The American West: Out of Myth, into Reality Peter H. Hassrick (Charles Marion Russell Chair in art history, University of Oklahoma, USA)
Western art of America's frontier years, from about 1825 to 1925, has traditionally been perceived as the art most representative of the country's cultural and historical essence. European American explorers were accompanied or soon followed by adventuresome artists whose drawings and paintings provided the first glimpses that eastern audiences had of this vast region and captured both its romantic allure and its commercial possibilities. The artists - Albert Bierstadt, George Catlin, Marsden Hartley, Alfred Jacob Miller, Thomas Moran, Fanny R. Palmer, Frederick Remington, Charles M. Russell, and John Mix Stanley, among others - presented a fabulous vision of the West that was at once Edenic and bountiful as well as dangerous and forbidding. Since the 1980s, much of western history and art has been re-evaluated. Its rosy ambience has been tinged with allegations of sexism, ethnocentrism, imperialism, and economic exploitation. This book explores some of these new insights and perspectives and seeks to reconcile these with entrenched myth.