Portrait of the West

When the Gene Autry and Southwest museums merged last year, some people in the museum world joked that the cowboys had married the Indians. After all, the Autry had spotlighted the history of the American West alongside the pop-culture mythology of the region, backed by a $100-million endowment from Jackie Autry, the widow of the singing cowboy. At the less wealthy Southwest Museum, on the other hand, the focus was on Native American art and artifacts, especially an impressive collection of textiles and pottery.

After the merger, which placed both institutions under the umbrella of the Autry National Center, comes the largest traveling exhibition of paintings by George Catlin since the artist, born in 1796, went on tour with his own show in the 1840s. Presenting a particular moment in the history of the West, it is the first comprehensive exhibition of Catlin’s pictures on the West Coast, displaying not only a painter encountering his subject but also a meeting between two cultures.

Organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, “George Catlin and His Indian Gallery” will be on view at the renamed Museum of the American West through Aug. 4. It features more than 100 artworks, including portraits and landscapes, along with artifacts Catlin collected on his journeys through the West.

A lawyer, adventurer and self-taught artist, Catlin set out from Philadelphia on several trips during the 1830s, visiting Indian tribes west of the Mississippi River to record their “manners and customs” with a twofold intent: artistic and documentary.

Having painted Indian delegations in his studio on the East Coast, Catlin wanted to paint tribespeople in their own environments. He believed their way of life was about to be eradicated, done in by illness and the United States’ westward expansion. The year Catlin began his travels, Congress had passed the Indian Removal Act, forcing tribes east of the Mississippi to resettle west of the river.

In St. Louis, Catlin met Gen. William Clark, then superintendent of Indian affairs, who showed Catlin his Indian museum and introduced him to the American Fur Co. And in 1832, retracing the footsteps of Lewis and Clark, Catlin followed the Missouri River for a 2,000-mile journey. In all, he made five trips west, often as a guest of fur traders. (He would later denounce the traders for supplying liquor to Indian tribes.)

From these journeys, he published 10 books and created more than 500 works, including sketches, paintings and drawings.

In the landscape paintings, Catlin tries to come to grips with the vast locales he traveled through. With shimmering greens, he painted the plains from a bird’s-eye view, showing little detail save the occasional red running figure. Done on the spot, “these were like newspaper color photography coming back to people who couldn’t understand what the West was about,” says George Gurney, who curated the current show with Therese Thau Heyman.

Later, Catlin sometimes created a second, more finished, version in his studio from the sketches in the field.

In the portraits, meanwhile -- often of tribal leaders in their Sunday best -- the artist rendered faces in great detail.

“He painted the people in such a way that they appeared relaxed and strong and full of pride,” says George Horse Capture, a special assistant for cultural resources at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and a member of the A’aninin (Gros Ventre) tribe in Montana.

If the faces reveal great personality and detail, the hands and torsos were often left sketchy and unfinished; the proportions and anatomy aren’t always quite right. Yet with these rough and unfinished elements, the paintings retain a mysterious quality, says Gurney: “It’s almost a contemporary way of looking at things.”

Not only Catlin’s approach but also his prodigious output -- what W. Richard West, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and a Southern Cheyenne, calls the “Whitman-esque exuberance of his creative life” -- makes him seem contemporary. “Were he alive to day,” West writes in the show’s catalog, “Catlin more likely would be found on the cover of Art Forum than in debtors’ prison, where he matriculated for a time.”

In the New York Review of Books, Sanford Schwartz observed that “in the way he turns painting into a matter of bright, glistening color, satiny surfaces, poetically awkward drawing and a muscular physicality, he can make another set of viewers think as easily of Raoul Dufy or Alex Katz.”

For Gurney, Catlin’s is an uneven body of work.

“When he was hot, he was hot,” he says. “But he’s probably a B painter in the long run.”

Yet beyond arguments about artistic merit, the paintings of specific people and their dress and jewelry have become important historical documents.

“He was more than a painter,” says Gurney. An amateur anthropologist, writer, cartographer, geologist and showman, “he was a curious man who made observations in a kind of Jeffersonian manner.”

During his lifetime, critics questioned the veracity of Catlin’s portraits, such as his picture of the O-kee-pa ceremony -- a self-torture -- performed by the Mandan. Because the tribe was decimated by smallpox a few years later, the accuracy of the portrayals was not confirmed until after Catlin’s death.

Although Catlin had great sympathy for the individual Indians he met, he remained a product of a time that still believed in the idea of the noble savage. And in his paintings, he sought to portray a more “uncorrupted” way of life, declaring: “It is for these uncontaminated people that I would be willing to devote the energies of my life.”

In the 1840s, in debt and unable to sell his collection to the government, Catlin became a proto-Buffalo Bill, taking his Indian Gallery on the road as a kind of Wild West show that exhibited his collection of paintings and artifacts along with people from various tribes.

This road show also became fodder for criticism. In “Framing America: A Social History of American Art,” Frances K. Pohl writes that Catlin engaged in imperialist nostalgia -- “a yearning for that which one has directly or indirectly participated in destroying.”

But Horse Capture sees no difference between the Indian Gallery and what happens in the entertainment industry today.

“You open a Hollywood movie -- you take some of the actors there,” he says.

What matters, he says, is the existence of a record, a portrait.

“Maybe the Indians exploited him. These words are thrown around. Maybe it was reciprocal, an amalgam. Who knows? But here they are, preserved forever.”

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‘George Catlin and His Indian Gallery’

Where: Museum of the American West, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Griffith Park, L.A.

When: Tuesdays-Sundays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursdays, 10 a.m.-8 p.m.

Ends: Aug. 4

Price: $3-$7.50; 2 and younger, free

Contact: (323) 667-2000