An American Collection: Works from the Amon Carter Museum

Rating:
Summary: Positively American Art
Review: In life Amon G Carter was all for getting the American plane industry off the ground. In fact, he flew the first airplane to Ft Worth, Texas, in 1911. With his death, in 1955, he hoped to open up the arts to all. So, by his will, a museum was set up to house as many works as possible by Frederic Remington and Charles M Russell.

His museum more than meets that goal. Its catalogue shows it to be the place to go for the art of both American frontier artists. For example, the museum has A dash for the timber. This oil on canvas made Remington a major painter, in 1889. The museum also has The fall of the cowboy. Two cowboys with their horses about to pass through gate rails, under a gray sky, in a wintry landscape, are painted so close in tones that you know a way of life's in its twilight years. Also, the museum has The outlaw. The bronze freezes in time the realistic folds in the rider's hat and his shifting weight against his pitching horse.

The catalogue also shows the museum to be the place to go for American drawings, paintings, photographs, prints, sculptures and watercolors. The staff sees as landmark additions American Indian symbols by painter Marsden Hartley and Barber shop, Bass rocks #2, Blips and ifs, Chinatown, and Egg beater #2 by lithographer and painter Stuart Davis. John Singer Sargent's portrait of Alice Vanderbilt Shepard, too, is seen as a catch. It contrasts the girl's carefully worked face with the thinly painted rest. Who can forget the brilliant white with blue and pink in her jacket and folds of her blouse?

Pride of ownership also goes out to sculptures by Alexander Calder and David Smith. There's Lunar landscape by Louise Nevelson, on painted wood. It goes out also to photographs. In fact, the museum's photography collection now swells at over 250,000 objects. For example, there's Berthoud by Robert Adams. There's Great gallery, Horseshoe Canyon, Utah, by Linda Connor. There's Music - a sequence of 10 cloud photographs by Alfred Stieglitz.

There are even daguerreotypes by Josiah Hawes and Albert Southworth. Two women posed with a chair has quite a range of clear tones, because of an extra layer of silver having been electroplated to copper plate. The smallest detail in their lace collars is caught. The light from the ceiling skylight also catches both women, in a Rembrandt-like highlighting.

Patricia Junker et al have come up with nicely arranged illustrations and clearly thought out write-ups for each item in the exhibition. AN AMERICAN COLLECTION's a keeper. It works well, too, with Junker's JOHN STEUART CURRY: INVENTING THE MIDDLE WEST and WINSLOW HOMER: ARTIST AND ANGLER.