the article:
Around 1905, the city fathers of Denver decided that a monmument to honor their pioneering predecessors was in order. The commission went to Frederick William MacMonnies, an American sculptor trained in the Beaux-Arts who lived in France. MacMonnies proposed a multi-tiered fountain topped by the figure of an Indian chief, but local citizens objected to celebrating a recently feared and despised enemy. So MacMonnies offered instead a sculpture of the all-around frontiersman Kit Carson (1809-68), who, to this day, appears in bronze riding a rearing horse at the summit of the Pioneer Monument in downtown Denver.
Had they been consulted, Native Americans might have demurred. During the Civil War, Carson was assigned by the Union Army to do something about the Navajo, whose defense of their tribal lands against incursions by settlers had become a problem. In the winter of 1864, Carson rounded up 8,500 Navajo men, women and children and forced them to journey on foot some 300 miles in what came to be known as the Long Walk. Hundreds died along the way; many more succumbed to terrible conditions at a poorly conceived and operated reservation at Bosque Redondo in New Mexico Territory.
A small version of the Carson sculpture, produced by MacMonnies in 1915 at the time when bronze statuettes were all the rage in America, now can be seen in "The American West in Bronze, 1850-1925", a spiritually troubling exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The wall label characterizes Carson only as a "legendary, if controversial figure". It notes, too, that Theodore Roosevelt bought this piece for himself in 1915 and displayed it in his Long Island home along with Frederic Remington's "The Bronco Buster" which Roosevelt's fellow Rough Riders gave him when the group disbanded in 1898.
Billed in the catalog as "the first full-scale exhibition to explore the aesthetic and cultural impulses behind the creation of statuettes with American Western themes," the show presents 65 mostly pedestal-scale sculptures by 28 artists. It's organized according to three themes: Indians, wild animals and cowboys.
It's less exciting than it sounds. Nearly everything here is in a mode of three-dimensional illustrative realism. Done up in bronze, such work assumes a high-art patina as if it belonged to a continuous tradition dating to the European Renaissance. What it really is is kitsch: pseudohigh art for a philistine clientele that was generally wealthy, East Coast, urban and male.
Artists like MacMonnies capitalized on the popularity of their public monuments by issuing small copies in editions of hundreds and having posh gallery exhibitions in New York. Most of the artists represented in this show had some academic training, and their works are visibly skillful. But hardly anything is formally or technically startling, and there's a monotonous sameness to the fictionalized realism running throughout. (The American Modernist Paul Manship's two-part 1914 sculpture of a kneeling Indian hunter and the anteloope he just shot with his arrow is refreshingly exceptional for its translation of overfamiliar motifs into an elegant, Art Deco- like choreography.)
A nostalgic, regretful mood suffuses the show. By the time most of the work was made–the late 19th and early 20th centuries–the West was no longer what it had been. The Indians had been subdued, the buffalo had been hunted nearly to extinction, and the broncobusting, six-gun-slinging cowboy was preparing for his Hollywood close-up. All the sculptures seem sad about that.
But what exactly are they mourning? One of the most poignant expressions of grief is James Earle Fraser's "End of the Trail" - the famous image of an exhausted brave on his tired horse, both man and beast hunched against a cold wind blowing at their backs. Ostensibily, this is an elegy for a noble people on the brink of oblivion. As the art historian Carol Clark notes in her catalog essay "Indians on the Mantel and in the Park," a critic writing in 1920 said it indicated "the national stupidity that has greedily and cruelly destroyed a race of people possessing imagination, integrity, fidelity and nobility."
But there's nothing in Fraser's sculpture or anything else in the exhibition that overtly criticizes what white, Euro-American civilization did and was doing to the native people, animals and plants of North America. It's as if the devastation of the West were an inevitable natural disaster rather than the product of vicious programs and policies of business and government.
Another interpretation might see in Fraser's sculpture a white culture grieving for itself, for the loss of its own inner wildness of soul. The Indians, cowboys, bears and buffalo are metaphors for psychological energies and possibilities that modern civilization must keep in check if people are to function properly in its market-based system. The apparatus of art production, sales and distribution from which such artworks issue is precisely the kind of thing that kills wildness.
As organized by Thayer Tulles, a curator of American paintings and sculptures at the Met, and Thomas Brent Smith, director of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art at the Denver Art Museum, the exhibition goes light on interpretation. It's usually a good thing to let the art speak for itself, but here it's troubling, because it underplays a real-world history of appalling violence and evil, to which the sculptures appear oblivious .
Ms. Clark's essay includes a photograph of the Indian chief Big Foot lying dead in the snow after the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890. There's nothing glamorous about that depressing picture, unlike the idealizing sculpture that Ms. Clark compares it to, "FallenWarrior (Death of the Chief)" by Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor behind Mount Rushmore. In "Warrior", made about a year after the massacre, a dying Indian displays his svelte, nearly naked physique as he reaches up to grasp the blanket on his standing horse. The descrepancy between grim reality and sexy fantasy is this exhibition's untold story.
Art Review Ken Johnson New York Times Weekend Arts edition 12-20-13
