Art in the Southwest

by MITCHELL A. WILDER

A SURVEY of the museums and art activities across such a sweeping expanse as the Southwest requires good transportation and an open mind. You are definitely off “the circuit so far as art museums are concerned, but your investigation will give you renewed faith in the value of art in this country, provided your basis of evaluation is the suitability of the job to the purpose, and not size or impressive collections. .Museums here are still young and must fill a need in the lives of the public. By and large, they lack endowment and must earn themselves or shut up shop.

Two approaches to the problem may be distinguished. Public interest is directed to the local artist. appealing to regional pride as well as fostering the artist’s work. For the historically-minded visitor, a new and growing field, native American arts, past and present, has become an essential part of the museum program. The popular appeal of these activities is the story of success in the small museum.

Texas first — both for its present and its future, with Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio rated in that order for their service to the public. Fort Worth is solving the museum problem with a new building which promises something truly progressive in museum design. Elsewhere the task of presenting and interpreting the visual arts rests with academic groups: University of Texas at Austin; Texas Western College at EI Paso: Texas Technical College at Lubbock; and at Denton, North Texas State College and Texas State College for Women — to name a few. What matters is that an art exhibition program is finding its way ahout these vast plains. Fifteen years ago such a plan would have been operating in a vacuum. Today Texas museums provide an ob ject lesson in coöperation and successful public relations. Each year Witte Memorial Museum in San Antonio, tin* Museum of Fine Arts of Houston, and the Dallas Museum join forces to provide an all-Texas painting and sculpture show which is of interest to the public (107,000 attended at Dallas during the Stale Fair).

Texan Jerry Hyvvaters looks like a rancher rather than the painter and museum director he is. Hywaters and the Dallas Museum are pacing the Southwest with an art school, a children’s eduention program, and an exhibition schedule singularly rich in regional interest and aesthetically well-balanced. In the annual graphics show the emphasis is toward regional participation of the Southwest, while in the three other annuals — crafts, architecture, and painting—sculpture —the entry fist is restricted to Texans. Last year Hyvvaters decided to open two galleries for the permanent display of useful arts and design a lest ing ground as well as exhibit ion, where the citizen may sit in the latest gadget designed to keep him off the floor, read beside the newest in lamps, and decide at no personal cost what the modern home is coming to. It is the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) idea extended. Texans love it.

Dallas collecting, like the shows, is concentrated on regional artists and contemporary American works. Paintings by the museum school faculty members. Otis Dozier and Russell Vernon Hunter, have recently been added to the collections, while art teachers at the University in Austin have been crowding the accessions ledger: William Lester, Everett Spruce, Dan W ingren, and sculptor Charley Umlauf. De Forrest Judd, teacher at Southern Methodist University, is a new name to be re mem bored, as is E. M. Schiwetz of Houston.

Like everything else in Texas, the museum is energetic and expansive, desiring no part of a tradition which might limit activity. Bywaters describes his museum as “a little regional outfit trying to behave like a metropolitan organization.”

Spinning across the grasslands toward New Mexico, let us consider the peculiar situation of New Mexican rmiseums. Living with the most dramatic natural and human phenomena in America, a fabulous landscape and the atomic age in the flesh, would seem sufficient stimulus to most people; yet the historical wealth and antiquities of the region endow a small population with a great cultural responsibility. In fact the entire state is one huge outdoor exhibit with science, art, mature, and mankind all clamoring for attention. The historian and archaeologist have been on the seene for years, as has the artist who discovered the charm of Santa Fe and Taos in the early 1900s.

The cultural index of the state has risen to tremendous heights in times past, and today among the creative artists who find the New Mexican landscape inspiring are .lohn Sloan, Joe Bakos, Gus Baumann, and Will Schuster. Santa Fe probably has more museums per capita than any other spot in America. Not only are today’s artists on view, but so are the remains of several previous civilizations, including the contemporary Indian and Spanish-American. Fortunately, the long administrative snarl among Santa Fe museums has found a solution in Boaz Long, Direclor of the Museum of New Mexico and former American Minister to various Latin American countries.

To see the full assemblage of New Mexican artists, and they are legion, the Museum of New Mexico is the spot. You will find many names you know, and many more that you don’t. Theodore Van Soelen, Randall Davey, Dorothy Brett, Emil Bisttram are easy; among othors from Now Mexico they have recently been shown at the Metropolitan in Now York. Lessor names, but deserving attention, are Veronica Helfensteller, Sam Smith of Albuquerque, Agnes Sims, who finds her Indians on the abstract side, and Roderick Mead, wood engraver from Carlsbad. One unique feature: the galleries are available to all comers without fear or favor. A pleasing thing about the Museum on the Plaza is its catholic taste and desire to put the artist across to the public. Most galleries sooner or later lose some of their enthusiasm for the home folks. Not so in Santa Fe; or, if they do, you’ll not discover it through a casual visit.

Taos is seventy miles up the Rio Grande from Santa Fe. En route you will pass by the Ahiquiu turnoff loading to the Chama Valley, Ghost Ranch, and the magnificent retreat in which Georgia O’Keeffe has isolated herself. Taos has suffered less from modernization than its neighbor—or, at least, the atomic ago doesn’t seem so imminent here. Nationally prominent as an art colony in bygone years, it has surrendered much of its glory and lives principally upon its past name and a nostalgic but outmoded sly In of painting. The strongly regional theme, Indian or mesa, is still selling but not showing elsewhere to any great degree. Howard Cook and surrealist Tom Benrimo live in “Taos and prove that there are exceptions. There are eight active art galleries in the village — evidence that art Is still economically sound.

In Albuquerque a new school, the Rio Grande Workshop, is hoping to open its doors next summer under the leadership of Adja Yunkers, recently at the New School. A foretaste of Yunkers’s ability and imagination appeared last autumn in a new portfolio of art and poetry. Prints in the Desert. With the existing art organization at the Universily, under Kenneth Adams and Raymond Jonson (of the airbrush and giddy color), Albuquerque looks to be the center of things in New Mexico so far as the creative end of art is concerned.

A 300-mile drive up the spine of the continent will find us in Denver, Colorado — Culture-erazy Colorado.” where music festivals, art schools, and symposia come in hunches like grapes. Three years ago, Denver’s municipal election sank the hopes for a new building for the burgeoning Denver Art Museum. Evidently the voters felt a Stock Show Stadium would pay off in more tangible returns than would an art museum. Otto Karl Bach, Director, and a revitalized Board of Trustees made the best of the electorate’s apathy, put their pathetically small building fund into rehabilitation of a cent rally located garage, and have come up with one of t he best exhibition rooms in America, the Sell Icier Memorial Gallery. As a first step in solving Denvers art dilemma (large collections, no galleries) Schleier Memorial has proved the answer. One year after its opening the museum has $400,000 in hand for the second step — a three-story wing all contributed as a result of interest in the new gallery.

At Colorado Springs the Fine Arts Center plays a dual role as a museum offering contemporary art plus a heavy agenda of native arts in the Taylor Museum. The Taylor Museum, named for its founder, Alice Bemis Taylor, is a department of the whole, the Fine Arts Center. To the Taylor Museum goes the honor of possessing one of the great collections of native art in America, the New Mexican santos. These are religious figures carved by the Mexican colonists during the frontier years, circa 1775 to 1875. Long passed by as mere “church furniture, santos came into their own during the 1930s. Numerous collectors and museums, recognizing the simple aesthetic formula of the devout craftsman for its compelling sincerity and emotional content, scoured the market, to the delight of curio dealers.

The Center, on the other hand, purchases in the contemporary field, and its most important shows, New Accessions. U.S.A. and Artists West of the Mississippi, point this direction. A rapid exhibition turnover is the rule, to keep the loealites interested. This year Colorado Springs is going all out on Northwest Coast Indians, in coöperation with the Seattle Art Museum and the University of Washington. As planned, the show will be a coming-tolife process for the handsome publication by Robert Bruce Inverarity, Art of the Northwest Coast Indians (University of California Press, $10.00).

During the past twenty years there has been a growing interest in the native arts, especially those of the Western world. Time was when the curios of the aboriginal were to be found only in natural history and anthropology museums. Nearly every art institution, however, has received gifts of native American craftsmanship which were promptly placed in dead storage as having no relationship to the generally accepted definition of art. At least one major institution sent off the native oddments on indefinite loan, glad to free the space for more “important works of art.”It was not until the early twenties that any major art museum startled planned collecting in this field.

