West of The Imagination; 106; Enduring Dreams; Final Version

The everyday reality of life in the West has changed dramatically. For the Indian, Hispanic, and Anglo alike. Cute by the political activism of the 1960s and early 1970s. A revolution has come. It's the most powerful. The most powerful. The most powerful. The most powerful. The most powerful. The most powerful. The most powerful. This program is made possible by the NELDA-C and H.J. Lutcher's Stark Foundation, owner and operator of the Stark Museum of Art in Orange, Texas and NELDA-C Stark. By the end of the 19th century, the West was settled.

The frontier had closed. What Frederick Remington called the Wild Writers and the vacant lands had vanished forever. Or so it appeared. The United States have become an industrial giant with teaming states. 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. Bird Phillips and Ernest Blumenstein were artists trained in Paris. They were seeking fresh subjects when their wagon broke a wheel. This chance event was the unlikely turning coin 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 Blumenstein. He wrote, never shall I forget the first powerful impression. My own impression. Through my own hands. Not another man's picture. Such beauty of color, vigorous form. Ever changing life. Natal's family took his delight and founded the still living in harmony with the land. And a peace with their Spanish neighbors. It was as if the tragic conflicts of the 19th century had never taken place. It's a little wonder that artists would later idealize the Pueblo Indians as nature's known, 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 source of inspiration. Simple houses and ancient churches, fashioned from the earth itself. To the artist, these villages were an oasis of peace in the busy 20th century.

At the head of the valley, the artist came upon a place that stood still in time, the Pueblo of Tows. 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 Tows' Monk, deriving their power and inspiration from them.

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. He Irving Couse, 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 Tows 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 Tows 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. Whenever they're 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 Tows Society of Artists, an American group devoted to American subjects. The approach taken by E. Irving Kauss was typical of the artist's fascination with the Indian. Kauss 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. Kauss' main model was a Tows Indian, called Ben Flouha. 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 Kauss' residence by 7 a.m. Grandmother Kauss would have given us breakfast, and in the meantime, Mr. Kauss would be in the studio, getting things ready for the day's business. Like many other artists of the group, Kauss 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. Kauss 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.

Kauss was a romantic idealist, not an anthropologist. His relationship to his models, though it appears paternalistic today, was personal and caring. Grandfather Kauss and I had an understanding. He didn't speak our tongue, 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' Wally. That meant take about three to five minutes. And when quitting time came, he would always give me a nickel. He called it, see below, meaning buffalo. I wish today I'd kept those nickels.

For 35 years Kauss 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 Kauss's methodical mind. Ben Luhan, the father of the little boy, became part of the family. He took Kauss's name and considered Kauss to be his father. He sat for it, in a long succession of poses. Each one intended to capture the spirit of the Indian. But few, if any, of the Tao's artists were able to penetrate to the heart of the Indian, to know and understand the rituals that tied him to the earth below, and the heavens upon him.

Yet the Pueblo religion was a source of endless fascination to the artist. Kauss traveled to Arizona to see the Mokisnake dance. This was something he could never recreate in his studio. In 1919, John Sloan prepared an ancestral spirit for Shari or clowns emerging from the teeth. In World Morning Star, evening Star, a Roman shine came close to capturing the mystery. A prayer for the success of the Hunters, dressed in animal skins, was the heart of the ceremony. The priest offers the ritual to the Moon and Star to appear as stylized facial images overseeing all.

In a war called superstition, Blumenshine portrayed the spiritual paradox of the Pueblo 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 Pueblo 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. When Blumenshine arrived, their religion became another source of inspiration for the artist's 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 rites of local sex, like the penitentes, were as strange as the winter rituals of the Pueblo Hunters.

So too were possessions of Christian pilgrim. 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 Rancho's dead towels, a fire is lit. Then pairs are offered to the Virgin. What is startling today, and must have startled the artist's colony, is the way the buffalo comes to join in this Christian sound. These are the outweighers, the animals spirits that dance behind the perception of the weight of the fire. And once they're scared away, they begin to run.

