Rebecca Olsen: "Gaslighter's Guide to the Galaxy:" an Artwork

 If we're not professional critics, we generally go to an exhibition, look at the works, maybe focus on one or two, and if we're not in the market, go home. Although trained as an art historian and critic, I made a visit to Rebecca Olsen's show entitled "Gaslighter's Guide to the Galexy" at Blue Star in San Antonio, stayed an hour, socialized for awhile, looked at the works, and left to go home, but I went home a changed lady.  The impact of the show as a whole, and its many complex parts continued to resonate over the last two days: it summed up exactly what I have been feeling about our present world for the past six months.

 

An instillation of many parts in many media seemed random and confusing at first, and there were many components in it that I may have skipped or don't recall seeing, but I wanted to write this not about each specific particle, but as an aggregate of a visual experience and its message to me.  In doing so, I deliberately ignored the small artist's statement and catalogue.  I wanted nothing except the show and myself.

 

There were two very dense collages, the first, a mountain of gesturing hands, letters that seemed to come from posters, and various groups of figures, the second, roughly Texas-shaped, of various humans, again some hands, a Guy Fawkes mask, a jumble of photo fragments seemingly smashed together.  It struck me as a view of all the events and confusions of our environment, right here, right now.

 

There was a gilded, padded comfortable armchair recliner that bristled with many straps: a comfy, soft electric chair, maybe?  Or a plush prison of complacency? There were pedestals and trays scattered around, and many plaster pairs of hands, at least one with zip-tie handcuffs (there were also souvenir cuffs to take home available).  In these hands and on some of the tables were imitations of cell phones, inscribed with manifestoes, or maybe random thoughts.

 

The biggest component was two seated male mannequins on upholstered chairs in black suits, each wearing a gasmask, connected to each other by their breathing tubes.  The one to the right had his hands clenched on the chair armrests, the one on the left clutched a cellphone. Suspended on these gasmask tubes was a tuxedoed ventriloquist's dummy, designated by the artist as "Marco Rubio."  The only other specific figure was a small guy in a spacesuit suspended above them by fishing wire, named "Elon Musk."  Behind them, pasted to the wall, were strips of paper, each with a progressive word or phrase, each one crossed out.  A jumble of large red and black letters lay on the floor beneath their feet.  Under the patent leather shoe of the man on the right was a tiny globe.

 

On the walls were other 2-D images, predominately in black and white, of various sizes and media. And against the gallery walls and out on the floor, more stuff, at first glance amusing, and then fraught.

 

When I as an art historian, and teaching studio students, I would tell them: "once a work of art leaves your hands and your studio, it's no longer yours."  It then belongs to everyone who sees it, and everyone will see and experience it differently, informed by their own life experiences. Art is visual communication, and its success is determined by how it resonates with those who see it.

 

Rebecca Olsen's show had a run of only a few weeks at a small corner gallery in a much larger exhibition area--and basically only open on weekends.  It deserves a more visible venue in a really big city, and maybe a limited run, in littler towns.  It expresses what our country is, right here and right now, in all its cacophony of imagery and sound--far more than any one individual can process.  It needs to be seen. And thought about.

