West of The Imagination; 106; Enduring Dreams; Original Film Transfer

You You You You

You By the end of the 19th century, the west was settled. The frontier had closed. What Frederick Remington called the wildriders and the vacant lands had vanished forever, or so it appeared. The United States had become an industrial giant with teaming cities.

But the west, as a source of American myth, has endured. In our own century, new dreams have appeared. In the artistic romance with the southwest, from the dark visions of the dust bowl and on. Myths of the west are still unfolding, as Hispanic artists and Native American painters create powerful new images. Our story of the 20th century image makers begins in 1898 on a back road in the territory of New Mexico. Bert Phillips and Ernest Blumenschein were artists, trained in Paris. But out west, they were just a couple of dudes.

They were seeking fresh subjects to paint when their wagon broke a wheel. This chance event was the unlikely turning point in their careers. And it brought them face to face with the greatest inspirational adventure of their lives. It was the landscape that first struck Blumenschein. The first shall I forget the first powerful impression, my own impression, through my own eyes. Not another man's picture, this. Such beauty of color, vigorous form, ever-changing light. In the Taos Valley, to his delight, he found Indians still living in harmony with the land and at peace with their Spanish neighbors.

It was as if the tragic conflicts of the 19th century had never taken place. It's little wonder that artists would later idealize the Pueblo Indians as nature's noblemen, untouched by progress. The land itself would be portrayed by painters as a strange paradise, harsh and rugged, but imbued with mystery and romance. The Spanish Adobe buildings were further sorts of inspiration. Simple houses and ancient churches, fashioned from the earth itself.

To the artists, these villages were an oasis of peace in the busy 20th century. At the head of the valley, the artists came upon a place that stood still in time, the Pueblo of Taos. Here beyond the gates of the church was an Indian township. Ancient structures unchanged for over 600 years, inhabited by descendants of the Anasazi, the ancient ones, the first people of the southwest. The texture of their everyday lives had changed very little.

Traditions had been passed along, generation to generation. They lived in the shadow of Taos Mountain, deriving their power and inspiration from it. As models, they were an artist dream come true. Maria Mondragon, today in her 80s, was painted as a girl by Ernest Blumenschein. Eventually, the quiet beauty of the Pueblo people attracted an international group of artists. Ernest Blumenschein was joined by Oscar Burning House, E. Irving House, his friend Bird Phillips and Joseph Sharp, the man who had prompted the first painting trip here.

Buck Dutton joined the group and they called themselves the Taos Society of Artists. They established studios in the tiny hamlet down the road from the Pueblo. They brought their families out and set up homes here. They met in Blumenschein's kitchen to discuss their art. Blumenschein's daughter Helen remembers the early days. There were so few of us. I mean, how many angles were here in the first place? The butcher and the grocery man and a few other things and that's about it. So we artists were very close just from necessity of talking to somebody. Slowly, the group of artists grew to include Martin Hennings, Walter Ufer, Victor Higgins and Kenneth Adams. The Taos Society was not an artistic school that set out to determine a certain style,

but the painter's approach to the subject was very similar. Whatever their background, they painted the Pueblo Indian from the same idealized point of view. Though many were trained in Europe, they were consciously seeking subjects that would inspire a uniquely American art. By contrast, the work of two Russian artists would parallel the southwest with their own native land. Leon Gaspard painted a Pueblo girl with striking similarity to this portrait of his sister Anna back home. This medicine man reminded Nikolai Fashin of the tartar chiefs in his native Kazan. But the Russians never joined the Taos Society of Artists, an American group devoted to American subjects. The approach taken by E. Irving Kaos was typical of the artist's fascination with the Indian.

Kaos photographed his models first. Then he drew a grid onto the photograph. The grid allowed him to transfer the scenes square by square onto the larger canvas. In the studio he concentrated on color and light to create his popular and sentimental paintings of Indian life. Kaos's main model was a Taos Indian called Ben Luhan. He sometimes posed with his son, Alessio. Years later, in a letter, Alessio recalled a typical day in the studio. When I was doing the modeling, Ben and I would be at the Kaos' residence by 7 a.m.

