The West as America

Christopher Columbus on Santa Maria in 1492 (1855) by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze

The exhibition began with historical paintings that introduced the concept of national expansion and included representations of colonial and pre-colonial events such as white male Europeans encountering the unknown North American continent for the first time. One of the first text labels read:

The paintings in this gallery and those that follow should not be seen as a record of time and place. More often than not they are contrived views, meant to answer the hopes and desires of people facing a seemingly unlimited and mostly unsettled portion of the nation.[9]

Embarkation of the Pilgrims at Delft Haven, Holland, July 22, 1620 (1844) by Robert Walter Weir

Truettner writes "...images from Christopher Columbus to Kit Carson show the discovery and settlement of the West as a heroic undertaking. Many nineteenth-century artists and the public believed that these images represented a faithful account of civilization moving westward. A more recent approach argues that these images are carefully staged fiction and that their role was to justify the hardship and conflict of nation building. Western scenes extolled progress but rarely noted damaging social and environmental change."[1] Another text label read:

This exhibition assumes that all history is unconsciously edited by those who make it. Looking beneath the surface of these images gives us a better understanding of why national problems created during the era of western expansion still affect us today.[7]

Works in this section included Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's Christopher Columbus on Santa Maria in 1492 (1855), which shows Christopher Columbus gesturing toward the New World, and The Storming of Teocalli by Cortez and his Troops (1848); Peter F. Rothermel's Columbus before the Queen (1852) and Landing of the Pilgrims (1854); Thomas Moran's Ponce de León in Florida, 1514 (1878); Joshua Shaw's The Coming of the White Man (1850); and Robert Walter Weir's Embarkation of the Pilgrims at Delft Haven, Holland, July 22, 1620 (1857). Colonial paintings included Weir's The Landing of Henry Hudson (1838) and Leutze's Founding of Maryland (1860).

The second section of the exhibition focused on portraits of prominent settlers and images of scouts, pioneers, and European immigrants moving west across an unpopulated landscape.

William S. Jewett's The Promised Land – The Grayson Family (1850), portrays a prosperous-looking man with his wife and son, all gazing west, posed against a golden landscape. The text labels called it "more rhetorical than factual", an image that "ignores the controversy that attended national expansion by equating the westward trek of the Grayson Family with white people's belief in the idea of progress."[9]

American Progress (1872) by John Gast

John Gast's American Progress (1872) depicts the ideal of "Manifest Destiny", a notion popular in the 1840s and 1850s which expounded that the United States was impelled by providence to expand its territory.[10] Called the "Spirit of the Frontier", the scene was widely distributed as an engraving that portrayed settlers moving west, guided and protected by a goddess-like national personification known as Columbia, aided by technology (such as railways and telegraphs), and driving Native Americans and bison into obscurity. The painting shows the angel-like Columbia symbolically "enlightening" the darkened west as light from the eastern side of the painting follows her.

Westward Ho! (1850) by James Henry Beard

Emigrants Crossing the Plains (1867) by Albert Bierstadt

Albert Bierstadt's Emigrants Crossing the Plains (1867) portrays a picturesque party of Germans traveling to Oregon. The canvas shows the warmth of the setting sun and spectacular hues streaking across the sky, which illuminate the sheer cliffs to the right. According to Truettner, paintings constructed this way brought to life for nineteenth-century viewers the western pioneer experience.

Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap (1851–1852) by George Caleb Bingham

Other images of western migration included George Caleb Bingham's Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap (1851–1852). Truettner describes Daniel Boone as the quintessential pioneer, whose energy and resourcefulness helped him to build a generous livelihood from a succession of wilderness homesteads. His image had become a national symbol exemplifying the spirit of adventure and accomplishment. But Boone's initial visit to Kentucky, Truettner explains, was prompted by real-estate speculation. He writes, "…in fact [these men] were no more than commercial vanguards. They were trespassers on foreign territory who began the process of separating Indians from their land. These images communicated that opportunities on the frontier awaited everyone and perpetuated the myth that the settling of the west was peaceful, when in reality it was bitterly contested every step of the way."[1]

The exhibition's third section used several rooms to group three different and conflicting stereotypes of Native Americans, which were thematically subtitled as the Noble Savage, the Threatening Savage, and the Vanishing Race.[11]

Young Omahaw, War Eagle, Little Missouri and Pawneess (1821) by Charles Bird King

Combined sample portraits with revisionist text informed by Richard Slotkin's book Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (1973) and Richard Drinnon's Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire building (1980) generated so much antagonism that Truettner voluntarily revised about ten of the fifty-five labels in an effort to tone down the message and to please anthropologists.[4]

A Death Struggle (1845) by Charles Deas

Truettner's original label read, "This predominance of negative and violent views was a manifestation of Indian hatred, a largely manufactured, calculated reversal of the basic facts of white encroachment and deceit." Truettner eliminated this sentence from the revised text. Another label stated, "These images give visual expression to white attitudes toward Native peoples who were considered racially and culturally inferior." The edited version of this label read, "These images give visual expression to white attitudes toward Native peoples." Truettner explained in an oral interview with Andrew Gulliford that he made changes to the text because he "wanted to catch visitors, not alienate them" and because he believes "in communicating with the larger museum audience."

