Art
Best Western
A Dallas exhibit shows how painter Frank Reaugh made high art of the open range. So why doesn't he get any respect?
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Although he spent less than a year abroad, Reaugh returned to Texas with a sophisticated synthesis of European trends. Preceding generations of westering American artists had painted Western icons like the Rocky Mountains and the mountain man in the conservative, classicizing style of the Düsseldorf Akademie; Reaugh, the first American artist to document the trail drives, was also the first one to essay the West with a forward-looking, Impressionist-influenced style. (New York audiences had gotten their first look at French Impressionism in a sensational 1886 show, but the style continued to shock critics well into the twentieth century.) Our view of a work like Reaugh's large pastel Watering the Herd (1889), a panorama of Longhorns circling a stock pond near Henrietta, is obscured by a century of cowboy art clichés (Reaugh himself knocked off versions of this composition decades later), but here we are witnessing the genesis of a genre, inaugurated with a freshness of vision and brilliance of execution it would never reach in any other hand. The soft olive foreground hues echo Corot and the Barbizon School; the dazzling whites of hide and horns, a technical tour de force in smudge-prone pastel, flash over the surface in a more controlled variation on Bonheur's blazing highlights.
By the time Reaugh painted The Approaching Herd, in 1902 (exhibited to glowing notices at the Art Institute of Chicago a year later), he was already in Remington's shadow. Less than a year younger than Reaugh and the son of a powerful Ogdensburg, New York, publisher, Remington had dropped out of Yale and blown his inheritance on a Kansas sheep farm in the mid-1880's. But as a correspondent and an illustrator for Harper's Weekly magazine, Remington fired the national imagination, retailing the exploits of Indian fighters and a little-known Western laborer called the cowpuncher. His cinematic scenarios were over-the-top horse operas inevitably enacted in a hostile, sunbaked, relentlessly ocher desert; it was always high noon in Remington's West. The Approaching Herd represented a contrary and far more authentically observed vision: The inquisitive lead steers, viewed head-on, are masterfully foreshortened and magisterially posed; the subtle mauve grasses and purplish shadows, rendered with stitchlike impressionistic brushstrokes, evoke an untrammeled prairie Eden that men entered with awe and reverence, not as action heroes in a Manifest Destiny epic. ("Remington," Reaugh later commented, "knew little about cows and was principally interested in the cowboy as wild man.") Artistically, Reaugh was a good decade or two ahead of Remington, who finally tried to adopt the hip new impressionistic style shortly before his death, in 1909; Reaugh's appreciation for the delicate ecological harmony of wild cattle and pristine prairie was a good half-century ahead of his time.
Reaugh's most formidable legacy may turn out to be his landscapes, most of them tiny pastels that somehow match the grandeur of the huge, Düsseldorf-style vistas that made Albert Bierstadt the star of the nineteenth-century Western landscape genre. Reaugh manufactured his own pastel sticks, which he could evidently sharpen to a pencillike point, packing astonishingly fine details and panoramic sweep into a format usually smaller than four by seven inches; Untitled [Color Notes] (c. 1885-1890) is a single page covered with nine tiny landscapes, each an almost surrealistically complete evocation of a distinct moment and place. But Reaugh's real magic lay in his often hazy, allusive color, as daring and original—despite its subtlety—as anything in the American landscape tradition. Lightning(1884) parallels the contemporaneous preference for misty, closely keyed color among tonalists like James Abbott McNeill Whistler or George Inness in his later works, but here Reaugh constrains his palette to a storm-tossed gray sky infused with the dusty pink of sunset and cleaved by a single white stroke of lightning; the wind-blurred foreground is rendered in a port-tinted chocolate more characteristic of Mark Rothko's paintings of the mid-sixties than of anything in nineteenth-century American art. In Untitled [Tree Over Pond] (c. 1905-1910) a scummy green East Texas watering hole erupts into a shimmering concerto of multihued reflections reminiscent of Monet's pond at Giverny. In their abstract clarity and limpid Southwestern colors, some of Reaugh's West Texas scenes of mesas and mountains looked forward to the Taos School of the twenties. Yet he often portrayed the endless expanses of bluestem grass in a startling—to our eyes—almost marine palette; the proverbial sea of grass can at times look more like the bed of some fantastically pellucid ocean. These almost otherworldly prospects, Reaugh pointed out years later, were accurate pictures of a once "opalescent" prairie that was soon despoiled by voracious fenced herds and cotton farming.
Reaugh moved his studio to Dallas in 1890 and exhibited to critical acclaim in galleries and museums from Chicago to Boston through the first decade of the twentieth century. By the twenties he had become North Texas' bearded art guru, each summer taking bohemian contingents of talented young artists and adventuresome society girls on sketching trips out west. In the thirties former Reaugh students like Alexandre Hogue and Harry Carnohan formed the nucleus of the progressive regional school known as the Dallas Nine, grabbing national attention with sere, hard-edged, contemporary visions of the Dust Bowl West. Reaugh suffered in comparison; touring with a multimedia stage presentation of large canvases reworking trail-drive images that had been fresh almost half a century earlier, he looked more like a pioneer of the nascent Texas nostalgia industry than a prophet of modernism. After Reaugh died, in 1945, his reputation collapsed even further. The Frank Reaugh Art Club, a legacy of his extensive culture-building efforts in Dallas, joined his former student Reveau Bassett in a red-baiting campaign against the European modernists ("commie artists," in Bassett's estimate) exhibited by the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts during the mid-fifties. The transformation—and the irony—was complete: Reaugh, who had ushered Texas art into the twentieth century by embracing advanced European influences, became a posthumous symbol of xenophobic reaction.
Reaugh's rehabilitation awaits a major Texas museum with the intellectual courage to mount an intensively researched Reaugh retrospective, taking advantage not only of the Canyon holdings but also of large, largely unseen collections at Texas Tech University and the University of Texas' Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, and perhaps tracking down a few of the possibly hundreds of Reaughs squirreled away in attics across Texas. In the meantime—and it is likely to be a long time—we can thank the MAC, TACO, and the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum for a rare glimpse of a true American original.
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