Grandmother Kaos would have given us breakfast. And in the meantime, Mr Kaos would be in the studio, getting things ready for the day's business. Like many other artists of the group, Kaos was fascinated by exotic arts and crafts. He'd amassed a large collection of Indian artifacts. Though they came from many different tribes, he intermixed them to create a composite picture of the Indian. When I was set, Ben would dress me in modeling clothes. And during that moment, Ben would instruct me whatever I was supposed to do. All things were somewhat strange to me. Kaos was striving to capture quintessential Indianness rather than reality.

He could do this best in the studio, where he was in complete control. When came modeling time, we would be placed on the stage in the exact position as a photograph. Kaos was a romantic idealist, not an anthropologist. His relationship to his models, though it appears paternalistic today, was personal and caring. Grandfather Kaos and I had an understanding. He didn't speak art, and we didn't speak his. When I was on the platform, holding a pose, every so often I would get fidgety.

He would watch me close. And then he'd say, rest chief O' Olly. That meant take about three to five minutes. And when quitting time came, he would always give me a nickel. He called it sea below, meaning buffalo. I wish today I'd kept those nickels. For 35 years Kaos continued to paint in the same style. The pictures meticulously planned and executed appeared to be scientifically accurate documents of Indian life, but they never were. They were products of Kaos's methodical mind. Ben Luhan, the father of the little boy, became part of the family. He took Kaos's name and considered Kaos to be his father. He sat for him in a long succession of poses, each one intended to capture the spirit of the Indian.

But few, if any of the Taos artists were able to penetrate to the heart of the Indian, to know and understand the rituals that tied them to the earth below and the heavens above. Yet the Puebla religion was a source of endless fascination to the artists. Kaos traveled to Arizona to see the Moki Snake Dance. This was something he could never recreate in his studio. In 1919, John Sloan portrayed ancestral spirits, Koshare or Clowns emerging from the Kiva. In Moon Morning Star, evening star, Blumenschein came close to capturing the mystery.

A prayer for the success of the hunters dressed in animal skins is the heart of the ceremony. The priest offers the ritual to the Moon and stars who appear as stylized facial images overseeing all. In a work called superstition, Blumenschein portrayed the spiritual paradox of the Puebla Indian, caught between two religions, his own and the Catholic faith. To some, Christ on the cross was the white man's superstition. The artist Walter Ufer was deeply suspicious of what Christianity had done for the Indians. But many in the Puebla had accepted it as an extra layer of faith.

The Christian shirts arrived in New Mexico with the Spanish. Their culture had coexisted with the Indian for almost three centuries. In Blumenschein arrived, their religion became another source of inspiration for the artist colony. This was a vivid faith with an emphasis on pain and redemption. The stark parable of the crucifixion was somehow close to the spirit of this land. Here were mysteries that had the power to inspire the local Spanish community as surely as the cycle of the seasons inspired the Indians.

To a visitor from the outside world, the burial rights of local sex, like the penitentes, were as strange as the winter rituals of the Puebla hunters. So too were possessions of Christian pilgrims. The traditional ceremonies of the Catholic church in New Mexico still take place. Every night, on the nine days before Christmas, the faithful moved through the coal streets of the villages, re-enacting the quest of Mary and Joseph searching for shelter. In front of the church at Ranchos de Tau's, a fire is lit, and then prayers are offered to the Virgin.

What is startling today, and must have startled the artist colony, is the way the buffalo come to join in this Christian ceremony. These are the abuelos, the old one, animal spirits that dance behind the perception on the way to the fire, and once there, scare away the evil ones. Here the Indian and Spanish cultures are intertwined. Cachinas and crucifixes, the buffalo and the virgin, the Christmas message, and the prayer of the hunter, all become an exotic blur in the eyes of the excited visitor. These images, these rituals, draw people to the basic, the primitive, the elemental. And so it was that a new generation, a second wave of artists, were drawn to the southwest.

