It’s hard to imagine two exhibitions that might complement each other as well as the pair of cowboy art shows that opened here over the past two weeks.
At the Denver Art Museum: “The Russells in Denver, 1921,” which aims to recreate the spirit of an exhibition the Western art icon Charles Marion Russell staged at the city’s landmark Brown Palace Hotel 122 years ago.
Related: Now at MCA Denver: A provocative new exhibit blows up the myths of the sturdy western icon
At the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver: “Cowboy,” a multi-media group show that documents how today’s artists are depicting the oldest profession this side of the Mississippi.
The set-up is nearly perfect. Coming at us from one direction, one of the great myth-makers of American art. And from the other, a horde of myth-breakers, who trade on tearing down cultural stereotypes.
You should see both, though I suggest starting with DAM. That is where this story begins.
“The Russells in Denver, 1921” is a modest exhibition by the museum’s standards, but it is both clever and enlightening.
Tucked into a corner of the Western American Art galleries on the seventh floor of DAM’s Martin Building, it features 18 of Russell’s artworks, some, though not all, of which were on in the display of paintings and sculptures that took place at the Brown back in the day. The arrangement offers a potent sampling of the artist’s considerable capacity to create scenes that moved the masses and made him an early 20th-century star.
Russell had a keen ability to paint action into his scenes, and that was a good match with his chosen subject matter, wranglers and herd drivers, gun fighters and skilled horsemen. And because there was more to the West than that, he painted equally scenes of Indians — Native Americans, as we say now — doing their own hunting, warring and traversing over vast plains in the land where the buffalo roamed.
All that movement, combined with a folklore that turned laborers into larger-than-life idols, gave people something to lose their breath over in the era before cinema really got them going. Hollywood took its cues from Russell, and before him Frederic Remington, and rode off into the sunset. It is where filmmakers got their ideas and, of course, their tropes that continue to be seen today.
This exhibition provides prime examples of all that, plus a little truth-telling. Russell was an Easterner and didn’t really witness many of the scenes he painted. He did immerse himself in the West, spending some years in Montana in the 1880s. But that was decades before the works in this show, the most significant of which were made in the 1920s.
By the time he got around to painting the subjects in these scenes, they were largely gone. Bison herds were decimated. Disputes were settled in courts of law, not in the streets between dudes wearing kerchiefs and wide-brim hats.
In that way, Russell didn’t create the stereotype as much as he perpetrated and exploited it. But he did that with great skill, and shamelessly. Under Russell’s brush, not even the quietest moments were rendered subtly.
Russell didn’t just paint cowboys, he painted them at their most dramatic. Works featured in this exhibit, like “When Guns Speak, Death Settles Disputes” live up to their name. Gunfighters on horseback are caught up in a swirl of momentum, their pistols blaring. The narrative unfolds at night, with a dark sky above and empty liquor bottles strewn on the ground below.
That macho momentum comes through with equal verve in paintings like “When Mules Wear Diamonds,” which captures a mustachioed cattle driver with a rifle on his lap and a whip in hand, pushing his charges through a rocky field. Same with “A Tight Dally and a Loose Latigo” — the title refers to ropes and straps of the trade — which has a cowboy bouncing high off his horse while trying to conquer a steer.
Russell’s mastery of color and style come through best on his paintings of Native Americans. Both “Piegans,” which depicts Indians riding across a plain on horses and communicating through sign language, and “In the Enemy’s Country,” a scene of Kootenai hunters crossing hilly terrain with their horses disguised as bison to throw off Blackfeet scouts, are set in the early morning hours. Russell renders the time of day and its unique light in jewel tones that radiate off the canvas. Both are showstoppers.
“The Russells in Denver, 1921” goes to great lengths to acknowledge the contribution of Nancy Russell, the painter’s wife, in his career. She was his publicist and manager and, according the text, played a crucial role in his success.
The exhibition, organized by JR Henneman, DAM’s lead curator of Western Art, is shrewd in the way it connects the painter to Denver.
As far as historians know — and this show relied on research— the couple only traveled to Denver once in their lifetime to produce this show at the Brown, where they also took up residence for two weeks. Using the 1921 exhibition as a filter for exploring the art gives local visitors to the museum a genuine link to their own past; adding a layer of Colorado history that makes the show all the more compelling.
As for Russell’s reliance on tropes, his fallback to the fantasy that the West was characterized by rough riders and noble savages, this exhibit makes no attempt to hide it. Instead, it focuses on his talents as a painter, and his impact on the world during the time he lived and worked.
In some way, that makes him, and the whole exhibition, a foil to the MCA show, with its new-century sensibilities of truth-telling and inclusiveness, its reveal (which most of us know already), that cowboys weren’t just good, ol’ boys. It’s a set-up, whether it wants to be or not.
But it also chronicles, with skill and courage, his power as both a painter and propagandist. In both regards, he was a mighty figure.
IF YOU GO
“The Russells in Denver, 1921,” continues through June 30 at the Denver Art Museum. Info: 720-865-5000 or denverartmuseum.org.
“Cowboy,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, through Feb. 2024. 1485 Delgany St, Denver. General admission $9 to $12. 303-298-7554; mcadenver.org.
