‘Mythmakers’ at the Amon Carter Museum takes a critical look at two icons of American art

Two American art icons active during the second half of the 19th century are presented together for the first time in a single exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

“Mythmakers: The Art of Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington” is on view through Feb. 28.

Both artists worked in a variety of mediums, including drawing, painting, graphic illustration and sculpture, all of which are represented here in more than 60 works of art.

The exhibition includes plenty of examples of Homer’s rural landscapes. Remington’s cowboys and American Indians are also featured, and the exhibition does not shy away from addressing the controversy associated with these works.

The museum collaborated with the Denver Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art and a host of lenders in a scholarly investigation of two very different artists, a generation apart, who explored similar themes rooted in American identity. These include the visualization of masculinity and the notion of struggling with forces encountered in the wilderness in an expanding frontier.

Homer (1836-1910) and Remington (1861-1909) were both born in the northeastern United States and remained there for the majority of their lives. Each traveled westward over the course of their careers on assignment to document events relevant to the times.

Homer covered the Civil War for Harper’s Weekly, and two decades later Remington published illustrations for the same magazine dealing with the government’s war with Geronimo.

As far as artistic style goes, Homer was already a plein-air (outdoor) painter like the French Impressionists, but unlike them he remained a realist who depicted simple rural scenes and vast landscapes.

Conversely, Remington was a naturalist who at times seemed impressionistic, exclusively portraying men in action on the Western plains. He has been criticized for privileging a representation of cowboys who were involved in decimating American Indian settlements that existed long before the settlers came.

In Shotgun Hospitality (1908), Remington depicts a seated cowboy, weapon in hand, talking with three American Indians around a campfire. This could be read several different ways. The curators quote historian Jennifer Pictou with a contemporary reading: “For every U.S. Native tribe, this is the way the U.S. government met them, with a shotgun in one hand and something hard behind their back.”

Many paintings in the exhibition satisfy the themes explored by the curators. Two stand out for me as atypical pieces that help to reframe the artists’ relationship to each other and their individual subject matter.

In Homer’s ravishing painting Undertow (1886), an almost classical composition situates four figures as they struggle against a powerful current. A feeling of danger imbues the composition with faithful emotional heft as two male figures attempt to rescue a drowning couple, and it’s unclear whether they will make it back alive.

This is where myths related to survival against nature come into play in his painting, and how these ideas frame the contentions of the exhibition as a whole.

In the stunning, surprising late-career work Moonlight, Wolf (1904), Remington experiments with unnatural hues of green. A wolf on nocturnal prowl turns his piercing gaze toward the viewer. His bright golden eyes, mirrored in the yellow stars above, hint at impending danger. Remington’s nontraditional use of color brings to mind European Expressionism.

Here, as with Homer’s painting, the foreboding conflict with nature itself, not with other humans, ties their work together in an examination of possible terror erupting out of nowhere.

Seen in the context of the Amon Carter’s extensive holdings of American art on view in the other galleries, specifically Remington and the early modernists who came after both artists, an engrossing experience awaits anyone who dares undertake the voyage west.

Details

“Mythmakers: The Art of Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington” continues through Feb. 28 at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 3501 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth. Free. 817-738-1933. cartermuseum.org.