Not Selfies But Nostalgia: Kenneth Riley

In the nineteenth century, European and Native-born painters were chronicling the Euro-American expansion into what became the United States. Once the frontier was proclaimed closed, western pioneering was over and the chroniclers were converted into artists who portrayed the myth of the west. Often illustrators of magazines or novels and movie-makers, they formed the basis for what are called "Western Artists" in the 20th and 21st centuries. Some like Frederic Remington spanned the transition, beginning as illustrators, but making the jump to "serious" gallery artists, but the further in time theyjourney from the frontier, they become progressively more inventors and perpetuators of the Old West myth. All of this is brilliantly chronicled in William H and William N Goetzmann in their comprehensive book, The West of the Imagination. Kenneth Riley (1919-2015) is an embodiment of such mythmaking. Trained in the grand tradition of illustration by Harvey Dunn, himself a student of Howard Pyle, Riley was the last in the tradition of World War II combat artists--in that respect, recording events as they happened, much as nineteenth-century illustrators for Harpers and Scribners had. After the war, he settled in Connecticut and made illustrations and covers for such popular magazines as The Saturday Evening Post and Readers' Digest, as well as large-scale paintings for the Church of the Latter-Day Saints. He had also studied with American Impressionist Frank DuMond, and as the need for drawn illustrations faded out, he became an easel painter. Traveling west, he became fascinated with Native American life--but more as it was than present-day realities. Not surprisingly, Bodmer and Catlin's images preoccupied him; and some of his paintings were reinterpretations of those two painters' images of the Mandans and Hidatsas. As he put it in an interview in Western Art Magazine: . "...they were there. You can't pretend that you have the ability to go back in time. If you do, then you are starting out immediately by being a phony. All that you can do is to apply what you've gleaned through on-the ground-research and to interpret it using the talent you have as an artist." But even more, he became enamored of these two painters themselves, and during the 1970's and '80's, produced works depicting these artists themselves in the act of painting, and attempting to recreate their world, almost as stills from a biographical movie, and like a film, blown up to a larger scale. Homage to Catlin, painted in 1977, measures almost three feet by four. It is a quote of Catlin's print in his Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indian, specifically "The Author Painting a Chief at the Base of the Rocky Mountains." It shows the artist painting Ma To Toh Pa, with the subject in the same pose as the Mandan chief, but here reversed, Catlin to the viewer's left and chief to the right. Both are depicted in the same costumes, surrounded by seated and reposing Mandan witnesses. The setting is now within an interior, and Riley takes some liberties: taking a cue from Catlin's writings, he places the scene in an interior---but hardly a Mandan lodge, but rather imagined as an interior of a tipi. Catlin had used a tipi himself, but art historians have speculated that this scene was added in later as a frontispiece, and that most readers wouldn't have known the difference. Riley puts Catlin in a more, serious, formal pose. His characterization has none of Catlin's sense of humor, showing himself bracing the easel with his foot (or the even more informal rendering of the scene by Catlin in his later cartoon collection). The native American witnesses are quieter and more formal. Catlin becomes "The Frontier Artist," noble and serious, rather than the showman-painter as well as documenter: he was in fact both. The third-hand "selfie" has morphed into the Western myth.

Riley was even more fascinated with Bodmer. In Bodmer Painting the Piegan Chief (Phoenix Art Museum), He appropriates Bodmer's 1986 Mexkehme Sukahs, Piegan Blackfoot Chief (Oklahoma City, Joslyn Art Museum) almost verbatim, places him in an interior, and has a youthful Bodmer, kneeling before him, painting his portrait. The youthful artist is shown younger than Bodmer portraying himself with his patron Maximilian in Travels in North America, though dressed in his immaculately clean light suit as in Bodmer's illustration. He repeated a similar, ingenuous portrayal of Bodmer as a painter of another chief in a second painting, inside a Mandan lodge, a setting taken from Bodmer's watercolor of 1834. There are other paintings of various Mandan notables, based on Bodmer images as well. But as is the case of Catlin, these are nostalgic illustrations of yesteryear.

