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