They were modernists seeking the primitive. They came to the same outpost as the earlier romantic painters, but for a very different reason. In the 1920s, the magnet at the center of intellectual society in Tau's was an emigrate from New York, Mabel Dodge-Lujan. She was a free thinker, an advocate of Freud, a sponsor of the famous Armory Show of 1913, that introduced America to abstract art. But she had tired of the world of movers and shakers. She came to New Mexico to seek spiritual rejuvenation and fell in love with a Tau's Pueblo Indian. She decided to establish a fashionable salon, Mabel Dodge collected people like ornaments, the poet, the painter, the composer, the anthropologist, the psychoanalyst,

all were welcome here. Welcome to discuss the most modern ideas in her avant-garde form. Her guests were particularly attracted by the promise of contact with truly indigenous American cultures, none more so than D.H. Lawrence. Mabel tried to get Lawrence here for years. She wanted him to interpret New Mexico to the modern world. He suggested they write a novel about her experiences here. She told him how the Indians had saved her from the sad effects of over-civilization, had opened her eyes to the natural, awakened her emotions, allowed her to become a woman. In her own words, she strove to seduce his spirit, to take my experience, my Tau's, and to formulate it all into a magnificent creation.

Lawrence's response to this awesome country was immediate. In the magnificent fierce morning, one sprang awake, a new part of the soul woke up suddenly, and the old world gave way to a new, a vast old religion which once swayed the earth, lingers in unbroken practice here, something wild, untamed, cruel, proud, beautiful, and sometimes evil. This is really America. By the 1920s, modernist painters were directly inspired by the abstract patterns of primitive art.

They saw a purity of form in the traditional designs that seemed to express the native mind. Victor Higgins painting Daisy Mirabal shows the use of flattened shapes and patterns taken from southwestern crafts. These paintings of Jan Matulka echo the Cubism of Picasso. They are angular, geometrical, fragmented, and abstract. The arrival of Andrew Dossberg in Tau's made the first generation of painters look distinctly out of date. He combined elements of Cubism with the colors of Szan. In the road to Lamey, the vertical lines and horizontal shadows cut vividly across each other, powerfully evoking a moment in time, as well as a sense of place.

Raymond Johnson's surreal shapes impose forms that hint of ancient civilizations, earth rhythms, he called them. John Marin cut the landscape into dynamic shapes. Dossberg looked for rhythms in nature. Triangles echoed mountains, rectangles, fields. The landscape launched them into adventures in abstraction. The subject itself was grand enough to allow many interpretations, and Mabel Dodge wanted to know them all. The painters Dossberg, Marin, and Georgia O'Keefe that conducted Leopold Stakowski, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the poet Robinson Jeffers,

the visitors to her house were the cream of intellectual society. This was Bohemia, elite and fashionable. The parties were legendary. Like to like Road Mabel Dodge, the magnetic ones flew to the magnet. The glowing spirits arrived every week and added their lustre to the lustrous valley. Those were the days. The Taos Valley was a magical place. Few of the visitors were happy to leave this coistered Shangri-La.

But by 1933, events were taking place that would make the Taos magic only a memory. It was the end of an era. Balumanchan commemorated this place and this time in a painting, ourselves and our Taos neighbors. Artists like Maynard Dixon and his wife, the photographer Dorothy Alang, reluctantly left the valley. For Maynard Dixon, the forces of nature were the one timeless element in a changing world. Nature is immense, powerful and serene in his paintings. Dixon places man in an age-old context with the land that supports him. Earth knower reflects what Lawrence had called the great Indian belief. The Taos shall acknowledge the wonder.

But man's age-old relationship with the land had dramatically changed by the 1930s. Nowhere more so than in the great plains where the farmer and the sacred plow had replaced the cowboy. The western hard land of America was the setting for one of the greatest self-wrought catastrophes ever known. The dream had shattered. The land of opportunity was turning into a land of terror. Grant Wood painted this area as a kind of American Eden, a dreamscape, but he was being ironic. The land had been overplowed, disaster was in store. Thomas Hart Benton was one of the foremost painters of the American scene in the 1930s.

The symbols in his paintings are startling. After many springs by Benton portrays a farmer plowing his field, but in the foreground, the earth opens up, revealing a human skull, a sinister portent, the dust bowl. Alexander Hogue portrayed the tragedy in all its stark simplicity. Drought stuck the land, where once the pioneer settled, dust and disaster loomed. American farm by Joe Jones is grimly ironic. Hogue, too, showed the rape of the virgin soil in this allegorical piece, Mother Earth, laid bare. Artists tried to project the maximum emotional power onto their canvases as in the paintings of John Stuart Curry and William Palmer.