Charles Bird King painted noble images of Indians as seen in Young Omahaw, War Eagle, Little Missouri and Pawnees (1822). The accompanying text labels read:

Artistic representations of Indians developed simultaneously with white interest in taking their land. At first, Indians were seen as possessing nobility and innocence. This assessment gave way gradually to a far more violent view that stressed hostile savagery…apparent in contrasting works…[7]

Charles Deas' The Death Struggle (1845) depicts a white man and a Native American locked in mortal combat and tumbling over a cliff. The text labels read:

Indians were inevitably represented as hostile aggressors at the very moment settlers and the army were invading their land. Such a patent change of image tells us that white artists were presenting a stereotype rather than a balanced view of Indian life.[7]

In T.H. Matteson's The Last of the Race (1847), Truettner writes, "Violent encounters were not the only means of "solving the Indian problem.""[1] Truettner adds that both Matteson's The Last of the Race and John Mix Stanley's Last of Their Race (1857) "suggested Indians would eventually be buried under the waves of the Pacific."[1]

Sacramento Indian with Dogs (1857) by Charles Christian Nahl

Another series of paintings represented acculturation themes that predicted Indians would be peacefully absorbed into white society, thereby neutralizing "aggressive" racial characteristics. Charles Nahl's Sacramento Indian with Dogs (1867) was among this group of paintings.[1] Truettner concludes, "The myth in this case denies the Indian problem by solving it two ways: those who could not accept Anglo-Saxon standards of progress were doomed to extinction."[1]

Stump Speaking (1853–1854) by George Caleb Bingham

The fourth section included paintings that portrayed the successful lives of miners and settlers and depicted the give-and-take of American frontier democracy; also included were popular culture and advertising images.[4] Works in this section included George Caleb Bingham's Stump Speaking (1853–1854) and Canvassing for a Vote (1851–52), John Mix Stanley's Oregon City on the Willamette River (1850–1852), Charles Nahl and Frederick August Wenderoth's Miners in the Sierras (1851–1852), Mrs. Jonas W. Brown's Mining in the Boise Basin in the Early Seventies (c. 1870–80), and George W. Hoag's Record Wheat Harvest (1876).

Miners in the Sierras (1851–1852) by Frederick August Wenderoth

Oregon City on the Willamette River (1850–52) by John Mix Stanley

Truettner writes that these works ".... support the myth that there was enough for everyone. Cities were models of organization and industry, exploitation of land and natural resources is featured with engaging naiveté, and industrial pollution is offered as a picturesque accessory to the landscape. These paintings convert frontier life to a national idiom of prosperity and promise."[1]

The fifth section focused on a series of landscapes that represented, in succession, the Green River Bluffs of Wyoming, the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, Donner Pass, and the Sequoia and Redwood trees of California, which portrayed the west as both Edenic wonders and emblems of national pride.[1]

Temporary and Permanent Bridges and Citadel Rock, Green River (1868) by Andrew J. Russell

According to Truettner, the market for scenes of commerce and industry coexisted with a "taste for heroic landscape" and included photographs and paintings of the western landscape as both symbol and exploitable resource. The images of the vast west meant to serve as a promotion to inspire further migration. Photographs chronicle the building of railroads and depict black steam engines traveling through the Rocky Mountains.[4]

Works in this section included Oscar E. Berninghaus' A Showery Day, Grand Canyon (1915), Andrew Joseph Russell's Temporary and Permanent Bridges and Citadel Rock, Green River (1868), Thomas Moran's The Chasm of the Colorado (1873–1874), and Albert Bierstadt's Donner Lake from the Summit (1873), as well as commercial landscapes and advertising images by unidentified artists, entitled Splendid (1935) and Desert Bloom (1938).

With the first five sections serving as metaphors of progress, the sixth and last section took the exhibit in a different direction and was deemed by many critics as the most controversial phase of the exhibition.

