Sunday, June 08, 2008
Exhibit Presents Blumenschein's Modernist West
By David Steinberg - June 8, 2008 Albuquerque Journal North
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The image on the cover of the catalog for the Ernest Blumenschein art exhibit
is right at home.
The image is of the painting “Star Road and White Sun,” an important work in the first definitive exhibit of Blumenschein's art — portraits, landscapes and illustrations — opening today at the Albuquerque Museum.
“Star Road” is in the permanent collection of the museum and is frequently on display there.
But the 1920 oil on canvas, which shows men of two generations of Pueblo
Indians, has a story to tell.
Having been an illustrator, Blumenschein told stories through his art.
Elizabeth Cunningham, a longtime Blumenschein scholar, called this a narrative painting.
But how should you read the painting?
“You can look at the two Native Americans glaring at you from the canvas. Right away, I thought of 'J'accuse' from the (Alfred) Dreyfus trial (in 1890s France). It's used in accusation and outrage,” Cunningham said.
The story behind the painting, she said, is that between 1878 and 1928, Indian children were taken from their families and communities to go to boarding schools to become “civilized.”
“For Taos Pueblo boys that meant you were away and not going into the kiva and not getting the learning of traditional ways, the equivalent of becoming a man. Sort of manhood rights,” Cunningham said.
“That meant when the youngsters returned to the pueblo they were stripped of their traditional holistic ways,” she said.
So the figure of Star Road, the younger man in the painting at the right, is wearing American clothes and hat.
The blue and orange-red scarf is an emblem of his use of peyote that's used in the Native American church, but it's not a Taos Pueblo tradition, Cunningham said.
By 1918, she said, the pueblo was split between the peyote ways and the traditional pueblo ways.
“So I believe what Blumenschein is saying in this painting is, 'What have you imposed on us? What have you done to us?' And they're looking out at the government and at the American public, saying 'J'accuse.' ”
(This is the same painting that three senior classes at Albuquerque High School had purchased from Blumenschein in the mid-1940s; the Albuquerque Public Schools sold it and other art in the AHS collection to the museum 40 years later. It's now worth several million dollars, according to Albuquerque Museum director Cathy Wright.)
Peter Hassrick, who worked with Cunningham in writing essays on Blumenschein, said his social commentary paintings are in contrast to the work in the same period by Taos artists Joseph Henry Sharp and Bert Phillips, who idealized the Indian.
Wright said the catalog designers at the University of Oklahoma Press had recommended to the exhibit organizers that this painting be used on the cover.
“We wanted to pick an image that was representative of Blumenschein's work but also that showed him in a real Modernist light as an artist,” Wright said.
Though the painting has a realistic representation of the two figures, the mountain background is Modernist, because it is painted in a less realistic way, she said.
“It's more Impressionistic as to the forms and colors,” Wright said.
The 61 paintings in the exhibit represent all periods of Blumenschein work.
One of them, “Two Burros” (1925), shows his developing a Modernist's interest in landscape.
Another, “Indians in the Mountains” (originally titled “Landscape
with Indians”), has a group of Pueblo Indians on horseback and wearing
Navajo and
Rio Grande blankets as decorative motifs, Cunningham wrote in the catalog.
The 1936 painting was renamed after Blumenschein reworked it in 1938.
Jerry Smith, associate curator of American Art at the Phoenix Art Museum, said Blumenschein “had a foot in each camp,” the traditional and the Modernist.
“He understood his place. He was traditionally trained but he appreciated what the Modernists were doing,” Smith said.
As early as 1913, Blumenschein had written a positive review of the avant-garde art in the landmark Armory Show.
“He is not only noting that this is great stuff but it's going to have a lasting effect, and he could see it,” Smith said.
“In the mid-1920s he was encouraging young artists to be accepted into the National Academy of Design exhibitions, even writing the New York Times, calling for it.”
It was probably not until the 1940s, when Abstract Expressionism came on the scene, that Blumenschein began to lose his footing in the art world, he said.
The exhibit catalog's foreword said Blumenschein “embraced Post-Impressionist color and texture, abstract organic pattern and structural design ...” in constructing the foundations for his art.
Over his career Blumenschein had shown at New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of New Mexico and the 1939 World's Fair.
In 1959, the year before Blumenschein died, the director of Madrid's Museum of Modern Art called him “a true patriarch of painting.”
The catalog for the exhibit is really a 400-page large-format book, said Wright, because it contains extensive essays about the artist and his art.
The catalog-book sells for $35 in paperback and $55 in cloth.
The University of Oklahoma Press and the Charles M. Russell Center Series on Art and Photography of the American West underwrote the printing and distribution of the catalog-book.
If you go
WHAT: “In Contemporary Rhythm: The Art of Ernest L. Blumenschein”
WHEN: Today through Sept. 7. Museum hours are 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays
WHERE: Albuquerque Museum, 2000 Mountain NW
HOW MUCH: $4 general public, $3 New Mexico residents, $2 seniors, $1 children
4-12. Free admission Sundays 9 a.m.-1 p.m. and the first Wednesday of every
month.
