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136 Western American Literature Views of a Vanishing Frontier. Edited by John C. Ewers, et al. (Omaha, Nebraska: Center for Western Studies/Joslyn Art Museum, 1984. 103 pages, $14.95.) The American West: The Modern Vision. By Patricia Janis Broder. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company for the New York Graphic Society, 1984. 350 pages, $75.00.) Views of a Vanishing Frontier is an exhibition catalog of the watercolors of a Swiss artist, Karl Bodmer, who with his patron Prince Maximilian of Wied visited the American West in 1833— 34 and left behind a splendidlydetailed record of landscape, wildlife and the Indians, Maximilian’sparticular preoccupation. The 150th anniversary of the Maximilian-Bodmer expedition has inspired some recent publications and given exposure to Bodmer’s paint­ ings, previously known only from the plates accompanying Maximilian’s account of his travels. Patricia Broder’s The American West is a survey of modernist paintings (it does not include sculpture) that will, with few excep­ tions, be even less familiar to the public than Bodmer’s. The books share a common geographical setting (though Bodmer’s West was the Missouri, Broder’s, principally the Taos-Santa Fe area) and certain subject matter (landscapes, Indians),but little else. They examine artists separated by nearly a century, and even more by their intentions. Precise observation and presen­ tation are the point of Bodmer’s work, and he stands as a model documen­ tarían. In contrast, the painters surveyed in Broder’s book are committed to expressing an inner vision, not external reality. This is most apparent in the work of the Abstract Expressionists, but isequally true of today’s Photo-realists who create the illusion of reality by working from photographs that are them­ selves two-dimensional illusions of reality. Their work, in short, might look like Bodmer’s but their intentions would have been incomprehensible to him. Views of a Vanishing Frontier isclearly focused;Bodmer, his accomplish­ ments and the role of his patron are discussed in the three scholarly essays accompanying the excellent, mostly color plates. The American West is also distinguished by the high quality of its reproductions, but Broder’s subject is relatively discursive, and her focus wobbles. Modernism is to be understood as the opposite of traditionalism, here also characterized as romanticism about the old West. Most of the artists Broder discusses rejected representational styles, differentiating them from the documentarians, memorialists (Reming­ ton, Russell), Taos School, and the legion of contemporary artists painting visually realistic tributes to a timeless West unscarred by highways, jet streams and donut stands. Her artists, Broder argues, have been unfairly neglected because of the western art establishment’s unease with other than purely representational painting, and the eastern art establishment’s unwillingness to acknowledge the achievements of modernists inspired by the West, as though anything western by definition could not be avant-garde. But Broder’s own principle of inclusion is generous to a fault: she throws a wide loop, snagging any eastern modernist who chanced to wander west on a summer’s vacation and leave an impression or two in paint. This wars with the idea of a westernbased modernist vision. Reviews 137 Broder divides her subject into categories (the realist vision, modernism, new images of Taos, American Indian modernists, etc.), provides a few pages justifying the category, then files short biographies and descriptive commen­ taries under the appropriate heading. She sometimes covers more than twenty artists in a chapter, though Robert Henri, John Sloan, Marsden Hartley, John Marin and Georgia O’Keeffe, whose images retain their power to astonish, merit chapters of their own. With so much to cover, the criticism does not cut deep. The shorter commentaries are essentially appreciations, placing each artist within modernist conventions. This can be disconcerting. Artists are praised for breaking free of romantic-representational forms and pegged as innovative because they essayed nonobjective approaches to western themes— imported conventions, in short, being preferable to traditional ones. Yet in the end Broder claims that “Western art is by nature representational,” and lauds the freedom enjoyed by western artists today, notably the Photo-realists, to paint representationally. Granted that their preference for the highwayclutter of the twentieth-century West distinguishes...

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