Art as History: Interpreting the Past at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art

VICTORIA GRIEVE

Modern art can offer a unique perspective on twentieth-century western history, challenging viewers' expectations and encouraging them to imagine a different West, or different Wests. The collection of the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University highlights some little-known but important twentieth-century artists.
CLAY SPOHN's Rolling Forts, Flying Fort and Anti-Aircraft Net is not what most of us imagine when we think of western art. (See Figure 1.) A fantastic and futuristic vision of war, the 1942 drawing is indebted to surrealism, a German art movement brought to the United States by refugee artists in the late 1930s. Spohn's improbable battle scene suggests dire images of human and ecological destruction; in the foreground a gigantic rolling fort crushes miniature tanks and trees. Explosive bursts of color enliven an otherwise bleak landscape. The only organic forms in the drawing are several tiny human forms, fleeing the approaching machinery. In the upper left, an unnatural yellow sky is dominated by a swirling anti-gravitational sky hook aircraft trap, which threatens an approaching aircraft. Helicopter propellers power the flying fort, which hovers menacingly over the scene. From the upper right, what appears to be a gigantic brassiere, trailing a large net, approaches the rolling fort, in what promises to be a futile attempt at capture. Such images recur throughout Spohn's work, and evoke a sense of technology run amok. His fantastic war machines seem unmanned and beyond human control, perhaps challenging the power of their creators.	1
Figure 1. Rolling Forts, Flying Fort and Anti-aircraft Net, 1942. Clay Spohn (1898–1977). Gouache, pencil, 17"h × 33"w. Image courtesy of Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University; Marie Eccles Caine Foundation Gift.
As historians, what can we make of such art? Somehow it seems much easier to explain the West through Thomas Moran's sublime landscapes, Frederick Remington's famous sculpture, Bronco Buster, or Charlie Russell's cowboys. Georgia O'Keeffe's New Mexico cow skulls seem far more western than Spohn's war machines. And yet, Spohn and his fellow abstract artists are as much a product of the modern American West as these better-known artists.	2
A native San Franciscan, Spohn was one of a group of artists connected with the California School of Fine Arts in the postwar years whose careers were shaped by the experiences of World War II and the anxiety of the atomic age. Their work forms an important part of a little-known but fascinating collection of modern art of the American West at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, located on the campus of Utah State University in Logan, Utah.	3
Designed by Edward Larabee Barnes and opened in December 1982, the 23,000 square foot, four-level building houses a collection of modern and contemporary art of the West. Recently accredited by the American Association of Museums, the museum's collection offers a unique western perspective on twentieth-century American art and history, and explores significant movements in western cultural history, such as Los Angeles post-surrealism, Santa Fe transcendentalism, Bay Area abstract expressionism, and San Francisco funk. With more than 4,200 objects, it is one of the largest collections in the Intermountain West.	. . .