Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960 9780822388104

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NATIVE MODERNS

Objects/Histories: Critical Perspectives on Art, Material Culture, and Representation A series edited by Nicholas Thomas Published with the assistance of the Getty Foundation.

NATIVE MODERNS American Indian Painting, 1940–1960

Bill Anthes

Duke University Press

Durham and London

2006

© 2006 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Minion by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

for kim and olive

CONTENTS

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Preface

xxix Acknowledgments 1 chapter 1. Art and Modern Indian Policy 30 chapter 2. The Culture Brokers: The Pueblo Paintings of José Lente and Jimmy Byrnes 59

chapter 3. ‘‘Our Inter-American Consciousness’’: Barnett Newman and the Primitive Universal

89 chapter 4. The Importance of Place: The Ojibwe Modernism of Patrick DesJarlait and George Morrison 117

chapter 5. Becoming Indian: The Self-Invention of Yeffe Kimball

142

chapter 6. ‘‘A fine painting . . . but not Indian’’: Oscar Howe, Dick West, and Native American Modernism

171

Postscript: Making Modern Native American Artists

183 Notes 217

Bibliography

227 Index

AUTHOR’S NOTE

the paintings by josé lente and jimmy byrnes that are discussed in chapter 2 have not been reproduced. These images represent ceremonies that are sacred to the Pueblos. Lente’s paintings are reproduced in Elsie Parsons, Isleta Paintings, edited by Esther Schiff Goldfrank (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1962), and are collected with Parsons’s papers at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. Byrnes’s paintings are collected at the School of American Research in Santa Fe.

PREFACE

in 1958, oscar howe entered an abstract painting in the annual Contemporary American Indian Painting Exhibition at the Philbrook Art Center (now the Philbrook Museum of Art) in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In its bold degree of innovation, Howe’s work departed from the conventions of ‘‘traditional-style’’ Native American painting. Titled Umine Wacipi: War and Peace Dance, the piece depicts five angular figures, in shades of blue, pink, and lavender, performing a ritual dance against a stark, abstract landscape [figure 1]. Needless to say, Howe was shocked when his painting was branded as inauthentic and disqualified from the competition. As explained by the panel of two white jurors and the Comanche painter Jesse E. Davis (a previous Philbrook grand prize winner), it was ‘‘a fine painting—but not Indian.’’ 1 That is, the jurors argued, the painting was not an authentic expression of Howe’s Indian heritage and identity. However, although the painting was excluded from consideration for prizes, it was kept on view with the work of nine other artists in the Plains region category at that year’s exhibition. Howe was born in 1915 on the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota as a descendant of Yankton Sioux chiefs. He graduated from Dorothy Dunn’s famous art program at the Santa Fe Indian School, after which he served in the Second World War. He then went on to obtain a master’s degree in art from the University of Oklahoma. In the course of his work, Howe became a well-known Native American painter whose paintings depicted aspects of Sioux life and culture. He was a prize winner at several Philbrook Indian Annuals, and he taught art at the Pierre, South Dakota, Indian School, at Dakota Wesleyan University, and at the University of South Dakota. How could his painting be anything other than Indian? Howe’s reception indicates that the Philbrook jurors believed what many observers did in 1958—that an Indian painting and a modern painting were two different things. When innovative Native American artists such as Oscar Howe chose to depart from established conventions, their artwork was no longer accepted at ‘‘authentic.’’ In response, Howe was quick to offer a virulent argument against the jurors’ judgment. In a letter to Jeanne Snodgrass, the Philbrook curator of Native American art and herself a Cherokee, he wrote, ‘‘Who ever said . . . that my paintings are not

in traditional Indian style has poor knowledge of Indian art indeed. There is much more to Indian art than pretty, stylized pictures.’’ While the jurors had assumed that if Umine Wacipe looked like a modernist painting then it could not be authentically Indian, Howe insisted that ‘‘every bit in my paintings is a true studied fact of Indian painting.’’ 2 In this book, I consider a generation of Native American painters who for the most part were born in the first decades of the twentieth century and developed as artists from the late 1930s through the late 1950s. Like Howe, the Native American modernists included here produced work that complicated simple distinctions between traditional and modern expression. Some, like Howe, were veterans of the Second World War. Many were trained in mainstream white institutions. Most came to see themselves as modern artists, valuing concepts of aesthetic innovation and individual expression, and imagined their work in relation to their Native communities in a variety of ways that departed from the traditional relationship between artist and tribe. Some of the artists I describe received little or no training and had little contact with mainstream modernist culture; rather, they made their own personal and aesthetic responses to the changed world they faced as modernization wrought radical changes in Indian country, communities were transformed, and Native Americans moved off reservations in massive numbers. As the historian Alison Bernstein describes, the Second World War was a key moment in twentieth-century Native American history. Before the war, Native Americans lived on Indian reservations and in the pueblos of the Southwest, physically isolated from mainstream American society. Wartime military service and home-front mobilization ‘‘unlocked the reservation[s],’’ as Bernstein writes, and accelerated Indian communities into the national mainstream. Thousands of Native Americans worked in the war industries or left home to serve overseas. Even those individuals who remained on reservations or in the pueblos of the Southwest faced a new intercultural dynamic as their communities became integrated into a modern national economy and the emerging world system.3 The crossing over and self-fashioning of twentieth-century Native American artists suggests a larger story of American modernism than is usually recounted in academic art history. Between the late 1930s and the late 1950s, these artists forged a hybrid modernity that challenged clear boundaries between Indian and white art and culture. They made innovative, highly individual, and often abstract artworks that were related stylistically to the European-American avant-garde yet also expressed their experiences as Native Americans in the twentieth century. They worked and exhibited not only in the U.S. West and Southwest, but also in New York at the

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time when the city was emerging as the center of a global modern art world. The transformative work of these Native American artists should be recognized as one of many modernisms in a multicultural America. However, this volume is not merely a recovery project with the goal of adding a few neglected figures to the canon of American modernism. Native American modernism is crucial to our understanding of American modernism generally, because bringing Native American modernism to the foreground rewrites the canon and the key terms of American modernism. Ultimately, I argue here that shifting notions of identity—citizenship, cultural property, and sovereignty—are fundamental to an understanding of American culture in the postwar period.4

NATIVE/MODERN

The title of this volume, Native Moderns, brings together two terms that at first might appear to be mutually exclusive. I argue that these terms become increasingly connected in the experience of twentieth-century Native American artists. My use of this vocabulary, however, requires a brief note about terminology. The word ‘‘native’’ is used often interchangeably with ‘‘traditional’’ to refer to societies or cultural expressions that value stasis and continuity over change. From one perspective, the native/traditional has been valorized over the modern as the repository and expression of cultural values that have become lost in technological societies. This was the allure of Native American cultures for early-twentieth-century Indian enthusiasts and policy reformers, and it continues to be so for many present-day collectors and aficionados. The concept also invokes collective societies in which individual identity is subsumed under the identity of the group. As used by advocates of Indian assimilation or uplift, the term ‘‘native’’ can also imply ‘‘backward,’’ ‘‘irrational,’’ or ‘‘of another time.’’ 5 But for both camps—the policy reformers and culture enthusiasts on the one hand, and the assimilationists on the other—native/traditional is the polar opposite of the concept of modern society, which places a high value on innovation (aesthetic and technological) and individual expression and creativity, and which presumes that a notion of individualism is an essential prerequisite for critical consciousness, competency, and citizenship in the modern state. Thus, for Native American art and culture generally, the distinction between tradition and modernity has been particularly charged politically. However, seemingly easy distinctions between tradition and modernity are complicated and politically motivated constructions.6 If the distinction between native and modern seems natural, discrete, and self-evident, it is because these terms have been invented and deployed (mostly

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by European American interests since the earliest days of contact and colonization) to police the boundaries between the modern West and its ‘‘Primitive’’ other.7 Non-Western art has been greatly misunderstood through the lens of the ‘‘Primitive.’’ To be sure, the Western image of the cultural other has often been self-reflexive and ethnocentric. To paraphrase literary critic Edward Said, Primitivism constructs the Primitive as the modern West’s ‘‘surrogate and even underground self.’’ 8 Primitivism, then, should be understood not as referring to any essential truth about its non-Western sources but as a projection of cultural desires and fantasies about the cultural other and about the West itself. Moreover, the very use of ‘‘the Primitive’’ and ‘‘Primitivism’’ is, to say the least, deeply problematic and politically suspect. To label a culture or people as ‘‘Primitive’’ is to employ the language and hierarchical models of nineteenth-century cultural evolutionism, which, as the historian of anthropology George Stocking demonstrated, propounded the mistaken belief that ‘‘the various societies existing in the contemporary world represented different stages in the progress of mankind . . . through a series of evolutionary stages which were often loosely referred to as savagery, barbarism, and civilization.’’ 9 Cultural evolutionism had lost much of its explanatory power even by the early twentieth century, which makes the persistence of the use in art of the category of ‘‘the Primitive’’ all the more troublesome. In this book I use the terms Primitive and Primitivism much like the terms ‘‘Fauvism’’ or ‘‘Abstract Expressionism’’—that is, they are capitalized to indicate their status as concepts with a specific historical currency despite their descriptive inadequacy. Further, I use the word traditional (without quotation marks) throughout the book as a shorthand adjective for long-standing indigenous practices, especially when artists, such as Howe, consciously maintain or reference these practices in their work. I use ‘‘traditional’’ (in quotation marks) to denote those twentieth-century styles that were developed in collaboration with white patrons but that have gained the veneer of venerable cultural forms. Another key word closely related to ‘‘traditional’’ is ‘‘authentic,’’ which is universally understood as a positive term (unlike its opposite, ‘‘inauthentic’’). In the context of Native American art and visual culture, authentic works of art have been understood as those cultural expressions made for the use of, consumption by, or to function within indigenous communities, thereby fulfilling Native needs that are uninfluenced by Western forms.10 To take a pertinent example, the style titled ‘‘Traditional Indian Painting’’ promoted by the Philbrook museum and other institutions in the early twentieth century in the Southwest and Oklahoma was formalized in the relationship between ‘‘Indian painters and white patrons,’’ as noted by the art historian J. J. Brody. As Brody further notes, however, it has been (mis)labeled as ‘‘traditional,’’ despite its re-

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cent vintage and hybrid origins.11 Since the publication of Brody’s important Indian Painters and White Patrons in 1971, ‘‘Traditional Indian Painting’’ has been criticized as being neither traditional nor authentic and has been derided as the ‘‘Bambi School’’ in reference to the ubiquitous motif of the blue deer, which has become a kitschy cliché [figure 2]. Because easel painting and representational drawings are not, as the argument goes, traditional to Native American visual culture, they are not an authentic expression of Native American culture. The problem with this argument is that while it values Native American art and culture it also speaks of an inability to imagine or recognize an authentic Native American expression in the present. Native Americans are thus prized solely for their connection to the past, and as such they are imagined as timeless (and therefore ultimately lost to history and progress). This image of Native Americans was propounded in nineteenth-century doctrines of cultural evolutionism, as well as in the Primitivist antimodernism that characterized much of the early-twentieth-century non-Native interest in Indians as well as advocacy on their behalf. Because both positions are founded on an evolutionist understanding of Native American culture, both denied the agency of Indian people as political actors—historically and in the present. Native Americans, then, have been caught in a cultural and political contradiction throughout much of the twentieth century—that is, they are perceived as insufficiently modern (or constitutionally incapable of modernity) while at the same time as being not authentically traditional by virtue of merely being alive in the modern world. Art historian Ruth Phillips has argued that evolutionist thought and avantgarde Primitivism erected a substantial impediment to Native self-representation, thereby producing ‘‘an empty space . . . in accounts of the history of native art during most of the modernist century.’’ As Phillips writes, ‘‘in standard accounts, the production of ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’ art is perceived to end in the reservation period, while a contemporary art employing Western fine art media did not begin until the early 1960s. The traditional native arts promoted by the Primitivists were defined as belonging to a tribal past, available for appropriation as a means of restoring authenticity to modernist Western art.’’ Likewise, Native artists working in traditional forms in the twentieth century have been faulted as inauthentic when they incorporate contemporary ideas, materials, or other Western borrowings. As a result, Phillips writes, ‘‘art museum collections hold almost no examples of painting or sculpture made by aboriginal people during the first half of the twentieth century,’’ because ‘‘the old linear and progressivist meta-narratives excluded native art on evolutionist and racist grounds.’’ 12 But worse than Indian art history being written out of the standard art historical narratives is the matter of the cultural and political ramifications of evolutionist and Primitivist definitions of Native people. Indeed, the preface xv

invisibility of twentieth-century Native American art is a synecdoche for the social situation of Native peoples. How could Native Americans be modern—how could they present themselves fully as modern cultural and political agents—if their only value is in their pastness?

NATIVE MODERN

As noted in Brody’s writing, drawings and easel paintings by Native American artists are a comparatively recent development (dating to the last decade of the nineteenth century), and in terms of material, technique, function, and patronage they are the products of a budding non-Native market for paintings and an emergent, modern world system. Following Brody, authors have understood Native American art in the twentieth century in terms of the appropriation by Indians of established modernist (i.e., non-Native) styles, culled from European and Euro-American art history by Native artists. Indeed, Oscar Howe has been described by many writers as a follower of Cubism—a point that he would vigorously deny throughout his career. Other writers have focused on the adoption of Western media (oil-based paints, canvas, bronze) that do not have a history in traditional Native American visual culture. Others have cited the moment when Native artists began making work for nonNative audiences and purposes rather than for local, ceremonial contexts. Others identify the embrace by Native American artists of Western notions of the art object as such. Overall, such readings instill a reasonable skepticism regarding the authenticity of Native American art in the twentieth century. But while they are valuable (they point to the modern origins of Native American fine art), these definitions can tend to reinforce a rigid binary wherein artworks, artists, and individuals can only be Native or modern; they overemphasize issues of authentic style or subject matter (or the artist’s legal identity—the ultimate trump card). The Indian and the modern artist are seen through (indeed constructed by) the metaphor of ‘‘two worlds’’ rather than understood as common inhabitants of a shared modernity. At best, Indians are seen as interlopers in the modern world; they remain the objects rather than the subjects of modernity. More recently writers have addressed the hybrid nature of this complex art.13 For example, writings in anthropology recognize the historical dimensions, the dislocations, and the give and take that define intercultural relations. As the anthropologist Fred Myers has written of contemporary Australian aboriginal painting, the emergence and recognition of such complex art forms signal the end of the paradigm that imagined cultures as discrete systems—seeking to isolate and study the most pure (i.e., untouched) expressions to get at the ‘‘authentic.’’ 14 Indeed, many forms

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of Native American cultural expression have evolved since European contact and conquest. Originating in the shifting borderlands between Native American cultures and the reach of modern Euro-American expansionism, Native American painting served different purposes for artist and patrons.15 Rather than assume that the adoption of signature Western materials, techniques, and forms is evidence of Indian artists’ passive acceptance of foreign forms and all that they stood for in the EuroAmerican context, we should recognize that this ground is inherently unstable— that Native artists eagerly adopted these new practices and from them produced new emblems of cultural identity. They then mobilized these emblems in a new context for their own purposes by producing paintings and drawings for complex reasons, while whites collected and consumed these artworks for their own reasons. Brody develops a more-nuanced reading of this material in his 1997 study, Pueblo Indian Painting: Tradition and Modernism in New Mexico, 1900–1930, in which he describes Pueblo painters’ early, tentative encounters with modern society at the beginning of the twentieth century and on through to the new art’s institutionalization in the 1930s. As Brody describes them, the first generation of Pueblo easel painters inhabited the new intercultural spaces of modernity but remained integrated in their communities as full participants in traditional Pueblo life. Pueblo drawings and paintings were, to be sure, produced with materials that had arrived in the Southwest via a developing national network of rail and communication lines. But while making art for non-Native patrons bridged borders it did not erase them, nor did the artist or patron aspire to do so. At first, neither Indian artists nor their white patrons wanted to fundamentally transform their own communities or institutions. What both parties believed to be the essential differences between Pueblo and Euro-American identities remained intact. White patrons (at first, government ethnologists) sought out Pueblo artists as anthropological informants; Pueblo artists encountered their new patrons and negotiated a relationship that allowed them to gain what rewards there were to be had from the transaction, while maintaining their traditional place within the village. The drawings and paintings produced for their white patrons were distinct from the artworks produced for use within Native communities. Indeed, Brody writes that this first generation of Native artist-informants did not, in fact, produce ‘‘art’’ in the Euro-American sense at all. For the Pueblos, he writes, ‘‘art produced in isolation from daily life was philosophically disharmonious, for it reduced the art making to a private, ego-oriented act that was outside the range of traditional values.’’ 16 While the market for Native American paintings and drawings was almost assuredly entirely white, Indian artists did exercise a degree of agency and control in the making of the artworks themselves, and in determining the limits of the preface xvii

representation. The art historians David Penney and Lisa Roberts have noted that early-twentieth-century Pueblo artists ‘‘attempt[ed] to illustrate, in a fashion organized for didactic purposes, what is normally only enacted.’’ Native American artistinformants may have been motivated to make their drawings out of a desire for cultural preservation. Traditionally, Pueblo ceremonies had never needed to be fixed in a permanent form because through practice they would be preserved for future generations. As white encroachment brought rapid and dramatic changes to Indian country, the drawings became necessary to preserve a culture that was threatened by the forces of progress and modernization.17 Moreover, Penney and Roberts argue that as the artworks circulated outside of Native American communities in the Southwest and traveled to New York and Europe, they played an important role by demystifying and aestheticizing Native traditional cultures and ceremonies at a time when government policy and official harassment by Bureau of Indian Affairs and local police still sought the destruction of Native cultural practices.18

ALTERNATIVE MODERNITIES

In this book I argue that twentieth-century Native American artists forged a uniquely Native American modernist art between the late 1930s and late 1950s. I argue that Native American modernist art embodied a consciously constructed response to cross-cultural encounter, clash, and accommodation as well as to the patterns and processes of societal modernization that swept Indian country in the twentieth century. My project is concerned with a uniquely Native American modernist consciousness that is embodied in hybrid artworks; with what it means to be a modern, to experience modernity, and to deliberately make oneself an agent and subject of modernity and not just modernity’s passive object. Non-Native notions of the artwork and artist—embraced by Native American artists in the twentieth century—are the key to understanding Native expressions in the twentieth century, as art and artists took on new roles vis-à-vis Native communities, culture, and identity. As Brody notes, new notions of the artwork and artist entered the Pueblo world via early encounters with white patrons. This had the effect of transforming social relations, often severing the shared sense of purpose and close bonds between Native artists and their communities. As Brody writes, ‘‘Watercolor paintings did occasionally become agents of social disharmony when they depicted aspects of Pueblo life that many Pueblo people preferred not to share with outsiders.’’ Moreover, after 1917 or 1918 Pueblo artists began to engage in ‘‘ego-oriented’’ practices, such as signing artworks and entering competitive exhibitions.19 Janet Berlo

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and Ruth Phillips similarly describe Native American modernism not only in terms of Western styles (although this is a key feature of much Native modernism), but also in terms of Western notions of the art object as such. The classic avant-gardist notion that modernist art stands in opposition to mainstream—or bourgeois—culture is an alien idea in most Native societies, which are more tightly integrated than the fragmented cultures of the industrial West. A crucial component of modernism is the notion of the art object as self-defining and independent of ceremonial or cultural contexts. Unlike the ethnographic object, critics have maintained, the modernist artwork requires no special pleading, thicket of verbal explanation, or other cultural baggage. European modernism aspired to the status of a universal language; to the extent that an artwork did require anthropological explanations, it failed. Berlo and Phillips write that Native modernists embraced these values and that they desired to make artworks that would ‘‘function as autonomous entities . . . experienced independently of community or ceremonial contexts.’’ 20 The radical nature of this new understanding of the art object for Native modernists cannot be overemphasized. It signaled both a new understanding of identity and a changed relationship to community (and indeed the larger world) that Native Americans faced in the twentieth century. This revolutionary transformation—from a practice of art making that was totally integrated in the life of the local community to a new understanding of the artwork as a portable object and carrier of culture and identity that would pass from the local to the wider world—is the hallmark of Native modernism that is examined in this book. It should be made clear that in this volume I seek to offer an alternative to the standard narratives of European and American modernism, which for the most part have been defined around a narrowly conceived narrative of formalist development as formulated by the New York art critic Clement Greenberg and his academic followers. This narrative institutionalized a version of modernism that focused on individual expression and style, social alienation, and the notion that avant-garde artists are positioned ambivalently vis-à-vis modern, bourgeois culture, to which they are linked ‘‘by an umbilical cord of gold.’’ 21 Greenberg’s vision cast the history of modernism in terms of the progressive refinement of abstraction and the separation of the autonomous aesthetic object from the social and political world and against the ascendant mass culture of the twentieth century. The limitations of Greenberg’s formalism—a willing blindness to the rise of late-capitalist consumer culture and the machinations of state power—have been addressed by a generation of revisionist readings of American modernism that emphasize the unremarked correspondences and important connections between the rise of the American avant-garde after the

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Second World War and the rise of the United States as a global superpower during the same period.22 But even those histories of modernism written as correctives to the limitations of academic formalism are restrained by a parochial focus on the metropolitan centers of the industrial West, in particular the New York art world. This is because modernity has been consistently defined as an urban phenomenon. The art historian Terry Smith, along with most historians of modernism, assumes that the city is the primary site of modernity. In Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America, his well-received reading of the connections between modernist culture and capitalist industry in the twentieth century, Smith defines the modern vis-à-vis the ‘‘second industrial revolution’’ in the United States of the 1920s and 1930s. In so doing he focuses on the predominant aesthetic of the machine and streamlining and on a fundamental iconography of modernity: that is, ‘‘industry and workers, cities and crowds, products and consumers.’’ 23 While Smith acknowledges that the experience of modernity is global, he assumes that the experience of modernity is one of movement toward a convergent future that ‘‘recruited more and more people and places to its project of making over the world into the ‘only new,’ ’’ in keeping with a pervasive ideology of progress, valuing the ‘‘wholly, unimaginably new, a universal state both in and beyond time and place.’’ 24 Smith is not alone in assuming that the dynamics of the modern are universal, nor is he entirely incorrect in this assumption. However, his urban-industrial focus leaves unexamined the critical problems of identity—nationalism, race, and citizenship—in a period in which identity was very much at issue, and it further leaves unexamined the experience of those at modernity’s margins. Ultimately, even the most radical revisionist readings of modernity and modernism are limited by the same parochial focus that bedevils Greenberg’s formalism: that is, they reproduce the understanding of the urban West’s others as ‘‘victims of modernity’’ rather than its coauthors.25 Twentieth-century Native American artists have been poorly understood by historians of both Native American art history and modernist art history alike, primarily because of the false binary of tradition and modernity that continues to inform the understanding of Native American cultural expression. While it is axiomatic that Native communities and cultural practices are always already endangered by the patterns and processes of societal modernization, my reading of Native modernism is illuminated by the broad definition of modernism offered by Marshall Berman in his All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. Berman defines as modernist the cultural products of ‘‘any attempt by modern men

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and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves home in it.’’ 26 Following Berman, I understand the artists studied in this book as individuals engaged in a struggle to understand, express, and ultimately transform their relationship to culture and community in a changed world. Fundamental to my reading of Native American modernism is the complexity and contradiction of American identity and experience in the twentieth century. Indeed, the tensions of modernity are nowhere more apparent than in the history of Native Americans.27 Native Americans’ experience of modernization (aka Americanization) comprises the shocks of genocide, colonization, and displacement, followed by the shifting tides of federal and local policy, assimilation, and not least, commodification as icons of authenticity and Primitive vitality. Collectively, these experiences have defined Native Americans as objects of modernity, but the artistic strategies that I describe in this book offer a picture of Native American artists becoming (or striving to become) subjects of modernity. I understand Native American modernist art not as a degraded form of lost ‘‘authentic traditions’’ or as merely a new mode of cultural production or a weak echo of modern forms invented elsewhere and imposed from above. Rather, I read Native American modernism as an expression of a transformed consciousness, which constitutes a particular (not universal) modernity that is unique to Native American artists in the twentieth century. In this sense Native American modernism is, in important ways, an alternative modernism. Native American modernism will at times share some characteristics of Euro-American modernism, including specific visual idioms such as abstraction or a value placed on formal innovation and individualism. However, it will be seen as differently inflected from the beginning, starting from difference and ending in a different place; maintaining connections to traditional ideas about place and identity while also resolutely modern because it represents an engaged response to a changed world.28 It is my hope that this volume enriches an understanding not only of Native American art in the twentieth century but also of American modernist culture generally. In fact, this study of Native American alternative modernism began many years ago as an investigation of Primitivism in the New York School of post–World War II modernist painters, including Barnett Newman (whom I address in chapter 3). Jackson Rushing has catalogued the influence of Native American art for the burgeoning New York avant-garde in the first half of the twentieth century, and as Stephen Polcari and Michael Leja have demonstrated, any number of conceptions of the ‘‘Primitive’’ were central to postwar American modernism.29 However, in thinking about this work I began to suspect that to focus solely on Primitivism was, to paraphrase critic

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Thomas McEvilley, to ask only half the question.30 As McEvilley noted, modernist Primitivism ‘‘illustrates, without consciously intending to, the parochial limitations of our world view and the almost autistic reflexivity of Western civilization’s modes of relating to the culturally Other.’’ 31 Moreover, as Ann Gibson’s work on artists of color and on women in the New York School demonstrated, a number of women and artists of color were also active in the postwar American art scene yet have remained invisible in most histories of the period.32 In framing this project, then, I have been influenced by recent writers on the cultures of the African diaspora, who have identified African art as a key influence in the formation of modernist culture. As Sieglinde Lemke has suggested in Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism, the recognition of African art by European artists was an ‘‘intercultural encounter,’’ which ‘‘caused European artists to experiment, transform, and regenerate their own styles.’’ 33 In framing the origins of modernism in terms of Primitivist cultural dialectic, Lemke seeks to explain the multicultural heritage of modernism, which she argues is elided by accounts that deny or discount the importance of such points of contact with non-Western art in the history of modernism. Building on Lemke’s thesis, I argue that Native American cultures were formative for American modernists at a moment when earlier paradigms were in crisis. The reformer and future Indian commissioner John Collier described the Native American pueblos of New Mexico as a ‘‘Red Atlantis,’’ which provided a model of community living that integrated individual needs with the group identity, tradition, and continuity.34 Primitivism based on Native American forms was crucial to the development of an American avantgarde. But as Lemke argues for the African diaspora artists of the black Atlantic, the native-modern interchange was mutually transformative. I argue that Primitivist artistic identification with Native American cultures initiated a cultural dialectic between the non-Native artists and critics of the American avant-garde and the Native American artists, who were never merely passive witnesses in this cultural exchange. In return, modernism bequeathed to Native artists an ambivalent legacy, the implications and ramifications of which are still being addressed by contemporary Native American artists.

MODERN LIVES

This book is intended to present an argument rather than to provide a survey. The list of artists I describe is not exhaustive; instead I have chosen artists for their interest and for their explanatory power as examples in what I am describing as

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a Native American engagement with modernity. Readers familiar with twentiethcentury Native American art will notice the absence of extended discussions of familiar figures such as Acee Blue Eagle, Jimalee Burton, T. C. Cannon, ‘‘Princess’’ Wa Wa Chaw, Joe Herrera, Carl Gorman, Allan Houser, Horace Poolaw, Fritz Scholder, Leon Polk Smith, Pablita Velarde, and others. Indeed, any of these artists would have provided rich material for case studies and many have been treated elsewhere. Some readers may be surprised by some unusual choices that I have made. While some artists in this volume are well known (Patrick DesJarlait, Oscar Howe, George Morrison, and Dick West), others are mostly forgotten figures (Jimmy Byrnes) or individuals who have been treated as anthropological subjects rather than artists (José Lente). Other figures are not Native Americans (Yeffe Kimball and Barnett Newman), but built their careers around the idea that Native American culture was relevant to modern lives. The artists I examine hail from diverse geographical and tribal backgrounds—living and working not only in parts of New Mexico and Oklahoma, Minnesota and South Dakota, but also in California in the era of World War II and in the postwar avant-garde enclaves of New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts. This book highlights a period from the late 1930s to the early 1960s that has not received due attention. A number of notable books have studied the formative years of Native American painting from the late nineteenth century through the early 1930s, when ‘‘Traditional Indian Painting’’ was institutionalized in Dorothy Dunn’s famous studio at the Santa Fe Indian School and in Oscar Jacobson’s Native American art program at the University of Oklahoma. But most studies follow from Berlo and Phillips’s assertion that ‘‘contemporary art employing Western fine art media did not begin until the early 1960s,’’ when the Institute of American Indian Arts (iaia) was founded in Santa Fe in 1962 and thereafter recruited an influential Native American faculty including Scholder, Houser, Charles Loloma, and Lloyd Kiva New. Today, Native American and Canadian First Nations artists, including Carl Beam, Rebecca Belmore, Jimmie Durham, Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds, Bob Haozous, Jaune Quickto-See-Smith, Edward Poitras, and Kay Walkingstick, are recognized as major contemporary artists. Although there is no contradiction between their art world status and their connection to Native American communities when their work is exhibited internationally, from the late 1930s through the late 1950s Native American artists made bold departures from the institutionalized ‘‘traditional’’ style of Indian painting. During and after World War II, Native American artists forged the innovations and the modernist consciousness that would serve as the groundwork for the emergence of a contemporary Native American art on a world stage. In chapter 1 of this volume I recount the changing perceptions of Native Ameri-

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cans and the shifts in U.S. Indian policy from the beginning of the twentieth century through the early 1960s, as Native Americans were increasingly integrated into mainstream American society. These shifting popular and legalistic notions of Indian culture and identity have constituted the terrain against which twentieth-century Native American artists developed their innovative artwork. Here, I analyze these transformations in terms of their impact on notions of Indian culture, identity, and sovereignty in this crucial period. Native American art was initially appreciated in the context of salvage anthropology and Primitivism in the first half of the twentieth century, which understood Native American culture as imperiled in the modern world. The early white promoters of Native American art were key among the proponents of Progressive-era Indian policy reform, and the emergence of an appreciation of, and market for, Native American art in the early years of the twentieth century should be understood as one aspect of a larger antimodern and cosmopolitan project that sought the preservation of Indian cultures in a diverse and pluralistic America. The aesthetic validation of Native American art played a role in reversing federal Indian policy under Indian commissioner John Collier, whose Indian New Deal reversed the official policies of detribalization and assimilation and insisted that Native American art should be ‘‘prized, nourished, and honored’’ and that the spiritual values of the ‘‘Red Atlantis’’ might provide an anodyne for the crises of modernity. During the Second World War, however, Collier’s Indian policy was challenged, and in the postwar period it was ultimately undermined by the beginning of large-scale off-reservation migration and urbanization, by new federal government policies for the abrogation of Native Americans’ tribal status and treaty rights, and by the relocation of Native Americans to cities in the Midwest and West. Whereas African Americans sought the legal protection of ‘‘individual rights,’’ the attempts to bring Native Americans under the big tent of civil rights were incompatible with notions of tribal sovereignty and the traditional status of the tribes as nations (rather than individuals) in relation to the federal and state governments. These ill-founded policies to remanufacture Indians in the mold of consensus liberalism and competitive individualism provided the impetus for contemporary Native American struggles for rights and sovereignty in the postwar period as well as the increasingly militant actions of the American Indian Movement, which asserted the political agency of contemporary Native Americans. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to the issues that have informed the work of Native American artists and white artists influenced by Native American art in the first half of the twentieth century. With this discussion as a backdrop I offer a series of case studies of both individual and paired artists. In chapter 2, I examine the role of a

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paradigmatically modern figure, the culture broker, whose work as an intermediary between his own Native American community and white audiences raises the modern issues of secrecy and cultural property, as well as the new notion of the Indian artist as an individual whose interests might become severed from those of the tribe. This chapter focuses on José Lente, an Isleta Pueblo Indian from New Mexico, who formed a working relationship with Elsie Clews Parsons, a pioneering feminist and cultural anthropologist working in the Pueblo communities of the Southwest in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Lente’s ‘‘secret drawings’’ for Parsons depicted aspects of Isleta ritual and esoteric knowledge that were not intended to be viewed outside of a closed circle of Indian initiates. Thus, while the modernism of Lente’s drawings might not be immediately apparent, his position as a figure willing to violate strict Pueblo rules of secrecy identify him as an ambivalent modern individual who sought to find a position of power amid a changing Pueblo world. Lente’s story is compared to that of Jimmy Byrnes, a mixed-ethnicity urban Indian living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who forged a working relationship with anthropologist and collector Byron Harvey (heir of the famous Fred Harvey Company, which held the concession franchise with the Santa Fe Railroad). Byrnes was typical of a generation of Native Americans living in the era of migration and assimilation after World War II who felt the need to reconstruct an identity and sense of Indianness out of modern urban experience. Byrnes’s relationship with Harvey allowed the young Indian artist access to a realm of Native American knowledge into which he had not been directly socialized, and which was accessible to him only via the ethnographic record. As Byrnes became Harvey’s informant and guide to the closed world of Indian ceremonials, Harvey became Byrnes’s friend, patron, and partner in reconstructing the world of the Acoma-Laguna Katsina cult. The picture that emerged was collaborative—and thus by definition hybrid and impure—but for Byrnes it was crucial to a process of self-discovery (or rather, self-invention) and healing, and thus was authentic in the most meaningful sense of that word. In chapter 3 I return to the question of Primitivism in the writings of the Jewish American painter and critic Barnett Newman. In his attempt to break from European tradition and found a new modernist art, Newman argued for the relevance of Native American traditions (specifically Northwest Coast and Pre-Columbian Mexican) to resolve modern crises of national and cultural identity. During the Second World War, Newman imagined that his cohort of New York School painters were the spiritual heirs to an ‘‘inter-American’’ (i.e., transnational) heritage that transcended the violence of modern nationalism and distinguished their work from a corrupt European tradition. Contemporary Native American artists and writers have pointed to

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Newman as an early critic of Eurocentrism. However, I argue that for Newman the value of Native American art was found only in the distant past; he failed to see the work of twentieth-century Native American artists as relevant, and he could not imagine a modern Native American expression. Chapter 4 examines the importance of place for Native American modernist artists, in particular the Ojibwe painters Patrick DesJarlait and George Morrison. In this chapter I look at ways in which Native artists appropriated the universal modes of modernism to embody distinctly Native American issues and experience. DesJarlait and Morrison developed individual modernist styles to embody deep connections to geography and regional identity, and in so doing they were among the first Native American modernists to break with the ‘‘traditional’’ styles of the 1930s. During and after the war, non-Native modernists broke from the narrative styles of Regionalism and American scene painting. However, I argue that the postwar break with representation and narrative in the American avant-garde cut differently for Native Americans who maintained relationships to place and identity even as they were abandoned by their white counterparts in the rapidly globalizing postwar culture of the mainstream. In chapter 5, I consider patterns of Native American self-fashioning in the 1940s and 1950s in the career of painter Yeffe Kimball, who moved between the EuroAmerican modernist art world of New York and the emerging Native American art markets of Oklahoma and New Mexico, claiming to be an Osage from Oklahoma. Kimball’s identity, however, was a fabrication. If in fact Kimball had been of Native American ancestry, then her career would be significant; in studying in France and Italy under Fernand Léger, as well as at the Art Students League of New York, she would have been among the earliest of the Native American artists to cross over into the modernist ‘‘mainstream.’’ Her Indian act thus makes a striking case study in cultural appropriation, and it raises issues of cultural sovereignty and the rights to cultural property in the transnational milieu of the postwar era, as notions of Indian culture and identity underwent radical transformations. Indeed, Kimball’s story anticipates the recent battles for control of Native American identity and cultural property that have flared up around Native American artists beginning with their first contact with Euro-American patrons and collectors and then crystallizing around the Indian Arts and Crafts Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in the 1990s. Chapter 6 examines issues of authenticity raised by individualism and innovation in Native American modernism. In this chapter I return to the example of Oscar Howe, whose modernist abstractions were criticized as ‘‘not Indian.’’ Howe’s ex-

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ample is not merely a matter of a conflict over the definition of ‘‘authenticity,’’ but also points to the tensions during the era of Termination (legislation to end the traditional treaty-trust relationship) around notions of individualism and collectivism in Indian culture and politics. Howe’s understanding of his own modernist art is compared to that of Southern Cheyenne painter Dick West, who also experimented with abstraction and who deliberately mimicked Western styles and techniques. By the late 1950s, it was becoming clear that ‘‘traditionalism’’ was a stifling collar for younger, individualistic, and innovative Indian artists who aspired to an artistic identity such as that cultivated by the non-Native modernist mainstream. The work of these two artists is studied in relation to Termination-era debates among white lawmakers as well as in popular culture, which imagined Indians as individuals in relation to tribal cultures and the national mainstream and also sought to detribalize Indians and to liquidate the federal government’s traditional trust obligations and place individual Indians under state jurisdiction. Finally, in a brief conclusion I recount a series of Rockefeller Foundation–funded seminars and workshops beginning in 1959, as well as the founding of the Institute of American Indian Arts in 1962 and the resulting Native American fine art movement, in which a Native American modernism—which claimed both Indianness and modernist consciousness—was most clearly articulated.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

this project has benefited from the community of faculty, colleagues, and other friends that I have enjoyed over the last several years. The initial ideas were developed as a dissertation in the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota, where I benefited from the generous criticisms, encouragement, and support of faculty including Elaine Tyler May, Lary May, Carol Miller, David Noble, Riv-Ellen Prell, and Erika Doss (University of Colorado), as well as a network of my fellow graduate students, including Matt Basso, Steve Garabedian, Deirdre Murphy, and Thea Petchler. In the American Civilization Department at Brown University, Robert Lee and Susan Smulyan granted me status as a visiting scholar and much-needed library privileges for my early research on this project. I have also benefited from the generous assistance of individuals in dozens of farflung locations who provided important materials and insights: Harvey and Ann Slatin, Stamford, New York; Mary Watson, Ada, Oklahoma; Dean Alvin Turner, East Central State University, Ada, Oklahoma; Charlie at the Osage Certificate Degree of Indian Blood office in Pawhuska, Oklahoma (who searched in vain on more than one occasion for evidence of Yeffe Kimball’s Osage ancestry, and explained the requirements of Osage citizenship); Richard Nelson, Duluth, Minnesota; Brandy and Jeremy Young, Glenhead, New York; Hazel Belvo, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Briand Mesaba Morrison, Bemidji, Minnesota; Lloyd Kiva New, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Ronald Kuchta, New York; Byron Harvey, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Joy Harvey, Somerville, Massachusetts; Tom Young, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma; Mario Klimiades and Jim Reynolds, Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona; Steve Eichner, Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia; Judy Throm and Liza Kirwin, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Rosemary Ellison, Southern Plains Indian Museum, Indian Arts and Crafts Board, Anadarko, Oklahoma; Walter Big Bee, Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe; John Day and Margaret Quintal, Institute of American Indian Studies, University of South Dakota, Vermillion; Shannon Parker, collections manager, Indian Arts Research Center, School of American Research, Santa Fe; and Valerie Verzuh, collections manager, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe. Valuable commentary and criticism were offered by copresenters, readers, re-

spondents, and audience members at numerous panels at conferences of the Native American Art Studies Association, College Art Association, and American Studies Association, where I presented early versions of many of the chapters and case studies in this book. In particular, I thank Kathleen Ash-Milby, Sara Bates, Bruce Bernstein, Elizabeth Hutchinson, Carolyn Kastner, Nancy Mithlo, Kate Morris, Zena Pearlstone, Jackson Rushing, Hillary Scotthorne, Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Jennifer Vigil, Sam Watson, Mark White, and Adriana Zavala for their insights and criticisms. As I prepared this book, Kim Beck carefully read and commented on every draft. At the University of Memphis, I enjoyed the support of the Department of Art and of the College of Communication and Fine Arts, where I was supported by a New Faculty Research Initiation Award, Faculty Development Grant, Faculty Development Leave, and travel assistance. In particular, my work was supported and assisted by Brenda Landman, Jed Jackson, Associate Dean Moira Logan, and Dean Richard Ranta. Steve Harvey (now at the University of Chicago) showed exceptional interest and collegiality, and pointed me toward a number of key resources relating to his father, Byron Harvey III. I was especially fortunate to have been awarded a fellowship and a residence as visiting scholar at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe, which generously provided the time, office space, and intellectual community for the writing of much of the present manuscript. Director Barbara Buhler-Lynes, Librarian Eumie Imm-Stroukoff, and my cohort at the research center—Alan Braddock, Greg Forter, Linda Kim, and Mark White—formed an exciting and collegial group whose shared interests and critical insights benefited this work immeasurably. My year in Santa Fe was also enlivened by a network of new friends and colleagues including Randolph Lewis, Joseph Traugott, and Vickery White. In New York, space for writing was generously provided by Bryson Brodie and Chad MacDermid. A subvention grant from the Society for the Preservation of American Modernists assisted with the costs of photographs and permissions for the artworks included here. Nancy Scott Jackson at the University Press of Kansas provided encouragement for this book at an early stage. Jackson Rushing and an anonymous reader for Duke University Press helped shape this book into the present form. Janet Berlo offered her enthusiastic support for this project at a crucial moment. I also thank Kirsten Bohl, Justin Faerber, Anitra Grisales, and Ken Wissoker for their enthusiasm, support, and assistance in bringing this project to conclusion. I also thank my parents, Bill and Nancy Anthes, and my family for their support over the many years that this book has been in the making. And finally, I dedicate this book to Olive for deep, soulful looks and fierce protection and Kim Beck for the same. xxx acknowledgments

NATIVE MODERNS

1

Art and Modern Indian Policy

native american paintings of the early twentieth century may not appear ‘‘modernist’’ (i.e., ‘‘abstract’’) in style, particularly as they often depict images of an ideal, premodern Indian existence. However, Native American painting is nonetheless an inherently modern expression. Indian painters have produced images in a cross-cultural context created by white encroachment, settlement, and industrialization of Indian country. Painting and drawing by Native American artists is a practice that emerged out of the encounter between Indians and white patrons and has been supported by a modern system of individual and institutional patronage. There is no historical precedent for painting as an autonomous aesthetic practice in Native American cultures, and the artworks made by Indian artists and collected by white patrons in the Southwest and in Oklahoma since the early twentieth century served no traditional function in Native American communities. It is significant that the invention of Native American painting occurred in the Southwest against a background of shifting federal policy regarding Indians in the first three decades of the twentieth century. As the century opened, Native Americans were still living under a massive government-led undertaking aimed at nothing less than the total annihilation of Native American culture and political sovereignty through a program of land privatization, forced education in distant boarding schools, and religious persecution. Native American art (including traditional crafts, music, and dance as well as modern inventions such as drawing and painting with pencils and watercolor on paper) played in modern Euro-Americans’ changing perceptions an important role as a visible symbol of the aesthetic and spiritual value of Native America and culture and identity. The Smithsonian anthropologist Jesse Walter Fewkes is generally credited as the earliest of many succeeding generations of white patrons to ‘‘discover’’ the modern tradition of Native American painting. In 1899–1900, Fewkes commissioned four Hopi men to produce in pencil and watercolor a series of drawings representing Kachinas, or the traditional Hopi spirit beings, that embody natural forces, plants and animals, as well as ancestral spirits [figure 3]. Fewkes published the drawings in the report he wrote for the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1903.

Of course, strictly speaking Fewkes’s commissions are not the first example of Native American representation. Earlier examples of Native American pictorial tradition predate his employment of the four Hopi artists. On the Great Plains, gendered traditions of painting and two-dimensional design evolved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Portable art forms included the narrative buffalo robes, figurative shields, and war record paintings; later, ledger books were painted by male warrior artists, and the abstract patterns of the parfleche, a rawhide storage container, and the tipi were made by women. In the Southwest, more permanent art forms had existed in the landscape for nearly a millennium, including in the famous petroglyphs of Bandelier National Monument near Santa Fe, New Mexico, and in Kiva murals such as the ruins of Awatovi in northeastern Arizona that date to the fifteenth century ce. Even more ancient traditions of polychrome painted pottery among the Anasazi and Mimbres traditions date to the twelfth century ce. Although Fewkes’s Hopi artists made their drawings on the borderlands of U.S. expansion, Fewkes sought to mitigate the visible effects of modernity, and his own involvement, in the production of the drawings. To establish their authenticity and to ensure their ethnographic value, the modern origins of the drawings needed to be explained away. Fewkes declined to publish the work of one graduate of the Haskell Indian Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, because it betrayed the ‘‘influence of instruction.’’ Instead, Fewkes published the work of artists who had, he believed, been least affected by education in government-run boarding schools or by modern commercial art and mass-culture imagery. Fewkes insisted that in subject matter and style the work was to be authentically aboriginal in character—that is, ‘‘pure Hopi.’’ 1 Fewkes’s comments suggest his desire to establish an appropriate and authentic pedigree for the Kachina drawings, to link them, despite the modernity of their cause and means, to an essential Indianness (‘‘pure Hopi’’), thus ensuring their value as ethnographic artifacts. Contemporary with Fewkes, other discoverers became significant supporters of this modern tradition of Native American painting. In 1901, Kenneth Chapman, who later founded the School of American Archeology (now the School of American Research) in Santa Fe, purchased a number of colored pencil drawings by a Navajo artist named Api-Begay at a trading post at Pueblo Bonito, and thus entered into a patronclient relationship similar to Fewkes and the Hopi artists. In 1908, Edgar Lee Hewett, founder of the Museum of New Mexico, discovered a number of artists working in the pueblo of San Ildefonso, including Crescencio Martinez (1879–1918) and Martinez’s nephew, Awa Tsireh, who also signed his works Alfonso Roybal (1898–1955) [figure 4]. After Martinez’s death in 1918, Awa Tsireh, Fred Kabotie (Hopi, 1900–

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1986), Otis Polelonema (Hopi, 1902–1981), and Velino Shije Herrera (Zia, 1902–1973) worked together for Hewett at the Museum of New Mexico and in so doing created the basis of a pan-Indian school characterized by crisp outlines filled in with flat areas of color; by the absence of background and with the illusion of space conveyed through the repetition and grouping of figures; and by picturesque, ethnographic subject matter and a tendency to edit out references to modern life. These early discoveries were initially valued only for their scientific value in the preservation of a ‘‘vanishing’’ culture. By the turn of the century, the end of open warfare on the northern plains had resulted in the confinement of Plains tribes to reservations. The event of statehood for Oklahoma in 1907 and for Arizona and New Mexico in 1912 signaled the entrance of yet more of the Native American land base into the expanding nation. As such, even as the practices of Fewkes, Chapman, Hewett, and other institutional patrons and collectors became the first wedge in the creation of a market for modern work by living Native American artists, they operated under what anthropologist James Clifford has referred to as a ‘‘salvage paradigm,’’ or the ‘‘desire to rescue ‘authenticity’ out of destructive historical change,’’ which was fundamental to turn-of-the-century anthropological enterprise.2 Drawings by Native American artists were not yet appreciated as works of art in their own right, but rather as precious links to a vanishing tribal past. Indeed, native cultures had been under assault in North America for centuries. Euro-Americans understood Native Americans from a nineteenth-century evolutionist perspective that cast Native Americans as racially and culturally inferior, and as destined to disintegrate before the progress of white Western civilization and U.S. territorial expansion. By the early years of the twentieth century, their eventual disappearance before the progress of Euro-American civilization seemed, to most observers, to be inevitable. As Fewkes, Chapman, and Hewett established relationships with Native American artists in the interest of ethnological research, the federal government sought to ensure the destruction of native cultures as viable, living institutions and to monitor the remanufacture of Indians into assimilated citizens in a homogenous American nation. After 1887, the Dawes General Allotment Act sought to break up the Native American land base by forcing Indian families to accept individual 160 acre parcels of land where, it was assumed, the magic of individual property ownership would somehow impel them to reinvent themselves as ideal Jeffersonian farmers. While outright warfare had ceased with the climactic massacre of more than three hundred members of Big Foot’s band of Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890, new solutions to the ‘‘Indian problem’’ included the steady erosion of traditional treaty rights, forced education in a network of church and federal government-run boarding schools where

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young students received corporal punishment for speaking Native languages, prohibitions against traditional dances and other ceremonials, and a policy of cultural genocide that, in the words of Colonel Richard Pratt—the influential architect of the Indian boarding school program—was designed to ‘‘kill the Indian to save the man.’’ Assuming that traditional Native American cultures were doomed by the steady march of progress, Fewkes and his generation believed, understandably, that their efforts were all that stood between Indians and historical oblivion. As such, the early patrons of Indian art weeded through the residue of colonial assimilation and education programs in pursuit of an imperiled authenticity. The act of forming relationships with individual Native American artists, they believed, was necessary in anthropology’s mission to preserve what national expansion and industrial progress could not tolerate. More dramatic than the introduction of new media, the Indian paintings and drawings of the early 1900s heralded a new moment in cross-cultural relations between Native American artists and their white patrons. As the artists produced images of Native American ceremonies, costumes, ritual paraphernalia, and everyday life, they became culture brokers. Translating between alien societies, they found themselves straddling the boundaries of their own communities and the larger white world. In this new role, they attempted to gain a degree of control over their own representations. While photographs of Native American costumes, dances, and ceremonies had been routinely made by Euro-American anthropologists, artists, and tourists since the middle of the nineteenth century, the Indian as artist-informant signaled a new development. Fewkes’s employment of Hopi artists as cultural informants initiated an era of pictorial ‘‘autoethnography.’’ 3 Identifying as such the drawings obtained by Fewkes underscores their origin in a cross-cultural encounter in which an image of the self is created reflexively. Fewkes’s artists pictured their own Hopi experience in terms that could be understood by a non-Hopi audience.4

NATIVE AMERICAN ART AND MODERNISM

Early painters and patrons helped to found a modern tradition of Native American art. The mode of Native American painting and drawing was also recognized by a second group of patrons, that of non-Natives who valued the work of Indian artists as a vital contemporary expression of cultural identity and not just a scientific document of life in the distant past. The appreciation of paintings and drawings by Native Americans in terms of aesthetic value and as expressions of a uniquely Indian subjectivity—that is, as art—was institutionalized by a subsequent generation

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of patrons and collectors, whose cosmopolitan tastes were concomitant with a new pluralist ethos in American culture. Nevertheless, these efforts were still undertaken in opposition to the federal government’s official policy of Indian assimilation. In 1918, John DeHuff was newly installed as superintendent at the governmentrun Santa Fe Indian School. He was accompanied in this post by his wife, Elizabeth DeHuff, who ran an art program in spite of official school policy that continued to dictate that assimilation was the goal of Indian education. DeHuff ’s interest in Native American paintings was based on aesthetic appreciation as well as on her commitment to cultural pluralism. Young painters, including Fred Kabotie (Hopi) and Oscar Polelonema (Hopi), were excused from industrial arts classes and invited into the DeHuff home, where they were offered pencils, watercolors, and encouragement to make pictures based on traditional and ceremonial subjects. Needless to say, Elizabeth DeHuff ’s young Indian students responded to her encouragement. As Kabotie later recalled, ‘‘When you’re so remote from your own people, you get lonesome. You don’t paint what’s around you, you paint what you have in mind. Loneliness moves you to express something of your home, your background.’’ 5 The efforts of DeHuff and other white teachers, including Ester B. Hoyt at the San Ildefonso day school, may also be seen to embody the salvage paradigm, as indeed many white-directed efforts on behalf of Native cultures were caught up in a funk of what anthropologist Renato Rosalda has described as ‘‘imperialist nostalgia.’’ 6 However, their encouragement of students to express a unique Native subjectivity ran counter to the Indian school curriculum designed to train students for life as assimilated laborers in mainstream American culture. This unofficial curriculum was often dangerous; John DeHuff was censured for his wife’s activities. However, Elizabeth DeHuff ’s teaching introduced the revolutionary idea that traditional cultures had a continuing relevance for Native peoples in the twentieth century, and perhaps for whites as well. By the first and second decades of the twentieth century, the value of Native American cultures was being recognized and celebrated by expatriate New Yorkers and midwesterners in the American Southwest, who scripted Native Americans into a new national romance symbolizing their commitment to the values of cultural pluralism. Native American cultures were also called to serve as examples and illustrations in critiques of modern industrial society. Such criticisms claimed to find in Indian cultures a spiritual anodyne for the debasements and alienation of modernity. As such, they understood that the value of Native American culture in the present was, paradoxically, its pastness.7 The appeal of Native American culture was for many deeply nationalistic. As

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American intellectuals turned to Native sources in their search for a usable past, many in the avant-garde of the Northeast were drawn to Native cultures as a vibrant new resource from which to craft a uniquely American aesthetic. In describing the mania among artists and intellectuals for the culture of Native America, Paul Walter predicted in 1916 that the Southwest would become an American ‘‘Barbizon,’’ by which he refers to the region of rural France that in the nineteenth century inspired a school of nationalistic sentimentalism as urban painters turned to peasants and other rural exotica for artistic subject matter.8 Walter Pach described the Native Americans of the Southwest as a uniquely American primitive culture, ‘‘different from the Oriental and nearer to us: it is American!’’ 9 In addition, Natalie Curtis wrote that ‘‘it seems a curious fact that . . . we have never recognized the art-crafts of the Indians as an asset to the nation’s culture . . . We echo Europe, whereas we might develop a decorative art truly American.’’ 10 And finally, an editorial in El Palacio, the magazine of the Museum of New Mexico, proclaimed confidently: ‘‘Indian paintings are the greatest art produced in America.’’ 11 The patronage of those in the avant-garde Northeast sought to redefine Native cultures as a unique and vital component of the cultural heritage of all Americans. Between 1914 and 1919, a number of northeastern modernists—such as the Ashcan School painters Robert Henri, John Sloan, and George Bellows, as well as the Cubists and Synchromists of the Stieglitz circle, including John Marin and Marsden Hartley—visited the Southwest. Avant-garde writers and artists ranging from Mary Austin to Raymond Jonson and George L. K. Morris broke with academic representation and concomitant cultural hierarchies and appropriated Native American aesthetic idioms and pictorial motifs, claiming that Native art, poetry, and song were inherently modernist in form.12 The modernist interest in Native American art, song, and dance argued implicitly for the contemporary relevance of Native cultures, even as federal and church-related initiatives continued to pursue the nineteenth-century agenda of assimilation and the ultimate disappearance of Native Americans as distinct ethnic and cultural identities. Such artists promoted the work of Native American artists for a broad, modern audience. They valued the Native Americans not just as subject matter but as subjects, and if not as individual artists then as bearers of a collective, traditional aesthetic that, they claimed, held an essential affinity with modernism. In 1917, a number of Kiowa students at St. Patrick’s Mission School in Anadarko, Oklahoma, came to the attention of Oscar B. Jacobson, a white artist teaching at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, who in 1929 in France published a limited edition portfolio of silkscreen reproductions of the students’ flat, brightly colored watercolor images of traditional

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costumes and dances.13 Beginning in the 1920s, Native arts were increasingly shown by organizations and individuals involved not only in the growing efforts by urban progressives on behalf of Indian cultures and land claims issues but also in modern art. As exhibited in eastern galleries and museums, contemporary Native American paintings of ceremonials and dances presented an image of Native culture to an audience increasingly willing to organize for changes in federal Indian policy. Beginning in 1920, with an exhibition of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s collection of contemporary paintings, the artist John Sloan organized exhibitions of Native American arts for the Society of Independent Artists at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Another patron, Amelia Elizabeth White, organized exhibitions both in New York and abroad throughout the 1920s. She handled this work from her base at her Madison Avenue gallery, Ishauu, which was connected with the Eastern Association of Indian Affairs, a white-run Indian relief organization. In 1931, Sloan organized the Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts, which showcased contemporary paintings at Grand Central Galleries. In 1933, the Museum of Modern Art organized the exhibition Native American Sources of Modern Art, which suggested that the prehistoric and traditional arts of North, Central, and South America represented a uniquely American resource for modernism and abstraction. If federal policy still lagged in the nineteenth century, the avant-garde artists and intellectuals along with urban museum audiences believed that Native American cultures were relevant to modern lives. Euro-American patrons and promoters established mechanisms for supporting artists, supplied models for aesthetic correctness, and policed the boundaries of ‘‘tradition’’ and ‘‘quality,’’ thereby establishing standards for connoisseurship that served the interests of a burgeoning non-Native market for Indian arts. In 1921, Hewett mounted the first Southwest Indian Arts and Crafts Exhibit of Santa Fe, the precursor to today’s Indian Market, which was notorious for its imposed prescriptions of appropriateness. The Indian Arts Fund (iaf) was established in Santa Fe in 1925, where its all-white board of trustees shared a common opinion that ‘‘Indian art was doomed to disintegration and oblivion,’’ and that ‘‘something . . . should be done about it.’’ In response, the iaf assembled a representative collection of Pueblo ceramics and Navajo blankets to battle cultural extinction: ‘‘Old standards were renewed, characteristic designs were revived and the Indians made more of art and less of ash-trays and trash.’’ 14 The education of Indian artists was also institutionalized in this period. In 1928, Oscar Jacobson enrolled the first small group of Kiowa students in a noncredit Indian arts program at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. In addition, the flat illustrational style of ‘‘traditional-style’’ Indian painting was codified in a curriculum

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developed by the white artist, educator, and author Dorothy Dunn, whose famous ‘‘studio’’ at the Santa Fe Indian School (sfis) trained a generation of Native American artists from 1932 through the 1950s, and was the first program to use federal resources for the preservation and promotion of Native culture.15 As such, Dunn’s painting curriculum at sfis represents the watershed, to which all the previous nonIndian cultural efforts had been leading. The style Dunn taught at the sfis was hybrid and pan-Indian; she encouraged her students to paint scenes of traditional Indian life in a style she deemed appropriately primitive. Dunn was clear, however, about the need to emphasize its relevance for the modern world. As she wrote: ‘‘Here was a chance for the modern-yearning Indian young people to see how well their amazingly modern traditional motifs might unite with some of the most advanced ideas of the modern world.’’ 16 Drawing from authentically ‘‘Native’’ (i.e., non-European) visual models and emphasizing flat, linear compositions without perspective, ground line, or background, Dunn based her lessons on studies of Native mural painting, pottery, and textile traditions in the Field Museum of Anthropology during her student years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The studio-style paintings focused primarily on scenes of nineteenth-century Indian life, with no evidence of the presence of whites or the modern conditions of their very production, although some student artists gave their artwork a distinctly contemporary flavor [figure 5]. A number of major Native American artists began their careers in Dunn’s studio. Santa Clara Pueblo artist Pablita Velarde (b. 1918) was in one of the first groups of students in Dorothy Dunn’s studio program at the Santa Fe Indian School. Even before graduating from sfis in 1936, however, Velarde worked on New Deal cultural programs. In 1934, she was one of fifteen sfis students hired under the Public Works of Art Project to create mural paintings in the Southwest. Velarde also participated with Kenneth Chapman and Raymond Jonson and other professional artists on the Works Progress Administration’s Santa Fe mural project, where she produced artwork that was exhibited locally at the Laboratory of Anthropology and in Washington, D.C., at the Corcoran Gallery. As a groundbreaking Native American woman artist, Velarde worked from 1939 to 1945 with the Civilian Conservation Corps as part of the artist-in-residence project at Bandelier National Monument, an ancestral Pueblo archeological site near Santa Fe, where she was assigned to make paintings of traditional Pueblo scenes [figure 6].17 As a woman and an artist living away from the pueblo, Velarde would have been barred from traditional positions of cultural and religious authority. However, she enjoyed a long career as a culture broker between the Indian and white worlds: ‘‘I was a kind of go-between in telling one side this life, and telling this side the other life,’’ she wrote, ‘‘I balanced it somehow.’’ 18

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ART AND REFORM

The reputations of the non-Native promoters and their projects are certainly somewhat tarnished by their positioning of themselves as the arbiters of tradition, quality, and authenticity. However, because they worked to recognize the relevance of Indianness for modern lives, this generation should also be credited with breaking away from the nineteenth-century cultural evolutionist paradigm that saw Native Americans as vanishing upon the arrival of a superior race and civilization. In their dismantling of this dusty model of manifest destiny, Dunn and others of her generation embodied the pluralist and integrative aims of modernist cosmopolitanism, which sought to dismantle the vestiges of Victorianism, Social Darwinism, and the hierarchies of race, class, and gender in American culture in the early twentieth century.19 If some patrons and promoters shared with their Gilded Age predecessors the perception that Indian cultures were vanishing, they differed in their diagnosis of the causes and in their prescriptions for action. Whereas the previous generation had perfected racialist theories of cultural evolution, the new Indian reformers understood government policies of allotment and assimilation, as well as the encroachment of capitalism and tourism onto Indian lands, as agents of cultural disintegration. And whereas the previous generation had sought to prepare Native Americans for entry into the American mainstream by erasing all signs and vestiges of Indianness, Dunn and her generation of pluralist intellectuals sought to preserve an authentic Indianness, which they considered to be a priceless and unique contribution to American and world culture. A key figure linking cultural and political efforts was John Collier (1884–1968), a progressive social worker, teacher, and activist who under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1934 was appointed commissioner of Indian affairs. Writer Mabel Dodge, who had hosted Collier in her New York salon in the first decade of the twentieth century when Collier was a social worker involved in the immigrant community center movement, first brought Collier to Taos Pueblo in northern New Mexico in 1920. At Taos, Collier believed he had found the model for a full-scale overhaul of the modern American psyche. Like many American intellectuals of his generation, Collier lamented the loss of the social and spiritual bonds that had united societies in a meaningful, shared culture, only to be fragmented and destroyed by the unchecked march of modernization, industrial development, and competitive individualism. As such, Collier believed that ‘‘the recreation of such mechanisms is our world’s task.’’ 20 For Collier, the vibrant cultures of the Pueblo Indians were a ‘‘Red Atlantis.’’ They

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offered a viable and superior social model for the modern world, albeit one that was imperiled by the incursions of the instrumental values of progress and modernization. Years later, Collier remained moved by the utopian vision he had first glimpsed at a Christmas ceremony at Taos Pueblo in 1920: The discovery that came upon me there, in that tiny group of a few hundred Indians, was of personality-forming institutions, even now unweakened, which had survived repeated and immense historical shocks, and which were going on in the production of states of mind, attitudes of mind, earth loyalties and human loyalties, amid a context of beauty which suffused all the life of the group. What I observed and experienced was a power of art—of the life-making art—greater in kind than anything I had known in the world before. Not tiny but huge, this little group and its personalities seemed. There were solitary vigils which carried the individual out into the cosmos, and there were communal rituals whose grave, tranquil, yet earth-shaking intensity is not adequately suggested by anything outside the music of Bach.21 Beginning in the 1920s, Collier and a critical mass of artists, writers, and intellectuals came together in defense of Indian culture. They first mobilized on behalf of Pueblo Indian dances, which were deemed immoral, obscene, and barbarous by Christian reform groups and were prohibited by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which believed that traditional Native cultures were an impediment to the goal of assimilation and progress.22 But it was the 1922 Bursum Bill that most effectively galvanized the nascent movement for Indian reform. The Bursum Bill attempted to resolve land disputes that had long festered in New Mexico between non-Natives and the Pueblo groups along the northern Rio Grande, and were exacerbated after 1912 when statehood raised questions about the status of the Pueblos vis-à-vis state and federal authority. Land tenure had been at issue in the region for centuries. The earliest disputes dated to 1745, when the King of Spain granted to the Pueblos titles that contradicted the grants made to Spanish subjects. During the Mexican period more titles were granted, overlapping the earlier Spanish claims. After the United States took possession of the region in 1846, many Pueblos sold lands to white settlers in good faith. These holdings were then threatened by a 1913 Supreme Court ruling that confirmed the status of the Pueblos as government wards entitled to federal protection, thereby challenging the validity of property sales to Euro-Americans. Complicating matters further, many documentary records had not survived the nearly two-century period under three national governments. Although many long-standing settlers’ claims were not in dispute, the increasing pace of white encroachment on Indian lands had worsened

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the situation as many of the northern Rio Grande Pueblos no longer had adequate irrigable land to support their people. The Bursum Bill was introduced in Congress by New Mexico senator Holm O. Bursum, but it was drafted and supported by a cabal representing the interests of non-Native property owners in northern New Mexico, including secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall, Justice Department investigator Ralph E. Twitchell, and Santa Fe attorney A. B. Renehan. The bill, which was authored and introduced without any input or participation from the Pueblos, threatened Pueblo land holdings and water rights by validating Spanish and Mexican period titles predating U.S. occupation; the holdings of individuals with U.S. titles; individuals who could demonstrate that they had occupied Pueblo lands since 1910; and, finally, some questionable claims included in a contested 1916 property survey.23 A broad coalition mobilized in response to the Bursum Bill. A counteroffensive was launched by the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, under the direction of Stella Atwood, a veteran of Indian policy reform efforts in California. Atwood recruited Collier for the cause, who labeled the bill a ‘‘land grab’’ and an outright attack by propertied whites on the survival of the Pueblos. S. R. Brosius and the Indian Rights Association, a Christian reform group based in Philadelphia, also joined Atwood and Collier in the campaign. The anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons appealed to friends in Congress on behalf of the Pueblos, and she wrote resolutions for the American Ethnological Society and the American Anthropological Association. Parsons also helped form the Eastern Association of Indian Affairs, and she organized demonstrations by a Pueblo delegation to Washington, D.C.24 Statements condemning the Bursum Bill were authored by Alfred Kidder of the Peabody Museum at Harvard and by Herbert Spinden of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Essays and editorials celebrated Pueblo culture and lambasted the Bursum Bill and Albert Fall. Collier published ‘‘The Red Atlantis,’’ in Survey magazine in October 1922, and the Nation, the New Republic, the New York World, and the New York Tribune also published editorials criticizing the bill. Artists and Writers against the Bursum Bill published a broadside listing the names of forty-eight individuals representing a cross-section of individuals from New Mexico and national figures in the arts and literature, including Mary Austin, Gustav Baumann, Ernst Blumenschein, Gerald and Ina Sizer Cassidy, Alice Corbin, Randall Davey, Zane Grey, Robert Henri, Victor Higgins, Grant La Farge, D. H. Lawrence, B. J. O. Nordfeldt, Olive Rush, Carl Sandburg, Elizabeth Sergeant, John Sloan, Mable Dodge, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, Maxfield Parrish, and others.25 Needless to say, these efforts proved successful; the Bursum Bill was scuttled in 1923, and in 1924 the Pueblo Lands Act established a board to deal with legal claims.26 art and modern indian policy 11

Collier was named Indian commissioner in 1933, and the effects of his appointment were immediate and radical. Under Collier, the Indian Bureau abandoned its earlier efforts to eradicate Native American languages and cultures. Collier took the bold position that Native American art and culture should be ‘‘prized, nourished, and honored,’’ rather than being consigned to the dustbin of history. After the reforms of the Indian New Deal—or the Indian Reorganization Act (ira)—were enacted in 1934, Indian communities began to exercise a degree of self-government. Collier’s goals for the ira were twofold: the preservation of Native American cultures and the conservation of the Native Americans’ landholdings and natural resources for Native purposes. Collier’s goal was not to replicate white patterns of land ownership and governance but rather to promote community self-determination, which would enable Indians to work within the context of the modern economy to rebuild indigenous institutions, and thus encourage economic development that would not disrupt traditional cultures.27 Collier was clear that the notion of ‘‘individualism’’ was not a panacea for the condition of Native Americans in the twentieth century. ‘‘The Indian is not a ‘rugged individualist,’ ’’ he wrote. Rather, Collier argued that Native Americans would be best served by local governments organized at the tribal level according to a fusion of constitutional and tribal forms. Collier argued that Native American society ‘‘functions best as an integrated member of a group, clan, or tribe. Identification of his [the Indian’s] individuality with clan or tribe is with him a spiritual necessity. If the satisfaction of this compelling sentiment is denied him—as it was for half a century or more—the Indian does not . . . merge into white group life. Through a modernized form of Indian tribal organization, adapted to the needs of the various tribes . . . , it is possible to make use of this proverbial latent civic force.’’ 28 Moreover, Collier recognized that self-government and a revival of traditional Indian arts and culture would be hollow if it did not provide for the tribes’ economic self-sufficiency. Collier took as his model the Pueblos of the Southwest, where self-government had persisted for centuries and where there had been comparatively less displacement and loss of lands.29 In arguing for the importance of a tribal land base for cultural preservation, Collier’s primary target was the failed federal policy of allotment. The 1887 Dawes Act allowed for the allotment of Indian lands into individual parcels of 160 acres, which were then transferred to eligible, enrolled tribal members. After all of the eligible tribal members had received their allotments, ‘‘surplus’’ lands were made available for sale to whites. Allotted lands were to be held in trust by the federal government for a minimum of twenty-five years; however, an amendment made through the 1906 Burke Act allowed Indian allottees to sell

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or lease their land to whites. As a policy, allotment led to the massive loss of lands: between 1887 and 1932, Indian land holdings were diminished by more than 65 percent—from one hundred and thirty nine million to forty eight million acres.30 The ira, however, reversed these policies.

INDIANS AND AMERICAN PLURALISM

In spite of the successes of the ira, as the major body of legislative reform enacted under the Indian New Deal it has been criticized for undermining traditional Native American sovereignty and supplanting it with uniform ‘‘tribal councils’’ and corporations. While these institutions recognized a right to Indian self-governance, they had the effect of accelerating Native American communities into the U.S. mainstream by modeling the new Indian institutions after constitutional forms.31 Indeed, the cultural and political integration of Native Americans into the national mainstream that culminated in the 1920s and 1930s was part of a broad shift in the conceptualization of American identity and in the concept of culture generally. This pluralist shift repositioned Native American cultures closer to the center of American society and made gestures toward political enfranchisement for Native Americans (although these remained, for the most part, unrealized until after the Second World War). According to the historian Philip Gleason, a turning point in the reconfiguration of American identity from an ethnic-racial construction to an ideological formation came in 1924 when legislation was passed that extended U.S. citizenship to Native Americans and placed restrictions on overseas immigration based on national origin. After the passage of immigration restrictions, ethnicity ceased to be considered as a determinant of Americanness. Rather, Gleason suggests, ‘‘a powerful reaffirmation of American ideology [became] the basis of national identity,’’ establishing an ideological, rather than racial, definition of citizenship as the dominant construction of American identity through the Second World War (where it was given narrative and visual form in the multiethnic fighting units featured in American war movies) until the mid-1960s.32 The political enfranchisement and social and political integration of Native Americans, then, should be understood as a component of an essentially pluralist project. To an extent, and particularly in the work of the artists, intellectuals, and reformist educators discussed above, this is true. However, this narrative of enfranchisement and integration elides the centrality and paradigmatic transformation of the modern notion of race. The meaning and makeup of American identity was itself under reconstruction in the early years of the twentieth century; a monolithic

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and unified American identity, understood in terms of ‘‘whiteness,’’ is a product of this same era. Historians of ethnicity and immigration have noted the coincidence and conceptual correspondence of the 1924 Johnson Act, which curtailed European immigration (Chinese exclusion had been on the books since 1882), and the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, which, in contrast with the exclusionary Johnson Act, sought to include Native Americans into the mainstream body politic. Indian political assimilation thus paralleled immigrant exclusion and the consolidation of a ‘‘white’’ racial identity as a prerequisite for the full rights of U.S. citizenship. Indianness was in this period relocated to a conceptual position close to the center of a reimagined American identity, even as Native peoples were politically stranded between an embattled tradition of tribalism and autonomy, and an as-yet-unfulfilled promise of enfranchisement. After the history of forced assimilation through allotment, boarding schools, and prohibitions against traditional arts and ceremonials, Indians were considered more fit for citizenship than were certain European immigrants who were similarly racialized as nonwhite ‘‘others.’’ Yet the ideal of Indian citizenship, political enfranchisement, and economic self-sufficiency (ideals held primarily by non-Natives) still contrasted with the bleak reality of Indian opportunity. This rescripting of Indianness from an exterior position that marked the boundary of civilization and national identity, to an interior position that defined the very essence of Americanness (i.e., the Southwest as an ‘‘American Barbizon’’) was, notably, played out against and informed by the ascendancy of the Boasian culture concept in the social sciences in the twentieth century.33 The modern replacement of cultural difference for the nineteenth century’s racial hierarchy was central in enabling the project of Americanizing Indianness (and also in reconstructing an autochthonous Americanness to which Euro-American artists and intellectuals could lay claim). The modern culture concept was the foundation of many of the cultural and educational efforts (and ultimately policy reforms) undertaken by progressives on behalf of Native Americans in the early twentieth century as part of the general assault on outmoded assimilationist programs. Ironically, however, the major outcome of the cultural shift in the twentieth century was the reification of ‘‘race’’ primarily along the ‘‘color line,’’ as W. E. B. Du Bois famously noted. The twentieth century’s ‘‘Negro Problem’’ eclipsed the nineteenth century’s concern over ‘‘Hebrews,’’ ‘‘Slavs,’’ and ‘‘Celts.’’ Indeed, since the founding of the republic, the color line—as realized in African slavery and Indian dispossession and extermination—had mitigated the formation of an ideology of separate and hierarchically arrayed ‘‘white’’ European races. From the 1790 granting of citizenship to all ‘‘free white persons’’ to the ‘‘probationary whites’’ of the nineteenth century, ‘‘whiteness’’ was privileged, if divided, throughout

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the history of the nation. The era of cultural pluralism ushered in by the ascendancy of the Boasian paradigm replaced racial difference with the concept of a plurality of cultures, or ‘‘ethnicities,’’ as the ‘‘races’’ of nineteenth century pseudoscience were granted whiteness and citizenship. However, ‘‘race’’ persisted as a category and a quality now assigned only to nonwhites—that is, the twentieth century’s ‘‘Negroid’’ (African) and ‘‘Mongoloid’’ (Asiatic) peoples.34 That Native Americans appeared to lack a clear categorization under the new paradigm may indicate the ambivalence of their position as racially ‘‘other’’ yet culturally, politically, and increasingly socially intimate, not to mention central, to white modernist self-imagining. As such, American pluralism shouldered a heavy burden of representation in the struggle against fascism in the Second World War. Throughout the war effort, an abstract, ideological sense of American nationhood was contrasted with the demonic example of Nazi Germany and a volkische racial nationalism now seen as dangerously atavistic in the modern multiethnic world.35 However, the ideals of a pluralistic, national unity that would defeat the insidious anachronism of fascism abroad were haunted by the persistence of racism on the home front. While social scientists and intellectuals including Robert Park, Margaret Mead, Erik Erikson, Horace Kallen and Louis Adamic were galvanized by the ideology of American freedom, equality, and the ‘‘common good,’’ the color line came to embody differences that would not be dissolved by the ideals of common citizenship. As the historian George Lipsitz argues, ‘‘white racism in the United States undermined arguments behind U.S. participation in the war and made it harder to distinguish the Allies from the Axis.’’ 36 Indeed, as W. E. B. Du Bois had predicted of the twentieth century, the fragile ideology of pluralism foundered on the issue of race, which reified difference as a matter of color. In the twentieth century, difference was reconfigured as a line around rather than divisions between Europeans (and by extension, European Americans). Nineteenth-century racialism and early-twentieth-century nativism, which constructed an elaborate hierarchy of the races of Europe, was replaced by the concept of ‘‘ethnic’’ difference, but race persisted by being displaced onto peoples outside the imagined brotherhood of Europeans and Euro-Americans, beyond the pale as it were. In the 1920s and 1930s a generation of progressive social scientists and intellectuals had forged the concept of ethnicity to explain and categorize patterns of human difference. Ethnicity was conceived as a social category that contributed to group identity formation based on, in the sociologist Werner Sollers’s phrase, patterns of ‘‘consent and descent.’’ The new ethnicity paradigm of the interwar period sought to supplant the biological determinism of the racial categories that had undergirded

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the ideology of Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the nineteenth century and eugenic science in the first decades of the twentieth, which culminated in the nativist and antiimmigrant Johnson Act of 1924 that severely curtailed the influx of European immigrants. Thus the rise of ethnicity as a paradigm for difference represented, in many ways, a triumph of American liberalism and the ideals of common citizenship. ‘‘Ethnic minorities,’’ according to the paradigm, struggled to assimilate and integrate into the host society, which benefits from cultural pluralism as well; that is, ethnic immigrants contribute their unique ‘‘cultures’’ to the mainstream as they themselves absorb the values and ideals of the majority nation. However, as the sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue, the ethnicity model, for all its egalitarianism, was blind to the new racial formations of the twentieth century and thus failed to account for the formation of ‘‘white’’ race consciousness.37 The narrative of white-ethnic social mobility could not account for the wholly different experiences of Indian dispossession (or African slavery and Asian exclusion). A narrative of assimilation and integration did not accurately portray the history of U.S.-Indian relations, the boarding school experience, and the wholesale efforts to eradicate Native Americans. But after 1924 Native Americans were imagined as star pupils in the story of the essential openness of American identity; that is, after 1924 Indians were ‘‘citizens’’ (if still in name alone) with unique ‘‘cultural traditions’’ that would enrich the mainstream and heal the broken soul of modern, industrial America. However, the principles of ‘‘ethnicity’’ and the ideal of cultural pluralism still failed to work their transformative magic in the lives of Native Americans. Thanks to the efforts of Collier’s generation of cosmopolitan progressives, Native American culture had been recast as a vital component of American pluralism. However, the place of Indians within a pluralist America remained ambiguous; Native Americans occupied a unique and ambivalent position vis-à-vis the color line in American culture. If at the beginning of the 1940s Indianness was culturally and politically intimate, Indians were still racially other and faced economic hardship, the unfulfilled promise of enfranchisement (Indians were still denied the vote in New Mexico and Arizona), the paternalism and incompetence of the federal Indian programs, and outright racism.

NATIVE AMERICAN ART AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

With all of the ironies described above in tow, Native American art was called to national service on the eve of the entry of the United States into the Second World War. These tensions were apparent at the Museum of Modern Art’s 1941 exhibition,

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Indian Art of the United States. This massive exhibition, which occupied all three floors of the still-young institution as well as the sculpture garden, was organized by the Department of the Interior’s Indian Arts and Crafts Board (iacb), under the direction of general manager René d’Harnoncourt, architect Henry Klumb (also an iacb member), and Frederic H. Douglas, curator of the Native American collections at the Denver Art Museum.38 Jackson Rushing has described the exhibition as ‘‘a watershed event in the history of Euro-American proprietary interest in Native American art in the twentieth century.’’ 39 Indian Art of the United States was the culmination of the enthusiasm of earlier progressives and New Dealers for Indian arts and culture as the foundation for a reconstructed modern American identity.40 The iacb had been created under Collier’s Indian New Deal in 1934 with the mandate to preserve, promote, and regulate the growing market for Native American arts and crafts.41 The creation of the iacb represented the federal legislative recognition of the value of Indian culture and identity and its relevance for modern American lives. The iacb had been founded on the belief that Native American arts and crafts had a twofold relevance: first, as bearers of Indian identity—no longer demonized as ‘‘pagan’’ and ‘‘primitive’’—and second, as in the writings of Collier and other reformer-aesthetes, central to a newly pluralist and spiritually reawakened American identity. Six years later, Indian Art of the United States embodied this shift for a wide mainstream public. Writing in the foreword to d’Harnoncourt and Douglas’s catalogue, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt noted this significance: ‘‘At this time, when America is renewing its cultural resources,’’ she wrote, ‘‘this . . . exhibition . . . open[s] up to us age-old sources of ideas and forms that have never been fully appreciated. In appraising the Indian’s past and present achievements, we realize not only that his heritage constitutes part of the artistic and spiritual wealth of this country, but also that the Indian people of today have a contribution to make toward the America of the future.’’ 42 In order to guide the viewers’ attention through the total exhibition experience, the design by d’Harnoncourt, Klumb, and Douglas made use of the entire museum in its argument for the relevance of Indian cultures to modern lives. At the museum entrance, mounted at street level and flush with moma’s modernist facade, the curators installed a thirty-foot contemporary totem pole carved in 1939 by Haida artist John Wallace. Inside, the exhibition was divided into three sections, ‘‘Prehistoric Art,’’ ‘‘Living Traditions,’’ and ‘‘Indian Art for Modern Living,’’ which occupied, respectively, the third, second, and first floors of moma.

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Beginning on the third floor, ‘‘Prehistoric Art’’ showcased the great civilizations of North America before contact. In contrast to the prevailing curatorial imperatives, which for educational effect grouped objects together by ‘‘culture areas,’’ d’Harnoncourt and his team designed the galleries on the third floor to present artifacts ‘‘for aesthetic value only.’’ Maps, explanatory texts, and other didactic information standard to the scientific and ethnographic display of non-Western cultures—a system that was developed a generation earlier by Franz Boas at New York’s American Museum of Natural History (amnh)—were confined to a small introductory gallery. In the remaining galleries, the installations of objects, photographs, and modern reproductions were displayed in spare, geometric spaces, which had the effect of abstracting and decontextualizing the artifacts, thereby estranging the aesthetic nature of the artifacts from their social and ethnographic significance. In effect, d’Harnoncourt and his collaborators encouraged the moma public, including painters and sculptors of the burgeoning New York School, to view Native American arts illuminated by the same formalist criteria by which modernist works of art were viewed. While Native material cultures had previously been exhibited in aestheticizing display strategies (notably at the Denver Art Museum under Douglas and at the Brooklyn Museum under Herbert J. Spinden),43 moma’s displays were more like a Fifth Avenue commercial gallery than the crowded, didactic installations seen at the amnh and at the Heye Foundation Museum of the American Indian. As such, they had a major impact in terms of the public and artistic reception of Native American arts as ‘‘art’’ rather than as ethnic curio or scientific specimen. The third floor galleries were dominated visually by two large mural paintings produced by contemporary Native and non-Native artists. The first mural, painted by Euro-American artists employed by the Federal Art Project, was a canvas reproduction of basketmaker-period pictographs from Barrier Canyon. The second image was a canvas reproduction of a kiva mural from Awatovi, which was painted by students at the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. The students’ work was done under the direction of Hopi painter Fred Kabotie, who had been a student in Elizabeth DeHuff ’s home as well as in Dunn’s studio program and who was employed as an artist and educator by the Indian Service. The work of living artists was also included prominently elsewhere in the exhibition. The second floor contained a series of galleries showcasing historic works under the heading ‘‘Living Traditions.’’ D’Harnoncourt and the iacb went to great lengths to present the works in these galleries as vital cultural traditions that had much to offer modern America. As such, the displays were designed to convey the message that the objects had more than aesthetic value, but rather embodied, and were deeply

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embedded in, a Native cultural and spiritual context. Here, d’Harnoncourt and his co-organizers implicitly argued for the contemporary significance of Native American worldview by presenting Native cultures as viable and valuable alternatives to modernity, much as Collier had witnessed at Taos two decades earlier. In the exhibition catalogue Douglas and d’Harnoncourt wrote of their concern to locate and present ‘‘what values there may be in Indian thought and art.’’ In their writing as well as their exhibition design they projected the pluralist and cosmopolitan view that previous policies to destroy Indian cultures were flawed because they were based on the mistaken notion that ‘‘Indian tradition was . . . an obstacle to progress,’’ with the result that ‘‘dances and ceremonials were outlawed, arts and crafts were decried as shameful survivals of a barbaric age and even the use of Indian languages was prohibited in many schools.’’ Douglas and d’Harnoncourt continued by outlining the paradigmatic shift that the recognition of the value of Native American cultures represented. ‘‘Only in recent years has it been realized that such a policy was not merely a violation of intrinsic human rights but was actually destroying values which could never be replaced, values so deeply rooted in tribal life that they are a source of strength for future generations. In recognition of these facts, the present administration is now cooperating with the various tribes in the efforts to preserve and develop those spiritual and artistic values in Indian tradition that the tribes consider essential.’’ 44 Maintaining the new partnership between Indian artists and the federal government was the role of the iacb under d’Harnoncourt. The iacb’s concern for the market in Indian arts was the subject of the first floor galleries, which displayed ‘‘Indian Art for Modern Living.’’ These galleries showcased high-quality contemporary versions of traditional Native American arts of the sort promoted by the iacb. The first floor galleries also featured paintings by contemporary artists including Kabotie (Pueblo), Harrison Begay (Navajo), and Oscar Howe. In their catalogue essay, Douglas and d’Harnoncourt aimed to dispel the stereotypes and antiquated ideas of modern Indians’ comparative lack of development along a hierarchical scale of human societies: ‘‘It is very misleading to refer to Indian art as primitive art. The word primitive, in either its literal sense, describing an early stage of development, or in its popular sense implying a lack of refinement, only fits a certain of the rudimentary and archaic forms of Indian art which can hardly be considered representative. Most Indian art is the result of a long period of development in which capable craftsmen devoted all their inventive skill to perfecting specialized techniques and styles. Some of it reaches a level that compares favorably with the products of any of the great pre-mechanic civilizations.’’ 45

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However, the exhibition also pointed to a deep contradiction in the iacb’s sponsorship of Native American artists. The iacb, charged with developing Native arts as a sort of ethnic industry, had the dual responsibility of revitalizing traditional forms and ensuring their authenticity and quality, as well as providing assistance for Indians to ‘‘realize their desire to adopt from the white man such achievements as will make it possible for them to live successfully in a modern age.’’ 46 Thus, Indian ‘‘traditions’’— presumed to be static—were contrasted with white ‘‘achievements’’—presumed to be a progression—that is, the modern industry of regional and ethnic tourism. The iacb endeavored to preserve authentic traditions that were, it was believed, imperiled by the degrading influence of the tourist market. Non-Native romanticism and sentimentalism, it seemed, threatened the very continuity of Native cultures as an authentic anti-modern anodyne. While Douglas and d’Harnoncourt stated that ‘‘the survival of tribal cultures through generations of persecution and suppression is in itself a testimony to their strength and vitality,’’ 47 the logic of the iacb indicated that Indians would need assistance in learning to survive in the modern competitive marketplace. However, if Indian artists wanted to survive at all, they needed to embrace that marketplace. Thus, while the third floor displayed precontact artifacts as decontextualized and reinvented as formalist masterpieces, on the museum’s second and first floors, those devoted to historic and contemporary arts, d’Harnoncourt and the iacb presented Indians as authentic folk. Native American artists were thus cast, again, as the antithesis of modernity. As Douglas and d’Harnoncourt wrote, ‘‘Indian art can best be described as folk art because it is inextricably part of all social, economic and ceremonial activities of a given society.’’ 48 As such, living Native American artists embodied a model of an ideal society, one that would make a fine template for both the reinvention of American identity and its foundation, especially as contrasted with the failure of modernity as seen in Europe with the coming of the Second World War. In the context of this ideal society, Indian arts represented the principle of functionalism— the integration of design and aesthetic. Workmanship was thus inextricable from artistry: ‘‘The close relationship between aesthetic and technical perfection gives the work of most Indian artists a basic unity rarely found in the products of an urban civilization.’’ 49 Thus, Native arts contrasted not only with the products of modern industrial manufacturing but also with the ‘‘art for art’s sake’’ mentality of the bourgeois ‘‘fine arts’’ of the Euro-American mainstream. Writing about the exhibition in Art Digest (which would take a continued interest in Native American arts throughout the decade), d’Harnoncourt claimed, ‘‘The modern Indian . . . can produce artistic things whose beauty and utility are keyed to modern life.’’ 50 In the context of the

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exhibition’s galleries on the first floor, however, this meant that Native American arts were compatible with modern interior design. Native ‘‘culture’’ was thus reified in aesthetic terms, as the design sensibility applicable to modern urban life expressed in ‘‘Indian Art for Modern Living.’’ But, as such, Indian artists were called upon to represent an impossible fusion of authentic Indian expression and modern production for the marketplace. Concomitant with the remanufacture of Indianness in light of modern consumerism, however, was the more important, if more insidious, reification of ‘‘culture’’ as an easily manipulated sign of ethnic difference. Conscripted as an ingredient in American pluralism, the image of an ideal spiritual community (or as modern interior design), Native American art was reinvented as a portable sign of cultural difference and estranged, again, from its political history. With Indian identity thus Americanized (that is, absorbed into the larger society of pluralist America), the phantom of Indian political difference—of sovereign Indian nationhood—disappeared in the language of inclusion. On the eve of the entry of the United States into the Second World War, Native American culture and identity were called upon to play a central role in a new pluralist self-imagining. However, Americanism—and especially the unity demanded as the nation geared up for war—could not tolerate Indian political autonomy or sovereignty. The unevenness and internal contradictions of the modern project of Americanizing Indianness and the forging of a pluralistic Americanism are seen in high relief when compared to the war experiences of other racial minorities. Native Americans’ experience and involvement in the war effort differed qualitatively from that of African Americans and Japanese Americans. While the campaign for ‘‘double victory’’ in the defeat of fascism abroad and racism at home organized by A. Philip Randolph and others led to FDR’s Executive Order 8802, which mandated fair hiring practices in the defense industries, African Americans and Japanese Americans still served in segregated units. Moreover, Japanese Americans, even if ‘‘100% American,’’ were relocated to internment camps where they would fulfill their patriotic duty behind a secure perimeter for the duration of the war. On the European front, the counterexample of Nazi anti-Semitism highlighted the antiracist ideals of the war effort; the Pacific front and the policy of Japanese internment at home gave the war a distinctly racial character. In contrast, Native American soldiers served in integrated units alongside white soldiers. (An exception was the experience of nonfederally recognized Indians from the Southeast who served in African American units.) Moreover, Native Americans embraced the war effort at home and abroad as a solemn patriotic duty. Native soldiers served in greater proportion than any other

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racial or ethnic group in the war: over twenty-five thousand Native American men served in the army, navy, marines, and coast guard. Native women organized War Mothers clubs; two to three hundred joined the nurses’ corps, military auxiliaries, the Red Cross, and the American Women’s Voluntary Service; and others filled job vacancies in tribal industries that had been held by Indian men. Another fifty thousand Native American men and women worked in U.S. war industries and for the railroad. Finally, Native Americans purchased more than seventeen million dollars worth of U.S. war bonds with tribal funds held in trust by the federal government.51 The war thus accomplished what earlier efforts toward Indian integration had started. The war effort continued the slow reversal of the ira, replacing Collier’s emphasis on tribalism with a renewed imperative toward integration and assimilation. The war economy provided new economic opportunities for off-reservation natives, and Indian lands were once again in high demand for war-related uses, including the testing of the nation’s arsenal and the internment of Japanese American citizens. The renewed fervor for Indian integration during the war years reversed Collier’s goal of preserving Native American communities as distinct enclaves within a pluralist and cosmopolitan America. The mobilization of the war effort and the powerful rhetoric of Americanism made a politically distinct Indianness untenable. Natives were to be integrated ‘‘culturally,’’ or as individuals, but not as politically sovereign societies or as ‘‘nations within.’’

CONSENSUS LIBERALISM AND THE RED MENACE

Before World War II, progressive cosmopolitans celebrated Native American cultures as the spiritual anodyne to the ills of a modernized culture, where the symbolic value of Indianness was constructed around notions of tradition and authenticity. After the war, the place held by Indianness in the cultural and political imagination of most Americans was redefined again. The continued viability of Native Americans as distinct political entities (an arrangement guaranteed by treaty rights and reaffirmed by Collier’s Indian New Deal) rubbed uncomfortably against the grain of the postwar culture of consensus. The architects of America’s new consensus culture sought to align individual citizens under a common American identity. Native American participation in World War II convinced many Americans that Natives were ready to join the mainstream. Native American political sovereignty threatened to undermine the project of integration and universal political enfranchisement. Before the war, Collier had labored to protect the Native cultures he believed to be powerful ‘‘personality-forming institutions,’’ which were responsible for the ‘‘pro-

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duction of states of mind, attitudes of mind, earth loyalties and human loyalties, amid a context of beauty which suffused all the life of the group.’’ 52 By the Second World War, however, the irony of Collier’s Indian policies was all too apparent, and his many critics were quick to highlight them. Ultimately Collier’s Indian New Deal reforms had sought to integrate Native Americans economically into the national mainstream, while maintaining tribal distinctiveness at the level of culture and selfgovernment. Collier’s reforms had encouraged the revitalization of Native cultures and had worked to increase Indian self-determination. However, the economic opportunities provided by the war effort led to the out-migration and urbanization of Native populations. To the extent that Collier’s pluralist and cosmopolitan policies were designed to improve the economic situation of Native Americans, they were self-defeating. As Natives increasingly participated in the national economy, and later the war effort, they became more and more like other Americans.53 Moreover, Collier’s policies of validating and encouraging tribalism faced a dual critique during the war years. First, ira policies were attacked as being backward; Collier’s enemies criticized his programs as un-American plots designed to send Natives ‘‘back to the blanket.’’ Second, Collier’s reforms were criticized as ill conceived and doomed to failure; notably, his congressional opponents argued that the tribal land base was insufficient to support traditional hunting and agricultural economies, thereby merely prolonging the death throes of a moribund tribalism and consigning Natives to certain poverty. The continued sovereignty of Native Americans contradicted the unity and common purpose forged by the war effort. That a racial minority maintained a unique relationship to the federal government (and what many believed was a privileged status) seemed un-American. Many believed, as did one commentator at the height of the war, that ‘‘the Indian has been measured for the melting pot, and he fits.’’ 54 In January 1944, Collier, who had served longer than any other commissioner of Indian affairs, resigned his position, having been driven out of office by the conservative backlash against New Deal reforms. Collier was forced to concede that maintaining separate goals and policies for different racial minorities—political enfranchisement for African Americans, separatism and tribalism for Native Americans—was inconsistent with the growing drive for consensus and integration. After the war, congressional conservatives (representing newly powerful Western political interests) expected Natives to move into the mainstream of consensus culture and abandon their traditional treaty relationship to the federal government. Native Americans, Collier’s critics believed, should surrender their political claims to special distinct Indianness, and maintain Indianness as a cultural identity only. Thus

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Native Americans, it was expected, would dissolve into the mainstream as had other ethnic Americans, and in extinguishing all lingering claims to separateness and sovereignty Natives could enter the national mainstream only as individuals and not as members of politically distinct sovereignties.55 After World War II, the ascendant ideology of individualism and consensus liberalism supplanted the collectivism of the Depression-era Popular Front and the war effort. In the postwar era, a new cult of competitive individualism was thriving. Notions of collectivism and conformity were part and parcel of the pervasive culture of cold war anticommunism. Native American art was no longer a privileged emblem of authenticity and community, but an example of backward socialism. Modern individualism was, for most Americans, incommensurable with tribal identities. Once prized as repositories of venerable communal values, Native American cultures were now perceived as stultifying institutions dedicated to the perpetuation of premodern rituals and the restraint of individual freedom—the very opposite of the positive model of community and continuity celebrated by the antimodern bohemians of John Collier’s generation. Indeed, the image of the individual straightjacketed by stultifying institutions resonated throughout U.S. culture at large—from social theory to popular Hollywood films in the cold war era. Indianness was just one ambivalent sign in this perceived plight. The forces of the Termination movement in Congress disparaged Native American cultures as backward institutions deserving of wholesale liquidation. Thus, Indianness could be imagined as something that prevented Natives from achieving self-actualization as free individuals.56 To become modern American individuals, it was now believed, Natives would have to leave their Indianness behind. The new internationalism of the postwar markets was virtually guaranteed by the advantages granted to American industry by the Marshall Plan; the result of postwar Americanization would be the opening of new markets and the dissolution of national boundaries. U.S. economic expansion negated difference and forged its own model of economic conformity. However, Native American tribalism, because it emphasized separateness and sovereignty, stood in the way of the universal marketplace. Thus, Before World War II, when American artists and intellectuals had desired to create a universal art and culture, Native American art and the primitive served as a model to transcend the modern nation. After the war the United States had transcended the national to forge an international, universal marketplace where free individuals were no longer bound by history or identity. When modernity and the nation were seen to be in crisis, Indianness was the solution; but when capitalist modernity had transcended the national crisis to become universal and triumphant,

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Native American cultures were again cast in nostalgic, backward terms, much as they had been at the turn of the twentieth century.

POSTWAR TERMINATION AND RELOCATION

The drive to integrate Native Americans into the new consensus culture was realized in House Concurrent Resolution 108, introduced by Republican senator Edward Moore of Oklahoma in 1952. Passed in 1953, hcr 108 (or the ‘‘Termination bill’’) set the stage for what Moore and his allies hoped would ultimately eliminate the Bureau of Indian Affairs and end the traditional trust-treaty relationship between Native Americans and the federal government.57 Moore asserted that the federal trust relationship ‘‘prevented otherwise competent Indians from exercising their rights as American citizens.’’ 58 Moore and other critics of Collier’s Indian New Deal utilized the language of ‘‘emancipation’’ and spoke dramatically of the need to ‘‘free Indians from government control.’’ American citizenship, they argued, superceded tribal identities, and Indians should now take their place in mainstream America. Indeed, the autonomous nature of Native American tribes as political entities rubbed against the grain of the ascendant culture of consensus and individualism. Moore’s Termination legislation was nothing other than the return of bygone assimilation policies. Moore’s desire to liberate Indians and refashion them as modern individuals was beholden to white interests in land and mineral rights, which were still held in government trust for Indian tribes. Also in 1953, Public Law 280, which authorized several western and midwestern states (California, Nebraska, Minnesota [except for the Red Lake Ojibwe], Oregon [except for the Warm Springs Reservation], and Wisconsin [except for the Menominee]) to extend into reservations their jurisdiction over certain criminal and civil laws, was passed without consultation with the Indian tribes or the embattled Bureau of Indian Affairs.59 Public Law 280 promised the ‘‘emancipation’’ of Native Americans ‘‘from ward status.’’ As the historian Donald Fixico writes, ‘‘Overtly, freeing tribal groups from their federal trust restrictions was the official intent of the termination policy. More importantly, however, termination essentially implied the ultimate destruction of tribal cultures and native life-styles, as withdrawal of federal services was intended to desegregate Indian communities and to integrate Indians with the rest of society.’’ 60 However, Native American emancipation was understood only at the level of the free individual and was never imagined vis-à-vis the tribes’ still unextinguished claims to sovereignty. The record of the Termination period is only slightly better than the damage wrought by the 1887 Dawes General Allotment Act, the most significant and destructive piece

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of Indian legislation of the nineteenth century. Between 1887 and 1900, a total of 53,168 allotments were made by the federal government under the Dawes Act, thereby removing 5 million acres from tribal trust.61 Between 1948 and 1957, the federal government removed 3,307,217 acres from Individual Indian trust status. Termination legislation through the 1960s involved 109 cases and affected a minimum of 1,362,155 acres of tribal land and 11,466 individuals.62 The notion of modernist individualism was at issue in the cold war era movement to terminate Native Americans’ traditional treaty relationships with the United States. The white architects of the new federal Termination policy maligned Native American cultures as stifling to the individual, and worse. Montana Senator George Malone repeatedly introduced legislation to repeal the ira and abolish the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Malone argued that the ira encouraged un-American, ‘‘socialistic’’ tribal governments and lobbied to bring Indians into the mainstream of American political life as individuals. ‘‘While we are spending billions of dollars fighting communism and Marxist socialism throughout the world,’’ he complained, ‘‘we are at the same time, through the Indian Bureau, perpetuating the systems of Indian reservations tribal governments, which are natural Socialist environments.’’ 63 For Malone and his allies, Termination would allow the federal government to ‘‘get out of the Indian business’’ and open up Native-owned lands for white investment. As the assistant secretary of the Interior, Wesley D’Ewart, argued, ‘‘This Administration holds that our government is built on the freedom of the individual, the right to develop one’s capacities, to manage one’s own affairs, to go and come as one chooses, and to own and pass on property to one’s children. We believe segregation is wrong and that wardship for competent people is repugnant to our way of life.’’ 64 In the pervasive climate of cold war anticommunism, Native American culture was cast as a ‘‘red menace.’’ D’Ewart’s use of ‘‘segregation’’ would seem to align the political and social needs of Native Americans with African Americans and other minority racial and cultural groups seeking full political enfranchisement. Indeed, the 1953 Warren Court decision had extended full civil rights to all minorities. The mass movement for African American civil rights had as its goal full integration and political enfranchisement. But while political enfranchisement and the recognition of citizenship and rights for African Americans was desirable, the same principle when applied to Native Americans threatened to undermine their traditional treaty relationship with the U.S. government. The post–World War II era’s broad, political movements for equality affected Native Americans differently. The Terminationists invoked the vision of a unified American people, free of class and racial distinctions. Postwar fed-

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eral policy tended toward assimilation for blacks and Indians alike. As Fixico writes, ‘‘The postwar presidential administrations enforced civil rights in the best interests of all minorities—including Indians, whether they wanted them or not.’’ 65 From the founding of the National Congress of American Indians in 1944, to the 1958 clashes between Iroquois and the state of New York over Tuscarora reservation lands, to the ‘‘fish-ins’’ staged by the National Indian Youth Council, to the 1961 American Indian Chicago Conference, organized to protest federal Termination policy, Native American activism in the postwar era aimed to maintain and protect distinct tribal identities and political sovereignty guaranteed by treaty relations with the United States.66 Along with Termination, the other cornerstone of postwar federal Indian policy was that of Relocation. The postwar period has been termed the ‘‘Second Removal’’ in reference to the 1830 Indian Removal Act, which relocated to the west of the Mississippi the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast, thereby opening up much-needed land for white settlement.67 The notion of Indian Removal was based on the idea that the best way to protect Native Americans was to segregate them from whites. Postwar Relocation had the similar effect of displacing Indians, but for altogether separate reasons. In keeping with the language of inclusion and civil rights, federal officials described Relocation with many of the same euphemisms used to justify Termination: withdrawal, readjustment, assimilation, liberation, and desegregation.68 Having gutted Collier’s 1930s reforms, the Bureau of Indian Affairs now promoted Relocation as a ‘‘New Deal’’ for Native Americans. Indian families and individuals were encouraged to voluntarily relocate to cities in the West and Midwest to improve their economic conditions. Relocation was actively promoted on the povertystricken reservations with printed brochures and pamphlets depicting white-collar workers, suburban homes, and modern conveniences that would presumably become available to Indians in the cities.69 According to a 1954 report by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 2,163 individuals had applied for relocation assistance, which consisted of startup money, assistance in finding housing, and placement in vocational training programs. Of the total number of those relocated, 54 percent came from northern states and were processed through relocation centers in Aberdeen, Billings, and Minneapolis, and 46 percent came from Oklahoma and the Southwest and were processed through centers in Anadarko, Gallup, Muskogee, and Phoenix. Relocatees were placed in twenty states, and the leading cities were Chicago and Los Angeles. By late 1954, 6,200 Indians of a total reservation population of 245,000 had been relocated. In 1955, the Bureau of Indian Affairs placed another 3,461 individuals. By July 12, 1956, some 12,625 Indians

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had relocated to cities, and the bureau expected another 10,000 by July 1, 1957. Thus between 1952 and 1957, over 17,000 individuals had received relocation assistance of some sort; and in the period from World War II to 1957, 100,000 Indians had left their reservations, of which three quarters did so without federal assistance.70 In 1960 Glenn L. Emmons, then commissioner of Indian affairs, announced that the program had been successful; as he noted, ‘‘about 70 per cent of the 31,259 Indians who left their reservations for Western and Midwestern Cities since 1952 have become self-supporting.’’ 71 Rather than moving Indians into the mainstream of middle-class American society, however, Relocation led to a new period of pan-Indianism and set the stage for the militant movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In the cities, relocatees lived in slum conditions. Urban Indians found themselves in competition with blacks and Puerto Ricans who had already established a foothold in American cities. Relocatees were thus forced to take low-level jobs or face unemployment, and they suffered discrimination from whites. The American Indian Movement had its beginnings in the impoverished Native American enclaves of Minneapolis–St. Paul. In response to their estrangement from reservation communities, and their segregation in the new Native American urban ghettos in Chicago, Minneapolis, Albuquerque, and Phoenix, the relocatees established Indian Centers. As Fixico writes, ‘‘Mutual tribal concerns and interaction dissolved many barriers between tribal groups who had never before associated with each other. Increasingly, Indian Americans in urban areas have identified themselves as Indians rather than by tribal designation.’’ 72

NEW VISIONS IN NATIVE AMERICAN ART

By the late 1950s, the uncomplicated images of traditional Native American life and community that were the hallmark of the studio style had reached the end of their relevance for many younger artists, and the aesthetic and cultural authority of ‘‘traditional-style’’ Indian painting was lost. Native artists who desired to reinvent themselves as modern individuals had to come to terms with the dominant legacy of the studio style. Many artists began to see the flat, pastel illustrations of traditional life as an imposed aesthetic that catered to non-Native audiences’ desire for untroubled images of Indian cultures. The studio style was seen as a simplistic stereotype that elided tribal differences, repressed individual expression, and was out of touch with contemporary Native American lives, which by now encompassed military service, urban wage labor, mainstream education, and increasing activism. The studio style ignored these facts in favor of traditional ceremonies and idyllic genre

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scenes. As Navajo artist R. C. Gorman explained, ‘‘Traditional painting is a bore if that’s what one becomes stuck with. It becomes meaningless after a while. Stale. Overstated. Pretty. Gimmicky. Dumb. Lazy. I say, and I’m speaking to young artists, leave traditional Indian painting to those who brought it to full bloom.’’ 73 Ironically, when the innovative paintings of Oscar Howe, George Morrison, and Dick West met with resistance at the Philbrook Indian Annuals, the studio style was further entrenched as ‘‘traditional.’’ The emergence of Howe and other modernist Indian painters after World War II coincided with broad shifts in policy and in notions of culture and identity during the Termination era of federal Indian policy. To be sure, Howe and other modernists were not proponents of the federal government’s Termination policies,74 but they did inhabit a world in which the social and cultural value of Native American culture and identity was radically transformed by Indian and non-Indian actors, and during which Native Americans in great numbers encountered, embraced, and resisted mainstream, modern society. It is important to remember here that distinctions between ‘‘traditional’’ and ‘‘modern,’’ to the extent that they can be made at all, are extremely complex for Native American artists. Abstraction and the adoption of Western pictorial styles have been identified—perhaps to a fault—as markers of modernity in Native American art. However, this formulation runs the risk of reifying a particular mode of painting as being ‘‘modern.’’ If abstract painting becomes the key marker of modernism in Native American painting, then it would follow that those artists who adopted such styles would be more fully denizens of the twentieth century than were the artists working in a style identified as ‘‘traditional.’’ Indeed, the definition of the modern is as artificial as the definition of the traditional. Imagining the tradition-modernity distinction primarily in terms of style risks creating the false impression that Native American artists who did not work in ‘‘modernist’’ styles were ‘‘backward’’ in the sense of belonging to another era. Such a distinction merely reproduces the stereotype that Native American artists are primitives, a people without a history until they embrace Western notions of time and progress. Indeed, Native American artists in the twentieth century, regardless of style, have been the coauthors of a shared modernity, even if the terms of their involvement have been, at times, egregiously unequal. While some artists have claimed an aesthetic and cultural authority based on their connections to ‘‘tradition,’’ they found themselves living in a world transformed by modernity and, in response, sought to find a place for themselves in it.

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2

The Culture Brokers: The Pueblo Paintings of José Lente and Jimmy Byrnes

If I had a way to get help in this world I would never have done this. I expect to get good help.—JOSÉ LENTE (ISLETA) 1 It was not until later that I became very much interested and decided that perhaps some of this, since it was becoming less known, should be in some way recorded because it was a good thing that was gradually becoming lost. In recent years I have tried to learn and understand and have hoped in a way to have shared some of it.—JAMES MICHAEL BYRNES (AKA JIMMY BEAR, ACOMA-LAGUNA-SIOUX) 2

There is no vantage outside the actuality of relationships between cultures, between unequal imperial and nonimperial powers, between different Others, a vantage that might allow one the epistemological privilege of somehow judging, evaluating, and interpreting free of the encumbering interests, emotions, and engagements of the ongoing relationships themselves.—EDWARD SAID, ‘‘REPRESENTING THE COLONIZED’’

in living in a world transformed by modernity, twentiethcentury Native American artists have become culture brokers, producing artworks for non-Native patrons and audiences and working as subjects and informants for non-Native researchers. These relationships formed with non-Native collaborators have enabled modern Native American artists to find a place for themselves and for their cultures in a changing world. Two Pueblo artists—José Lente (Isleta; d. 1953 or 1955) and James Michael Byrnes (aka Jimmy Bear, Acoma-Laguna-Sioux; 1938– 1998)—formed relationships with white anthropologists, for whom they produced images of Pueblo religious ceremonies and through whom they were themselves transformed. Lente and Byrnes were modern figures. The paintings and drawings that they made represented a traditional Pueblo world of belief and ritual and were intended for white audiences, often far from the artists’ home villages. Their claim to authority—their value as informants and the value of the drawings and information they provided to their white patrons—depended on their connections to traditional Pueblo culture and on the authenticity of the cultural information about traditional

religious practices that they provided, as well as the scarcity of individuals willing to provide such a service. However, Lente and Byrnes were not traditional figures per se. In brokering tribal knowledge across cultural boundaries by making representations of traditional Pueblo subjects for non-Indian audiences, Lente and Byrnes played a part in a long tradition of border crossing and cultural mediation that has defined the Americas since European discovery and conquest and that set in motion the globalizing forces of modernization. For five centuries, interpreters, traders, and diplomats shuttled between Native and non-Native cultures as culture brokers. While the Southwest had been one node in a global network since the sixteenth century, the boundaries between cultures were made increasingly permeable by the intrusions of capital and new economies of exchange to the Southwest after the arrival of the railroad in 1880 and the subsequent increase in the pace of white settlement and expansion in the early twentieth century. As such, the experience of individuals was no longer bounded by tradition or geography as it had been in the traditional Pueblo world.3 By virtue of their unique and often ambivalent position at the margins of societies, these intermediaries became hybrid figures. As anthropologist Margaret Connell Szasz writes, ‘‘Moving across these frontiers demanded extraordinary skill. Intermediaries became repositories of two or more cultures; they changed roles at will, in accordance with circumstances. Of necessity, their lives reflected a complexity unknown to those living within the confines of a single culture.’’ 4 Because they were more highly visible among white collectors and reformers, Native American artists were often sought out to play such roles. White researchers looked to artists as exemplary subjects and informants; art collectors and other tourists imagined artists as tribal spokespersons, even if they held no position of authority in their own communities. Artists were well known among whites; their reputations had more currency than individuals who were considered experts or authorities in their own communities and who had achieved authority through traditional means. However, as J. J. Brody describes, the first generation of Indian artistinformant-spokespersons worked to bridge borders and to strike a balance between Indian and white worlds. In the world of the classic Pueblo painters of the early twentieth century, artists remained as integrated, functioning members of their own communities, and they did not aspire to erase the distinctions between Pueblo and white societies. Neither Indian artists nor their white patrons wanted to transform their own institutions or fundamentally reimagine their identities.5 The relationships that Lente and Byrnes formed with their white patrons are markedly different from the artists that Brody describes. Both Lente and Byrnes felt with particular intensity the overlapping and competing pressures of their role as the culture brokers 31

broker between cultures in a modern borderland. While their value as artists and informants traded on the distinctiveness of Pueblo cultural practices, in the changing world they occupied Lente’s and Byrnes’s own identities changed irrevocably. If they found a degree of power in their relationships with white patrons they also trafficked in the very forces of modernization that would forever alter their community and culture, as well as their relationship to it. Their stories raise key critical issues of secrecy and transgression in the unequal relationship between anthropologist and subject—and between the anthropological subjects and their community—as individuals and information cross cultural boundaries. Indeed, issues of agency and autonomy in a cross-cultural environment are central to the question of modernism and modernity for Native American artists. Issues of secrecy, cultural property, and the protection of cultural property are raised by the development of a modern social, economic, and political system in which Native American individuals and cultures become embedded—often with great rapidity—in a larger world. Lente and Byrnes worked in a shifting political climate, wherein Native American political institutions were fundamentally transformed and Native cultures were newly recognized as inherently valuable—for Indians as well as for whites. The agents of this transformation included the new institutions of anthropology, the art market, and tourism, all of which operated through the brokering and translating of Indian cultures for non-Indian audiences.

A LETTER FROM ISLETA

When the anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons’s monograph Isleta, New Mexico was published in 1932 in Washington, D.C., as the forty-seventh annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (bae), a copy of the volume found its way into the hands of an Isleta Pueblo Indian artist named José Bartolo Lente. Although Lente was a selftaught artist, he had been educated in English-speaking schools and he could read and write. In spite of his writing skills, however, at one point he requested the assistance of an individual named Mr. B. G. Young to help him compose a letter to the bae, which he hoped would purchase his drawings.6 On November 26, 1935, Young sent a letter to the bae, in which he described Lente as an ‘‘Indian boy’’ who had drawings to sell. He also included two of Lente’s watercolors, which he identified as depicting ‘‘Isleta medicine men.’’ Young focused his promotional efforts on Lente’s ability to produce images of better quality than those that appeared in Parsons’s volume; he described the pictures that Lente had made as ‘‘somewhat contradictory but altogether a great improvement over the ones shown’’ in Parsons’s monograph.7

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We might say that the value of Lente’s drawings was inextricably linked to—indeed produced by—the secrecy demanded by Pueblo tradition. Selling drawings of closely guarded information about Isleta culture and religion would defy the strict rules of secrecy, common in the Pueblo communities of New Mexico and Arizona, that mandated that information about religious ceremonies and other pieces of esoteric knowledge were not to be shared with outsiders. Because Lente was, as Young wrote, ‘‘somewhat superstitious,’’ he wished to avoid ‘‘antagonism from the majority of his tribe.’’ 8 Although Lente was willing to trade in Isleta secrets, he would do so only if he could remain anonymous—that is, only if his relationship with the bae remained unknown at home. The bae did not immediately respond to Young’s letter, and so five months later, on May 1, 1936, a second letter was delivered to the director of the bae, H. W. Dorsey. This time Lente wrote the letter himself. ‘‘I have read the magazine printed by Washington in 1932,’’ he wrote. ‘‘The history is true and exact, but pictures to complete it are missing. I have drawn some of them.’’ 9 Lente also described six other drawings and cited the figure and page numbers in Parsons’s monograph to which his own versions corresponded. Again, Lente offered to sell his drawings to the bae. ‘‘Steady work,’’ he wrote hopefully, ‘‘will make me a living.’’ 10 The drawings and letters were forwarded to Elsie Parsons in New York. Parsons responded immediately, sending a letter on stationery from the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. She enclosed two five-dollar bills, one for each of the drawings enclosed in Young’s introductory letter, and she promised to pay the same rate ‘‘for others equally good.’’ Parsons also assured Lente that his identity would remain a secret. She wrote, ‘‘I understand your position thoroughly and I promise you as far as I am concerned there will be no trouble.’’ 11 Over the next five years (until Parsons’s death in 1941), Lente produced over 140 drawings, representing a nearly page-by-page companion to the 1932 monograph. True to her promise that she would protect his identity, Parsons identified Lente only by the pseudonym ‘‘Felipe’’ in her subsequent writings.12 Although they had an extensive correspondence, Parsons and Lente never met face to face. In looking at the drawings, the modernity of Lente’s art is not immediately apparent. Stylistically, his drawings are not visually inventive; they document, in rudimentary style but with a keen sense of detail, the religious ceremonies of the Pueblo of Isleta, access to which was barred to all but initiated members of the Pueblo’s various ritual societies. Although records imply that Lente did not participate in Dorothy Dunn’s famous art program at the Santa Fe Indian School, his drawings do resemble the conventional ‘‘traditional-style’’ Indian painting practiced by Dunn’s students.13

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By the late 1930s when Lente began making his drawings for Parsons, Indian paintings in Dunn’s studio style had broad currency and were widely visible in the trading posts that Lente would have known in nearby Albuquerque and at railroad stops throughout New Mexico and Arizona. Lente’s 1940 drawing of a Christmas dance at Isleta reveals the influence of—or at least a strong resemblance to—paintings made by students at Dunn’s studio. Like the studio painters, Lente made his drawings on cardboard, and later on watercolor paper with pencils, inks, and watercolors. Further indicative of the style, figures tend to be grouped in the center of the page and rendered in a dark ink outline that delimits flat areas of watercolor, and any visual evidence of the intruding modern world has been studiously avoided. While Lente’s bold outlines do seem peculiar to his style, he appears to adapt from studio-style paintings a number of traits: a generalized, nearly monochrome background; a view from above (as if from a rooftop adjacent to the village plaza); and the compositional device of repeated figures arranged in semicircular groups to convey an illusion of perspective. Lente’s letters continually emphasized the accuracy and detail of the drawings. His primary interest, it seems, was the precise recording of ethnographic detail, and his notations in pencil identify specific figures and the aspects of costume, ritual paraphernalia, and activities depicted. Lente’s drawings thus appear motivated, foremost, by a desire to convey factual information about traditional Isleta culture in the clearest manner possible. The value of the drawings came from their being perceived as a view of ‘‘authentic’’ Isleta life as witnessed and explicated by a Native informant; to demonstrate his expertise, Lente wrote, ‘‘I know most every [Indian] secret . . . I can sing any clan songs.’’ 14 These traits were apparently of great interest to Parsons. Unlike the modernist promoters of Native American art in Santa Fe and New York, Parsons held no particular interest in Lente’s drawings as aesthetic objects. She compared them to Persian miniatures (to which studio-style paintings were also often compared), and wrote, ‘‘I am told . . . they have no little esthetic appeal.’’ For Parsons, the primary appeal of Lente’s drawings was their accuracy and the degree of access they provided to the closed world of Isleta ceremonials. The level of detail in Lente’s drawings increased their ethnographic value; they could contribute to filling the gaps in her bae report. Further, Parsons noted, even though as unadorned images the drawings provided ethnographic information, it was Lente’s written notations that provided valuable technical and contextual information. In addition to making illustrations of the subjects described in her monograph, Parsons noted that Lente contributed valuable new information to her research on Isleta. Among the topics illuminated

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by the drawings are aspects of Spanish/Catholic acculturation in Isleta life, as seen in a variety of rituals and practices associated with childbirth, baptism, funerals, and memorials.15 As Parsons wrote, ‘‘Many details are given that could hardly be brought out in verbal descriptions or in photographs, which, in any case, are taboo in Isleta.’’ 16 While Parsons admitted that studying the drawings chronologically in the order they were produced might highlight interesting aspects of Lente’s ‘‘personal esthetic development’’ as an artist, she chose to minimize this aspect of the project and ordered them according to the Isleta ritual calendar. The rarity and completeness of Lente’s catalogue was noted by other anthropologists working in the Pueblo communities of New Mexico and Arizona. The Santa Clara Pueblo anthropologist Edward Dozier speculated that it was unlikely that another series as encyclopedic as Lente’s would ever be produced. Since the 1930s, Dozier reported, Pueblo artists had become increasingly savvy about the movement of their artworks and closely guarded secrets about religious beliefs and practices outside their communities. In response, Dozier wrote, ‘‘Pueblos zealously guard the religious aspects of their culture and the strictures that befall the informer are so stringent that few dare to reveal ceremonial secrets.’’ 17 In addition, to protect sacred information from curious whites, Pueblo artists had begun to produce abstract compositions or genre scenes of everyday life, which did not reveal sensitive cultural information. As the anthropologist Byron Harvey, who undertook fieldwork and interviews at Isleta a generation later than Parsons from 1955–1960, wrote of Lente’s paintings, ‘‘Part of the exceptional interest of Parsons’ material is the evident willingness of the artist to violate even the strictest taboos in depicting death, medicine ceremonies, and other little known aspects of Pueblo life.’’ 18 As Harvey further noted, ‘‘No single series of paintings approaches the frankness of the Parsons series in dealing with tabooed subjects such as death and witchcraft.’’ 19 Recounting Lente’s risks and anxieties begs the question of why he would even think of betraying his culture and revealing Isleta secrets. Money and personal survival were, of course, motivating factors. However, it is Lente’s reimagining of cultural property as portable that is most significant. Lente made a modern leap when he imagined that his drawings of sacred events could have secular significance. Alienated socially and spiritually, Lente sought recognition and status not through traditional Pueblo means but rather through his relationship to an outside audience for whom he transformed images of embedded religious practices into autonomous aesthetic objects—artworks—for circulation in the wider world. The fact that Lente worked in a style related to a well-known modern tradition of Native American painting suggests that he imagined himself in relation to the larger world beyond

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Isleta. What is most significant, then, is the currency of Lente’s images. His encounter with Parsons—a relationship between an anthropologist and an Indian who rebelled against local religious authority—was a paradigmatic moment of modernity and an emerging Native American modernism. Lente’s relationship with Parsons involved his engagement and negotiation of issues of audience and secrecy, and of risk and value, in two interpretive communities: the local ‘‘neighborhood’’ of Isleta and the larger world as represented by Parsons and the Bureau of American Ethnology. Moreover, Lente’s conceptual leap from the local to the broader world resonates with what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai describes as the characteristically modern phenomena of ‘‘the unyoking of imagination from place.’’ 20 In Lente’s relationship with Parsons, we see him recognize the broader world beyond Isleta and seek to find a place for himself in it. As a modern figure, Lente’s position as a cultural mediator was precarious. He emerges as someone who was not a socially integrated member of his home village. Lente’s correspondence with Parsons reveals him as a figure negotiating a variety of aspects of modern experience, including issues of agency and power in both Indian and white worlds, and the balance of individual needs against community strictures. Through his relationship with Parsons, Lente attempted to gain a degree of stability in a changing world. As Lente discovered, however, and as Marshall Berman notes, the liberating power of modernity can never be totally mastered by the individual. ‘‘To be modern,’’ Berman writes, ‘‘is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformations of ourselves and the world— and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.’’ 21 If Lente appears as a modern figure, then, his story is ultimately a tragic one: he was transformed, and perhaps destroyed, by his role as a broker between Native and non-Native worlds.

