Remington &Russell

Reflecting the most recent scholarship and critical thinking in the field, this is the first full-scale exhibition to explore the important—but often very different—ways in which the art of Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell shaped views of the American West during the late 19th century. The exhibition, which was organized by the Trust for Museum Exhibitions, Washington, D.C., will be on view at the University of Oklahoma Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art from October 6 through December 9, 2001.

Remington, the sophisticated Easterner, saw the American frontier as a wild and uncivilized place to be tamed, while for Russell, the “cowboy artist” from Montana, it was a paradise to be preserved. Collectively, however, their work projected an image—still very much with us today—of the West as a place that cultivated and tested the quintessentially American virtues of self-reliance, hard work, and physical courage.

Curator of the exhibition is Peter Hassrick, a leading authority on the art of Remington and Russell and, until recently, director of the Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West at the University of Oklahoma and Charles Marion Russell Memorial Chair.

Although almost exact contemporaries, the two men destined to become the greatest artists of the American West came from dramatically different backgrounds. Frederic Remington (1861–1909) attended Yale and studied art with teachers trained at the prestigious French Academy in Paris. Like many of his generation, he was fascinated with the American West and made it the exclusive subject of his art. Although as a young man he briefly lived in Kansas, and subsequently made frequent trips West in search of subject matter, Remington lived most of his life in and around New York City.

Charles M. Russell (1864–1926), who had little formal education of any kind, made his home in Montana, where he had arrived as a teenager to live the cowboy life. Largely self-taught as an artist, he produced his first drawings and sculptures as amusement for his bunkmates on the range.

By 1900, the two men shared the limelight as the leading artists of life in the American West. Contemporary critics and the public often engaged in heated debates over their relative merits. Russell’s supporters claimed that his depictions of the West were more authentic; Remington was generally regarded as more accomplished and technically proficient. As the present exhibition demonstrates, the differences between the two were far more complex and profound.

The first half of the exhibition explores in detail how Remington’s and Russell’s respective perceptions of the West evolved; the kinds of artistic as well as cultural influences they absorbed; their rise to fame; and public and personal reactions to their shared celebrity. The balance of the exhibition comprises thematic groupings that allow visitors to compare and contrast the artists’ portrayals of such subjects as the cowboy, Native Americans, and women.

Remington, Russell and the Language of Western Art begins by evoking the distinct personalities of its two subjects. A photograph of Remington (ca. 1902) shows a portly gentleman, nattily attired in a derby hat and posed with his cane and gloves. In obvious contrast is a 1907 photograph of Russell in a cowboy hat, his jaw firmly set and a faraway look in his eyes. The introductory section also includes works typifying their respective artistic styles and approaches. For example, Remington’s The Discovery (1908), in which two riders in the prairie suddenly come upon human skeletons, illustrates his flair for theatrical scenes suggestive of danger and unseen enemies. Russell’s The Buffalo Herd (ca. 1890), in which several generations of buffalo lumber peacefully towards a waterhole, reflects his gentler and more idyllic view of the West.

Although Remington and Russell never consciously competed, comparisons of their work were inevitable, and each artist had his own coterie of detractors and supporters. (The Russell camp, for example, argued that, as a “true child of the West,” he was the more accurate of the two and accused Remington of “faking the West.”) This section of the exhibition focuses on the efforts by the press and the public to promote a sense of rivalry between Remington and Russell. Among the objects on view are Remington’s famous bronze Broncho Buster (1895), criticized by Russell’s supporters as inaccurate in its portrayal of a rearing horse. Displayed alongside it is Russell’s allegedly more correct sculpture of a bucking horse, Bronc Twister (1920).

Remington and Russell are thought to have met only once, in 1904. Yet they clearly knew and learned from each other’s work. This section explores the nature of their artistic relationship, and includes Russell’s first bronze, Smoking Up (1904), a figure of a cowboy shooting his gun in the air, that owes much in pose and spirit to one of the rollicking cowboys in Remington’s bronze Coming Thru the Rye (first cast in 1903; represented here by a posthumous cast of ca. 1912-13).

As young men, both Remington and Russell went West in search of adventure and self-identity. This section of the exhibition documents the very different nature of their experiences. An 1883 photograph of Remington (aged about twenty-two), in rumpled jeans and shirt, was made during the year he spent in Kansas operating a sheep ranch; displayed nearby is the watercolor of his property, proudly inscribed “My Ranch.” The enterprise was a failure, and he subsequently embarked on a career as an artist-correspondent with the military. Russell, on the other hand, arrived in Montana Territory in 1880, when he was only fifteen, and spent more than a decade working as a night wrangler for various cattle operations. A photograph of 1884 shows him in full cowboy regalia—a buckskin jacket, chaps, and hip holster. His rather defiant expression seems to confirm Russell’s remark that he was “considered pretty ornery” in his youth.

The next section of the exhibition is devoted to a pivotal event in Remington’s rising career as an artist—the commission to illustrate the book Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, written by another Easterner with a love of the West, Theodore Roosevelt. Published in 1888, this lively account of Roosevelt’s youthful experiences as a rancher in the Dakotas—replete with Indian battles, frontier town shoot-outs, and bronco busting—was enormously popular. It established Remington’s reputation as the preeminent illustrator of the American West and also served as an important source of subject matter and imagery for Russell.

