Hermon Atkins MacNeil (1866-1947)
The Moqui Prayer for Rain, 1895-96
The American West in Bronze – Metropolitan Museum Through some 65 bronze sculptures by 28 artists, ‘The American West in Bronze, 1850–1925’, explores the aesthetic and cultural impulses behind the creation of statuettes with American western themes. Metropolitan Museum, December 18, 2013–April 13, 2014.]]>
Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Although the 28 artists represented in the exhibition are bound together by their use of bronze, they are distinguished by varying life experiences. Alexander Phimister Proctor and Solon Hannibal Borglum, for instance, grew up in the West, and that first-hand experience informed their work, even after the artists had moved to cosmopolitan centers, especially New York and Paris. Some resided in the West their entire lives—notably Russell, who settled in Montana—punctuated only by brief travels east or abroad. Others, such as Edward Kemeys and Charles Schreyvogel, were transitory explorers, ethnologists, and front-line recorders of the western experience. Still others rarely traveled west of the Mississippi River—Frederic William MacMonnies, for example, spent most of his career in France.
Despite inherent differences, these sculptors collectively glorified an Old West past of Indians and wildlife, cowboys and pioneers, in marked contrast to the gritty realities of industrialization and immigration then altering East Coast cities and pushing inexorably westward. Remington no doubt spoke for many of his colleagues when in 1907 he stated, “My West passed utterly out of existence so long ago as if to make it merely a dream. It put on its hat, took up its blankets and marched off the board; the curtain came down and a new act was in progress.”
The exhibition covers the period 1850 to 1925 (with several later exceptions) and centers on four specific themes: the American Indian, wildlife, the cowboy, and the settler. While the American Indian and animals were favored subjects throughout this 75-year period, the cowboy was not portrayed in sculptural form until the 1890s, and the pioneer not regularly until the turn of the 20th century. Among the historical figures represented in the exhibition will be Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé, frontiersman Kit Carson, silent-film actor William S. Hart, and humorist Will Rogers.
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