THE INTERLOCUTORS

Elsie Clews Parsons (1874–1941) had a privileged upbringing in a wealthy, socially prominent, and politically conservative New York family. Yet in spite of this background she emerged as an outspoken and controversial figure in the radicalbohemian Left in the early decades of the twentieth century. Born to a New York banker and a descendent of the president James Madison, Parsons defied family wishes that she become a debutante. Instead, she pursued an education and embarked on a career as a writer and public figure lambasting the society of her parents. Parsons graduated from Barnard College in 1896 and earned a master’s degree from

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Columbia University in 1897 followed by a doctorate in sociology in 1899. After a brief career teaching at Barnard (1899 to 1905), Parsons’s family wealth allowed her to devote herself full-time to research and writing. Parsons’s early writings lodged a trenchant critique of bourgeois and Christian mores. Her advocacy for the controversial concept of ‘‘trial marriage’’ in her first book, The Family (1906), raised the ire of preachers, the press, and New York society, which dropped her name from its rolls. Parsons’s subsequent publications, Religious Chastity (1913), The Old-Fashioned Woman (1913), Fear and Conventionality (1914), Social Freedom (1915), and Social Rule (1916), established her as a major figure in Greenwich Village feminist and socialist circles. In addition, Parsons contributed articles to Max Eastman’s magazine The Masses, and she was among the founders of the New School for Social Research.22 Frustrated by the entry of the United States into the First World War, in 1918 Parsons delved into research on Southwest anthropology, which would become her life’s work and eventually establish her as a leading figure in the study of cultural anthropology and folklore. She came to her work among the Pueblos of Arizona and New Mexico relatively late in life, after a trip to the Southwest. Influenced by the pioneering cultural anthropologist Franz Boas, and driven by an abiding interest in acculturation, Parsons also pursued work in Indian villages in Mexico and among African diaspora cultures in the Caribbean and the Americas. Parsons served as president of the American Folklore Society from 1919 to 1920, as associate editor for the Journal of American Folklore from 1918 to 1941, and as president of the American Ethnological Society from 1923 to 1925. In 1940 Parsons was elected the first woman president of the American Anthropological Association. When Lente contacted Parsons, she was living in New York and Maine and working to complete her encyclopedic two-volume Pueblo Indian Religion, published in 1939, which compiled the results of twenty-five years of collaborative work in New Mexico and Arizona. Considerably less is known about Parsons’s Isleta correspondent José Lente. Like many of his generation of Native Americans, he was educated in an English-speaking school, but it is not known where. Some biographical information can be gleaned from Lente’s first letter to the Bureau of American Ethnology, in which he wrote, ‘‘I am an Indian and have no way of making a living, no farm. I worked at the A.T.S.F. [Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe] Railway Company for about 8 years in Clovis and Gallup and [undecipherable] and last in Albuquerque under Mr. D. E. Barton Supt. Late, and left the service on account of my health.’’ 23 The fact that Lente had ‘‘no way of making a living, no farm,’’ suggests a degree of alienation from the village life of Isleta, as does the fact that Lente had pursued wage work in the non-Native economy in a scattering of railroad towns throughout New Mexico.

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In 1880, the atsf Railway built tracks from Albuquerque to El Paso and the Atlantic and Pacific Railway built tracks from Albuquerque to Los Angeles. Thus many Pueblo communities, including Isleta, Laguna, and Zuni, were suddenly on two major rail routes. As the populations of these villages grew in number throughout the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, white encroachments and claims on scarce water resources limited agricultural expansion. However, the increase in white settlement and tourism brought new jobs in growing cities such as Albuquerque, Bernalillo, Clovis, Gallup, and Santa Fe. Pueblo men entered this wage labor market, and income from occasional work with the railway, for example, supplemented the declining subsistence agricultural economy. Men like Lente who were not able to make a living in traditional agriculture increasingly turned to outside employment, which in turn brought the Pueblos into closer contact with Mexican and EuroAmerican populations, as well as other cultures. Many Pueblos worked alongside African Americans and Asian immigrants building stretches of rail track through the harsh New Mexico desert.24 At the time that Lente contacted the bae, he was in dire financial straits. Lente imagined that somehow the bureau had the influence to ‘‘do something to get me in touch with some of the Santa Fe Railway officials for them to put me back to work at the Albuq[querque] shops or elsewhere, then I will be pleased because money does me much good.’’ Indeed, perhaps nothing speaks more eloquently to broken ties to home and community than the fact that Lente had apparently exhausted even his last resort at Isleta and now approached government anthropologists for help. Lente’s home village of Isleta had a long history of transformative relations with outsiders, moving through Spanish rule from 1533 to 1821; the Mexican period from 1821 to 1846; and U.S. occupation in 1846 followed by acquisition of the territory in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848 and statehood for New Mexico in 1912. As one of the nineteen northern Native American Pueblos on the Rio Grande River in New Mexico, thirteen miles south of Albuquerque, Isleta has occupied the same site since at least 1540, the date of its discovery by Spaniards. It was these Spanish explorers who named the village, inspired by its position on a tongue (islet) of land projecting into the river. From 1621 until the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, when the Spanish were driven from northern New Mexico, Isleta was the seat of the Franciscan mission of San Antonio de Isleta. At the time of the revolt the Spaniards at Isleta were not killed, but in 1681 the village was abandoned by most of the Native Isletans. The village was subsequently razed by the Spanish, who withdrew with the remaining Indians to Isleta del Sur (Isleta of the South), located on the Texas side of the Rio Grande, a few miles below present-day El Paso. The original Isleta was reoccupied

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in the early eighteenth century, and a new Spanish mission named San Agustín de Isleta was founded. Most of the missions were abandoned after a smallpox outbreak in 1780–1781 decimated one-third of the entire Pueblo population, but the mission at Isleta remained active until the 1830s.25 Due to this complex history as well as its large Mexican population and its nearness to Albuquerque, Isleta was more cosmopolitan than the neighboring Pueblo communities of Laguna and Acoma. However, the growth of this cosmopolitanism was held in check by repressive and otherwise coercive traditions governing religion and daily life. Although Parsons understood that her Pueblo subjects were largely justified in their desire to protect their religious practices from white interests, she was often rebuffed in her attempts to gain access to Pueblo rituals. In 1917, a ritual dance was rescheduled at Acoma when it was learned that Parsons intended to witness and record the ceremony. At Hopi in 1920, Parsons convinced a family to ‘‘adopt’’ her as a daughter and thus into the tribe. However, even though she was adopted in a traditional ritual of hair washing and naming, as a woman she was still denied access to the male domain of the kiva. In 1921, for example, the governor of Jemez Pueblo confined Parsons to a room and blocked the view from the window with sacks.26 ‘‘Pueblo Indians,’’ she wrote, ‘‘are trained from their earliest childhood to keep the major part of their life hidden from their White neighbors and visitors. It is an intelligent technique of self-protection against those who for various reasons would make changes in Indian culture.’’ 27 To protect proprietary knowledge within the village, Isletans and other Pueblos excluded from certain religious performances members of the villages who were not initiated into specific ritual societies. Thus whites and Mexicans were admitted only to Catholic saint-day ceremonies. As Parsons wrote, ‘‘Isletans will warn one another of the presence of an alien by referring to the hawk. If the stranger understands Isletan, they will say, ‘The beam is broken,’ meaning, ‘Beware lest the roof fall.’ ’’ 28 Secrecy in the Pueblo communities was traditionally maintained through systems of membership and status in secret societies. Ramón Gutiérrez explains that secrecy is related to ‘‘how social inequalities in the Pueblos are politically articulated.’’ Traditionally, the relationship between Pueblos and the supernatural was mediated entirely through men, organized into ritual organizations or societies within the kivas. Knowledge was maintained and distributed by elder men or priests. Any request for ritual knowledge (pertaining to the hunt, war, weather, curing, or blessing) was accompanied by gifts. As Gutiérrez writes, ‘‘Knowledge obtained with gifts is always exchanged slowly, over a long course of time. This maximizes the dependence of the young on the old, of aspirants on ritual specialists, and perpetuates the material in-

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equality on which the gifting calculus is based. Without secrecy, the value of knowledge in the calculus evaporates.’’ Complete knowledge is never held within one faction or kiva. Secrecy guarantees that there will not be a monopoly on information. As a result, Gutiérrez, writes, ‘‘factionalism and conflict are endemic to many Pueblo towns precisely because of competing knowledge/power claims.’’ 29 By 1935, when Lente contacted Parsons through the bae, the border-crossing work of depicting Native cultures for white audiences had played a significant role in political efforts to reform federal Indian policy. It also had begun to emerge as a tool to be used for personal reasons, as artists began to imagine themselves as individuals as well as tribal members. As a non-Native researcher of Indian life, Parsons relied on such intermediaries—often cultivating relationships with marginal or poorly integrated figures such as women or male transvestites—to provide access to details of daily life, ritual practices, and esoteric knowledge prohibited to outsiders. Parsons depended on the cooperation of individuals who were willing to imagine that their own destinies might be separated from that of the Pueblo community, and thus she looked for informants who were willing to break ranks with their village and translate closely guarded cultural beliefs and experiences and identities for non-Native audiences. Desley Deacon describes Parsons as a very modern figure, drawn to the ‘‘innovative individual who placed herself or himself outside of society and from there moved a culture in new and unexpected directions.’’ 30 In her ethnographic studies of the Southwest, Parsons often highlighted the perspective of individuals in chapters devoted to ‘‘town gossip.’’ Further, Parsons made an ‘‘innovative attempt to capture the personality of a Pueblo’’ in her Pueblo Indian Journal (1925), which was based on the life history of George Chochisi, Parsons’s Hopi host during her fieldwork in 1920. At Parsons’s request Chochisi kept a record of town life, thereby establishing a pattern that Parsons would follow in later work at Mitla in Mexico and at Peguche in Ecuador. In the final published form of the journal, Parsons gave Chochisi the name ‘‘Crow-Wing,’’ and stated that she saw Chochisi / Crow-Wing as an ‘‘exemplar of acculturation.’’ 31 When discovered, the acts of Parsons’s informants in revealing tribal secrets often put them at odds with the priests and ritual societies that controlled knowledge. But the willingness of her informants to divulge secret knowledge also suggests, as Gutiérrez argues, that the Pueblos were never homogenous social entities but instead were characterized by a tenuous balance of power and knowledge wherein different segments of the population held different ‘‘situated knowledge.’’ Often, the informants who worked with Parsons were outsiders to the male world of esoteric knowledge. Moreover, Parsons’s interest in matters of acculturation, and her own status as

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an outsider to mainstream, conservative American values, drew her to individuals at the margins of the community.32 Parsons’s relationships with individual informants allowed her to break through the Pueblo wall of secrecy and gain access to closely guarded information about ritual practice and belief. At Isleta in 1925, Parsons had conducted interviews with a single individual under conditions of anonymity. In fact, these interviews were conducted thirteen miles north of Isleta in Albuquerque, and thus out of earshot of family and community members.33 Parsons referred to her tactic with individual informants among the Pueblos as her ‘‘secretive method,’’ and she was aware that the ethics of her methodology were questionable.34 Indeed, Pauline Turner Strong argues that Parsons’s methods ‘‘exacerbated factionalism in the Pueblos, reinforced their self-protective secrecy, and increased their suspicion of anthropologists and other outsiders. Parsons’s sense of Western science’s entitlement to Pueblo religious knowledge continues to this day to cast a shadow upon her oeuvre on the Pueblos.’’ 35 But Parsons did understand that her interactions with individual Pueblo Indians were fraught with tensions because her informants divulged information at great psychological, spiritual, and physical risk: her research could have devastating personal and social consequences for informants who revealed sensitive and privileged knowledge for payment or exchanges of information.36 As Parsons noted, ‘‘Giving information about the customs is strictly taboo. Is it said that the violator would be whipped with a strap by the governor [of the Pueblo]; he might even be interred to his waist in a secluded part of the town.’’ 37 Informants at Santo Domingo, Jemez, and elsewhere expressed anxiety that their relationship with Parsons would get them in trouble or killed. In these situations, as with Lente, Parsons refused to divulge the names of her sources—even when pressed by Pueblo governors or when banished or even threatened with death herself. She maintained that her publications were intended for a small, educated, and white readership, and as such they represented no threat to traditional Pueblo life.38

SECRET DRAWINGS

For a price, Lente offered to supply pictures of the ceremonies described in Parsons’s book. The reticence and resistance that Parsons had encountered during her fieldwork at Isleta and the other Pueblo communities made the fact that the contact was initiated by Lente all the more unusual. However, Lente was not a member of any of the ritual societies at Isleta, and he earned his living working outside of the Pueblo in railroad towns. Like Parsons’s other informants, perhaps, Lente understood himself

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as an individual, and he could therefore imagine that his needs were distinct from tribal concerns for cultural privacy. He was thus willing to flout tribal rules or propriety regarding privileged and proprietary knowledge. As a product of a modern history of displacement and dislocation in the cultural borderlands of the Southwest, Lente was (or became) an outsider in his own village; but he also worked to present himself to Parsons as an insider and a credible informant because he needed to convince Parsons that he offered a rare insider’s view of life in Isleta. In his letters, Lente struggled to balance his relationship to his Pueblo and to his patron, while arguing for the value of his services in hopes of gaining some degree of economic stability in return for his alienation. In the letter he wrote in his own hand to the Bureau of American Ethnology in May 1936, Lente explained that he offered a rare and valuable service: ‘‘These drawings you will never see anywhere because no one [else] can do them, it is too hard.’’ Other Isletans would not undertake such a job, he wrote, because ‘‘they are afraid they will die if they do them.’’ Like Parsons’s other Pueblo informants, Lente’s anxiety about deliberately breaching Pueblo secrecy was clear. He would work only under conditions of anonymity: ‘‘I don’t want any soul to know as long as I live that have drawn these pictures.’’ Finally, he noted that his services were valuable because of the risks involved, and he stated, ‘‘I want good satisfaction because they are valuable and worth it.’’ 39 From the content of his letters it appears that Lente deliberately sold himself and his art. He wrote to convince Parsons that his drawings of Isleta ceremonials were valuable because they offered a view of a world to which access was barred by the boundaries of race. ‘‘They are most secret,’’ he wrote. ‘‘No one can see them but Indians who believe.’’ 40 Lente described the ‘‘wonderful pictures’’ he had made, and he promised to make more ‘‘different drawings on different acts,’’ including ‘‘more medicine men and how they bring their spruce from the mountain and how they do it in the middle of the plaza.’’ 41 He continued, ‘‘I will send the pictures a few at a time as long as you promise me you will keep me away from trouble. I will complete all the secret drawings. It will be all right for you to publish them some day, but don’t tell who did this, it [would be] hard on me. I will look for mail soon; write before I change my mind.’’ 42 Lente felt the need to continuously remind Parsons that he required anonymity. Indeed, he apparently harbored feelings of ambivalence about his relationship with Parsons; as he wrote on another occasion, ‘‘I do not know if I am doing right to tell all this or not. Sometimes I feel funny.’’ 43 In a letter in August 1936 Lente again emphasized that he alone would risk making drawings for Parsons. ‘‘No person will do this because they are afraid,’’ he wrote. ‘‘They have great belief in it and say if they

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ever tell they will die or fall into poor health . . . I am ready to die any time but I will have a little good time with this little money that I get.’’ But he also continued in his attempts to validate himself as a qualified informant. Lente and Parsons differed over what comprised suitable and interesting subject matter. Parsons had requested that Lente produce pictures of day-to-day secular life. Earlier, Parsons had written that anthropological accounts overemphasized ritual practice, creating the false impression that Native American life was ‘‘one unbroken round . . . of curing or weather control ceremonials, of prophylaxis against bad luck, of hunting, or of war. The commonplaces of behavior are overlooked, the amount of ‘common sense’ is underrated, and the proportion of knowledge to credulity is greatly underestimated. In other words the impression we give of daily life of the people may be quite misleading, somewhat if we described our own society in terms of Christmas and the Fourth of July, of beliefs about the new moon or ground hogs in February, or of city streets in blizzards and after, of strikes and battleships.’’ 44 However, as seen in a 1939 picture of a kiva interior illustrating the major figures in Isleta ceremonial and secular life, the subject matter of Lente’s drawings is dominated by the ritual activities of Isleta men.45 As Parsons noted, ‘‘Activities such as cooking, eating, sleeping, or the merely economic aspects of farming hunting, and handicraft, did not appeal to the artist as subjects for portrayal—and this in itself is significant.’’ While revealing such details to outsiders defied Pueblo tradition, the fact that Lente’s drawings deemphasized the everyday and mundane in favor of the ceremonial is in keeping with the Pueblo understanding of individual action in the context of religious ritual. Lente’s choice to represent what was closely guarded suggests that he was aware of providing a rare and valuable service to Parsons. The ritual activities of Isleta men were forbidden to her, and thus were accessible only by at least one remove through the verbal account of an initiated informant, or through drawings made in secret. Lente’s pictures revealed information intended only for a local audience of initiates. Lente understood the value of his ‘‘secret drawings’’ of birth, curing, the Isleta ceremonial cycle, and death. Such images, he knew, commanded greater compensation than the less-restricted scenes of everyday life. In his effort to capitalize on the value of those aspects of his Pueblo identity that were most liquid on the open market, Lente repeatedly asserted the value of his services in his letters. While his initial letter indicated that he had found Parsons’s 1932 monograph to be ‘‘true and exact,’’ he would later point to errors of fact. Where Lente had initially felt the need to compliment Parsons so as to win her friendship and business, his relationship with his patron, it seems, evolved to a point where he felt he needed to highlight her need

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for him. ‘‘He didn’t tell real,’’ he wrote critically of Parsons’s original informant. As a corrective to these shortcomings, Lente offered himself as truthful and authentic: ‘‘Everything I tell you is real fact as I don’t want to make mistakes or make believe something that is not so.’’ 46 When Parsons found a drawing unsatisfactory, Lente defended the accuracy of his illustrations. ‘‘I am sorry that you do not feel everything is true than I am working on,’’ he wrote. ‘‘If I had not seen or known about all this I would not know how to begin or what to draw, but I had been with them and grandfather and my father were in these ceremonials, headmen too . . . I cannot draw a picture of war in Poland because I don’t know what is going on [there].’’ 47

LENTE’S TROUBLES

Lente had initially contacted the bae out of desperation, in the hope of receiving aid to ensure his survival. Having made his deal with Parsons, however, Lente needed help of a different sort—that is, help to ‘‘keep away from trouble.’’ Anxious, he worried in one letter that Parsons had leaked his name: ‘‘There were some people here looking for me by my name and these people tried to get me through Maisel’s Ind. [Indian] Trading post at Albuq[uerque].’’ 48 On another occasion a letter from Parsons that included a payment of twenty dollars was accidentally delivered to and opened by a man in Isleta named John P. Lente. After this incident, Lente instructed Parsons to send her correspondence to general delivery in Albuquerque because, ‘‘in Albuq[uerque] there will be no trouble.’’ 49 On numerous occasions, Lente emphasized that no one else at Isleta would make the drawings owing to their fear of death for flouting religious authority. He often mentioned his own ambivalence and insecurity. ‘‘This drawing is hard for me to do but I need money to live on, and I hope I will never get killed for this. Please don’t mention me if they ever try to find out.’’ 50 On another occasion he wrote, ‘‘I hope they never find out about this. If they do there will be plenty of trouble.’’ 51 Lente’s assertions of value were often linked to moments of crisis. Given that risk increased the value of Lente’s services, Parsons theorized that the anxiety felt by informants was ‘‘translated into pecuniary terms.’’ And, as she further noted, ‘‘Fear has to be compensated.’’ 52 Lente’s letters to Parsons suggest that he often attempted to renegotiate their arrangement to get more money for his work. His reasons included the materials and labor involved, but most significantly he cited the personal risk involved in working in secret as an informant: ‘‘It is too much trouble for this work and I don’t get enough pay . . . I buy my own paint and paper and envelopes,

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stamps, pay my fare in trips to town and answer your questions and tell you some history that you don’t know, and explain . . . so you see this is too much work and you pay me just for drawing. At the end of all this trouble I don’t make anything. . . . I am taking a big chance.’’ 53 However, Parsons never increased the amount she paid to Lente, and he rarely pressed the matter. It was reasonable for Lente to be concerned about what ‘‘trouble’’ could arise from violating community strictures. Anthropologist Byron Harvey, who did fieldwork at Isleta a generation later (1955–1960), indicated that Lente’s fears were well founded. According to Harvey’s conversations with Isleta informants in the 1950s, Lente did suffer some ill will—and perhaps worse—as a result of his relationship with Parsons. Harvey showed the drawings to his own Isleta informants in the 1950s. While they criticized Lente’s transgression and voiced their suspicions that he may have been a witch, none challenged the truthfulness of the images (upon which Lente had insisted). Indeed, Harvey speculated that the vehemence of their reactions indicated the degree of veracity. According to Harvey, ‘‘Several Isleta informants stated that [Lente] had recorded his culture, especially its rituals, at the risk of a severe beating or perhaps even his life.’’ Harvey noted a general suspicion that Lente ‘‘might have been a witch,’’ as informants noted that ‘‘he wasn’t anything’’—which is to say that he held no ceremonial office. Whereas Lente told Parsons that he could ‘‘sing any clan songs,’’ others at Isleta reported that ‘‘he used to be drunk every day and come down to the depot and he’d sing all the sacred songs and say all the words he wasn’t supposed to use right there in front of everyone.’’ 54 Although Lente’s grandfather and father held positions of authority, he was himself not integrated into Isleta religious society, and was, as Harvey reported, ‘‘a rebel . . . regarded as a prying interloper by some of his fellow villagers.’’ 55 Lente’s anxieties precipitated an almost daily renegotiation of issues of audience, appropriateness, and who had the right to see his pictures. According to tradition, and under ideal circumstances, his pictures revealed information intended for exclusive consumption by an interpretive community defined by race, citizenship, and religious qualification. Yet Lente did allow his drawings to leave Isleta and circulate beyond the community of ‘‘Indians who believe.’’ But while Lente was conflicted he also felt that his transgressions were justified. As Harvey speculated, ‘‘In spite of the taboo on Pueblo ritual representations, Pueblo artists are strongly attracted to them. But the artist who conforms to western conventions of graphic art tends to be considered a rebel in his own society. The Pueblo artist, moreover, is pushed into rebellion because ritual and ritual objects form the major content of his art.’’ 56 Lente reasoned that Parsons’s 1932 Bureau of American Ethnology report proved that

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she already had penetrated the Isleta wall of secrecy, and thus that he did not reveal anything that Parsons hadn’t already seen with her own eyes or heard from an earlier informant.57 But the most compelling and oft-repeated rationalization was economic. Lente understood his situation with a grim clarity: make the drawings and risk death, or not make the drawings and face an equally uncertain future. Engaging an audience beyond Isleta and breaking the code of Isleta secrecy demanded yet more secrecy. Curiously, Lente remained in Isleta, where he presented the appearance of conformity. As Parsons’s student Esther Goldfrank wrote, Lente conformed to the strictures of life at Isleta, and ‘‘except when he was drunk, to its authoritarian mode of life.’’ 58 Lente mailed his drawings from Albuquerque, so as to avoid the prying eyes of neighbors. He implored Parsons repeatedly to never reveal his identity or his transgression at home. He hoped that the circulation and reception of his drawings outside of Isleta could be kept secret at home. He wanted to cross borders, not dissolve them; the value of his work depended on the fact that his Isleta subject matter could never be witnessed directly by his non-Isleta audience. Likewise, his survival required that knowledge of his outside work never reached Isleta. The drawings were thus ‘‘secret’’ in two different senses: they depicted religious practices that Isletans kept carefully hidden, and the drawings themselves were dangerous secrets. Ultimately, the dual nature of the secret drawings paralleled Lente’s own dual identity. Lente imagined himself and his work in relation to different and distinct cultures, economies, and interpretive communities, as he unyoked Isleta culture from place so that it could be transformed into fodder for anthropology or made into art. The thirteen-mile trip from Isleta to Albuquerque, which he made to mail his secret drawings to an audience he had never met but only imagined, was a leap of imagination through which Lente came to understand himself and his tradition as portable, and fungible—valuable to others in some way that could not be understood at home. Lente gambled on the fact that in the modern world he could choose to transgress the Isleta tradition of secrecy, but only if his non-Native patrons would protect him from trouble—by maintaining the boundaries between Pueblo and white worlds, even as that boundary was being erased. This is the key to understanding Lente’s modernity, and it is also his curse. It is not clear how Lente fared after Parsons’s death in 1941. One of Byron Harvey’s Isleta informants speculated that if the village authorities ‘‘had known he was doing that, they would have killed him if he hadn’t already died.’’ Harvey’s informant further states that Lente ‘‘took his life,’’ but then contradicted this statement by saying ‘‘he was killed in an auto accident’’ in 1953 or 1955. But even with Lente out of the pic-

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ture the stain of his actions did not disappear, and his transgressions had lingering ramifications in Isleta. Harvey states that Lente’s ‘‘relatives also came under a cloud of suspicion,’’ notably when one of his Isleta informant remarks, ‘‘we think they’re witches; how else could they know everything?’’ 59

JIMMY BYRNES

Two decades after Lente’s relationship with Parsons, Jimmy Byrnes, a mixedethnicity urban Indian living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, forged a cross-cultural friendship with anthropologist and collector Byron Harvey. Whereas Lente’s modern relationship/cross-cultural collaboration with a white anthropologist caused him trouble, for Byrnes the act of forming a friendship and collaboration with a white anthropologist was the solution to his own modern problems. Harvey—the great-grandson of the famous Santa Fe railroad concessionaire and Southwest promoter Fred Harvey—was at the time a graduate student in anthropology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.60 Byrnes was born in Tohatchi, New Mexico, twenty-five miles north of Gallup, near the Arizona border. The son of a Lakota father named James Byrnes Sr. and an Acoma-Laguna mother, Margaret Serricino, Byrnes attended the Albuquerque Indian School and graduated in 1955. He later worked as a hospital attendant. Byrnes was typical of a generation of Native Americans during the Termination and Relocation era in U.S. Indian policy, during which time approximately one hundred thousand Native Americans left their reservations for cities in the West and Midwest. As an urban Indian living away from his Pueblo community, Byrnes worked actively to reconstruct an identity out of his modern urban experience. Byrnes’s 1956 painting Katsinas Emerging from the Sacred Spring, Goweshtaya was one of the first works that he brought to the Albuquerque home Harvey shared with his wife, Joy, and which the young patrons bought from the artist. The background is simple: contour lines suggest courses of stonework and the open entrance to the bottomless sacred spring—known as Goweshtaya, or ‘‘cold water’’—the home of the Katsinas. Five figures arrayed left to right represent three Katsinas (Gowashturch, Gainanyi, and Nawish), a seated Mudhead (or sacred clown—the foil to the more serious activities of the other Katsinas), and the First War Officer, Tastia Hocheni. Byrnes lavished particular attention on costume details and on the significant ritual objects brandished by the figures. The First War Officer—at far right and facing the Mudhead and three Katsinas to the left—wears red moccasins, a white blouse, and is wrapped in a black cloth with blue trim. His face is painted and he wears eagle wing

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feathers and eagle down tied in his hair, along with a turquoise bracelet, earrings, and necklace. On his back is a quiver made of mountain lion skin, which contains a number of arrows and a bow. He holds an object that Byrnes describes as a ‘‘corn ear mother’’ in his left hand, and he gestures toward the Mudhead and Katsinas with his right. As Byrnes describes the picture, he notes: ‘‘For the actual dance [the First War Officer] wears the costume, but he leaves the corn ear mother, the mountain lionskin quiver, and his bow and arrow, carrying only a willow prayerstick with a feather. He has a parrot (macaw) tail feather and eagle wing feathers and eagle down tied in his hair and a bunch of small feathers.’’ The seated Mudhead to the left holds a stone knife in a gesture of blessing toward the First War Officer. The three Katsinas are identifiable by their distinctive masks, costumes, and prayersticks. They carry presents: Nawish—standing directly behind the Mudhead—carries a small bow to give to a young boy and a doll representing his likeness to give to a young girl; Gowashturch carries another such doll, representing Gainanyi.61 Byrnes painted the costumes and ritual objects in brilliant colors, replicating the poster paints and yarn used in the making of costumes and gifts for the Katsina ceremonies, which were sold in stores in the Laguna-Acoma area. The drawing suggests the importance of costumes and props in Pueblo Katsina ceremonies. Such a degree of care and accuracy would have appealed to the young anthropologist Harvey, who was at this time pursuing fieldwork among the Pueblos. Harvey speculated that the lore relating to the specific Katsina costumes, which he calls the ‘‘behind the curtain’’ details of the cult, ‘‘becomes increasingly important to its participants as they take over responsibilities’’ for maintaining the ceremonies. Perhaps, he wrote, this was the artist’s concern in producing such a detailed record.62 But Byrnes’s talent for producing accurate images of ritual paraphernalia was perhaps also related to the fact that he earned money by carving Katsina figurines and, later, by making costumes for Plains Indian dances. Over the next several years, from 1956 to 1963, Byrnes and Harvey developed a close friendship, collaboration, and correspondence. Harvey introduced Byrnes to anthropological literature, and dialogue developed between them. Byrnes showed Harvey paintings based on his memories and experiences. Harvey supported Byrnes’s development as an artist by buying his paintings and making important business contacts for him, and he cultivated Byrnes as an informant. Byrnes painted numerous scenes depicting aspects of Acoma and Laguna ceremonial life, at least twenty of which were purchased by Harvey. As an anthropologist, Harvey saw Byrnes’s paintings as rare depictions of ceremonies and esoteric knowledge that were closed to non-Native and uninitiated audiences. As he later wrote of Byrnes’s

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art, ‘‘Perhaps the single unique feature of the paintings is the record which they constitute of masking, fetishism, and curing in times of exceedingly rapid cultural change.’’ 63 In his relationship with Byrnes he saw historical echoes of earlier relationships between artists and anthropologists. Describing his relationship with Byrnes, Harvey explained, ‘‘I suppose my function was to encourage the work. I rarely made suggestions. Payments were not large . . . We became friends and the work built a cooperative feeling though all the ideas for paintings came from Byrnes.’’ 64 Byrnes’s and Harvey’s careful attention to iconography and paraphernalia is seen in Acoma Fire God, a painting on cardboard, likely dating to 1959. The Fire God was of particular interest to Byrnes, who painted several versions. In Acoma Fire God the stylized figure of the Fire God crouches before a shrine. At his feet are two elaborate prayersticks and a ceremonial water canteen. Other items of paraphernalia included in the painting are an embroidered sash and, carried on the Fire God’s back, a bundle of mice for food. The Fire God’s body is painted ash black with spots in red, blue, white, and yellow—the colors of the four directions. Lines in white paint—forming the symbols of the crescent moon, morning star, and clouds—frame the figure of the Fire God. In his discussion of the painting, Harvey noted that a detailed description of the Fire God’s attributes appeared in Matthew W. Stirling’s 1942 Bureau of American Ethnology report, ‘‘Origin Myths of Acoma and Other Records.’’ Presumably, Harvey shared this source with Byrnes, who then reproduced the iconography in the several versions of the scene he painted. However, an unusual addition to the scene in Acoma Fire God is the inclusion of two Katsina figures. These figures are not centered on the page but rather are cropped by the edge of the cardboard, where they exit the scene at bottom left. This image lends a sense of dynamism and movement, uncommon in traditional painting, that later becomes a hallmark of Byrnes’s experimentations.65 In addition to his interest in Pueblo beliefs that motivated his Katsina paintings, Byrnes considered himself a Catholic. According to Harvey, Byrnes realized only later that his 1959 painting Pueblo Madonna bore a strong resemblance to the figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a familiar image from the painted retablos in Southwestern homes and churches. Byrnes’s version is a syncretic catalogue of Laguna, Acoma, and Spanish colonial Catholic iconography. The bird at the Madonna’s right along with various geometric elements seem to relate to Laguna patterns. Byrnes explained to Harvey that the shepherd’s crook, visible behind the figure to the left, referred to the figure of Christ as the Good Shepherd as well as to the Laguna tradition of shepherding, introduced by the Spanish.66 Through his relationship with Harvey, Byrnes came to see his art as much more

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than anthropological illustration; indeed, his paintings became increasingly individualistic and innovative interpretations of Pueblo ceremonies. As he wrote to Harvey, ‘‘I do . . . observe as an artist Ronny, not just for all the good times, I’m always having all kinds of crazy wonderful ideas for pictures, and things to put on paper—vivid, vivid memories and impressions, some I can almost taste and smell.’’ 67 Likewise, Harvey understood Byrnes as much more than an informant; he described Byrnes’s experience as universal and as that faced by all artists in the process of finding their individual approach, even as such experiences pulled Byrnes further away from Pueblo tradition. According to Harvey, Byrnes faced ‘‘anxieties and problems common to any artist in a difficult situation.’’ Byrnes’s ‘‘rare courage and persistence in achieving a sizeable body of work weighs heavily in his favor, if any vindication be ever required for an artist’s life and decisions.’’ 68 As a member of a family with a long history in the business of Indian arts, Harvey offered the young artist advice in practical professional matters. In a 1960 letter to Byrnes, Harvey wrote about his suggestions for changing the title of a painting, ‘‘I think ‘Cosmology’ is a better title than ‘Cloud People.’ ’’ In addition, he advised: ‘‘You should prepare a short resume of your experience and training, as well as of the collections and museum(s) where your work is represented . . . It is great . . . that you have so many customers or patrons for your work. Beware of too many repetitions unless it is for practice.’’ And, as he noted further, ‘‘Be careful in your credit relations with your people—some will understand and be willing to wait—others it may be better to sell to but not accept advances from. You can always tell them that you have to wait for inspiration.’’ In the same letter, Harvey also wrote, ‘‘I think it would be interesting to try some non-Indian conceptions. Not everything has to be on the level of kachinas.’’ Referring to Byrnes’s mixed background, Harvey suggested that ‘‘since we have Sioux, Laguna, Zuni, Acoma subject matter . . . it is well to show versatility.’’ Harvey also encouraged Byrnes to consider abstraction, and advised, ‘‘Your artistic work should have its ‘uniqueness’ no matter what the subject.’’ 69 But, as Harvey came to realize—much as Parsons had realized of Lente—Byrnes was most interested in the Katsina cult of Acoma and Laguna, which he interpreted in his increasingly individualistic paintings. Byrnes cited his paintings of 1963, including The Making of Man, as more developed artistically and more aesthetically accomplished than his earlier efforts. Harvey noted this as well, and in a formal context he wrote; ‘‘A gradual development of the artist’s style is evident. The artist felt that his earlier paintings, whatever their merit as illustrations, were artistically unsatisfactory. . . . A more abstract, even geometric style with total composition is characteristic of his most recent work . . .’’ which

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‘‘exhibit[s] a well conceived overall composition.’’ 70 The ostensible subject of The Making of Man is a Katsina initiation ritual at Acoma. Byrnes described such a scene for Harvey, who understood the picture in relation to similar accounts by the anthropologists Leslie White and Elsie Parsons. Byrnes described the initiation of young Acoma men into the Katsina society in a ceremony where they are whipped with bundles of yuuca and assigned a Katsina friend, whose mask they will wear in future ceremonies. The painting depicts an aspect of the ceremony, in which the young initiate has been whipped. A figure to the left holds a Katsina mask above his head as he instructs the young man in the secrets of the Katsinas. A Mudhead in the upper right gestures in blessing, as a menacing black-and-white spirit leers from behind the Katsina at the left. Nude female figures, drawn in white ink outlines, gesticulate wildly. As Byrnes described the scene for Harvey: ‘‘My picture could be called ‘The Making of Man’ [or] ‘to put away the things of children’ or ‘Like a man.’ The women (lower left) could be the mothers not wanting to lose the boy and the women who will cause him pain—because he will become involved in the lives of women. The figures are those who have taken a mask—who understand, have learned, and know . . . the symbols of the cloud people, the medicine people, the cheani, the kupishtaya (right, superimposed upon male figure)—the ten directions of the universe and the six directions of the earth—and the black Ka-na-dye-ya, ‘the devil, evil one,’ is terrible.’’ 71 As in his previous work, Byrnes paid considerable attention to the authenticity of the iconography of the Katsina masks and ceremonial paraphernalia. However, with its dramatic distortions of space and scale, and the inclusion of figures that break frame and the rendering of other figures in ghostly white outlines, The Making of Man departs from the illustrational style of Byrnes’s earlier work for Harvey. Moreover, this painting—especially as Byrnes described it to Harvey—also introduced a degree of sexual and psychological content in the sense that it depicts individual conflicts arising from sexual maturity and the assumption of adult male responsibilities. As Byrnes described the picture for Harvey, in addition to depicting the Katsina initiation ceremony at Acoma, it also represented the idea that becoming ‘‘like a man’’ involves not only assuming the responsibilities of the Katsina ceremony but also dealing with other struggles that come with leaving the world of one’s mother and forging relationships with ‘‘the women who will cause him pain—because he will become involved in the lives of women.’’ Whether Byrnes felt such conflicts himself is not clear. However, his letters to Harvey do indicate a degree of anxiety owing to his lack of a clear place in both Indian and white worlds. Byrnes wrote plaintively of feelings of loneliness and iso-

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lation and of his need to find a sympathetic community. He missed Byron and Joy Harvey, who had moved to Phoenix after Harvey completed his master’s degree in anthropology. As Byrnes lamented, ‘‘[there is] no one to sit and talk with really. I still have bad days and black moods, no matter how many exciting things go on around me, I still sometimes think how I sit back and watch the world falling to pieces— Days when the world seems like the very pasture of hell—I’m all afraid and sad. Is anyone ever completely happy—Sadness has no end, it’s not like happiness.’’ 72 On another occasion, Byrnes wrote from jail: ‘‘I’m now to the point where I must talk to someone or go out of my mind.’’ 73

CULTURAL CHANGE AND CULTURAL PROPERTY

The experiences of Lente and Byrnes raise the question of the ownership of Native culture at moments of crisis and transformation—as traditional notions of community, membership, and identity are threatened or are changing. In times of change when traditional hierarchies and social organizations are under the stresses of encroaching white society, who are the stewards of knowledge? In a changing world, who has the authority to represent cultural information? When boundaries are dissolving, is it still forbidden to share tribal secrets with outsiders? 74 The years during which Lente produced his drawings for Parsons represented just such a period of change. Even in the short time between Parsons’s initial research at Isleta in 1925 and Lente’s first letter to the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1935, the Pueblo world changed dramatically. When Parsons first visited Isleta, the Pueblos were still ruled by traditional theocracies. Suspicions about informants’ relationships with anthropologists and other outsiders often led to their censure by religious authorities. Parsons described a 1927 council held at Isleta regarding Charles Fletcher Lummis’s Pueblo Indian Folktales, which was first published in 1910 but apparently had come to the attention of Isleta residents only recently. Two Isleta residents who had been associated with whites, Calendaria Chavez and the Pueblo governor Pablo Abieto, were summoned before a town council of ‘‘Mothers and Fathers.’’ Chavez was dismissed when she argued effectively to the council, as Parsons writes, that Lummis’s book ‘‘was written 30 years or more ago and that the stories which were ‘not very important stories’ at any rate (being mostly of Laguna), were got by Lummis from one Patricio, now dead.’’ 75 Abieto’s case, however, dragged on for four days. Parsons speculates that Abieto was censured for submitting the winning entry in a contest to name the new Albuquerque movie theater designed in the Pueblo-Deco style.76 Abieto had submitted the name ‘‘KiMo’’ (a combination of Tanoan words

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meaning ‘‘mountain lion’’ but also interpreted as ‘‘king of its kind’’) and was awarded fifty dollars. As Parsons reported, ‘‘Pablo got the prize, also much hostile criticism from his townspeople.’’ 77 Just seven years later, in 1934, the Indian Reorganization Act (ira), the centerpiece of John Collier’s Indian New Deal, transformed traditional understandings of identity and authority for many Native American communities. In addition to ending the allotment of Indian lands, the ira provided for the formation of tribal governments and enabled tribes to organize as corporations to manage resources. Tribes organized under the act would draft constitutions that would become the basis of autonomous tribal governments. The terms of the ira were to apply to only those tribes who voted in a referendum to accept the act. Between 1934 and 1936, 258 tribal referendums were held. A total of 181 tribes (representing 129,750 Native Americans) voted to accept the act, and 77 tribes (representing 86,365 individuals) voted to reject it. Over half of those Indians not covered by the act were from a single tribe, the Navajo (approximately 45,000), which rejected the act in a close vote.78 After ratification by the individual tribes, between 1936 and 1945 a total of 93 Indian groups had ratified the ira and established tribal charters, of which 74 had established business charters. As of 1947, 195 tribes, bands, communities, and groups were organized under the provisions of the ira. Isleta, along with eighteen of the Pueblos of New Mexico and the Hopi of Arizona, adopted ira constitutions after 1934. (Among the Pueblos, Jemez alone did not vote to adopt the ira.)79 As traditionally nonliterate societies, Native American communities depended on social unanimity and collective land ownership to ensure cultural continuity. In many Native tribes and communities, different degrees of assimilation led to conflict between ‘‘traditional’’ and ‘‘progressive’’ factions. The Pueblos of the Southwest, however, were not as plagued by assimilation and factionalism as were tribes in other regions with longer histories of white encroachment. Despite the arrival of the railroad and the increasing urbanization of the Southwest after 1880, the Pueblos remained remarkably homogenous and culturally distinct, which was a great part of their appeal for anthropological study. A survey by the Bureau of the Census, the Civil Works Administration, and the National Resources Board between 1930 and 1933 determined that the Pueblos were among the Indian groups classified as ‘‘Low Assimilation, Economic and Cultural.’’ The notation ‘‘low assimilation’’ meant that less than 20 percent of the population was of mixed race, that the literacy rate was less than 75 percent, and that less than twenty-five percent of allotted land had been patented or allotment had never been introduced. However, some degree of factionalism did exist among the Pueblos because of the spread of the pan-Indian peyote

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cult after 1917, which undermined traditional religious practices and the authority of traditional religious leaders. In particular, at Isleta in 1922 the bia had stepped in and reorganized the council to deal with one such case of religious suppression.80 Isleta, with a total population of 1,103, held its referendum on the ira on June 17, 1935. Of an eligible voting population of 567, a total of 138 voted for the act and 7 voted against it.81 Approved on March 27, 1945, the Constitution of Isleta established rules for tribal membership (an individual had to be one half or more Isleta blood, with provisions for other persons of Indian blood to become naturalized), and established a division of powers based on the secular American model including executive, legislative, and judicial branches. After the passage of the ira, many Pueblos including Isleta adopted similar democratic constitutions that installed secular governments in the place of traditional councils, which were grounded in and organized by religious practices. As they were based on Anglo-American political traditions rather than Native traditions of citizenship and sovereignty, the ira constitutions have been criticized as ‘‘cookie cutter documents,’’ and the secular governments that they created have been criticized as alien institutions with no basis in traditional modes of governance or relevance for Native American communities.82 The new ira governments supplanted the traditional councils—that is, the town councils of ‘‘Mothers and Fathers’’ described by Parsons. To a degree, the Pueblos that voted to accept the ira faced a crisis of authority as new secular institutions supplanted the traditional leadership. As Charles Taylor writes, ‘‘The political leaders of the Pueblos were naturally protective of their traditional claims to authority, and chose not to prepare written constitutions, which they feared would limit their powers, although they approved the Indian Reorganization Act. The bureau accepted this decision and dealt with the traditional Pueblo governments as legal entities.’’ 83 Indeed, many critics of the ira argue that the assimilation and adoption of white institutions presented a greater and more insidious threat to Native cultures and communities than did direct violence and anti-Indian racism.84 It was in this context of pervasive and fundamental transformation that Lente first contacted the bureau and formed a relationship with Parsons. While his letters convey a deep anxiety about breaking tribal secrecy, Lente rationalized his actions based on the very economic hardships that were exacerbated by white encroachment and the modernization of the Pueblo world. After 1934, the social and political world of Isleta was very different than it had been just a decade earlier. In the modern world of the post-ira Pueblos there was separation of secular and religious authority. In the wake of the ira, this crisis of authority enabled Lente to imagine his drawings

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in a larger world while also giving him license to ignore community tradition. As Lente imagined that his drawings could find an audience in the larger world, he also imagined that he could, with impunity, violate the traditions that earlier informants had been punished (and worse) for transgressing.

THE ARTIST’S DILEMMA

Through their collaboration, Byrnes and Harvey pieced together an understanding of the Katsina cult that was more complete than could have developed by either of them working alone. Like Lente and Parsons, Byrnes and Harvey grappled with issues of ritual secrecy and traditional prohibitions against representation of sacred subjects. Restrictions on the representation of sacred images were still powerful, as they had been twenty years earlier in Isleta when Lente made his secret drawings for Elsie Clews Parsons. As a result, Harvey wrote, ‘‘Truly ceremonial paintings are rarely encountered by the student of Pueblo culture.’’ 85 However, Harvey also noted that artists had begun to challenge the restrictions, and he wrote that ‘‘although the risk of revealing secrets is great, not a few Pueblo individuals find the interest of outsiders to be a provocative challenge. . . . Although the Pueblo artist is warned by his elders that he must not depict scenes or ritual activity, a desire for recognition or praise of outsiders may increase his desire to transgress the rules.’’ 86 Indeed, Harvey wrote, ‘‘The pueblo artist is in something of a dilemma. If he conforms to western conventions he tends to be considered a rebel in his own society. Since ritual and ceremonial symbols form such a major part of Pueblo expression, the artist must either violate taboo or select activities which are held less sacred as subjects. Should he elect this alternative, vitality often leaves his work. For many artists, the taboo plainly defines the limits of their subjects.’’ 87 However, Byrnes’s often strained relationship with the Acoma and Laguna Pueblos further complicated the traditional taboo. As a result of federal efforts to assimilate Indian youth into the mainstream, Byrnes and other young Pueblos of his generation were caught uncomfortably between two worlds. Harvey compared Byrnes’s situation to that of a young Laguna girl who complained, ‘‘They are trying to get you educated so they can get you away from home, and at home I have a hard time because I don’t know much about my own Indian religion. I guess you have to go right in between, but there is no way to go in between because you are caught on both sides.’’ 88 Indeed, living and working in Albuquerque away from Acoma and Laguna, Byrnes was not a full participant in most of the rituals he depicted in his paintings, which were likely based on events that he had seen or heard about second-

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hand. Harvey theorized that Byrnes’s alienation may have influenced his decision to become an artist, and he stated that ‘‘the difficulty of achieving status in both white and native society accounts for part of the artists’ motivation to paint. At times their adjustment in their home village is poor.’’ 89 Byrnes apparently fit this pattern; Harvey reported that he ‘‘has only been partially initiated to a medicine society.’’ Moreover, Harvey wrote that Byrnes’s ‘‘varying success in attaining adjustment has pushed him increasingly away from the village.’’ 90 In a letter to Harvey, Byrnes himself described his ambivalent position by stating: ‘‘Reservation life is fine but not a place I can stay forever even tho’ I might like to, not now anyway.’’ 91 To the extent that Byrnes was an outsider to the Katsina scenes he painted, he became an anthropologist himself, working as a student and recorder of a culture to which he had not been directly socialized and that was, in his words, ‘‘fast becoming lost.’’ He recalled that ‘‘as a child I came to know many of these dance figures, the Ka-Tsin-Nah [Katsina] as their name is called and, understanding as a child, much of it I took for granted.’’ Byrnes, then, came to understand his art as a valuable cultural inheritance. In his letters to Harvey, Byrnes described his observations and comparisons of ceremonies: ‘‘I did sit through some interesting night doings. Reminds some of Voodoo. I’m reading currently about Voodoo in Haiti. Been making comparisons, Voodoo, Catholicism, and Indian religion. I could go on a real jag— Gad!!’’ 92 And Harvey wrote back, ‘‘Pity the poor anthropologist who never sees the ‘night doings,’ ’’ suggesting that Byrnes was in a unique position as a Pueblo with some degree of access to closed Katsina ceremonies. He also encouraged Byrnes to continue his observations and comparisons, ‘‘Keep thinking about pueblo life and try to characterize it—this is a help.’’ 93 Finally, Harvey was respectful of such cultural boundaries. He wrote to Byrnes, ‘‘I don’t pry too much and haven’t tried to be a kachina and try to help out when I can.’’ 94 Byrnes developed his own opinions regarding Pueblo secrecy. He wrote that the sacred activities at Laguna and Acoma ‘‘are closed to all outside influence or observation, a reason for this being the spread of Christianity through the Pueblos. One comparison I like to make: it was not unlike the early Christians of Rome having to retreat with their beliefs into the catacombs.’’ 95 As he wrote to Harvey, ‘‘Any more there aren’t any fixed rules pledging us to secrecy, I found that out. You are just asked not to tell—discretion?’’ 96 Indeed, Byrnes may have sought to preserve his anonymity and obfuscate his role in producing the paintings, which made some at Acoma and Laguna uncomfortable,97 because he signed many of his paintings with the pseudonym ‘‘James Bear’’ or simply ‘‘Bear,’’ above the image of a bear claw. Byrnes’s art was motivated by a sense of urgency that recalled the ‘‘salvage para-

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digm’’ that James Clifford writes was fundamental to turn-of-the-century anthropological enterprise and that characterized many early collectors and promoters of Native American art.98 With Harvey’s help, Byrnes sought to recover and preserve an authentic Pueblo culture, which from his vantage point in Albuquerque he took to be fast disappearing. He wrote, ‘‘When I was younger, the masks used to be real pretty, painted by the old men who knew how. All those old people died and people aren’t enough interested now to really want to learn. When they had those dances, we would never miss them.’’ 99 In a 1964 statement written for an exhibition at Arizona State University, Byrnes offered an insight into his relationship to his Pueblo subject matter: ‘‘To me these figures . . . are representative of a way of life that is fast becoming less known to the Indian himself.’’ 100 Indeed, Byrnes’s sense of mission was so strong that he felt that violating the traditional prohibitions against revealing secrets was warranted by the urgency of preserving a fading culture. Harvey wrote that Byrnes’s compulsion to represent the Katsina cult (or in Harvey’s words, to ‘‘secularize a sacred art’’) was motivated by the same sentiments that dictated the stringent rules of secrecy upheld by other Pueblos. Byrnes’s art, Harvey wrote, ‘‘stems from his desire to preserve a record of his religion—a hope which is as sincere as the wish of others to retain ceremonial art and the related beliefs by keeping them completely secret and totally apart, insulated from the surrounding white culture.’’ 101 Harvey felt a similarly keen sense of racing against time in the project, especially when noting the documentation of ceremonies that were no longer practiced in the Pueblos. ‘‘Perhaps the single unique feature of the paintings,’’ he wrote, ‘‘is the record which they constitute of masking, fetishism, and curing in times of exceedingly rapid cultural change.’’ 102 Byrnes did not see his art as being only for other Pueblos. Indeed, he understood his art and the Katsina cult as universal. ‘‘As one of my elders once told me,’’ he wrote, ‘‘ ‘It belongs not only to us but to everyone who can respect another’s beliefs.’ ’’ 103 Byrnes may have been able to see Pueblo culture as universal because he was not himself fully of the culture—living as he did in Albuquerque and balancing a career as a student and later as a hospital worker. Indeed, much of Byrnes’s art and life seems to have been consumed by anxieties that came from not having a place where he fit comfortably in either the Pueblo or white world. After 1963 Byrnes painted only sporadically, and over the next several years he concentrated primarily on Katsina carvings and began making northern plains dance costumes. Byrnes wrote to Harvey, ‘‘Spent the summer of ’67 in St. Louis and from there moved on to South Dakota and was given my grandfather’s name ‘pejuta’ which means medicine and along with all the appropriate ceremony, songs, and feast

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at the Fort Thompson Fair. Quite an honor. Rediscovered MY People the Sioux and all my relatives, it was neat.’’ 104 For much of 1968, Byrnes was in residence at the Koshare Kiva in La Junta, Colorado, making paintings and carvings and dancing with a troupe of non-Indian hobbyists, with whom he toured the East Coast in the summer of 1968.105 In 1976, Harvey and Byrnes collaborated on a manuscript titled ‘‘Laguna and Acoma Pueblo Beliefs in the Paintings of James Bear.’’ 106 For reasons probably having to do with increasingly difficult personal relations as the sensitive nature of the ceremonies represented the essay and paintings were never published. Harvey lost contact with Byrnes after 1976, and in 1986 he donated his entire collection of paintings by Byrnes (except for one that was lost) to the School of American Research in Santa Fe, where they remain today.

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3

‘‘Our Inter-American Consciousness’’: Barnett Newman and the Primitive Universal

The artist came to believe that what was essential in art—given the diversity of themes or motifs—were two universal requirements: that every work of art has an individual order or coherence, a quality of unity and necessity in its structure regardless of the kind of forms used; and, second, that the forms and colors chosen have a decided expressive physiognomy, that they speak to us as a feeling charged whole, through the intrinsic power of colors and lines, rather than through the imaging of facial expressions, gestures, and bodily movements, although these are not necessarily excluded—for they are also forms . . . That view made possible the appreciation of many kinds of old art and of the arts of distant peoples—primitive, historic, colonial, Asiatic and African, as well as European— arts which had not been accessible in spirit before because it was thought that true art had to show a degree of conformity to nature and of mastery of representation which had developed for the most part in the West. The change in art dethroned not only representation as a necessary requirement but also a particular standard of decorum or restraint in expression which had excluded certain domains and intensities of feeling. The notion of the humanity of art was immensely widened. Many kinds of drawing, painting, sculpture and architecture, formerly ignored or judged inartistic, were seen as existing on the same plane of human creativeness and expression as ‘‘civilized’’ Western art. That would not have happened, I believe, without the revolution of modern painting. —MEYER SCHAPIRO, ‘‘THE LIBERATING QUALITY OF AVANT-GARDE ART’’ Harold Rosenberg challenged me to explain what one of my paintings could possibly mean to the world. My answer was that if he and others could read it properly, it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism. That answer still goes.—BARNETT NEWMAN, ‘‘ ‘FRONTIERS OF SPACE’: INTERVIEW WITH DOROTHY GEES SECKLER’’

in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as josé lente faced the crises of modernization in Isleta Pueblo, in New York City the Jewish American artist Barnett Newman (1905–1970) faced another set of modern dilemmas: a crisis of national identity and a crisis of aesthetic authority for his own art and for the work of his

New York School peers. At the moment that Lente found that the traditional Pueblo world was being irrevocably transformed by modernization, Newman believed that he had found in Native American culture the solution to the crises of modernity. Newman believed that he found in the ‘‘primitive’’ arts of the Americas a model and a resource for a new ‘‘inter-American’’ culture that would transcend the divisions of modern politics and forge a common bond between modern individuals.1 Native American art, Newman believed, would heal the ruptures and divisions of modern life. Newman’s project took place through the rearticulation of non-Western, ofteninstrumental artifacts in a space and vision that transformed them into autonomous, non-instrumental, formally self-contained, and culturally and historically decontextualized ‘‘universal’’ artworks. This, on one hand, had the benefit of recognizing in Native American culture a centrality and aesthetic authority it had previously lacked, while simultaneously challenging the canonicity of Western art. In the last decade of the twentieth century, artists and intellectuals from Native American and Canadian First Nations communities discovered in Newman’s modernist Primitivism a usable past for the assertion of an indigenous art history and intellectual tradition. In Newman’s 1946 essay for the exhibition of Northwest Coast Indian Painting that he curated for the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, Newman had made the claim for an affinity of the modern and the Primitive, suggesting that both the modern and Primitive artist stand as ‘‘island[s] of revolt . . . authentic accomplishments that flourished without benefit of European history.’’ 2 For the Anishnabe artist and writer Robert Houle (b. 1942), Newman’s esteem for Native American art is relevant to contemporary Native artists who wish to create an aesthetic and intellectual tradition that stands apart from the Eurocentric history of modern art. In an essay for the 1992 exhibition Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada, Houle describes Newman’s writings as ‘‘a language [that contemporary Native artists] understand, for any attempt to move away from the Renaissance imagery of figures and objects contributes to the struggle to open and reopen the discussion over the nature of beauty.’’ 3 Similarly, Plains Cree artist and writer Gerald McMaster (b. 1953) cites Newman approvingly in the context of an argument that art by contemporary Native American artists constitutes a critical intellectual tradition distinct from Eurocentric art and intellectual history. For McMaster, Newman’s claim demonstrates that, ‘‘fissures at the master narrative’s border had already begun to open early in the twentieth century.’’ 4 Houle and McMaster read Newman’s Primitivism as a challenge to Eurocentric claims to cultural preeminence, and Newman thus becomes a key figure in a critique of Western modernism. In this telling, the legacy of Newman’s modernism and his appro-

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priation of Native American art are recovered for an indigenous art history and criticism. Newman is celebrated as an astute observer of the crises of European and U.S. nationalism, as well as an early advocate for the decentering of Western modernism.5 But Newman’s romance with Native American art more properly takes its place in the history of modernist Primitivism—the deep fascination with prehistoric, tribal, and non-Western culture that has characterized the work of many artists and intellectuals in the twentieth century. Primitivism has been central to the cultural history of twentieth-century culture; indeed, it is difficult to imagine modern art history without Pablo Picasso’s 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as a watershed and milestone. While the primal scenes of modernist Primitivism date to the turn of the century in the Parisian studios of Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Maurice de Vlaminck and are focused on artifacts from Africa and the South Pacific, a distinctly American modernist Primitivism—focused on Native American art and culture—thrived in the United States. In Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde, the art historian Jackson Rushing has catalogued the influence of Native American art for the burgeoning New York avant-garde in the first half of the twentieth century. As Rushing writes, ‘‘The modernism of New York’s avant-garde . . . was dependent on Native American art and culture to a degree previously unrecognized in the art historical literature.’’ 6 In laying claim to an indigenous, Native American tradition, Primitivism served as a powerful platform for American artists seeking to differentiate their work from their European contemporaries.7 Primitivism in American art reached its fullest expression during the Second World War, and the art historians Stephen Polcari and Michael Leja have written of the importance of concepts of the Primitive in the intellectual milieu of the New York School of the 1940s and the new style of Abstract Expressionism, which would come to define and dominate American art in the postwar period.8 As the art historian Kirk Varnedoe writes, ‘‘For many American artists stalled at an impasse around 1940, primitivism, taken in a very broad sense, offered the solution to an entangling riddle: What basis could be found for a new art that was neither derivative nor provincial, that was individual yet universal, free from cant and canon yet absolute?’’ 9 To a great extent, this pivotal moment turned on the work of Barnett Newman, an artist who would emerge after the Second World War as a leading figure in the American avant-garde and as a spokesman for Abstract Expressionism. A host of artists and writers in Newman’s orbit were influenced by Native American art in this period. Newman’s friend and painter Adolph Gottlieb, for example, began collecting ‘‘primitive’’ art in 1935. In New York during the Second World War, a number of European

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émigrés, including the artists John D. Graham and Max Ernst and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, mined the collections of the Heye Foundation Museum of the American Indian. Painter Jackson Pollock broke with his Regionalist mentor, Thomas Hart Benton, whose ubiquitous images of the American people defined the Depression years. Working from a personal collection of anthropological publications, including a set of the Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Pollock found inspiration in a tradition that transcended national boundaries and history. In She Wolf (1943), he painted an expressive, horrific image of a fantastic, primordial beast, thereby supplanting his teacher’s gritty paintings of hard-working, musclebound American folk. The lesser-known ‘‘Indian Space’’ painters—Will Barnett, Robert Barrell, Gertrude Barrer, Peter Busa, Howard Daum, and Steve Wheeler— drew from Native North American forms in search of formal principles for use in their abstract art.10 Newman is a key figure because of his centrality to the canon of postwar American modernism based on his extensive writings about the relevance of the Primitive for modern culture, on his efforts to organize two significant exhibitions of Pre-Columbian Mexican and Native North American art for New York galleries in 1944 and 1946 respectively, and on the particular cultural and political work that he called for Native American art to perform. Newman appropriated Native American art to legitimize his own modernist project. His fascination with Native American art had its roots in the problem of his ethnic identity vis-à-vis the pressing problem of nationalistic violence in Europe, as well as in relation to the cultural milieu of the United States. While a prewar generation of Anglo-American Primitivist artists and critics including George L. K. Morris and Marsden Hartley had earlier mined a rich vein of Native American iconography, Primitivism was most powerful for a cohort of first-generation and secondgeneration immigrant and Jewish artists in New York as they made a successful play for a position of cultural and aesthetic authority during and after World War II. Primitivism enabled these artists to shed the label of cultural outsider to the European and American mainstream and to negotiate new roles for themselves and their art. Beginning in the early 1940s, Newman and other Jewish modernists used the Primitive to promote, as historian Lisa Bloom writes, ‘‘a universalist cultural style that transcended the geographically specific,’’ even as modernism was celebrated by some writers, artists, and members of the emergent capitalist and foreign-policy elite as embodying essentially ‘‘American’’ characteristics.11 Newman’s Primitivism legitimized his cosmopolitan, antinationalist identity as the American son of Jewish immigrants, while also giving him and his cohort of white-ethnic artists the aesthetic authority accruing to modernist art. American identity for Newman and

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his cohort—overwhelmingly a generation of immigrants and the children of immigrants—was thus reconfigured as universal, allowing those who had been outsiders a generation earlier to claim the aesthetic authority to define a new American culture and identity, at precisely the moment that paradigms of national culture were in crisis. Primitivism enabled Newman to imagine that art could accomplish several feats: Primitivism offered access to and proof of a universal visual language, which had the capacity to bring people together across national, ethnic, and racial lines (as well as across temporal and historical divisions). In keeping with Newman’s lifelong commitment to anarchism, Primitivism thus promised to transcend the politics of divisiveness through the unifying power of a universal culture. American identity was thus redefined through its encounter with the Primitive—as a generation of white ethnics acted as cultural brokers by assimilating the Primitive into a new culture and identity that would mediate the modern crises of nationalism. Newman and other ethnic and Jewish modernists in the 1940s aligned themselves with an indigenous culture to imagine more authentic American selves. Such cultural borrowings from and assertions of affinity with Native American cultures mediated tensions around issues of nationalism, modernity, and identity even as the United States emerged as a dominant cultural, economic, and political force in the new international order of the postwar world.

