A look at its superb museum of Western art from Catlin and Bierstadt to today.
A few weeks ago, I found a new museum to add to my list of favorites. It’s not an indiscriminately long list — I’m a tough critic when it comes to museums, unlike a dog when it comes to cuisine — but the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, in Cody, Wyo., is so various, so filled with treasures, so surprising, so beautifully presented, and so much fun that I spent two afternoons there. I visited as a tenderfoot. Aside from a quickie wedding in Reno — not mine — and the annual dance festival in Vail, I’d never been to a mountain state or the Dakotas.
Today I’ll look at its wonderful collection of the art of the American West, displayed in a wing called the Whitney Western Art Museum. The first subject when visitors enter the place is bison. Or buffalos. There’s a difference. The colloquial is “buffalo,” and in its Buffalo Nation exhibit, the museum usually goes with that, but an honest-to-goodness buffalo is Asian or African. Bison by the millions, nomadic grazers, fed Native tribes and, along with Western landscapes and Indians, were prime subjects for artists.
The museum opens Buffalo Nation with a bust portrait of a bulky-headed beast by Albert Bierstadt, from 1878. “Take that, Sargent, and Reynolds and Rembrandt, too,” was my first thought as I looked at this handsome, frank subject, his one eye fixed on me. Bierstadt’s Last of the Buffalo, from 1888, and, nearby, Alfred Jacob Miller’s Surround of Buffalo by Indians, from the early 1850s, and glorious mountain scenes by Thomas Moran and Bierstadt start us off with blockbusters.
The Last of the Buffalo is famous for many reasons. It’s big and cinematic. In the more-bang-for-the-buck department, it comes in two versions; the first is at the National Gallery in Washington. D.C. The Washington version’s a 10-footer — almighty big as they say in Wyoming — and Cody’s is a mere 6 feet but still a merciless and romantic thing. It’s a slaughter scene and another telling of the story of the Indian as a fast-disappearing race. The painting put the buffalo’s brush with extinction in the headlines and advanced the cause of a new national zoo. Bison were grazing at the National Zoological Park very soon after it opened, in minimal form, in 1889.
The galleries feel more like a rambling ranch than a temple, an Eastern look as museums go. The Whitney is mostly open-plan, so there’s a big front-to-back space but also enough freestanding walls to carve niches and a couple of separate galleries. I love vista views in museums. From the entrance, we can see the length of the wing and through a spacious window to an outdoor bronze equestrian sculpture of Buffalo Bill Cody himself. As a tease, I’ll tell you that the sculpture led directly to the museum.
The building is practical. The exterior has a triangular pediment, suggesting a tepee, and the walk from the greeter desk to art is less than a whoop and a holler. Historical and contemporary art mix it up. It was a joy to see James Prosek’s Yellowstone Composition, from 2016, on view, mixed with the 19th-century landscapes. He’s a great artist. Near the Bierstadts and Morans are Frank Buffalo Hyde’s three paintings from the early 2020s that imagine selfie-taking, ubiquitous at our parks, from the bison’s point of view. Westerners aren’t sanctimonious types. They’ve got a sense of humor. Hyde is what I’d call a Pop Surrealist — he mixes Native icons such as the buffalo with icons of high tech.
The center is really five museums in one sprawling, seven-acre campus. There’s the Whitney and also the Cody Firearms Museum, and I believe them when they say it’s the best museum of American guns in the world. The Plains Indian Museum fed my expanding interest in Native art — not anthropological or archeological but art of exquisite craftsmanship, originality, and beauty. The Draper Natural History Museum focuses on Yellowstone National Park — its eastern entrance is a bit more than an hour’s drive from Cody.
Then there’s a museum of the lives, times, and spectacles of Buffalo Bill Cody (1846–1917) and also Annie Oakley (1860–1926). I’m ashamed to say I knew next to nothing about these two exemplary Americans except from a revival of Annie Get Your Gun. For those as uninformed as I am, or more so, Buffalo Bill was a soldier, teamster, scout, chronicler, showman, and legend, among the founders of Cody and, if you believe Larry McMurtry, America’s premier celebrity from the days of P. T. Barnum and his circus stars until the arrival of Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp. His Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show is thought to have traveled a quarter of a million miles, captivating peasants to potentates. Oakley was part of it and the supreme flower of women sharpshooters.
Buffalo Bill’s niece, Mary Jester Allen, was among the museum’s founders. After opening it in a 50-by-70-foot log home in 1927, she served as its director until 1960. In the early 1920s, she led the charge in enlisting New York’s Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to sculpt a bronze monument to Buffalo Bill. Vanderbilt took the job. And what a good new friend she became. Gertrude was not only a great granddaughter of Commodore Vanderbilt, with big bucks of her own, but she’d married Harry Payne Whitney, who, by the time she immersed herself in all things Buffalo Bill, had inherited a $36 million steamship fortune. The baby museum was thus introduced to New York money.
Whitney hadn’t yet established the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City or won the turgid custody battle for her niece, Gloria Vanderbilt, but she’d done the Titanic memorial in Washington — her brother had gone down with the ship — and was known as an adept but fledgling sculptor. Buffalo Bill — The Scout, dedicated in 1924 and still outside the center on a boulder base, is very good, 14 feet of a lithe, dynamic horse and Cody. Allen and other keepers of the flame weren’t convinced by her designs for either horse or rider — too Eastern — so they sent a local cowboy and Smokey, a horse from Buffalo Bill’s ranch, by train to New York to pose for her. And Whitney did it gratis.
