WASHINGTON, 29 June 2003 — When one thinks of the American West of the 1800s — with its desolate plains and even more desolate morality — there are particular images that come to mind; frozen moments nurtured by decades of pulp comics and stories and films that illustrate the rugged romance of a wild lifestyle lived on the fringes of stable society.
The term Wild West recalls images of cowboys and Indians engaged in dusty, horse-driven battle or a single lone ranger walking on foot, dwarfed into meaninglessness by the vast panoramic vistas surrounding him.
To those of us weaned on spaghetti Westerns and mythic tales of violence, the work of the painter, illustrator and sculptor Frederic Remington (1861-1909) is a like a companion piece to these images.
His art is not only an homage to the Old American West but serves to perpetuate its existence, keeping it alive for the generations that will never have a chance to step out onto the barren, silent plains of uncharted territory.
Yet in a recent exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC entitled “Frederic Remington: The Color of Night,” it seems that all the joie de vivre, all the light has been removed from the artist’s work.
The collection of artwork on display, as the exhibition’s title suggests, centers on how Remington’s painting treats the subject of night. And indeed, in a majority of the paintings there is very little light. The nocturnes were Remington’s bid for artistic credibility.
Up until the nocturnes, his work had been most popular in such magazines as Harper’s and Colliers, where his black-and-white illustrations accompanied numerous short stories.
With these nocturnes, however, we get a glimpse of Remington, as he wanted to be perceived: An artist.
His ability to capture a frozen moment in dynamic action still remains; his penchant for visual storytelling still manages to hold the viewer’s attention — but there now hangs over all these images a melancholic atmosphere.
It is not limited to the paintings of night, but pervades even those caught in the orange-yellow hues of a western sunset. A painting such as “Coming to the Call” (1905) — which depicts the final moment of a hunted moose’s life as it stands in meditation on a riverbank — seems filled with a silent loneliness.
Other paintings such as “The Luckless Hunter” (1909) or “Apache Scouts Listening” (1908) only magnify this tragic feeling.
Remington’s color of night tends to be an amalgamation of blue and green that suffuses the entire picture, punctuated only at small intervals by light from a fire, lantern, or even pinpricks of yellow stars in a night sky that seems just as lonely and troubled as some of the artist’s subjects.
Perhaps the most visually stunning of these paintings is the simplest: “Moonlight, Wolf.” (1909) The subject is a wild wolf staring at the viewer in a trance along a dried and stony riverbed, a decent enough subject for anyone cataloguing the animals of the American West. But notice the way the wolf’s two yellow eyes echo the yellow stars in the sky. It is a prime example of how this batch of paintings feels less like a celebration of the American West than a slow, mournful elegy to an era and an environment that was dying, both for a country and for its most fervent and talented representative.
For more information: http://www.nga.gov/feature/remington/remington.htm
