How The West Was Spun

By ROBERT HUGHES

The first photograph in the catalog of "The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920," the large and deeply interesting show now on view at Washington's National Museum of American Art, has to be one of the funniest ever seen in a museum. It is of Charles Schreyvogel, a turn-of-the- century Wild West illustrator, painting in the open air. His subject crouches alertly before him: a cowboy pointing a six-gun. They are on the flat roof of an apartment building in Hoboken, N.J. Such was the "authentic West" of Schreyvogel and other painters like Frederic Remington and Charles Russell, circa 1903.

It is the right emblem for this show. Religious and national myths are made, not born; their depiction in art involves much staging, construction and editing, under the eye of cultural agreement. Whatever the crucifixion of a Jew on a knoll 2,000 years ago looked like, it wasn't Tintoretto. And the American West of the 19th century was rarely what American artists set out to make it seem.

What they left, instead, is a foundation myth in paint and stone. Its main character is God, the approving father, as manifested in the landscape that he had created and that white migrants were now taking for themselves. Its human actors are frontier scouts and settlers, cavalrymen and trappers, and the American Indians -- noble at first, then seen as degenerate enemies of progress as the century went on and their resistance grew, and finally (by the 1890s) turning into doomed phantoms. Its landscapes are prodigious. Its stage material includes the Conestoga wagon, the simple cabin, the tepee, the isolated fort, the deep perspective V of the railroad -- and at the end, symbol of absolute victory over nature, the California sequoia with a road cut through its trunk.

Among the painters of this myth were George Catlin, friend of the explorer William Clark and indefatigable painter of native tribes; George Caleb Bingham, that vigorous orderer of American genre scenes; the landscapists Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran; and a host of lesser figures, who also played their part in the creation of a heroic imagery of national conquest. And here the difficulty rises, for Americans still wish to believe in the "historical" truth of their icons, which is what such pictures have become.

"The West as America" comprises hundreds of items -- paintings, sculpture, prints, photographs, caricatures -- and is an enlightening exhibition, though not a consoling one. John Wayne would have disapproved. The exhibition shows how the vast exculpatory fiction of Manifest Destiny wound its way round the facts of conquest and turned them into art. It therefore does a valuable service, even in the banal aesthetic quality of much of the work in it -- those earnest efforts of small, provincial talents whose work would not be worth studying except for the clarity with which it enshrines the obsessive themes of an expansionist America.

The American West of Hollywood was there in art, 70 years before, in most of its shades of triumphalism and moral uncertainty. It is the nature of big subjects to produce floods of bathos, as well as a few masterpieces, and to foster works of singular political equivocation.

< It is fascinating to see how prototypes from older art were adapted to the artists' ends. Thus the motif of Moses leading the Exodus becomes Bingham's image of Daniel Boone escorting settlers through the Cumberland Gap toward the promised land; thus the buckskin-clad immigrant and his family are consciously meant to evoke Joseph, Mary and Jesus on the flight into Egypt. The religious imagery sometimes amounts to a suffocating pietism, but that was America too. It still is.

But when you have seen the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny in the paintings of, say, Albert Bierstadt -- the tiny wagons advancing into those golden floods of light from the westering sun, the absence of opposing Indians, the implicit approval of Jehovah himself -- you still have to decide how good they are as art. This is why the dubious orthodoxy of art-historical deconstruction is so popular. It aborts the problem by collapsing everything into ideology and fatuously claiming that the idea of "quality" is either meaningless or oppressive. It appeals to sanctimony and makes the stuff easy to teach. It lets academics feel radical. Above all, by recognizing how full of social messages bad art as well as good can be, it expands the range of available thesis subjects and thus brings relief to the eaten-out pastures of American academe.

We then come to imagine that all works of art carry sociopolitical messages the way brown bags carry sandwiches: open the flap and there they are. When one reads a cultural historian like Simon Schama reflecting on the art and society of 17th century Holland, one sees what deep access a contextual approach can give to culture. But this is a very far cry from the ritual indictments of the past on the grounds of racism, sexism, greed and so forth that increasingly substitute for thought among our academics. Lo, the Native American! See, he is depicted as dying! And note the subservient posture of the squaw! And the phallic arrow on the ground, emblem of his lost though no doubt conventionally exaggerated potency! Eeew, gross! Next slide!

Is "The West as America" free from this? By no means. Its tone is prosecutorial, and often unfairly so. The walls are laden with tendentious "educational" labels, seemingly aimed at 14-year-olds. The catalog essays are mostly better than this, but not always. Thus Julie Schimmel, writing of Charles Bird King's 1822 portrait of Omahaw and other Indian chiefs who visited Washington -- an image that could hardly be exceeded in straightforwardness and respect for the sitters -- claims that "they represent a race that could perhaps be persuaded by rational argument . . . to abandon tribal tradition." There is not a shred of evidence in the painting for this sanctimonious interpolation. Elsewhere one reads that "rectilinear frames . . . provide a dramatic demonstration of white power and control." Sure, and gilt rococo ovals would mean drag queens had taken over the Senate.

The two best catalog essays are by William H. Truettner: they set out the propagandistic themes of most Western art and are especially good on the ideology of "enlightenment" that supported and sugared the cruel facts of European conquest and expansion. Solid thought and research lie behind them, and though the conservative would complain that we know the story of Manifest Destiny's barbarous self-interest, the point is that until this show, we did not know (or certainly not in such detail) about its ramifications in painting and sculpture.

Yet even Truettner pushes too far. For instance, he sees Emanuel Leutze's The Storming of the Teocalli by Cortez and His Troops, 1848, as a celebration of Christian virtue conquering Aztec barbarism. But the image is far more melancholy and ambiguous than that: the Spanish conquistadors are presented as brutes, one flinging a baby from the temple top, another tearing loot from a corpse; and Leutze's intent to provoke pity for the Aztecs is summed up in an upside-down torch, nearly out, which lies on the steps in the foreground, an adaptation of the classic funerary image of the reversed torch of extinguished genius. Even mediocre artists like Leutze, it seems, can sometimes be a little more complex than their interpreters might wish.