The plow that broke the plains is a film by Pierre Lawrence that tells a similar story. It's called a documentary, but it's not impartial. Lawrence's aim, like that of the painters, was to create an emotional response. They'd go, blown out, and broke. Year in, year out, uncomplaining. They brought the worst drought in history. They stopped choked to death on the barren land. Their homes were nightmares of swirling dust, night and day.

Many were the hidden, but many stayed. Until stopped machinery, homes, credit, food, and even hope were gone. Farm to the west. Once again, they headed for the setting sun. The art of photography was also employed to alert the American public to the tragedy in their midst. As a result, the story of the dust bowl and the agricultural depression became forever part of the myth of the west.

The Farm Security Administration, the FSA, employed photographers to document in detail what was happening to the land. Arthur Rothstein was the first of the FSA photographers. His heading for an outbuilding in the face of a storm echoed John Stuart Curry's painting of a family fleeing from a tornado. This is Rothstein's eviction of sharecroppers. These pictures have a remarkable impact. They pull the viewer up to the plane of decency. Dorothy Alang, his best known as the photographer of the Great Migration Westwards. 300,000 people left the land to head for California. This is Lang's migrant mother, 1936, and ditched, stalled, and stranded.

Lang's pictures provided the documentary basis for a work that still haunts our memory of those days. John Steinbeck's novel, The Grapes of Wrath, and the film John Ford created from it. He's going to look back more, give the old place a last look, and go to California. Let's go to California. I've had looms, everything I had for life. These pictures were taken by former FSA photographer Russell Lee.

He explains what it was like to document people in such dire circumstances. I'd make a lot of notes about their particular economic situation on the farm. Perhaps what kind of a lease do you have if that happens to be a you don't own your own farm? And how many acres, how many acres of cultivation, type of farming, how the building is good? How's the soil? Soil all right? And what how many are in your family? Are you a young couple with one child or do you have several children? How far are you away from school? This kind of thing. Well, I'd spend maybe 15, 20, 30 minutes just talking to them about their particular economic situation. And then I would have noticed something perhaps in the house there that I would like to photograph. It might be a photograph of their family before. Maybe their mother and father are both together or some particular memorabilia on the wall or somewhere that might be of interest. So I'd say, I'd like to photograph that if you don't mind. And they'd say, why do you want to photograph that? I said, well, no. These are your ancestors. These are your people.

And what I'm taking now is going to be a history perhaps of tomorrow. In 1939, the west of tomorrow was officially unveiled at the New York World's Fair. The fair was a harbinger of hope and a dramatic exercise in imagination. One exhibit transported visitors across the frontier of the future. Superhighways would cut through the mountain. Giant dams would harness the rivers. Suburbs would flow out across the plain. It was both a promise and an omen. It suggested a time when the Western wilderness would be tame. The primitive power of nature control, perhaps forever.

It was the American dream. But in the headlong rush out of the depression of what use was the past. It was the idea of a usable past that motivated the creation of a series of giant murals across the nation in the 1930s. This is the work of Thomas Hart Benton in the Missouri State Capitol. In a time of rapid transition, he realized the importance of putting people back in touch with their roots. Some of the scenes represent the more heroic history of the west. The pony express. The riverboat era.

But this was no whitewash. Benton also portrayed slavery. The lynchings after the Civil War. The tarring and feathering of Mormons. By recalling the collective memory of the past, the mural bound people together and linked their dreams with those of their ancestors. It also offered a context in which to see the future, preparing the community to accept the inevitable changes. Just as Benton's mural interpreted the history of the people of Missouri, Hispanic murals across the southwest tell a story from a different point of view.

The artists here at Cassiano Homes in San Antonio, Texas are teenagers and children from the Barrio. They paint pictures from their past, both history and legend, to help form dreams for their future. There are about 100 murals in this housing project. Many portray Hispanic heroes. The local priest rededicates the mural that tells the tale of Gregorio Cortez, a favorite outlaw hero. But others have a mythic content that goes beyond a single cultural history. There are images of hope, the creation of the world, images of despair, the nuclear arm again.