For Supremacy (1895) by Charles Marion Russell

Truettner explained that the ideology used to justify expansion had suddenly achieved permanent status, and without more frontier left to conquer, artists and their images were now called on to relay the ideology of the past to future generations. Truettner claims the images in this section "speak not to the actual events but to the memory of those events and its impact to future audiences."[1] Critics saw this as the curator's attempt to deny that the art of Frederic Remington, Charles Schreyvogel, Charles Russell, and Henry Farny had any basis in western realism and that their images were merely products of composite sketches based on photographs.[9]

Attempting to place these artists of western frontier images in an eastern urban context, the exhibit label states, "Although they reveal isolated facts about the West, the paintings in this section reveal far more about the urban, industrial culture in which they were made and sold."[4] Truettner writes in the show's catalog that when artist Charles Russell was asked in 1919 who purchased his paintings, the Montana artist explained that his paintings were purchased by "Pittsburghers most of all. They may not be so strong on art but they are real men and they like real life."[1]

Other works included Russell's Caught in the Circle (1903) and For Supremacy (1895), Charles Schreyvogel's Defending the Stockade (c. 1905), and Henry Farny's The Captive (1885). Another painting entitled The Captive (1892), by Irving Couse, generated a lot of critical reviews. Roger B. Stein writes, "The much disputed critical reading of Irving Couse's The Captive (1892), an image of an old chief with his young white "victim," raised explicit questions about the intersection of gender and race and the function of the gaze in constructing meaning in this troubled emotional and cultural territory in a way that shocked viewers because it had not been prepared for earlier." Stein adds:

The curatorial experiment failed not because what the textblock said was untrue (though it was partial, inadequate and rhetorically over-insistent) but because the significant verbal comment on gender had been withheld until the last room of the exhibit. Visually, The West As America was a fascinating study of gender issues from the first Leutze images forward. One may legitimately reply that gender was not the intellectual territory which this exhibition staked out in its verbal script, but my argument here is based upon the premise that a museum exhibition is – or ought to be – first and last a visual experience (the book or catalog is another and different mode of communication).[11]

The Captive (1892) by Irving Couse

The label read:

From Puritan cultures onwards, the captivity theme had been an occasion for white writers and artists to advocate the "unnaturalness" of intermarriage between races. Couse's painting is part of this tradition.

The painting establishes two "romances." The first – suggested but not denied – is between the woman and the Indian. The two figures belong to different worlds that cannot mix except by violence. (Note the blood on the woman's left arm). The second romance is between the woman and the viewer of the painting, implicitly a white man, who is cast in the heroic role of rescuer. This relationship is the painting's "natural" romance.

These two conflicting romances account for the ironic combination of chastity and availability encoded by the woman's body. The demure turn of her head shows that she has turned away from the Indian. Yet this very gesture of refusal is also a sign of her availability: she turns toward the viewer. It is by her role as sexual stereotype that the woman in Couse's painting is really captive.[11]

The label also went on to suggest that an open teepee flap implied sexual encounter and that arrow shafts become phallic objects.[4]

The opening of The West as America coincided with the final phase of the Gulf War in 1991. According to reviewers in the media, for those who understood the war as a triumph of American values, the exhibition's critical stance toward western expansion seemed like a full-blown attack on the nation's founding principles.[12] The language of the show, while not the curator's goal, "played into the hands of those who would equate cultural criticism with national betrayal."[4]

In a book for comments by visitors, historian and former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin wrote that the exhibition was "...a perverse, historically inaccurate, destructive exhibit… and no credit to the Smithsonian."[4] Boorstin's comment prompted Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska and Senator Slade Gorton of Washington, two senior members of the Senate Appropriations Committee, to express outrage over the exhibit and to threaten to cut funding to the Smithsonian Institution.[13] By appealing to patriotism, the Senators used funding of the Smithsonian as an opportunity to criticize the "dangers of liberalism." Stevens argued that the institutional guardians of culture – the federally funded Smithsonian and other related federally funded arts programs in general – had become "enemies of freedom."[14]

According to the Senators, the problem with The West As America as well as with other curatorial controversies produced by the Smithsonian and the National Endowment for the Arts such as the Mapplethorpe and Andre Serrano photographs, was that it "breeds division within our country."[14] Citing two other Smithsonian projects, a documentary about the Exxon Valdez oil spill and a television series about the founding of America that reportedly accused the United States of genocide against Native Americans, Stevens warned Robert McAdams, the head of the Smithsonian, that he was "in for a battle." In a reference to the funding of the Smithsonian, which in part is regulated by the Senate Appropriations Committee, Stevens added, "I'm going to get other people to help me make you make sense."[13]

To many in the national press and the museum community, the Senators' attack on the Smithsonian and the exhibition at the National Museum of American Art was one movement in a larger effort to transform culture into a "wedge issue".[14] The term, often used interchangeably with "hot button issue", is used by politicians to exploit issues using highly contentious loaded language to divide the opposing voter base and to galvanize a large electorate around the issue. "Political correctness" became another expression used frequently in the debate. The use of words and phrases such as "race", "class", and "sexual stereotype" in the exhibit's text labels allowed critics of so-called "multicultural education" to condemn the show as "politically correct". In the minds of the critics, the exhibition served as proof that multicultural education had spread from the campuses to the Smithsonian.[12]

