The Art of Darkness: Frederic Remington's Nocturnes
April 26, 2003
East Building Auditorium
Held in conjunction with the exhibition
Frederic Remington: The Color of Night
Introduction: Frederic Remington: The Color of Night
Nancy Anderson, associate curator, American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art
Old West Meets New Art History: Some Reasons Why the Dust Hasn't Settled
William H. Truettner, senior curator, Smithsonian American Art Museum
For many years western art has been viewed as an offshoot of mainstream American art. The latter was thought to engage "big" ideas - nature and nationalism, the settlement of "untouched" land, progress, democratic ideals. Western art, by contrast, was assumed to be reportage, an effort, often ethnographic and topographical, to simply record the events of the westward movement. Now it appears that neither western nor mainstream art tells the stories we thought they did.
Moments of Change: A Career in Art
Peter H. Hassrick, emeritus director, Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of the American West, University of Oklahoma
Frederic Remington enjoyed an abbreviated but dynamic career as an artist during a twenty-four year period from 1885 to 1909. In that short time he explored a dozen or more distinct modes of expression that ranged from figurative literalism and romantic naturalism to historical idealization, expressionism, and symbolist reverie. Remington crafted this series of powerful personal statements in response to the changing artistic and political realities of his day, which included such disparate trends in American life and art as the closing of the western frontier, the ascendancy of impressionism, developments in color printing, the evolution of illustration, and the Rooseveltian resistance to art's perceived effeminacy.
Looking into the Dark: Remington's Westernizing of the Nocturnal Tradition
William C. Sharpe, professor of English, Barnard College
Painted in the first decade of the twentieth century, Frederic Remington's night scenes are in many ways a culmination of the extraordinary interest in nighttime effects and events that underpinned key developments in nineteenth-century art and literature. Night painting is traced from its beginnings several centuries ago through the modern age, with images by Rembrandt, Turner, Homer, and Ryder, as well as the gaslit and electrically lit cityscapes of Whistler, Van Gogh, and the Ash Can School. The discussion concludes with Remington's response to the nocturnal vogue that influenced the worlds of painting, poetry, and photography.
Burning Daylight: Remington, Electricity, and Flash Photography
Alexander Nemerov, professor of American art, Yale University
From 1907 to his death in 1909, Frederic Remington increasingly painted firelit nighttime scenes. Though always set in the Old West, these paintings reveal the artist's fascination with the startling new illuminations of his own modern era: namely, flash photography and the electric streetlight. The brilliantly illuminated nights in The Grass Fire, In From the Night Herd, and The Guard of the Whisky Trader show Remington to have been, in his own day, the most contemporary of painters - one who both acknowledged and disavowed a new world of "burning daylight."