Here, the Indian and Spanish cults, these are Peter Twine, the chinas and those around him. On the lower version, the Christmas message, and the prayer of the hunter, will become an exotic glow in the eyes of the excited visitor. These images, these rituals, brought people to the mercy of the current, the element. And so it was that a new generation, a second wave of artists, will draw into the subway.

They won modernists, seeking the primitive. They came to the same outpost as the earlier romantic names, but for a very different reason. In the 1920s, the magnet to the center of intellectual society in Taos, was an emigrate from New York, Mabel Dodge, Lohan. 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 Taos 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 overcivilization, 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 Taos, 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 unburgened practice here, something wild, untamed, cruel, proud, beautiful, and sometimes evil. This is really American. 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 and Taos made the first generation of painters look distinctly out of date. He combined elements of Cubism with the colors of Suzanne. 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 civilization, earth rhythms, he called them. John Mirren cut the landscape into dynamic shapes. Dossberg looked for rhythms in nature. Triangles echoed mountain, rectangles, fields. The landscape launched them into adventures in abstraction. The Sunday itself was grand enough to allow many interpretations, and Mabel Dodge wanted to know the world. The painter's Dossberg, Mirren and George O. came to conduct early opposed to Cousin, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the poet Robinson Jeffers.

The visitors to her house with a dream of intellectual society. This was Bohemian, elite and fashionable. The parties were legendary. Music Like to like Mabel Dodge, the magnetic ones flew to the magnet. The glowing spirits arrived every evening and added their lustre to the lustre smile. Those were the days. The Tal's Valley was a magic place. A few of the visitors were having a week as coincidence. It was the end of an era.

Flemenschein commemorated this place and this time in a painting, ourselves and our Tal's neighbors. Artists like Maynard Dixon and his wife, the photographer Dorothea Lang, were left in 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 ageal context with a land that supports him. Earth knower reflects what Lawrence had called the great Indian belief, thou shalt 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 lands where the farmer and the sacred plow had replaced the common. The western hard land of America was the setting for one of the greatest self-locked catastrophes ever known. The dream had shut. The land of opportunity was turning into a land of terror. Radwood painted this area as a kind of American even, a green scale, but he was being ironic. The land had been overploughed. 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, Benton portrays a farmer plowing his field, but in the foreground, the earth opens up, revealing a human skull, a sinister portent, a dust bowl. Alexander Hogue portrayed the tragedy in all its stark simplicity. Drought stalk the land, where once the pioneers 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, William Palmer.

The plow that broke the plains is afield by peril, and tells a similar story. It's called a documentary, but it's not impartial. Mullens' aim, like that of the painters, was to create an emotional response. They'd go, low now, and broke. Year in year-old, under the blade, they walked the listar in history. They stopped, choked it out on the barren land. Their homes were nightmares of swirling dust, night and day.

Many were the hidden, but many stayed until stars, machinery, homes, credit, food, and even hope. I'm going to go. 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 the 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. It's going to look back more. Give the old place a last look. Go to California, please. All right then, let's go to California. I'm going to lose everything I have to lie. 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. How many acres? How many acres and cultivation? Type of farming? Are the buildings 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 away from school? This kind of thing. Well, I'll 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 before I take you now, it's going to be a history perhaps of tomorrow. In 1935, the west of tomorrow was officially a band of the New York World's Fair. If there was a harbinger of hope, your magick keeps nice and energetic. Why is it that time-sporting visitors across the frontier of the country? Is it where our lives will come through the night? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. The proud of nature, the proud of nature, the proud of nature, perhaps the world. It was the American world. I never had one of our shipyard without a question.