The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial entitled "Pilgrims and Other Imperialists", labeled the exhibition "an entirely hostile ideological assault on the nation's founding and history." Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer condemned the exhibition as "tendentious, dishonest, and finally, puerile" and called it "the most politically correct museum exhibit in American history."[4]

In a hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee on May 15, 1991, Stevens criticized the Smithsonian for demonstrating a "leftist slant" and accused The West As America of having a "political agenda", citing the exhibition's 55 text cards accompanying the artworks as a direct rejection of the traditional view of United States history as a triumphant, inevitable march westward.[5] The head of the Smithsonian, Robert McAdams, responded to the attack by saying he welcomed an inquiry, which he hoped would allay concerns and added, "I don't think the Smithsonian has any business, or ever had any business, developing a political agenda."[5] Stevens called the show "perverted" but later conceded to Newsweek magazine he had not actually seen the exhibit on the West but had "merely been alerted by the comment posted by Daniel Boorstin in the museum's guestbook."[13]

There were more than 700 visitor comments recorded in the museum's guestbook in Washington, D.C., generating three large volumes of commentary. Viewers passed judgment on the works, the curator's competence, and the tone of the explanatory texts, previous comments in the comment book, and local reviews of the exhibition. Praise dominated the criticism – 510 of the 735 comments were generally positive.[12] One hundred and ninety-nine people signaled out the wall texts for praise, while 177 felt negatively about them.[15]

Comments in the guestbook show that for many of the exhibition's younger supporters, asking questions about western images seemed not only correct but even the obvious thing to do.[12] Those disagreeing with the text generally thought the images should be allowed to speak for themselves and felt that even without the text explanations the images would reveal a truthful account of westward expansion. The opposing group, some of whom still objected to the texts, agreed the images misrepresented history in that they cast the westward movement as too much of a heroic odyssey.[12]

One commentary typical of those disagreeing with the texts read:

The "reinterpretations" accompanying these great paintings go too far. Too much supposition in artistic intent. Granted wasn't all a "dream," and inequalities were there – but it took guts and spirit to go westward.

— Signed DC[15]

Another viewer offered:

I always thought painting was supposed to be about hopes, dreams, the imagination. Instead, you seem to say it's political statement at every brushstroke. Your tendentious opinions betray a lack of understanding of the artist and a blindness to the paintings themselves. Every painting is, according to you, an evil, cunning, greedy "Anglo-American." Shame on you for choosing to make a statement (a very limited statement) about your "political correctness" instead of really looking at the art for what it says about the appeal of the West to our collective imagination. Art is bigger than everyday logic.

— Signed VC, Alexandria, VA[15]

Those defending the exhibit wrote:

It's refreshing to see an exhibit on early U.S. history which includes the atrocities that were performed on the native or "original" North American populations. Thank you for challenging the mythology of white supremacy. The paintings are truly interpretative, and without the commentary and discussion that was included alongside the paintings, visitors would not necessarily consider all sides of the westward expansion.

— Signed IN, Washington, DC[15]

…myths of the conquest of the West as being peaceful and full of promise with justice for all were horribly false…

— Signed DC, Great Falls, VA[15]

Some viewers had mixed feelings:

The art is terrific. The labels are propaganda – distortions in the name of "multicultural" education.

— Signed PL, New York, NY[15]

Some commented on others' comments:

I found several of the political commentaries thought provoking (e.g., the reading of the woman's position in The Captive). Others seem less convincing, as in the commentary about the presence or absence of Native Americans. Painters are condemned for omitting the Native Americans (as in The Grayson Family). But they are also condemned for portraying them. I leave the exhibit with the sense that the painters could not have done anything right, and I think the exhibit should address that question.

— Signed JM, University of North Carolina[15]

The West as America was scheduled to run from March 15 – July 7, 1991, but was extended an additional 13 days to accommodate a growing audience. Attendance to the National Museum of American Art increased by 60% over the same period in the previous year.[4]

While praise dominated the comments in the guestbook in Washington, D.C., show promoters were denied the opportunity to measure the variety and intensity of reaction in other parts of the country, notably in the Western United States itself, because of the cancellation of two proposed exhibit tours at the St. Louis Art Museum and the Denver Art Museum.[3] The cancellations were not due to the controversy, but rather a result of the continuing recession and the $90,000 participation fee, which was only part of a total estimated cost of $150,000 per site.[4]