Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 1985
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 5, No. 1, Winter 1985, pp. 3-4.
Abstract
From colonial times, American art has been subject to European stylistic influences, but art historians have not heretofore devoted much attention to the effect of such influences on the visual art of the Great Plains. Thus this topic seemed a fruitful theme for the 1984 annual symposium of the Center for Great Plains Studies, as was proved by the variety of proposals elicited by a call for papers. Many of the submitted papers concerned the various manifestations of Romanticism and its effects on painting in and of the region. Romanticism, an imprecise term, covers a multitude of feelings, philosophies, and beliefs, ranging from vague longings for distant pasts and distant places to the desire to establish an individual existence in an ideal society. Romanticism tinged many of the developments that have shaped our modern world, including the rise of democracy, the attempt to create utopian communities, the systematic development of the sciences, and the process of founding nations defined by linguistic and cultural affinities. All these notions in one way or another influenced the arts. The four articles that follow present a cross section of the papers presented at the symposium, more of which will appear in future issues of the Great Plains Quarterly.
Stephen Behrendt's "Originality and Influence in George Caleb Bingham's Art" questions the importance of influences and cautions against inflating them. Behrendt does not deny that Bingham, like many of his contemporaries, was strongly attracted to the Biedermeier style of neoclassicism as taught at the Düsseldorf Academy in Germany. Emmanuel Leutze's familiar painting Washington Crossing the Delaware epitomizes the Düsseldorf manner of uniting theatrical, baroque light effects with neoclassical linearity and also sets recent historical figures in postures copied from GrecoRoman sculpture. Behrendt contends, however, that Bingham's uses of antique poses and backgrounds like those of French painter Claude Lorrain are more than stylistic. These devices gave viewers a point of reference, enabling them to understand experiences outside of their own particular realm. The Romantic dreams of faraway places, and for the eastern viewer, scenes from Bingham's Missouri frontier had an allure as powerful as scenes of the mysterious Orient. Pictures such as the Jolly Flatboatmen and Fur Traders Descending the Missouri excited the viewer's imagination; but while the dancing boatman may have been copied from the Hellenistic sculpture The Dancing Satyr, and while the background of the Fur Traders may have been Claudian, Bingham's paintings emphasized American traits: freedom, and life in and of nature.
The Romantic also dreams of times past. Kirsten Powell demonstrates in her article, "Cowboy Knights and Prairie Madonnas: American Illustrations of the Plains and PreRaphaelite Art," that popular illustrators saw many similarities between the myth of the West and the Arthurian legend. The English PreRaphaelite painters, Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, William Holman Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, recreated scenes from medieval romance in a style loosely based on early Italian Renaissance painting. Their emphasis on somewhat sentimental, quasireligious themes, painted with meticulous detail, inspired the American illustrator Howard Pyle, who in turn influenced his students Harvey Dunn, Frank Schoonover, and N. C. Wyeth. They equated the cowboy with their romanticized version of the medieval knight. The -cowboy's fights against cattle rustlers and land grabbers took on epic dimensions as the humble proletarian reached aristocratic status. Right and wrong were clearly defined in the popular cowboy tales' and illustrations. No matter how simple and unsophisticated the hero may have been, he knew what was right, and he did it. The women in his life, as we know from the short stories and the films and television series that succeeded them, were saintly even when barroom-tarnished. Powell shows us how the Pre-Raphaelite vision of Saint George rescuing the world from evil and of the Virgin Mary bearing the hope of the future helped define the popular conception of the hero and heroine of the Old West.
Comments
Copyright 1985 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln