” and Charles Russell” isn’t the usual museums love to put on when presenting Western art’s two biggest names.
In fact, surprisingly, it’s just the opposite. Rather than turning the painters into heroes of their era, it renders them as regular guys, hard-working artists with lives separate from canvas and bronze. The work is small and well-chosen, impressive and endearing, and for once, the legends about these men feel real.
That makes the exhibit just right for its venue, the Longmont Museum and Cultural Center, itself an intimate setting and far from the downtown Denver core, where this art more often shows up. The place is casual and uncrowded, a spacious room for a quiet afternoon with Fred and C.M.
The Front Range suburbs have exploded with new cultural venues in the past decade, and they’ve searched hard for their own identity. Should theaters in Lakewood and compete with the cultural offerings of the big city or specialize in community events? Should art galleries in and or small?
This exhibit offers an answer: They should fit themselves comfortably in between, offering high-quality wares that complement the Denver institutions. This show has a pedigree — it has traveled from the in Cody, Wyo. But it’s neither overwhelmed by ambition nor ruined by too much marketing. It sets reasonable expectations, and exceeds them.
That’s because the Buffalo Bill Center, where Mindy Besaw is the curator, sent a smart sampling of objects, paintings, sketches, sculptures and more. Both artists are represented in broad terms.
Peek inside the artist
Russell, in particular, comes alive here with his detailed oils of the Old West in its waning days. With works spanning from 1890’s “The Buffalo Herd,” through 1912’s “Deer Grazing,” you can see how he worked as a documentarian, creating a rich portrait of the continent’s earlier inhabitants for the growing country.
Yes, he was a romantic — too much so — but he had a way of capturing subjects from their own point of view. His 1900 watercolor, “When Wagons Meant Plunder,” has a group of Indians hovering on a cliff planning some kind of raid on a caravan of covered coaches below. His 1922 bronze figure, “An Enemy That Warns,” presents a wolf in the heat of the hunt.
The subjects can be oversimplified, and fully fictional, even ignorant, but they tell a compelling story all the same.
The exhibit does that for Russell, as well. By including such a diverse array of media, we see him as an artistic explorer. It was intimate touches, like three letters he wrote to friends, each adorned with color sketches t, that give us a clue of his colorful character.
A smaller Remington
Remington is similarly shrunk. There are examples of the sort of work that made him famous, notably the 1906 bronze “The Outlaw,” with a cowboy balanced precariously on an untamed horse, bucking high with just two feet on the ground.
But we also get a series of pared-down lithographs from 1901 depicting archetypes of the West, like “The Sioux Chief” and “A Cavalry Officer.”
It gets closer. We see pen-and-ink sketches of faces and objects Remington assembled during trips to the frontier. The show includes a fascinating series of oil studies he did of ranches, rivers and prairie sagebrush.
These works served as references for later work. For us, they offer a confidential glimpse into his process. Remington was a collector, a cataloger, a student. Every bootstrap and lasso that he re-created in metal or oil appears here to have came from thorough research and lots of tries.
This show answers questions, but it also raises some. It could use a bit more text about the times these men lived in, so we can get to know their outside worlds as well as we grow to know their artistic habits.
The castings are from a wide range of dates, including some near or after their deaths. As any collector of three-dimensional Western art knows, authenticity is a serious matter. There’s no reason to doubt the connoisseurship of the Buffalo Bill Center, though, again, some supplemental text on how to know the real deasl from the fakes would lead to a better understanding of why some pieces get into museum shows and some don’t.
Still, there’s plenty of education to be had in Longmont, and the class is a joy. This show offers a modest thrill, just big enough to inspire traditional arts consumers to do a reverse commute out of the city, rather than toward it.
That’s a lot to say about culture on the fringes of the metro area, and let’s hope there’s more to come.
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/rayrinaldi
FREDERIC REMINGTON AND CHARLES RUSSELL: MASTERWORKS FROM THE BUFFALO BILL CENTER OF THE WEST The Longmont Museum & Cultural Center presents a variety of works by Western art’s two biggest names. Though April 19. 400 Quail Road, Longmont, $8. 303-651-8374 or .