Now what use was the past? It was the idea of a usable past that motivated the creation of a series of giant mirrors across the nation in the 1930s. This is the work of Thomas Hartman and the Missouri State General. 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 Boni Express. The river bone here. But this was no whitewash. Men also portrayed slavery. The lynchings after the Civil War. 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. I dig into the history of the people of Missouri. If Sp tapping mirrors crossed the South-west, tell the story from a different point of view. the people of Missouri, Hispanic heroes, cross the Southwest, tell a story

from a different point of view. They are this here at Contiano Looms in San Antonio, Texas, their teenagers and children from the Barrio. They paint pictures from their past, their local history of legend, to help form dreams for their future. There are about 100 murals in this housing project. Many of us praise Hispanic heroes. Right through the sea. The local priest rededicates the mural but tells the tale of Gregorio Cortezco, a favorite of us. But others have been in the sun in town and 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 tomb, 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 Vajcaro 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 subject to 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. The Indian, Hispanic, and Anglo alike. Many artists believe it pointless to reproduce old western stereotypes without reinterpreting them in a modern context. The worn out images, the conventions of the past, must be Jefferson. The world by the political activism of the 1960s and early 1970s.

A revolution of history. A revolution of history. A revolution of history. A revolution of history. A revolution of history. 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. And that's what art is all about. Seeking truth of a day-to-day search. I'm 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. Seeking right in the pit of the only. All the need for the western sky. Seeking shoot the banker down. See them chase him out of town.

And I'd like to have that hit up on me. His work is often ironic, with a certain gallows humor as in village with pop. Cannon died in 1978. This is his self-portrait. He wrote, My determined eye, my resolute heart, my singular searching soul, all have windows from which I watch endlessly. Seeking shoot. The search for the mythic roots of Native American culture is what preoccupies a landy day white, a fuley suit. His early work plays with the conventions

of Indian ledger art. Custer's last stand revised shows the seventh cavalry as 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 Sue Warrior 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 Andy 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 like done coffee. They were called on green time. Before the West was civilized, it was a myth of the West. For artists like Fritz Scholder, the West itself is the dream.

The power of the land lies in its mystery. At first, one is aware of the beauty. The vastest skies that surround blue skies. Thousands of stars at night. The rugged landscape. But then, he realized that there's more. He realized that you have a new awareness of color, even in the tans and greens. And that's shadows of the mountains are truly purple. In the sunset, there are a martian. But in the silence of the mountains and deserts, there are endless vibrations, animals and cultures.

It goes to the morning about the moment I'm still stirring. The news comes. 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 of the West have taught us. In the 20th century,

is the mythical heritage of the West in danger. Have all the horsemen passed by. Puehlet's her prize winning historian, Dr. William Getzman, has spent much of his time pondering these questions. He's the creator of the West of the imagination. Dr. Getzman, have the horsemen passed by? I don't think so. Around the world, the cowboy and Mickey Mouse are the two most acknowledged heroes that relate to the United States, and I think they're alive and well. We've had a president Reagan, who was a westerner and considered a cowboy. Some of our great international statesmen like Henry Kissinger pictured themselves as cowboys, the lone gun, riding into save the world. And I think people that image appeal to people and also think as we passed the Sun Belt and the West grow in population

that the Western image will also continue to grow rather than to decline. Speaking of the Sun Belt, those Indian artists, now that seems to be the image of the West in transition because they are obviously angry artists. What are they doing out there? Well, they're figured to be really speaking blowing up an icebox at a shattering the mold. They're not going to want to be professional Indians. They want to be Native American artists. So what they've done is one of the most exciting developments in American art. They've taken their old myths and made them new. And they've managed to create a whole new art form in their painting and their sculpture. And to re-new and rejuvenate their own culture and movement. What new myths can we expect to be engendered as we move into the 21st century? Well, no one can be a complete

prophet, especially historians. But I think what we can expect is for the Western myth to continue because it's our great national saga and it gives us identity. And I think what we will do is go through a process similar to that of the Native Americans. And we will never lose touch with the basic identity engendered by the great Western myth in our great national saga. And I think we're also well advised to take our cue from D.H. Lawrence, who said of this great national saga thou shall acknowledge the wonder. Thank you, Dr. Getsman. .

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