The galleries never suffer from sameness. George Catlin’s Crow Chief, from 1850, is a gem. It’s our American version of Velázquez’s royal equestrian portraits. An N.C. Wyeth lasso painting from around 1904 mixes well with folk art painting and sculpture, contemporary scenes such as Allan Mardon’s fantastic Battle of Greasy Grass, from 1996, and bronzes by a range of Western sculptors. There are two impressive focus galleries, too. One surveys the career of Alexander Phimister Proctor (1860–1950). He was the eminent Beaux Arts animal sculptor famous for designing the horse on which General Sherman sits near the entrance to Central Park. He also did sculptures of mustangs, pumas, buffalos, and, yes, lions and tigers and bears and Theodore Roosevelt.
On the other side of the museum wing is the re-creation of Remington’s New Rochelle studio, a huge and delightful surprise. I love Remington’s nocturnes — there’s one on view at the center — and he’s a good horse painter. His action scenes are effective. He’s not beyond the scope of human emotion, though. Still, he’s knocked by woke whackos for the sin of playing cowboy, but don’t we all act in our own internal dramas off and on? Yes, he was very Gilded Age and a New Yorker and so fat and squat that he needed a crane to get on a horse, but he strove for the you-are-there, documentary look, which is very American. Did Gérôme ever live in a harem? Not on your tintype, pardner. You don’t have to be a Sioux to paint a Sioux.
What I do see in Remington’s studio are hundreds of artifacts — props — from bandanas and batwing ties to wampum belts and war bonnets. The hoard came to the center in the late 1950s along with a group of very good works by Remington, many on view opposite the studio. The studio was a public showplace like, say, William Merritt Chase’s, but a packed, practical workplace with objects gathered over the years. He was after authenticity and was an exacting set designer.
Snoots think there isn’t much to excite in Western art. It’s derivative and primitive, they say, too sharp in focus, with too many horses and all that cow flop. Worse, it aggrandizes cowboys. Too much outdoors for pasty people. Too hardy. Too manly. Too fake. That’s city-slicker talk. Charles Russell is a realist, so clarity of expression and precise iconography are essential in his work. Realism is the default style in American art. It’s honest. Of course, toxic masculinity is about as prevalent as toxic femininity. And sprezzatura and abstraction and slashing brushstroke were seen as too highfalutin and European and New York and therefore not allowed. There’s no cowboy version of Rothko.
But, you say, Jackson Pollock is from Cody. Yes, and that was part of his mystique in the late 1940s. He was said to bring authentic, wild cowboy spirit to Action Painting and “cowboy” was — and still is — both a compliment and a slur in defining our capacity to break things as we get our way. Whatever. By the late ’30s, he’d gone Surreal, and Westerners are into the illogic of stampedes and broncos, not dreams.
The curators of the Buffalo Bill Center are very talented on many fronts, among them the decision to juxtapose big, theatrical art against smaller, even precious things. Edgar Paxson’s Custer’s Last Stand, from 1899, though, is something else. It’s a 10-foot history painting but also contemporary art, since it was done just 23 years after the Battle of Little Bighorn. A cast of hundreds, gringo and Native, are at the mano a mano stage of one very intense fracas to the death. It’s a riot of buckskin, feathers, blasting guns, pink and white clouds, Army corpses, and Native horses charging on both sides, in toto a one-sided massacre in the making. At the top, in the center, is a wounded Custer, making literally his last stand before death.
Paxson is a Montana artist, self-taught, and what I call a sparkling realist, as if his crisply conveyed figures and luscious color are finished with a sprinkle of fairy dust. He’d done his research, too, interviewing survivors and gathering accessories to make it look right. Near the Paxson, but more compact and in cases, are Remington’s Coming Through the Rye, a rollicking bronze from 1902–1907, and his Cheyenne sculpture, from 1902. On the other side of the space are small Western scenes close together. The balance is perfect. And by the glass wall looking out to The Scout sculpture is a commodious gallery with cushy chairs and books on Western art.
I have very few quibbles. The museum is working to acquire more work by Native artists. This is ongoing and correctly a priority. I’d move some of the art in the Plains Indian Museum into the Whitney. A small Whitney show on a Japanese World War II internment camp near Cody is awkwardly off-topic. It belongs someplace else, maybe a transition space.
Piles of invective have been heaped upon the myths of the American West. Was the winning of the West really a murder spree? A scalpel was needed to pare away what’s demonstrably false as well as vice passing as virtue. Instead, as with most everything else, fantasists, pimps, and professional victims took a bludgeon to the taming of the Wild West, which overall was uplifting and a miracle. No nuance, no complexity, no awe — and, more often than not, the grievance mongers swapped one set of myths for another. I look at James Bama’s Contemporary Sioux Indian, from 1978, as depicting a young man with a relationship to the past but a life in the modern world. That’s among the museum’s target themes.
I prefer to look for positive things. Many of what the haters, the aggrieved, the envious, and the stuck call myths are true or false or something-in-between stories — founded on simple cowboy virtues. Self-reliance, surely. Courage. “Scared to death but still saddlin’ up to do what’s got to be done,” Rooster Cogburn — John Wayne — told us in True Grit. Finish what you start, take pride in your work, and keep your promises. Know where to draw the line and cleave to it, with a Rough Rider revolver by your side if need be. Be Gary Cooper in High Noon. You’re gonna get thrown a lot, but just keep gettin’ back on. All are part of Western life and the art you’ll see at this wonderful museum.