The crucifixion reconciles the two. A new world, a new future, profoundly connected to the images and icons of the past. Redefining American myths has become the life work of Hispanic artist Luis Jimenez. In the progress series, large fiberglass sculptures in vibrant colors depict favorite American heroes. The sodbuster pays tribute to Thomas Hart Benton's characteristic placement. The vaquero echoes the energy and excitement of a Remington writer. It is also a tribute to the Mexican origins of the cowboy.

Jimenez's newest subject is a southwest pietà, planned for the city of Albuquerque. This popular Mexican myth depicts an Indian man, metaphor for an active volcano, holding a woman, symbol of the dormant land. Jimenez intended the piece to infuse an ancient myth with renewed energy. It's ironic that the city fathers saw it as disturbingly erotic and therefore banished it to the barrio. Eventually, this too will be a gleaming fiberglass reminder of Hispanic roots. Native Americans have also found a new voice in the latter part of the 20th century. Like the Hispanic community, they've moved from being the subject of western art to becoming storytellers in their own right.

By the 1960s, many Indians were tired of being regarded as colorful curiosity, no longer a part of what America had become. The everyday reality of life in the West has changed dramatically, for the Indian, Hispanic and Anglo alike. Many artists believe it pointless to reproduce the old western stereotypes without reinterpreting them in a modern context. The worn-out images, the conventions of the past, must be Jefferson. Fueled by the political activism of the 1960s and early 70s, a revolution in western art started in northern New Mexico.

At the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, the pop Indian was born. A new spirit of pan-Indianism brought students from across the United States. These paintings are by Bill Sosa, and these by Alfred Youngman. Their work was in turn political, satirical, cynical, and coldly distanced.

One of their teachers, Fritz Scholder, was a great influence. What we learn in the beginning is not the truth, and so for the last half of one's life, you start to get some kind of inkling of the truth. That's what art is all about, seeking truth of a day-to-day search of trying to find out, first of all, who you are, and second of all, what can you do to, in some way, make the reality in which you find yourself, in some way, viable. In Scholder's own work, his super-Indian is joined by the cowboy. Again and again, he has reworked these iconic figures, the classic adversaries of the West.

They have become ghostly heroes, like half remembered shadows from a movie of our collective imagination. One of his most gifted students was T.C. Cannon. Cannon created a pop art Indian gallery. See him ride the pit of the pony. On the east, the western sky. See him shoot the banker down. See them chase him out of town, man, I'd like to have that pit of pony. His work is often ironic, with a certain gallows humor as in village with bomb. Cannon died in 1978, this is his self-portrait. He wrote, my determined die, my resolute heart, my singular searching soul, all have windows from which I watch endlessly.

See him kiss the scenery down. The search for the mythic roots of Native American culture is what preoccupies Randi Lee White, a brulee suit. His early work plays with the conventions of Indian ledger art. Custer's last stand, revised, shows the seventh cavalry, has unscrupulous used car salesmen, surrounded and attacked by angry Indians. The useless cars lie dead on their backs. More recently, White has created a series called Messianic Memoirs, in which he portrays the suoi or crazy horse as a Messiah to his people. In 24 paintings, he tells the story of Christ's life, from the enunciation to the resurrection as an Indian legend.

For Randi Lee White, the West is a mythic arena, in which universal stories can be told. In the most recent work of Fritz Scholder, the Cowboys and Indians have been replaced by allegorical figures of the shaman, ghostly spiritual leaders, in touch with primitive forces. Scholder believes the source of their power is in the land, the West. As they search for the roots of our collective memory, Western artists are beginning to explore the symbols of the past. These totem sculptures are by Doug Coffin. They recall a dream time, before the West was civilized, when myths were strong. For artists like Fritz Scholder, the West itself is the dream.

The power of the land lies in its mystery. That first one is the wear of the beauty, the vast skies, the serillion blue skies, the thousands of stars at night, the rugged landscape. But then you realize that there's more. You realize that you have a new awareness of color, even in the tans and greens. And the shadows of the mountains are truly purple, and the sunsets are martyred.

But in the silence of the mountains and deserts, there are ominous vibrations of animals and cultures. The ghosts of all the buffaloes are still stirring. The unknown is still known. The West is the last outburst. The myths and images of the West have helped to shape the American consciousness and define American dreams. As we move toward the year 2000, we have only to ask, what new myths will the West engender?

The West is the last outburst. The West is the last outburst. The West is the last outburst.