In the mid-1920s two men in the West, Kenneth M. Chapman at Santa Fe and Frederic H. Douglas in Denver, undertook independent studies of the Indian as a creative artist. Chapman worked chiefly on ceramics and textiles of the Southwestern tribes, while Douglas, holding the curatorship of Indian art in the Denver Art Museum, was proving that such it department could exist.

The Denver story is important, for it is the beginning of a change of attitude on the part of American art museums. Frederic Douglas and his Indian oddities set up shop in the basement of a noble Denv er brownstone house. Through the years the collection has grown magnificently, and with it the department has produced publications (the well-known Indian Leaflet Series; 10 cents each, over 100 titles in print), design plates, and exhibitions, and — most important of all — has pulled the Indian out of his anthropological pigeonhole and presented him to us as a creative human being.

The climax of this trend came in the great Indian shows at the San Francisco Fair in 1939-1940 and the Museum of Modern Art in 1941. With the guiding genius of Rene d’Harnoncourt, formerly with the Indian Arls and Crafts Board and presently Director of the Museum of Modern Art, the arts of the Indian from Alaska to Florida were properly shown and interpreted for the first time before the sophisticated art audiences of America. Since that date native arts have become desiderata throughout the land, and the market for examples of unusual interest and quality is forever rising.

The interest in native arts as indicated by exhibitions extends into every corner of America. The Portland Art Museum recently presented the Rasmussen Collection of Northwest Coast Indian materials in an opening show which Director Tom Colt very properly proclaimed a “minor potlatch.” (Potlatch is a great ceremonial occasion among Northwest Indians.) The Taft Museum in Cincinnati has been enjoying a recent show of Central and South American antiquities and the Cleveland Art Museum, the Nelson Galleries in Kansas City, and several Pacific Coast museums have permanent installations of superb native American art.

Philbrook Art Center at Tulsa, Oklahoma, offers an annual American Indian Painting exhibition in April—a rara avis in art exhibitions, for it functions within a clear-cut, foreign aesthetic standard, founded In the Indian ethnic background and not in our own artistic tradition. American Indians of any tribal ancestry are eligible, whether they are in Indian school, are alumni of those schools, or are simply the Indian equivalent of our Sunday painters. Last year 153 entries representing 31 tribes were juried by a group of Indians, anthropologists, and artists. Philbrook’s now director. Bob Church, reports favorably upon the jurying system and the Indian reaction. Because the show is a sincere attempt at cultural rejuvenation in the natives’ terms, they view it as a new hope for the rebirth of creative Indian art.

Should you be inclined to frontier atmosphere, Oklahoma museums will provide you with a rare treat, for in no other state will you run into cow boy and Indian painting in equivalent quality or quantity. There is an interesting disparity in taste indicated here: while some museums have been clearing out canvases dealing with the early West, two in Oklahoma, the Gilchrist Foundation in Tulsa and the Woolaroe Museum at Bartlesville, are frantically picking them up. The former is the proud owner of the Cole Collection of Frederic Remingtons and Charley Russells. The finest examples, numbered by the hundreds, are here, together with fine Indian collections. Woolaroe Museum, a synthetic name compounded by the founders, is the gift of Frank Phillips. Here the pageant of history, especially in the Southwest, is presented through excellent historical and Indian collections aided and abetted by painting. As Director Pat Patterson expresses it, “these are the kind of pictures people want to see": Remington, Russell, Frank T. Johnson, and the flower of the Taos school. Set in a 6000-acre game preserve with wild life roaming at will, visitors find Woolaroe a living chapter of the old West.

The newest addition to Santa Fe is the Museum of International Folk Art, the gift of Chicago’s Florence Dibell Bartlett. The new building is going up between the Laboratory of Anthropology and Mary Wheelwright’s Museum of Navaho Religion. Robert Bruce Inverarily is the Director. No specific statement of field or program has been forthcoming, but the building won’t be ready for several months. In any event, a new folk-art museum serves to emphasize again the growing interest throughout the country in native arts.