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Reviews
| Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960. By Bill Anthes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. xxx + 235 pp. Photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $84.95 (cloth); $23.95 (paper).
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In the two decades from 1940 to 1960, the Western art world saw a shift from European-based art movements to American-initiated modernism. This was especially true in painting, with artists establishing an avant-garde style later to be identified as abstract expressionism. Artists used color and gesture to express ideas that were, for the most part, nonobjective. New York became the center for emerging art which introduced an expressive medium that was not uniformly received or preferred over generally accepted naturalistic subject matter and illusionism. American Indian painters found their art defined and judged by conflicting aesthetic criteria. What criteria were essential for a painting to be labeled American Indian art? Could American Indian painting be modern within the established avant-garde definition? This volume by Bill Anthes addresses these queries and others by choosing select, but specific, examples of artists who stretched the plurality of modernism beyond formalist European and American categories. |
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Anthes offers a conceptual discourse rather than an encyclopedic history of American Indian painting. He presents an overview of the era, including the range of changes experienced by native painters within the context of political, economic, and social history. He examines thought-provoking issues that are significant to understanding native modernist painting: the importance of place, cultural appropriation, reconstruction, and individual innovation. Preconceived cultural constructs of American Indian art added to the complexity of freeing native expression from the projected and often romanticized representation of a never-changing Indian aesthetic. |
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The Preface and chapter 6 reference the 1958 rejection of Oscar Howe (1915–83) from the Contemporary American Indian Painting Exhibition at the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Why would an American Indian be disqualified from the competition as being inauthentic? The exhibition title set up the contrast and possible conflict between contemporary and native. While Native Moderns is centered on 1940 through 1960, the question of where and what is an appropriate placement for a contemporary ethnic painting still exists. Recent museum installations of non-Western arts have been choosing between placing ethnic, native, or minority arts into either "native" or "contemporary" exhibition spaces. When should a contemporary work of art be placed into a global venue and when should it be placed into an ethnic venue? Clearly, exhibition framing changes the meaning of an object within its institutional context. The question arises as to whether there was a venue for native painters to exhibit within the modernist definition. |
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Anthes highlights another specific example of a native modernist in chapter 5. Yeffe Kimball (1904–78) was a white, female painter who claimed throughout her professional career to be an American native. Her lack of heritage within any Native American culture was proved after her death, bringing up another twentieth-century modernist tendency of questioning perceived or declared reality. In 1928–29 the French artist, Rene Magritte, painted his The Treachery (or Perfidy) of Images, including the text, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This is not a pipe). To paint a pipe yet say that it is not a pipe is a modernist concept in which the obvious is visually denied. Kimball claimed an identity that gave her a particular venue, but she was never granted that identity, even in an honorary way. Should she be categorized as a native modern painter? Who are native moderns? And at what point are native painters creative individuals, ethnic conservators, or intercontinental artists? |
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With a thorough background in Western and American Indian art history, Anthes probes these questions to define modernist attitudes of the 1940s through the 1960s and bring into consideration questions of ethnic labels and identification applicable to all.
Patricia Coronel
Colorado State University
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