Art and the American West:  Grandeur, Fortitude, Competing Destinies

What inspires and intrigues in “Window on the West” is much more than the eclectic visual images that describe the 19th century westward movement in the United States of America and its attendant settlements. Indeed this migration is showcased in the Phelan view of the American frontier.

An additional great achievement of the Phelan collection is that viewers are confronted with the reality of life before the liberal dissemination of the photograph, a reality in which landscapes, individuals, towns, vistas, and rural areas are captured by known and unknown artists whose diverse mediums and styles refresh and educate, charm and inspire awe.

Add an additional dimension, a subtext which includes biographies of the artists, biographies of the artworks themselves (Andy Warhol is a previous owner of one work, for example); plus Phelan’s theses that underpin his collection, and the back-stories become as captivating as the visuals.

Phelan agrees with Frederick Jackson Turner’s idea that not only did the frontier experience shape American democracy, but it shaped the “individualistic character of the American psyche,” as well.

In addition, the collection calls Manifest Destiny to the fore, and thus, the hardships of Natives, the fortitude of settlers, these wounds and struggles become an inevitable backdrop subject.

The American romance with landscape painting began in earnest after the Federal period in American art (1785-1830) and is also featured in this collection. In works like John Henry Hill’s “Shoshone Falls” and Thomas Hill’s “Giant Geyser, Yellowstone,” the captivation involves the forceful movement of water which dominates in these wilderness scenes. In Albert Bierstadt’s “Nebraska Teritory; Wasatch Mountains,” Bierstadt’s signature use of serene luminosity pervades the entire picture plane, inviting contemplation of the vast expanse of frontier in the Nebraska Territory.

Particular settlements and encampments are represented: Glenwood, Colorado; Fort Union on the Missouri; a Sioux camp in the Rocky Mountains; a Navajo reservation; the Santa Barbara Country Club. And so the saga of the Native American is told alongside that of the encroaching human of European descent, plus those of Hispanic origin, who as Phelan essayist Eleanor Jones Harvey points out, “were often the first Europeans in the West.”

What art lover wouldn’t be interested in the following biographical tidbits: Artist Carl Oscar Borg was sponsored by William Randolf Hearst’s mother, his primary patron. One Phelan artist is the grandchild of Mormon founder Brigham Young. Artist Dawson Dawson Watson spent five years studying color at Giverny before painting “A Glimpse of the Grand Canyon.” One of Georgia O’Keefe residences appears in Jozef G. Bakos’ “Abiqui, N.M.”

Any complete American Art textbook includes masterworks by Phelan artists Bodmer, Kensett, Bierstadt, John James Audubon, plus others represented in the collection. Those big-name artists are given their due in print and in museums, but the artists without significant recognition, those less visible artists who played a role in recording western movement deserve credit too, for without both groups, the painted history of the American West would not be as completely described. And this is one of the hallmarks of this stunning yet common, pictorially diverse yet thematically consistent collection. Interspersed with paintings of ordinary people doing ordinary and extraordinary things are dramatic, memorable masterpieces that we are fortunate to be able to view so up close and personal.