Stepping away from evocations of painted selfies, Kenneth Riley did at least one more tribute to a western artist of the past: Frederic Remington and the Buffalo Soldiers from 1986, now in the Briscoe Museum. This one is only incidentally inspired by Remington's pictorial work, but rather stems from his illustration days when he was writing and making pictures for Harper's, Collier's and Century Magazines. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Remington both wrote and illustrated essays on his own western travels. In 1889, Remington wrote and illustrated an article for Century entitled "A Scout With the Buffalo Soldiers," recounting one of several trips he took with these celebrated African American soldiers in Arizona, dealing with the Apaches, and he took time to describe one such encounter, where he wanted to make a sketch: "Great excitement prevailed when it was discovered that I was using a sketch-book, and I was forced to disclose the half-finished visage of one villainous face to their gaze. It was straightway torn up, and I was requested with many scowls and grunts, to discontinue that pastime, for Apaches more than any other Indians dislike to have their portraits made." Riley chose to paint this three-way encounter of Apaches, Soldiers and Remington with the artist hurriedly making a sketch while bracing his paper on his horse's rump. Though he himself didn't illustrate this incident, other pictures he drew for the article, portrayed himself among these soldiers, wearing his distinctive white hat, quoted by Riley in his scene Riley's painting thus becomes a nostalgic painted snapshot of the past--yet another myth of Western history. _________________________________________________________________ William H. and William N Goetzmann, The West of the Imagination, now in its second edition, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. Riley's quote is taken from Todd Wilkinson, "Painting the Life of Riley," Western Art and Architecture, December 2012/January 2013. https://westernartandarchitecture.com/features/the-painting-life-of-riley. Frederic Remington, "A Scout With the Buffalo Soldiers," The Century Magazine, Vol. XXVII (1888/1899), p.908 https://www.victorianvoices.net/ARTICLES/CENTURY/Century1889A/C1889A-BuffaloSoldiers.pdf

Selfies II: Frenzeny and Tavernier

 

Paul Tavernier: Big Medicine Man, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts

At first glance, the watercolor Big Medicine Man resembles Catlin's frontispiece of himself painting the Mandan Chief Mah To Toh Pah: both show an artist portraying Native Americans, in this case, a Chief, his wife and his horse, while other Native Americans stand behind him,looking

Catlin Painting Mah To-Toh Pa

on.  This one is from another, later time period, and was not done by the painter Jules Tavernier himself, but by his partner and fellow artist, Paul Frenzeny. 

 Tavernier and Frenzeny were two illustrators of French origin, who spent most of their lives in the New World and beyond.  For a year (1873-4), they traveled together around what would soon become the continental United States, under a contract from Harper's Magazine, recording the expansion of Euro-American domination during that period.  

 

Their journey is chronicled and analyzed in detail by art historian Claudine Chalmers in her book Chronicling the West for Harper's (2013).  The two men were given passes to ride rapidly expanding rail lines, but also made many side-trips by any transportation they could muster.  Their modus operandi was to prepare their compositions for monochromatic line drawings, transferred by pencil in reverse on thin boxwood blocks-- small ones riveted together, which were then shipped back to New York, to be engraved by Harper's crew of professional wood engravers in pieces, then put back together to be printed along with a moveable-type text, often their own commentary.  Altogether, they produced a hundred of these illustrations that Harper's published between 1873 and 1876, as well as sketches and watercolors for their own use and sale.

 

The growing America they recorded was of a country of rapid expansion, as European and Post Civil-War Americans "won the west," at a time when most of the enduring legends of such settlements were being made.  Beginning with European immigrants arriving in New York, and the hardships of trekking west on uncomfortable trains and other means of transportation, they recorded factories in the east, unrest among coal miners, and as they progressed, what new settlers were doing. They showed Texas cowboys in East Texas on great cattle drives, railroad construction, primitive meteorologists with rudimentary prediction tools in isolated locations, ore smelting, stagecoach supply outposts, and many new towns being built along the new railroad lines.  Some of the things they drew were things of the moment that are now forgotten, such as a lone cowhand doing his job on horseback shading himself with an umbrella, incipient railroad towns being built, the inhabitants living in roofed dugouts until more durable housing could be constructed, and an unusual culture of gypsy-like drifters, called "pilgrims," who migrated back and forth between Arkansas and Texas, doing seasonal work. 

 

There were other, less laudable things too-- ghost towns, hastily built and hastily abandoned when the anticipated railroad line never came; deserted, trashed played-out mining camps, a leadup to a lynching, and the wholesale slaughtering of bison, both by professional hunters, and random railroad passengers killing vast amounts of them by shooting at passing herds out of train windows.

