Cody

We drove out of September into January as we rose into the clouds. At 7000 feet Festiva began to lose her head and suffer from oxygen deprivation, but we were in no hurry anyhow. Lucky thing. Coming round a bend at about 8000 feet there was a Bronco in the other lane with his hazards flashing, and the driver was waving a red flag out the window. Wide load, I figured. Then around the next bend came a herd of cattle filling the narrow road from cliff wall to drop-off. Three cowboys on horseback and one in a stock truck herded the doggies past, into blowing sleet, as we zigged and zagged through the livestock.

Loose Stock

Antelope

A great country, where the national parklands have “Loose Stock” signs, and the deer and the antelope play. We saw a lot of them, too. Pronghorns grazing by the highway. The early travelers reported them too easily spooked to stalk, but they could be tricked into range by lying on the ground and kicking your legs in the air. Their curiosity was just too much for their better sense. They must think Detroit’s best are the strangest thing yet, and don’t spook until you slow to point a camera at them.

We didn’t point the camera too much today. Not that the vertiginous switchback weren’t spectacular, but the view off the edge into empty clouds only made us hang on tight, not grab for the Olympus. At 9000 feet we chatted up a flag woman in her 50’s who held us at one end of a construction zone. She said the last snow had been in June, so they’d had an average roadwork season, two months of summer.

Spire in snow

Blowing off

.The west slope of the Big Horns spits you out through a dramatic cleft in the eons into an even drier landscape, approaching high desert after this year’s drought: the Big Horn Basin. As we moved out onto it, all we saw was a vast flat expanse of sagebrush and sparse grasses without horizon. But then the clouds began to lift like a curtain, to the west and southwest, and the shining mountains rose up to enclose our vision. The Absarokas, black and white with snow, and glistening under the silver skirts of the stormclouds. The contrast between the sear brown hills in the foreground and the leaping black and whites beyond had us weaving all over the road as we rolled down into Cody.

We’d been told that there was a superb museum at Cody, but no one had warned us about the western art collection. Breath-taking. Catlin, Bodmer, Miller, Remington, NC Wyeth, Bierstadt, Moran, Henry Jackson, and on and on. I take it back. You can paint the West. Granted, most of the artists chose big canvases to tell a big story, but some of them caught the light and the sweep without raising their voices. We could only take an hour’s worth of eyefill before we had to go out and try our hands at the sunset. And what a setting. Mountains jumping out of the plain all around.

Absarokas (Bryce)

Peggy's Cody

We goggled into a motel and asked for a room with a view. “We’re sorry, none of our rooms have views.” Hah. You could sell the picture out this window to hang on the walls of motels all over America.. in fact, I think they do. And it kept changing, as the bad weather moved out and the westering light painted the remains gold and salmon. Now a full moon is riding the sky fields. Last night we watched the lunar eclipse over the Wal*Mart in Sheridan. Tonight she’ll set behind the Absarokas.

(Memo #22)

Sept. 27. - Western Art, Buffalo Bill Center, Cody, Wyo. Who? Buffalo Bill Cody, Western artists What? Buffalo Bill Historical Center 4 museums (western art, Plains Indian, Buffalo Bill, firearms) Where? Cody, Wyoming (NW section of state), eastern gateway to Yellowstone When? 1900s to the present How? by museum collectors Topics: Western art, museums. Questions: What makes a great museum? What is Western art? Is Western art taken seriously in the art world?

Ol Bill

Debouching onto naked plains

We drove into Cody, Wyoming, after a first foray into the Rocky Mountains. There was snow flying up there and hairpin turns and beautiful views. A road crew was getting a last stretch paved before winter closed in (!). One worker said they’d had snow once on the 4th of July. We crossed the Bighorn Range into the high dry basin in central northern Wyoming, endless sage-dotted flats with pronghorn antelopes. Cody sits at the eastern edge of the next Rocky chains, a lovely small city in the foothills with spectacular mountains views in three directions. Several e-mail friends, and a trucker, had said we MUST get to the museum in Cody.

The Buffalo Bill Historical Center sits on the western edge of town and is four museums in one - a Western art museum, a Plains Indian museum, a Buffalo Bill museum, a firearms museum. There is also a contemporary art gallery. The building itself is beautiful - gray stone with occasional sets of huge windows looking to the mountains and two green sculpture courtyards with mountains, plants and trees. The four museums have individual spaces. It was obvious that the buildings were made for the collection not vice versa. Some museums give you the impressions of artifacts crammed into awkward preexisting rooms, this was spacious and comfortable and appropriate to the specific collection.

Trappers Dancing (Alfred Jacob Miller)

Blackfoot Medicine Man (Catlin)

The Western art gallery has a large collection of the artists identified with the West: Frederick Remington, Henry Jackson, George Catlin, Thomas Moran, Alfred Bierstadt. Each has a distinctive style and role. George Catlin was one of the earliest explorer-artists recording the vanishing cultures - his paintings of Mandan villages especially are in most American History books. He was the first white to see the quarry where the Plains tribes got the stone for their pipes.The museum shows posters and books from the European exhibition tour of Catlin’s paintings. Thomas Moran was in the first official expedition to Yellowstone and his paintings helped convince Congress to create the park. His paintings are vast mountain landscapes in great detail and color, a Hudson school approach to the west (although the canvases are not huge - as some Hudson school works are). “The Golden Gate” is his best known picture of Yellowstone. Bierstadt also did grand views in realistic detail in oil. The collection is big enough to have variety of subject and media. In preparation for the oil paintings Moran made watercolor sketches that are really lovely.