BARNETT NEWMAN AND THE CRISIS OF NATIONAL CULTURE

While a number of American artists of the 1940s immersed themselves in the heady mélange of ancient artifacts, European aesthetic theory, and the anthropological discourse that was New York School Primitivism, only Barnett Newman was as deliberate in setting out to argue for the significance to modern America of Native North American and Pre-Columbian art. Along with his fellow ‘‘Mythmaker’’ painters Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Mark Rothko, Newman sought to harness what he perceived as the sublime power of the Primitive as the basis of a new American art.12 In a series of essays written between 1944 and 1949 and in two exhibitions organized for New York galleries in 1944 and 1946, Newman articulated his concept of a universal aesthetic experience uniting the Primitive and the modern. For the exhibitions, Newman used objects borrowed from the American Museum of Natural History (amnh) in New York and from an extended circle of private collectors and modernist artists. Newman’s installation placed works of material culture that previously had been considered only for scientific and educa-

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tional interest into spaces designed for disembodied aesthetic contemplation of art. However, Newman’s agenda ranged far beyond mere formal appreciation. By literally and figuratively removing artifacts from the didactic contexts of museums of archeology and ethnology and redeploying them in the clean, modern (and commercial) spaces of New York galleries, Newman in effect recast the artifacts as essentially modernist artworks in an unfolding drama of, in Newman’s words, ‘‘our inter-American consciousness.’’ 13 Newman was born in New York City in 1905 to Jewish immigrants from Russian Poland. In 1911 he moved with his parents from the squalor of the Lower East Side to the relatively bucolic Tremont section of the Bronx, where he and his siblings attended the National Hebrew School, of which his father, Abraham, was a founding trustee.14 Abraham Newman was a passionate Zionist who believed that the only solution to the struggles of Eastern European Jews was the founding of a Jewish state. However, as noted by Thomas Hess, Newman’s friend and biographer, in the Newman home Jewishness was primarily cultural rather than religious—that is, it was embodied in values of education, progress, and self-help. Further, given Abraham Newman’s position as the owner of a prosperous menswear manufacturing business and his political orientation as a staunch Republican, being Jewish was meshed with a quality of middle-class Americanism. Needless to say, Newman’s earliest artistic efforts were influenced by the patriotic values instilled at home. For example, Hess writes, ‘‘when [Newman] was twelve, he made chalk sidewalk drawings of patriotic subjects, such as George Washington, the American eagle and the defeated Kaiser, at Liberty Bond rallies.’’ 15 In 1922, while still a student at De Witt Clinton High School, Newman enrolled at the Art Students League. He often cut classes to wander the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he was deeply affected by the sublime landscapes of the painters of the Hudson River School. After his graduation in 1923, Newman planned to become a full-time artist, but such a path was inimical to the values of his pragmatic parents, who ultimately persuaded their son to attend college. As Hess notes, ‘‘For Newman’s generation, . . . American culture with its harsh emphasis on the middle-class values of progress, success, pragmatism and conformity (that is, fear of the unusual and of the unknown), accepted and respected art only as decoration which symbolizes power and riches. It was something for ‘others,’ for aliens to make; artists were strangers.’’ 16 But of course Newman was already a stranger; barred by ethnic quotas from attending New York University, Newman enrolled in the majority-Jewish and politically radical City College of New York (ccny). After graduation in 1927, he was again persuaded by family and friends to defer his artistic

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aspirations and work for a period of two years in his father’s menswear manufacturing business, after which he would be able to provide himself with the financial security to begin his life as an artist. However, in 1929 the stock market crash nearly destroyed the family business and decimated Newman’s savings. In the aftermath of the crash Newman’s father became increasingly withdrawn, and Newman assumed greater control of the business. Although that year he also resumed coursework at the Art Students League, in 1931 he began working as a substitute art teacher in New York City’s public high schools and thus his career as an artist was again placed on the back burner. However, Newman’s commitment to artistic freedom and political beliefs—which broke decidedly with his parents’ nationalism and conservatism—may have influenced the deferral of his career as an artist even more than did economic circumstances. At City College Newman studied philosophy, but he was most deeply influenced by the Russian anarchist Piotr Kropotkin, for whose memoirs Newman later wrote a foreword.17 Newman’s anarchism thus dictated that he remain an unaligned figure in the left-wing intelligentsia of 1930s New York. This is best seen in his effort to run for New York City mayor and comptroller through an absurdist 1933 write-in campaign that he organized with his friend, the writer Alexander Borodulin. Describing themselves as ‘‘aesthetes,’’ Newman and Borodulin promised a ‘‘Cultural Program’’ of expanded public education, which included free schools for art and music, a free city university, and adequate salaries for teachers. The program also featured amenities such as a ‘‘planetorium,’’ opera house, orchestra, art gallery (with no jury), theater, movie studio, casino, parks (along with clean air and water), and ‘‘a large indoor and outdoor public forum free of police licensing.’’ 18 Although by the 1930s Bolshevism had largely eclipsed anarchism as a viable political movement, Newman rebuked the Popular Front ideology embraced by other politically engaged artists in New York by refusing to subscribe to any ideology that would limit the freedom of the artist. As he wrote: ‘‘Though it is true that the artist labors and suffers like a worker, in his nature he is profoundly opposed to the principle of the worker. The worker creates for use, the artist definitely does not. It is only the slave psychology of masses in chains, given expression in the Marxian parties, that insists that art must be useful. The worker recognizes the true creative artist as his enemy, because the artist is free and insists upon freedom. It is therefore a contradiction of his own nature for any artist to hope for anything more from the worker than from the politician.’’ 19 Newman also shunned employment in the Works Progress Administration’s ‘‘easel division,’’ which between 1935 and 1943 employed some six thousand artists (one half

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to three quarters of whom were in New York) at ‘‘plumber’s wages’’ of twenty-three dollars per week. Further, Newman was not involved with the primary organizations of radical artists in New York in the 1930s and early 1940s—the John Reed Clubs, the American Artists’ Congress, the American Abstract Artists, and the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. Indeed, rather than participating in the heated debates about the role of the artist in the struggle against capitalism and fascism that consumed and ultimately splintered the New York art community of the 1930s, Newman was busy holding down two jobs. He continued to manage the family business until 1937 when his father suffered a heart attack, after which Newman was free to liquidate the company, and he taught in the city schools until 1939. By the end of the 1930s, Newman had left his teaching position and finally settled the family obligations that had for so long deferred his artistic ambitions. However, he was again stalled, this time by the growing political crisis in Europe. The September 1938 sacrifice of Czechoslovakia in Munich and the April 1939 defeat in Madrid of republican loyalists by a reactionary Spanish military aided and abetted by Germany and Italy presented the grim vision of Europe under the heel of fascism. Among Newman’s cohort of artists and intellectuals the Moscow Trials of 1936–1938 sowed the first seeds of doubt about the Soviet solution, seeds that took root and sprouted with the partition of Poland and the Nazi-Soviet Pact of summer and fall 1939 and the November Soviet invasion of Finland. Newman remained unaligned with the Popular Front, but he was nonetheless agonized by events in Europe.20 By the end of 1939, England and France had entered the war and by 1940 Newman stopped painting altogether.21 Nationalist hyperbole characterized many of the initial responses to the crisis by the New York art community. On October 7, 1939, the editor of Art News, Alfred M. Frankfurter, published a strident condemnation of Germany and Russia as sworn enemies of ‘‘civilization’’ who shared a ‘‘fatal antagonism to Western culture.’’ Frankfurter’s essay is notable for its encapsulation of the sense of an impending cultural Armageddon; for example, when he writes: With the same contempt for a civilized ethic and the right of the individual now manifested in Hitler’s deliberate provocation of the slaughter and in Stalin’s cold-blooded coöperation in its extension, the Nazi and Communist states have, from the first moments of their respective being, savagely attacked and suppressed the artistic, and, in fact the entire cultural basis of Western civilization. Of these crimes committed against art in the name of the perverse, lying ideologies of National Socialism and National Communism we know enough to expect no quarter in the, we pray remote, event of their victory. In a world

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ruled by Hitler and Stalin, the only art that could survive would be the ordained posters and effigies propagandizing the dictatorship of the rabble, and a handful of other objects too impotent and innocuous to offend those rulers, triumphant over all other creative efforts of the past and present which would probably be consigned to the pyres for which the burning libraries of Germany have already set the example.22 Frankfurter’s stance in defense of high culture was avowedly elitist, but it was also profoundly nationalistic—he believed that the United States had a unique role to play in the coming crisis. Frankfurter insisted that an isolationist United States, which remained disengaged and aloof from European politics, was the last defense of the values of Western civilization that were its proper birthright: ‘‘The only way America can prove her right to a heritage of Western civilization now is to guard it unselfishly’’ against the ‘‘Nazi and Marxist bacilli.’’ 23 For Frankfurter, it was the epic duty of Americans to defend the universal, humanistic values that were now entrusted by history to the United States against the ‘‘sworn enemies of civilization.’’ And although the American war effort would be widely represented as a struggle against intolerance and in defense of the values of pluralism—in particular the Popular Front’s campaign for ‘‘Double Victory’’ against racism abroad and at home—the culture that Frankfurter saw imperiled was the refined culture of European libraries and museums.24 Not all of the responses by the New York art community to the crisis in Europe shared Frankfurter’s parochialism. Following the June 1940 Nazi occupation of Paris, critic Harold Rosenberg—Newman’s friend and, later, biographer—grimly announced in the Partisan Review that ‘‘the laboratory of the twentieth century has been shut down.’’ Rosenberg mourned the internationalism and cosmopolitanism of the fallen citadel of modernist culture. Paris, for Rosenberg, was the ‘‘Holy Place of our time . . . the only spot where necessary blendings could be made and mellowed, where it was possible to shake up such ‘modern’ doses as Viennese psychology, African sculpture, American detective stories, Russian music, neo-Catholicism, German technique, Italian desperation.’’ 25 Likewise for Newman, the rise of fascism threatened a modernist culture that transcended racial nationalism. But significantly, the target of Newman’s rage was not abroad but at home.26 Although by 1940 Newman had stopped painting, he continued to write essays and ‘‘monologues’’—his term for the unpublished notes in which he developed his aesthetic theories.27 In an unpublished essay of 1942 titled ‘‘What about Isolationist Art?’’ Newman rehearsed a critique of the nationalism and chauvinism that he saw continuing to dog the popular American art of the day. Newman argued that the

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abiding ‘‘isolationist’’ aesthetic of American Scene and Regionalist painting represented the cultural wing of a dangerous political bloc made up of the Reverend Charles Coughlin, Senator Burton K. Wheeler, Henry Ford, and other prominent xenophobes. Newman demonized pictures by the painters Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry as an American counterpart of ‘‘Hitlerism.’’ Newman criticized American art—the school of the ‘‘old oaken bucket’’—as an adjunct of a dangerous, racialized Americanism, and he warned that ‘‘isolationist painting, which [its proponents] named the American Renaissance, is founded on the bad politics of chauvinism and on an even worse aesthetic.’’ 28 Newman sought to link the aesthetic of the American Scene and Regionalist painting to American political isolationism, and thus to tacit support for policies of National Socialism in Germany. He worried that appeals to patriotic feeling pandered to Americans’ reactionary desire for a national culture and foisted ‘‘a false aesthetic that is inhibiting the production of any true art in this country.’’ 29 Further, he excoriated the advocates of a vigorous cultural nationalism based on Regionalist images and stereotypical American icons. Such false patriotism, Newman argued, threatened the slim beachhead claimed by international modernism on American soil. He wrote that American Scene painters ‘‘fill the American wings of our museums; they dominate our art schools, our art galleries. They have their own museum [The Whitney Museum of American Art]. They have penetrated the Museum of Modern Art.’’ 30 Extending his hyperbole, Newman described the hegemony of the preference for ‘‘American’’ pictures and subjects in language befitting a totalitarian regime: ‘‘Isolationism is a powerful intellectual movement that has dominated and even today continues to dominate the cultural life of America with a hand of iron.’’ Moreover, he reserved a similar level of contempt for the ‘‘peace movement’’ that still clung to the policies of appeasement that had sacrificed Czechoslovakia and Poland.31 ‘‘Isolationism,’’ he wrote, ‘‘we have learned by now, is Hitlerism. Both are expressions of the same intense, vicious nationalism.’’ Newman’s essay cited an ‘‘isolationist monopoly’’ that included artists Benton, Curry, and Grant Wood, publishers, critics, art dealers, and museum director Gertrude Whitney.32 Painting with a broad brush, Newman conflated all of these figures with the Nativist and anti-Semitic critic Thomas Craven. ‘‘Craven’s methods and the methods of his friends were the methods of Hitler,’’ Newman wrote. ‘‘They used all of them: the ‘great lie,’ the intensified nationalism, the false patriotism, the appeal to race, the calling of names, the reemphasis on home and homey sentiment.’’ 33 A passage parodying the ‘‘100-percenter’’ rhetoric of Craven and his Regionalist followers reveals the depths of Newman’s anger:

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The art of the world as focused in the ‘Ecole de Paris,’ these men ranted, is degenerate art, fine for Frenchmen but not for us Americans. The French art is like [the French] themselves, a foreign, degenerate, Ellis Island, international art appealing to internationally minded perverts. It is definitely un-American. How could the French art be good anyway? The French people themselves are no good, a filthy, penny-pinching, tourist-gouging, drunken bunch of foreigners. And who are their American fellow-travelers? A bunch of New York Ellis Islanders who aren’t even fifty percent American, most of them communist and internationally minded, etc.34 Moreover, Newman argued that such appeals to patriotic feeling raised the specter of mediocrity—bad taste and the ruined possibility of forging an authentic culture: ‘‘Instead of stimulating the emergence of great minds by creating conditions that might help to stimulate their appearance,’’ Newman wrote, the American Scene painters and their isolationist and nativist patrons, ‘‘created a label based on bad logic around which mediocre minds equipped with some manual skill could rally to create a movement.’’ Newman lambasted the ‘‘fallacy’’ that by painting ‘‘America’’ artists would be creating ‘‘an American art.’’ 35 Authenticity and identity were matters of expressive form rather than narrative content; popular American art was nothing more than ‘‘cheap genre painting . . . an expansive Currier and Ives revival.’’ 36 Newman’s critique resonated with Clement Greenberg’s worries that kitsch—or popular art—was ‘‘merely another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects.’’ 37 Like kitsch, isolationist culture was politically dangerous because, Newman argued, ‘‘America as a nation is immature in matters of taste and culture; that suffering from an inferiority complex on that account, it fell easy prey to a Nazi philosophy that promised to bolster up an injured pride and a warped national ego, very much as the German people fell prey to a similar movement in the political field.’’ 38 To counter the aesthetic and political dangers of isolationist art, Newman proposed New York as the heir to the international culture of fallen Paris. Newman’s notes from 1943 and 1944 described the city as home to everything that Coughlin, Wheeler, Ford, and their reactionary ilk decried as ‘‘un-American’’—that is, immigrants, ethnics, radicals, and European émigrés. The period from 1939 to 1942 saw an influx of Jews, radicals, and artists to New York. By 1942, a sizable contingent of the European avant-garde had relocated to the United States: Max Ernst, André Breton, Roberto Matta, Salvador Dalí, André Masson, Yves Tanguy, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, and Marc Chagall were in New York. (Notable exceptions were Picasso and Vassily Kandinsky, who remained in Paris.) This influx of ethnic im-

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migrants and artists made it possible for Newman to see New York as beginning to increasingly resemble Rosenberg’s description of prewar Paris as a ‘‘cultural Klondike.’’ Newman defined the polyglot city as the site of a ‘‘new culture’’ in the making and a new definition of American identity: ‘‘The tip of the island of Manhattan forms a compact heterogeneous cosmopolis where one can still have the charming feeling of living in two centuries, where one can still catch the friendliness of the small town, where one can savor the distinctive American flavor.’’ 39 In Newman’s notes on New York a new concept was developing of an American city that transcended a homogeneous, racial nationalism, and which could be home to an international culture. ‘‘I have always been suspicious of the love of country professed by professional Americans,’’ Newman wrote. ‘‘They do not really love America. Those who claim to, do so because they wish to express their hatred of Europe and its cities. The artists and writers who have gone to Europe to come back yelling ‘America’ have proven their dislike of America by their insistence on linking New York with Europe. To them, America is the fields of Kansas and the dirty waters of the Mississippi. Have they forgotten that New York was America long before Kansas was even seen by a white man?’’ 40 In his celebration of the immigrant city as the font of American identity, Newman also gestured toward an older Native American culture that had flourished before the ‘‘white man’’ had seen Kansas (or Mississippi); a culture to which the ‘‘professional Americans’’ were blind and one that Newman would soon place at the center of his idea of culture. Newman’s position was different from other cosmopolitan critiques of American art during the 1940s. His challenge to the ‘‘professional Americans’’ contrasts sharply with the art historian H. W. Janson’s critique of Regionalism. In 1946, Janson published an article titled ‘‘Benton and Wood: Champions of Regionalism’’ in the Magazine of Art. Arguing that the ‘‘Western tradition’’ in art passed from Europe to America by way of abstract modernism, Janson wrote that Regionalist art was aesthetically retrograde and politically dangerous, nurtured ‘‘by some of the fundamental ills of our society—the same ills that in more virulent form, produced National Socialism in Germany.’’ Regionalist artists, he argued, ‘‘substitute . . . nationalism for esthetic instincts.’’ Nationalism was ‘‘a state of mind justified only in the imperfect world of events, not in the realm of ideas; its proper sphere of action is not art but politics.’’ 41 Indeed, Janson thus shared with Newman a common belief that the greatest achievement of modernism was its promise and potential as a vehicle for transcending the perils of nationalism and racial chauvinism. Such feelings were shared by many of the artists and writers—Jewish and non-Jewish—of the New York avant-garde of the 1930s and 1940s. For Janson, Frankfurter, and many leading fig-

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ures in New York, the crisis in Europe and the coming war represented a threat to their idea of Western culture, and the effort to retain that culture was analogous to resisting nationalist violence itself. However, Newman’s Primitivism differed from the emphasis that Janson placed on the central position of the Western tradition, and from Frankfurter’s call for its rescue and preservation by Americans. Newman insisted that the roots of American culture extended far back in time, to the great indigenous civilizations, and could therefore serve as the basis of a new culture. Indeed, Newman would subsequently find little of value in the tradition of European art as a resource for the creation of a new, modernist culture in America after the war. (It is this aspect of Newman’s project that makes him valuable for Native American artists and writers such as Houle and McMaster.) For Newman, then, the crisis of the European tradition precipitated a turn to an idea of Native America as an undiscovered resource for a reimagined modernism based on a pluralist idea of culture and a project of aesthetic integration. If the European institutions that embodied and preserved Western art and civilization were imperiled—as Frankfurter’s image of the ‘‘burning libraries of Germany’’ testified—a new tradition could be founded in the Americas on the foundation of ancient indigenous cultures. This new culture would be different from the old, threatened culture of Europe, which was collapsing under the weight of the elaborate cultural and racial hierarchies it constructed. Fascism would destroy Western civilization because the very foundations of Western civilization were unsound. The new American art would be hemispheric, and it would be created on the foundations of the Primitive. To emphasize Newman’s critique of notions of national culture is to read him against the grain of most histories of the American avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. The formalist criticism of Clement Greenberg understood Abstract Expressionism as the unfolding of an autonomous aesthetic, which was in the process of evolving and differentiating itself from a European tradition. By the 1950s, Greenberg’s support for American Abstract Expressionism was explicitly nationalistic. As if to emphasize the patriotism of the postwar New York School, art historian Irving Sandler titled his canonical survey of the period The Triumph of American Painting.42 Since the late 1970s, revisionist accounts have linked the ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism in the postwar period to the Cold War ideology of American business and foreign policy elites.43 However, Newman’s writings from the period suggest that the Eurocentrism and nationalism of American modernists at mid-century needs to be further complicated. Art historian David Craven describes Newman’s New York School circle as

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global in their aesthetic influences and radical in their politics. ‘‘Post-1945 U.S. art,’’ he writes, ‘‘emerged from an expansive and highly ‘impure’ process of cultural convergences in which Third World artistic practices—Native North American, Latin American, Afro-American, and South Pacific in origin—[were] enjoined with the European artistic traditions so ethnocentrically privileged by formalist apologists for U.S. art.’’ 44 Craven thus argues that Newman’s cohort of first-generation and secondgeneration immigrant and ethnic New York artists and intellectuals forged a ‘‘multivalent and polycentric’’ art that drew from global sources to critique European and U.S. isolationism, imperialism, and ethnocentrism.45 For Newman and many others in his circle, Native American visual cultures functioned as the most immediately available and compelling resource toward this end. The roots of Newman’s Primitivism run deep in the history of the New York avant-garde in the twentieth century. Among Newman’s teachers at the Art Students League from 1929 to 1931 was the painter John Sloan, a central figure in Greenwich Village artistic circles, who in 1931 organized the Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts at the Grand Central Galleries in New York. Indeed, a broad fascination with and advocacy for traditional Native cultures prevailed among the Greenwich Village bohemians, and many artists of the 1920s and 1930s fell into the grip of ‘‘Indian fever.’’ A flood of publications, exhibitions, and progressive reform efforts on behalf of Native Americans culminated in the 1934 Indian New Deal under Roosevelt’s Indian commissioner, John Collier. Throughout this period, Native American art was widely on view in New York. Among artists of the later 1930s and 1940s, Rushing cites the Jungian notion that Native American art had deep roots in the subconscious, and the attendant currency of notions of ‘‘myth,’’ ‘‘totem,’’ and ‘‘ritual’’ among Newman’s Mythmaker cohort, who believed that Native American art, because it was a living tradition, was evidence of a ‘‘cultural continuum’’ that united ancient and modern people and, thus, had relevance for modern times: the Primitive would help to forge a ‘‘transformed consciousness for modernity.’’ 46 Indeed, these are likely sources for Newman’s initial fascination with Native American art and the concept of the Primitive as anodyne to the many ills of nationalism and modernity. Newman’s particular formation of the Primitive can also be understood in relation to the broader relevance of the ancient and prehistoric arts of the Americas during the war years and their explicitly political utility in the struggle against fascism. Primitive art had broad currency in the United States before and during the war, especially at the Museum of Modern Art, which organized a series of influential exhibitions including American Sources of Modern Art (1933), African Negro Art (1935), Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (1940), Indian Art of the United States (1941), and

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Art of the South Seas (1946). In particular, the three moma exhibitions organized during the war—Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, Indian Art of the United States, and Art of the South Seas—formed a conceptual unit. Fascists were no supporters of Primitive or modernist art; the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition organized by the Nazis in 1937 attempted to fuse and discredit the two modes. moma’s wartime programming demonstrated the international relevance of the Primitive in the context of the war. The art historian Eva Cockroft has amply demonstrated the connections between moma’s exhibitions program and the interests of Roosevelt’s pan-American policies during this period. As Cockroft notes, through the influence of moma trustee and former president Nelson Rockefeller, the museum fulfilled thirty-eight wartime contracts for U.S. government agencies, including the Library of Congress, the Office of War Information, and the Inter-American Affairs Office, of which Rockefeller served as director.47 Rockefeller’s full title was Coordinator for Commercial and Cultural Relations between the American Republics for the Council of National Defense, and his specific charge was ‘‘countering the Fascist threat in Latin America.’’ 48 In addition to moma’s work with the ancient and primitive arts of the Americas, Rockefeller’s office coorganized nineteen exhibitions of modern American art for travel to Latin America. And in May 1941, moma hosted a symposium titled ‘‘InterAmerican Cutlural Relations in the Field of Art, organized by the Artists’ Coordinating Committee.49 In Rockefeller’s and moma’s cultural policy, then, the modern and the Primitive were allied as a hedge against the fascist threat. An example of this conjoining is an essay by Constantino Malinovsky, suggestively titled ‘‘Pre-Columbian Art in Peru and Its Significance for the Americas,’’ which was published in the Bulletin of the Pan American Union in 1941. In the essay (accompanied by watercolor reproductions of Pre-Columbian Mochica ceramics) Malinovsky intones, Havoc is being wrought in countries whose museums and libraries contained priceless cultural treasures, created by the genius of many generations. Churches, families, moral and spiritual incentive are being destroyed. With such conditions prevailing, where can the American continent find the patterns for its Euro-America? And should it come to pass that the march of progress is halted, must the New World stand still and adhere to traditional forms while it waits for the reestablishment of normal life in Europe? No, because America has an inexhaustible supply of spiritual power, and the time has come when every citizen of the American continent feels entrusted with new responsibilities. We must not only be custodians of the cultural treasures

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of the embattled countries, but creators of new works based on the great rich past of our own hemisphere. Unfortunately this past is to the majority of us literally a terra incognita.50 Malinovsky’s statement represented an important transformation in the framing of the cultural crisis of the war, and it points toward Newman’s vision for a new ‘‘interAmerican consciousness.’’ This position is distinct from Frankfurter and Janson’s call for a vigorous defense of the elitist values of Western (i.e., European) civilization when faced with the fall of Paris and the potential collapse of Europe as global modernist metropolis. Rather, Malinovsky, with Rockefeller’s circle of economic elites, imagined a powerful cultural and economic force emerging in the American hemisphere in the aftermath of the war. Newman and his circle of New York artists and intellectuals—mostly Jews and recent immigrants anxious over the failure of European nationalism—shared a similar vision, albeit not one informed by the elites’ vision of the open markets and endless capitalist expansion. Newman and his circle of Primitivist artists turned optimistically to the indigenous cultures of the Americas as an aesthetic and spiritual resource. Their modernist project would become the exploration and incorporation of the American terra incognita.

THE PRIMITIVE UNIVERSAL

Newman’s first opportunity to make his argument on the public stage came in May 1944 when art dealer Betty Parsons invited him to curate an exhibition, titled PreColumbian Stone Sculpture, for the Wakefield Gallery, which was located in the basement of the Wakefield Bookshop at 64 East Fifty-fifth Street. As Newman described it, the exhibition highlighted ‘‘the art of the archaic horizon [period] through the work of the Guerrero [Mexico], early Costa Rica, and Brazil regions; the art of the middle horizon through work of the Totonac, Toltec, Huastec, and Chorotega cultures; [and] the Aztec horizon through early and later works of that period. (We excluded the Maya culture because it is so much better known.)’’ 51 For the exhibition, Newman assembled some fifty individual objects representing a vast geographic and chronological diversity. Small items—jewelry, figurines—were shown in glass cases in the main store. Larger sculptures were placed in the gallery below. Of the fifty objects in the exhibition, nineteen were on loan from American Museum of Natural History (amnh), with the remainder on loan from private collections or for sale through the gallery. The four-page exhibit catalogue contained a checklist, an essay by Newman, and three black-and-white photographs by Aaron Siskind, a friend of Newman’s from ccny.

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Newman’s Wakefield exhibition was not the first opportunity for the interested public to view Pre-Columbian art in New York. moma had mounted ‘‘American Sources of Modern Art’’ in 1933 and ‘‘Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art’’ in 1940. Most recently, the amnh had rearranged and reinstalled its famous collections in the Hall of Mexican and Central American Archeology in late winter 1944. The contrast with Newman’s Wakefield exhibition that spring is telling. The amnh installation placed artifacts in a broad sociocultural milieu, creating a holistic view of the cultures of Pre-Columbian Mexico and Central America. As such, the amnh sought to instruct visitors in the values of cultural pluralism and the recognition and respect of human difference. In contrast, Newman’s exhibition sought to establish the autonomous aesthetic value of a visual tradition he claimed as universal. The displays at amnh were grouped according to geographical region and period and augmented by maps and photographs of archeological sites. Newman’s Wakefield exhibition depended on the purely visual experience of the singular object. Indeed, the design that Newman developed for the Wakefield Gallery included no explanatory texts, dioramas, or didactic materials to evoke social or cultural context; rather, the objects were displayed to highlight their formal qualities, as if they had been conceived and produced as modernist sculptures. Newman’s exhibition as well as his catalogue isolated objects against spare, white backgrounds to emphasize contour and sculptural form and to encourage aesthetic rather than scientific contemplation; as Newman noted, they were ‘‘removed from their ethnological background in true art-gallery style.’’ 52 Moreover, Newman deliberately narrowed the field of artifacts to stone sculpture, ‘‘so that the visitor would get a clear view of the span of this art within a single medium.’’ 53 Thus, whereas the amnh curators had sought to display a visual culture in its entirety, Newman, in emphasizing the qualities and experience of a single medium, placed objects in a framework that paralleled the modernist notion of medium purity. ‘‘It was an exciting experience to see this sculpture presented purely from an aesthetic point of view,’’ Newman wrote, ‘‘freed from the distractions of the usual ethnological jumble of sculpture, pottery, textiles, and other artifacts, which, although of genuine interest to the student of archeology and ethnology, is a source of confusion to those looking for an aesthetic experience. Here the sculpture was to be enjoyed—as sculpture.’’ 54 A number of objects in the exhibition already had made the transformation from artifact to sculpture. Newman borrowed several pieces from the private collections of New York artists and intellectuals—including the influential surrealist painters John D. Graham and Max Ernst—where primitive artworks had arrived via the modern marketplace and were already appreciated for their aesthetic value.

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Moreover, Newman created a category—‘‘Pre-Columbian stone sculpture’’—that cut across regional, temporal, and cultural boundaries. The aesthetic category of ‘‘Pre-Columbian stone sculpture’’ had not existed before—neither at amnh nor in the Pre-Columbian context. Newman’s exhibition conscripted the diversity of PreColumbian material culture into a modernist formal category. This operation could only be enacted within the space of the white-walled gallery and within the discourse of modern art history. As such, Newman’s exhibition shares a common impulse and modus operandi with André Malraux’s paradigm of the modernist museum experience, the ‘‘Museum without Walls’’ (1935–1951), which used photography to gather and elevate to the status of painting and sculpture a global diversity of functional objects. As Malraux wrote: ‘‘A Romanesque crucifix was not regarded by its contemporaries as a work of sculpture; nor Cimabue’s Madonna as a picture. Even Phidias’s Pallas Athene was not, primarily, a statue.’’ 55 Newman’s Wakefield installation enacted this same modernist program, broadening the conceptual category of art to include under its purview utilitarian or ceremonial non-Western objects. Newman’s curatorial program made Primitive objects into modern art as he shipped stone sculptures across town for his exhibition. Newman’s 1944 exhibition of Pre-Columbian art thus decontextualized and, to a great degree, misrepresented its objects. But, as Rushing has argued, Newman’s work should also be understood as an act of creative recontextualization.56 In this sense, Newman performed for non-Western artifacts the radical feat that Marcel Duchamp had done with mass-produced artifacts. Duchamp’s notorious ‘‘readymade’’ sculptures of the first and second decade of the twentieth century took common massproduced items—a ceramic urinal, a snow shovel, a rack for drying bottles—and reassigned them new functions within the aesthetic economy of modern art, thus deflating many of the tenets of ‘‘art’’ and the aesthetic object as such, and foregrounding the conventional nature of artistic production. Moreover, Duchamp’s readymade sculptures undermined notions of art as the embodiment of the spirit (e.g., of a culture or a nation). Newman’s relocation of artifacts from beyond the pale of Western high culture into a privileged position within that high culture overturned conventions of art, culture, history, and identity. Significantly, the contemplation of pure aesthetic form was not Newman’s sole agenda in his Wakefield Gallery exhibition. Newman called upon aesthetic contemplation to play a vital role in the forging of a new modernist consciousness and identity. This was an undertaking with profound political ramifications. Newman claimed Pre-Columbian art as a resource for the construction of a new American culture; one that would heal the divisions that had not been

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solved by politics. His introductory essay for the exhibition put the modernist aesthetic appreciation of Pre-Columbian art in a context of an emergent hemispheric consciousness: ‘‘The growing aesthetic appreciation of Pre-Columbian art is one of the satisfying results of our inter-American consciousness. It is by looking at them [the sculptures] as works of art rather than as the artifacts of ethnology that we can grasp their inner significance. Paradoxically enough, the excitement of the aesthetic experience will achieve the very aims of statesmen and scientists who feel that our common hemispheric heritage is a vital link in inter-American understanding, since it is by comprehending the spiritual aspirations of human beings that permanent bonds can best be built.’’ 57 Access to the ‘‘inner significance’’ of the work of art was to be through strictly visual and formal means. Aesthetic contemplation, then, would propel modern Americans to understand their essential intimacy with the Primitive and exotic. As such, Newman’s exhibition sought to instruct visitors not in the values of different cultures seen from a relativistic, cosmopolitan perspective, but in an ethic of universalism, wherein peoples recognized not their essential difference (as under fascism), but their essential sameness. In a revised and expanded version of the article published in Spanish translation in La Revista Belga, a propaganda organ of the Belgian government’s Office for Latin America, Newman amplified his arguments: ‘‘Through art, we comprehend the deep stirrings of man’s soul.’’ Newman argued that the universal experience of the visual would bridge temporal and geographic distances and create common understanding: ‘‘Friendship based on the comprehension of each other’s art will be founded, therefore, on common moral purpose and will do a great deal to accomplish the world unity we all desire, since it is by comprehending the spiritual aspirations of human beings that permanent bonds can best be built.’’ 58 Newman’s exhibition privileged a universal visual experience as the sole means of grasping the gravity of modern America’s hemispheric cultural inheritance. In Newman’s view, visual experience, because it is universal, accomplished the best hopes of Rockefeller’s internationalist elites—that is, successfully claiming the indigenous traditions of the Americas as the heritage of a newly reconstructed modernist culture. Newman wrote that the avant-garde conscription of the Primitive held the ultimate goal of redefining the natural history museum experience as a ‘‘cultural’’ event on the level of that offered by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, or Carnegie Hall, all bastions of refinement and high culture.59 Such a redefinition of the ethnological collection as high culture demanded a larger shift in the conception of ‘‘culture’’ as such—a radical reimagining of culture as universal. Newman wrote of these goals in a letter to the amnh’s Department of Anthropology in April 1944:

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‘‘It occurred to me that important as it may be to bring the art of the ethnology museum to the attention of the art public, it is equally important to bring to the scientific community an appreciation of the aesthetique [sic] involved in this art.’’ 60 Reporting on the success of his Wakefield Gallery exhibition of Pre-Columbian sculpture, Newman wrote, ‘‘The exhibition is awakening artists and laymen to the beauty of this art and is making them aware of the great treasury of art to be found at the Museum of Natural History.’’ 61 However, archeology and anthropology told a different story than the one offered by Newman [figure 7]. The archeologist Pal Kelemen, writing in Art News on the occasion of the reopening of amnh’s Hall of Mexican and Central American Archeology, suggested that the art of Pre-Columbian civilizations could not be so easily assimilated to a universal Western art history and visual experience: ‘‘This early art of America is the only great art that developed in isolation from the Old World and its ideal of beauty is therefore quite remote from ours which was nourished on the Greco-Roman background of our western Christian civilization. Thus the visitor on entering this hall is struck by a completely alien atmosphere which remains with him throughout his stay. He has difficulty not only in adapting himself to a strange iconography and to unfamiliar shapes, but also in visualizing those cultures in their fullness because of the fragmentary character of the material available.’’ 62 Kelemen’s archeological understanding and Newman’s modernist vision contrasted most in their different assumptions about the nature of—indeed, the constructions of—the ideal viewer and the expected visual experience of Pre-Columbian artworks. Kelemen’s viewer is struck by the essential difference of modern and PreColumbian societies; his account emphasizes the isolated, remote, and alien character of these artworks—the degree to which they cannot be assimilated to a Western identity and perspective. Newman’s account of the public’s experience of similar works at the Wakefield Gallery makes dramatic claims about comprehension, understanding, and appreciation all flowing from an untutored visual experience. Newman’s ideal visitor emerges from the galleries with a newfound appreciation of a common hemispheric heritage, which is immediately comprehensible via the contemplation of objects that Kelemen’s visitor found recalcitrant. The actual experience of the viewer cannot necessarily be deduced from either account. Both institutions orchestrated public response through the mediating effects of the institutional frame they placed around the objects in question. The museum sought to educate its public in the lessons of cultural diversity, even if the fragmentary nature of the available material made it impossible fully to grasp Pre-Columbian cultures. Newman’s modernist installation implied that the same materials were best approached through the

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lens of aesthetic appreciation, which made it easier to imagine that the viewer was communing with the ‘‘deep stirrings’’ and ‘‘common moral purpose’’ of a universal art-consciousness. Newman’s 1946 exhibition ‘‘Northwest Coast Indian Painting,’’ at the Betty Parsons Gallery, strove for the same effect by claiming the Native American artists of the Northwest Coast as the spiritual and aesthetic ancestors of modern American artists who were, Newman asserted, struggling to assert an identity separate from the European tradition. In his brief catalogue essay for the exhibition, Newman argued that ‘‘it is becoming more and more apparent that to understand modern art, one must first have an appreciation of the primitive arts, for just as modern art stands as an island of revolt in the stream of Western European aesthetics, the many primitive art traditions stand apart as authentic aesthetic accomplishments that flourished without the benefit of European history.’’ 63 Newman’s essay argued that the indigenous cultures of the Americas were autonomous developments, and as such they would function as a model for an internationalist modernism that grew from American roots rather than from the ruins of Europe. Newman was clear to claim Native American painting as a valuable resource in its own right and one of universal significance. ‘‘This painting tradition,’’ he argued, ‘‘constitutes one of the most extensive, certainly the most impressive, treasuries of primitive painting that has come down to us from any one part of the globe.’’ 64 Again, Newman worked with amnh, from which he borrowed eighteen of the twenty-eight objects in the exhibition. Private collectors including, again, Ernst and Graham, loaned the remaining ten. As late as one week before the scheduled opening, Newman wrote to curator Harry Shapiro to plead for permission to borrow a large, painted Tlingit house front that had initially been refused. He particularly wanted to include this piece because he felt that its large scale made it the strongest comparison with contemporary American painting, a point that he worried would be lost if only smaller objects—drums, clothing, masks, and other items—were on view. Ultimately, the house front was loaned to Newman for the show.65 As in his exhibition of Pre-Columbian sculptures, the Tlingit house front and the other objects were disconnected from the didactic environment of the natural history museum and relocated to the modernist gallery. Newman’s friend, the artist and architect Tony Smith, designed the exhibition itself. The objects were displayed as modern paintings, attached to the wall with simple metal rods. As in the catalogue for ‘‘Pre-Columbian Stone Sculpture,’’ the Northwest Coast catalogue contained striking black-and-white photographs by Aaron Siskind. As a reviewer for Art Digest noted, the exhibition of Northwest Coast Indian Paintings, which opened the new Betty Parsons Gallery on

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57th Street, included a large number of works for sale shown alongside an impressive array of important pieces on loan from the Anthropology Department at amnh.66 Much like his goals for the exhibition of Pre-Columbian stone sculpture at the Wakefield Gallery two years earlier, Newman desired that these works, which were functional ceremonial pieces in the Native American context, be appreciated as art objects. What was important for Newman, however, was that the paintings would not be viewed as merely ‘‘art for art’s sake.’’ And while Newman understood paintings as autonomous aesthetic objects, he also believed that through their aesthetic function they performed an important political and social function for modern American audiences. The paintings, he wrote, ‘‘constitute a kind of heightened design,’’ which took their place not in the day-to-day life of Northwest Coast Natives but in the highest spiritual pursuits. ‘‘These paintings are ritualistic,’’ he wrote. ‘‘They are an expression of the mythological beliefs of these peoples and take place on ceremonial objects only because these peoples did not practice a formal art of easel painting on canvas.’’ 67 Moreover, Newman wrote, ‘‘There is an answer in these works to all those who assume that modern abstract art is the esoteric exercise of a snobbish elite, for among these simple peoples, abstract art was the normal, well-understood dominant tradition. Shall we say that modern man has lost the ability to think on so high a level?’’ 68 Newman thus argued that Northwest Coast Indian paintings and Pre-Columbian stone sculptures provided a validating genealogy for modernist art: ‘‘Does not this work rather illuminate the work of those of our modern American abstract artists who, working with the pure plastic language we call abstract art, are infusing it with intellectual and emotional content, and who, without any imitation of primitive symbols, are creating a living myth for us in our own time?’’ 69 In Newman’s formulation, then, the function of the Primitive was to serve as a template of the sort of secular spirituality he demanded of modernist art. The Primitive was called on to perform double duty as a foil to the crises of the modern West and as model for an American avant-garde culture attuned to the complex spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities of the modern age. As he wrote in his essay for the exhibition of Pre-Columbian sculptures: ‘‘While we transcend time and place to participate in the spiritual life of a forgotten people, their art by the same magic illuminates the work of our time. The sense of dignity, the high seriousness of purpose evident in this sculpture, makes clearer to us why our modern sculptors were compelled to discard the mock heroic, the voluptuous, the superficial realism that inhibited the medium for so many European centuries. So great is the reciprocal power of this art while giving us a greater understanding of the people who produced it, it gives meaning to the strivings of our artists.’’ 70

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PRIMITIVISM AND THE POSTWAR AMERICAN ARTIST

The first statement of the relevance of the Primitive for modern artists from Newman’s immediate circle can be seen in a 1943 letter to Edwin Alden Jewell, an art critic for the New York Times, which was signed by Newman’s friends and fellow artists Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko. The letter shows the influence of Newman’s thinking, and it seems likely it was written with his assistance. In a review of a June 1943 exhibition by the Modern Painters and Sculptors organization, Jewell had pleaded ‘‘befuddlement’’ in response to viewing abstract paintings by Gottlieb and Rothko. Generously, Jewell made his column available to the artists to offer their own explanation. In their response they defined their art in terms of ‘‘spiritual kinship’’ with the Primitive, as the ‘‘poetic expression of the essence of . . . timeless myth.’’ As they reasoned, ‘‘Since art is timeless, the significant rendition of a symbol, no matter how archaic, has as full validity today as the archaic symbol had then.’’ Claiming spiritual affinity with the timeless and universal Primitive allowed Newman and his circle of abstract artists to stake their claim to a position of aesthetic authority vis-à-vis American high culture. In a passage that recalled Newman’s earlier diatribe against ‘‘isolationist painting,’’ they aligned their art against those that would be offended by it aesthetically and ideologically: ‘‘It must insult any one who is spiritually attuned to interior decoration; pictures for the home; pictures for over the mantel; pictures of the American scene; social pictures; purity in art; prize-winning potboilers; the National Academy; the Whitney Academy; the Corn Belt Academy; buckeyes; trite tripe, etc.’’ 71 By aligning their art with the Primitive, Gottlieb, Rothko, and Newman sought to create an art that would transcend such sentimental and blatantly nationalistic expressions. In his essay ‘‘The Painting of Tamayo and Gottlieb,’’ published in La Revista Belga in 1945, Newman developed the assertion that the most advanced art of the day transcended national culture. He compared the work of two contemporary artists—his friend Gottlieb and the Mexican Rufino Tamayo—both of whom, he argued, transcended the everyday and the nationalistic and embodied a new ideal of closeness to indigenous sources in ‘‘the attitude that ought to motivate our American artists and those art laymen who are concerned with the establishment of an ‘American’ tradition.’’ As he had argued earlier for Primitive art, Newman argued that these modernist artists’ affinities with Native American sources would succeed where the nationalist politics (and art) of ‘‘professional flag wavers’’ had failed. Such misguided and bad faith attempts to appeal to nationalist sentiment had not delivered on promises to forge a new culture. As such, Tamayo and Gottlieb embodied the new

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‘‘inter-American consciousness’’ that would transcend politics and nationalism. Insisting that ‘‘politics is an unnecessary marriage for the artist,’’ Newman continued by stating, ‘‘Art is a realm of pure thought. As such, it, like all other realms of pure thought, must be concerned with its own problems. Art is self-contained. Politics is not only unnecessary, it is irrelevant . . . In the realm of pure science—in mathematics for example—no one agitates for an American, French, or Mexican ‘mathematical tradition.’ ’’ 72 Newman thus argued for a radical new category of universal visual experience, to which postwar artists could now claim an affinity. Pointing to the putative independence of Einstein from German or American nationality, or of Darwin from Englishness, Newman implored his fellow modern artists to follow the lead of Tamayo and Gottlieb in recognizing ‘‘that there is no art of nations, only of people.’’ Newman cited the example of the prewar School of Paris, a cultural international in which ‘‘all men—French, Spaniards, Poles, and Americans—worked in complete freedom.’’ 73 Of Tamayo, Newman wrote that the artist, while educated as a modernist, had roots ‘‘deep in the great Pre-Columbian arts of the Valley of Mexico. Tamayo understands that to be close to one’s country one must be close to its art rather than to the contemporary people who surround one. He knows that merely to paint an Indian does not create an indigenous art.’’ 74 According to Newman, Tamayo possessed an essential affinity with the ancient and Primitive that precluded his engagement with the concerns of contemporary Mexicans. Such involvement in the politics of the modern nation, Newman argued, could lead only to sentimentalism (which was, for Newman, no real solution; indeed, it was dangerous). In arguing for art’s essential separation from contemporary politics, Newman suggested that such marriages of convenience between art and politics were doomed to failure for a ‘‘lack of understanding of what art is about—of its nature.’’ 75 Citing Tamayo’s use of the symbols of the jaguar and the serpent drawn from the archive of Pre-Columbian imagery, Newman claimed that Tamayo had successfully assimilated the fundamental Primitive capacity for ‘‘terror’’ and ‘‘tragedy,’’ which he assumed to be basic to Primitive experience. Tamayo and Gottlieb, Newman asserted, believed that art transcended time and place, that the key to art’s nature was its ability to ‘‘recapture the basic terror, the brutality of life’’ (Tamayo), or ‘‘the tragedy of life’’ (Gottlieb).76 Both artists, Newman argued, were deeply involved with the exploration of the implications of ‘‘myth’’—but in the most universal sense. ‘‘Nowhere,’’ he wrote, ‘‘are these artists interested in the illustration of any particular myth. They are concerned with the expression of its implications.’’ Gottlieb, for example, was linked to the Native traditions of the Northwest Coast by his use of abstraction ‘‘to present a concrete myth.’’

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Importantly, Newman’s project depended on the assimilation of Native American visual cultures into a universal theory of cultural identity. Crucially, however, his reading of these artists’ work in light of a putative affinity with Native American sources is compromised by his superficial misreading of indigenous cultures. Newman’s curatorial activities continued after the end of the war. His 1947 group exhibition for the Betty Parsons Gallery, The Ideographic Picture, crystallized the theories that he had been developing since the early 1940s. The exhibition, which included all of the artists represented by Parsons’s gallery (including Newman himself ), also firmly established the core group of American modernist painters whose works embodied Newman’s concerns with the intimacy of the Primitive and modern. Newman’s essay provided a reading of the new painting in light of the ‘‘interAmerican consciousness’’ forged by the elective affinity of the Primitive and the modern. As Newman wrote, ‘‘Spontaneous, and emerging from several points, there has arisen during the war years a new force in American painting that is the modern counterpoint of the primitive art impulse.’’ Comparing the modernist painter to the Northwest Coast Indian painter, Newman wrote that the new American artist was not interested in pure abstraction—‘‘the meaningless materialism of design . . . the pleasant play of nonobjective pattern, [left] to the women basket makers,’’ while the ‘‘everyday realities he [the new American artist] left to the toymakers’’ (and, apparently, the American Scene painters). Rather, Newman wrote, for the Northwest Coast Indian painter, ‘‘a shape was a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable.’’ 77 Newman argued for the autonomy of the modernist artwork from the ‘‘everyday,’’ and suggested that the artwork as ‘‘pure idea’’ partook of universal truths: ‘‘The basis of an aesthetic act is the pure idea. . . . The pure idea is, of necessity, an aesthetic act. . . . For it is only the pure idea that has meaning. Everything else has everything else.’’ 78 According to Newman, the new painting forged an aesthetic affinity with the traditions of the Primitive Americas into a universal project. Thus, Newman’s writings on Native American arts reinscribed indigenous traditions into a universal visual experience wherein the autonomous object transcended the vicissitudes of nation and identity. But Newman’s interests were also deeply political in the sense that he imagined that the new painting would transcend the jingoism of outmoded American and European racial nationalisms; that is, the ideologies of white supremacy, antiSemitism, and the like. These artists, Newman claimed, eschewed the ‘‘everything else’’ of nationalistic politics. For Newman, the Primitive was the key to founding a new culture in the Americas. As such, Newman’s postwar avant-garde furthered the earlier projects of John Collier and other reformers who had imagined Native

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culture as central to a reconstructed American culture in the 1920s and 1930s. However, Newman’s Primitivism did not desire to reconstruct the nation but rather to transcend it.

ABANDONING THE PRIMITIVE

For the artists of the New York School during the war, Native American culture had provided the solution to a crisis of nationalism, much as the idea of Africa had enabled Pablo Picasso in Paris in the early 1900s to distance his art from the stultifying tradition of the academies. Unlike their predecessors in the 1930s who sought to give visual form to the history and culture of the nation, Newman and his cohort pledged allegiance to the timeless values of the primitive universal. Distancing himself from a dangerous culture of jingoism and isolationism, Newman spoke of Americanness (or his Jewishness, for that matter) as little more than an accident of birth, and he likened the modernist culture he was founding to the universality of science. The Primitive, an abstract category that promised to transcend history and the nation, facilitated this paradigm shift, enabling Newman to reimagine culture and identity as universal. But by the end of the 1940s Primitivism had been used up or assimilated into the largely nonobjective and recalcitrant style of Abstract Expressionism. Indeed, by the 1950s many saw Native American cultures as stifling to individual freedom and innovation. After the war, Primitivism, which had been defined primarily by the appropriation of Native American styles and motifs, was laid aside as artists pursued a deeply individualized and psychologized art practice that celebrated the artist as transcendent individual. The notion of the gesture—the mark or ‘‘signature’’ that revealed the artist’s unique hand and individual identity—displaced the Primitive as the privileged site of authenticity and aesthetic authority for artists. The individual as artist-creator was encouraged to embrace a more basic, existential freedom. With his prolific writings, work as a curator, and advocacy for the avant-garde painters of the New York School, Newman had by the end of the war emerged as a spokesman for his generation of Abstract Expressionist artists. By this time, the psychic energy of the Primitive had been absorbed into a new art. Newman and his cohort believed that they had freed themselves from the accumulated baggage of tradition—indeed, from the problem of subject matter altogether. As he exclaimed in his 1948 essay ‘‘The Sublime Is Now’’: ‘‘We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of

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Christ, man, or ‘life,’ we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.’’ 79 For his part, Newman abandoned overt visual and verbal references to the Primitive as he made his breakthrough paintings and developed the signature style in which he would work for the remainder of his career. Indeed, Newman emerged as a major painter in his own right in 1948 with his signature series of ‘‘zip’’ paintings. These were radically reductive artworks—flat, undifferentiated fields of color interrupted by narrow vertical stripes. Newman’s breakthrough works abandoned the Primitivist themes of his earlier work, and the notion of the sublime—a transcendent category of human experience independent of history and place—assumed a position of central importance. Thomas Hess describes the creation of Newman’s first large-scale zip painting, Onement 1: ‘‘On his birthday, January 29, 1948, he prepared a small canvas with a surface of cadmium red dark (a deep mineral color that looks like an earth pigment—like Indian red or a sienna), and fixed a piece of tape down the center. . . . He quickly smeared a coat of cadmium red light over the tape, to test the color. He looked at the picture for a long time. Indeed he studied it for some eight months. He had finished questing.’’ 80 In a recent reading of the development of Newman’s art in the late 1940s, critic Yve-Alain Bois connects the composition of Onement 1, with its monochromatic visual field bisected by a ‘‘zip’’ of a lighter value and its deliberate conflation of the relationship between figure and ground or positive and negative space, to the bilateral symmetry and vertical orientation of the human body [figure 8]. Importantly, Bois does not attempt to recover a hidden level of representation in Newman’s ‘‘zip’’ paintings. Rather, Bois describes Onement 1 as an embodiment of the moment of human perception; that is, the view that Newman ‘‘finished questing’’ when he arrived at a composition that succeeded in the ‘‘anchoring of perception in the ‘prehistorical’ knowledge of our body without referring to the originary condition of its orientation in space.’’ 81 Here, the Primitive seems to be supplanted by a new attention to phenomenological experience. Other Abstract Expressionists also abandoned overtly Primitivist content in their paintings. Pollock’s famous paintings of 1948–1950 broke with the Primitivist imagery of She Wolf to create weblike traceries of paint dripped onto the horizontal canvas in an improvisational manner. Indeed, moma curator William Rubin described the postwar period in terms of an ‘‘intellectualized primitivism,’’ wherein the ‘‘object-to-object relationship’’ between the artists and their tribal sources ‘‘has largely been displaced.’’ 82 Critic Harold Rosenberg, who was in close contact with the artists of the New York school, heralded the arrival of the artist as transcendent individual in his 1952 Art News essay, ‘‘The American Action Painters.’’ ‘‘The big moment came,’’ he wrote,

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‘‘when it was decided to paint . . . just to paint. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from value—political, esthetic, moral.’’ 83 Rosenberg placed the figure of the individual artist—the subject—at the center of his criticism, and in so doing he gave voice to the painters’ insistence that their art was related to interior states of mind. Influenced by existentialist thought and by the Surrealist practices of automatic writing, Rosenberg defined the artist as an actor and the canvas as an arena. Rosenberg’s action painter worked through a process of free improvisation and on-the-spot problem solving—without the benefit of culture or tradition, and with only personal wit and ingenuity as a guide. Instead of a representation, the resulting painting was a record and an index of the artist’s individual intention and action. Each gestural mark—brushstroke, splatter, or drip—responded not to a model in the visible world but to the network of marks that preceded it. The most basic human qualities of feeling and intuition, rather than training and skill, were prized qualities for Rosenberg’s painter. The Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell described his working method in terms consonant with Rosenberg’s: ‘‘I begin a painting with a series of mistakes. The painting comes out of the correction of mistakes by feeling. . . . Ultimate unifications come about through modulation of the surface by innumerable trials and error. The final picture is the process arrested at the moment when what I was looking for flashes into view.’’ 84 The method of action painting was performative and open to accident, but ultimately it was resolved by the controlling vision of the individual artist. For Rosenberg, the new painting was understood as a matter of encounter and performance: ‘‘At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event . . . The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind, he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter.’’ 85 However, the Primitive retained much of its power for Newman. Bois links Newman’s embodiment in Onement 1 of the most basic facts of human perception to the characteristic bilateral symmetry of Northwest Coast Indian painting described by Newman in his essays on the paintings of Adolph Gottlieb. Indeed, Newman continued to write of the power of the Primitive. In an unpublished 1949 essay, Newman described a visit to prehistoric mound sites in southeastern Ohio: ‘‘Standing before the Miamisburg mound, or walking inside the Fort Ancient and Newark earthworks, surrounded by these simple walls made of mud, one is confounded by a multiplicity of sensations: that here are the greatest works of art on the American continent,

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before which the Mexican and Northwest Coast totem poles are hysterical, overemphasized monsters; that here in the seductive Ohio Valley are perhaps the greatest art monuments in the world, for somehow the Egyptian pyramid by comparison is nothing but an ornament—what difference if the shape is on a table, a pedestal, or lies immense on a desert? Here is the self-evident nature of the artistic act, its utter simplicity.’’ 86 However, as the passage above suggests, the power of the Primitive for Newman lay in the very fact that it was in some sense irretrievably lost. Its alienness and inscrutability made it an ideal projection screen for Newman’s own politics and aesthetic ambitions. While the idea of an indigenous art was central to Newman’s idea of a transformed culture and ‘‘inter-American consciousness,’’ living Native people were effectively erased. Vanished and known only through ruins and redeemed artifacts, Native Americans were for Newman a usable past, but were ultimately usable only as a past. Thus, while the Primitive universal had power for Newman, it was a deeply flawed notion. As Thomas McEvilley has noted, modernist Primitivism ‘‘illustrates, without consciously intending to, the parochial limitations of our world view and the almost autistic reflexivity of Western civilization’s modes of relating to the culturally Other.’’ 87 In a similar vein, but perhaps more to the point, Hal Foster has described Primitivism as ‘‘a metonym of imperialism, which served to disavow these preconditions.’’ 88 And Steven Leuthold has written, ‘‘The universalist assumptions of modernism—that universal formal principles of art account for, say, African sculpture or northwest Coast Indian masks for non-native viewers—exist in contradiction to the actual economic conditions of production and reception that marked the time of the development of these universalist assumptions.’’ 89 Still, Newman’s Primitivism fulfilled an important cultural and political role for his modernist self-fashioning and his efforts to gain a position of aesthetic authority in post–World War II America at the same time that it imparted an ambivalent legacy for living, contemporary Native artists. To be sure, the Native American artworks that were brought into the horizon of American modernism defined Primitivism as a cultural dialogue, even if the terms were unequal. Thus, although accusations of cultural appropriation carry some obvious moral authority, twentieth-century Primitivism should not be seen as merely an oppressive act of cultural theft. In many ways, Newman’s modernist Primitivism opened up the notion of a ‘‘third space’’ as defined by Homi Bhabha.90 This third space—resulting from the aesthetic blending of modernist and indigenous forms—was a cultural arena for the representation of cultural and spiritual practices that remained persecuted and repressed in the real social and political world where Indians and whites interacted. Such a space provided a platform

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from which Native and non-Native artists asserted the value of cultural difference. Primitivism thus enabled American artists to reconstruct a universal modernist culture while, conversely, it opened up an aesthetic space for Native artists to claim a modernist subjectivity. To be sure, however, the space opened up by modernist Primitivism was modest and conflicted. As such, the art world’s fascination with the Primitive universal may be seen as a microcosm of American pluralism. The place of actual Others—artists of color, Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, and women—was less assured. A climate of institutional apartheid still limited the realworld opportunities of those who could not claim whiteness and maleness. However, like the unfulfilled commitment of the United States to the values of pluralism and integration, Newman’s notion of the Primitive universal stumbled over the issues of race and gender; universality was never universal. Rather, the avant-garde claim on Native America functioned as a tool for the integration and upward social mobility of one group of cultural outsiders, while others were further marginalized. While Native American artists and writers including Houle and McMaster identify the value of Newman’s modernist fascination with Native American art, his legacy is more ambivalent. Ultimately, Primitivism entailed a violent misreading of Native American culture as undifferentiated and ahistorical—existing beyond time and space as a preserve of universal creative spirit. Native American culture offered a storehouse of ideas and images, which could be mined by artists such as Newman for their own purposes. While this had a salutary effect for Newman’s recasting of American modernist culture, it also rendered living Indian artists invisible and denied Native American artists their own modernity.

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The Importance of Place: The Ojibwe Modernism of Patrick DesJarlait and George Morrison

Place is a special kind of object. It is a concretion of value, though not a valued thing that can be handled or carried about easily; it is an object in which one can dwell. —YI-FU TUAN, SPACE AND PLACE Place determines who we are in that it establishes our relationships to everything around us. Our cultures, including our aesthetic productions, grow out of our relationship to place. I say relationship rather than ‘‘connection,’’ because the latter’s meaning seems too mechanical to express the rich intermesh between a person and a place in Native life. It is not simply a ‘‘connection to the land,’’ but a multidimensional interdependence between place and community that shapes the way we live and think.—W. RICHARD WEST (CHEYENNE-ARAPAHO), ‘‘THE CENTRALITY OF PLACE’’

while barnett newman recognized the power of native american culture, he could only imagine Indians in the past as Primitives and as a resource to be discovered and exploited by non-Native modernists. He could not see modern Native Americans living in his midst—responding, as he did, to the world transformed by modernity—or even literally living in the same neighborhood. The Ojibwe artists Patrick Robert DesJarlait (1921–1972) and George Morrison (1919–2000) were, to be sure, modern artists in the strict sense of the term. They came of age artistically in the 1940s, and they developed personal styles that departed from the Santa Fe and Oklahoma schools of Native American painting, which had predominated since the 1930s. They worked separately: DesJarlait developed his signature style—derived from American Regionalism and the Mexican muralists of the 1930s—in Arizona and California during the Second World War; Morrison developed his Abstract Expressionist style in dialogue with the artists of the postwar New York School. While their paintings resembled the work of European and American modern artists, they were different in important and significant ways from their non-Native peers. Indeed, to privilege only their bold modernist styles is to repeat the familiar Primitivist misperception that innovative artworks by Native American artists are somehow ‘‘not Indian.’’ 1

The art of DesJarlait and Morrison emerged from and responded to their experience as Native Americans in the twentieth century. Drawing from a well of experience and tradition unique to them as Native American artists, DesJarlait and Morrison created an alternative modernism, identified with specific (local, tribal) places and rooted in the past, yet also relevant to the present and future situations of modern Native Americans. Even as federal policy worked to urbanize Native Americans in the post–World War II era, they did not abandon their commitments to the local and the tribal even as they adapted and melded Native concerns with modernist forms. In their art, DesJarlait and Morrison retained a uniquely Native American perspective; they forged a Native American modernism that maintained traditional connections to place—notably their tribal homelands on the Red Lake and Grand Portage Ojibwe reservations in northern Minnesota.2 As the art historian Kate Morris writes in an essay on the power of place for contemporary Native American artists, ‘‘The physical land is the fabric from which a people’s history is woven.’’ 3 Indeed, the paintings of DesJarlait and Morrison embodied deeply felt connections to the specific geography of northern Minnesota and to their identities as Ojibwe artists. As such, their modernism resonates with the philosopher Scott Pratt’s description of Native American traditions of ‘‘emplacement’’ in Native homelands. As Pratt has argued for Native American narrative and oral traditions, Native homelands function as ‘‘the center in terms of which the events of the story get their meaning.’’ 4 In Native American oral tradition, Pratt writes, ‘‘When language is continuous with action and place, that is, when it is grounded, it has the potential to foster growth and the production of new meaning. The key to emplacement, to gaining a place, is the recognition of the literally embodied connections between meaning and action. Emplacement is a process of interaction, of being put and staying put on a given land.’’ 5 Similarly, DesJarlait and Morrison maintained powerful connections to Red Lake and Grand Portage, where their people had lived for generations because the land was not ceded or consolidated during the allotment era of the nineteenth century. And while as figures of the twentieth century neither artist could be described as ‘‘being put and staying put on a given land’’—given that their modern lives led DesJarlait and Morrison away from their reservations to discover their artistic vision in the larger world—their traditional homelands became in their art an essential resource for both artists. DesJarlait painted the image of Red Lake and its people throughout his career; Morrison rediscovered the value of localized, traditional knowledge after having made a career in the non-Native art world. It is important to note that unlike Newman and his New York avant-garde cohort, DesJarlait and Morrison did not hold the same dreams for a modernist utopia of dis-

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solving borders. While Newman and the Abstract Expressionists mined the power of the Primitive to create a universal art that could speak across cultural divisions, the Native American modernism of DesJarlait and Morrison was concerned with imagining a place for the continuity of tradition in a changed world.

