential American artists, Frederic Remington (1860 - 1909) is renowned for his depictions of the Old West. Through paintings, drawings, and sculptures, he immortalized a dynamic world of cowboys and American Indians, hunters and horses, landscapes and wildlife. Frederic Remington: A Catalogue Raisonné II is a comprehensive presentation of the artist’s body of flat work, both in print and on this book’s companion website.

Artists and filmmakers in the early twentieth century reshaped our vision of the American West. In particular, the Taos Society of Artists and the California-based artist Maynard Dixon departed from the legendary depiction of the “Wild West” and fostered new images, or brands, for western art. This volume, illustrated with more than 150 images, examines select paintings and films to demonstrate how these artists both enhanced and contradicted earlier representations of the West.

Like his good friend Charles M. Russell, Edward Borein stands today as one of the most artistically gifted and intellectually honest chroniclers of the American West and a way of life that has now, unfortunately, passed almost completely away. A master at portraying cowboys, Indians and Western life and work, his early work documented the transition from Spanish to American influence in California, and he continued to paint Western scenes until the end of his life. The fine sketches, etchings, drawings and watercolors of this self-taught artist come to life in this book.

In 1904, Field and Stream sent Frank Tenney Johnson (1874-1939) to the Rockies and the Southwest. It was on this journey that Johnson established his distinctive style and discovered the subject matter on which he would draw throughout his life. He became a painter of the world of Indians and cowboys from the Wyoming Rockies to the exotic canyons and cliffs of New Mexico and Arizona, and was considered the foremost painter of the West, recognized for picking up where Remington and Russell left off.

In 1914, Dr. Edgar Hewitt, director of Santa Fe’s School of American Archaelogy, urged Henri to paint in New Mexico. Henri’s strong personality and liberal ideas regarding museum policy, particularly unjuried exhibitions, left a lasting imprint on the newly opened Museum of New Mexico.

Frederick Remington’s early paintings of the West were more literal depictions than his romanticized later ones. The boldness Remington had lost in his work by eliminating hard outlines began to reinstate itself in his later works with vigorous brushwork. In his later years, he preferred to paint nocturnes because it allowed him greater freedom and depth of perspective. This commemorative catalogue focuses on Remington’s nocturnes and bronzes, a body of work that provides a clear view of the artist’s mature vision. In the years between 1905 and his death in 1909, the new direction of Remington’s art finally earned him the critical recognition he had been seeking.

A landmark overview of western American art, the original edition of The West of the Imagination brought the region to wide public attention as a companion to a popular PBS series of the same name. This book, significantly expanded and updated, shows that the West is a vibrant mirror of American cultural diversity. Through 450 illustrations—more than 300 in color—the authors trace the visual evolution of the myth of the American West, from unknown frontier to repository of American values, covering popular and high arts alike.