As this section of the exhibition makes clear, both artists were keenly—and sadly—aware that they were portraying a West and a way of life that were rapidly disappearing. In Remington’s painting An Indian Dream (1898), he addresses this subject in a poetic and rather theatrical manner—a lone Indian rider is shown against a ghostlike backdrop of warrior braves in headdresses. Russell evokes the Old West with greater specificity, as in his bronze depiction of Jim Bridger (1929): The last of the legendary mountain men, Bridger had died in 1881, soon after Russell’s arrival in the West.

Depictions of violent encounters between man and nature also figure prominently in the work of Remington and Russell, both of whom glorified the West as a place to test one’s mettle and masculinity. But, here again, there are important differences. Remington’s figures tend to show confidence and supremacy, as in The Outlaw (1906), a bronze portrayal of a man dominating a wild horse. By contrast, man’s victory over nature is often less certain in Russell’s work, as exemplified in his painting The Broken Rope (1904), in which a cowboy and his horse are downed by a charging steer.

From here, the exhibition turns to a subject that Russell readily embraced and Remington tended to avoid—women. Russell’s numerous portrayals of domestic life, both among the white settlers and the Indians, often included women. His paintings also—and rather daringly for the time—acknowledged the existence of interracial marriages in the West, as in his Cowboy Bargaining for an Indian Girl (1895). The omission of women in so much of Remington’s work reflected his conviction that the West was primarily a man’s world; nonetheless, the exhibition includes a strikingly beautiful exception, a nocturnal tryst entitled Waiting in the Moonlight (1907).

The exhibition moves on to examine the ways that Russell and Remington depicted Native Americans, and, in the case of Remington, how this changed over time. A number of Russell’s paintings, such as On the Warpath (1895), Horse Thieves (1901), and Sun River War Party (1903), illustrate his tendency to portray Indians on their own terms, with empathy and respect. Russell was, in fact, a serious student of Indian ways and formed an especially close bond with the Piegan tribe. A vigorous, early bronze entitled Counting Coup (1907) shows the Piegan warrior Medicine-Whip vanquishing Sioux horse thieves.

Remington’s images of Native Americans also reflect an admiration for their physical prowess and bravery. Initially, however, he tended to portray them from a white man’s perspective. A case in point is the watercolor Cheyenne Scout (1890), which shows an Indian rider in military garb—a clear reference to Remington’s belief that mustering young Indian men into the U.S. Army was an effective way to assimilate them into American life.

The horrific experiences of the Spanish-American War (1898), in which Remington served as an artist-correspondent, seem to have left him with a heightened sympathy for Indians and their imperiled way of life. When His Heart Is Bad, painted in 1908, a year before Remington’s own death, shows an aged Indian warrior, seated alone on a hillside, silhouetted against the setting sun.

Up until the 1880s, the cowboy was widely decried as a morally dissolute and dangerous member of society. This section of the exhibition reveals how Remington and Russell both helped to transform the cowboy’s image into a heroic emblem of American manhood and, ultimately, an icon of national identity.

Remington led the way with such images as Prairie Fire (ca. 1885), a thrilling scene of a cowboy driving a panic-stricken herd of cattle to safety. The Rattlesnake (bronze, 1904), in which a rider deftly controls his horse as it suddenly shies from a coiled serpent, suggests the kind of everyday perils in a cowboy’s path.

Russell also celebrated the skill and gritty courage of the cowboy, although he tended to provide more detailed accounts of actual cowboy work. In his Capturing the Grizzly (1901), a cowboy reins in his terrified horse with one hand and expertly throws a lasso over the snarling bear’s head with the other. Russell’s cowboy heroes could also be engagingly human and fallible, as exemplified in his bronze Where the Best of Riders Quit (1920), which shows a cowboy sliding down the back of a nearly vertical rearing horse.

Native Americans were not the only non-whites in the West, and Remington and Russell were unusual in the degree to which they included other ethnic types in their frontier scenes. Indeed, Remington was the only prominent Western artist to celebrate the important role African Americans played in the military efforts on the frontier. This section of the exhibition features two notable examples, Captain Dodge’s Colored Troopers to the Rescue (ca. 1890) and The Advance (1896-98). Unlike many other contemporary artists, Remington and Russell also included the Hispanic cowboy in their works. In Russell’s painting Mexican Buffalo Hunters (1924), his admiration for the brilliantly colored attire and graceful horsemanship of the vaqueros is apparent. (He once remarked that, next to Mexican cowboys, the Anglo cow punchers “look like hay diggers.”) Curiously, neither artist painted black cowboys, despite the fact that an estimated one-third of all cowboys were African American.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, written by Hassrick and published by the Trust for Museum Exhibitions, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit service organization that provides exhibitions and technical support to museums and cultural centers throughout the U.S. and abroad.

Welcome Lectures Location		Return to top Symposium OU homepage
Credits: Frederic Remington—photograph c. 1902, by Davis and Sanford, courtesy Frederic Remington Art Museum, Ogdensburg, N.Y.; Charles M. Russell—photograph c. 1907, by A.O.Gregory, courtesy National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum Oklahoma City, Okla., Joe DeYong Collection