Review
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Title: Branding the American West: Paintings and Films, 1900-1950
Editors: Marian Wardle and Sarah Boehme
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Genre: Art History (American West)
Year: 2016
Pages: 240
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN-13: 9780806152912
Price: $39.95
Reviewed by Greg Seppi for the Association for Mormon Letters
(Check out online information about the exhibit associated with this book at the BYU Museum of Art in Provo, Utah: http://moa.byu.edu/project/branding-the-american-west-paintings-and-films-1900-1950/)
It’s a bit unusual to begin a review by looking at the price of the book, but any high-quality art history book with a price tag lower than $50 is practically a steal. Such is the case with this recently published, edited volume issued in conjunction with two major exhibits at museums. Produced by a well-respected academic press, edited by two experts in the history of art in the American West, and including essays by some of the finest minds in American art history, this is that rarest of texts—a coffee table book with substantial academic value at a reasonable price.
Almost every page includes at least one piece of art that aligns with the general theme of the volume—the “branding” of the American West. Many, if not all, of the works in the book’s pages will be exhibited by BYU’s Museum of Art in Provo, UT from February 19 to August 13, 2016; at the Chysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, VA, from October 27, 2016, to February 5, 2017; and at the Stark Museum of Art in Orange, Texas, from March 11 to September 9, 2017. For those who appreciate the art of the early 20th century American West, or for those who are even remotely interested in it, this book will be invaluable.
If the book was only a collection of pretty pictures, perhaps it would be less significant, but the essays included in the text provide valuable insights into the nature of artistic work in the West, from Western movies and novels to murals produced to commemorate strikes in California in 1934, to more traditional artistic works depicting life in New Mexico or the scenery of southern Utah.
With broad, clean margins, excellent images of artistic works, and strong essays, the care with which this book was assembled shouts from each page. I lack the familiarity with art history that would enable me to seriously engage with this work on the highest critical level, but there were several essays that stood out to me. I’ll try to touch on each essay and its themes, but will stress those essays that I felt were strongest. To keep this review to a reasonable length, I’ve cut out thorough descriptions of some of the other essays, which include a study of promotional literature produced to draw tourists to New Mexico, a thorough examination of the art of Maynard Dixon focusing on Dixon’s depictions of union strikes in 1934 California, which are perhaps less well-known today than his depictions of life in the west (see, for example, Ott, p. 78).
Indeed, perhaps the most notable contribution of this text is its efforts to reclaim Maynard Dixon’s art from its romantic, even inane branding, and re-frame his work as closer to truth-telling, preservationist art, constructed around images of otherwise invisible human suffering.
While there were several major artists with Mormon roots or who lived in Utah, such as Cyrus Dallin and Maynard Dixon, the spiritual center of the text is found in New Mexico. Editors Wardle and Boehme note in their introduction that “the landscape attracted artists to the West and specifically to New Mexico in the early twentieth century, but once ensconced in the region, artists developed another subject for their brushes—the original inhabitants of this continent,” meaning the American Indians (or Native Americans).
The introduction, written by volume editors Marian Wardle and Sarah E. Boehme, unifies the disparate topics examined in the volume. While I often feel that introductions are so much fluff, this introduction is actually essential to understanding why this book even exists. The authors set the reader up for the essays that follow by teasing out such themes as the art of Maynard Dixon, Minerva Teichert, and W. Herbert Dunton.
“The organizing idea of the volume is also provided in the introduction, which notes that the essays revolve around the “multiple and changing brandings of the American West during the first half of the twentieth century, after the much-cited ‘closing’ of the frontier Frederick Jackson Turner spoke of in his 1893 address to the American Historical Association… Our new study adds to the body of scholarship on western imagery produced from 1900 through the 1950s—work that is less discussed than nineteenth-century potrayals” (Wardle and Boehme, p. 5).
The term “branding” appearing alongside “the American West” is chosen purposefully. For example, the term may refer to the process of burning a brand into the hide of a young calf or horse—the process of establishing ownership and even dominion over something or someone. Today, we usually understand “branding” to refer to artful product placement in such spaces as photographs, magazines, movies, and TV shows. Corporations establish brands and spend billions to expand and defend them from encroachment. This collection of essays provides valuable details about the history of the art of the American West.
Beyond these details, however, each essayist explores the roots of how we conceive of the West today. The first half of the twentieth century was an incredibly complex time in American history, and “[c]ontemporary moviemakers, [artists] Remington, Dixon, and the Taos artists had their fingers on the pulse of the viewing public in order to market their work” (Wardle and Boehme, p. 7). The omnipresent threat of annihilation continued to haunt Native American groups in this period. Perhaps the most notable instance of branding the American West is in the idea that the “tribes” had passed out of existence—the death of the “noble savage” who had played such a signal role in the creation of the myth of America, a near-mystical paradigm or world view that had influenced British settlers and authors from the time the Americas were discovered (for example, Sir Thomas More’s *Utopia*, which described an ideal society existing in the Americas, is populated with these figures).