It was also the period of continuing conflict between whites and Native Americans, and the wholesale destruction of the latter's way of life.  Tavernier was fortunate be the only white visitor to witness and record the three-day Sundance festival at Red Cloud Agency--the last of its kind--in June 1874.  It was a coming-of-age ceremony comparable to the Mandan O-Keepa rituals that Catlin had been privileged to witness, but the very title of the scene by Harper's, " Indian Sun Dance–Young Bucks Proving Their Endurance by Self-Torture," speaks of the patronizing attitude of the easterners who would read about it in the artists' dispatches. Tavernier and Franzeny also recorded the degradation of dispossessed Native Americans at trading posts, some bringing in goods to trade, others hanging out at railroad stations and begging, to be ogled by American travelers.

Like Catlin and Bodmer, Frenzeny's portrait of his partner in action was apart from the artists' official assignment, in this case the illustrations for Harper's, but a personal comment of their roles as artists. Frenzeny's watercolor shows Tavernier in a suit, vest, tie and hat, sitting on a folding stool working on a tiny, stretched canvas.  His subjects are formally posed further back, in front of some low white cliffs with treetops behind them. They appear to be clad in buckskin ceremonial garments, and the chief wears a war bonnet. The Native Americans clustered around the white-suited artist wear a motley collection of garments (Chalmers has identified one in the foreground's dress as Cherokee).  Their expressions range from wonder to curiosity to anger, and the picture's title "Big Medicine Man," along with their poses and the raggedy Native American boy exploring Tavernier's paintbox, imply a more "primitive" social state than the light-skinned, bearded painter.  In other words, they reinforce the mid-nineteenth attitude of Manifest Destiny in the spirit of the Harper's series itself.

 

When their contract was up, both men went on to San Francisco, where the lingered awhile among the society of bohemian artists there and in the bay area.  Tavernier spent time with other Native American tribes, including the Elem Pomo community of northern California, got to know many of them well, and made watercolor sketches of ceremonies and other activities.  He had intended eventually to return to Europe via Japan, but ended his life in Hawaii, where he painted volcanoes and died of alcoholism at forty five.

 

Frenzeny too lingered awhile in San Francisco, becoming fascinated with its Chinatown. He continued his association as a traveling illustrator for Harper's which took him to many places, from the Yukon to the north, Mexico and Guatemala in the south, and subsequently to China and Siberia, returning eventually returned to London. He also illustrated at lease seven books, for which he's more remembered today, including the first English edition of Anna Karenina  and some for The Jungle Book.

___________________________________________________________________________________

The best authority on Tavernier and Frenzeny is Claudine Chalmers, Chronicling the West For Harper's. Coast to Coast with Frenzeny and Tavernier.  Norman, University of Oklahoma Press 2013.  Chalmers continues to publish on Tavernier.

 

For Jules Tavernier's subsequent life in California and Hawaii, see "Jules Tavernier and the Elem Pomo" TheMetropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Summer, 2021, https://www.metmuseum.org/met-publications/jules-tavernier-and-the-elem-pomo (downloadable).

Selfies: Bodmer and Catlin

 NOTE: For some reason I can't add posts to jbswest, so these new posts will be found here under jbsmusings.

George Catlin: "The Author painting a chief at the base of the Rocky Mountains"
frontispiece from Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indian (1841) 

As 19th century Euro-Americans set out to conquer America west of the Mississippi, visual artists moved with them and recorded the "wild" that remained (all the Native Americans who were there first were considered part of the wilderness).   Among the earliest were Titian Peale and Samuel Seymour, who went with the exploration journeys of Major Stephen Long of 1819-20.  Peale and Seymour recorded landscapes, flora and fauna and views of Native American tribes in their environments.

Visual artists who concentrated more on portraits of individual tribal members began their work in the 1830's were George Catlin and Karl Bodmer.  Both were on a mission to record tribal notables in their native dress and environments; both were men of their times in their outlooks and opinions.  Both believed that native cultures were doomed to be subsumed in the "conquering" of the west by superior European-Americans --a term that would be called "Manifest Destiny" in the next decade. To Europeans it was in part an outgrowth of Romanticism, a fascination with the tragic idea of vanishing "primitive" exotic cultures. An extension of this romantic ideal was the visual recording of the artist himself in the "unspoiled wilderness."