PATRICK DESJARLAIT

As an early innovator who developed a personal style distinct from the dominant studio style of Native American painting during World War II, DesJarlait is often cited as the first Native American modernist painter.6 His modern style notwithstanding, however, DesJarlait’s innovative artworks resonate with tradition and his powerful connections to place. He adopted and adapted European-American painting styles to embody his deeply felt connections to the Red Lake Ojibwe reservation in northern Minnesota, which remained the subject of his innovative watercolor paintings even though he spent his adult life in Arizona, California, and urban Minneapolis–St. Paul. So far from home, DesJarlait’s traditional homeland and people provided him with an invaluable reference and resource throughout his life. Born in 1921 to Solomon and Elizabeth Blake DesJarlait of Red Lake, Patrick DesJarlait was the fourth of seven children. He inherited his French surname from a fur trapper grandfather, who had married an Ojibwe woman. As a child, DesJarlait was named Nagawbo (or ‘‘Boy of the Woods’’), but later his Catholic parents gave him the name Patrick in honor of the Irish saint. As a Red Lake Ojibwe, DesJarlait was born into a world in which connections to the land were powerfully felt. Today, the Red Lake Ojibwe Nation comprises 564,426 acres, an area roughly equal in size to the state of Rhode Island. The people of Red Lake are one of six Ojibwe communities in Minnesota that were not relocated to the White Earth Reservation, which was created by treaty in 1867 to be the home for all of the Ojibwe people in the state even though it was never the historic territory of any group. The Red Lake Ojibwe today live on a diminished reservation; however, they continue to live on traditional tribal lands occupied since the 1750s when the area was vacated by the Dakota. The local historical sites of Battle River and Sandy River mark where the last battles were fought between the Dakota and the Ojibwe in 1765. The Red Lake Band of Ojibwe have maintained what remains of their traditional lands into the twentieth century through the adroit use of treaties, agreements, and strategic land cessions. The 1863 Old Crossing Treaty ceded 11,000,000 acres to the United States, before the Congress of 1871 abolished treaty making as a means of dealing with Indian nations. In Red Lake, Independence Day is celebrated on July

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sixth to honor the courage of tribal leaders who resisted government allotment in 1889, when 2,905,000 acres were ceded. However, the main reservation surrounding Lower Red Lake and a portion of Upper Red Lake were never ceded. Under the Agreement of 1904, the Red Lake Band ceded another 2,256,152 acres, and in so doing the group was guaranteed that the provisions of existing treaties would be honored. DesJarlait’s autobiography, Conversations with a Native American Artist, was based on interviews conducted shortly before the artist’s death in 1972, and it was published as a children’s book in 1975.7 DesJarlait’s autobiography depicts his life episodically, as he travels away from and back to Red Lake. While DesJarlait did not remain at Red Lake, the reservation functions as the place—or center—in terms of which his identity and experience as an Ojibwe are given meaning. As a child DesJarlait was sent to St. Mary’s, a Catholic boarding school in the neighboring village of Redby.8 As DesJarlait recalled, St. Mary’s exemplified the assimilationist philosophy that had characterized church and federal Indian schools since the late nineteenth century. ‘‘All the Chippewa school children had to live at the school,’’ he wrote, ‘‘even though some of our homes were only half a mile away.’’ Rigid Catholicism supplanted Ojibwe culture in the daily lives of the students. ‘‘Our lives at St. Mary’s were dominated by Catholic traditions,’’ DesJarlait wrote. ‘‘We were not allowed to speak to one another in Chippewa or to participate in activities related to our heritage. Traditional Chippewa games, dancing, and crafts were forbidden. By imposing these restrictions, the school hoped to encourage us to accept the white people’s way of life.’’ 9 From an early age DesJarlait had artistic ambitions. He recalled sketching as a child, even during an early bout with trachoma, an illness common among Indian families and one that often caused total blindness.10 But his early art aspirations were often thwarted by the realities of reservation life. As he remembered, ‘‘Dad wanted me to cut timber and chop pulp. He couldn’t understand how I could make money painting.’’ 11 Throughout his childhood, DesJarlait did not consider art a living for a ‘‘reservation Indian.’’ Instead, he imagined a life much like that of his father. ‘‘I thought that I would always live at Red Lake and that I would eventually earn my living in the lumber mill or at the fisheries,’’ he wrote. ‘‘It didn’t occur to me that there was any other way of life open to me.’’ 12 DesJarlait’s understanding of life beyond the reservation expanded as a young man. He was sent to the Pipestone Boarding School in southwestern Minnesota, from which he graduated in 1935. At Pipestone, DesJarlait also met and worked with non-Indians, and as a member of the Boy Scouts he traveled to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. In the summers, DesJarlait worked for the Indian Division of the Civilian

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Conservation Corps (ccc), a New Deal agency that during the Depression employed more than three thousand Native American men by providing work and vocational training in conserving and developing rural resources.13 DesJarlait’s artistic interests were encouraged by his white teachers. At Pipestone, he carved small pipestone sculptures for sale in local tourist shops, and as a Boy Scout he earned merit badges in art and woodcarving. On his Boy Scout trip to Sioux Falls, he created a display of artwork that featured paintings of traditional Ojibwe life and a model of an Ojibwe canoe. At Red Lake High School, DesJarlait’s teachers supported his aspirations. ‘‘My English teacher at Red Lake High School inspired me the most,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Dorothy Ross helped me get equipment for my painting and even let me skip some English classes to paint.’’ 14 Under Ross’s guidance, his interests in art developed and he began to see commercial art as a ‘‘practical way to earn a living in the white man’s world.’’ 15 Indeed, DesJarlait’s artistic abilities and education would lead him far from Red Lake and would affect his understanding of himself and his art in the larger world. After graduating from high school in 1939 DesJarlait was awarded a scholarship from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (bia), and he attended Arizona State College in Phoenix from 1940 to 1942. In 1942, he met and married Eleanor Luther of Laguna Pueblo, with whom he had a daughter, Patricia. At Arizona State College, DesJarlait enrolled in art appreciation courses, which introduced him to the history of European art and to modernism. During college, he lived in the dormitory of the nearby Phoenix Indian School, he enrolled in additional afternoon classes in Indian arts and crafts and still life oil painting, and he took classes in mural painting with the Swedish muralist Olle Nordmark.16 In his art classes at the Phoenix Indian School, surrounded by Indian students from the Southwest, DesJarlait noted that his own artistic style differed from the approach of the Pueblo students who worked in the well-known studio style. ‘‘I . . . found that other Indian students . . . were painting in a completely different style than I was,’’ he wrote. ‘‘My style was almost photographically realistic, whereas they presented their subject matter in a flat, profile style that reminded me of ancient Egyptian art.’’ 17 The events of the Second World War expanded DesJarlait’s horizons further. In spring 1942, on the recommendation of his teachers at the Phoenix Indian School (including possibly Nordmark), DesJarlait was recruited by a representative of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to organize an art program at the Colorado River War Relocation Center, a Japanese internment camp in Poston, Arizona.18 The relocation center at Poston was initially organized under the direction of the bia, which ran the camp under contract for the War Relocation Authority from April 1942 to Decem-

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ber 1943, during which time DesJarlait served a six-month tenure as art director.19 DesJarlait’s charge was to organize a sign making operation and an art department to occupy the Japanese internees, many of whom had worked in Hollywood studios before relocation. His experience with Nisei (second-generation) detainees, U.S. citizens like himself, affected DesJarlait and led him to draw parallels to his own experience so far from home. ‘‘I had a great sympathy for the Japanese,’’ he wrote, ‘‘because they had been placed in a situation similar to that of my own people. They were forced to move from their homes to remote and restricted areas, as many Native Americans had been forced to do.’’ 20 In September 1942, DesJarlait was called up for active duty and moved to San Diego, where he worked for the remainder of the war in the U.S. Navy Visual Aids Department as an animator producing training films. As he described the experience, ‘‘There were fourteen men, all experts from the Walt Disney Studios; we learned film animation and production from them. We worked with the print shop, the photo department. We all worked and lived in one area at the base. It made us a team, with good esprit de corps.’’ 21 In the navy during the war, DesJarlait began to see himself as a representative of his Ojibwe community in the broader world. In this sense of his place, DesJarlait’s experience resonated with that of others in his generation of Native Americans during the war years. As a result of his participation in the federal ccc programs, his biafunded college education in Arizona, and his work in the multiethnic milieu of the war industries in Southern California, DesJarlait’s world was dramatically expanded. Moreover, his experiences with Japanese American internees in the Poston relocation camp impressed upon DesJarlait a sense of urgency to bring to the broader American public an understanding of contemporary Native Americans. On the occasion of his first gallery exhibition in 1945, DesJarlait told a San Diego newspaper: ‘‘It is my hope that I can bring a better understanding of my people, the American Indians, through my work.’’ 22

RETURN TO RED LAKE

DesJarlait was honorably discharged from the navy on November 20, 1945, and he returned to Red Lake. After the war his wife Eleanor did not want to leave her home in the Southwest, and their marriage dissolved in 1945. During his first year back in Minnesota, however, DesJarlait remarried—this time to Ramona Needham of the Red Lake Band of Ojibwe, with whom he would have five children.23 DesJarlait described his return to Red Lake as ‘‘a time for keen observation. I wanted to record everything I could learn about my people and their way of life. I had strong per-

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sonal feelings about keeping my subject matter unique and original, and I also felt compelled to tell the story of my people through my paintings. I have always wanted to show others the interest and pride that the Chippewa take in their families, their ceremonies, and their environment.’’ 24 During the first year he spent in Red Lake following the war, DesJarlait developed the repertoire of subject matter—social events, individual workers and craftspeople, cooperative group activities, and the Ojibwe family unit—to which he would return throughout his career. The figures and settings in DesJarlait’s paintings of Red Lake are somewhat anonymous because they function not as portraits but as types, or as iconic images of the Ojibwe people. These images, which are made monumental by their central placement and large scale, appear as the solid and stylized forms seen in the murals of Diego Rivera and other Mexican muralists of the 1930s. Forms are rendered in intense, opaque watercolors that are reduced and simplified into interlocking geometric planes reminiscent of the paintings of the African American artist Jacob Lawrence. The lake itself is visible in many of DesJarlait’s pictures, and all of DesJarlait’s subjects invoke the importance of Ojibwe emplacement and the continuing role of cultural traditions in contemporary Ojibwe life and identity—on the Red Lake reservation as well as in urban environments. In the paintings, for example, scenes such as that of Ojibwe fishermen on Red Lake document the contemporary life of Minnesota Ojibwe peoples, as do the scenes of maple sugar refining and the wild rice harvest—the paintings of which were prize winners in the Philbrook Indian Annual exhibitions in 1946 and 1947. DesJarlait’s work speaks to the continuity of the culture and economy of Red Lake, even as modern technologies are adapted and assimilated into traditional seasonal practices. As the art historian Julie Ann Coleman writes, DesJarlait’s paintings ‘‘reflect the reality of Ojibwe traditional life as inseparable from the world of the modern Ojibwe.’’ 25 With its bold, abstracted forms and dynamic composition, Red Lake Fishermen of 1946 depicts two Ojibwe men in a small, wooden rowboat [figure 9]. They wear heavy aprons, gloves, rubber boots, and wool felt hats. Like their contemporary clothing, their boat is of modern manufacture and not a traditional birch bark canoe. The horizon line of the lake against the sky is located out of frame, above the upper edge of the composition. This effect flattens the space of the picture to allow a view from above into the boat, the bottom of which contains a net full of fish. The man to the left hauls a second load on board; he leans backward on his right leg as he drags the net into the boat. The man on the right leans forward, resting his left arm on his left knee, and he holds an oar pointing to the left with his right arm. The interplay between these two figures in action creates a centralized circular movement that is contained within the composition—a dynamic arrangement of centrifugal forces held the importance of place 95

in tension around a central point, where the figures’ legs cross behind the brightly highlighted body of a fish caught in the net. The painting depicts fishing as central to the economy and culture of Red Lake. Ojibwe fishermen sold their catch through the Red Lake Fisheries, which had been organized under Minnesota law to produce fish as a wartime measure during World War I. Later, in 1929, it was reconstituted as a Native-run cooperative. Red Lake Fishermen, like many of DesJarlait’s paintings, presents an image of traditional subsistence activities as practiced by a resilient community unbroken by the economic disruptions of allotment, depression, war, migration, and urbanization. Cooperative work thus plays a role in community identity, as traditional practices of labor and production allow the Red Lake Ojibwe to persevere in the modern world. Similarly, Maple Sugar Time, which won a ‘‘citation of honor’’ in the Woodland division of the 1946 Philbrook Indian Annual, depicts traditional, cooperative labor performed by modern Ojibwe men and women [figure 10]. Although maple sugaring was a traditional activity at Red Lake, it was not a major economic activity. The seasonal process of collecting maple sap and refining it into sugar is illustrated through five interlocking figures that occupy the crowded foreground of a forest scene. DesJarlait’s use of a technique similar to the Cubist facture—shifting between two- and three-dimensionality—allows the viewer to read in a single pictorial space each step in the process of maple sugaring. Through the compression of elements a narrative emerges that follows an S-shaped curve from the upper-right corner of the painting to the bottom left. An Ojibwe man on the right carries clear maple sap collected from a tree (traditionally done in birch bark baskets, but here in steel pail); next, the sap is poured into iron kettles and heated over a fire until it thickens into syrup. A woman in a headscarf in the center of the painting stirs the sap. A man to her left stirs the thickening syrup—the change of state signaled by the change of color from bright white to rich amber. The thickened syrup is poured into wooden troughs, where a fourth figure—the woman in the lower right—stirs it with a wooden paddle until it separates into grains of sugar. The woman at bottom left stitches together a traditional birch bark basket, in which the sugar is stored or sold in grocery stores or tourist shops in nearby towns such as Bemidji. The entire composition is framed and contained underneath two branches, which support four large iron kettles that are brightly highlighted and placed at the center of the painting. As in Red Lake Fishermen, the painting Maple Sugar Time suggests productive energies centralized and contained. DesJarlait painted a third major Red Lake picture, Making Wild Rice, in 1946 [figure 11]. The painting, which won first purchase prize in the Woodland division

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at the Second Philbrook Indian Annual, depicts the production of wild rice—or mahnomin—a staple of the traditional diet of the Red Lake Ojibwe. While rice production, like fishing and maple sugaring, had been affected by the introduction of new technology, in DesJarlait’s depiction it had not been fundamentally transformed, and the seasonal cycle of the harvest still promoted the continuity of traditional culture. Wild rice was not plentiful at Red Lake, so families traveled fifty miles south to the White Earth Ojibwe Reservation for the two-week harvest every fall. The rice, which grows in water and is harvested in boats, is collected and returned to Red Lake for processing. In Making Wild Rice, DesJarlait depicts this traditional activity as practiced by modern Ojibwe men and women. In DesJarlait’s painting, the adoption of new technologies (e.g., iron kettles) does not signal the end of traditional ways of living and working together or the fragmentation of the communities that are united by the harvest; rather, the changes and adaptations take place within the context of a continuous and vital cultural tradition. The composition of Making Wild Rice is self-contained and viewed from above against a flat ground-plane. The ground is scattered with fallen leaves and run through with roots or footpaths that unite the three figures into a single unit. As in Maple Sugar Time, an implied compositional S-shaped curve organizes the figures (two men and a woman) who illustrate the three steps in wild rice processing. In the upper half of the painting, we see the process of parching. The harvested rice is put in a large metal kettle (in the upper-left corner of the painting) and heated over a fire until the husks burst. DesJarlait has depicted the kettle as if from above, while the man to the right who stirs the kettle is presented in profile. As he reaches across the upper half of the painting to stir the grains of rice in the kettle, his arm and paddle act to contain the scene in a compositional device that recalls the framing branches of Maple Sugar Time. In addition, as in Red Lake Fishermen the horizon line has been pushed out of the frame. Following the S curve to the lower-right corner we see another man, known as a trampler or mamishkoogum, who wears buckskin moccasins and stands with both feet in a steel bucket. Traditionally, Ojibwe men loosened the hulls of the wild rice by dancing or ‘‘jigging’’ in a hole in the ground lined with buckskin. The trampler wore spotless new white moccasins that had never touched the ground, because if the moccasins were not clean the next year’s harvest would be poor. In this painting the trampler is jigging the rice in a steel bucket, although in later versions of the scene DesJarlait depicted the trampler jigging the rice in a traditional buckskin-lined pit.26 At the bottom left corner, the third figure, a woman, winnows the rice in a birch bark basket, separating the hull from the grain. In addition to the changes in technology depicted in Making Wild Rice, Des-

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Jarlait also documented changes in the gendering of Ojibwe labor. Rice processing had traditionally been a women’s activity, as opposed to the male activity of hunting. However, contemporary circumstances—the shortage of off-reservation employment and the loss of traditional hunting lands—led men to participate in activities such as rice processing in greater numbers in the twentieth century.27 But regardless of the changing gender politics of work in Red Lake, the visibility of new technology in the context of traditional, seasonal labor, and the modernism of DesJarlait’s style, Making Wild Rice (along with Red Lake Fishermen and Maple Sugar Time) imagines a self-contained world of cooperative, purposeful labor, where the traditional lifestyle of the Ojibwe continues in the seasonal practices of the harvest, which further bind the Red Lake Ojibwe to their place in the world. It is interesting to note, however, that the labor’s final product—the fish, maple sugar, and rice sold to non-Indians and tourists—is absent from DesJarlait’s closed compositions. Also absent are the realities of wage work and the forces of modernization and urbanization experienced by many Ojibwe after World War II. While some families were able to maintain their traditional lifestyles in the northern woodlands by engaging in seasonal agricultural labor and using government assistance, many families (including DesJarlait’s) were forced by circumstances to relocate to cities such as Minneapolis and St. Paul.28 In contrast, the activities that DesJarlait depicted were still performed in much the same way as in the past, implying that the changes visiting DesJarlait’s home in Red Lake would not undermine traditional Ojibwe economy. His paintings, then, were fantasies of an imagined wholeness, which he understood to be in transformation during his own modern lifetime. As DesJarlait explained, ‘‘I am dedicated to painting the Chippewa [Ojibwe] people. . . . In my paintings I give the picture of the ideal people . . . I try to bring out things in my paintings that many white people may never see—the happy people, like the happy mothers and fathers with their children. I never paint about the problems.’’ 29 He further explained Making Wild Rice in a letter to Jeanne Snodgrass, the curator of Native American painting at the Philbrook museum: ‘‘I paint rather primitive because the Indian is gradually rising from that stage, but the Indians that still inhabit the reservation are still primitive in custom and environment, althou[gh] many live like the whitemen there is still that feeling of distance in races of man. I trie [sic] my best to paint and feel the way my subjects appear to me after all my people still carry on traditions like ‘wild rice time’ in the same fashion like there [sic] fore fathers did only differance [sic] is we dress in the style of the whiteman.’’ 30 For DesJarlait, as for many of his generation, Red Lake held few economic opportunities; yet he needed to support a growing family. DesJarlait’s own experience

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was as part of the Second Relocation—the migration to cities after World War II, where Native Americans like himself went in great numbers in search of economic opportunities greater than those found at home. After a year in Red Lake, DesJarlait moved with his family three hundred miles south to St. Paul to pursue a career. For the next twenty-six years DesJarlait worked as a commercial artist for advertising agencies in the Twin Cities area, including Reid Ray Films and Campbell-Mithun, where he helped develop a number of advertising campaigns that used northern woodland Indian images, including the animated bear used in television commercials for Hamm’s Beer; the Minnegasco maiden; the firebird logo for Standard Gas; and the Land O’ Lakes butter maiden.31 As he developed his career as a commercial artist in the Twin Cities, DesJarlait continued to make watercolor paintings at the kitchen table of the suburban St. Paul apartment he shared with his wife and five children.32 Having lived and worked in the Twin Cities since the late 1940s, DesJarlait was aware of the burgeoning militancy of the American Indian Movement (aim), which was founded in Minneapolis in 1968. The militant founders of aim were younger than DesJarlait: they were products of the federal government’s relocation programs of the 1950s and 1960s that sent young Native Americans to cities including Denver, Albuquerque, and Minneapolis–St. Paul. DesJarlait was never affiliated with aim, and he claimed he was nonpolitical. However, even though DesJarlait’s family did not take part in Ojibwe religious ceremonies he did travel regularly to Red Lake, and he shared with the younger aim members a commitment to fostering a sense of Indian pride and knowledge of traditional culture among urban Indians. And while DesJarlait was generally supportive of aim’s efforts on behalf of urban Indians, he did not believe that it was the responsibility of the artist to take a political position.33 Thus, instead of taking a militant stance, DesJarlait chose to create positive, idealized images of the Native American family and community, most often set in Red Lake. In so doing, DesJarlait argued for the relevance of his artworks for the younger generation of urban Native Americans. As he wrote, ‘‘Each of my paintings tells a story about some aspect of Chippewa life. It has always been my hope that my paintings will help to remind my people of their own heritage and that they, in turn, will inform other people about the traditional Chippewa way of life.’’ 34 Significantly, the only urban scenes that DesJarlait painted are his late-1960s pictures of powwow dancers, such as The Chippewa Dancers of 1968 [figure 12]. By the 1960s, powwows had become popular social events in urban centers such as Minneapolis–St. Paul. Intertribal meetings traditionally had served religious and political functions in Native American culture; in the twentieth century, powwows be-

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came primarily social and cultural gatherings that included singing, dancing, feasts, games, and competitions. As the historian Rachel Buff demonstrates, in the postwar period the increasingly secularized urban powwows came to serve as an important expression of heritage and cultural perseverance; as an opportunity to showcase Native American cultures as vibrant and vital; and as a vehicle for the reinvention of group identity in new urban settings.35 DesJarlait applied his brightly colored and dynamic signature style to expressing the vitality of urban powwow culture, which for him was embodied in the energy of the powwow dancers and in their costumes and music: ‘‘My people took great pride in expressing themselves through the art of dancing and I loved to watch their twisting turning movements as they kept time to the beat of the drum.’’ 36

AN ARTIST’S IDENTITY

While DesJarlait did win important awards at the Philbrook show, his modern style was markedly different from that of most of his Native American peers. His depiction of contemporary subjects set him apart, as did the degree of abstraction he brought to his paintings. In the early 1940s at Arizona State College and at the Phoenix Indian School DesJarlait noted his distaste for the ‘‘flat, profile style’’ of the other Indian painters.37 Although he studied for two years in Phoenix, where he became aware of Cubism and of European moderns including Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, DesJarlait considered himself a self-taught artist.38 As he wrote to Snodgrass in 1947, ‘‘I really have never gone to art school, everything I learned was through hard work and determination and seeking further knowledge in the field of art.’’ 39 In a later statement, DesJarlait cited his on-the-job education. He wrote, ‘‘The training I have had was mostly during my years in the Navy, doing art work for the visual education unit. Training films included art work—animation [and] slide films. My training [was] watching other artist[s] & learning.’’ 40 Indeed, DesJarlait was at pains to deny comparisons to other artists. Many writers compared his iconic, blocky figures to the Mexican muralists and the American Regionalists of the 1930s. However, DesJarlait would deny in particular the influence of Mexican art; he believed that the mural styles were too ideological and he considered himself to be an apolitical artist.41 According to his son Robert, DesJarlait did not want to be accused of imitation and he denied the claim of his critics that he had simply applied Rivera’s aesthetic to Ojibwe subject matter. But DesJarlait had studied Rivera’s style in the 1940s at Arizona State College. In a 1964 letter to Jean Snodgrass, DesJarlait noted, ‘‘I like the style of Mexico. Perhaps living in California

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gave me a chance to start building my style of art[.] But as time went by it seem[ed] to flow as my art experience progressed.’’ 42 Robert DesJarlait argues, however, that his father ‘‘understood the socialistic tenets inherent in Rivera’s work and it was for this reason that he rejected Rivera’s influence. He detested the idea, suggested by Native art commentators, that he had been so influenced by Rivera that he simply transposed Rivera’s socialistic imagery to an Ojibwe setting. To him, this assumption of imitation was a denigration of his art. Patrick DesJarlait was not interested in creating universal themes propounding the common man as hero.’’ 43 Instead, DesJarlait was interested in claiming his place as a modern innovator, independent of Mexican influence. To an interviewer, DesJarlait explained: ‘‘I believe my art has the qualities of aesthetic [modernist?] art . . . In my Indian paintings I would venture to say I’m an individual—I express my ideas in my own way.’’ 44 As he wrote to Snodgrass in 1964, contrasting his own art with traditional artists, ‘‘I firmly believe everyone should have an individual style. To me the American Indian style of art follows a set pattern. Most of the art work that is done goes back to days of old[;] everything is beautiful and secure . . . If more artists paint what they see today perhaps it will help promote the status of the Indian in his present day environment.’’ 45 DesJarlait’s paintings have also been compared by some writers to traditional Ojibwe artworks, such as birch bark scrolls, beaded bandolier bags, or song boards and scrolls, which featured geometric and floral patterns. DesJarlait recalled that at Red Lake Senior High School a white teacher had encouraged him to study the color and symbolism of these motifs in traditional Ojibwe design.46 DesJarlait began including images of these objects in his paintings beginning in the late 1960s, such as in the 1970 painting Basket Maker [figure 13]. DesJarlait’s practice of creating an outline and filling it in with layers of individual opaque watercolors seems to mimic the process of stitching and embroidering, as does his use of multiple shades of a hue to fill in large areas of color.47 DesJarlait’s position on his relationship to traditional Ojibwe art changed, however, throughout his career. In a 1945 statement, he wrote, ‘‘I think my color and design comes from the Indian craftwork such as beadwork and porcupine quillwork which I have seen all my life.’’ 48 But by the 1960s DesJarlait disavowed any such influence, much as he had denied any association with Rivera. Unwilling to have his individual achievements and innovative art undermined by comparisons and suggestions that he was a derivative artist, he wrote, ‘‘I don’t know anything about beadwork.’’ 49 But while DesJarlait was concerned with innovation, more important to him was the history communicated in his paintings, which he saw as the contemporary equivalent of Ojibwe oral traditions and storytelling. This was a task that DesJar-

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lait felt with particular urgency. He often expressed a concern that the traditional Ojibwe life he had known as a child was ‘‘fading away’’ under the impact of modernization and urbanization, which he himself knew and experienced as an artist. In his 1947 statement for the Philbrook Indian Annual, he wrote, ‘‘I feel that in [the years] to come the tradition of the American Indian will be only a memory. It is up to the Indian Artist to paint and preserve these traditions or tradition will vanish with time.’’ 50 Believing that the traditional culture of the Ojibwe was fading away, he explained, ‘‘The world was changing so fast and our life was changing too. There were so many things that people didn’t know about us, that even young Chippewa didn’t know or remember about our wonderful way of life. I knew then what I wanted to do: somehow I was going to paint the story of my people!’’ 51 Yet despite his sense of the urgency of preserving a fading way of life, from the visual evidence he presented in his paintings—particularly of the urban powwow dancers—his Ojibwe culture was vibrant and adaptive, even if the center was shifting from Red Lake to the Twin Cities and a new generation of artists and activists. DesJarlait spent the last years of his life traveling and making presentations at public schools and colleges, in which he discussed Ojibwe life and the importance of education. During these years he also collaborated with Neva Williams on his autobiography. Even as he worked in Minneapolis–St. Paul’s modern, urban setting, Red Lake continued to function as a resource—the center of his life and identity. As he wrote to Snodgrass, ‘‘To me the woodland Indian has a whole wealth of material to last me a life time.’’ 52

GEORGE MORRISON

The life of the Ojibwe artist George Morrison involved patterns of displacement and return that were similar to those experienced by DesJarlait. Like DesJarlait, Morrison made an extended sojourn in the non-Native world when he left Minnesota as a young man to pursue a career in the mainstream art world. Later, he met with success living and working in the Northeast and in Europe. As an Abstract Expressionist painter, Morrison exhibited his work in New York. Like DesJarlait’s journey, Morrison’s path also led back home. Morrison’s autobiography, Turning the Feather Around: My Life in Art, was based on interviews with the writer Margot Fortunato Galt. Published in 1998, two years before his death in 2000, Morrison’s autobiography is, like DesJarlait’s, organized around journeys away from and back to northern Minnesota. Morrison was born in 1919 in Chippewa City, Minnesota, into the Grand Portage

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Band of Ojibwe. The third of twelve children of Catholic parents, Morrison described himself as five-eighths Ojibwe, inheriting his non-Indian blood and Scottish surname from his paternal grandfather’s line. His grandfather, James Morrison Sr., was a fisherman by profession, but he also worked as an interpreter in court trials. In addition, he sang in the church choir and translated English hymns into Ojibwe, and he was a founder of the Catholic St. Francis Xavier Church (also called the Chippewa Church) in Chippewa City, which was built in 1895.53 George Morrison’s father, James Morrison Jr., was a hunter and trapper who later worked on federal wpa programs, such as building the sewer system in the nearby town of Grand Marais.54 In Morrison’s youth, Chippewa City was a small settlement of one hundred to two hundred people (mostly Indians) on the shore of Lake Superior. Chippewa City is separated from the reservation on state land, west of the city of Grand Marais and the Grand Portage Reservation in which Morrison was enrolled and to which the Grand Portage Ojibwe have deep and long-standing connections. Ojibwe people arrived in Grand Portage in the 1730s, migrating along the northern shore of Lake Superior. In an 1854 treaty, the Grand Portage Ojibwe ceded their lands in the Arrowhead region of Minnesota and accepted the Grand Portage Reservation. During the allotment era, however, no serious attempts were made to relocate the Grand Portage Ojibwe to White Earth. The Grand Portage Reservation is in the extreme northeast corner of Minnesota, where it is bordered on the north by Canada, on the south and east by Lake Superior, and on the west by Grand Portage State Forest. The Morrisons had made their living from the land for generations, but George Morrison was born into a changing world. While the Morrison family spoke Ojibwe at home, the children were not given Indian names (31). Morrison described his childhood as a period during which many of the traditional ways and crafts of the Ojibwe were fading under the impact of white encroachment and capitalist expansion. Morrison was aware that the old Ojibwe society of Chippewa City was beginning to disintegrate as some family members intermarried with whites and others moved away due to a lack of economic opportunities. Canoes and tipis were still sometimes made of birch bark and beadwork was still produced by Ojibwe women for special occasions (but more often for the growing tourist trade). As Morrison wrote: ‘‘As I look back on my childhood, it was a time of transition. Indians had lost the best of the old world and could not fully cope with the new one. White civilization was encroaching on our lives. We attended white schools and were taught to imitate white people’s ways. Our old mystical rites were no longer performed because they conflicted with church teachings. Our people viewed the church, I think, as a substitute for what they’d lost.’’ 55 Like DesJarlait, Morrison’s childhood was spent in Indian

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boarding schools. When Morrison attended a school in Hayward, Wisconsin, however, he did not experience the repression described by DesJarlait and other Native American students of his generation; indeed, Morrison remembered that ‘‘many of the kids spoke Indian. The school didn’t repress it or stop it the way I’ve heard was done in some schools’’ (38). Morrison spent a considerable amount of his youth in hospitals due to poor health. At age eleven, a bout of tuberculosis and arthritis of the hip sent Morrison to an Indian sanatorium in Onigum, Minnesota, and later to the Gillette State Hospital for Crippled Children in St. Paul, where he spent fourteen months with his legs in a cast. He described his stay in Gillette as a ‘‘good period,’’ during which he interacted and exchanged ideas with the non-Indian children. As he noted, ‘‘The hospital had a good program. I went to school there, was active with art projects, did a lot of reading and became more introspective.’’ After an operation Morrison was able to walk again, but because his left leg had been fused it was shorter than his right, and he walked with a limp. This affliction made Morrison more self-conscious, and it kept him out of World War II (39–40). Like DesJarlait, Morrison attended a high school close to home, in Chippewa City. And also like DesJarlait, Morrison worked during summer breaks in the Civilian Conservation Corps, living at an Indian camp in Grand Portage where he earned thirty dollars per month. In school he was encouraged in his academic and artistic interests by sympathetic teachers: ‘‘My English teacher encouraged people to consider going to college,’’ he wrote, ‘‘a neighbor in Chippewa City . . . also encouraged me. She liked me because I was one of the few finishing school. Then going on to study art. I considered enrolling in commercial art as a means of making a living. I had certain talents in art, using my hands’’ (47). In 1938, Morrison graduated from high school in Grand Marais. Through scholarships from the school and loans from the Consolidated Chippewa Indian Agency, Morrison was able to leave northern Minnesota to study art at the Minneapolis School of Art (47). Unlike DesJarlait, however, Morrison did not come into contact with other Native American students in college: he was the only Indian student in his class, and he roomed with a white family near the art school. Morrison’s experience as the only Native American student at the Minneapolis School of Art would have compounded his already developing sense of difference. From an early age, Morrison was cognizant of not fitting in. A desire to stand out is not a Native trait, but Morrison’s sense of difference and isolation was heightened by health problems, which affected him throughout his life. His artistic abilities and ambitions also set him apart at home and at school in Chippewa City. ‘‘I was kind of

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a loner from the beginning,’’ he wrote, ‘‘because I liked to be by myself, carve, draw, and copy things out of books. Maybe psychologically, I became even more of a loner as a result. They say about artists that they become lost within themselves, in their own kind of expression’’ (33). In art school, Morrison’s view of himself as different from those around him led him to adopt the persona of an artistic loner. Morrison was not just an Ojibwe among non-Natives; he came to see himself as an artist, an innovator, and an individual. In describing a life-drawing class with a nude model, Morrison wrote, ‘‘All the students, maybe twenty-five in all, sat in the round, drawing the model. That was a pretty standard thing, learning how to draw the model. Everybody did much the same thing. Everybody drew the figure. And everyone’s figure was pretty much the same’’ (48). Morrison’s teachers included artists working in academic and realist styles. As he recalled, European modernists such as ‘‘Cézanne and Renoir were regarded as . . . extreme, even though their works were fifty or so years old by then.’’ However, some faculty members were more experimental. Morrison cited one teacher, Alexander Masley, as a major influence: ‘‘He was instrumental in shaping my ideas, as opposed to the other, more academic teachers. They followed the old academic ways. Masley wasn’t like that. He encouraged more open experiment, more freedom, more individual expression. That was right up my alley’’ (54–55). A 1939 Picasso exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, which Morrison described as ‘‘very extreme for Minneapolis,’’ encouraged the young student to consider art as a creative and expressive activity (48–49). During his student years at the Minneapolis School of Art, Morrison produced oil paintings such as Mount Maude of 1942, which show him grappling with his new role and identity as an artist [figure 14]. The painting shows Morrison working in a style similar to the American Regionalists of the 1930s and early 1940s. Morrison was concerned with details of place and the specific geography near his home in Grand Portage, Minnesota. As Morrison described the scene: ‘‘I was at home for the summer, staying with my brother Bernard at his forestry tower on Mt. Maud [sic]. That was near what used to be Mineral Center, a little community on top of the hill above Grand Portage, four or five miles up. Bernard was married then, with children, and they lived in a cabin at the foot of the tower. You had to walk up a steep, sloping hill to the base of the tower. He climbed the tower to do his job, watching for fires’’ (52). But more than a faithful rendering of the scene, Morrison sought to impart an emotional effect through the use of a rough texture of paint applied with a palette knife. In art school Morrison came to see himself as a fine artist. In high school in Chip-

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pewa City, Morrison had been tracked into commercial and applied art and industrial design—pursuits that were believed to be appropriate for a young Indian student. ‘‘When I was growing up, being able to carve things was strictly the physical part of making something,’’ he wrote. But in art school, Morrison developed a new sense of himself as an artist and an innovator, and of art as a creative and expressive activity. ‘‘During my school years,’’ he wrote, ‘‘I was beginning to find out that art was a very broad endeavor . . . I suppose I was influenced by the seriousness of being an artist and all the romance connected to it. . . . I probably had a romantic notion of playing the role of the artist, living in a garret, being poor, trying to survive as an artist.’’ And, ‘‘I was becoming more radical[,]more individual’’ (49–50). Indeed, Morrison’s self-image as an artist seems to be not so much the idea of himself as a representative of the Grand Portage Ojibwe bringing a better understanding of his Native American heritage to mainstream American society, but rather the idea of his need to escape the stifling provinciality of small-town America—a need that was felt by many midwesterners, including Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

NEW YORK AND THE ART WORLD

Morrison’s artistic aspirations carried him far from home. When he graduated from the Minneapolis School of Art in 1943, he received the Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Scholarship to continue his studies—the highest honor awarded at the school (56). After spending the summer at home, he moved in fall 1943 to New York City, where he took an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen on the West Side. Morrison then enrolled as the first Native American student at the Art Students League. New York during the Second World War was the destination of a wave of émigrés from Europe—notably avant-garde artists, Jews, and others fleeing the artistic and political restrictions of German fascism. Needless to say, these émigrés had a dramatic impact on New York’s art world, and Surrealism, Expressionism, and other modern styles began to appear in New York galleries. Morrison’s teachers at the Art Students League included Frank DuMond, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Vaclav Vytlacil, and Morris Kantor. Although no one at the school was yet teaching abstraction, Morrison was energized by the intellectual and artistic milieu that surrounded him. As he wrote, ‘‘Jumping from Minneapolis to New York and meeting those radical students like me, I felt very free. We were doing what we wanted to do’’ (60). After a few months, Morrison moved with a roommate to the multiethnic bohemian environment of Greenwich Village. There, he relished the international flavor of the restaurants and cafés, and he visited the jazz clubs such as the Cedar Bar and the Five Spot, where he listened to musicians including Charlie

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Parker, Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, Coleman Hawkins, and Thelonius Monk. As he later wrote, ‘‘It’s the luck of being there at the right moment’’ (105). Morrison arrived in New York at a key period in the emergence of the postwar American avant-garde. Modernist artists were fascinated by the power of Primitive artworks, and Native American art in particular. Barnett Newman’s exhibitions of Pre-Columbian Stone Sculpture and Native Northwest Coast Painting for the Wakefield and Betty Parsons galleries took place in 1944 and 1946. In 1946, Kenneth Beaudoin’s Galeri Neuf mounted an exhibition titled Semeiology, or Eight and a Totem Pole, which featured the ‘‘Indian Space’’ painters Barnett, Robert Barrell, Gertrude Barrer, Peter Busa, Howard Daum, and Steve Wheeler. Abstract Expressionism would soon emerge as the first American movement to take the world stage, and it was galvanized by Newman’s Primitivist writings, including ‘‘The Ideographic Picture’’ (1947) and ‘‘The Sublime Is Now’’ (1948). But as the painters of the postwar New York avant-garde embraced Native American art to undergird their aesthetic independence from European tradition, Morrison embraced the theories and techniques of European Surrealism in pursuit of a deeply personal expression. As he traveled farther from his northern Minnesota Native roots, Morrison’s artwork turned more decisively toward abstraction. By the late 1940s, he recalled, his own work had been changed by the influx of new ideas brought by the European émigré artists. Looking back, he noted: ‘‘A lot of my work emerged out of scribbles, part of the automatic drawing technique that came to us by way of the French, the Dadists. They, in turn, were influenced by the associative thinking derived from psychoanalysis’’ (99). Painting in a style influenced by Surrealism and other modernist movements, Morrison’s career bloomed in the late 1940s as his works appeared in galleries and museum exhibitions. In 1947, his paintings were included in the Whitney Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, as well as in exhibitions at the Riverside Museum, at the Grand Central Moderns Gallery in New York, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and at Southern Illinois University. Morrison had his first solo show in the modern art department of the Grand Central Art Galleries on Fiftyseventh Street in 1948. Between 1949 and 1952, he showed work at the University of Nebraska, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Third Tokyo Independent Art Exhibition. In 1952 Morrison won a Fulbright Scholarship to France where he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. After returning from France in 1954, he was awarded a John Hay Whitney Foundation fellowship and lived for a year in Duluth, Minnesota (73). By the 1950s, Morrison had broken decidedly with representational painting [figure 15]. He described this transformation as follows: the importance of place 107

My work was going toward abstraction but I didn’t jump into it. I was subconsciously feeling my way along. By this time all my paintings were studio paintings, painted inside. All imaginative. I still began with subject matter—a whale vertebrae, a piece of driftwood—then I built the composition around these. I became preoccupied with texture. Scumbling for instance. Scumbling is a technical term for laying the paint on with a palette knife and brushing it so that a bottom layer already on the canvas shows through. This creates texture. I like the so-called magical surface of a painting, the marks a painter makes. This is different from the realistic portrait painters I had in school. They knew exactly how to make flesh color, what paints to use. But when you get into imaginative painting, you let your subconscious suggest. Now I was coming around to the idea of making all kinds of scribbles on the canvas. Or putting a bright color here, a big area, then another color beside it. Making arbitrary shapes that didn’t relate to anything like clouds or boats or the horizon line, just plain arbitrary shapes that were all over the canvas. . . . Figurative elements in my work were becoming obscure. Finally, I abandoned them and my work became totally abstract. (75, 77–79) As Morrison relates, it was being in New York that allowed him to find freedom in abstraction. ‘‘These influences,’’ he wrote, ‘‘were coming directly from Europe, through [his teacher, Morris] Kantor’’ (109). Later, he described his work process: I went through a period of using thick paint . . . This gave more immediacy to the painting. Putting the paint on without thinning it with oil, or using acrylic paint without any water added. Putting it thick on the brush and then on the canvas with broad strokes, showing the thickness and movement of the pigment. Some of the paints were right out of the tube . . . This was my version of gestural painting, which the other Abstract Expressionists like [Jackson] Pollock and [Willem] de Kooning were doing. This was typical of what was going on in painting at the time—gestural immediacy. Movement of the paint became an integral part of the idea of painting. There might be a suggestion of subject matter . . . But the phenomenon of paint was what the painting was really about. Rather than getting sentimentally involved with a subject, the artist was more conscious of the paint itself, and that became the painting. (101) In describing his work as ‘‘gestural,’’ and in being concerned above all else with the ‘‘phenomenon of paint,’’ Morrison sought to align his art with Abstract Expressionism. Indeed, his circle grew to include the major figures of the postwar American art world in New York. While drinking at the Cedar Bar in Greenwich Village in

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the mid-1950s, Morrison met and befriended the Abstract Expressionists Pollock, de Kooning, and Franz Kline, who later would become the godfather of Morrison’s son. While Morrison never exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists, he understood his development through the late 1950s in relation to their innovations. Morrison’s abstract paintings of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Red Painting (Franz Kline Painting) of 1960, show him working in Abstract Expressionist style. Moreover, his subtitle for Red Painting, which he planned to trade with Kline, self-consciously placed his art in close proximity to the leaders of New York Abstract Expressionism. In 1945, after his second year at the Art Students League, Morrison began spending summers at the artists’ colony of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Since the early twentieth century, artists from New York had been attracted by the sunshine, beaches, and cheap rents of the Portuguese fishing village on the eastern end of Cape Cod. It was in Provincetown that Morrison met his first wife, the artist Ada Reed, and they married in 1948 (72). While Provincetown was new terrain for Morrison, he experienced it in terms of his home on Lake Superior. As he wrote, ‘‘With its harbor, Provincetown is a lot like Grand Marais—Lake Superior, the Atlantic Ocean, the big waters . . . I have an affinity for water, big water. I have always felt good being near the water because of being born right near the lake’’ (67). In Provincetown, Morrison developed the compositional device that would become his trademark—the insistent horizontal line that suggested the meeting of sky and sea—the Atlantic Ocean, or alternately Lake Superior. As he noted, ‘‘My paintings and drawings from Provincetown all show the beginning of a horizon line and above that, the clouds’’ (71). During these years Morrison also began teaching art, thereby launching the career that would sustain him throughout his life. In summer 1947, he taught at the Cape Ann Art School, which was founded by an instructor from the Art Students League, William McNulty, in Rockport, Massachusetts, near the fishing village of Gloucester. The next summer Morrison, along with a friend, the artist Albert Kresch, took over the school and renamed it the Rockport Art School. In 1959, beginning with a three-month position at the Minneapolis School of Art, Morrison began a career as a university and art school professor. In 1960, the artist Yeffe Kimball (whom Morrison knew from New York) recommended him for a teaching position in Ohio at the school of the Dayton Art Institute. In Dayton he met and married his second wife, Hazel Belvo, a student who had two sons from a previous marriage; Morrison and Belvo together had a son, Briand Mesaba, in 1961 (109). After leaving Dayton Morrison taught at Iowa State Teachers College, Cornell University, Pennsylvania State University, and in 1963 he took a permanent position at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. In 1969, Morrison received an honorary master of fine arts degree from the Minneapolis School of Art. the importance of place 109

The cosmopolitan New York art world offered Morrison an escape from midwestern provincialism, the grim realities of reservation life, and the anti-Indian racism of small-town Minnesota. When he first moved to New York in the 1940s, he was exhilarated by the multiethnic experience of the city. His classmates at the Art Students League were ‘‘all smart kids, Jewish kids and mixtures of different nationalities.’’ Morrison’s Indian identity no longer defined him as an outsider. ‘‘When they found out about me,’’ he wrote, ‘‘they kidded me about the ‘Indian bit.’ They didn’t do it derogatorily; it was all in kidding, so it was ok. I didn’t worry about fitting in. I was where I wanted to be’’ (61). Being identified as an Indian in New York was, Morrison wrote, a matter of good-natured kidding from the Jewish kids. ‘‘I was freed from the . . . discrimination at home,’’ he wrote, ‘‘absolutely’’ (81). If in Minnesota he was immediately recognizable as an Indian, he was just another person on the colorful streets of New York. As he later stated, ‘‘In New York, the melting pot, people didn’t know what I was. They thought I was Persian because I was sporting a mustache. Maybe they thought I was a Persian businessman’’ (79). Indeed, Morrison’s abstract paintings can be read as metaphors for the newfound freedoms of his life in the city. ‘‘I could never have done this kind of abstraction in Minneapolis,’’ he wrote, ‘‘Never, never, never’’ (79). Rather than specific places, or making images of Native American themes, Morrison described his abstract paintings in terms of ‘‘endless space,’’ which ‘‘seemed to go beyond the edges of the canvas’’ and was not limited by borders or boundaries.56 As such, Morrison’s Abstract Expressionist paintings would seem to represent the opposite of the clear and bounded world of the Red Lake Reservation imaged by DesJarlait. Indeed, as Morrison would recall of his early career in the New York avant-garde: ‘‘I don’t remember being interested in Native American things.’’ 57 In New York, Morrison was, for the first time in his life, free to not be an Indian. ‘‘I never played the role of being an Indian artist,’’ he wrote. ‘‘I always just stated the fact that I was a painter, and I happened to be an Indian. I wasn’t exploiting the idea of being Indian at all, or using Indian themes’’ (71). His abstract art offered no clue to his racial identity. Abstract painting, like the mustache that made him look like a Persian businessman, offered Morrison a way to be seen as an artist and an individual first, and as an Indian second, or not at all.

RETURNING HOME

The abstract image of boundless and endless space that embodied Morrison’s peripatetic youth as an artist, however, belied his growing desire for emplacement. In 1970, Morrison resigned from his tenured position at the Rhode Island School of

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Design. As he wrote, ‘‘I wanted to come back to the Indian connection, to Minnesota and my family. I felt an inner need to come back, not realizing the consequences of what I was doing. I felt the need to put certain Indian values into my work’’ (135). He accepted a dual appointment in Minneapolis at the University of Minnesota in the Studio Arts Department and the newly formed American Indian Studies Department. There, Morrison researched and developed a new course, ‘‘The Arts of the American Indian,’’ which catered to a younger generation of Native artists and university students—including the Ojibwe painter Frank Bigbear Jr. from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota (139–40). In thinking of this time, Morrison noted, ‘‘During the years I had lived out east, I had not stayed in connection with the tribe, had more or less given it up over the years’’ (149). His new position demanded a process of self-education, as he had not been actively involved in Native American art or Ojibwe culture for three decades. In the Twin Cities, Morrison became more involved with urban Native American communities and the activists of the American Indian Movement. He wrote, ‘‘I think the original meaning of Indian art begins with tribal meanings. A lot of Indian sculptures had a religious or spiritual meaning. Coming back to Minneapolis made my mark in a new way because I got involved with the Indian thing again—like joining aim, designing murals for the Indian centers, being a little bit active in Indian affairs’’ (154). The murals Morrison designed for Indian centers were wood collages, which he began to make in Minnesota on his return. In 1974–1975 he worked on a major project supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, in which he created a new facade for the Minneapolis American Indian Center. Based on a feather turning in space, the structure was formed from interlocking chevrons of cedar wood. Made initially with cut pieces of driftwood that Morrison collected during his summers on the beaches of Provincetown, Cape Ann, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket, other of the wood collages suggest landscapes, with their subtle yet insistent horizon line, and in so doing seem to connect Morrison’s experience of the New England coast with his memories of Grand Marais and Lake Superior [figure 16]. Morrison described such artworks as paintings in wood, which unified his intuitive, surrealist process with deeply held memories of place. As he later wrote, ‘‘They come out of my head. I make them from scratch, yet they are derived from nature, based on landscape. There’s a horizon line in each one, about a quarter of the way from the top. That’s an absolute straight line, made with a pencil, to help guide the work . . . In the large collages, the grain of the wood and the knots suggested the movement of clouds, sun, and wind. All this is formal, yet the driftwood itself gives a sense of history—wood that has a connection to the earth, yet has come from the

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water. I realize now that in making these, I may have been inspired subconsciously by the rock formations of the North Shore’’ (128). In 1983 Morrison retired from teaching to work in a studio overlooking Lake Superior, where he struck a balance between his early years in the New York avant-garde and his deeply felt connections to traditional places. The ‘‘Red Rock’’ series done in this period has been described by the art historian David Penney as Morrison’s ‘‘homage to his homeland.’’ 58 In this work, the Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist improvisational technique becomes, as Morrison explains, ‘‘a broad expanse of a segment of the earth’’ [figure 18]. As Penney writes, ‘‘These are not pictures of the lake shore, but images derived from an inner state of contemplation, the experience of a ‘place’ so internalized that it can be reduced to a basic visual language of form, color, and line.’’ 59 And as Morrison himself explains, ‘‘The horizon has been an obsession with me for most of my life. It makes an indelible image that, for me, stems from being born and growing up near the edge of the lake. Later, spending many summers on the Atlantic shore reinforced it’’ (192). Penney compares the horizon line that is common in all of Morrison’s work after the mid-1940s to the signature motifs of the non-Native painters of the New York school, such as Barnett Newman’s instantly recognizable ‘‘zips’’ or Adolph Gottlieb’s ‘‘bursts.’’ 60 But, Penney notes, the horizon also places the viewer in relation to geographical place. Moreover, he states, ‘‘As a personal symbol, the horizon line alludes to a broader cosmological awareness of spiritual mysteries of the earth and its elements—rock, water, sky—that seems ever present in Morrison’s work.’’ 61 His art, while abstract, is imbued with the significance of place. For Morrison, his Ojibwe heritage continued to grow in importance. In 1984 he was diagnosed with Castleman’s disease, a rare condition affecting the lymphatic system. Although his illness was treated with a conventional regimen of chemotherapy, radiation, and drugs, Morrison also underwent a traditional healing ceremony in Grand Portage, in which he received two Ojibwe names: Standing in the Northern Lights and Turning the Feather Around. With his return to tradition, by the 1980s and 1990s Morrison occupied a prominent position in the Native American contemporary arts movement. He was profiled in Jamake Highwater’s book The Sweet Grass Lives On, and he received invitations to show his works in Native American exhibitions.62 His art was featured in several major shows including the exhibit Shared Visions at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. In 1991, Morrison was included in the exhibition Our Land/Ourselves: American Indian Contemporary Art, which was organized by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith at the State University of New York in Albany. A 1964 painting, Ex-Patriot, was acquired by the Philbrook museum in 1995, and in 1999

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Morrison was honored as a Contemporary Master by the first Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art. Such recognition suggests that Morrison’s modernism was no longer exclusive from his Ojibwe identity. He wrote, ‘‘Now I was thinking of returning to my home area, the reservation in Grand Portage. Many times, it’s interpreted that coming back home is making the full circle. Coming around. I suppose I really wanted to get home again. As to why, I don’t know. I guess there’s a natural attraction to where you were born, your locale. Like the lake or the woods for me’’ (150). To be sure, Morrison was influenced throughout his career by the vocabulary of European-American modernism: ‘‘As always,’’ he wrote, ‘‘I am interested in the phenomena of paint and the act of painting. Using Surrealist ideas and techniques, I let images emerge from the masses of paint. So there may be hidden associations that become real for me in the final mark’’ (174). In contrast with his earlier ideas about the connections between his Indian identity and abstract paintings, Morrison now developed a new notion of modernist self-expression that was completely compatible with his sense of himself as Native American. As he explained, ‘‘I call it pretty much straight painting. If there’s any ‘Indian’ coming through, it’s because I’m an Indian and I’m painting what’s coming out of me’’ (187). However, the primary associations in his work, Morrison explained, are of a sense of place: ‘‘I seek the power of the rock, the magic of the water, the religion of the tree, the color of the wind, and the enigma of the horizon’’ (175).

THE CONTINUING IMPORTANCE OF PLACE

For both DesJarlait and Morrison, a deeply felt connection to place defined their modernist art as different from the work of their non-Indian peers. DesJarlait carried his connections to the Red Lake Ojibwe reservation throughout his life as an artist; Morrison rediscovered the value of his traditional connections to Grand Portage and Lake Superior after having pursued a career in the mainstream art world. Their connection to indigenous places—what Scott Pratt calls ‘‘the given land’’—distinguished their art as uniquely Native American, even as they broke away from traditional Native American visual culture and absorbed influences from European and American modernist art. It is important to recognize that the use by Native American artists of styles from the modernist repertoire did not indicate an acceptance of the modernist project unconditionally or at every level. While DesJarlait and Morrison, to be sure, embraced the modernist celebration of the artist as individual, their work did not share Newman’s dream of a modernist utopia of dissolved borders or

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an ‘‘inter-American consciousness,’’ nor did it partake of Newman’s disdain for the local and the provincial. Indeed, DesJarlait continued to practice a kind of Regionalism—a celebration of the particular qualities and virtues of the specific place of Red Lake—well after that style had fallen out of critical favor. And Morrison, whose Abstract Expressionist paintings of the 1950s and 1960s expunged all reference to specific places and subject matter, began to reintroduce specific landscapes into his work when he returned to Minnesota and reclaimed a connection to the landscape of Grand Portage. This tendency to maintain connections to the local distinguishes the art of DesJarlait and Morrison from the mainstream of modernist art in the twentieth century, which has, as the literary theorist Fredric Jameson argues, embodied the modern annihilation of space (by the evolving technologies of global commerce and communication) and the estrangement of modern individuals from the specificities of local experience. Jameson has argued that the development of modernist abstraction represents a cultural and aesthetic shift in relation to the evolution of global capitalism. And, he notes further, the developing landscape of global capitalism has been represented through a series of aesthetic forms since the nineteenth century. Classical or market capitalism necessitated the ‘‘reorganization of some older sacred and heterogeneous space into a geometrical and Cartesian homogeneity, a space of infinite equivalence and extension.’’ The transition from market to monopoly capitalism in the twentieth century engendered ‘‘a growing contradiction between lived experience and structure, or between a phenomenological description of the life of an individual and a more properly structural model of the conditions of the existence of that experience.’’ Whereas in traditional societies ‘‘the immediate and limited experience of individuals is still able to encompass and coincide with the true economic and social form that governs that experience,’’ under the new structural realities of international capitalism, ‘‘the truth of . . . experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place.’’ As Jameson writes, this new order impels the artist to ‘‘invent new and elaborate formal strategies for overcoming this dilemma . . . [to] inscribe a new sense of the absent global system on the very syntax of [aesthetic form] itself.’’ 63 As the historian David Noble writes, previous generations of European and American artists had produced paintings and works of fiction that embodied a powerful relationship to the bounded and sacred landscape of nations, which were ‘‘imagined as sacred spaces.’’ Noble writes that it was ‘‘the duty of all artists—historians, novelists, poets, musicians, painters, and architects—to express the beauty, the goodness, and the truth of national landscapes [that] were given substance as

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the variety of artists gave them representation.’’ 64 The work of artists spoke, Noble explains, ‘‘in a democratic language that had an organic relationship to the national landscape,’’ and it gave visual form to the notion that the modern nation existed in a ‘‘state of nature’’ and had emerged, innocently, from the national landscape.65 In describing his mural The American Historical Epic, Thomas Hart Benton, the bestknown American Regionalist painter of the 1930s, wrote, ‘‘I tried to show [that] the people’s behavior, their action on the opening land, was the primary reality of American life.’’ Benton’s art was an attempt to create a public art, ‘‘which reflected the American peoples’ life and history in a way which the people could comprehend.’’ 66 However, during the Second World War this notion was discredited by the artists and writers of Newman’s generation, who plumbed the depths of the Primitive to find a universal expression adequate to the new age. The shift in style from American Regionalism in the 1930s to Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s, as seen in the linked careers of Benton and his student Jackson Pollock, is illustrative and instructive. Whereas Benton sought to create a public art that ‘‘reflected the American peoples’ life and history,’’ for Pollock this project was impossible, even inconceivable. The new modernist art would be focused on itself, exploring the universal visual language of abstraction. As he wrote, ‘‘The idea of an isolated American painting, so popular in this country during the thirties, seems absurd to me. The basic problems of contemporary painting are independent of any one country.’’ 67 But DesJarlait and Morrison did continue to imagine that their art could embody a deeply felt connection to traditional homelands. Significantly, this was an active process. DesJarlait defined the sense of Red Lake as much as he passively mirrored it; Morrison created a sense of place in his Red Rock series that was at once highly personal and creative as well as rooted in tradition and specific place. After a period of displacement or absence, they experienced a renewed sense of being rooted in specific and significant geography. While DesJarlait and Morrison worked in nontraditional, modernist styles, and would never, unlike younger Ojibwe artists such as Norval Morriseau, violate traditional proscriptions against the representation of sacred imagery, each developed deeply felt personal and cultural connections to a homeland that defined their work as Ojibwe. The importance of place in the art of DesJarlait and Morrison anticipated contemporary Native American struggles for aboriginal sovereignty and nationhood that are visible in work of contemporary Native American artists. To take just one recent and powerful example, the contemporary Thunder Bay Ojibwe artist Rebecca Belmore (b. 1960) asserted long-standing Native connections to place in her 1991 performance-installation, Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their

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Mother. In this work, which traveled to Native communities across Canada, Belmore created a six-and-a-half foot megaphone through which Native peoples were invited to voice their aboriginal connection to place.68 Belmore’s own speech, delivered during the initial installation of the work in Alberta, addressed the issues of cultural continuity and the artist’s personal reconnection with community and tradition: ‘‘My heart is beating like a small drum, and I hope that you mother earth can feel it. Someday I will speak to you in my language. I have watched my grandmother live very close by you, my mother the same. I have watched my grandmother show respect for all that you have given her . . . Although I went away and left a certain closeness to you, I have gone in a kind of circle. I think I am coming back to understanding where I come from.’’ 69 Like the work of DesJarlait and Morrison, Belmore’s work embodies connections to place as the center in terms of which meaning and identity are grounded. Belmore’s performance enlisted audience members as participants in the performance of the work; Native audiences were empowered as speakers and given authorial voice in the creation of the sacred time and place that is the work of art. Traditional cultures and connections, such as those articulated by the many other Native participants in Speaking to Their Mother serve as the ground amid the blurring borders and fractured connections to place and identity of a global culture.

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5

Becoming Indian: The Self-Invention of Yeffe Kimball

New York—Rome—Paris Pine Ridge and Provincetown Reds, orange, and yellow greens Moons—stars—blinding sun Cook books, hominy—turnip greens AIM, INCA,

Santa Fe

Pinons, Turquoise—Purple Mountain Majesty White Buffalo —LLOYD KIVA NEW (CHEROKEE), ‘‘WHITE BUFFALO’’

in 1946 yeffe kimball, a white woman, launched a career as a Native American artist. From her midtown New York City penthouse on Fifty-fourth Street, overlooking the sculpture gardens of the Museum of Modern Art, Kimball entered an artwork in the First Annual Exhibition of American Indian Painting at the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The painting Kimball sent to the Philbrook, titled Sacred Buffalo, was a small work in oil that depicted an iconic white buffalo, sacred to the Plains Indians, silhouetted against a dark and abstract night sky [figure 18]. On the entry form, Kimball described herself as an artist of Native American ancestry born in 1914 in a prairie dugout in Kiowa County, Oklahoma, to an Osage father and a white mother. Kimball, who was actually born in 1904, passed as an Indian from the 1940s until her death from cancer in Santa Fe in 1978. She moved fluidly between the EuroAmerican modernist art world of New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the emerging Native American art markets of the Southwest. When she died, she was eulogized at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe by leading figures in the world of Native American art, including the painter Joe Herrera (Cochiti) and the founding director of the Institute of American Indian Arts, Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee), who wrote and recited a poem for the occasion. Her New York memorial, which was attended by Russell Means (Oglala-Lakota) of the American Indian Movement, included as speakers Will Rogers Jr. and the Ojibwe painter George Morrison.

