The Carter’s new show dispels myths by finding similarities in two different artists

Frederic Remington (1861-1909) painted galloping horses with unprecedented accuracy in depictions of the Wild West.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910) is best known for paintings that explore the strength of nature, specifically the force of water.

The turn-of-the-century American painters are not a natural pairing for an exhibit, but both explored themes of masculinity and the crisis of modernity with realism. Their legacies are also surrounded by common myths.

On view at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art from Dec. 22 to Feb. 28, “Mythmakers: The Art of Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington” exhibits their work together for the first time to examine surprising similarities.

A collaboration with Denver Art Museum and Portland Museum of Art, the show features 70 works. Nine are from the Carter’s permanent collection and the rest are on loan from dozens of other museums throughout the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Worcester Art Museum, and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.

Amon Carter Museum curator Maggie Adler says a photograph of the two artists together was found early in the exhibit’s development. It turned out to be fake and there is no evidence that they knew each other, but the artists were living in New York around the same time and photographed by the same people.

Homer was a war illustrator during the Civil War and Remington did the same work during the Spanish American War. They both maximized their reputations with dramatic illustrations that helped create a perception of the Wild West that appealed to post-Civil War periodicals with East Coast audiences. These illustrations are highlighted in an early section of the show.

“They are talked about as these exacting reporters who show these photographic scenes that are completely accurate and full of detail,” Adler said. “Very few of these paintings are full of detail but they give you the sense of being there.”

Indeed, Homer and Remington were masters of conveying mood and atmosphere, even figuring out how to show wind and the cold. They both continued exploring macho fantasies of American identity rooted in outdoor living as painters.

Adler notes that the lore around Remington’s reputation as a cowboy tends to be unquestioned in Texas, although he was painting in New York after making trips to the South with a camera and sketchpad. Interestingly, the exhibit includes a passage written by Remington in which he complains about a miserable trip to Fort Worth.

“He wasn’t that into Texas and he wasn’t that much of a cowboy,” Adler said. “But he had businessmen patrons who solidified that connection with the Wild West. They were trying to live vicariously through this idea of American masculinity. Every Western movie would not exist without Remington’s example.”

The two painters are often remembered as self-taught artists, but both visited museums and learned from their peers. Remington attended Yale and was with the Art Students League of New York. Homer may have decided to spend the rest of his life painting the ocean after moving to Maine, but he had attended the National Academy of Design.

“It’s not as though they were these lonely geniuses figuring it all out by themselves,” Adler said.

The exhibit does not shy away from dispelling other myths about the popular artists who celebrated simpler American life before industrialization and urbanization. Video shows technical analysis sorting through layers of paint on some of the works, revealing earlier versions of landscape paintings. Train cars in a modern setting, for example, were removed from one of Remington’s paintings to focus on figures with horses.

Homer and Remington were painting images of an imagined Wild West in East Coast studios, largely inspired by the surrounding landscapes.

The show also includes examples of the realists experimenting with Impressionist color theory. Some of Homer’s watercolor works on display here have been exhibited so rarely that they are as fresh as when they were first painted. Remington’s paintings in this section are clearly inspired by Monet, which is surprising for an artist labeled as a cowboy realist. By priming viewers with these Impressionist roots, the show creates a new perspective on some of the artists’ best-known works in the next gallery.

The influence is immediately noticeable on one of the Carter’s treasures, Remington’s first masterpiece from 1889, “A Dash for the Timber.” For once, the bulging eyeballs of the horses is not the first thing we notice about this intense scene of cowboys fleeing a life-threatening situation, straight towards the viewer. With a salmon foreground and blue shadows, the color combination of the landscape in this cowboy painting helps capture the frenetic energy and violence of the scene. But it could have been used for an image of a woman with a parasol.

This story was originally published December 18, 2020 at 5:30 AM.