Both the American, Catlin (on his first trips west), and the Swiss Bodmer on his only journey to frontier America accompanying an expedition financed by Prince Maximilian of Wied zu Wied, covered the area of the northern Great Plains at about the same time, Catlin from 1832 through 1836, and Bodmer between 1833 and 1834.  They are best remembered now for their portrayals of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribal members and their activities and ceremonies--which took on romantic tragic overtones in 1837, when they were virtually wiped out by smallpox, brought in by white colonizers. 

Prince Maximilian, in the manner of his friend and mentor, Alexander von Humboldt, was an explorer and naturalist. In 1815-17, he had already been in Brazil accompanied by two German naturalists, collecting specimens and visiting and chronicling Amazonian tribes.  In 1832, he embarked on his two-year expedition to North America.  This time he brought along two associates, his valet and hunting companion, David Dreidoppel, and Karl Bodner, to make visual records of what they saw. 

For Bodmer, then in his early twenties, this trip proved to be the adventure of his life.  He was already a skilled painter and engraver.  This New World journey was the only one he made.  He returned to Germany, and subsequently, he would emigrate to France and join the Barbizon painters, with considerable success, though he had to resort to commercial illustration to make ends meet.

 

Catlin, self-taught, made a career of his portrayals of native Americans, subsequently including Central and South American tribes, and taking his artistic product on Barnum-like traveling shows, in both the United States and Europe. In Europe, he took advantage of touring Native American tribal dancers to augment his exhibitions, and when they weren't available, he dressed family members in Native American clothing and gear that he had acquired on his journeys. At a time when an artistic career had become an issue of free enterprise, both men capitalized on their North American paintings and sketches to enhance their reputations and more importantly, to earn themselves a living.  For Catlin, it was part of his modus operandi; for the more reluctant Bodmer, eager to resume his painting career as a European landscape and wildlife artist, it was in obligation to his patron. 

In an age of developing mass media, 81 of Bodmer's paintings were reproduced as aquatints in Europe in a two-volume account penned by the Prince called Maximilian, Prince of Weid's Travels in the Interior of North America (1841), first in German, and later in French and English.  500 of Catlin's sketches and paintings were gathered in a collection called the Indian Gallery, which he attempted to sell to the American government.  When that didn't work, he took the Gallery on tour to London and later the European continent.  Unfortunately, much of this collection was confiscated and stored to cover debts, so he recreated 300 works from his field sketches, naming it the Cartoon Collection.  Catlin too took his work to the public via the print medium. In the same year that the Maximilian/Bodmer volume came out, his Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indian, also in two volumes with 300 of his works reproduced as engravings and the text written by himself was published in England.

 

Both of these works contain a print that was not among the Native American portraits: they are self-portraits of each artist "in action" on their painting journeys.  The frontispiece of Catlin's book, captioned "The Author painting a chief at the base of the Rocky Mountains," shows him in the act of painting Mah-To-Toh-Pah (Four Bears), the second Mandan Chief, dressed in the same ceremonial outfit and in the same pose as the portrait that graced the Indian Gallery (the chief later gifted Catlin that shirt).  Four Bears assumes the stance of a baroque European King--the famous Rigaud portrait of Louis XIV comes to mind--which is being echoed in his image on canvas.  Surrounding them are tribesmen, with six of them reclining in the foreground, once more in a traditional Baroque manner.  Behind them are two tipis, and some tall, cypress-like trees.  Catlin, with his deerstalker cap and his pristine buckskin outfit, one foot braced on his equally pristine easel, delicately works on the image.

 Art historians have been quick to point out that the Mandans lived in fixed lodges, not tipis, and others have been equally insistent that as a frontispiece for the many Native American tribes contained in the book, this was intentional, and for the average reader, tipis would have been just fine. The title, "The Author painting a Chief at the base of the Rocky Mountains," is equally a stretch: no mountains are shown.