Although Kimball was remembered fondly by Native Americans and non-Natives as a pioneering modern Indian artist and a tireless advocate of Native American causes, her identity was, nevertheless, a fabrication. Kimball was never an enrolled member of the Osage or any other Native American nation or tribe. All efforts to locate an ancestor in the 1906 Osage Allotment rolls—the basis for all legal claims of Osage citizenship—have been fruitless.1 By passing as an Indian for a period of four decades, Kimball illustrates an extreme example of the possibilities for self-invention in modern America. Moreover, her act as an Indian makes a striking case study in modernist appropriation and the cultural capital accruing to Native American identity in the postwar era. Further, Kimball’s story raises issues pertaining the rights to cultural property in a modern context (which are in turn related to the issues raised by the relationships that José Lente and Jimmy Byrnes formed with white anthropologists). Kimball’s story invokes many of the recent controversies over Indian ‘‘wannabees’’ and the battles for control of Native American cultural property that flared up with the growth of the market for Native American art and with the New Age movement of the 1970s and 1980s. These controversies then crystallized around the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, which serves as a type of ‘‘truth-in-advertising law’’ that prohibits the sales of artworks falsely claimed to be of Native American manufacture. Kimball, however, inhabited a milieu in which Indian identities were figured quite differently than they are today given the aftermath of the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s and, further, the acquisition of the knowledge of cultural difference and identity that has been informed by a decade or more of struggles around identity politics and multiculturalism in the art world. Indeed, the ease with which Kimball fashioned herself as a Native American artist, along with her reasons for doing so suggest that the terms of Native American identity in the postwar years were quite fluid, even as federal policy worked to assimilate and urbanize Native Americans, and popular culture celebrated Indians as an authentic and spiritual people who offered the precious gift of their culture to American society. Had Kimball actually been a Native American artist, she would have been a truly groundbreaking figure. In many ways she was a pioneer—a successful woman artist in an era when the old boy network still dominated the American art world. As an aspiring woman artist in postwar New York, Yeffe Kimball faced an overwhelmingly masculine field, which may have inspired her decision to go native in search of a new artistic identity. The macho swagger of the artists of the New York School is well known, and it is no surprise that the careers of women artists in this milieu were slow to develop. The late-blooming career of the artist Lee Krasner—who is consis-

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tently described by the critics of the day as a housewife and the studio helpmate of husband Jackson Pollock—is a good point of reference. Although she was given the name Lenore at birth, Krasner shortened her name to the more ambiguous ‘‘Lee’’ and signed her paintings of the 1940s and 1950s with the gender-neutral initials ‘‘L. K.’’ As Ann Wagner has written, Krasner’s obfuscation of her identity as a woman artist in hopes of being viewed as ‘‘universal’’ represents one possible response to a culture of male privilege.2 Kimball’s self-fashioning and crafting of a fictional Indian persona is another possible response to an era of male privilege. Kimball would claim to have had more ‘‘one-man shows’’ than any other woman artist to date. Her confidence was bolstered and facilitated by her identification with Native American culture. Indeed, Indianness provided Kimball with a position of strength on which to build a career, and she styled herself as the exotic curiosity of being an Indian in New York as well as a rising star in the Indian exhibitions of the West. Kimball’s abstract, modernist works were shown widely in the United States and in Europe. She exhibited at the National Academy of Design, the Whitney Museum, and the Carnegie Institute, and she mounted over sixty solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad during her lifetime. She lived both in New York City and in Provincetown, where her friend Walter P. Chrysler, the millionaire collector and automotive heir, collected her paintings. She attended Apollo launches at Cape Kennedy, exhibited paintings at the Houston Space Center, and was the first woman artist included in the nasa art collection. That all of this was accomplished under an assumed identity is, to be sure, significant to an understanding of the importance of Native culture for American modernists. A question that might reasonably be put to the career of Yeffe Kimball was made by the art historian Sieglinde Lemke when she asks, ‘‘Was modernism passing?’’ 3 Lemke’s query points to a history of Western modernism that recognizes its debts to practices of racial transgression and masquerade. To illustrate this notion, Lemke considers the primal scene in the history of European modernism when Pablo Picasso encountered in 1906 the West African carvings at the French colonial Trocadero Museum in Paris. Lemke argues that Picasso’s aesthetic appropriation, in his painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907, of these objects that at the time were considered merely an ethnographic curiosity was a watershed in the invention of Cubism and in the history of twentieth-century modernist culture. Beginning with Picasso, Western modernists mimicked non-Western cultures to break free from the stultifying European academic tradition.4 However, playing the part of ‘‘the Primitive’’ without relinquishing the privileged status of self-conscious cosmopolitan enabled, ironically, the artists of the twentieth century to claim a modern subjectivity.

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And, indeed, Kimball’s fabrication of a fictional Indian persona is an extreme example of the modernist Primitivism practiced by American artists. Jackson Rushing, in his book Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde, demonstrates that American artists ‘‘saw in Indian art a vitality and a ‘primitive’ purity that they sought to embody in their own work.’’ They were, Rushing writes, ‘‘attracted to the forms and designs of Indian art because they perceived in them unity with nature, unbridled psychic and mythic forces, and continuity with the primordial origins of humanity.’’ 5 Works by non-Native artists including the ‘‘Indian Space Painters’’ (such as Will Barnet, Gertrude Barrer, Peter Busa, and Steve Wheeler), as well as the Abstract Expressionists (Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and Jackson Pollock), assimilated a range of Native North American and Pre-Columbian forms and visual motifs into abstract compositions. In a 1944 statement, Pollock explained, ‘‘Some people find references to American Indian art and calligraphy in parts of my pictures. That wasn’t intentional; [it] probably was the result of early memories and enthusiasms.’’ 6 Kimball’s assumption of an Indian identity, a role she performed for much of her life, also places her in the company of other twentieth-century counterfeit Indians—the ‘‘Plastic Medicine Men’’ decried by the anthropologist Alice Kehoe. The membership of this tribe has included fraudulent Indian healers, spiritual leaders, environmentalists, artists, and writers, including Archie Grey Owl (aka the Canadian-Englishman Archie Belaney), Chief Two Moons Meridas (the manufacturer of a popular patent medicine in the early decades of the twentieth century), and the contemporary New Age author/gurus Adolf Hungry Wolf and Sun Bear. This group of counterfeit Indians also includes cultural figures such as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, who was born Sylvester Long, the child of former slaves from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and who went on to graduate from the Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Indian Industrial School, and to write books and star in the 1930 film The Silent Enemy. The group of notables also includes R. Lee White (aka Randy Lee White, or Randy Lee Whitehorse, who claimed to be of mixed-race ancestry and a member of the Sioux Nation); the author Jamake Highwater (aka the San Francisco choreographer J. Marks, aka the Toledo, Ohio, filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos), whose books Song From the Earth: American Indian Painting (1978), The Sweet Grass Lives On (1980), and The Primal Mind: Vision and Reality in Indian America (1981; and subsequently produced as a pbs film) have been bestsellers and were routinely assigned as required reading in college courses on Native American art and ethnography throughout the 1980s. Yet another notable member is Forrest (born Asa) Carter, the former Klansman and speech writer for George Wallace, whose 1976 faux auto-

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biography, The Education of Little Tree, purported to tell the story of his Cherokee boyhood during the Great Depression in the mountains of Appalachia.7 Like these impersonators, Kimball’s Indian act bested her New York School colleagues and fooled more than a few Native Americans. She successfully reinvented and promoted herself in New York as a Native American artist—not simply as a painter of Indian scenes or a Primitivist aficionado of Indian artifacts, but as an artist born of Native ancestry and, as such, the possessor of Native cultural capital. In a review of Kimball’s solo debut in an upscale New York gallery, Henry McBride of the New York Sun wrote, ‘‘Kimball not only paints Indian themes, but is herself of Indian extraction.’’ 8 Beginning in the late 1930s or early 1940s, Kimball crafted a bogus public persona that bolstered artworks fusing the Indian Primitive with modernist form. In the introductory essay to the catalogue of Kimball’s solo debut in 1945 at the Frank Rehn Galleries on Fifty-seventh Street in New York, Jon Corbino (who had been one of Kimball’s instructors at the Art Students League) explained paintings such as Faun and Spirit of 1945 by making reference to the artist’s purported mixed-race identity: ‘‘Yeffe Kimball finds inspiration in the deep and ancient wells of her American Indian heritage. Her aim is to express this old tradition in modern tongue’’ [figure 19].9 Kimball’s Indian act brought a whiff of the exotic to a career that might have otherwise been unremarkable. Her persona as a Native American from Oklahoma heightened the appeal of her work and afforded her privileged access to the New York art world. She offered, in the words of another critic, a ‘‘firsthand account’’ of Indianness along with the spectacle of Indian authenticity in the modernist space of the Fifty-seventh Street art gallery.10 As McBride wrote, ‘‘Georgia O’Keeffe had better watch out. Her rival now appears on the desert horizon.’’ 11 Kimball’s Indian act also helped her develop an extensive social circle. Her husband Harvey Slatin, an atomic scientist, remembered the groups that gathered at Kimball’s New York apartment: ‘‘She was a powerhouse . . . Her personality was most engaging and she easily won the affection of anyone who met her. She had no hesitation to use anyone to accomplish her cause—to help the American Indian. She seemed to know everybody . . . senators, presidents, artists, musicians, you name it, came to our house.’’ 12 She hobnobbed with Secretary of the Interior Stuart Udall and his wife Lee, along with the legendary San Ildefonso potter Maria Martinez [figure 20]. Even as Kimball’s paintings became increasingly abstract throughout the 1950s, and 1960s, she continued to mine Indian themes in her titles and her commitments to Native American cultural and political causes increased. She illustrated children’s books based on Indian legends, The Story of the Totem Pole (1949) and The Pueblo

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Indians in Story, Song and Dance (1955), and coauthored a book of Native American recipes, The Art of American Indian Cooking (1965). Dressed in braids and Southwestern jewelry, Kimball established herself as an authority on Native American art—reviewing, for example, the 1946 and 1947 Philbrook Indian Annuals for the New York publication Art Digest. Kimball selected objects for a 1953 international exhibition of Native American artworks organized by the U.S. State Department, and she wrote essays that were translated into Russian for Amerika, a glossy Life magazine clone, which was distributed as U.S. propaganda in the Eastern Bloc during the cold war. Kimball catalogued Native American objects for the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe and for the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. Throughout the 1960s, she served on committees for the Department of the Interior and for Native-run political, cultural, and educational groups, and she organized auctions of artworks benefiting increasingly militant Native American causes. Kimball’s audience was not limited to urban modernists and political and cultural elites; she also counted among her close friends members of national, pan-Indian circles, including artists, museum professionals and political activists. Throughout her career, Kimball’s commitments to Native American culture extended beyond the art world into what many described as a sincere engagement with Native American political activism. Indeed, Kimball’s Primitivism and her cultivation of an Indian persona were closely tied to the sincere and extensive commitments to Native cultural, political, and educational causes that preoccupied her throughout her career. Her dedication to Native cultures was expressed in writing and in her membership in Native American political organizations, including the National Congress of American Indians (ncai). The Ojibwa Abstract Expressionist George Morrison, in his 1998 autobiography Turning the Feather Around, remembered Kimball’s active involvement in the 1950s, ‘‘even before the civil rights movement stirred people up.’’ 13 As an early member of the ncai, Kimball served alongside Will Rogers Jr., D’Arcy McNickle, and other prominent Native Americans in organizing and fundraising activities.14 Later, Kimball worked with organizations devoted to Indian education, arts, and youth issues. In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Kimball was committed to organizations involved in Indian health and education, including Arrow (of which she was a founding member and a member of the board of directors), inca, and the Institute of American Indian Arts. In the 1970s she raised money for the fledgling American Indian Movement. These organizations, notably, were made up of an entirely Native membership and board and were dedicated to the continuity of Native culture and identity in the modern world—thereby standing in contrast to

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the imperatives of termination and relocation that defined federal Indian policy in the postwar years. Kimball’s Primitivism, then, did not define Native Americans in terms of a past immemorial, and she believed that Native American identity and modernity were not mutually exclusive properties. In the context of a movement that recognized the Indian identity of a diversity of Native peoples—traditional as well as urban— Kimball’s assumed identity was apparently never at issue. More than twenty years after her death, Kimball is still passing as Indian. One recent biographer writes that contemporary Native American artists regard Kimball as a ‘‘foremother.’’ 15 In addition, she is still included in a number of major collections and standard reference works on Native American artists. In 1996, Kimball was represented in the Philbrook Museum of Art’s Visions and Voices—the exhaustive catalogue of the museum’s collections of Native American painting.16 Further, the 1998 edition of the St. James Guide to Native North American Artists states that Kimball was born of Osage ancestry in Mountain Park, Oklahoma, where she was ‘‘given the name Mikaka Upawixe, or Wandering Star.’’ The entry continues by noting that ‘‘the name aptly describes her art . . . because Kimball would travel extensively, [and] took an interest in the subatomic world . . . Kimball’s works reflect a restless creativity and easy absorption into new subjects—from ‘‘primitive’’ African art to space travel—and she moved easily between styles to express her visions and interests.’’ 17 Such inclusions reiterate and validate Kimball’s fictional claims as fact and describe her as an early and active participant in the development of a modern Native American art movement after World War II.

PASSING

If Kimball’s false identity implies that she was not the important early Indian modernist cited in the literature, then who was she? Who was this white woman who fooled audiences both in New York and in the West, and who continues to fool critics and historians of Native American art? The ‘‘real’’ Kimball was born Effie Goodman in 1904 (or 1906), not in Oklahoma but in Kansas City, Kansas. Her mother, Martha Clementine Smith, had nine children, of which Effie was the third. Kimball’s father is listed in various sources as an Osage named ‘‘Other Good-Man’’ or ‘‘Other Good-Man Smith’’; however, her father’s actual name was Oather Goodman.18 Her parents—both non-Native—met and married in 1902 in Oklahoma in the land rush preceding statehood. Effie Goodman kept the name Kimball from a first (annulled) marriage, thereby making a clean break with her past by erasing her non-

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Native family, which then made it easier to construct a new identity in New York. A 1948 article in a Tulsa newspaper—written on the occasion of a touring exhibition of her paintings, organized by her New York gallery—identified Kimball as an ‘‘Oklahoma girl’’ born in Mountain Park, a small homesteader settlement in Kiowa County.19 Such misinformation may have led the Philbrook curators to list her in the First Indian Annual as ‘‘Kiowa,’’ because later publications identified her as ‘‘Osage.’’ Early reports also claimed that Kimball graduated from East Central State College in Ada, Oklahoma, and that she studied at the University of Oklahoma in Norman in the 1930s. This implied a connection with the Indian art program started by Oscar Jacobson, who had worked with Kiowa students beginning in the late 1920s. Kimball, however, apparently never lived or studied in Oklahoma but instead worked as a designer for a Kansas City department store before traveling to New York with a second husband in 1935 to begin her art career. In New York, Kimball studied at the Art Students League from 1935 to 1939, where she later served as a board member. She also studied in Rome as well as in Paris with the Cubist painter Fernand Léger, and it is likely that it was as a student in Europe that Kimball took on her Indian persona. In a later interview she spoke of visiting the ethnological collections of Paris, as Picasso had done a generation earlier. Looking back, she described the experience in terms of self-recognition, seeing more of herself in the art of non-Westerners than in the work of her modernist peers. As she explained, ‘‘I looked at Impressionism, but the things that really interested me were the sculptures of the primitive Africans. I saw a similarity between them and what I knew from my own background. My work began to reflect this.’’ 20 It is possible that here Kimball is merely referring to herself as an American artist and hence as an outsider to the European tradition, yet it is clear that during these years she imagined and recast herself as ‘‘other,’’ even if at first this identification was primarily figurative and rhetorical. An early example of Kimball’s newfound fascination and identification with Native American art is Zuni Maiden of 1939 [figure 21]. The image of a pueblo woman —familiar from Indian paintings in the studio style then on view in New York— was painted by Kimball from a rear viewpoint in order to emphasize the costume and color. However, Kimball’s loose, expressionistic brush handling and use of oil paints contrasts with the flat, stencil-like patterning of studio-style painting and ‘‘traditional-style’’ Indian painting, and the effect is such that Kimball’s work bears a closer resemblance to the painterly Primitivism of John Sloan, Robert Henri, and other non-Native painters of Southwestern exotica. At her solo debut in 1945 at the Frank Rehn Galleries in New York, Kimball pre-

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sented paintings with titles that suggested Indian themes but did not draw directly from Native American pictorial traditions. Rather, she produced modernist paintings in a semi-abstract style that recalled the Primitivism of her better-known New York School peers while also representing herself as an Indian. Critics validated Kimball’s claims to an Osage identity by analyzing her art in racial terms. Kimball’s art, writers suggested, married Indian form, craft, and tradition with the modernist’s ‘‘sophisticated taste’’—equal parts ‘‘primitive’’ and modern—and as such served as a metaphor for what critics believed was Kimball’s ‘‘half-breed’’ identity. Kimball was described in the New York art press as a Native American savant who had crossed over into the modernist mainstream while keeping one foot firmly rooted in Indian traditions. Henry McBride claimed to find evidence of a racial predisposition in Kimball’s paintings, describing her art as having ‘‘something mystical in it, as though the artist’s blood was asserting itself in spite of her art training.’’ 21 Peyton Boswell Jr. of Art Digest described Kimball’s works in terms of a hybrid stylistic genealogy befitting her alleged mixed-race heritage: ‘‘Within the compass of Yeffe Kimball’s art,’’ he wrote, ‘‘are contained two age-removed cultures—that of the American Indian, which was contemporary perhaps with the zenith of Egypt, blended with the sophisticated taste of the true modern. While Miss Kimball often seeks her source in the lore of her people, she has rejected the traditional symbols to create pictorial statements around . . . modern concept[s].’’ 22 The success of Kimball’s Indian persona was dependent on her cultivating proper credentials—she would have to pass among Indians as well. Thus it was while living and working in Manhattan that Kimball entered the First Philbrook Indian Annual. The 1946 Philbrook exhibition was the first major postwar showcase for modern Native American art,23 and thus being able to place a painting in the show was a crucial step in Kimball’s efforts to develop credibility as an Indian artist. The Philbrook annuals were essential to the institutionalization of modern Native American art: indeed, in 1946 at the first annual the Philbrook acquired twenty-three paintings for its permanent collections. A painting placed in the Philbrook’s growing collections guaranteed an artist a place in the history of twentieth-century Native American art. As Kimball explained in a letter to her New York dealer Frank (‘‘Poppa’’) Rehn, even though a small painting like Sacred Buffalo might normally sell for $500, she would sell it to the Philbrook for $350 if the jurors awarded it the grand purchase prize.24 Philbrook director Bernard Frazier, who initiated and organized the first five annuals, wrote that the shows were designed to fulfill in the post–World War II decades a number of cultural initiatives, including: ‘‘To acquaint the world with Indian painting; to encourage the collection of Indian painting; to maintain high standards

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through competent juries; to document records of Indian life and culture through traditional expression of the Indians, and to stimulate the renaissance of this unique expression by the encouragement of Indian artists.’’ 25 Those considered eligible to enter paintings in the annuals included ‘‘all artists of North American Indian or Eskimo extraction.’’ Frazier intended the exhibitions as a prestigious forum for an annual showing of Native American painting, which was in a period of rapid growth owing to the return of many Native veterans of the Second World War and the home front war effort. The exhibit was judged by a panel of Native American and non-Native jurors; for the first exhibit in 1946 the jury included the Potawatomi artist Woody Crumbo, the Oklahoma Regionalist painter Charles Banks Wilson, and an emeritus curator at the Philbrook, Clark Field. The honorary jurors were Susie Peters, a former Indian service field agent, and Professor Oscar Jacobson of the University of Oklahoma, both of whom were non-Natives who after 1915 had been early promoters of the Kiowa school.26 The Philbrook exhibition was national in scope. Frazier organized paintings under three regional categories: Plains, Southwest, and Woodlands, the latter of which was a catchall category that included works by artists not associated with the other two culture areas. Purchase prizes were awarded to the top paintings from each region. Of the twenty-three paintings that the Philbrook bought in the first annual for its permanent collections, ten were acquired through purchase prizes and thirteen more were purchased. The exhibition had a continuing effect on popular and institutional understanding of Native American art. Beginning in 1947, a selection of thirty-four works from the first annual circulated in a national two-year tour. In 1950, under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution’s Traveling Exhibition Bureau, an expanded exhibition toured eight cities in the United States, Mexico, and Guatemala for four years.27 Throughout the following decades, purchase prizes formed the bulk of the Philbrook’s massive and now canonical collection of twentieth-century Native American paintings. To be sure, Sacred Buffalo, Kimball’s entry for the first Philbrook Indian Annual, did not draw from Native American pictorial traditions. But the very notion of a traditional style of Native American painting was in flux after World War II.28 The Philbrook did accept artworks that departed from traditional Native American style and media. Although artists could submit work in any modern media, including watercolor, oil, or pastels, representation was limited to a prescribed set of authentic images. The Philbrook Indian Annuals were not open to works that did not address Native themes and subjects. Entries were limited to representations of ‘‘traditional’’ images, the authenticity of which was policed by a panel of Native American artists

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and non-Native experts. ‘‘Subject matter,’’ the exhibit guidelines stipulated, ‘‘should concern traditional, ceremonial or mystic themes relating to the life or thought of Indian peoples.’’ 29 In 1946, in his last year at the Art Students League, the Ojibwe painter George Morrison showed his work in mainstream exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Woman’s Club in Minneapolis. But when Morrison attempted to enter a painting in the Philbrook Indian Annual it was rejected. As he later wrote, ‘‘I also wanted to join some exhibits of work by Native Americans, so I applied to the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But I was rejected. My art was too extreme; it wasn’t Indian enough for them.’’ Morrison’s experience with the Philbrook annuals makes a curious contrast to that of Kimball. As Morrison wrote with unintended irony, ‘‘I never played the role of being an Indian artist . . . I wasn’t exploiting the idea of being an Indian at all, or using Indian themes.’’ 30 Kimball’s modernist interest in abstraction and in sources that were not specific to any particular tribal identity would not necessarily have aroused suspicions as to her true identity. Despite the efforts of the Philbrook and other institutions to define an authentic style, aesthetic innovation and pan-Indianism were hallmarks of twentieth-century Native American painting. Moreover, Kimball was by no means the only aesthetic innovator to submit work to the Philbrook annuals. A number of the artists exhibiting in the annuals were notable for their postwar transformations of traditional Native American painting. The hybrid and modern nature of the art shown at the Philbrook is illustrated by works such as the Ojibwe painter Patrick DesJarliat’s Making Wild Rice of 1946, which, as described in chapter 4, was painted in a representational style that recalled the Mexican muralists and the American Regionalist painting of the 1930s.31 The Yanktonai Dakota artist Oscar Howe’s Dakota Duck Hunt, which won the grand purchase prize in 1947, merged a traditional genre subject with landscape, which was not a traditional or common subject for Native American artists. Indeed, the fluidity of modern pan-Indian art styles—for example, the ambiguity of the category of the ‘‘authentic’’ after World War II—made it possible for Kimball to cobble together a style and an identity that would be accepted as ‘‘Indian’’ to both Native and non-Native audiences and juries at the Philbrook as in New York. When Kimball became interested in Indian painting in the late 1930s, the most readily available model on exhibition in New York was the Santa Fe style, which was associated with Dorothy Dunn’s students at the Santa Fe Indian School and, to a lesser extent, with the Oklahoma style associated with Oscar Jacobson’s Kiowa students at the University of Oklahoma. Although clearly Kimball was influenced by

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this style, an obvious difference lies in the fact that Kimball painted in oil, rather than the watercolors and pencils of the dominant Indian styles. Kimball also reduced and abstracted form into decorative pattern, but this tendency was also apparent in much traditional Indian painting in the twentieth century. Many Kiowa and Pueblo paintings demonstrated a love of pattern and decoration due to the survival of indigenous abstract forms. Many of Dunn’s Pueblo students worked in decorative modes that were derived from traditional, but not sacred, pottery designs due to tribal prohibitions against the depiction of ceremonial practices. Kimball’s Indian paintings simultaneously embodied her embrace of these Native American styles and European-American aesthetic modernism. The paintings that Kimball exhibited at the Philbrook and elsewhere in the late 1940s and early 1950s drew from a range of Native American cultures for subject matter, none of which, of course, were Kimball’s own in any sense. Kimball’s ModernPrimitive paintings were thus pan-Indian in the sense that they were not associated with any particular tribe or nation in terms of style or specific content. Faun and Spirit recalled prehistoric pictographs that Kimball then repeated and layered in the dynamic patterns of early-twentieth-century Cubism and Futurism. Other paintings found sources in the nineteenth-century Plains Indians’ ledger drawings of mounted warriors on horseback, but these were incorporated into an abstract organization. Kimball’s 1948 painting Manabozo and Friends took as its subject the story of the Ojibwe culture-hero, Manabozo. As such cultural borrowings demonstrate, Kimball did not attempt to re-create a traditional Native expression but rather updated and modernized her sources using contemporary Euro-American modernist aesthetics and oil paint (and later acrylics and resins). In a search for a usable past in which to ground a modernist, artistic subjectivity, Kimball drew from an ethnic heritage to which she felt an elective affinity. But in 1946 Sacred Buffalo received a cooler reception than Kimball had anticipated; she won no prizes that year at the Philbrook show and the painting was not purchased by the museum. Still, Kimball was excited that her painting hung alongside works by the established Kiowa painters Monroe Tsatoke, Stephen Mopope, and Waldo Mootzka, and the Zia painter Velino Herrera.32At Frazier’s urging, Kimball entered the Philbrook Indian Annual again in 1947. This time the jurors—including the Native artists Archie Blackowl and Fred Kabotie—awarded Kimball’s painting To the Happy Hunting Ground first honorable mention in the Plains region category. Kimball reviewed the 1947 annual for Art Digest and included a reproduction of her painting at the bottom of the page [figure 22]. To the Happy Hunting Ground selfconsciously synthesized Native American pictorial traditions in its gracefully attenu-

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ated, art deco silhouettes repeated in a friezelike space with no ground line, framed by abstract, linear elements. Philbrook art director Bernard Frazier wrote to Kimball congratulating the artist on her award: ‘‘In a way it is a moral victory for you in that both jurymen of last year’s show have enthused over it a bit[,] labeling it as good Indian stuff. Last year they doubted that your nice white bison had any real Indian mood and therefore were not too sympathetic toward it.’’ 33 Needless to say, with this award Kimball was accepted as an Indian artist. Her transformation from a New Yorker received with skepticism and suspicion by the Philbrook jurors into an artist who produced ‘‘good Indian stuff ’’ is significant. She would continue to exhibit in the Philbrook annuals, and over the next three decades she would carve out a niche for herself in Native art, culture, and politics.

THE PERILS OF PRIMITIVISM

Kimball’s Primitivism was significantly different from her modernist peers in that she did not see Indian identity and modernity as mutually exclusive. Her writings on the Philbrook annuals in 1947 and 1948 for Art Digest, written in the voice of her adopted Indian-modernist persona, located Native American painting at an important historic juncture in Indian art history and in the larger process of U.S.-Indian intercultural and political relations. Kimball defined traditional Native arts in a context of ritual and communal utility that existed independent of modernist issues of individual innovation and quality. As she stated, ‘‘Such was the original sphere of American Indian painting: ceremonial recordings set down through standardized symbols; not judged as good or bad, but simply as right or wrong.’’ Kimball argued that the Philbrook exhibitions documented the emergence of modern innovation and individualism in Native art at midcentury. She asserted that the modern paintings at the Philbrook (and she included her own work in this grouping) ‘‘spring from the deep roots of a true vernacular art, based on the indigenous primitive, influenced by the modern.’’ As she further noted, ‘‘Indian Chiefs, sincere in their beliefs, vigilant to preserve the magic of the sacred ceremonies, did much to delay the progress of the artists by condemning their works as omens of evil.’’ But while modern Native painting was rooted in the Primitive, Native artists at mid-century were in ‘‘revolt against traditionalism, tight-bound ceremonial functions, Chieftan rule and Kiva law.’’ At the turn of the twentieth century, Kimball argued, Native artists came under the influence of a ‘‘new horizon,’’ which was heralded by the expansive Euro-American mainstream. Native artists were influenced by the modernist values of liberalism and individualism, which imposed modern notions of progress onto the cyclical time

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of Native cultures. This new, strange horizon, and the cultural shocks it implied, instilled in Native artists an ‘‘uncontrollable urge to express.’’ 34 Kimball argued that Indianness and modern subjectivity were not mutually exclusive. Native artists, she asserted, were engaged in a self-conscious modernism that looked to the past and future simultaneously. Modern Native American artists, she argued, were engaged in an ‘‘inner struggle’’ to ‘‘preserve what was aesthetically valid in its relation to pure painting, without destroying their ancestral roots or losing their individual painting language.’’ 35 Kimball’s willingness to see ‘‘pure painting’’ and ‘‘individual’’ styles in Native American painting indicates her commitment to forging a new modernist Primitivism that was not limited by the stereotypes of collectivism and aesthetic conservatism. Moreover, she argued that modern Native painting had a rightful place in American art. Few critics writing before World War II would have disagreed with Kimball’s claims for the relevance of Indianness in American art and culture. However, Kimball’s willingness to see Indianness as fully compatible with modern, individual innovation was unique in the late 1940s. In staking out this position—a position that claimed the contemporary nature of twentieth-century Native painting, valuing individuality and innovation—Kimball wrote against those who would exclude Howe’s 1958 painting from award consideration in the Philbrook annual on the grounds that it was ‘‘a fine painting . . . but not Indian.’’ As Kimball argued to the contrary, ‘‘The modern Indian artist has painted his own ‘Declaration of Independence,’ [and] now insists on participating in the twentieth century. . . . For the Indian to think and feel other than as a twentieth century artist is as futile as forgetting that the atomic bomb has swept away the very roots of mysticism.’’ 36 In this regard, Kimball’s picture of the modern Native painter is not so different from the self-description offered by the exemplary modern super-individual of twentiethcentury art history, Jackson Pollock, who in 1950 explained to an interviewer that his art expressed ‘‘this age, the airplane, the atom bomb and the radio.’’ 37 While some postwar critics argued that the traditionalism of Native arts limited their ability to communicate across differences, Kimball countered that ‘‘the Indian artist, while documenting his people finds it natural to invest his work with the cosmos, since every aspect of Indian life shows [the] concept of man’s place in the universe and his relationship to it. The use of symbols, often reduced to near abstraction, is as near for him today as it was for his forbears, as exemplified by the prehistoric paintings found on Kiva walls.’’ 38 Kimball continued to exhibit her modernist paintings regularly at the Philbrook annuals, and eventually she won the overall first purchase prize in 1959 for her painting Old Medicine Man in the nontraditional ‘‘New Directions’’ category, which was

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introduced that year. Kimball’s visible, gestural brushstrokes and crowded composition characterized Old Medicine Man as a modernist painting, recalling earlytwentieth-century European Expressionism. In the painting a looming totem pole pushes the imposing head and shoulders of an Indian elder into the immediate foreground. While ostensibly based on Northwest Coast imagery (the frankly stereotypical totem pole), the painting had a psychological edge that was absent in ‘‘traditionalstyle’’ pictures. Significantly, Kimball’s success at the 1959 annual came just one year after the Sioux painter Oscar Howe’s Umine Wacipe: War and Peace Dance of 1958 was excluded from judging. Kimball’s painting was a surprising award winner in an exhibition that had generally been conservative, even paternalistic, in its sponsorship of Native American painting. However, the purchase prize awarded in 1959 for Old Medicine Man, which had been painted in 1951, elided the fact that Kimball’s own style had undergone a major transformation over the course of the decade [figure 23]. While not painted in the dominant studio style, White Buffalo and To the Happy Hunting Ground were, like Old Medicine Man, self-conscious evocations of a stereotypical Indian art, where Kimball referenced Native cultures in subject matter if not style. Yet by the mid-1950s Kimball was increasingly preoccupied with her political activities and less able to produce new artwork.39 During this time, she moved away from Primitivist imagery and embraced a process-oriented, abstract painterly style. In 1957, at the urging of her friend the millionaire art collector and automotive heir Walter Chrysler Jr., she began summering in the artists’ colony at Provincetown on Cape Cod. It was there that she painted Gods in Monument Valley, a seven-foot-tall abstraction in acrylic— a new medium that she perfected with the help of her husband Harvey Slatin, a Manhattan Project scientist [figure 24]. While the title putatively references the iconic landscape of the Southwest (the backdrop for numerous John Ford westerns), the stains and drips of Kimball’s process took precedence over her use of Primitivist imagery—with this body of work she had moved on to pure abstraction. With the stylistic shift evident in Gods in Monument Valley Kimball was very much in step with new directions that were emerging in the work of the New York School artists of the late 1950s. Kimball’s new process-oriented canvases were similar in effect to the ‘‘color-field’’ paintings of Helen Frankenthaler and Jules Olitski. Kimball referred to this series as ‘‘fused earth paintings.’’ These, and the ‘‘space paintings,’’ which she produced throughout the 1960s, gave form to her new interest in atomic processes and space imagery, which she later credited to the influence of her husband Harvey, who had given her a sample of glass created by the heat of atomic testing at Alamogordo, New Mexico.40

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More important, Kimball’s new abstract direction provided a way to escape the Primitivist stereotypes through which her earlier Indian-themed paintings had been received. Her move from Primitivism to pure abstraction may have been her solution to the limitations of the stereotypes that had earlier defined her career, which, indeed, she had deliberately manipulated in her art and life. To this extent, Kimball may have found herself the victim of the very discourses of Primitivism that she had been so adept at manipulating in the 1940s. Kimball maintained her political and cultural commitments even beyond the point where they seemed to be useful for her career. Since the late 1940s she had found her voice as an Indian through the use of stereotypical imagery (as well as costume and jewelry); now, she moved into a style of ‘‘action painting’’ that showcased her identity as an autonomous modern artist, free from tradition.41 Her Indian act notwithstanding, Kimball was concerned throughout her career to maintain her artistic freedom independent of established schools and movements, or parochial small-mindedness—Indian, Euro-American, or otherwise. In 1960, three years after she began summering at the Cape Cod artists’ colony, she published a vitriolic letter in the Provincetown Advocate wherein she resigned her membership in the Provincetown Artists Association. Angered over the rejection of a ‘‘sculptured collage’’ from a juried exhibition, she criticized the organization as ‘‘a home for the mediocre and amateur painter,’’ which was ‘‘rejecting that which is unfamiliar, new, or unknown.’’ As Kimball added, ‘‘I believe that an artist who does not try to learn what has been contributed before his time and does not attempt to add something to this contribution is a failure, dilettante, or a charlatan. To copy, imitate, or join a ‘school’ of painting is an easy road to travel for an individual who is satisfied and content with mediocrity . . . I do not wish to be a member of any organization with such clannish conduct and limited artistic judgment.’’ 42 During this period, Kimball produced what are now her best-known works, many of which were collected by the art program of the National Air and Space Administration (nasa).43 Certainly, this work bore the influence of her nuclear chemist husband. Dressed in futuristic white jumpsuit, Kimball poured and dripped industrial pigments and resins across canvases that were so large that she used a harness to suspend herself above the horizontal surface, much like an astronaut on a space walk suspended miles above the surface of the earth. These paintings are massive in scale and bear no recognizable trace of Native American identity or visual tradition; it is with these works that Kimball erased her constructed Indian identity with the gestural mark. In so doing, Kimball’s desire to see herself as an individual resonated with other New York artists’ understanding of the self as the privileged site of authenticity. The gesture—the mark or ‘‘signature’’ that revealed the artist’s unique hand

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and individual identity, and which increasingly characterized Kimball’s work in the late 1950s and 1960s—displaced the Primitive as the privileged site of authenticity in the early 1950s. The 1962 painting-in-the-round, Solar Continuum, exemplifies this phase of Kimball’s career. This piece, measuring four feet in diameter and ten feet in height, is a cylindrical painting in acrylic resin and industrial pigments on canvas, placed over a core of molded plywood. Solar Continuum, like other abstract works that occupied Kimball from the late 1950s through the late 1960s, exploited these new artistic materials to suggest the vastness of space, as well as the excitement of the early years of the U.S. space program. When it was unveiled at the Chrysler Museum in Provincetown in 1962, Solar Continuum, which Kimball described as a ‘‘contiguous canvas of the universe . . . enveloped in consuming Nuclear Fire,’’ was accompanied by an audio soundtrack, supplied by her husband, of actual extraterrestrial noises [figure 25].44 In contrast with her earlier Primitivist style, the act of focusing on the image of the earth from space or the cosmos deemphasized the particularities of human identity and minimized difference by focusing on the universal. Kimball’s cosmic abstractions found a wide audience. They were shown in galleries in New York and Provincetown, in major museums including the National Gallery in Washington, and at nontraditional venues such as nasa’s Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston and at twa’s Galerie des Deux Mondes in the Eero Saarinen–designed terminal at New York’s Idlewild (now JFK) Airport. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, Kimball returned to explicitly Native American themes in her art. The large-scale portraits of historical and contemporary Indian leaders and activists produced at this time are in many ways analogous to the new Indian painting then emerging in the studios and classrooms of the Institute for American Indian Art in Santa Fe. The series that Kimball created includes the paintings Chief Red Cloud (1970) and Angry Young Man (1970), in which the model is apparently a young Russell Means [figure 26]. Kimball’s scale and pop-modernist style in these homages recalls the work of the groundbreaking Native American artists at the Institute of American Indian Arts, including Fritz Scholder (Luiseño) and his student T. C. Cannon (Kiowa-Caddo). However, unlike Scholder and Cannon who were attempting to radicalize Native American art for the 1960s, Kimball apparently did not feel the need to make iconic the figure of the Indian warrior. Many of Kimball’s other paintings and constructions of this era combine more typically ‘‘Indian’’ materials of feathers and shells with Kimball’s use of acrylic resins. Her Chief Red Cloud and other pictures of this era look as if they were drawn from the late-nineteenthcentury photographs of Edward S. Curtis and other non-Native romantics. Instead

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of the pop-culture accoutrements brandished by the ironic noble savages of Scholder and Cannon, Kimball’s portrait heads emerge from timeless veils of pigment as if from the mists of romantic history. But for Kimball, who felt the zeal and sincerity of the convert, Native American identity had never been ironic. To the end of her career, Kimball continued to claim an Indian identity, and in her final, unfinished, painting, she fashioned herself as a triumphant Plains warrior on horseback [figure 27].

KIMBALL’S LEGACY

The truth of Kimball’s invented identity was apparently an open secret among at least some in the postwar Native American art world. While Morrison and many other Native artists never indicated that they believed Kimball to be anything other than sincere in her claims, a letter from Frederick J. Dockstader, director of the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, in New York, to Jeanne Snodgrass, curator of Native American art at the Philbrook, does shed some light on the question of who knew what and when. The letter is undated, but it makes reference to Kimball’s thirty-year retrospective exhibition, which was organized by the Philbrook in 1966 and traveled to the Indian Arts and Crafts Board Gallery in Washington, D.C. in 1967. As Dockstader wrote, ‘‘Your descriptive statements about [Kimball’s art] are most amusing since she is about as Indian as you are.’’ (Snodgrass, an enrolled Cherokee, wrote in the margin: ‘‘Ha ha guess I’m more than she is!’’) As Dockstader continued: It is possible though, that way, way back some Indian sneaked into the wigwam one night, but she does not have even enough Indian blood in her veins to be counted a 16th or even a 32nd. Ever since she was in New Mexico she played up this Indian bit, but it is 99 percent showmanship and one percent ethnological. Real gutsy gal. As you know, she is a full sister to Mary Watson (Mrs. Lewis Watson) of Ada, Oklahoma. I have talked to Mary, and she just laughts [sic] every time she thinks of her ‘‘Indian sister.’’ However, it would just kill Mary if she knew that I was telling you this. So please don’t make too much of an issue out of it. My only concern [is] that the Indian has been exploited long enough without a bunch of Sycamores still trying to get on the gravy train by tomfoolery or falsification. I believe she was born in Arkansas, but cannot varify [sic] this.’’ 45 Dockstader’s letter indicates his knowing complicity in Kimball’s charade, but while he was clearly critical of other artists seeking to advance their own careers, he also asked Snodgrass to exercise some discretion in Kimball’s case and to not over-

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publicize the facts of her invented identity. Dockstader may have been willing to countenance Kimball’s Indian act because, throughout her career, Kimball pursued meaningful connections with Native art and Native peoples to a far greater extent than did her New York School peers. Kimball’s interest in Native American art and culture ultimately led her far from her Manhattan penthouse in pursuit of ever closer and more intimate contact with Native Americans in the aboriginal spaces of the West. In the late 1940s, Kimball worked under Kenneth Chapman—a Collier-era anthropologist and an early supporter of efforts to preserve and revive traditional Native arts and culture—in his efforts to study the collections of the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe. In addition, Kimball spent spring 1949 cataloguing objects in the collections of Native American Art at the Portland Art Museum, and she published an essay in Art Digest on the museum’s Northwest Coast Indian collections.46 In pursuit of experience and credentials, Kimball applied in 1948 and 1949 (both times unsuccessfully) for a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York.47 In her application, Kimball claimed to have been born in Kiowa County ‘‘of American Indian and Pioneer parentage,’’ and that as an artist whose heritage was ‘‘partly Indian,’’ she was concerned with the study of Native American art as a resource for her modernism. She submitted a request for support of her ‘‘creative painting’’ and her ‘‘study and research in American Indian Art and culture as a foundation and source of inspiration.’’ Kimball’s plan of study consisted of living among Natives at the Apache, Hopi, Navajo, and Ute reservations, where she would observe ceremonies, rituals, and dances; visit and study prehistoric archeological sites and ‘‘Kiva paintings’’; and study in the research libraries and museum collections of the West and Southwest: ‘‘With probably no other people has religious ceremony been so intermingled with all the activities of daily life.’’ Kimball, as did members of the American avant-garde before her, looked to Native American art and spirituality as a beautiful model for the reintegration of the aesthetic into modernity. In so doing, she proposed a course of study that would allow her to find artistic inspiration for modern works in such Primitivist experiences. Kimball also suggested that Native American culture and ritual were ‘‘truly American,’’ and as such formed a viable aesthetic resource for a truly American modern art: ‘‘Here is an example of complete unity. Communal participation in the belief of a people is carried out in order and rhythm by these beautiful figures uttering their songs and prayers as they move in dignified procession. All the arts are an inseparable expression. A source of material unique in its character because of its purity, invaluable to art and to our native expression of it.’’ 48 Kimball came of age socially, politically, and artistically in the context of mid-

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century American modernist desires to commune with human universals that, it was believed, spoke across differences and transcended geography and history. Stories of self-discovery, repudiation, and reinvention are emblematic of the modern experience.49 Indianness was, for Kimball’s generation, the malleable sign of an ideal premodern consciousness. Kimball, educated in mainstream institutions and savvy to international modernist culture, approached Indianness as a cosmopolitan and addressed it as something that could be chosen and consciously constructed. She came of age artistically in an era of pluralism, in which John Collier and other urban bohemians and political progressives looked to Native cultures as valuable in their own right and understood as an important natural and national resource—as something to be ‘‘prized, nourished, and honored.’’ For Collier’s generation (and for Kimball coming of age in the 1930s) cosmopolitanism was figured in what David Hollinger has described as a ‘‘desire to transcend the limitations of any and all particularlisms in order to achieve a more complete human experience and a more complete understanding of that experience . . . Particular cultures and subcultures [were] viewed as repositories for insights and experiences that can be drawn upon in the interests of a more comprehensive outlook on the world . . . Insofar as [a particular] heritage or tradition is an avenue toward the expansion of experience and understanding, access to it [was] to be preserved.’’ 50 Newman’s optimism about the new ‘‘inter-American consciousness’’ he saw on the horizon is one powerful example of this univeralist ethos as it responded to the crises of World War II.51 Kimball’s choice to become Indian suggests the great degree, by the early postwar period, to which Native art and identity had been invested with an aesthetic authority in American modernist culture. Indianness enabled Kimball to transcend the limitations of her opportunities as a woman painter much as the Primitive universal had allowed Barnett Newman and the predominantly ethnic and immigrant artists of the New York School to simultaneously claim adherence to a universal, transcendent culture and claim the mantle of American art at midcentury. Indeed, as Sieglinde Lemke suggests, modernism’s liaison with otherness was always about passing and crossing over. Indianness for Kimball, as it had been for others, provided the raw material for constructing a modernist artistic subjectivity where other options were lacking. Kimball’s invented identity was a success, both in the sense of a successful disguise and in the sense that New York society found her fascinating and Native Americans found her to be sincere. Her paintings were accepted by Native and non-Native critics and audiences alike as embodying an essential Indianness—or as Frazier wrote, ‘‘good Indian stuff.’’ This was the central fact upon which Kimball’s career traded.

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So what was at stake in Kimball’s passing for Indian? Outside of the small rewards to be had for winning purchase prizes at the Philbrook annuals, Kimball’s choice to assume an Indian persona was not about a desire to capitalize on a burgeoning market for modern Indian art but rather about the psychologically and culturally hazy matter of elective affinity. Kimball’s lifelong commitments to and activism on behalf of Native causes demonstrate that her affinity with Indianness was sincerely felt, if not given ancestrally. Simply put, in an art world and a historical moment less wellattuned than today to the issues and implications of cultural sovereignty and identity politics, if Kimball said she was Indian, then she was. Indeed, why should anyone have thought that she wasn’t? Why would anyone have suspected that Indianness might be impersonated? Kimball’s crossover presence in the Indian and mainstream modern art worlds anticipated the market currency of Native arts that would mature in the 1970s and 1980s, even as Kimball’s currency was false coin. However, Kimball’s greatest payoff was in the cachet that Indianness imparted in the context of the New York gallery world. Here Kimball found greater cultural capital in Indianness than was otherwise available to her as a woman painter. Her fabrication of an Indian identity should be seen as an act of self-invention in response to the social and sexual dynamics of the postwar New York art world, but also as a response to her own sincerely felt affinities. For Kimball, the transformative power of the Primitive enabled her to transcend the second-class status of a woman painter in the masculine milieu of the postwar New York art world and to reinvent herself as an Indian artist. In this role, Kimball found greater cultural capital and aesthetic authority than would otherwise have been available to her. During her lifetime Kimball’s claims went unchallenged, but her legacy has been affected by more recent events. Her career as an Indian artist predated the concerns over cultural sovereignty that precipitated the passage of U.S. Public Law 101–644, known as the Indian Arts and Crafts Act (iaca) which has significantly chilled the market for artworks by unenrolled Indian artists.52 The 1990 act is an amendment to the original legislation that created the Indian Arts and Crafts Board as an agency under the Department of the Interior in 1935 and was signed into law by President Bush. The act was the culmination of lobbying efforts by Native American artists and activists throughout the 1980s as the market for Native American arts and crafts grew dramatically. According to its proponents, the purpose of the act was to stop the sale of works of counterfeit Native art—whether produced by foreign industries and sold under false pretenses in the United States, or made by individuals falsely claiming to be Native American—and to provide a legal remedy to the threats to economic stability and cultural sovereignty posed by counterfeits. What began in the late nine-

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teenth century as a curio trade in pottery, weavings, and other craft items has evolved at the end of the twentieth century into an international market worth an annual sum of $408 million. A 1985 report by the U.S. Commerce Department estimated that inauthentic Native artworks—both fine arts and crafts produced by non-Native artists and overseas industries and sold under false claims of Native manufacture— were siphoning off 10 to 20 percent of the Native artworks market.53 One of the most vociferous organizations lobbying for the passage of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act was the Santa Fe–based Native American Art Alliance (naaa). At a public hearing in 1988 organized by the alliance, David Bradley—an outspoken artist, enrolled member of the White Earth Ojibwa Reservation in Minnesota, and vice president of the Native American Art Alliance—singled out a number of successful Southwest Native artists as frauds. As he asserted: ‘‘They choose a tribe and make unfounded claims of being an Indian of that tribe, even to the absurd point of claiming to be a medicine man of the tribe. They make these claims in order to enhance the sale of their artwork. This lie damages the tribe they have chosen, misinforms the public, reinforces stereotypes and robs a proud people of their culture and artistic traditions, all for the sake of money.’’ 54 Drafted by Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, the only Native American serving in the U.S. Congress (and a jeweler himself ), along with senators Kyl and McCain of Arizona, the act amended previous powers of the Indian Arts and Craft Board, which were never enforced, by increasing the penalties for violations. Fines were raised from $500 to $250,000 and potential prison time was increased from six months to five years. In addition to these criminal provisions, an amendment to the law made in 2000 allows for tribes to file civil suits for monetary damages against those perpetrating fraud under the act.55 However, other Native artists and activists voiced their concerns about the longterm effects of such legislation. As written, the act recognizes as legitimate only those artists who are enrolled members of a federally recognized Indian tribe. However, given the history of anti-tribalism and the drive toward allotment and assimilation that has characterized U.S.-Indian relations, tribal enrollment is a flawed criterion for identifying Native Americans. Indeed, Native Americans might not be enrolled in a federally recognized tribe for any number of reasons—for example, the many tribes that have lost federal recognition, not to mention the many individuals whose ancestors refused to enroll with the federal allotment rolls, which disbanded tribal landholdings wholesale from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth, which are, ironically, the basis of contemporary tribal membership. Many Native Americans and artists feel that the act smacks of ‘‘cultural imperialism.’’ One participant

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in a panel discussion on the impact of the increased regulations at the October 1992 biennial conference in Minneapolis of Atlatl, a Native American arts service organization, expressed the common concern that the iaca reflected federal government efforts ‘‘to gain firm control over the production of Indian arts.’’ Further, many conference participants portrayed the iaca as divisive and unworkable, serving only to perpetuate colonialism.56 Although a number of civil cases have been initiated, not one criminal case has been brought to trial under the act. However, the increased penalties for violations (and the specter of costly civil settlements) have raised curators’ awareness of issues of institutional integrity, and in some instances have had a chilling effect on the careers of artists who are unable to produce verification of tribal enrollment. One example of this is found in the case of the successful artist R. Lee White (aka Randy Lee White, or Randy Lee Whitehorse), who claimed to be of mixed-race ancestry and a member of the Sioux Nation. White’s art drew from traditional Plains art; his work was well-researched and appropriated images and forms from shields, shirts, and ledger book and war record painting. He combined these Native pictorial traditions with an Abstract Expressionist gesture to make sophisticated, hybrid artworks that sold well in Native American art galleries. White’s purported Native identity was central to the meaning and value of his work; indeed, he won a number of awards and was included in exhibitions for which he would have been ineligible as a non-Native.57 In a 1987 report issued by the naaa, however, White’s name appeared among those artists listed as suspicious. As a result, in 1988, the Heard Museum in Phoenix, which was at the time hosting an exhibition of his art, changed the text of a catalogue that identified White as an enrolled Native and canceled the remainder of a European tour of his art. White now denies that he ever claimed to have been an enrolled member of an Indian nation, and he blames the ‘‘overzealous’’ art press for creating a romantic image of him as a Native artist. Further, he has eliminated the use of Plains Indian iconography in his work and he now describes himself as a multiracial artist and a ‘‘bridge maker’’ for ‘‘audiences of hybrid heritage.’’ 58 In another example, the artist Jimmie Durham had two exhibitions canceled in 1991 largely as a result of the impact of the iaca and the organizing efforts of the naaa. Because of his inability to document his claims to Cherokee ancestry, the American Indian Contemporary Arts Gallery in San Francisco canceled a planned solo exhibition of his work. Another organization, the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, also postponed a solo exhibition of Durham’s work until he could prove his identity as Cherokee. Like White, Durham has insisted that he is not an ‘‘Indian artist,’’ but it seems likely that his intention in such statements is to resist

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stereotypical images of the romantic ‘‘Indian artist’’ and instead claim an identity as a critical, contemporary artist. Interestingly, Durham’s art has always engaged issues of the construction of Indianness and authenticity. In 1991, he wrote, ‘‘I am Cherokee but my work is simply contemporary art, and for me it is vital that my work be seen as contemporary art without any qualifiers or labels. I do not like the idea of ‘Indian art.’ It is a trap for artists and a disservice to the Indian communities.’’ 59 However, in 1993 Durham sent a letter to the editor of Art in America, in which he stated, ‘‘I am not a Cherokee. I am not an American Indian. This is in concurrence with recent U.S. legislation, because I am not enrolled on any reservation or in any American Indian community.’’ 60 Durham’s disavowal may be related to his refusal to be part of the increasingly bitter infighting in the very small world of Indian art and politics.61 Unlike White, Durham has had numerous exhibitions at major international mainstream institutions. Although his ability to exhibit as a Native American artist has been limited in the United States, he has continued to exhibit in Europe and Canada. After the passage of the iaca, Durham’s exhibition credits included a 1992 solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, as well as work in the 1992 Native artists’ exhibition titled Land, Spirit, Power at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and in the 1993 Whitney Biennial and at Documenta IX, a major international exhibition in Kassel, Germany. Needless to say, Yeffe Kimball’s legacy has also been affected by the new standards. After her death, Kimball’s husband, Harvey Slatin, was approached about the issue of donating her estate to the Department of the Interior.62 Kimball had been involved with the department throughout her career: for example, her 1966 retrospective, which was organized by the Philbrook Art Center was shown at the Department of the Interior art gallery in Washington. Between 1978 and 1983, ninetyfive works by Kimball (paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints), several boxes of papers, and her personal library of Native American and art-related materials (primarily from her estate) were collected in Anadarko, Oklahoma, in the Southern Plains Indian Museum, which is managed by the Department of the Interior’s Indian Arts and Crafts Board. Slatin recalls that the iacb was interested in dedicating a museum wing to Kimball’s paintings and collections; however, her materials are currently in long-term storage where they are for the most part inaccessible. The next-largest collection of Kimball’s art is at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, which has nine of her paintings in its collection, as well as a large group of ethnographic photographs that were taken by her in the 1950s. Some of these paintings and other materials were given by Kimball to the institute; some were donated by Slatin after Kimball’s death; and the rest were received as damaged

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works from the Bureau of Indian Affairs art collection. The status of the Kimball holdings at the Southern Plains Indian Museum and at the Institute of American Indian Arts is currently uncertain, notably because her unverified tribal enrollment makes the inclusion of these materials in institutions that receive federal funding disputable. While the provisions of the iaca apply in the first instance to retail sales, the legislation begs the question of the historical significance of Kimball’s artworks. Are Kimball’s artworks only of value insofar as they have some relation to Native American culture? Are they less significant as historical artifacts once the artist’s authenticity is challenged? And what should be done with these holdings? Should they be transferred to another institution? And, by extension, what will become of works by other marginal and/or inauthentic Native artists, or authentic artists who are unable to provide documentation of legitimate tribal ancestry? What standard of proof warrants their continued inclusion in federally funded institutions that are dedicated to the collection and display of Native American culture? Such questions, raised by shifting notions of authenticity and identity, remain unresolved.

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6

‘‘A fine painting . . . but not Indian’’: Oscar Howe, Dick West, and Native American Modernism

My prime aim in art is to show that the Indian, with his priceless heritage, legend, and color, can make himself an important place in contemporary American art.—DICK WEST 1 It has always been my version of Indian traditions to make it individualistic in my own way.—OSCAR HOWE 2

oscar howe’s famous disagreement in 1958 with the philbrook Indian Annual jurors over his painting Umine Wacipe: War and Peace Dance was one of many challenges to the aesthetic authority of ‘‘traditional-style’’ Indian painting after World War II. Since its founding in 1946, the Philbrook Indian Annual had promoted what its organizers considered to be the ‘‘traditional style’’ of Native American painting, developed by the young Indian artists in Dorothy Dunn’s Studio and under Oscar Jacobson at the University of Oklahoma in the 1930s. While Native American artists had been painting only since the early twentieth century, the modern style of easel painting formalized under Dunn and Jacobson had quickly become established as ‘‘traditional.’’ This illustrational style, which Dunn connected to precontact textile and pottery design techniques, emphasized flat, linear patterns and unmodulated earth colors uncontaminated by Western pictorial techniques such as shading and perspective.3 The organizers of the Philbrook Indian Annuals followed Dunn’s lead, defining works rendered in ‘‘flat design and solid color areas’’ as ‘‘authentic.’’ As stated in a 1949 press release: ‘‘The compositions are most frequently arranged in a formal, often symmetrical designs.’’ Detail was to be carefully executed: ‘‘Animal’s hair,’’ they described, ‘‘in many pictures, is brushed on with infinite patience.’’ Such attention to detail would ensure the faithful depiction of costume and iconography. Further, authentic Indian painting was to be illustrational and ethnographically correct: artists were to represent only their own tribe or region, and the proper subjects of Indian painting were ‘‘traditional, ceremonial, or mystic themes relating to the life or thought of Indian peoples.’’ The organizers of the Philbrook annual believed that the standards that enforced these essential traits guaranteed the authenticity and value of Native American painting at a time when they feared that

Indian cultures were disappearing. ‘‘In view of these faithful delineations of character, custom, and costume,’’ the press release stated, ‘‘these paintings are valuable ethnologically as authentic records of American Indian culture, as well as being a significant art expression worthy of recognition.’’ 4 Beginning in the late 1950s, Native artists who desired to reinvent themselves as modern individuals had to formulate a critique and come to terms with the dominant legacy of the Studio style. Many artists began to see the flat, pastel illustrations of traditional life as an imposed aesthetic that merely catered to non-Native audiences’ desire for untroubled images of traditional Indian cultures. By the late 1950s, the positive images of Indianness that were the hallmark of the Studio style had reached the end of their relevance for many younger artists and thus had lost their cultural authority. The Studio style was seen as a simplistic stereotype that elided tribal differences, repressed individual expression, and was out of touch with contemporary Native lives, which by now encompassed military service, urban wage labor, mainstream education, and increasing activism. The Studio style ignored these facts in favor of genre-type scenes of traditional (i.e., reservation-based) ceremonies. However, the Studio style looked like kitsch to modernist critics, innovative artists, and revisionist art historians alike.5 The ‘‘traditional’’ art of the Studio era has since been criticized as the ‘‘Bambi school’’ of Native American painting, where the ubiquitous ‘‘blue deer’’ motif is denigrated as an emblem of the ‘‘counterfeit culture’’ feared by Clement Greenberg and other critics of mass culture. In the 1950s, cosmopolitan, educated Native American artists including Howe and Dick West (Southern Cheyenne, 1912–1996), whose 1951 painting Water Serpent had been included in the Philbrook Indian Annual, argued that ‘‘traditional-style’’ Indian painting had become ‘‘kitsch’’ or ‘‘formulaic,’’ thus stifling individual expression and limiting the freedom of Indian artists and the viability of Indian art [figure 28].

