The West as America, Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920 was an art exhibition organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum (then known as the National Museum of American Art, or NMAA) in Washington, D.C. in 1991, featuring a large collection of paintings, photographs, and other visual art created during the period from 1820 to 1920 which depicted images and iconography of the American frontier. The goal of the curators of The West as America was to reveal how artists during this period visually revised the conquest of the West in an effort to correspond with a prevailing national ideology that favored Western expansion. By mixing New West historiographical interpretation with Old West art, the curators sought not only to show how these frontier images have defined American ideas of the national past but also to dispel the traditional beliefs behind the images.
Many who visited the exhibition missed the curators' point and instead became incensed with what they saw as the curators' dismantling of the history and legacy of the American frontier, which caused an unforeseen controversy that, according to art critics, "engaged the public in the debate over western revisionism on an unprecedented scale." Controversial reviews generated widespread media coverage, both negative and positive, in leading newspapers, magazines, and art journals. Television crews from Austria, Italy, and the United States Information Agency vied to videotape the show before its 164 paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, and prints, along with the 55 text panels accompanying the artworks, were taken down. Republican members of the Senate Appropriations Committee were angered by what they termed the show's "political agenda" and threatened to cut funds to the Smithsonian Institution.
The paintings at the Smithsonian American Art Museum represent the United States government's oldest art collection; in its 160-year history, the museum had not received much detrimental publicity before this exhibition. Several key factors, including a prominent venue, skillful promotion, widespread publicity, an elaborate catalog, and the importance of the artworks themselves, all contributed to the impact of the exhibition. Timing also played a part in fostering public response both pro and con, as the show's run coincided with events such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, the allied victory in the Gulf War, the resurgence of multiculturalism, and the revival of public interest in western themes in fashion, advertising, music, literature, and film.
Background The history of the United States' westward expansion is viewed by some as a vital component in interpreting the structure of American culture and the modern national identity. There are competing visions of the western past that assume different western significances; it was the newer versions of western history that were emphasized at the 1991 exhibition. NMAA director Elizabeth Broun stated, "The museum took a major step toward redefining western history, western art and national culture."
The conclusions set forth in The West as America were rooted in revisionist studies such as Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, Richard Slotkin's Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (1973), and William H. and William N. Goetzmann's book and 1986 PBS television series, The West of the Imagination.
Layout The West as America included 164 works of visual art, including paintings, drawings, prints, engravings, photographs, sculptures, and others, created by 86 well-known artists of varying nationality during the period between 1820 and 1920. It was curated by William H. Truettner and a team of seven scholars of American art, including Nancy K. Anderson, Patricia Hills, Elizabeth Johns, Joni Louise Kinsey, Howard R. Lamar, Alex Nemerov, and Julie Schimmel.
A text panel in the last section of the show reads:
The art of Frederic Remington, Charles Schreyvogel, Charles Russell, Henry Farny, and other turn-of-the-century artists has been called a "permanent record" of nineteenth century frontier America. Yet, as the accompanying photographs of Schreyvogel attests, these artists often created their work in circumstances vastly removed from frontier America itself.
Artist Frederic Remington's painting Fight for the Water Hole (1903), which was displayed in the last section of the show's thematic exhibit, was accompanied by a wall text with a quote from the artist that read:
I sometimes feel that I am trying to do the impossible with my pictures in not having a chance to work direct but as there are no people such as I paint it's "studio" or nothing.
Truettner's intention was not to criticize western art but to acknowledge the way the art of the West imaginatively invented its subjects. Truettner sought to demonstrate the deep ties between the art and the artists' participation in the American Art-Union during the antebellum period, and to show that many artists' works were influenced by patronage from capitalists and industrialists of the Gilded Age. Another wall text read:
Although they reveal isolated facts about the West, the paintings in this section reveal far more about the urban, industrial culture in which they were made and sold. For it was according to this culture's attitudes – attitudes about race, class, and history – that artists such as Schreyvogel and Remington created that place we know as the "Old West.""
The National Museum of American Art produced a 390-page book with more than 300 illustrations for the exhibit, which was edited by Truettner and included a foreword by Broun. In addition, the NMAA produced a handbook entitled "A Guide for Teachers", intended for grades 10–12, to help students develop the ability to interpret works of art and to see how and why works of art create meaning. The handbook states, "…the exhibition at the NMAA argues that this art is not an objective account of history and that art is not necessarily history; seeing is not necessarily believing."
Both the curator and the director stated they presented an exhibition on American art that described how images have been misconstrued as truthful representations of history, "But," Broun stated, "the public changed the terms of the debate." Truettner added, "We thought we were doing a show on images in history, but the public was more concerned that we had challenged a sacred premise."
In an effort to create a show that would effectively question past interpretations of familiar works by these artists, the curator divided the artworks into six thematic categories that were accompanied by 55 written text labels. The text labels commented on the artwork and introduced popular and/or dissenting material. Through the use of the 55 text labels, the exhibition curator explicitly asked the audience to "see through" the images to the historical conditions that produced them. This technique raised what critics called "uncomfortable questions about basic American myths and their relationship to art."
"Prelude to Expansion: Repainting the Past"
The exhibition began with historical paintings that introduced the concept of national expansion and included representations of colonial and pre-colonial events such as white male Europeans encountering the unknown North American continent for the first time. One of the first text labels read:
The paintings in this gallery and those that follow should not be seen as a record of time and place. More often than not they are contrived views, meant to answer the hopes and desires of people facing a seemingly unlimited and mostly unsettled portion of the nation.
Truettner writes "...images from Christopher Columbus to Kit Carson show the discovery and settlement of the West as a heroic undertaking. Many nineteenth-century artists and the public believed that these images represented a faithful account of civilization moving westward. A more recent approach argues that these images are carefully staged fiction and that their role was to justify the hardship and conflict of nation building. Western scenes extolled progress but rarely noted damaging social and environmental change." Another text label read:
This exhibition assumes that all history is unconsciously edited by those who make it. Looking beneath the surface of these images gives us a better understanding of why national problems created during the era of western expansion still affect us today.
Works in this section included Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's Christopher Columbus on Santa Maria in 1492 (1855), which shows Christopher Columbus gesturing toward the New World, and The Storming of Teocalli by Cortez and his Troops (1848); Peter F. Rothermel's Columbus before the Queen (1852) and Landing of the Pilgrims (1854); Thomas Moran's Ponce de León in Florida, 1514 (1878); Joshua Shaw's The Coming of the White Man (1850); and Robert Walter Weir's Embarkation of the Pilgrims at Delft Haven, Holland, July 22, 1620 (1857). Colonial paintings included Weir's The Landing of Henry Hudson (1838) and Leutze's Founding of Maryland (1860).
"Picturing Progress in the Era of Western Expansion" The second section of the exhibition focused on portraits of prominent settlers and images of scouts, pioneers, and European immigrants moving west across an unpopulated landscape.
William S. Jewett's The Promised Land – The Grayson Family (1850), portrays a prosperous-looking man with his wife and son, all gazing west, posed against a golden landscape. The text labels called it "more rhetorical than factual", an image that "ignores the controversy that attended national expansion by equating the westward trek of the Grayson Family with white people's belief in the idea of progress."
John Gast's American Progress (1872) depicts the ideal of "Manifest Destiny", a notion popular in the 1840s and 1850s which expounded that the United States was impelled by providence to expand its territory. Called the "Spirit of the Frontier", the scene was widely distributed as an engraving that portrayed settlers moving west, guided and protected by a goddess-like national personification known as Columbia, aided by technology (such as railways and telegraphs), and driving Native Americans and bison into obscurity. The painting shows the angel-like Columbia symbolically "enlightening" the darkened west as light from the eastern side of the painting follows her.
Albert Bierstadt's Emigrants Crossing the Plains (1867) portrays a picturesque party of Germans traveling to Oregon. The canvas shows the warmth of the setting sun and spectacular hues streaking across the sky, which illuminate the sheer cliffs to the right. According to Truettner, paintings constructed this way brought to life for nineteenth-century viewers the western pioneer experience.
Other images of western migration included George Caleb Bingham's Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap (1851–1852). Truettner describes Daniel Boone as the quintessential pioneer, whose energy and resourcefulness helped him to build a generous livelihood from a succession of wilderness homesteads. His image had become a national symbol exemplifying the spirit of adventure and accomplishment. But Boone's initial visit to Kentucky, Truettner explains, was prompted by real-estate speculation. He writes, "…in fact [these men] were no more than commercial vanguards. They were trespassers on foreign territory who began the process of separating Indians from their land. These images communicated that opportunities on the frontier awaited everyone and perpetuated the myth that the settling of the west was peaceful, when in reality it was bitterly contested every step of the way."
"Inventing 'The Indian'"