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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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The following essay was adapted from the introduction to Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West, by Jules David Prown, Nancy K. Anderson, William Cronon, Brian W. Dippie, Martha A. Sandweis, Susan Prendergast Schoeler, and Howard R. Lamar, copublished by the Yale University Press and the Yale University Art Gallery. ©1992 Yale University. Reproduced by permission. The exhibition for which the book serves as the catalog will be on view at the University Art Gallery through January 3. Our picture of the Old West, a West distant in time and now physically transformed—the West of cowboys and Indians, of wagon trains rolling westward, and herds of buffalo grazing on vast prairies—has been colored by countless romanticizations in film and fiction and art. One purpose of Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts is to reexamine surviving contemporary paintings, drawings, and watercolors of that West in search of a deeper understanding of the reality that was, and is no longer. A second purpose is to consider the processes whereby a scrim of myth has come to veil our view of the past, misleading by pleasing. The art of the West often purported to depict its subjects realistically, but perhaps it depicted more accurately the needs, values, and aspirations of its viewing audience. In an abstract way, Thomas Eakins’s portrait of Frank Hamilton Cushing (circa 1895) emblemizes this study. Eakins, a student of anatomy and a practitioner of dissection, probed beneath surface appearances to express in his art the underlying physical truths of the human body and the less palpable but no less real truths of the human spirit. He sought to make the inner reality of human beings visible. His subject here, Cushing, was regarded, according to William H. Truettner, “as the most gifted and controversial field anthropologist at work in America during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.” Through immersion in Zuni culture, Cushing investigated the inner reality of peoples rather than persons. His chosen mission was to live inside another culture and make its values explicit. The efforts of both Eakins and Cushing triggered negative reactions. Eakins was seen as a violator of convention, an artist who breached the etiquette of good taste with gratuitous displays of nudity and blood, and honest visual records of the eroding effect of life experience manifest in worn faces and tired bodies. And Cushing seemed eccentric, preferring the accoutrements and values of an aboriginal culture to those of his civilized own. Truettner has called attention to the striking parallels between Eakins and Cushing. Both disregarded institutions and defied conventions and traditional modes of behavior. Both sought empirical evidence, relying on their own experience rather than on accepted cultural assumptions. And both suffered professional estrangement. In a comparable vein, many of today’s scholars aspire to engage the evidence anew empirically rather than repeat comfortable accepted interpretations of another time and place, attempting thereby to gain a clearer understanding of realities long masked. They follow a series of reinterpretations, or re-visions, of the Old West, through the study of western art history; in particular they come on the heels of the groundbreaking and controversial West as America exhibition held at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., in 1991. Time has validated Eakins, now recognized as a great American 19th-century artist, the subject of perceptive studies by Lloyd Goodrich, Elizabeth Johns, Michael Fried, David Lubin, and others. Such recognition has been slow to come not because there is more to Eakins’s art than meets the eye; it is because what meets the eye has been ignored or rejected. The eye is a selective instrument of the mind of the perceiver; it sees what the mind wants to see and is blind to the rest. Time has also validated the ethnological quirkiness of Cushing, who anticipated the modern preoccupation with culture in general, and with ethnicity and cultural diversity in particular. In the long run, those revisionist views articulated in the West as America exhibition that seemed so irritating and strange to some will also be sanctioned as our culture’s evolving eye and mind accommodate themselves to some of the larger truths concerning the invasion of the western hemisphere by Europeans that began in 1492 and largely destroyed indigenous cultures. The flourishing civilizations of Aztec and Inca were physically obliterated by Catholic Spanish conquerors, although there was considerable assimilation of indigenous peoples through conversion and intermarriage. Farther north, there was little assimilation by the ultimately triumphant Protestant English; the pattern was one of displacement and occasional annihilation of indigenous cultures. The continuing shove of Indian peoples westward led eventually to resettlement in “reservations,” a concept that cannot help but conjure up in the modern mind parallels with recent modes of dealing with perceived or potential enemies of the state by “concentrating” themin certain areas “reserved” for the purpose—Japanese-Americans in World War II, Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, Soviet political prisoners in the gulags—neutralization by isolation or, in extreme but not infrequent cases, extermination. The past belongs to the victors. The history of the conquest and settlement of the American West has been written and pictured by whites—more specifically, by male whites. Little survives of the view from the other side, the Indian perspective on retreat or forcible removal to the West. Available visual data include initial efforts by artists accompanying expeditions or traveling on their own to record geographical and ethnographic facts, and later more romantic visualizations of the rapidly evaporating West. Early interpreters of this body of western art tended to take the images at face value as reports. Now we are more skeptical, and the analytic procedure of choice today is interdisciplinary rather than multidisciplinary. History, art history, folklore, anthropology, linguistics—each alone can tell us something, but we end up with perceptions of parts of the whole. More can be gained by combining scholarly forces and bringing them to bear on the subject. What makes the interdisciplinary approach increasingly effective is that the methodologies and materials of disciplines are becoming less disparate; the membranes that kept them separate and distinct are increasingly permeable. Not only are the boundaries between scholarly disciplines being breached to permit cooperative endeavors, but individual scholars in one field display an increasingly greater willingness to work—sometime incautiously, it must be admitted—with the materials and methodologies of another. More and more, historians interpret images, rather than use them simplistically to illustrate preconceived ideas. Art historians subject non-art material to formal analysis; anthropologists use structural models derived from linguistics; scholars in many fields have become creatively aware of the significance of what is left out, of that which is not included in the visual or verbal field of view; literary analyses of texts are informed by insights drawn from psychology as the fictions of individual dreams and phobias become paradigms for the explication of the fictions of narrative and myth; economic motivation emerges as a powerful balance to or reinforcer of ideology; and perspectives of gender and race and class offer new ways of perceiving old information. Conversely, particular attention is paid to elements that are included unintentionally, subconscious expressions articulated by choices made in the process of depiction, not only in regard to inclusion and exclusion, but as regards points of view and placement. Just as history can never retrieve the affective wholeness of the past, neither can art be a totally accurate visual report. History and art history present us with partial truths, incomplete stories, but the concentration of multiple interpretive approaches and methodologies enlarges our understanding of other times and other places. The results
of new readings and revisionist interpretations may be painful, even offensive,
to scholars wedded to older approaches, and to a public raised on a rose-tinted
view of the invasion of the West as Manifest Destiny, as the bringing of
civilization to barbaric peoples, as the triumph of heroic white people imbued
with codes of honor and fair play (enshrined in Hollywood scripts). This
self-serving interpretation has been reinforced by the powerful symbolism of
our physical world, where the sun rises in the east and moves relentlessly
westward each day. In the end, Anglo-Saxon “civilization” reigned from coast to
coast, its triumph couched in terms of human values although it had in fact
been effected by technology. Weapons and locomotives, not cultural superiority,
empowered Anglo-Saxon prejudice, almost completely eradicating the American
Indian and the buffalo from the plains and enshrining them on the nickel. But
in the end perhaps not all is lost. As Howard R. Lamar has noted, substantive
changes in attitude in the 20th century reflect increasing appreciation not
only of western lands but of indigenous cultures. The magnetic appeal of the
western landscape and its power to evoke strong aesthetic responses have not,
in the end, been eradicated. The western landscape continues to be discovered
anew and to weave its spell. |
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©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu |
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