George Catlin: "Catlin Painting Ma Toh To Pah," from the Cartoon Collection
Courtesy National Gallery of Art Washington, DC;  oil on card

Catlin also produced a sketchier watercolor of the same scene with no tipis, but a generic Plains riverside setting, the easel constructed like a tipi shaped support of three tree branches, and the canvas casually flapping on a ruder support. He is surrounded by a similar crowd of tribespeople, but this time with more women and two small dogs replacing two of the foreground recliners, which echoes a written account by Catlin of making the same picture. The onlookers in this version are almost like cartoon figures, reflecting the same humor brought to many of Catlin's other sketches. This version is generally dated around 1860, when Catlin was reproducing his work for the Cartoon Gallery.

 By 1846, the Mandans themselves were gone, virtually eliminated by the smallpox epidemic in 1837.  Catlin himself was in London, exhibiting his Indian Gallery and still attempting to get it sold to the American government or the newly established Smithsonian Institution.  This self-portrait is really Catlin promoting himself and his lifework, trying to make a living, and showing himself in action at his craft.

Karl Bodmer, "The Travelers Meeting With Minatarre Indians," Maximilian, Prince of Weid's Travels In The Interior of North America (1841)

Bodmer's print shows the artist, but in a somewhat different context.  The setting is outside Fort Clark, where the party wintered in 1833-34, and the three members of Maximilian's party are depicted meeting Minatarre (or Hidatsa) tribal members for the first time. To the left is a local guide and interpreter, usually identified as Toussaint Charbonneau, the same man whose late wife, Sacagawea, had been the indigenous interpreter for the Lewis and Clark expedition thirty years previously.  Here he gestures towards the Europeans, Maximilian in a green coat and hat in the colored version of the print, with Bodmer beside him, wearing a top hat.  Between and behind the two is Dreidoppel, wearing a cap.  Art historians have identified one of the Hidatsa as Ahschüpsa Masihichsi, who was also portrayed individually by Bodmer.

Like Catlin's self-portrait, there are no field sketches for this composition, and the print is generally accepted as a representation made after the trip and inserted as an illustration made especially for Maximilian's publication.

Presumably Bodmer made it for the book, a project he would work on for Maximilian for a decade after the expedition's return and too expensive, in the end to offer the Archduke a profit.  The three explorers, like Catlin are dressed in their best--more symbolically than likely--they had already been on the road for a year. Bodmer presents himself as one of a group expedition rather than an individual artist, and there's no indication of the role he played as its visual chronicler; rather he bristles with weapons and appears to hold a pipe.  The focus is all on his boss, the Prince, the only one in green and immaculate white trousers in the colored version of the print.

Though in the present day, Bodmer is considered the more talented as a portrayer of vanishing tribal chiefs than his American counterpart, his real artistic interest lay in the landscapes and wildlife he depicted rather than his human subjects, a fascination he would retain in his later career. 

                  

Neither artist really considered their images as independent creative art in the Romantic sense; both were doing imagery for different purposes--both to document a region of America that would quickly disappear, but in Bodmer's case to chronicle both the land and the people who inhabited it, and Catlin to record the people who vanished within his own lifetime.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There are numerous studies of both Catlin and Bodmer's images on the internet: here are three of the best:

For Catlin's Frontispiece, see https://humanitiesusa.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/george-catlin-catlin-painting-the-portrait-of-mah-to-toh-pa—mandan-c-1861-1869/

For Catlin's Cartoon Collection: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.50492.html#overview Overview

For Bodmer, see https://maximilian-bodmer.org/about/maximilian-bodmer-expedition/

There are also two excellent monographs on these artists:

Catlin: George Gurney and Therese That Heyman (eds.) George Catlin and His Indian Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, W.W. Norton & Company,  third printing, 2008.

Bodmer: William H. Goetzmann, David C. Hunt, Marsha Gallagher and William J. Orr, Karl Bodmer's America, Joslyn Art Museum & University of Nebraska Press, 1984.