Remington and Jackson are both artists who are labeled “illustrators”. Both did, in fact, produce works of art for magazines and books. Remington illustrated two of Theodore Roosevelt’s books on the West. The pictures tell a story in vivid detail: breaking a horse, eating by a campfire, standing nightwatch on a cattle drive.

Cowboy Mail (Remington)

Night Crossing (Miller)

The gallery tackles the controversial roles of illustrator and artist this way: “This type of art has sometimes been criticized as ‘merely’ illustration, implying a lack of creativity on the part of the artist because he did not necessarily originate the subject matter. Yet the best illustrators can stand on their own as works of art. These artists use the elements of art to make strong visual statements while following a long tradition of storytelling through painting”

There were Western paintings by several other famous illustrator-artists: N.C. Wyeth and W.H.D. Koerner. Many of these artists had trained with Howard Pyle (best known for his Robin Hood illustrations). There were a number of sculptures, mainly in bronze. One Henry Jackson sculpture shows a berserk bronco with rider. The contorted figures “stand” on one of the horse’s legs. President Ford apparently gave a copy of this to Queen Elizabeth to celebrate the American bicentennial!! Did she take offense at the implication?

Setting Traps (Miller)

Mandan Medicine (Catllin)

There was a whole section of animal paintings. The New York Zoological Society funded work to preserve animals in nature and art, much as ethnological societies were funding artists to preserve vanishing cultures. The museum also has two full artists’ studios - Remington’s had many western artifacts on the walls and floors - cowboy hats and pottery and bows and skulls and blankets.

In the Western art gallery and contemporary gallery, the people and landforms of the West are presented in every conceivable medium and technique - there are impressionist views of Indian villages in lovely pastels, mixed media collages, formal portraits of Indians in traditional dress and modern attire. I think you can apply any standard of great art to the works we saw and they would stand the test.

The Medicine Robe (Maynard Dixon)

Beaded Hightops

The Plains Indian museum is wonderfully built. You walk up a long solarium toward a real tipi which fills the entrance space. There are fullscale figures of Indians and horses with traditional adornment throughout. Galleries are devoted to individual subjects like “personal adornment” and “religion”. The display cases do not seem crowded. Each object has its space and importance. One had a display of Plains Indian toys, another of cradle boards and other child gear. Even a ceiling high case with over forty pairs of beaded moccasins did not seem cluttered. The emphasis is on the craftsmanship as well as the cultural details. A huge space at the back of the museum with three “balconies” overlooking has a fullscale settlement with three fully stocked tepees, staked hides and outside structures. It is terrific!

We loved the Cody Center and kept revisiting specific paintings or objects on our two visits. I wonder if I would have liked the museum as a child. Or would I have wanted to join a museum activity, trying to embroider with porcupine quills or eat pemmican? Do we appreciate museums differently at specific ages? Could we design a Freeport retail museum? What makes a great museum? We’ve seen a variety: indoor, outdoor, diorama, display cases, recreated dwellings, digs. Some are great, some aren’t. I’m still trying to figure out what makes the difference.

Impressionistic Remington

Bryce's Cody

A full moon peeked in the motel window in Cody this morning, and by the time dawn turned the thin clouds salmon we were munching on cereal and plotting another assault on the Buffalo Bill Cody Museum . A stiff breeze was snapping the flags, but, for a change, it was a mild westerly, and the big red bluff west of town glowed in the morning sun. Damn, but Wyoming can seduce you.

There are few public spaces that are truly welcoming, and the air of importance in most of them spoils the greeting. Not so this time. The open airiness inside matches the vistas outside, and the inner courtyards and the huge glass wall looking out at the mountains keep you in the landscape. The presentation is uncluttered and without pretension. That may be because ‘Western” art is the idiot stepchild of American ART. Which patronizing is absurd, of course. Here again is a regional art that mirrors a place, and needn’t apologize to anyone about its mastery.

Sacagawea (Statue by Henry Jackson)

Artifacts (Bryce)

But we’d immersed ourselves in those waters yesterday, so we indulged in the Plains Indian Collection for starters, today. I’ll let Peggy describe the effectiveness of it as a cultural exposition, but from an esthetic angle it’s a knockout. For me, the hair-raiser was the display of ritual objects. While I was alone in that space, it was full of corner-of-the-eye creatures. Figures lurking just out of sight. The investment of spirit energy in objects, in the making, and in the using, leaves a charge that is palpable to a sympathetic imagination. But it wasn’t a heavy charge, there’s a lot of sacred laughter in Native American spirituality, and there were echoes of laughter in the collection as well as chanting voices, and ghost dancers.

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