Continuing our Texas tourism, we visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. The museum occupies several buildings and we did not get to everything in the first building, the Beck building. So look for more posts coming soon. I had my doubts about visiting an art museum, but I was pleased that the first gallery we hit was western art.
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- Frederick Remington: Against purple mountains and a hazy sky, a Native American man on horseback raises a piece of buffalo hide above his head. In the background, his companions encircle a herd of horses they have just captured.
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- Charles M. Russell, 1897: The Approach of the White Men. Situated on a rocky outcropping, a Native scouting party scans the horizon for the “White-Men” that will soon confront their community.
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- The concha belt has become iconic of the Southwest United States, but the Diné (Navajo) have been wearing belts like these for hundreds of years.*
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- Navajo bracelets.
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- Sculpture by Frederick Remington. The rattlesnake (in the lower left).
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- Reduced-size Remington in a niche in our living room. I admired a Remington once and our oldest son bought us this one. Amazon has a wide selection available.
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- Hopi Pueblo shawl: White shawls are a type of clothing that can be worn in many different ways by the Hopi. A male member of a bride’s family weaves and gives them unembroidered and in pairs to the bride.
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- The Last of the Tribes. Hiram Powers.**
*The concha belt: decades ago, before you could enter Monument Valley on your own, we took a guided tour. At the tour’s end, a young Navajo man on horseback herded sheep down to a watering hole. He was wearing a concha belt. After he was done he removed his western shirt to reveal an Arizona State University tee shirt.
**Text of the museum label: Inspired by James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans, Hiram Powers portrays a young Native American woman intended to embody the myth of the vanishing race. Working in Rome and using an Italian model, Powers sculpted this graceful female figure mid-stride. The illusion of movement—the figure runs while looking over her shoulder—allowed the artist to show his skill in the detailed pleats and fringe of the woman’s skirt. The delicate modeling of the subject lends an elegant form to the myth of Western expansion, belying the dreadful reality of Native American displacement and genocide.
For more western art see my past posts: