A First Time for Everything

Perhaps you remember your first museum visit. I certainly do.


The Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma was the first art museum I ever saw. These days it's called "Gilcrease: The Museum of the Americas," and touts itself as "one of the country's best facilities for the preservation and study of American art and history," according to its web page. But in the mid-2oth century Gilcrease was one of a bare handful of museums devoted to Western art. Today there are considerably more institutions in the western United States that exhibit Native American art, "Western" art (more on that below), or historical art. Anyway, around that time we went to the museum for a school field trip, a mass of elementary school students, gleeful at escaping from the classroom and giddy with the excitement.


The Gilcrease, as I'll call it throughout this piece, was then as now located northwest of downtown Tulsa in the Osage Hills. Thomas Gilcrease, after making a fortune in the oil business, began buying art--a lot of art. In 1943 he opened The Museum of the American Indian in San Antonio, Texas, but it attracted little attention. In 1947 he bought an entire art collection. Today that collection is the nucleus of the Gilcrease. The group of works contained forty-six paintings by Charley Russell, the famous "cowboy artist," plus nearly thirty of his bronzes, but the jewel of the collection was (and is) bronzes and paintings by Frederic Remington. Remington began his career in art as an illustrator but made the leap to fine art in the early 20th century. In addition to works by these two iconic western artists, Gilcrease's acquisition included photographs by Edward Curtis and an archive of documents and correspondence of well known figures in the American West. Gilcrease, himself a member of the Creek tribe, exemplified a new interest in the Old West and the American Indian. (He had made his fortune primarily because as a Creek he had been granted 160 acres in Oklahoma that just happened to be on top of the largest oil discovery in North America up to then--what luck!) After the lack of interest in his Texas museum, in 1949 Gilcrease founded the museum I visited around a decade or so later.

Today the institute is called (rather grandly) Gilcrease Museum of the Americas, but the core of the collection is still Remington and Russell, with a healthy dollop of other well-knowns, including Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and George Catlin, among others.

So lets take a look at some of the features of the collection. You can't talk about Western Art without talking about Frederic Remington. Although many think he must have been a westerner, Remington was actually from New York. During the late 19th century, he made a reputation (and a great deal of money) as an illustrator for various periodicals and books, but he yearned for recognition as a fine artist. Although Remington did briefly attend art school at Yale, he wasn't that interested and left when he was still only eighteen. Refusing to go back to school, Remington instead went west to Montana in 1881 when he was about twenty. The mythical "Old West" was already fading by Remington's time, but the hook was set and he would return numerous times to sketch and paint. Nevertheless, except for brief periods, he never lived in the west.

The painting to the right, "The Stampede," is one of my favorites by Remington. It dates from 1908, a year before the painter's death, the period when he was intent on throwing off the label of illustrator. To that end, he began a series of extensive studies that resulted in a series of about 70 paintings he dubbed nocturnes. In these paintings, of which "The Stampede" is one of the finest examples, he throughly studied the color of night as he saw it. (For other examples, see the entry for the 2003 exhibition The Color of Night at http://www.nga.gov/programs/abstracts/remington.shtm .) If you look carefully, you can see too that Remington was a master draftsman. His animals and humans all have real bones, convincing anatomy, and personality. And he could render action better than many of his contemporaries. Note that the galloping horse has all four hooves off the ground. Clearly, Remington had studied the pioneering photographic work of Edweard Muybridge.

Although he made his name in painting, by the end of the 19th century Remington had also begun sculpting in bronze. The Gilcrease is rich in original bronzes by Remington and now hold 18 of his originals. Today you can buy reproductions via many sources, and there is a brisk trade in fakes. But the Gilcrease pieces were all produced by the artist himself. To the right is a view of the one that I've always loved. Remington called it "Off the Range," but it has come to be known as "Comin' Through the Rye," which in my view is much more appropriate. Here we have four cowboys, probably fresh off a cattle drive, tanked to the maximum (hence the "rye") and having a great time. Remington originally sold these through Tiffany's in New York City.

Besides Remington, the Gilcrease has perhaps one of the finest collections of Charley Russell's work. Russell was perhaps as well-known as Remington a century ago, although today I suspect his reputation is less glossy. Russell, like Remington, was not a native of the Old West but instead was born in St. Louis. Unlike Remington, though, Russell went West and stayed there, emigrating to Montana in 1880 to become a cowboy. He seems to have had no formal art training, and in fact his reputation was of "cowboy artist" came after a small watercolor of his, painted in the early 1890s, was circulated by the owner of a ranch where Charley was a cowboy. A his fame grew, Russell made many friends among well-off collectors of his works, including actors and film makers such as William S. Hart, Will Rogers, and Douglas Fairbanks. He died in 1926.

My favorite from that first visit to Gilcrease is this one, aptly titled "Meat's Not Meat 'Til It's In The Pan," is one that caught my adolescent fancy, probably because the title is humorous and the painting clearly needs the viewer to add some narrative. Russell was never the great draftsman or colorist that Remington was, but for a primarily self-taught painter, he was damn good.

Gilcrease is also a repository of American history and anthropology. The museum holds one of the circulated copies of the Declaration of Independence, signed by Ben Franklin, among other documents and letters by Founding Fathers, early maps, and even correspondence from the family of Christopher Columbus. There is also an extensive collection of Native American artifacts--clothing, pottery, basketry, and weapons.

If you're ever in Tulsa, take a couple of hours and visit. It's well worth your time.