Fralin Catalog (6-21-23) - Flipbook - Page 63
The frontier
Westward & Regionalism
T
he American frontier, as both an idea and a reality, is
widely recognized as influential to art and culture within
the United States. In the broadest sense, the age of the
frontier began in 1607 with the founding of Jamestown,
and ended in 1912 with admission of the last territorial regions as
states. The concepts of the frontier and westward expansion implied
and even embraced the forceful conquest and takeover of lands long
home to Indigenous people of the Americas.
The representations of Native American culture in Frederick
Ferdinand Schafer’s Morning on the Lava Beds of the 1870s records a
way of life that was already threatened. As founding members of the
Taos Society of Artists, Oscar Berninghaus and Joseph Henry Sharp
recorded the American Southwest and Native Americans of the Taos
Pueblo. Jerry of Taos by Sharp and Indian with Ponies by Berninghaus
are among the most naturalistic portrayals of early 20th-century
Indigenous peoples by artists of European descent. While such
representations of native cultures in some ways comment upon
legacies of ethnic and cultural loss, they are considered deeply rooted
in traditions of documentary realism.
A more symbolic invocation of the encounter of Native Americans by
pioneers advancing ever westward is found in Thomas Hart Benton’s
Old Kansas City and Open Country, both dating to the 1950s. Along
with John Steuart Curry, Thomas Hart Benton was at the forefront
of American Regionalism, a school of painting that explored
imagery of the American heartland. With its embrace of Native
American figures, coonskin-capped explorers, wagon train pioneers,
and westward-expanding railroads, Old Kansas City celebrates a
mythology of westward expansion that is deeply embedded within
the American psyche.
Opposite: detail of John French Sloan, Plaza, Noon, Santa Fe, 1919, illustrated page 66-67
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