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Life & Arts

Wild West comes back to Houston

by MOHAMMAD OLOKODE
The Daily Cougar

The way of the West has made its way to Houston in the form of art.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston has opened an exhibit called The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950. The exhibit, which runs through Jan. 28, focuses on the West in the form of modernism as seen through the eyes of the featured artists and photographers. It contains loaned artwork from different museums, including the Amon Carter Museum, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Emily Neff, curator of the exhibit and of American painting and sculpture at the MFAH, said there were specific pieces of art that made her decide to do the exhibit.

"Well, it came out of three different productions: One was our own selections of works by Frederic Remington, who we always think of as the kind of cowboys and Indians painter, and I was very interested in how he uses landscapes in his art," Neff said. "We also made a huge addition in 19th- and 20th-century photographs."

Many artists are highlighted in the exhibition, including Ansel Adams, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. 

"For some, the modern West is an oxymoron," Neff said in a press release. "Most people believe that American modernism sprang exclusively from the urban East. The mythic West -- promoted in pulp fiction and Hollywood westerns -- has obscured a key relationship: the kinship between modernism as it developed in both the East and the West." 

The exhibit begins with a prologue titled "Landmarking the West." The prologue shows how the artists introduced "the dramatic landscapes and vistas of the West" to the American and European public. The painting that begins the exhibit is Thomas Moran's 1875 work "Mountain of the Holy Cross." 

The exhibition later goes into "The End of the Frontier: Making the West Artistic" and "The Many Wests: Modern Regions" focusing on California, the Southwest and the Dust Bowl. In the Dust Bowl section, photographs by Dorothea Lange focus on the Great Depression and rural life, with "Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California" -- one of Lange's most recognizable pieces -- featured. 

"These photographs reveal several of Lange's approaches: one shows the mother nursing her baby, and another shows a view from afar of a tattered tent, an open trunk of clothes and an older child in a rocking chair," Neff wrote in a book that accompanies the exhibit. 

The final section of the exhibit is the epilogue, "The Abstract West." The section focuses on the West after the Dust Bowl era and concerns artists exploring surrealism and abstract expressionism. 

Neff hopes viewers will go to the exhibit and learn more about the complex nature of the American West.

"I kept it as open-ended as I could so that people can interpret it themselves," she said. "I don't want to tell people what to think. What I hope happens is that they understand the West itself, the very landscape itself (and) the feeling of connection to the land."

For more information, visit www.mfah.org. 

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