COLOR, LINE, AND THE COLOR LINE

Other Native American modernists of the 1950s sought to distance themselves from ‘‘traditional-style’’ Indian painting by other means. As a young painter, George Morrison aligned himself with the notion of the artist as individual by denying the significance of his Native American heritage and identity for his abstract art, which he saw as modern and therefore not Indian. Like the paintings of the Abstract Expressionists he admired, Morrison’s abstract paintings promised direct communication between the painter and the viewer through the medium of the brushstroke as well as through the gesture and the artist’s unique visual language. While pur-

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porting to represent the ‘‘biography’’ of the artist, the skeins of paint smeared and dripped across the surface of the canvas depicted no conscious imagery; the gesture also revealed nothing of those markers that labeled the artist in the larger society, such as race, gender, age, nationality, sexual orientation, or class. Indeed, nothing was revealed beyond the vague sense of the painter’s body, which was evident in the process of creating the surface and which remained visible in the finished work. Abstract Expressionist paintings, then, remade the individual subject as transcendent and universal by obscuring everything but the ‘‘signature style’’ of the artist, which, of course, revealed nothing. Action painting, then, was silent on the question of the artist’s identity. While the painting promised the presence of the subject—the unmediated ‘‘hereness’’ of the painter in direct communication with the viewer—it delivered only absence. While Morrison did enjoy a certain success, his identity as an Indian placed him at a certain remove from the center of the New York School. Indeed, his experience as an artist was formed by his racial identity. In New York, Morrison hoped his work would be appreciated as the work of an individual rather than an Indian. As a young artist, Morrison saw Indianness as a ‘‘role’’ that could be ‘‘exploited’’ or not, much as the white artists of the avant-garde sometimes appropriated Native American motifs. Morrison preferred the universal, modernist identity of the artist as an individual. Reductive and stereotypical understandings of what constituted Native American art encouraged Morrison to fashion an identity for himself as a modernist, whose Indian heritage was unrelated to his work as an artist. In Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics—a study of women and artists of color in the New York School—the art historian Ann Gibson argues that Morrison and other Native American, African American, and Asian American artists employed abstraction as a strategy in the 1950s. In seeking to have their work appreciated on its own merits, artists of color made abstract paintings so that, Gibson writes, ‘‘there was little chance that their work would raise ‘racial’ associations.’’ As Gibson argues, artists who were typecast as ‘‘Primitives’’ felt with particular urgency the need to eliminate any reference that might mark their work as inferior or other to the mainstream of modernist culture.6 Whereas the white Abstract Expressionists were able to have their paintings perceived as the work of transcendent individuals, Morrison’s decidedly nontraditional and nonobjective paintings were often described by reviewers in New York and elsewhere as containing some kernel of an Indian essence. In a review of Morrison’s first solo exhibition at the Grand Central Moderns Gallery in 1948, one reviewer wrote, ‘‘Unconsciously or otherwise, these figures and forms derive from the ideography of Morrison’s forebears . . . Even the crude, compelling harmonies of earth tones, smol144 chapter 6

dering reds, empyreal blues and molten oranges might have been fired to the canvases centuries ago in the kilns of his ancestors.’’ 7 In a review of a 1949 exhibition at the Hart Art Gallery in Duluth, the Duluth Herald identified Morrison as Chippewa from Grand Marais and Duluth and described the artist and his work as ‘‘uncompromisingly modern.’’ 8 Nevertheless, his paintings were shown alongside crafts by Ojibwe artists from the reservation at Nett Lake, Minnesota. In thinking back about this time, Morrison recalled, ‘‘As my work became better known, some critics would pick up on my Indian background, and they’d make something of it. I guess they were looking for a way to understand my work.’’ 9 Indeed, Morrison found that his position vis-à-vis the color line in America still very much influenced the reception of his art. As he further noted, ‘‘I found there was prejudice in New York, too, alongside acceptance in the big city.’’ 10 The positive reviews that Morrison received tended to be backhanded by resorting to clichés about his ‘‘primitive’’ racial predisposition. In 1954, Morrison was included in an exhibition of Native American artists sponsored by the Department of the Interior and the Indian Defense Association of Northern California at the M. H. De Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. In the San Francisco Chronicle, reviewer Alfred Frankenstein wrote, ‘‘Only rarely . . . does one find anything in this style which has power of eloquence of design,’’ and he added that Morrison was one of the few Indian artists who was ‘‘sufficiently creative to go back to primitive Indian forms and develop them in their own ways.’’ 11 For Morrison and for other artists of color working within the modernist mainstream, the anonymity of the gesture made abstract painting appear to be a viable path to integration and assimilation for some artists. The anonymity of the abstract gesture seemed to promise the transcendence of social hierarchies of race, class, and gender by promising that an artist’s work would be judged according to the values of quality and modernity; in the case of Barnett Newman and other Jewish painters in New York, this transcendence was particularly desirable after the fascist regimes of the 1930s in Europe. Refashioning one’s self as a transcendent individual held out the promise of resolving the contradictions of Primitivism for some artists of color. Adopting the gestural style of Abstract Expressionism might allow some women and artists of color to ‘‘pass.’’ However, gesture could not transcend the categories and hierarchies that continued to define social life in the cold war years. As Gibson writes, ‘‘Because an important measure of value in Abstract Expressionism was the degree to which the art and artist were one, its subjects, its subject matter, and its audience tended to locate their outlook where this was most feasible: the territory of the heterosexual, the Caucasian, and the male.’’ 12 The integration of art, work, and life promised by the gesture was purpose-built for the expression of individual ‘‘a fine painting . . . but not indian’’ 145

subjectivity. But the self that was purportedly revealed by the gesture was always already interpellated vis-à-vis whiteness and male privilege within postwar culture. To the extent that Abstract Expressionism partook of the culture of individualism, it was complicit with postwar America’s systematic denial of subjectivity to nonwhites, women, and homosexuals. Indeed, as the cultural critic Joan Scott has asserted, the problem with the ideology of individualism is that ‘‘difficult analyses of how history and social standing, privilege and subordination are involved in personal behavior entirely drop out.’’ 13 The notion of the transcendent individual faltered on the issue of difference. The ideology of the autonomous creator—with its emphasis on individual choice and the existential freedom of the individual—failed to grasp the larger significance of how social categories of race and gender affected the ability of the individual to achieve freedom and claim subjectivity in the consensus culture of the cold war era. The celebration of Abstract Expressionism’s potential for selfcreation and unmediated communication elided the social categories of racial, gender, and sexual difference and the uneven access to cultural, political, and economic authority that they determined. Transcendent individualism was not an option that was available to all. Individuals who were marked socially by race and gender were not able to reconstruct themselves vis-à-vis the universal; rather, they remained local and particular—limited by identity. Indeed, it was assumed that modernist subjectivity was unattainable for artists of color in the twentieth century due to a critical double-standard. The situation of Native American modernists after World War II was not unlike the situation of African American artists a generation earlier. During the Harlem Renaissance African American artists had, at the urging of black intellectuals such as Alain Locke (as well as white patrons), found resources for an African American modernist idiom in African visual cultures. Artists including Aaron Douglas, Lois Mailou Jones, Hale Woodruff, and Malvin Gray Johnson partook of a larger cultural project that sought to affirm an Africanizing, black Atlantic legacy that was vital to the situation of African Americans at the time.14 However, the legacy of EuroAmerican Primitivism left in a bind those black artists who would pursue an investigation into an African usable past. Black artists who would employ African traditions were confounded by the history of European modernism and Primitivism, which had already laid claim to these forms. Because of the history of colonialism and the Middle Passage, the rich legacy of African art was only available to the artists of the Harlem Renaissance via European modernist Primitivism or in European and American collections, which themselves were a legacy of a history of European colonialism and modernist misreadings of African visual cultures. Moreover, African American artists who engaged the history 146 chapter 6

of Euro-American modernist Primitivism and produced artworks that appropriated African art for contemporary social and political ends, were not read by EuroAmerican critics and white patrons as true Primitivism. Black artists were denied credit for possessing the historical subjectivity crucial to a modernist appropriation of Primitivist sources. In the publications of the Harmon Foundation, a major EuroAmerican benefactor of ‘‘New Negro’’ artists, the utilization by African Americans of African visual traditions was not given the status of conscious engagement with the primitive on the part of an educated, cosmopolitan artist. Rather, such borrowings were attributed to inherent (i.e., racial) predispositions and ‘‘Negro traits,’’ which the black artist tapped from deep within his or her own racial memory to transform into new art forms. Thus, according to the stereotypes of American culture, the work of black artists was not self-consciously modern but merely ‘‘primitive.’’ A similar double standard affected Native American artists, who were still persistently constructed as ‘‘primitives’’ (in the discourse of Dunn’s Studio) rather than as modern, self-conscious individuals. Modernist subjectivity was understood as something that only a self-aware, modern individual (someone who could transcend the specificity of their own identity—that is, a Euro-American male artist) possessed the subjectivity (i.e., status as a ‘‘subject’’) to engage in a dialogue with European modernism. Such was the dead end of Primitivism that Native American artists opted to work in a style that betrayed nothing of their Native heritage. Morrison, for example, chose styles that drew from the mainstream of Euro-American modernism as a way to avoid the stereotypes associated with Indianness, thus working in an abstract mode to avoid any associations with Primitivism. As Gibson writes, ‘‘Artists whose cultural heritages had been identified as ‘primitive’ but who wanted full acceptance as contemporary intellectuals were often the most determined to resist the tendency to reinforce these stereotypes in their own work.’’ 15 Escaping or obfuscating the particularities of specific, socially constructed, racial identity enabled one to claim status as a transcendent modern individual. However, the artists who were best able to recast themselves as transcendent, universal individuals were those who possessed the qualities of whiteness and maleness that were seen as universal. While adherence to the principles of abstraction and modernism might have suggested that anyone could transcend the limitations of identity to become a universal individual, in the social circles of the art world (as in Orwell’s barnyard) some artists were cast as inherently more universal than others. The anthropologist Margaret Dubin argues that Native American artists have been constructed as incapable of progressive, artistic development because they are ‘‘withheld from the flow of time.’’ 16 As she explains: ‘‘Because they are not seen as equal participants in a shared modernity, their interpretations of non-Native forms ‘‘a fine painting . . . but not indian’’ 147

and styles are frequently viewed as mimicry rather than intelligent responses to larger human issues.’’ 17 Indeed, the popular conception of ‘‘two worlds’’—Indian and modern—is a persistent, neocolonial stereotype that denies Native modernity and subjectivity. As such, Indian modernism has presented a problem to critics and historians of Native American art and to American modernism in general. Whereas the predominant critical model of modernism emphasizes formal exploration to the exclusion of all else, Native modernism engages—whether by design or circumstance— the politics of modern identity. The individualistic and innovative art of Howe and West contradicted stereotypical notions of ‘‘authentic’’ Native American painting. Committed to the ideals of personal expression and aesthetic innovation, they reimagined Native American painting as a modernist art. And unlike the black modernists of the Harlem Renaissance, whose only access to African forms was through the lens of European colonialism, many Native modernists had experienced Native American culture directly as a living tradition. Howe and West each sought to integrate Native and modernist forms and to resolve the apparent contradiction between being a Native American artist and painting as a modernist. They modernized Native American painting by adapting European styles (e.g., Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism) and thus created a hybrid modernism from Indian and white sources. As Gerhard Hoffman has argued, Native American modernists produced ‘‘an art of synthesis’’ that ‘‘revitalized [European modernism] by an infusion of new primal content springing from the ancient mythic vision of a holistic world.’’ 18 Hybridizing Native American art, Native American modernists believed, would forestall the ‘‘artistic stagnation’’ that mired ‘‘traditional’’ Indian painting. There are important differences between West’s modernism, which adapted Indian subject matter to contemporary (i.e., non-Indian) styles, and that of Howe, which was rooted in specifically Sioux sources and adapted traditional technique to modern needs; indeed, the art of West and Howe represent opposite approaches to making Indian art modern. But, more generally, Howe, West, and others hoped to revitalize and reinvent Native American art by embracing a modernist commitment to individual expression and aesthetic innovation, even as this ethos appeared to contradict the collective nature of Native American aesthetic traditions, centuries old.

DICK WEST’S NATIVE ABSTRACTION

Born in 1912 in Darlington, Oklahoma, Walter Richard (Dick) West’s grandfather was the Cheyenne warrior Thunder Bull. Although he was given the name Wah-Pah-

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Nah-Yah, or ‘‘Lightfoot Runner,’’ which was his father’s name, he was also given the Anglo name Richard in honor of a white doctor who had befriended his father. West had a traditional Cheyenne upbringing, and then from 1917 to 1927 he attended the Concho Indian School in Concho, Oklahoma, which was, like most federal Indian boarding schools, organized on the military model. Students lived under strict discipline and received corporal punishment for speaking Native languages. As West recalled of his early education, ‘‘If you fouled up or did something wrong during the weekday, it was similar to [what] they have in a recognized prison. You had to work it off. If you had two demerits, you had two hours. On the weekend you cracked big rocks to make little rocks. What they strove to do, and perhaps the only thing they had in mind, was to make a little white man of out of you.’’ To assimilate young Native American students and prepare them for life in the mainstream, the boarding schools’ curriculum concentrated on manual training. As West recalled, ‘‘you had to feel that at that point the philosophy of the federal government was [that] the Indian . . . didn’t have a brain. But he had dexterity of hand and so trades were paramount in their instruction.’’ 19 West’s early experiences might have led to a life of manual work. After leaving Concho, West spent three years on a construction crew, laying pipeline through oil fields in Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri. But finally after tiring of the exhausting and dangerous work with nitroglycerin and tnt, West realized that furthering his education was the only path to getting ahead in a changing world.20 In 1931 he enrolled in the Haskell Institute, an Indian school in Lawrence, Kansas, and in 1938 he enrolled in Bacone Junior College (founded by missionaries to give Native Americans a Christian education) in Muskogee, Oklahoma. At Bacone, he studied under the famous Creek-Pawnee painter and teacher Acee Blue Eagle (Alex C. Macintosh, 1907–1959), who had attended Oscar Jacobson’s Native American art studio program at the University of Oklahoma. West graduated from Bacone in 1938 and entered the University of Oklahoma at Norman in the fall. In summer 1939, he worked as a counselor at a boys’ summer camp in East Hebron, New Hampshire, where he later told a Tulsa newspaper reporter that he had painted a mural and worked ‘‘teaching pale faces archery, Indian lore, painting and primitive dances’’ to earn money for his university tuition.21 At the University of Oklahoma, West studied under Jacobson and the Swedish muralist Olle Nordmark, who had worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs at the U.S. Army base at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, during which time, at the Indian Art Center, he taught fresco mural painting to Native American artists, including Patrick DesJarlait, as noted in chapter 4. West was the first Native American student to earn a bachelor of fine arts

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degree from the University of Oklahoma. After graduation in 1941, West painted a mural at the Okemah Post Office, The Grand Council of 1842, for the Works Progress Administration. From 1941 to 1942, he worked as an art instructor at the Phoenix Indian School in Arizona. In 1942 West enlisted in the U.S. Navy, and on December 6, 1943, he received a commission as an ensign in the Naval Reserve. West saw active duty in the Atlantic fleet by escorting convoys and participating in antisubmarine warfare. After completing his duty in the Atlantic, West was transferred to Treasure Island, San Francisco, where he served until his release from active duty in 1946. Thereafter, West continued in the reserve, where he attained the rank of senior-grade lieutenant.22 After his release from active duty, West enrolled in the summer 1946 term at the University of Redlands in California, where he pursued graduate work toward his teaching credentials. From 1946 to 1947, West again taught as an art instructor at Phoenix Indian School, until he took a position as the director of the Art Department at Bacone College, where he would remain until 1970. Between 1948 and 1950, West earned a master of fine arts degree at the University of Oklahoma. His master’s thesis, ‘‘Six American Indian Modifs [sic] Adapted to Contemporary Pictorial Principles,’’ related Native American art to trends in mainstream modern and contemporary art, and as such offered West’s first formalized theory for a modern Native American art. West noted that postwar Indian painting was ‘‘stylized and simplified without background or modeling,’’ and he further suggested that these formulas were tired and needed to be infused with fresh ideas from non-Native sources to insure the continued vitality of Native American expression. West’s thesis project dealt with finding a way to reenergize Native American painting, because, he wrote, ‘‘there is a definite need for new expression in Indian Art.’’ 23 For his thesis, West produced a suite of six oil paintings in a range of styles, with brief written interpretations and explanations of each: Sioux Girl, a realist portrait; the more expressionistic Soldier Dance; a Fauvist-inspired landscape abstraction titled Red Pond; Thanksgiving Prayer, a canvas filled with a range of flat abstract motifs from different Native American tribes—all relating to food; The Masked Dancers, in which West quotes Picasso’s 1907 Demoiselles d’Avignon; and Buffalo Migration, a Surrealist painting that featured a simplified buffalo motif in an atmospheric background. West became known first for his innovative abstract paintings that departed from the ‘‘traditional’’ style of Indian painting. In 1951, Water Serpent, an abstract oil painting that recalled his thesis work Thanksgiving Prayer in its use of traditional, abstract Plains motifs, won the one hundred dollar purchase prize in the sixth Philbrook Indian Annual. ‘‘I was known as ‘Dick West the abstract painter’ in the ’50s,’’ he

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later recalled in an interview.24 West regularly exhibited his work in the Philbrook’s Oklahoma annual show of non-Native art as well as in the Indian annual. In 1955 his abstract painting Peyote Dream, based on the imagery associated with the drug used in the Native American church, split the grand purchase prize with the Chiricahua Apache artist Allan Houser. The 1955 award was doubly significant because it was the first Philbrook grand prize award for an oil painting (oils were uncommon in the work of Native American artists, who generally painted in watercolor on paper) and the first for an abstraction. As the Muskogee Sunday Phoenix and Times reported, ‘‘The painting is a decorative composition of geometrical patterns and suggested creatures, among them the buffalo of the Western Plains. Its central theme is the symbolic peyote fan, a spiked conventional motif of reds, yellow, and green and orange.’’ 25 In a 1955 letter to the Philbrook curator Joan Nordling, West wrote that he thought the award for Peyote Dream was significant because it recognized that tribal traditions of abstract painting represented a viable form for Native American artists to pursue. ‘‘I have always felt that the term abstraction has been a part of Indian artistic thinking longer than most European contemporary influences and perhaps in a truer form,’’ he wrote. Moreover, the award validated West’s fusion of traditional Native American expression and the ‘‘formal background’’ of his university training. West believed that such a fusion would guarantee that Native American painting could continue to evolve as a vital contemporary art. As he wrote to Nordling, ‘‘I do feel that the Indian artist must be allowed freedom to absorb influences outside of his own art forms and develop them in his own manner.’’ West also noted that he had been criticized for departing from the established formulas of ‘‘traditional’’ Indian painting, and he noted that there were ‘‘dangers’’ in doing so— notably a loss of authenticity and cultural distinctiveness. Yet at the same time he saw ‘‘the promise of a new lane of expression that should keep the Indian’s art alive and closer to a more contemporary existence,’’ and he wrote that he possessed ‘‘an urge resulting from my formal art training to investigate certain theories that I feel will help the Indian artist to broaden his range to make a living out of his artistic creativity.’’ 26 West, however, avoided the controversy that Howe’s work provoked. For the most part, West showed ‘‘traditional’’ paintings at the Indian annuals and showed abstractions at the Oklahoma annuals, which showcased the work of non-Indians painters. His 1950 painting The Wedding of Art and Science won first prize in the Oklahoma Artists’ Tenth Annual Exhibition at the Philbrook [figure 29]. However, although West did not show the painting in the Indian annual, and although it contained

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no trace of recognizable Indian subject matter, critics read the work in terms of his Indian identity, much as others had interpreted the Abstract Expressionist canvases of George Morrison. Indeed, Anne Davis of the Muskogee Daily Phoenix described it as ‘‘bringing the Indian style of painting into the field of modern art.’’ 27 West’s innovations and adaptation of Native American painting were not, however, limited to abstraction. In 1955 at Bacone College he painted his series of ‘‘Indian Christ’’ paintings (now destroyed), in which he made use not of modernist abstraction but of three-dimensional modeling, fully developed backgrounds, and a degree of illusionism that was unknown in ‘‘traditional’’ Native American painting.28 West is perhaps best known for his career as a teacher. He taught in the Indian schools that had been transformed since his youth into institutions that valued and preserved Native American culture and identity. After leaving Bacone, West worked from 1970 to 1972 as director of the Art Department at Haskell Junior College (the school was his alma mater, the former Haskell Institute, and is now Haskell Indian Nations University). From 1972 to 1977 West was chair of the Division of Humanities at Haskell, and in 1977 he retired to paint full time. During his career he was awarded two honorary doctorates: an honorary doctor of humane letters (lhd) from Eastern College in St. Davids, Pennsylvania (1962); and an honorary doctorate of fine arts from Baker University in Baldwin, Kansas (1976). In 1979 West was named a commissioner on the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, and in 1986 he moved to Tijeras, New Mexico. He died in 1996.

WEST AND ‘‘TRADITIONAL’’ INDIAN PAINTING

Ironically, West is remembered as a stalwart preserver and ‘‘one of the last deans’’ of the ‘‘traditional’’ style of Native American painting.29 Jeanne Snodgrass (herself a promoter and gatekeeper of the ‘‘traditional’’ in her role as curator at Philbrook) described West as ‘‘the only Indian teacher who constantly is teaching young Indian artists to paint in the ‘old school’ of the flat style.’’ West, she wrote, ‘‘has insisted that his students learn their own tribe, its history and lore and paint it authentically.’’ 30 As West wrote of himself, ‘‘As a teacher, I have striven to preserve the accepted form, the Native American Pictorial Art. I do this so that the potential young Indian Artist will know the origin of his native art.’’ 31 His role as teacher and preserver of the ‘‘traditional’’ style was crucial, because ‘‘without exposure to the old culture, it’s like a non-Indian trying to paint Indian.’’ 32 However, by referring to the ‘‘traditional style,’’ as the ‘‘accepted form,’’ West signaled that he understood it to be of recent invention, developed in collaboration

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with non-Native patrons and institutions. By 1950 West had become disenchanted with the ‘‘traditional’’ style. It had, since its heyday in the 1930s, he believed, become ‘‘hackneyed.’’ He further argued that it offered no possibility of growth or change and that, inevitably, Native American artists must embrace non-Native forms and thus European academic naturalism and modernist abstraction would need to inform and transform Native American painting.33 As a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, West’s polyglot stylistic experiments and innovations demonstrated that he was equally adept painting in the ‘‘traditional’’ Santa Fe–Bacone style, the abstract Plains style, but also in the modeled, three-dimensional European academic mode as well as in modernist abstraction. As a result of his education and his broader experience of the non-Native modern art world, West believed that a new expression was needed. For his Native American students, West believed in grounding their work in ‘‘the accepted form’’ of flat, illustrative painting. However, he doubted that the ‘‘traditional’’ style would serve their needs as they developed as artists. ‘‘I do not expect him [the young artist] to stay in that time of history,’’ he wrote.34 West expected that Native American art would continue to evolve as a hybrid form, incorporating non-Native sources as its practitioners saw fit, but he had no fear that Native American art would disappear or become inauthentic. ‘‘There will always be Indian art,’’ he wrote, ‘‘because of the color of skin.’’ 35 In other words, Indian art would continue as long as there were Indian artists. However, he wrote, ‘‘The Indian artist must inevitably turn in the direction of more contemporary two- or three-dimensional studies.’’ 36 West also believed that the standard forms of traditional Indian painting had reached a dead end and thus required an infusion of new ideas and creative energy in order for Native American art to claim a place as a vital, contemporary American art. He saw the role of mainstream education and training in non-Native art technique and theory as important to this task. ‘‘I do believe that Indian artists with formal art background will be doing more and more in the direction of the European interpretational influences,’’ he wrote.37 Yet simultaneously he also advocated a self-conscious return to Native sources. (Indeed, European modernism owed a debt to Primitivism.) By returning to Native sources, ‘‘tribal traditions and . . . the deep wells of atavistic memory,’’ and incorporating them into modern artworks, West predicted that contemporary Native American artists would produce a modern art of enormous aesthetic value. This hybrid of Native and Western/modern forms, he predicted, ‘‘could retain the essence of the glorious past but [be] geared to the present.’’ 38 It would, ‘‘[ring] with something very distinctly Indian, but different from the parent source.’’ 39

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An example of this productive fusion is Water Serpent, which won a one hundred dollar purchase prize in the 1951 Philbrook Indian Annual. Water Serpent departed markedly from the ‘‘traditional’’ style, but in reflecting on the work West wrote, ‘‘I feel that this type of painting should be considered as much Indian in origin as . . . primitive native paintings. This particular approach is an attempt to adapt the American Indian motifs to contemporary pictorial principles.’’ 40 The subject matter is adapted from Plains (specifically Cheyenne) legend and mythology; different presentations are specific to different Plains tribes. In describing the appearance and function of the water serpent in Cheyenne tradition, West wrote: ‘‘To the Cheyenne [the serpent is] described as being serpentine in form and having a snake-like body covered with scale[s] interspersed with long hair on the back. It is said that the serpent had a head that looked like a lizard and on his nose a horn. The serpent was the protector of all springs and rivers. He lived underground in these waters and was not known to have been destructive to people. Whenever he showed himself above the water there would be great rumblings of thunder and flashes of lightning. By protecting the waters he insured food and life for the plants, and plants with full life meant food for the animals and in turn animals substanents [sic] for man.’’ 41 West explained that Water Serpent was a visual demonstration that Indian motifs could be used as a basis for ‘‘contemporary pictorial principles.’’ He believed that this aesthetic cross-breeding of Native and modern forms could yield ‘‘numerous possibilities’’ where contemporary Native painting could range from the realistic (naturalistic) to ‘‘extreme abstraction’’ and still retain its Indian identity. ‘‘It is hoped,’’ he wrote, ‘‘that this work may in a small way prove helpful to other Indian artists and lead toward a brighter future for Indian art.’’ 42 In Water Serpent, West frustrated attempts to define or classify his art by a single genealogy. Although the intense color and abstraction of the painting may seem to draw from sources in European Expressionism (the color palette and degree of abstraction recall Franz Marc or Wassily Kandinsky), it may also be seen to draw from nineteenth-century Cheyenne aesthetics and the linear tradition of Cheyenne hide painting in its use of black and red lines to define forms as well as the presence of red, green, and yellow—colors often found in Cheyenne painted parfleches. Indeed, during his graduate studies at the University of Oklahoma, West had studied hide painting alongside his studies in European art history and technique. In his thesis and after his graduation he began to experiment with abstraction, drawing from the legacy of Cheyenne hide paintings as well as European modernism to develop his abstract, two-dimensional compositions. West’s abstractions, then, may be seen to emerge from two traditions in which West discovered an aesthetic affinity.43

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OSCAR HOWE: ABSTRACTION AT THE PHILBROOK INDIAN ANNUAL

More than any other modern Native American artist, Oscar Howe’s biography mirrors the history of modern Indian painting—the institutionalization of the ‘‘traditional’’ style in the 1930s and its supersession by more innovative/individual styles after the Second World War. Descended from Yanktonai Sioux chiefs, Howe was given the name Mazuha Hoksina, or Trader Boy, after his maternal greatgrandfather, White Bear, who was known for his fairness and openness and who traded with white settlers. Howe’s maternal grandfather, Fearless Bear (or NotAfraid-of-Bear), was a signatory at the Council of 1876 following the Battle of Little Bighorn, which reduced the boundaries of the Great Sioux Nation as well as the Northern Arapahoe and Cheyenne, and which seized the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota where gold had been discovered in 1874. Howe’s paternal great-grandfather was Bone Necklace, head chief of the lower Yanktonai and a noted orator; his paternal grandfather was Unspensi, or Don’t Know How, the last hereditary chief of the Yanktonai.44 In 1915, when Oscar Howe was born, the Plains cultures were in crisis. The many traditional arts and social forms were collapsing under the influence of Americanization and the dire poverty that afflicted the reservations. At the age of seven, speaking no English, Howe was sent to the federal Indian school in Pierre, South Dakota. As in West’s boarding school experience, the Pierre Indian School was administered on a military school model and traditional cultural practices were discouraged by force. Students received corporal punishment for speaking their native languages. At the age of ten, Howe fell victim to the health problems that plagued Native Americans on the reservation and in the federal Indian schools. He developed a serious skin condition as well as trachoma, which caused total blindness in many young Native Americans. He also suffered a serious and debilitating depression and considered suicide. Sent home to recover, Howe was placed in the care of his maternal grandmother, Shell Face, who nursed and entertained him with traditional Sioux stories. As Howe remembered, ‘‘She would tell these stories, true ones, about culture and life and everything that was fine and good about the Dakota culture. In her native formal tongue, she told [about] the beautiful and wonderful [ceremonial] events . . . I still remember them so clearly I could think them, which I have done. The language she used was so poetic and beautiful in song and in words, that I now try to equal them by giving them visual forms.’’ 45 His grandmother was blind, but she drew in the sand

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with her fingers. Howe would later credit his grandmother for his knowledge of traditional Sioux symbolism, which he would use in his art. Like Morrison, poor health would trouble Howe throughout his life. He returned to Pierre and graduated in 1933 at the age of eighteen. He worked briefly on an Indian road crew for the Civilian Conservation Corps, where he developed tuberculosis, another illness afflicting rural Native American communities in the early twentieth century.46 In fall 1933, Howe enrolled at the Santa Fe Indian School. He took regular high school classes for half a day and then spent the other half painting in Dunn’s Studio program, where he was the only Sioux student. In his 1937 painting Sioux Ceremonial he applied the studio characteristics that would later be institutionalized by the organizers of the Philbrook annuals [figure 30]. As in other Studio/style pictures of the 1930s, Howe focused on recognizable Indian subjects in keeping with the studio tendency to depict picturesque, ethnographic detail and avoid references to modern life. Howe remembered the pedagogy at the Studio, which, while lacking in overt direction, still encouraged a standard formula from Dunn’s diverse group of young artists: ‘‘It was a different kind of teaching in the art department,’’ he later wrote. ‘‘There were no lectures at all on anything, not even hints of instructions. We weren’t allowed to do research. The teachers . . . said: ‘Start painting.’ I stayed there three years, but I never heard a word of instruction. The idea to figure out one’s own way of doing drawings or detail work was . . . quite a challenge for me. I depended on my knowing of Sioux culture and things of symbolic meaning. It seems that we all did the same technique, whether he or she was a Navajo, Hopi, Apache, Sioux, Kiowa, Cheyenne or what.’’ 47 Dunn recalled that Howe excelled at the Studio. While still a student, his works were exhibited with the work of other Studio students at the Brooklyn Museum and in San Francisco, Paris, and London. In a later review of a 1957 exhibition at the Museum of New Mexico, Dunn remembered Howe as ‘‘a serious student, keenly intelligent, with an appealing aloofness that won admiration.’’ Howe pursued independent research at Santa Fe collections of traditional Sioux arts, including hide paintings. But while Dunn insisted that modern Indian paintings be based on traditional models, she discouraged the direct copying of those models. In her writing she further notes that Howe was no mere copyist: ‘‘Howe analyzed, summarized, memorized, but copied nothing in his own compositions. Every painting had his unique stamp upon it, although, for example, his horses were kindred in spirit, color, and swift long lines of the wild, free steeds of the hide paintings.’’ 48 Thus rather than a form of ‘‘copying,’’ Dunn argued that Howe’s art effected an original fusion of authentic Native and modern sensibilities.

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After graduating from the Santa Fe Indian School in 1938, Howe worked on a reservation road crew before returning to Pierre, South Dakota, in 1939 to teach art at the Pierre Indian School. In 1940, after writing to the Indian Service in Washington, D.C., Howe was hired by the South Dakota Artists Project (a division of the Works Progress Administration). He was sent to the Fort Sill Indian Art Center in Lawton, Oklahoma, where he studied with Nordmark, with whom DesJarlait and West had also studied. After studying mural painting techniques at Fort Sill, Howe earned regular wpa wages of sixty dollars a month for his work at the Carnegie Library in Mitchell, South Dakota, where he painted an abstract mural, Sun and Rain Clouds over the Hills, which was based on traditional Sioux designs [figure 31].49 Also in 1940, Howe produced the illustrations for Legends of the Mighty Sioux, a collection of Indian legends published by the wpa’s South Dakota Writers Project.50 In May 1942 Howe was hired to paint a set of ten murals, History along the Missouri, for a wpa project at the Mobridge Municipal Auditorium in Mobridge, South Dakota. Shortly after beginning work on the project, Howe was called up for active duty by the U.S. Army and sent to Fort Snelling, Minnesota, but the citizens of Mobridge sent letters requesting that Howe be permitted to finish the mural before deploying to Europe. Howe obtained a two-week leave and finished the mural before leaving for his three and a half years’ duty in North Africa (where he painted camouflage or ‘‘dazzle painting’’ on military equipment), Italy, Sicily, France, and Germany, as one of two Native Americans in his battalion.51 While stationed in Biedelkopf, Germany, Howe met Adelheid (Heidi) Karla Margarete Hampel, a young German woman who worked in her family’s tailor shop. Howe and Heidi Hampel developed a relationship that continued after Howe returned home in 1947. Using the three hundred and fifty dollar grand purchase prize he won for his painting Dakota Duck Hunt at the second Philbrook Indian Annual, Howe paid to bring Heidi to the United States, and in July 1947 he met her as she arrived in Chicago. Because the anti-miscegenation laws in South Dakota prevented marriages between whites and Native Americans in that state, they were married in Chicago at the Cook County Courthouse.52 For four months in 1947 Howe and his new wife lived in Norman, Oklahoma, while he produced illustrations for a book on Native American costume, which was being written by Oscar Jacobson at the University of Oklahoma. While in Norman, their daughter, Inge Dawn, was born. In fall 1947 Howe moved his family to Mitchell, South Dakota, where he had been offered a position as an artist in residence at Dakota Wesleyan University. The following year Howe had his first experience as a teacher in a course on Native American art; and as he noted in a letter to Bernard Frazier at the Philbrook, ‘‘Of course, I

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would prefer Indian students but I think most of the students will be white.’’ 53 That year, Howe began designing the annual murals for the Corn Palace, a civic auditorium in Mitchell, a job he held until 1971. In contrast with his more personal artwork, however, Howe saw these murals as illustrations.54 Howe’s career and reputation developed quickly. While he was still in his senior year at Dakota Wesleyan University, he served as acting chair of the art department. He graduated in 1952, and that year he was named ‘‘Artist Laureate of the Middle Border.’’ From 1952 to 1954, Howe and his family returned to Norman, Oklahoma, where he earned a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Oklahoma. Until 1957, Howe served as director of arts at Pierre Indian School. And in 1957 he accepted a position as a professor of art at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. In 1960, Howe appeared as a guest on the television show This Is Your Life with his friend the actor and art collector Vincent Price. In introducing Howe, Price remarked: ‘‘When you walk into such places as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Chicago Art Institute and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., and you see Oscar Howe’s paintings hanging alongside such masters as Picasso, Gauguin, Van Gogh, you have to be impressed.’’ 55 On the show, Howe’s painting of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre of the Sioux was purchased and presented to President Eisenhower.56 That same year Howe was named artist laureate of South Dakota’’ by Governor Ralph Herseth.57 Howe enjoyed a long career as a popular member of the art faculty at the University of South Dakota. He taught painting, drawing, design, and art history. He was a member of Delta Phi Delta (a national honorary art fraternity) and of the National Education Association, and he was a fellow of the International Institute of Arts and Letters, a member of the Episcopal Church, and an avid bowler. Howe devoted his summers to teaching a workshop for young Native American artists. After struggling with Parkinson’s disease, which made it impossible for him to continue painting, Howe died in 1983. When Howe’s painting Umine Wacipe was excluded from judging at the 1958 Philbrook Indian Annual, the definition of the ‘‘traditional’’ style of Native American painting (which Howe denigrated as ‘‘pretty, stylized pictures’’) was an open question. Indeed, the definition of a traditional style had been slippery since the founding of the Philbrook annuals. An earlier abstract painting by Howe, Victory Dance, had received the grand purchase prize in the 1954 annual [figure 32]. The jurors and the Philbrook directors often differed on matters of interpretation of standards and their application. A number of artists had their work judged as ‘‘nontraditional’’ and excluded from the annual, only to be exhibited elsewhere in the museum or purchased

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outright. In 1946, Yeffe Kimball’s Sacred Buffalo was rejected by the jurors—including the painters Woody Crumbo (Potawatomi) and Charles Banks Wilson (a prominent Oklahoma Regionalist muralist), as well as Philbrook curator emeritus Clark Field, Kiowa field service agent Susie C. Peters, and Oscar Jacobson of the of the University of Oklahoma—but was exhibited by museum director Bernard Frazier alongside other paintings by Native American artists. The same year, Patrick DesJarlait’s Maple Sugar Time was denied a prize on the grounds that it was not traditional, although it was included in the exhibition and purchased by Frazier for the permanent collection of Native American art. Likewise, paintings by ‘‘Princess’’ Wa Wa Chaw were rejected by the jurors but purchased by the museum. By the mid-1950s the notion of a ‘‘traditional’’ style was becoming more and more contentious. Howe and others argued that the categories that non-Natives had created for Native art had become irrelevant to Native artists’ lives and work. Popular notions of authenticity and tradition were becoming untenable as descriptions of the aesthetic range of Native art. West noted that ‘‘outside of the Indian’s culture, his art is judged by European standards.’’ 58 Non-Native audiences and institutions including the Philbrook continued to define Native art by the illustrative style that had come to fruition between 1932 and 1937 in the Studio School. Howe and members of his generation were educated in Dunn’s Studio, but given their experience in military service, travel, and education they had since experienced a wider, more cosmopolitan view of art that was informed by world art and modernism. Like West, by the mid-1950s Howe was experimenting with new forms. His aesthetic explorations coincided with a broad questioning of the validity of the traditional Indian paintings patronized by the Philbrook and the institutions of the Southwest, and Howe and others increasingly saw the Studio style as a limited and limiting stereotype. But despite the increasing number of artworks submitted that, like Howe’s Umine Wacipe, departed from established prototypes, in 1958 the Philbrook Indian Annual jurors held tightly to existing notions about Indian art. Their published statement included proscriptions against innovation and purely decorative, abstract elements. ‘‘The use of symbols that are not used by the artist’s own tribe, or related to the subject matter of a given painting, is deplored,’’ they wrote. ‘‘In future, it is hoped that purely decorative elements that serve only to fill up space will be kept to a minimum, if not altogether excluded. The jury feels strongly that the use of pseudosymbols detracts, rather than adds, in any painting.’’ The jurors’ deliberate wording seems to be a reference to the jagged, vertical forms that punctuate Howe’s composition and mimic the gestures of the five figures depicted in the painting. Moreover, Howe’s intense, nonnaturalistic color palette and his jarring distortions of figure and

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space likely struck the jurors as an unnatural departure from the traditional style. In their statement the jurors implied that Indian identity and modern subjectivity were mutually exclusive, and thus by extension suggested that Native American artists were primitives trapped in an irredeemable past and incapable of innovation in the present. Like the Philbrook jurors, many critics and art historians have assumed that Howe’s art was derivative of European modernism and abstraction. J. J. Brody, in his 1971 volume Indian Painters and White Patrons, described Howe’s work as ‘‘postCubist.’’ 59 Jamake Highwater asserted in his 1976 Song From the Earth: American Indian Painting that ‘‘there is no question that Howe was every bit influenced by European modern painting,’’ and he cites Howe’s tour of duty in Europe as the point of exposure.60 John Milton wrote that Howe’s art dressed up Sioux subject matter in modernist trappings: ‘‘While his early work was realistically descriptive, he later developed a unique style based on cubism. Influenced by Picasso, Howe’s art nevertheless remains within a wholly Indian tradition of storytelling and visualization of the telling.’’ 61 John Anson Warner further suggested: ‘‘Howe dramatically changed his art after experiencing such Modernist paradigms as Cubism and Abstract-expressionism. During World War II, Howe spent three and one-half years in the Army; while in Europe, he was exposed to the Cubist art of such painters as Matisse, Picasso, and Braque. Also during the 1940s, he was exposed to the creations of the Abstract-expressionists who dominated the mainstream art world in New York until the early 1960s.’’ 62 More recently, writers have explored the hybrid genealogy of Howe’s abstractions. Janet Berlo and Ruth Phillips write that ‘‘a painter who had traveled in Europe in the 1940s, and had earned an mfa in painting in the 1950s, was surely not uninterested in European experiments in the dismemberment of planar space.’’ 63 Further, Berlo and Phillips suggest that it is likely that Howe’s innovative abstractions represented a cross-fertilization of aesthetic influences, a development that is understandable among the cosmopolitan, university-trained Native American artists of Howe’s generation. However, the matter of actual influence is less important to understanding Howe than is the position that Howe felt it important to take. Howe resolved the apparent contradiction between the Native and modern sources of his art by vehemently insisting that he had no contact with European modernism during the war. Throughout his career, Howe would insist that his formal innovations were rooted in traditional Sioux art. By 1958, then, Howe and the organizers of the Philbrook Indian Annual faced a vexing set of contradictions: a widely accepted ‘‘traditional’’ style with no basis

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in tradition and an institutional structure that limited personal innovation and denied Native American artists the right to define their own production. The Philbrook jurors responded by insisting on the correctness of their vision of Indian painting, stating that they were ‘‘convinced that the present Philbrook policy of asking artists to enter works executed in traditional style is a sound one. In general, we have adhered to it in selecting the paintings to be hung in the Indian Painting Annual.’’ They did, however, acknowledge that the art was evolving in unforeseen directions. ‘‘In a few cases where a painting in a non-traditional style is of unusual value on its own merits,’’ they wrote, ‘‘we have stretched a point to include it. This is not to say that we recommend any change in the current policy—only that we hope we may be forgiven a reasonable flexibility in carrying it out.’’ 64 Thus, while they included Umine Wacipe in the exhibition with nine other artists in the Plains region category, the jurors excluded it from consideration for prizes. To Howe, the jurors’ act of exhibiting the painting while excluding it from competition was patently ridiculous. He also noted the irony of entrusting non-Indian jurors to determine the authenticity of Indian art. He was a celebrated and awardwinning Native American painter; on what basis did the Philbrook jurors determine Howe’s art to be ‘‘not Indian’’? He asked, ‘‘Are we to be held back forever with one phase of Indian painting, that is the most common way?’’ Howe argued for the importance of Native American art and he insisted that ‘‘Indian Art can compete with any Art in the world, but not as a suppressed art.’’ He also indicated what for him was a painful injustice: that the authenticity of his culture and artistic expression was being policed by the ignorant gatekeepers of a white institution, a situation that recalled the violence and paternalism of the reservation system. He railed against the notion that Native Americans ‘‘are to be herded like a bunch of sheep, with no right for individualism, dictated to as the Indian always has been, put on reservations and treated like a child, and only the White Man knows what is best for him.’’ Howe wrote plaintively that such ‘‘mismanagement and mistreatment’’ had exacted a heavy toll, that his father had died living in a shack on the reservation and that his two brothers were ‘‘still living there in shacks, never enough to eat, never enough clothing, treated as second class citizens.’’ Howe, then, was acutely aware that the Philbrook’s jury of experts was the moral equivalent of the white Indian agents that had—through either malice or incompetence—brought Indian culture to the brink of destruction, and had led him, he wrote, to become an artist ‘‘to keep the fine ways and culture of my forefathers alive.’’ Finally, he wrote, ‘‘one could easily turn to become a social protest painter. I only hope . . . the Art World will not be one more contributor to holding us in chains.’’ 65

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OSCAR HOWE’S THEORY OF ART

Howe resolved the apparent contradiction between the Primitive and modern by insisting that his abstract art developed from Sioux visual traditions rather than from non-Native sources. As a young student and soldier, Howe boldly crossed racial and cultural lines. As an artist, however, Howe maintained throughout his career that his paintings represented a natural evolution of specifically Sioux visual practices rather than a borrowing of modern styles. Educated in the techniques, history, and theory of European art in mainstream universities, he nevertheless opted out of the European tradition and claimed an identity as a Yankton Sioux modernist—developing a modern abstract art that evolved not from European cubism and abstraction, but from specific, regional Native sources. Howe’s abstract style, which matured in the mid-1950s, marked the culmination of his conscious revival of a Plains tradition of abstraction, painted on animal hides, tipis, and clothing, and on documents such as winter counts. Howe saw his work as the recovery of an art that had been obscured by cultural change and by its own impermanence. ‘‘So much information of Sioux designs has been lost,’’ he wrote, ‘‘because, unlike the Indians of the Southwest, the Sioux were nomadic. Their art was applied on clothing and implements. When these were worn out, they were thrown away and the art was lost.’’ 66 Sioux abstract art was centuries old, but it had been overshadowed since the early twentieth century by the dominance of the narrative ‘‘traditional’’ style promoted by Dunn, Jacobson, and others. Howe rediscovered Sioux abstraction as a resource and reinvested its practice with cultural and personal significance, in a move that mirrored the engagement of many modern, non-Natives with indigenous visual traditions. In artworks such as the 1940 abstract mural Sun and Rain Clouds over the Hills for the Carnegie Library in Mitchell, South Dakota, and the early painting Sioux Painter, Howe located his modern artistic development and identity in a Sioux tradition of symbolic abstraction [figure 33]. To align his painting with Sioux art, Howe deliberately chose to paint in water media and casein on heavy Fabriano paper—materials he believed were similar to those used in Plains skin painting. Howe had been introduced to Sioux abstract symbolic traditions by his grandmother, Shell Face, while he was a young boy, and he had undertaken further serious study of these traditions in Santa Fe collections while he was a student in Dunn’s studio program. For Howe, Sioux painting differed from naturalistic or representational artwork (which he linked to a European tradition) in that it was abstract. Visually, Howe wrote, ‘‘skin painting technique was a flat two-dimensional affair. The delineating lines were simple and short—less plastic and without any shading.’’

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But unlike European modernist abstraction, to which it bore a superficial similarity, Sioux art was not a private universe of abstract forms, intelligible only to their maker. Sioux abstraction represented a collective artistic and cultural legacy, legible to the initiated community members to whom it was intended to communicate. Howe understood Native American art—and in particular his Sioux tradition—as a symbolic art. For Howe, Sioux abstract painting was a ‘‘true reflection’’ and an embodiment of the ‘‘true essence’’ of Sioux culture and its intimate connection to the natural world. The colors of traditional Sioux art were derived from natural sources—earth, minerals, plants—and had ‘‘meanings taken from nature’’: blue (from sky) symbolized peace; red (from fire and blood) symbolized war; yellow (from light) symbolized religion and spirituality; green (from flora) symbolized growth; dark symbolized evil; and white symbolized purity.67 Howe described his process in terms of venerable Sioux artistic practices of abstract hide painting and quill work. According to Howe, Sioux abstraction was produced in the course of a ‘‘formal painting ceremony’’ performed by a narrator and an artist. During the ceremony, the artist produced a graphic representation that corresponded to the verbal account of the narrator. ‘‘The painting of the truth’’ was produced in the course of a ceremony open only to initiates. The resulting abstract work was a record of the oral history related during the course of the ceremony: ‘‘The witnesses hear the verbal part and see the artist paint the pictorial or abstract part. The artist draws and paints according to esthetic points, working point to point until the painting is completed. Howe explained that traditional Sioux painting is abstract or ‘‘decorative’’ but never private. Rather, Sioux abstraction ‘‘has a definite idea or story in a visual form and can be understood by the group’’ of initiates.68 As he noted, ‘‘In the ceremony, the narrator would verbally describe the event while the artist worked precisely from point to point in objectifying what was being narrated.’’ A select audience of initiates would witness the ceremony. The resulting abstract image on a ceremonial object, item of clothing, or document would be valid and legible to the extent that it conformed to and embodied a shared vocabulary: ‘‘Its validity depend[ed] on the witnessing of the truth translation and the accepted conventions of art as to technique, medium, colors, materials and the traditional way of painting.’’ As such, Howe noted that Sioux painting was inextricably embedded and linked to oral tradition and the collective practice of ritual. ‘‘The verbal context,’’ he wrote, ‘‘preceded the visual painting.’’ 69 Recalling this embedded, community-based practice, Howe described his own art as a ‘‘visual response to the Dakota language.’’ 70 But rather than re-create the situation of the Sioux artist of the past, Howe aimed to adapt traditional forms to his mod-

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ern experience. A significant aspect of his fundamentally modern experience was its inherently cross-cultural nature. Whereas the traditional Sioux artist created for an exclusive audience—other Sioux—Howe’s biography led him far from his home in the Sioux community on the Crow Creek Reservation. As a graduate of the federal Indian schools and mainstream universities and as a veteran of the Second World War, Howe understood that he was as much a product of modern American culture (including the history of U.S.-Indian policy) as he was of his Sioux upbringing. He was acutely aware of his position as a Native American artist in a white world, and he came to see his role as that of a culture broker. As he told an Omaha, Nebraska, newspaper reporter: ‘‘Indian Work is an art few white people can understand . . . I am attempting to bring it to where more people can understand it.’’ 71 He later wrote that the modern Indian artist ‘‘is like a pioneer stepping from one society into another . . . I think a person is better for knowing and understanding but also experiencing two cultures. His experience would be better on the universal basic level.’’ 72 Living and working in such a cross-border environment, Howe hoped, would help ‘‘integrate a more universal art trend . . . to understand the world of the future . . . [and] cause closer contact with nations . . . [in] this better world.’’ 73 Mark White has suggested that Howe’s ‘‘call for ‘individualistic transitions’ indicates a partial acceptance . . . of the modernist belief in the validity of individual expression and abstraction; at the same time, his interests lie in recording the contemporary life of Native Americans,’’ and in an aesthetic grounded in the specific collective forms of the Yanktonai Dakota.74 Howe’s Sioux modernism embraced notions of individual expression and personal innovation that were central to the artistic subjectivity of the modern European artist. In this, Howe claimed an identity as a ‘‘modern.’’ He explained that his painting differed from ‘‘traditional’’ (meaning collective) Sioux arts because it represented his individual expression. Howe contrasted such ‘‘cultural’’ art, which he defined as ‘‘ethnic documentation of Sioux Indian culture,’’ with his own ‘‘eclectic’’ art, which he defined with the following list of words: ‘‘visual, American, esoteric, versional [individualistic], language verbalism—equated [with] visual form, [and] private.’’ While his work was ‘‘private’’ (i.e., his personal expression), his art remained rooted in tradition. It retained its relationship to Sioux language (Howe’s first language), and in terms of technique it ‘‘evolv[ed] Sioux Indian Skin-painting technique.’’ 75 As Howe would explain to an interviewer in 1954, ‘‘I can not help but take this racial thing and make it more individualistic. That’s naturally done. I mean I did not try to be unique or a little bit different. You know, it just come[s] natural[ly].’’ 76 Thus Howe presented a theory for his modernist abstractions that was compatible with Plains tradition. He argued that the individual innovations of modern Native

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American artists remained rooted in a specific place and people. His paintings were rooted in his tradition, but they also represented his personal interpretations and innovations within the context of Sioux tradition. In this, Howe revealed the influence of Dunn’s pedagogy, which championed a combination of Native tradition and individual style. ‘‘At Santa Fe,’’ he wrote, Dunn ‘‘insisted that everyone have his own way of drawing a horse or man. No research, just reflection.’’ 77 In describing these early experiences as a young artist, Howe wrote that he decided that modern Indian art must be an ‘‘individual effort . . . Indian art became an individualistic art. Versions of the old forms were defined for personal expression. Evolvement from tradition was not an obstacle but an involvement in art.’’ 78 Moreover, even in the traditional context of the Sioux ‘‘painting of the truth’’ ceremony, Howe wrote, ‘‘the painting style and content were visually exoteric [esoteric] for intellectual identity.’’ 79 Howe argued that Indian artists were accepted and integrated members of Native societies and understood as members of the community who shared the community’s values and whose art represented those values. Even if the artist developed a personal, individualistic, innovative art (as Howe had), if it remained ‘‘natural’’ it was still perceived as an expression of the artist’s traditional culture. ‘‘Individualistic work may change to nontraditional art where it may become more private and impersonal,’’ Howe wrote, ‘‘but if the change is a natural transition, I believe his art would be accepted by the majority of the Indians. As long as he is living according to standards, he is ‘right’ within the Indian society.’’ 80 Howe’s theory rooted individual innovation in the particulars of place and culture so that it retains its authenticity as a Sioux (and not just individual) cultural expression. Moreover, his theory neatly contradicted the Termination-era stereotypes of Indian cultures as stifling to individualism. Howe resolved the apparent contradiction between cultural and individual expression by arguing that his innovations were a natural evolution and personal interpretation of Sioux tradition, and were therefore understandable within Sioux culture. As Dunn speculated: ‘‘Most of Howe’s compositions would be at home in any contemporary show; yet were it possible for the artist’s great-grandfathers, Bone Necklace and White Bear, to see them, they could at once recognize each motif and symbol of the rites, the dancers, warriors, and other tribal figures. This seeming paradox lies not so much in the fact that Howe, through skilled use of modern media and techniques, brings his pictures up to date as in the fact that the art of the old chieftans’ day appears modern. It is, so to speak, an art that was ahead of its time so far as style is concerned. In Howe’s work, the resemblance of old to new is inherent rather than acquired . . . Martha Graham’s choreography seems not more advanced.’’ 81 Thus Howe’s innovative, abstract paintings, based on his knowledge of the ‘‘true ‘‘a fine painting . . . but not indian’’ 165

studied fact of Indian paintings,’’ were at once authentically Indian (in the sense that they represented a traditional and collective expression) and fully modern (in that they were Howe’s innovative, individual creations). Howe’s abstractions were connected to traditional Sioux aesthetics. Specifically, he described his abstract art as a continuation of the geometrical point-and-line compositional device that he referred to as tahokmu, or the ‘‘spider web,’’ in which designs are generated by a weblike network of points, creating compositions that are at once balanced and dynamic, as seen in the symmetrical, abstract motifs of Plains hide paintings. Howe explained that traditional designs were ‘‘diamond-shaped (long) with one deer hoof track design (small) at each end, that is left and right horizontally symmetrical. From this design comes all geometric designs, one with the straight line or lines.’’ Howe explained that these principles could be adjusted as the artist desired, to add ‘‘more feeling and meaning.’’ Symmetrical shapes could be distorted for individual, expressive, and aesthetic effect.82 While mindful of the traditional Dakota linear aesthetic, he ‘‘worked to add dimensions to Dakota art.’’ 83 As he explained: ‘‘The Dakota art of painting—its medium, technique, process, subject matter and its qualitative aspects—has given me direction, purpose, substance, and art, an art which is still in its original form, originality unblemished and unquestionably a true reflection of culture, not a bastardly exploitation. Being a Dakota with a background of Dakota culture I felt I should continue the art. To use the ways and means of Dakota art for continuity and still keep the essence of Indian art was paramount in my quest for expression. In order to stabilize and validate this it must work with or from the traditions and conventions. Its components remain Dakota to the core regardless of individualization of the art.’’ 84 In his role as professor of art at the University of South Dakota, Howe regularly lectured on the history of Western art and modernism. While he was clear to distinguish his own work from European art, certain revealing parallels or similarities may be observed between his understanding of European modernism and his own modernist formation, grounded in Sioux traditions. In addition to embracing and adapting notions of individual expression and innovation, Howe’s understanding of his own art may be seen to resonate with his discussion of the European modernist, whose art stands in opposition to the work of the conventional, or academic artist. Arguably, Howe saw his own work existing in a similar opposition to the ‘‘pretty, stylized pictures’’ of ‘‘traditional’’ Indian painting, even as he held to the seemingly contradictory position that his work is rooted in a tradition that respects individual perspectives and contributions. In a 1960 lecture on Cubism, to which his work was often compared, Howe argued that the artistic goals of Pablo Picasso and George Braque were to construct a composition rather than represent perceived reality. He

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compared their paintings to the ancient Egyptian technique of representing an object by its characteristic profile, or to the schematic abstraction found in Native American art. Form in their paintings, he described, is broken down into smaller units, but is contained within a larger, coherent composition. ‘‘The artists,’’ he explained, ‘‘have constructed . . . pictures out of more or less uniform parts so that the whole represents an appearance of consistency comparable to such works of primitive art as the [Northwest Coast] American totem pole. So objects or parts of objects are visible from the sides and fronts and tops, and exaggerated for tactile feeling.’’ Moreover, Howe suggested that Cubism’s relationship to its audience was not unlike the relationship between traditional Sioux painting and its audience. Like Sioux abstraction, Cubism was intended for an initiated audience that understood its forms.85 Howe also claimed another important parallel by stating that he and the European modernist were both innovators. He added that the painter of the past knew ‘‘what he was aiming at. He had tradition as his guide. And the number of decisions with which he was confronted was limited. The modern painter . . . is in a less inevitable position.’’ He must forge ahead as an individual and make innovative personal decisions. The painter in the Western tradition and the painter in the Sioux tradition both worked within a narrow range of possibilities, thereby producing artworks according to long-standing expectations and formulas. Howe saw himself as very much like the European modernist in the sense that he also sought to transcend the limitations of tradition. ‘‘I suppose that the real truth,’’ Howe speculated, ‘‘is that the modern artist wants to create things, the stress is on create . . . He wants to feel that he has made something, which had no existence before. Not just a copy of a real object however skillfully, not just a piece of decoration however clever, but something more relevant and lasting . . . Something that he feels to be more real than the shoddy objects of our humdrum existence.’’ 86 Much like West and Morrison, Howe’s description of his artistic process offers some additional insight into the parallels he saw between his own work and European modernism, and it offers another perspective on the ways in which Howe’s Sioux abstraction was compatible with (but not entirely assimilative to) modernist notions about art and creativity. Much as the New York School critic Harold Rosenberg had described the work of the postwar American action painters, Howe described his painting process as intuitive and improvisational. He began with an underlying design that he described as ‘‘all emotional and non content or no objects,’’ and only after this was established did he begin to ‘‘look for objects or suggestions of them’’ and allow the narrative component of the composition to emerge.87 As such, Howe’s modernism (and his understanding of the role of individualism in creativity) was fundamentally different from that of the action painters described by Rosenberg, ‘‘a fine painting . . . but not indian’’ 167

who interpreted the work of the individual artist as a ‘‘gesture of liberation, from value—political, esthetic, moral.’’ 88 But ultimately Howe’s complicated and nuanced sense of the modernity of his art enabled him to imagine that his work could have relevance beyond the Sioux traditions that had generated it. And, indeed, Howe at times suggested that he would prefer that his work be seen without labels or classifying categories whatsoever. In a 1977 interview, Howe resisted the label of Native American artist. ‘‘Some day,’’ he offered, ‘‘art will be called art, not this ethnic classification, Indian Art, etc. I think it’s a stigma to be classified as [an] Indian artist.’’ 89 While Howe continued to ground his art within his specific Plains cultural tradition, he also intended that the emotional content communicated through abstraction would transcend the local and find an audience beyond his own Sioux community, who would appreciate its formal beauty even if they had no experience of its relationship to Sioux tradition. As he wrote: Some . . . people who follow my work[,] that is they are deeply interested and feel concerned about my art work[,] have suggested their interest in my art work paintings only in the design side, the positive and negative . . . together in the compositions and have no interest in the context of the picture. They say and I agree that since I am a product of this American society therefore I or rather my art work reflect[s] what America is doing right now. I ask about that and they [say] America is studying space, use of space, structuring, experiencing space breaking, building skyscrapers, building bridges, exploring outer space. [It’s] true I work this way[.] I work the negative areas [and] non-objective design and then I allow lines to bring out the positive areas. In other words the negative lines presented or suggest the positive part. It is my belief that the negative areas or background areas or patterns should be as beautiful if not more beautiful than the positive or foreground areas or patterns.’’ 90 However, the 1958 jurors’ assertion that Howe’s art was not authentic suggested that Indianness and modernity were mutually exclusive. The Philbrook jurors could not see Howe’s work as an experimental, modern composition drawn from traditional pictorial principles. Indeed, the jurors’ shortsightedness illustrates that non-Native audiences and gatekeepers perpetuated their own stultifying institutions dedicated to the suppression of innovation and expression.

TRANSFORMING THE PHILBROOK INDIAN ANNUALS

Howe’s angry letter received replies from Jeanne Snodgrass and Denys P. Meyers, the art director at the Philbrook. Chastened by the artist’s critique, King wrote to Howe that she believed that ‘‘every art of every culture has a right to progress.’’ However,

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she saw the Philbrook as having its hands tied because ‘‘the Board [of Trustees] insists that our Annual represent the ‘traditional’ as ‘they’ see it. I cannot change their minds as to what ‘traditional Indian art’ is.’’ As a Cherokee whose paternal grandfather had suffered forced removal and the Trail of Tears, Snodgrass insisted that she shared Howe’s frustration and worked ‘‘every day for the betterment of our people.’’ Further, she promised that she was working on a new solution for the next year’s annual.91 Meyers wrote to Howe, explaining, ‘‘it is certainly not the desire or the purpose of Philbrook Art Center to discourage or inhibit freedom of expression on the part of artists, be they of American Indian, European, Asiatic or African descent.’’ He added that he understood why Howe would believe that the annuals’ policies, which emphasized ‘‘traditional’’ arts, were ‘‘conservative,’’ ‘‘reservationist,’’ or ‘‘paternalistic.’’ However, he noted that the reason for this problem was that the annuals had two purposes, which now were becoming to seem at cross-purposes: first, to encourage the work of living Native American artists; and, second, to provide an ‘‘illustrative pictorial record of American Indian life and customs.’’ Meyers noted that a number of contemporary Indian artists held views similar to those expressed by Howe, and he promised to revise the guidelines for the 1959 annual.92 In an internal memo dated July 11, 1958, Snodgrass recommended that artists from any tribe could legitimately paint subject matter from any region, and, more important, that the artists’ innovations be recognized as legitimate: ‘‘Philbrook Art Center recognizes that the American Indian is in a state of transition,’’ she wrote. ‘‘We have seen the cave drawings, skin paintings and the trading post drawings on wrapping paper advance to an established ‘school’ (style) in the early 1930’s. Now almost thirty years later we are experiencing a new generation, on which is desirous of painting its own culture but through the use of the ‘sophisticated palette.’ The artist has made great advancement and is no longer primitive. Philbrook has always been a leader and has no wish to restrain the artist from a natural trend. By thus recognizing abstract painting we would also be furthering research for anthropologists, historians and connoisseurs of native arts.’’ She recommended a new category—‘‘Abstract &/or Symbolic Painting’’ (later changed to ‘‘Non-Traditional Painting’’)—to include ‘‘almost any painting which is not commonly accepted as pictorial or representational. (This would take in such work as was entered this year (1958) by Oscar Howe and also the prizewinning earth painting entered by Pablita Velarde.)’’ Snodgrass still insisted that paintings in all categories should ‘‘be representative of the Amerindian culture,’’ and she noted that ‘‘an abstract of a city skyline, or a still life would not be acceptable,’’ suggesting that she still could not fathom that modern Indian culture and experience might include urban life.93

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Snodgrass’s proposed reforms were adopted for the 1959 annual. The Philbrook added the new category; the first award went to Yeffe Kimball for Old Medicine Man ($100). Howe’s painting Dancing the Scalps won grand prize ($250). A second painting by Howe, Wakan, won a $200 purchase prize from the U.S. Department of the Interior, with Snodgrass and Bernard Frazier serving as jurors. For Howe, West and other postwar Native American artists, Indian culture represented a viable tradition, which was available directly through the artists’ own communities, not just as mediated through the white avant-garde. Their model was to create an Indian modern art—an art that would find its roots in tradition yet be fully of the modern world. As Howe’s experience at the 1958 Philbrook Indian Annual demonstrates, however, this strategy could still not avoid the pitfalls of Primitivism. However, it did provide a fruitful model that has served as a legacy and resource for younger artists seeking to integrate Native and modern sources. The transformations of the Native moderns presaged the emergence of ‘‘New Indian Painting’’ in workshops funded by the Rockefeller Foundation beginning in 1959 in Arizona, and in the founding of the new Institute of American Indian Arts in 1962, which was built on the site of Dunn’s Studio program at the Santa Fe Indian School. The new spirit in Native American art that emerged at the institute was committed to aesthetic innovation and the ideal of the artist as exemplary individual— the central issues of postwar modernism. The crisis of representation felt by West, Howe, and others regarding images of Indianness thus figured larger issues of artistic subjectivity in mainstream postwar art and culture and signaled major shifts in the construction of identity in culture and policy in postwar America.