Probably no work of art best captures the concept of “branding” than the scene depicted in Berninghaus’ 1939 *Movie Night at Taos Theater* (depicted on p. 8 and 9 of the text). This oil painting centers around a stereotypical movie scene of Indians hiding in ambush, preparing to attack a passing stagecoach. The movie still is captured in bright colors still associated with western scenes today—purple mountains, a bone-dry yellow gulch, brown, black and white horses standing out in sharp relief, the black hair of the “Indians” and the browns of their guns somehow obscuring their figuring while drawing the eye of the audience to them. Meanwhile, the audience is drab, nearly (but not quite) colorless, shaded in grey, with brown and black-headed figures neatly seated. Wardle and Boehme note that Berninghaus “represents the symbiotic relationship between painting and film. The filming of a western movie near the artist colony in Taos inspired his subject just as the artists helped draw the filmmakers to the picturesque location… Taos painters and Dixon… were later influential in changing the look of the western landscape from the Great Plains to the scenic red rocks and desert of the American Southwest—an image also adopted by filmmakers. Similarly, the artists altered the nineteenth-century image of western peoples as pioneers, cavalry, and hostile Indians. They largely focused on the domesticated Indian raising cattle and sheep, producing Native crafts, or participating in ceremonial rituals and dances. This vision appealed to marketers of western tourism.” (p. 10-11)
The influence of these marketers continues to be perpetuated today in general tourist literature found in any hotel west of the Mississippi. The predominant image of “Native Americans” as harmless, threatened, but ultimately disappearing peoples was produced in this period, and continues to obscure and define attempts to modernize their societies. While the sense of a threatened people could be used by antiassimilationists who mobilized against Federal policies that had undercut and reduced tribal structures (p. 16-18). This resulted in a shift in Federal policies in 1934 that restored some power to tribal organizations (p. 19). As evidenced by the recent creation of a memorial acknowledging the massacre of Paiutes at Circleville in April 1866, the relationship between American society today and the nearly-forgotten individuals who suffered at the hands of settlers continues to haunt the American imagination.
This continued construction of memorials sometimes threatens to entirely occlude those who still belong to tribal organizations. LeAnne Howe’s essay, “Imagine there’s no cowboy,” draws on her own memories of watching Western movies while recuperating from a childhood illness. It excellently weaves artistic depictions of the West on film with Howe’s memories to present a backdrop for her comments on life for most Indians in the 1950s—“by 1956… American Indians across the United States had been forced onto reservations; their children sent to government boarding schools, in which their Native languages were forbidden; their lands under control by the Bureau of Indian Affairs; and their Native religions forbidden” (p. 168-169).
Thus, while artists such as Minerva Teichert continued to produce paintings that drew on the memory of Indians, such as her Stampede in the Canyon, their work referenced the American Indian as an absent presence. Continuing, Howe quotes from the work of Stephanie A. Fryberg, who noted that “Contemporary American Indians… exist beyond the reach of most Americans. That is, most Americans have no direct, personal experience with American Indians” (as quoted by Howe, p. 169). Howe extends her analysis to answer the obvious question that follows from this, namely, why do most Americans have no experience with American Indians? She draws from film history to show how effectively American Indians were elided from films supposedly about Indian life.
Importantly, and in contrast to the more nuanced view of the Taos artist colony provided by Elizabeth Hutchinson, Howe rightly notes that sympathy is not quite the same thing as allowing a group to define itself; she notes still images and advertisements created for tourist advertisements that showed “scenes of the Taos Society of Artists… placing the Indians in dramatic stoic poses in order to paint their portraits… In another scene the artists put on blankets and headdresses and dance around in a mockery of a powwow dance,” (p. 177). Howe sees these instances of white artists creating a supposedly “authentic” image of the Indian for commercial purposes as little better than minstrel shows—indeed, one of the images apparently shows a white actor in “blackface,” or, as Howe puts it, “redface,” since the actor was trying to portray an Indian” (p. 177).
In stark contrast to the depictions of strong white men, weak Indian women who must die before the film (or book) can end, and noble white cavalrymen rushing to the defense of heroic settlers which she was exposed to throughout her childhood, Howe notes that her own fiction writing contraposes the traditional “absent presence” of the American Indian by writing out the cowboy—for her, “there are no cowboys” (p. 179). This effort to rebrand the traditional image of the American West attempts to replace the absence of an “othered” people who must be destroyed for the story to continue, with an alternative that draws on the fact that “American Indians, indigenous people, are amazingly still alive and well, [which is] a cause for celebration” (p. 180).
For the reader interested in artists long influential in LDS circles, such as Maynard Dixon, many of whose works were acquired by BYU, and have thus been part of the backdrop of a BYU student experience for decades, and Minerva Teichert, an LDS artist whose paintings of the western migration of Mormons are practically ubiquitous today, this book may prove slightly disappointing, since the Mormon themes associated with these artists are not strongly enunciated, yet readers may actually be pleasantly surprised to find that Minerva Teichert’s works retain their significance even when her Mormon identity is not over-emphasized.
*The art of the American West* undoubtedly influenced and was influenced by the Mormon experience, especially in the mid-to-late 19th century, when any artist passing through the West would likely have at least passed through Utah. However, this text covers the broad outlines of early 20th century art produced in the Western States, and therefore only rarely touches on themes that might be considered “Mormon.” This is not, therefore, the best book for understanding Mormon art. But it has no aspirations to be such a book, nor does it suffer because of a paucity of Mormon themes. This is simply a very well-written, well-edited, and well-illustrated text on the art of the American West, and I can heartily recommend it to anyone who finds the art of Frederic Remington, Maynard Dixon, Minerva Teichert, or other western artists of the early 20th century to be even somewhat interesting.