Painting Culture, Painting Nature: Stephen Mopope, Oscar Jacobson, and the Development of Indian Art in Oklahoma by Gunlög Fur (review)

In Painting Culture, Painting Nature: Stephen Mopope, Oscar Jacobson, and the Development of Indian Art in Oklahoma, Gunlög Fur presents highly engaging accounts of the lives of two icons of the twentieth-century Native American fine art movement. Swedish American artist and academic Oscar Jacobson and Kiowa painter Stephen Mopope are her subjects. Employing a methodology based in concurrent histories, Fur focuses on the divergences and intersections of Jacobson’s and Mopope’s lives and on the ways the two influenced one another through complex entanglements.

In 1927 Jacobson provided Mopope and five other Kiowas with an extraordinary and unparalleled educational and professional opportunity, bringing the young artists to the University of Oklahoma to study easel painting. He also arranged for them to study mural painting with fellow Swedish immigrant artist Olle Nordmark at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Jacobson’s actions were unprecedented. No other American university had such a program, and it was not until much later in the twentieth century that Native students studied art at American universities in significant numbers. Under Jacobson’s mentorship and promotion, the group of painters who became known as the Kiowa Five gained international recognition and went on to long and successful art careers. What began as a teacher-student relationship that crossed social and cultural boundaries grew into a long-lasting friendship and professional affiliation between Jacobson and Mopope, which contributed significantly to the development of a twentieth-century Native American fine art tradition.

Mopope was born on the Oklahoma reservation where his southern plains tribe had been forcibly removed in the 1870s. Jacobson was a Swedish immigrant who was raised in the Swedish American enclave of Lindsborg, Kansas. After graduating from Yale University, he became an art professor at the University of Oklahoma, where he remained for the rest of his career. Given their backgrounds, Jacobson and Mopope seem like an unlikely pairing. However, as Fur argues, both were members of diasporic communities; and although they experienced dislocation in different ways, each experienced restrictions and loss as a result of their outsider status. Fur argues for the importance of viewing Jacobson’s experience of immigration and Mopope’s experience of dispossession as interdependent and complexly interlinked. While she never loses sight of the greater social inequality Native Americans have experienced relative to Swedish immigrants, she posits that displacement and loss may have served as common points of identification that allowed Jacobson and Mopope to forge and maintain a fruitful alliance.

Fur uses published scholarly studies, archival sources, oral histories, and memoirs to reconstruct the lives of Jacobson and Mopope. Mopope’s grand-daughter Vanessa Paukeigope Jennings and Jacobson’s wife, Sophie Brousse Jacobson, who wrote under the pen name Jeanne d’Ucel and completed several unpublished manuscripts on her husband’s life and work, were especially important sources of information. Fur points out that, while scholarship on Swedish immigrants to North America is abundant, histories of interactions between Scandinavian newcomers and American Indians are rare, and such retellings tend to lump all European immigrants together as one indistinguishable group. Fur’s previous scholarship on Swedish immigrant communities in North America and Karen V. Hansen’s Encounter on the Great Plains: Scandinavian Settlers and the Dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890–1930 (New York, 2013), which Fur cites as influential on her work, are notable exceptions.

Historical accounts of Jacobson’s work with the Kiowa artists are numerous. However, Fur provides a richer and more nuanced accounting than her predecessors. Her writing is elegant and engaging, and the narratives she presents are compelling. Anyone with an interest in twentieth-century Native American art will want to read Painting Culture, Painting Nature.