A Father’s Day 
Art
Amon High
Fort Worth's newly expanded Amon Carter Museum offers a thrilling roller-coaster ride through the American psyche.
(Page 2 of 2)
Nothing, however, illustrates the Carter's innovative eye so much as its vast photography collection. Mitch Wilder, himself an accomplished photographer, stole a march on the market, acquiring the entire estates of personal friends like groundbreaking colorist Eliot Porter and Navajo chronicler Laura Gilpin at a time when most museums ignored, if not actively disdained, the medium; the Carter has gone on to assemble about thirty thousand exhibition-quality prints and a couple hundred thousand negatives and related documents. While most of the wealth is kept in state-of-the-art cold-storage vaults in an enormous new basement complex, the new galleries dedicate enough real estate for five inaugural photography exhibits and a "learn more" gallery with examples of various printing techniques. The central survey, "Masterworks of American Photography" (on view through March 3), pushes beyond the risk-taking evident in works like the McCloskey, not so much challenging accepted standards as setting them. The usual shopping list—Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Edward Weston—isn't overlooked, but that this isn't the standard textbook overview is quickly established by Two Women Posed With a Chair (1850), by Albert Southworth and Josiah Hawes. The oversized daguerreotype is so naturalistically lit and casually animated that it defies expectations of a technique that consistently produced stilted, harshly two-dimensional results; only the sitters' grim early Victorian hairdos and prim lace collars betray the image's origins in photography's infancy. And in a medium whose canon has yet to be firmly set, the Carter nurtures the reputations of lesser-known masters like Karl Struss, who in the mid-1910's produced a vanguard series of New York views (the Carter owns thousands of Struss prints and negatives). Struss's The Avenue-Dusk (1914) was shot in the then-prevailing soft-focus pictorial style, but the streetlights that seem to stream in effervescent bubbles over the vintage Fifth Avenue traffic jam give the twilight scene a science-fiction look as well as a precocious abstract quality.
If the Carter's collections insist on a fresh look at American art, they even more aggressively challenge the myths and orthodoxies of the history of the West. "Aesthetics and content are equally important," Stewart says of the museum's collections, which also represent a remarkable mine of raw historical documentation. "Common Ground: Settling Colorado," an exhibit drawn from the Fred and Jo Mazzulla collection of 10,000 historical photographs (on view through March 31), chronicles the often surrealistic, post-gold rush transformation of the state that was simultaneously inspiring the virginal mountain panoramas of Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt. What Manifest Destiny really meant was scenes like William Henry Jackson's early 1880's vista of a freshly laid rail line snaking through the blasted, lifeless Grand Canyon of the Arkansas River, an image accompanied by others of huge industrial smelting complexes, chintzy Victorian parlors, packed dry-goods stores, immaculately dressed schoolchildren, tourists (hunters, fishermen, and the fashionable ladies captured in an 1895 amateur print while sightseeing in the South Platte Canyon), and finally, the new machines in the garden, cars parked at a pioneering 1923 auto campground in the foothills of the still scenic but no longer pristine Rockies.
The conquest had more brutal costs. Despite the paucity of evidence in most museums, nineteenth-century American artists didn't overlook the original snake in the American Eden. John Quincy Adams Ward's intimate but heroic bronze figure of an African American slave, The Freedman, cast (sometime after 1863) to commemorate black soldiers killed fighting for the Union, still wears a braceletlike legacy of bondage: a miniature working manacle. There was similar sympathy for the dignity and plight of Native Americans. The ordinarily pedestrian West Point drawing instructor Seth Eastman looks more like Brueghel in his charmingly energetic painting of lacrosse on ice, Ballplay of the Dakota on the Saint Peters River in Winter (1848). Charles Wimar, perhaps the most talented of a whole school of mid-century specialists in Native American genre scenes, painted Indians Crossing the Upper Missouri (1859-1860) in the Technicolor style he acquired at the Düsseldorf Academy; sunset irradiates the placid water and surrounding buttes with a light that is as apocalyptic as it is romantic, both a tribute to and a prophecy for a people already regarded as doomed.
Despite its checkered past, the Carter's West never loses its mythic power. The West as a crucible of American modernism is a theme the museum has made its own, with a stunning collection of abstract landscapes by artistic pilgrims to New Mexico in the twenties and early thirties: Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and the doyenne of them all, Georgia O'Keeffe, who actually first essayed the West while teaching school in Canyon; her watercolor-on-newsprint Light Coming on the Plains, No. 1 (1917) depicts the sunrise in echoing, arcing strokes of blue-green wash. Robert Adams, the dean of contemporary Western photographers, whose work is the subject of the largest of the opening photography shows (on view through January 27), revisited the Western landscape in three separate series dating from the late sixties. Beginning with White Churches of the Plains, austere, reverent views of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century clapboard churches in Colorado, Adams progressed to ironic documentation of diners, convenience stores, tract houses, and graffiti at historic sites; in the nineties he regained his faith with a series of light-flooded, almost vaporized seascapes, shot in the mouth of the Columbia River, that seem to recapture the transcendental yearnings with which we began our Western quest, in another century on another coast.
Long a key player in the new history of the Old West, the expanded Carter will assume an even more prominent role as a destination for advanced study. "We've built a Ph.D.-level research facility," says Stewart, himself a leading Western-art scholar, pointing to basement rooms full of drawer after drawer of prints and negatives and row after row of meticulously filed documents, destined to be catalogued on the museum's Web site. And while it plans to organize some splashy loan shows, like next fall's "Celebrating America: Masterworks From Texas Collections," the Carter will make bigger waves with smaller "focus" exhibits mined from its own vaults, exploring such themes as Hartley's and Strand's artistically intriguing road trip to Mexico in the thirties as well as such big and contentious issues of contemporary Western scholarship as race and the environment.
The net result of all the Carter's basement musings promises to be anything but esoteric. To wander through the new Amon Carter Museum is to take a thrilling roller-coaster ride through the American psyche, from Cole's representation of our original innocence to Remington's embodiment of our jingoistic self-confidence, from Ward's and Wimar's tragic self-recognition to Hartley's and O'Keeffe's search for a new century's new vision and Robert Adams' metaphoric struggle for redemption. It is the story of us, our nation's great collective epic, told as never before in all its subtle colors and dramatic shades of light and dark.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