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Postscript: Making Modern Native American Artists

The future of Indian art lies in the Indian’s ability to evolve, adjust, and adapt to the demands of the present, and not upon the ability to remanipulate the past.—LLOYD KIVA NEW (CHEROKEE), ‘‘USING CULTURAL DIFFERENCE AS A BASIS FOR CREATIVE EXPRESSION’’

during the second world war, barnett newman and his cohort plumbed the depths of the Primitive universal in search of authentic and universal expression; Newman’s Primitivism used Native American art as a resource and model for American modernists. But by the 1950s, Indian identity had been refigured in the rhetoric of the Termination movement, which sought to detribalize Native Americans and hasten their integration into the national mainstream. The Terminationists cast Native American culture as backward and out of step with the new realities of the modern world and the challenges of competitive individualism. Native American cultures, they argued, limited individual liberty and prohibited Indians from enjoying the full benefits and freedoms of American citizenship. Moreover, many non-Indians believed that Native American art, once seen as a precious resource and spiritual anodyne to the soulless experience of industrial modernity, had been reduced by modernization to a mere shadow of its former greatness. In the new climate of consensus liberalism, the New York modernists abandoned the Primitivism of the war years and embraced the new ethos of individualism. They abandoned their notions of the Primitive as a resource of authenticity and the font of universal communication, and instead located the last preserve of authenticity in the individual psyche. In so doing, they embraced a new notion of modernist consciousness as characterized by inwardness. The postwar modernists expressed their authentic, inner selves through a process of ‘‘action painting’’ described in 1952 by New York School critic Harold Rosenberg in terms of encounter and performance. For the postwar New York School, action painting held the possibility of the integration of art, work, identity, and life; the traces that were left on the canvas after the artists completed their work actually purported to offer direct and unmediated access to the artist as an individual. Instead of a representation (of the visible world, or of symbols of the Primitive universal), the action painting was a record and an index

of the artist’s individual intentions, worked out against what critic Clement Greenberg called ‘‘the resistance of the medium.’’ The most basic human aspects of feeling and intuition, rather than training and skill, were prized qualities for the postwar painter. The recognition by the Abstract Expressionists of the canvas as an arena for human action entailed a close identification between the action or gesture and the individual identity of the artist. Rosenberg defined action painting as ‘‘inseparable from the biography of the artist.’’ He further remarked that ‘‘the act of painting is of the same metaphysical substance of the artist’s existence,’’ suggesting that action painting held the possibility of the meaningful integration of art, work, and life, but also of ‘‘liberation, from value—political, esthetic, moral.’’ 1 As Barnett Newman wrote in his 1948 essay ‘‘The Sublime Is Now,’’ which signaled his move away from the Primitivism of the war years: ‘‘We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you.’’ The new painting would be made, Newman exclaimed, ‘‘out of our own feelings.’’ 2 This transformation—from a notion of the artist as conduit for symbols of the Primitive universal to a new vision of the artist as exemplary personality, cut loose from stultifying tradition—would have profound effects on the critical understanding of modern Native American art and culture. While the Primitivism of Newman and his New York School cohort recognized the value of Native American cultures as a resource and a model (for whites if not for living Native American artists), the postwar celebration of the singular personality of the artist presented a critical dilemma for Indian artists and their white supporters. Indeed, as the new ideal of the artist as individual resonated with the rhetoric of the Termination movement, how would modern Native American artists be understood? As debased producers of tourist kitsch? As the last remains of a once great Primitive culture that had been destroyed by modernization? If to be modern was to be an individual, how could Native American artists become ‘‘modern’’ without forsaking their cultural identity and inheritance? These concerns led white supporters of Native American art to the self-conscious project of remaking Native Americans as ‘‘modern artists.’’ These issues began to be addressed at the institutional level in the late 1950s, in the aftermath of Oscar Howe’s disagreement with the organizers of the Philbrook Indian Annual. One of the first moves was the 1958 addition of sculpture—a nontraditional medium for Native American artists—as an exhibit category. The next year an ‘‘experimental’’ category was added to the Indian annual, which allowed innovative works, such as the one Howe submitted in 1958, to be judged and awarded purchase prizes.3 Also in 1959, the Rockefeller Foundation funded the conference Directions in

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Indian Art, which was held at the University of Arizona and attended by Native American artists, educators, and tribal council members, as well as non-Native academics, museum professionals, art dealers, and employees of federal agencies, including the Department of the Interior’s Indian Arts and Craft Board. The 1959 conference addressed such issues as cultural change, authenticity, and the very definition of Native American arts in the twentieth century; the pressures of the market; a canon of quality, which would guarantee the continued viability and vitality of the Indian arts industry; and the role played by the federal government in the preservation, support, and growth of Native American art. The Rockefeller Foundation had supported Native American art since the 1920s, when John D. Rockefeller Jr. committed support to the Indian Arts Fund and to the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, New Mexico—organizations dedicated to the preservation and revival of traditional Southwest Native American arts. Through René d’Harnoncourt and the Museum of Modern Art, Rockefeller’s patronage had underwritten wartime claims that Native American art could serve as a model and a resource for a new American modernism distinct from European tradition. The 1959 conference continued this pattern of support for Native American art as well as the pattern of such support being prescriptive. The most important issue raised at the conference was that of artistic progress and individualism in modern Native art: that is, how to ensure that Native American art would become truly modern. But this issue also presented a seeming paradox: If Native American art became modern, how would it still be Indian? Frederick Dockstader, assistant director of the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation in New York, highlighted these concerns in his conference address. ‘‘To define Indian art is almost impossible,’’ he told the audience, because ‘‘the esthetic abilities and efforts of the hundreds of native tribes of America vary so tremendously.’’ However, Dockstader insisted, ‘‘Whatever its definition,’’ Indian art ‘‘must be a free expression of the artist, in whatever medium he chooses, and in whatever manner he may feel best expresses himself. It must be a living, growing, creative art, with an individual flavor which in some degree reflects thousands of years of Indian tradition.’’ 4 Native artists, he argued, must be as free to express their individuality as any modern, non-Native American artist. The modern Indian artist must not be bound by tradition. However, the central problematic facing Native American art in the modern era was the very issue addressed by Oscar Howe and Dick West: how to maintain an authentic and meaningful connection to ‘‘thousands of years of Indian tradition’’ when modern artistic innovation and expression seemed to demand that artists be free individuals, loosed from the bonds of history.

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Dockstader’s position, however, was not universally representative of the nonNative academics, administrators, and art dealers at the conference. Among the nonNative attendees, progressive as well as status quo opinions were voiced. A significant number of statements reflected a paternalistic concern for the quality and the continuity of tradition in handicrafts such as jewelry and pottery, which represented the bulk of the market in Native American arts. In a statement to the conference the educator and artist Dorothy Dunn spoke in defense of the ‘‘traditional’’ style of Native American painting. Dunn, perhaps predictably, cited the need for ‘‘guidance’’ and the role of ‘‘specialists’’ in helping Native students connect with appropriate models for Indian art. As Dunn stated: ‘‘An Indian artist is one who utilizes the peculiar art backgrounds of his own tribal group as a starting point for developing an individual art distinguishable from that of nonIndian groups. The Indian artist needs special guidance if he chooses the Indian way of painting as opposed to the general [non-Indian, modernist] field.’’ Dunn insisted that guidance was necessary to maintain the connections between Indian art and traditional cultures and communities. ‘‘Guidance,’’ she asserted, ‘‘is the responsibility of the Indian schools.’’ 5 In contrast with Dunn’s advocacy for grounding Native American artists in some version of Native American culture, other conference attendees advocated the swift assimilation of Native artists into the modernist mainstream. Anthropologist John Adair suggested that Native American artists could divorce the ‘‘business’’ of being an artist from their cultural life as an Indian.6 Others argued that the only way to assure that Native America art could remain vital and avoid the pitfalls of kitsch culture was to break definitively with Indian identity and tradition; the ‘‘Indian-artist’’ needed to become an ‘‘artist.’’ Indeed, art historian Joy Gritton notes that the position held by non-Native critics of modern Native American art revealed their intolerance toward Native cultures and their concordance with the tenets of Termination, believing that ‘‘traditional aesthetics—distinguished by concern for communal welfare, social mores, and religious proscriptions and practices—and thus, traditional values and beliefs, were dysfunctional and inimical to success in the modern world.’’ 7 Andreas Andersen, head of the Department of Art at the University of Arizona, made a clear distinction between the universal figure of the ‘‘artist’’ and the more specific (and limited) ‘‘Indian artist.’’ Andersen saw the issue facing modern Native artists as a choice between two mutually exclusive identities. He argued, ‘‘In order to produce a valid art product, the Indian artist must face the choice of one of two alternatives: either to try to keep his work within the tradition, or to disregard the tradition.’’ This was the very same binary that Howe, West, and Morrison (even Kim-

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ball) resisted in their own construction of an individual artistic identity. Andersen, however, predicted only sentimental, pseudo art for those who clung to tradition in the modern world: ‘‘Unfortunately the results . . . have become stereotyped or confused by meaningless repetition.’’ Indeed, Andersen argued that the Indian artist could only ‘‘try to keep his work within the tradition,’’ but that any such attempt was doomed to failure and could only generate kitsch. Tradition was lost as a living and vital resource and could only be preserved as in a museum (‘‘proud reminders of his historic past and as inspiration for his future’’), but trapped in the past nonetheless. ‘‘Artistic quality has been lost and fewer and fewer true artists have developed,’’ he asserted. To be an artist, the modern Indian artist must abandon attempts to work within tradition, because ‘‘no tradition can be preserved when the conditions which fostered it are in change. We do the Indian no service by trying to impede or prevent change because of a sort of historic nostalgia.’’ 8 Lamentably, modernity had destroyed authentic Indian culture, but those very forces were also, ironically, hailed as the salvation of Native American artists as producers of a vital cultural product. Indian artists must embrace change, Andersen suggested, or become mere producers of debased kitsch. Ultimately, Andersen believed that it was the forces of modernity that had debased authentic Indian art. Yet, ironically, it was the modern marketplace that the Indian artist needed to embrace: ‘‘Having forced the need for new forms, we must do all we can to recognize and foster talent and see to it that the products of these artists reach the markets of the world.’’ However, Andersen did not clarify what the role of the artist’s identity was to be; he suggested that Indianness was to remain an important factor in developing a market for the work, but the artist was to become a universal figure.9 Robert Quinn, an associate professor of art at the University of Arizona, echoed Andersen’s position. As Quinn asserted, ‘‘It is important for the Indian to realize that being an artist is a matter of being an individual.’’ 10 Otherwise, Quinn argued, Native artists would remain inhibited by ‘‘tribal customs.’’ Quinn deplored Dunn’s Studio program for fostering an irrelevant style that was, as he insisted, ‘‘derived from Persian miniatures,’’ rather than from authentic Native visual cultures. Like Andersen, he encouraged modern Native artists to abandon Indianness and assume modernist, individual identities: ‘‘It seems to me,’’ Quinn spoke, ‘‘that the real problem the Indian faces is the insistence that he be an Indian.’’ Quinn implied that those doing the insisting were non-Native bureaucrats and educators who were intent on keeping Native Americans tied to the past. The modern Native artist, Quinn declared, ‘‘should be an Indian only if he cannot help it. To dwell too much on his Indianism is to put the emphasis on ethnology rather than on art. There should be no effort

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to contain the Indian within the traditions of his past. He has to realize that he is an artist first and an Indian second if his art and the tradition it represents are to grow.’’ Quinn implored the modern Indian artist to ‘‘leave the past in the museum,’’ or ‘‘become a museum piece himself.’’ 11 But the aesthetic differences between Dunn and her critics notwithstanding, the non-Native participants in the 1959 Directions in Indian Art conference were overwhelming in their reliance on the stereotype of two worlds—Indian and modern—which remained irreconcilable. The issues that emerged in the 1959 conference were addressed in the Southwest Indian Art Project, a series of experimental summer workshops funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and held at the University of Arizona in Tucson from 1960 to 1962. The summer workshops were described as a ‘‘new and unique approach to the problem of enabling the young Indian artist to make use of his abilities in a nontribal existence and still draw upon his heritage of spiritual and artistic values.’’ Focusing on Native American students from the Southwest, the summer workshops featured an experimental curriculum for young Indian artists, including lectures in the history of Western and world art and classes in the practices and techniques of modern art. The organizers assumed that Native aesthetics and local traditions were in the midst of collapse and in need of revitalization, but they argued that young Indian artists should not look to the past for models. ‘‘As the tribal core gradually disintegrates,’’ the organizers wrote, ‘‘the traditional art loses its meaning, function, and vitality. The young Indian artist must seek new forms of creative expression that draw upon his cultural heritage without slavishly reproducing old Indian forms the value of which both as art and as an expression of moral and social standards no longer exists.’’ 12 Their new curriculum, they believed, would integrate Indian student artists into the modern mainstream. Trained as modern artists, Native Americans would not be reduced to slavishly copying debased and meaningless traditional forms, but rather would be prepared to build a new tradition befitting their cultural inheritance yet geared toward modern life. But the white commentators and educators who attended the 1959 conference and participated in the summer workshops were themselves struggling over definitions and distinctions that, as demonstrated by the experiences of Howe and other Native American modernists who desired to be recognized as individuals possessed of a critical subjectivity, had become untenable by the 1950s. Native American attendees came to the 1959 conference with a different set of modern concerns. Ned Hatathla, a member of the Navajo Tribal Council, signaled the irony and futility of the hand wringing by non-Natives over issues of authenticity. In response to Quinn’s assertions, he joked, ‘‘I learned many things today about Indian

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art. One of the things I learned is that Indian art comes from Persia.’’ 13 Hatathla was more concerned with the basic economic realities of the marketplace, and he wondered how Navajo craftspeople could withstand competition from ‘‘white men who can make similar jewelry cheaper than the Indian.’’ Hatathla imagined the craftspeople whose concerns he carried to the conference as already fully modern, as they produced traditional crafts for a cross-cultural clientele. The Chiricahua Apache artist Allan Houser (1914–1994) echoed Hatathla’s concerns. Houser, a former student of Dunn’s Studio, voiced his concerns about the economic viability of a truly modern and innovative Native art: ‘‘Practical experience and wider education stimulate the artist to do better creative work. But the facts discourage him. He has learned that commercial art, which pays well, is a competitor to creative art which often offers nothing but starvation.’’ 14 And indeed, the concerns of Native artists resonated with many of the non-Native traders who worked more closely with Native artists and craftspeople than did the many non-Native academics, museum administrators, and bureaucrats in attendance. For this crosscultural group, the cultivation of a better-informed and educated public of art buyers and patrons was the most pressing concern facing Native American artists. Lloyd Kiva New (1916–2000) a successful Cherokee textile artist and fashion designer with a studio and gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona, encouraged modern Native artists to look beyond tradition and the outmoded stereotypes of the studio style and embrace modernity and the market; neither of which required relinquishing one’s Native identity. New contended that ‘‘the future of Indian art lies in the future, not the past,’’ and he urged Native artists to accept change and innovation as a necessary correlative of modern experience: ‘‘If Indian culture is in a state of flux then we must expect a corresponding change in art expression.’’ However, unlike many of the non-Native participants, New did not believe that embracing modernity meant relinquishing Native identity. Rather, he insisted that the ‘‘Indian art of the future will be in new forms, produced in new media and with new technological methods. The end result will be as Indian as is the Indian.’’ 15

THE INSTITUTE OF AMERICAN INDIAN ARTS

In 1962, the Southwest Indian Art Project summer workshop was brought to a halt by the founding of the Institute of American Indian Arts (iaia) by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Responding to the need for reform in Indian education and to support the development of Native American art and artists as a national resource, iaia was founded on the site of the Studio School. Under founding director Lloyd Kiva New,

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the institute revised the outmoded curriculum of the Studio program. The influential teaching faculty at the new institute included the Hopi jeweler Charles Loloma, the Chiricahua Apache painter and sculptor Allan Houser, who had been a student of Dunn’s at the studio, and the Luiseño painter Fritz Scholder (1937–2005), who was born of mixed-race parents in Minnesota and was conspicuous for not having been trained in Indian schools. Scholder had studied art at Wisconsin State University in Superior and at Sacramento City College and Sacramento State College in California. Already an established artist by the early 1960s, Scholder had participated in the Southwest Indian Art Projects in Tucson as a student. When it opened in 1962, the coeducational classes at the iaia had an enrollment of three hundred and fifty Native American students (representing eighty-eight tribes from twenty-five states), who ranged in age from sixteen to twenty-three. The high school program, which included grades ten through twelve, offered art electives. A post–high school program, with vocational and arts curriculum and college preparatory work, featured courses in painting and sculpture, as well as in music, drama, creative writing, fashion and textile design, ceramics, jewelry, graphic arts, and commercial arts. The new curriculum, in keeping with the new ideas about the place of the Native artist in the modern world that had been voiced in the Directions in Indian Art conference and the Southwest Indian Art Project summer workshops, emphasized a broad training in international modern and contemporary art practices and the marketplace. Lloyd Kiva New recognized that it was not possible, ‘‘to live realistically in outmoded tradition.’’ Indeed, he argued that it was ‘‘the business of the artist . . . to create new and worthy actions leading to new traditions.’’ 16 Toward this end, the iaia students were also trained in the technologies of modern art and mainstream business practices. In her history of the institute, Joy Gritton argues that the founding of the iaia represented an imposition of alien modernist ideologies, aesthetics, and social values upon its young Native students. The new Native American art taught at the iaia, Gritton argues, adapted traditional forms only when they were ‘‘palatable’’ to modernist tastes and sensibilities, much as Newman and other New York School artists had adapted Primitivist forms to validate their modernist project. As such, the modernism of the iaia and its talented young students was a true revolutionary moment, representing a new era in Native American art. To the extent that the talented young Native students at the iaia were able to master the new modernist forms and practices, the efforts were hard won, as they represented a value system far removed from the traditional cultures into which they had been born. Read in this light, the iaia represents the goals of the Terminationists and the white educators who spoke at the 1959 Directions in Indian Art conference.17

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But the modernism of the iaia can also be interpreted as being grounded in traditional practices. Indeed, this was New’s vision for the new school. According to New, the iaia represented the reclamation by young Indian artists of tribal forms (e.g., abstraction) that had been appropriated by white modernists. As he mused, ‘‘What could be more abstract expressionist than the body of a hawk or other animal fetish mounted on a freely yellow ochre smeared Plains Indian war shield collage? What’s more conceptual, demonstrational, and performing than a Sioux Sun Dance? I like to toy with the idea that a lot of these ‘schools’ of art—abstraction, surrealism, etc. were invented by Native Americans long before the so-called ‘modernists’—that when our young people move out, they are not forsaking their heritage, they are just reclaiming it.’’ 18 New argued that rather than a ‘‘fusion’’ of traditional and modern forms, or an imposition of modernist styles, the modernism at the iaia in the 1960s was an expression of tribal identity. The forms that seemed so modern and revolutionary were, in fact, tribal forms being reinvested with aesthetic authority by the young students and their teachers in the exciting environment of the new school. An early statement of purpose for the iaia, written by New, developed this philosophy: The art educational program of the Institute of American Indian Arts is based on the theory that traditional expressions in the arts by American Indians can be extended, commensurate to an effective evaluation of the demands of individuals and groups in terms of cultural needs. Indian art can be enriched in its present state by techniques that consider well the universal forces of creativity, contemporary demands, and respect for cultural difference. Indian art can be projected into the future by a willingness to consider the evolution of new forms, the adoption of new technological methods, and the fact that new incentives for expressions by the individual must fill the void of inertia in Indian group or tribal forces, in the rapidly changing Indian world.19 As such, rather than the imposition of a modernist ideology—and the selective appropriation of tribal forms that neatly reinforced that ideology—the iaia represented an alternative vision of modern art, one that adopted only those elements of modernist ideology that were found to be compatible with Native American culture and identity.20 The iaia curriculum, based on New’s vision, was designed not to further assimilation or to speed entry into the national mainstream, but rather to address the economic, social, and psychological problems facing Indian youth in the United States: ‘‘A generation,’’ as he described them, ‘‘of confused and insecure youth.’’ 21 Students were given lectures on world art as well as the history of Indian arts in order to instill pride in their cultural inheritance and recognize the value of cultural differmaking modern native american artists 179

ence in the modern world, and to form self-confidence ‘‘utilizing all that is good in Indian heritage to strengthen their position in contemporary society.’’ 22 Moreoever, for many students the art training was not even the most valuable experience at the iaia. Indeed, many iaia student artists did not continue with their art. Their years at the school were spent using art as a tool to come to terms with their identities as Indian people in a modern world.23 As the artist Alfred Youngman (Ojibwe/Plains Cree, b. 1948) remembers, ‘‘many students’ lives were saved by their experience at the iaia, which gave them the spiritual, creative and material tools to build successful lives as painters and make important contributions to their communities.’’ 24 Whereas the 1959 Rockefeller conference attendees argued that the traditions themselves had become debased and stultifying, New argued that this was not the case. Indians were limited not by their traditions but by white expectations (i.e., Primitivism). As West and Howe understood, Indians were not limited from within their cultures but by outside pressures to conform to ‘‘authentic’’ styles. According to the iaia program, the young Indian student-artist ‘‘learns to stand on his own feet, avoiding stultifying clichés applied to Indian art by the purist who sometimes unwittingly resents evolution in Indian art forms and technology.’’ According to New, the iaia and faculty would work to build a ‘‘cultural bridge . . . to serve students as members of two societies, enabling them to benefit from both as well as to contribute to both.’’ New’s goal for the iaia students was that they would learn to use ‘‘tradition as a springboard for personal creative action.’’ 25 Following New’s vision, the faculty and graduates of the new school emerged as major figures in Native American art in the 1960s and 1970s. Scholder’s student T. C. Cannon (Caddo/Kiowa, 1946–1978) was, like Scholder, engaged with modern and contemporary non-Native art to a greater degree than were previous generations of Native artists. While George Morrison and Leon Polk Smith (Cherokee, 1906–1996) were active in the postwar New York School, these artists had chosen the anonymity of abstraction and thus deemphasized the importance of Native identity in their modernist art. In contrast to Morrison and Smith, Scholder, and the young iaia artists reintroduced images culled from the troubled past of U.S.-Indian relations and deliberately engaged a new discourse of Native American identity and critical subjectivity. Convinced that popular images of Indians were completely at odds with the experience of modern (often urban) Native Americans, Scholder’s paintings of Indians mediated the gap between romantic stereotypes that had been foisted upon Indian artists and the realities of modern, urban Native life. Frustrated that his Native students at iaia were still beholden to cliché and were unable to ‘‘master . . . their

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Indian subject,’’ Scholder turned to the image of the Indian in 1965.26 As he explained: ‘‘When I first came to Santa Fe, I vowed to myself that I would not paint Indians. Then I saw the numerous over-romanticized paintings of the ‘noble savage’ looking into the sunset and decided that someone should paint the Indian in a different context. My concern therefore includes depicting the strange paradox created in the transition to the 20th century; the quiet humor of the nature-oriented person; the faces that show the imposition of the non-Indian and the tenacity for holding onto an identity; the monstrous metamorphosis that at times makes the Indian his own worst enemy; the contemporary Indian/cowboy with a can of beer in his hand. . . . In the final analysis, however, the Indian Series is an optimistic reaction to a new era of the emerging American Indian.’’ 27 Scholder reappropriated the hackneyed images of Native Americans, such as James Earl Fraser’s iconic 1894 sculpture The End of the Trail, which he sardonically reconstructed in his 1970 painting of the same name [figure 34]. In doing so, Scholder insisted that history and images had cultural power, with which contemporary Natives must come to terms. Moreover, Scholder painted in an expressionistic style that borrowed from the modernist mainstream. As Jackson Rushing writes, Scholder appropriated ‘‘styles associated with the ‘dominant’ culture—Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, and Pop Art—to probe the personal and social dilemmas of authentic, but non-traditional Indian cultures.’’ 28 The art of Scholder and the iaia artists was modern, to be sure, and the iaia is often cited as the beginning of modern Native American art. Indeed, it was the first organized and programmatic effort to make a Native American modernist art. But, as we have seen, Native American artists were already moderns.

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NOTES

PREFACE 1. See Frederick J. Dockstader, ‘‘The Revolt of Trader Boy: Oscar Howe and Indian Art,’’ American Indian Art Magazine 8.3 (summer 1983): 42–51; Mark Andrew White, ‘‘Oscar Howe and the Transformation of Native American Art,’’ American Indian Art Magazine 23.1 (winter 1997): 36–43; and White, ‘‘Aesthetic Regeneration in Post–World War II Native American Painting,’’ paper presented at the Twenty-seventh Annual Meeting of the Midwest Art History Society, April 8, 2000. 2. Oscar Howe to Jeanne Snodgrass, April 18, 1958. Jeanne Snodgrass King Collection, H. A. and Mary K. Chapman Library, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 3. Alison R. Bernstein, American Indians and World War Two: Toward a New Era in Indian Affairs (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 87. 4. In formulating these questions I am building on the work of Ann Eden Gibson, whose Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) first made the innovative argument that race and identity are crucial categories for discussing postwar American modernism. 5. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 6. See George Marcus and Fred Myers, eds., The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 7. This critique was established forcefully by the ‘‘Primitivism’’ debates of the 1980s. See William Rubin, ed., ‘‘Primitivism’’ in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984). Most of the critical responses to moma’s Primitivism are collected in Jack D. Flam, ed., Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). See also Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 8. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), 3. 9. George W. Stocking Jr., ‘‘The Dark-Skinned Savage: The Image of Primitive Man in Evolutionary Anthropology,’’ in Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 114. 10. See Shelly Errington, ‘‘What Became of Authentic Primitive Art?’’ Cultural Anthropology 9 (1994): 201–26; and Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 11. J. J. Brody, Indian Painters and White Patrons (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971). 12. Ruth B. Phillips, ‘‘Performing the Native Woman: Primitivism and Mimicry in Early Twentieth-

Century Visual Culture,’’ in Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity, edited by Lynda Jessup (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 29. See also Phillips, ‘‘Art History and the Native-Made Object: New Discourses, Old Differences?’’ in Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories, edited by W. Jackson Rushing III (London: Routledge, 1999), 97–112. 13. For a sampling of recent writings, see Rushing, Native American Art in the Twentieth Century. 14. For a comparison to similar development in contemporary Aboriginal art in Australia and New Zealand, see Fred R. Myers, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); and Nicholas Thomas, Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999). 15. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). Pratt describes colonial borderlands as a ‘‘contact zone,’’ which she defines as ‘‘the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’’ (6). 16. J. J. Brody, Pueblo Indian Painting: Tradition and Modernism in New Mexico, 1900–1930 (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1997), 15. 17. David W. Penney and Lisa A. Roberts, ‘‘America’s Pueblo Artists: Encounters on the Borderlands,’’ in Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories, edited by W. Jackson Rushing III (London: Routledge, 1999), 25. 18. Ibid., 31. 19. Brody, Pueblo Indian Painting, 15. 20. Janet Catherine Berlo and Ruth Phillips, Native North American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 210. On the definition of Native American modernism and for an argument for an earlier date, see Elizabeth Hutchinson, ‘‘Modern Native American Art: Angel DeCora’s Transcultural Aesthetics,’’ Art Bulletin 83.4 (December 2001): 740–56; and Hutchinson, ‘‘Indigeneity and Sovereignty: The Work of Two Early Twentieth Century Native American Art Critics,’’ Third Text, no. 52 (summer 2000): 21–29. 21. Clement Greenberg, ‘‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’’ (1939), in The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume I: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944, edited by John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 11. See also T. J. Clark, ‘‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,’’ Critical Inquiry 9.1 (September 1982): 139–56. 22. See Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 23. Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 7. 24. Ibid., 4–5. 25. Ibid., 10. 26. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 5.

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27. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), and Okwui Enwezor, ed., The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994 (Munich: Prestel, 2001), which place, respectively, the middle passage and the process of African decolonization at the center of modernist history. 28. An important model for my understanding of Native American modernity in this regard is Ruth B. Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998). 29. W. Jackson Rushing III, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of Cultural Pluralism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995); Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1991); Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Painting and Subjectivity in the 1940s (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993). The earliest synthesis of Primitivism as a theme within modernism was Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Painting (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938). 30. Thomas McEvilley, ‘‘Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief: ‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art,’’ in Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity (Kingston, N.Y.: Documentext/McPherson and Company, 1992), 33. 31. Ibid., 27. 32. See Gibson, Abstract Expressionism. 33. Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 40. 34. John Collier, ‘‘The Red Atlantis,’’ Survey (October 1922). See also E. A. Schwartz, ‘‘Red Atlantis Revisited: Community and Culture in the Writings of John Collier,’’ American Indian Quarterly 18 (fall 1994): 507–31.

1. ART AND MODERN INDIAN POLICY 1. Jesse Walter Fewkes, ‘‘Hopi Kachinas Drawn by Native Artists,’’ Bureau of American Ethnology Report, vol. 21 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1903), 14, quoted in David W. Penney and Lisa A. Roberts, ‘‘America’s Pueblo Artists: Encounters on the Borderlands,’’ in Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories, edited by W. Jackson Rushing III (London: Routledge, 1999), 24. 2. James Clifford, ‘‘Of Other Peoples: Beyond the ‘Salvage’ Paradigm,’’ in Discussions in Contemporary Culture, vol. 1, edited by Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 121. See also Clifford, ‘‘On Collecting Art and Culture,’’ in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 215–51. 3. Pratt defines ‘‘autoethnography’’ as ‘‘instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms. If ethnographic texts are a means by which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others, autoethnographic texts are those the others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations’’ (Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation [London: Routledge, 1992], 7). 4. Penney and Roberts, ‘‘America’s Pueblo Artists,’’ 25.

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5. Fred Kabotie and Bill Belknap, Fred Kabotie: Hopi Indian Artist (Flagstaff, Ariz.: Museum of Northern Arizona Press, 1977), 8, quoted in Penney and Roberts, ‘‘America’s Pueblo Artists,’’ 25. 6. See Renato Rosaldo, ‘‘Imperialist Nostalgia,’’ in Culture and Truth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 68–87. 7. T. J. Jackson Lears describes antimodernism as ‘‘the recoil from an ‘overcivilized’ modern existence to more intense forms of physical or spiritual experience supposedly embodied in medieval or Oriental culture’’ (Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994], xv). See also Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998); and Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians of the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996). 8. Paul A. F. Walter, ‘‘The Santa Fe–Taos Movement,’’ Art and Archeology 4.2 (July/December, 1916): 333, quoted in Penney and Roberts, ‘‘America’s Pueblo Artists,’’ 28–29. 9. Walter Pach, ‘‘Notes on the Indian Watercolors,’’ Dial 68.3 (1920): 344, quoted in J. J. Brody, Indian Painters and White Patrons (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971), 185. 10. Natalie Curtis, ‘‘An American Indian Artist,’’ Outlook 1244.1 (1920): 51, quoted in Brody, Indian Painters and White Patrons, 185. 11. ‘‘Paintings by Indians,’’ El Palacio 10.13–14 (1921): 23, quoted in Brody, Indian Painters and White Patrons, 185. 12. Dilworth, Imagining Indians of the Southwest, 175–81. 13. Oscar Jacobson, Kiowa Indian Art (Nice, France: C. Szwedzicki, 1929). See also Bruce Bernstein, ‘‘Art for the Sake of Life: Dorothy Dunn and a Story of American Indian Painting,’’ in Modern by Tradition: American Indian Painting in the Studio Style, by Bruce Bernstein and W. Jackson Rushing III (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1995), 4; and Rushing, ‘‘Modern by Tradition: The ‘Studio Style’ of Native American Painting,’’ in Bernstein and Rushing, Modern by Tradition, 27. 14. Indian Arts Fund, Indian Art: Preservation and Development, pamphlet (n.d. [after 1926]), Laboratory of Anthropology Archives, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, New Mexico. 15. Dunn directed the studio from 1932 to 1937; and from 1937 to 1961 the studio was directed by Gerónima Cruz Montoya (San Juan Pueblo, b. 1915). In 1962, the studio art program was superseded by the Institute of American Indian Arts, which exists to this day. 16. Dorothy Dunn, American Indian Painting of the Southwest and Plains Areas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968), 273–74, quoted in Bernstein and Rushing, Modern by Tradition, 38. 17. See Sally Hyer, ‘‘Pablita Velarde: The Pueblo Artist as Cultural Broker,’’ in Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker, edited by Margaret Connell Szasz (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 278, 282–84; and W. Jackson Rushing III, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of Cultural Pluralism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 38. 18. Pablita Velarde, quoted in Pablita Velarde: An Artist and Her People, videocassette produced by the National Park Service, n.d., quoted in Hyer, ‘‘Pablita Velarde,’’ 274. 19. See Daniel Joseph Singal, ed., Modernist Culture in America (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Pub-

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lishing, Co., 1991). As defined by the historian David Hollinger, cosmopolitanism is the ‘‘desire to transcend the limitations of any and all particularisms in order to achieve a more complete human experience and a more complete understanding of that experience . . . Particular cultures and subcultures [are] viewed as repositories for insights and experiences than can be drawn upon in the interests of a more comprehensive outlook on the world . . . Insofar as [a particular] heritage or tradition is an avenue toward the expansion of experience and understanding, access to it [was] to be preserved’’ (Hollinger, ‘‘Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism, and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligentsia,’’ American Quarterly 27.2 [May 1975]: 135). See also Alfred Haworth Jones, ‘‘The Search for a Usable Past in the New Deal Era,’’ American Quarterly 23.5 (December 1971): 710–24. 20. John Collier, From Every Zenith: A Memoir and Some Essays on Life and Thought (Denver: Sage Books, 1962), 94. 21. Ibid., 126. 22. Lawrence C. Kelly, The Assault on Assimilation: John Collier and the Origins of Indian Policy Reform (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983), 295–348. For an interpretation of the defense of the Pueblo dances as an aspect of 1920s feminism, see Margaret D. Jacobs, Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879–1934 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 106–48. 23. See Kelly, The Assault on Assimilation, 190–254; and Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford Lytle, The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 37–54. 24. Pauline Turner Strong, ‘‘Introduction’’ to Pueblo Indian Religion, vol. I, by Elsie Clews Parsons (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), xii–xiii. 25. Kelly, The Assault on Assimilation, 185. 26. Other products of this era included the landmark studies undertaken by the Brookings Institution, The Office of Indian Affairs by Laurence F. Schmeckebier (1927) and The Problem of Indian Administration by Lewis B. Meriam and associates (1928). While the 1928 Meriam report, The Problem of Indian Administration, is rightly characterized as the first sign of mainstream recognition that government policies of allotment and assimilation had been a dismal failure—in most cases stranding Native Americans with neither economic or cultural resources—the report gave its tacit approval of assimilation into the U.S. mainstream as an ideal, if still flawed in implementation. The Meriam report cited impressive statistics on Indian poverty and cultural disintegration resulting from poorly managed and corrupt Indian services. 27. Graham D. Taylor, The New Deal and American Indian Tribalism: The Administration of the Indian Reorganization Act, 1934–45 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), 30. 28. Collier (Commissioner of Indian Affairs), Annual Report, 1934–1935, 114, quoted in Taylor, The New Deal and American Indian Tribalism, 39. 29. Taylor, The New Deal and American Indian Tribalism, 40. 30. Ibid., 5. 31. Deloria and Lytle, The Nations Within, 171–82. 32. Philip J. Gleason, ‘‘American Identity and Americanization,’’ in The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, edited by Stephan Thernstrom (Cambridge Mass.: Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 1980), 47.

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33. See Deloria, Playing Indian. 34. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigration and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 26. 35. Gleason, ‘‘American Identity and Americanization,’’ 47–48. 36. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 192–93. 37. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1994), 15–16. 38. The Denver Art Museum had been one of the first of the urban fine arts museums to collect Native American art from an art historical rather than ethnographic perspective. Douglas, like Dorothy Dunn and other early collectors and supporters of Native artists, had been trained as an artist. Thus, for Douglas, aesthetic interest was primary. 39. W. Jackson Rushing, ‘‘Marketing the Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern: René d’Harnoncourt and ‘Indian Art of the United States,’ ’’ in The Early Years of Native American Art History, edited by Janet Catherine Berlo (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992), 191. See also Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde, 104–20. 40. The exhibition had a broad impact: it was reviewed in literally hundreds of newspapers and popular periodicals in the fields of art, design, culture, and politics. 41. See Robert Fay Schrader, The Indian Arts and Crafts Board: An Aspect of New Deal Indian Policy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983). 42. Eleanor Roosevelt, foreword to Indian Art of the United States, by Frederic H. Douglas and Rene d’Harnoncourt (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1941), 8. 43. Rushing, ‘‘Marketing the Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,’’ 215. 44. Douglas and d’Harnoncourt, Indian Art of the United States, 9. 45. Ibid., 12. 46. Ibid., 12. 47. Ibid., 10. 48. Ibid., 12. 49. Ibid., 13. 50. Quoted in Rushing, ‘‘Marketing the Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,’’ 214. 51. Donald L. Fixico, Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945–1960 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986), 4–6. 52. Collier, From Every Zenith, 126. 53. Alison R. Bernstein, American Indians and World War Two: Toward a New Era in Indian Affairs (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 68. 54. Edward Linderman, ‘‘Integration of Indians into American Life,’’ Statement, April 1944, aclu Archives, quoted in Bernstein, American Indians and World War Two, 108. 55. Bernstein, American Indians and World War Two, 110. Cf. Vine Deloria Jr., ‘‘The Red and The Black,’’ in Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York: Avon, 1970), 169–95. 56. Yet if congressional conservatives maligned Native cultures for their collectivity and conformity, legions of white hobbyists and a burgeoning counterculture celebrated Indianness as the buckskin anodyne to middle-class, gray-flannel corporate identity. Indianness was thus an ambivalent category that could still serve even contradictory agendas. See Tom Engelhardt, The

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End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York: Basic Books, 1995); and Deloria, Playing Indian. 57. An important precursor to Termination was the Indian Claims Commission. Established on August 13, 1946, as an independent agency by an act of Congress, the commission was to resolve all outstanding claims by Native Americans against the federal government. The commission heard and awarded monetary damages to any tribe, band, or other identifiable group of American Indians residing in the United States. Compensation was rendered for lands ceded under treaty and for lands wrongly taken, among other reasons. With all outstanding claims settled, the authors of the act believed, Native Americans would finally be prepared for integration into the national mainstream. The commission was abolished effective September 30, 1978, by an act of October 8, 1976 (60 Stat. 1049, 1946; 90 Stat. 1990). 58. Quoted in Bernstein, American Indians and World War Two, 105. 59. Fixico, Termination and Relocation, 112. But as Fixico notes, in forcing tribes to develop relationships with state governments, pl 280 introduced a new set of administrative and legal burdens (133). 60. Fixico, Termination and Relocation, 98. 61. Ibid., xi–xii. 62. Ibid., 175, 181. 63. Congressional Record, Washington, D.C., 29 July 1953, p. 10294, quoted in Joy L. Gritton, The Institute of American Indian Arts: Modernism and U.S. Indian Policy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 70. 64. Wesley D’Ewart, ‘‘Letters,’’ Harper’s Magazine 212.1272 (1956): 4–10, quoted in Gritton, The Institute of American Indian Arts, 76. 65. Fixico, Termination and Relocation, 77. 66. On the background to the American Indian Movement, see Vine Deloria Jr., Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An American Indian Declaration of Independence (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974); and Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The American Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: New Press, 1996). 67. Donald L. Fixico, foreword to American Indians and the Urban Experience, edited by Susan Lobo and Kurt Peters (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altamira Press, 2001), x. 68. Fixico, Termination and Relocation, 158. 69. Ibid., 139. 70. Ibid., 138, 142, 148. 71. ‘‘Emmons Claims Indian Relocation Big Success,’’ Republic (Phoenix), February 29, 1960, quoted in Fixico, Termination and Relocation, 155. 72. Fixico, Termination and Relocation, 139, 156. See also Deloria and Clifford, ‘‘The Barren Years,’’ in The Nations Within, 183–99. 73. R. C. Gorman, quoted in Lloyd E. Oxendine, ‘‘Twenty-three Contemporary Indian Artists,’’ Art in America 60.4 (July-August, 1972): 58. 74. Howe’s understanding of the relationship between modernist expression and traditional culture is discussed in chapter 6.

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2. THE CULTURE BROKERS 1. Quoted in Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons, Isleta Paintings, edited by Esther Schiff Goldfrank (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1962), 1. 2. Quoted in Byron Harvey and James Bear [Jimmy Byrnes], ‘‘Laguna and Acoma Beliefs in the Paintings of James Bear’’ (1976), 3; Byron Harvey III Collection, Indian Arts Resource Center, School of American Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico (hereafter cited as Byron Harvey III Collection, Santa Fe), ac II:3. 3. Moreover, in the unbounded space of the modern Southwest, on the frontiers of European and American political and industrial expansion, relationships between border crossers were defined by fundamental inequalities of power. In her study of travel writing and European imperialism, Mary Louise Pratt employs the term ‘‘borderlands’’ to describe ‘‘the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’’ (Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation [London: Routledge, 1992], 6). See also Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possession: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 4. Margaret Connell Szasz, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker, edited by Margaret Connell Szasz (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 6. For additional perspectives on the role of the culture broker and the process of accommodation, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Brian C. Hosmer, ‘‘Reflections on Indian Cultural ‘Brokers’: Reginald Oshkosh, Mitchell Oshkeneniew, and the Politics of Menominee Lumbering,’’ Ethnohistory 44.3 (summer 1997): 493–509. A perspective on modern culture brokers is offered by the historian Frederick E. Hoxie, who examines the early-twentieth-century generation of Native Americans. Known as the ‘‘boarding school generation,’’ many were graduates of the federal boarding schools, and many also served as political leaders in the burgeoning pan-Indian political movements. The group included a number of college graduates, some of whom held advanced degrees in anthropology, law, or medicine. Educated and fluent in English, their experiences in the Euro-American mainstream gave them the ability to translate between cultures and to serve as intermediaries between Indian and white societies. They employed these skills to protect and promote Native American cultures and values in a changed world. As Hoxie writes: ‘‘Positioned as they were, between a remembered world of relative freedom and the grim realities of industrial society, [they] attempted to define ways in which their traditions might be valued in a new setting. They believed they could never flee from white society nor contemplate an alternative world peopled only by Indians. For [Native Americans of this generation], the future depended on their ability to define and protect areas in American cultural and political life where the ‘ancient way’ might somehow survive. Their efforts in the years between 1900 and 1930, which engaged them in fields as various as literature, anthropology, art, religion, and politics, were Native American journeys of discovery, journeys devoted to the search for a new home in a captured land’’ (Hoxie, ‘‘Exploring a Cultural Borderland: Native American Journeys of Discovery in the Early Twentieth Century,’’ Journal of American History 79.3 [December 1992]: 969–70).

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5. J. J. Brody, Pueblo Indian Painting: Tradition and Modernism in New Mexico, 1900–1930 (Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research, 1997), 15. 6. Young, presumably a non-Native resident of Isleta, has not been identified. 7. Quoted in Parsons, Isleta Paintings, 1. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. See also Esther Schiff Goldfrank, The Artist of ‘‘Isleta Painting’’ in Pueblo Society (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1967), 4–5. The complete set of drawings and correspondence are collected with Parsons’s papers at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. Interestingly, the transcriptions in the works of both Parsons and Goldfrank edit Lente’s language to more closely approximate standard English. For purposes of clarity, I use Goldfrank’s transcriptions. 10. Goldfrank, The Artist of ‘‘Isleta Painting,’’ 5. 11. Parsons to Lente, May 17, 1936, in Goldfrank, The Artist of ‘‘Isleta Painting,’’ 5. 12. Goldfrank revealed Lente’s identity in 1967, after the artist had died. 13. Paintings from Isleta were rare. There were apparently no Isleta students in Dunn’s studio program at the Santa Fe Indian School, and none are listed in Bernstein and Rushing’s catalogue of the Dorothy Dunn collection at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology, Museum of New Mexico. See Bruce Bernstein and W. Jackson Rushing III, Modern by Tradition: Native American Painting in the Studio Style (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1995). 14. Lente to Parsons, August 20, 1936, in Goldfrank, The Artist of ‘‘Isleta Painting,’’ 13. 15. Parsons, Isleta Paintings, 9, 12. 16. Ibid., 3. 17. Dozier quoted in Harvey and Bear, ‘‘Laguna and Acoma Beliefs in the Paintings of James Bear,’’ 3. 18. Harvey, ‘‘A Further Commentary to Isleta Paintings’’ (1965), 3, Byron Harvey III Collection, Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. 19. Harvey and Bear, ‘‘Laguna and Acoma Beliefs in the Paintings of James Bear,’’ 3. 20. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 58. Modernity, as it has been theorized by Western thinkers, emphasizes a single moment of rupture, which, as Appadurai writes, ‘‘creates a dramatic and unprecedented break between past and present . . . between tradition and modernity and typologized as the difference between ostensibly traditional and modern societies’’ (3). However, Appadurai argues that modernity is not teleological; it does not imply that modernization and globalization will produce a convergence or homogeneity on a global scale. It is not, as Appadurai writes, ‘‘a recipe for how modernization will universally yield rationality, punctuality, democracy, the free market, and higher gross national product. . . . [It] is not any large-scale project of social engineering (whether organized by states, international agencies, or technocratic elites) but is the everyday cultural practice through which the work of the imagination is transformed’’ (9). See also Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997). 21. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Penguin, 1988), 15. 22. For biographical information on Parsons, see Desley Deacon, Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

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23. Goldfrank, The Artist of ‘‘Isleta Painting,’’ 5. 24. Edward Holland Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962), 176, quoted in Kurt M. Peters, ‘‘Watering the Flower: Laguna Pueblo and the Santa Fe Railroad, 1880–1943,’’ in eds., Native Americans and Wage Labor: Ethnohistorical Perspectives, edited by Alice Littlefield and Martha C. Knack (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 178, n. 1. Peters further notes that the Pueblo of Laguna had an oral agreement with the atsf Railway to hire as many men as wanted to work in exchange for right-of-way through tribal lands. 25. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest, 176. 26. Peter Hare, A Woman’s Quest for Science: Portrait of Anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1985), 143–47; quoted in Ramón Gutiérrez, introduction to Elsie Clews Parsons, Pueblo Indian Religion, vol. 2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), viii. 27. Parsons, Isleta Paintings, 2. 28. Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons, Isleta, New Mexico (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1932), 206–7. 29. Gutiérrez, introduction to Elsie Clews Parsons, Pueblo Indian Religion, x–xi. 30. Deacon, Elsie Clews Parsons, 369. 31. Parsons, Pueblo Indian Journal (Menasha, Wisc.: American Anthropological Association, 1925); Deacon, Elsie Clews Parsons, 241, 324. 32. Gutiérrez, introduction to Elsie Clews Parsons, Pueblo Indian Religion, x–xi. Deacon describes Parsons as an ‘‘outsider in her own society and an even greater outsider among the Pueblo Indians’’ (Deacon, ‘‘The Republic of the Spirit: Fieldwork in Elsie Clews Parsons’s Turn to Anthropology,’’ Frontiers 12.3 [1992], quoted in Gutiérrez, vii). 33. Parsons had failed in an earlier effort in Isleta, and in 1924 she assigned her student Esther Schiff Goldfrank to ‘‘crack’’ Isleta in one month (See Goldfrank, preface to Parsons, Isleta Paintings, ix; and Goldfrank, The Artist of ‘‘Isleta Painting,’’ 4. Parsons’s 1932 monograph was largely completed as a result of interviews conducted with one informant contacted by Goldfrank during her one-month stay. 34. Strong writes, ‘‘Parsons herself wrote in letters of having ‘kidnapped’ an Isleta informant and ‘cleaned out’ a woman from San Juan, and upon another occasion called herself ‘the most ruthless of detectives’ ’’ (Strong, ‘‘Introduction,’’ xi). 35. Ibid., xi–xii. 36. Ibid., x–xi. 37. Parsons, Isleta, New Mexico, 206–7. 38. Gutiérrez, introduction to Elsie Clews Parsons, Pueblo Indian Religion, ix–x. Gutiérrez reports that Pueblo Indian Religion is still controversial. Copies are still kept under lock and key at some libraries. Elsewhere copies were destroyed. ‘‘Destroying copies of Pueblo Indian Religion, thus denying ‘outsiders’ access to ‘insider’ information, was deemed by some a tactic for the preservation of culture’’ (v). Nevertheless, as has the work of H. R. Voth at Hopi, Parsons’s books have become a resource for later generations. 39. Lente to bae, May 1, 1936, in Parsons, Isleta Paintings, 1. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid.; Goldfrank, The Artist of ‘‘Isleta Painting,’’ 5.

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42. Quoted in Parsons, Isleta Paintings, 2. While acknowledging that the pictures would be published, Lente hoped that he would be dead by the time the pictures were seen by a wide audience (Letter to Parsons, March 18, 1938, in Goldfrank The Artist of ‘‘Isleta Painting,’’ 14). 43. Quoted in Parsons, Isleta Painting, 2. 44. Parsons, ed., American Indian Life: By Several of Its Students (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1922), quoted in Deacon, Elsie Clews Parsons, 237. 45. Parsons, Isleta Painting, 3. 46. Lente to Parsons, March 29, 1939, in Goldfrank, The Artist of ‘‘Isleta Painting,’’ 14. 47. Lente to Parsons, October 13, 1939, in ibid. 48. Lente to Parsons, January 10, 1937, in ibid., 13. 49. Lente to Parsons, January 28, 1937, in ibid. 50. Lente to Parsons, April 6, 1937, in ibid. 51. Lente to Parsons, March 10, 1939, in ibid., 14. 52. Parsons, Isleta Painting, 2. 53. Lente to Parsons, March 29, 1939, in Goldfrank, The Artist of ‘‘Isleta Painting,’’ 14. On another occasion Lente wrote, ‘‘You are getting more real stuff than Mr. [Charles] Lummis did because he just learned from one old man Patricio’’ (Lente to Parsons, June 20, 1939, in Goldfrank, The Artist of ‘‘Isleta Painting,’’ 14). 54. Harvey, ‘‘A Further Commentary to Isleta Paintings,’’ 3. 55. Harvey and Bear, ‘‘Laguna and Acoma Beliefs in the Paintings of James Bear,’’ 3. 56. Ibid. 57. Lente wrote to Parsons, ‘‘You . . . know it anyway’’ (quoted in Parsons Isleta Painting, 2). 58. Letter to Parsons, August 20, 1936, in Goldfrank, The Artist of ‘‘Isleta Painting,’’ 13. 59. Harvey, ‘‘A Further Commentary to Isleta Paintings,’’ 3. 60. Byron Schermerhorn Harvey III was born in 1932 in Chicago, Illinois. He received a ba from the University of Chicago in 1954, and an ma in anthropology from the University of New Mexico in 1960. On the history of the Fred Harvey Company, see Marta Weigle and Barbara Babcock, eds., The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway (Phoenix, Ariz.: Heard Museum, 1996); and Kathleen L. Howard and Diana F. Purdue, Inventing the Southwest: The Fred Harvey Company and Native American Art (Flagstaff, Ariz.: Northland Publishing Company, 1996). 61. Byrnes’s description quoted in Harvey and Bear, ‘‘Laguna and Acoma Beliefs in the Paintings of James Bear,’’ 21. The descriptions of the paintings in Harvey’s 1976 manuscript were collected during interviews with Byrnes over the course of eight years. 62. Harvey and Bear, ‘‘Laguna and Acoma Beliefs in the Paintings of James Bear,’’ 4. 63. Ibid., 20. 64. Harvey, letter to the author, September 25, 2001. 65. Harvey and Bear, ‘‘Laguna and Acoma Beliefs in the Paintings of James Bear,’’ 67. 66. Ibid., 73. 67. Byrnes to Harvey, July 11, 1960, Byron Harvey III Collection, Santa Fe, ac 11:1. 68. Harvey and Bear, ‘‘Laguna and Acoma Beliefs in the Paintings of James Bear,’’ 5. 69. Harvey to Byrnes, July 13, 1960, Byron Harvey III Collection, Santa Fe, ac 11:1. Harvey’s relationship with Byrnes is typical of the support he showed a number of young Indian artists

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throughout his career. Harvey’s working relationship with Byrnes anticipated his later collaboration with five Hopi artists who produced a series of paintings collected by the Heye Foundation Museum of the American Indian and published in 1970 as Ritual in Pueblo Art: Hopi Life in Hopi Painting (New York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1970). The five Hopi artists were Leroy Kewanyama, Marshall Lomakema, Narron Lomayaktewa, Arlo Nuvayouma, and Melvin Nuvayouma. 70. Harvey and Bear, ‘‘Laguna and Acoma Beliefs in the Paintings of James Bear,’’ 20. 71. Ibid, 55. 72. Byrnes to Harvey, July 11, 1960, Byron Harvey III Collection, Santa Fe, ac 11:1. 73. Byrnes, undated notes for letter from jail, Byron Harvey III Collection, Santa Fe, ac 11:1. 74. Lente’s relationship to Parsons bears some resemblance to the contemporaneous collaboration between Don Talayesva, a Hopi Indian from Oraibi, Arizona, and Leo W. Simmons, a Yale sociologist. For his work on the Cross-Cultural Survey at the Institute of Human Relations Simmons engaged Talayesva from 1938 to 1940 as a Hopi informant (for thirty-five cents per hour). Later he hired Talayesva to produce a diary (compensated at seven cents per page), which was then edited and published in 1942 as a ‘‘life history’’ titled Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian. This volume became a well-known example of the ‘‘culture and personality’’ school of anthropology, which sought to understand the formation of personal and social identity in relationship to the surrounding environment or, as Simmons wrote, to surmise ‘‘what manner of man the two cultures made of [Talayesva] and what we can learn from his experiences.’’ Talayesva, who might be understood as a member of Hoxie’s ‘‘boarding school generation,’’ also worked as an informant for other academics, including Leslie A. White, Fred Eggan, Edward Kennard, amd Mischa Titiev. Although his work as an informant generated a degree of tension between Talayesva and his community, he remained an integrated member of his village. As he grappled with issues of cultural property and secrecy in two cultures, Talayesva’s autobiography is illuminating when placed in comparison to the life of Lente, as Talayesva voices so much of what Lente did not or was not capable of voicing. See Simmons’s introduction to Don C. (Chuka) Talayesva, Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian, edited by Leo W. Simmons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942), 1. For a discussion of Sun Chief in terms of the genre of Native American autobiography, see H. David Brunble III, ‘‘Social Scientists and Indian Autobiographers: Sun Chief and Gregorio’s ‘Life Story,’ ’’ Journal of American Studies 20 (1986): 273–90. 75. Parsons, Isleta, New Mexico, 207. 76. Prominent movie-house architect Carl Boller’s design for the theater was based on sketches made during a research trip to the Pueblos of Acoma, Isleta, and the Navajo Nation. See ‘‘The KiMo Theater: Brief History,’’ City of Albuquerque, http://www.cabq.gov/kimo/. 77. Parsons, Isleta, New Mexico, 207. 78. This outcome was largely the result of the Navajo’s animosity toward Collier and the Department of the Interior because of a controversial federal stock reduction plan that had hurt many Navajo ranchers when it was imposed in 1933. 79. Theodore H. Haas, Ten Years of Tribal Government under I.R.A. (Washington, D.C.: United States Indian Service, 1947), 3. See Graham D. Taylor, The New Deal and American Indian Tribalism: The Administration of the Indian Reorganization Act, 1934–1935 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), 36.

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80. See Taylor, The New Deal and American Indian Tribalism, 40–47. 81. Ibid., 36. 82. See Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Stephen Cornell, The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford Lytle, The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty (New York: Pantheon, 1984); Kenneth R. Philp, John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920–1954 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977); and Wilcomb Washburn, ‘‘A Fifty-Year Perspective on the Indian Organization Act,’’ American Anthropologist 86.2 (June 1984): 279–89. 83. Taylor, The New Deal and American Indian Tribalism, 47. 84. Ibid., 3. 85. Harvey and Bear, ‘‘Laguna and Acoma Beliefs in the Paintings of James Bear,’’ 2. 86. Ibid., 2–3. 87. Ibid., 3. 88. As quoted in Peter Feibelman, ‘‘The Enduring Life of the Pueblo Indians,’’ Holiday (August 1963): 110; quoted in ibid., 3. 89. Harvey and Bear, ‘‘Laguna and Acoma Beliefs in the Paintings of James Bear,’’ 3. 90. Ibid., 3. 91. Byrnes to Harvey, July 11, 1960, Byron Harvey III Collection, Santa Fe, ac 11:1. 92. Ibid. 93. Harvey to Byrnes, July 13, 1960, Byron Harvey III Collection, Santa Fe, ac 11:1. 94. Ibid. 95. Quoted in Harvey and Bear, ‘‘Laguna and Acoma Beliefs in the Paintings of James Bear,’’ 6. 96. Byrnes to Harvey, July 11, 1960, Byron Harvey III Collection, Santa Fe, ac 11:1. 97. Harvey noted that the public viewing of Byrnes’s paintings by Pueblos, especially the noninitiated, did cause some controversy: ‘‘In contrast to Jimmie’s pride in his paintings (which his mother has also seen) he always has us put away any Keresan dolls we might have when his relatives come to visit’’ (Harvey, ‘‘Laguna-Acoma Watercolors,’’ undated manuscript, Byron Harvey III Collection, Santa Fe, ac 11. Harvey noted that while some Pueblos objected to the display of Byrnes’s paintings, at least one woman saw them as protective figures, or ‘‘house protectors’’ (Harvey and Bear, ‘‘Laguna and Acoma Beliefs in the Paintings of James Bear,’’ 20). 98. James Clifford, ‘‘Of Other Peoples: Beyond the ‘Salvage’ Paradigm,’’ in Discussions in Contemporary Culture, vol. 1, edited by Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 121. 99. Quoted (in 1956?) in Harvey and Bear, ‘‘Laguna and Acoma Beliefs in the Paintings of James Bear,’’ 14. 100. Quoted in ibid. 101. Harvey and Bear, ‘‘Laguna and Acoma Beliefs in the Paintings of James Bear,’’ 20. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid. 104. Byrnes to Harvey, January 10, 1968, Byron Harvey III Collection, Santa Fe, ac 11:1. 105. On the Koshares and the phenomenon of ‘‘hobby Indians’’ in cold war America, see Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 128–53. 106. The manuscript was intended for publication in the Heye Foundation Museum of the American Indian series. Apparently, series editor Frederick J. Dockstader wanted to publish the paint-

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ings with only brief descriptions, as done in Ritual in Pueblo Art. When this did not work out, another publisher was never found.

3. ‘‘OUR INTER-AMERICAN CONSCIOUSNESS’’ I would especially like to thank Greg Forter and Mark White for their careful reading of this chapter. 1. Barnett Newman, ‘‘Pre-Columbian Stone Sculpture’’ (1994), in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, edited by John P. O’Neill (New York: Knopf, 1990), 61–62. 2. Newman, ‘‘Northwest Coast Indian Painting’’ (1946), 105–6, quoted in Gerald R. McMaster, ‘‘Towards an Aboriginal Art History,’’ in Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories, edited by W. Jackson Rushing III (New York: Routledge, 1999), 82. The Canadian Gerald McMaster (Plains Cree artist, curator, and theorist, b. 1953) exemplifies the contemporary Native artistic reclamation of an autonomous Native subjectivity that articulates themes of cultural sovereignty. As Houle’s successor as curator of Contemporary Native American Art at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull, Quebec, McMaster was influential in the articulation of a critical dialogue around contemporary Native American arts. In 1992, McMaster shared curatorial duties with Lee-Ann Martin for Indigena: Contemporary Native Perspectives at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, one of three Native-organized exhibitions to address the legacy of the quincentenary of the arrival of Columbus in the Americas. In 1995, McMaster curated an exhibit of the Plains Cree artist Edward Poitras (b. 1953), which represented Canada at the Venice Biennale. In 1998, McMaster curated the show Reservation X at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Most recently he has served as deputy assistant director for cultural resources for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, where he supervises the curatorial, repatriation, and archival departments. 3. Robert Houle and Charlotte Townsend-Gault, ‘‘The Spiritual Legacy of the Ancient Ones,’’ in Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1992), 46. Houle is an artist as well as an important curator and critic of Native American art. In the late 1970s, he was the first curator of Contemporary American Indian Art at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. 4. McMaster, ‘‘Towards an Aboriginal Art History,’’ 82. 5. Moreover, the art historian David Craven links Newman’s anarchism and opposition to the Eurocentrism and formalism of arch-modernist critics such as Clement Greenberg to a postwar critique of European colonialism. See Craven, ‘‘Abstract Expressionism and Third World Art: A Post-Colonial Approach to ‘American’ Art,’’ Oxford Art Journal 14.1 (1991): 44–66; ‘‘Clement Greenberg and the ‘Triumph’ of Western Art,’’ Third Text 25 (winter 1993/1994): 3–9; and Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 6. Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde, xi. 7. To be sure, as historian Philip Deloria demonstrates, Americans have historically turned to the figure of the Indian as a rhetorical model for national self-fashioning (see Deloria, Playing Indian [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998]). 8. Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Painting and Subjectivity in

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the 1940s (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993). The earliest synthesis of Primitivism as a theme within modernism was Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Painting (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938). 9. Kirk Varnedoe, ‘‘Abstract Expressionism,’’ in ‘‘Primitivism’’ in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, edited by William Rubin, vol. 2 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 615. 10. See Ann Gibson, ‘‘Painting Outside the Paradigm: Indian Space,’’ Arts Magazine 57.6 (February 1983): 98–104; and Sandra Kraskin and Barbara Hollister, The Indian Space Painters: Native American Sources for American Abstract Art (New York: Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, City University of New York, 1991). 11. Lisa Bloom, ‘‘Ghosts of Ethnicity: Rethinking Art Discourses of the 1940s and 1980s,’’ Socialist Review 24.1–2 (1995): 133. On Abstract Expressionism’s relationship to U.S. business and foreign policy interests, see Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 12. Rushing, in Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde (121), states that the origin of the term ‘‘Mythmakers’’ is from Mark Rothko’s introduction to the exhibition catalogue Clyfford Still (New York: Art of This Century Gallery, 1946). See also Leja, ‘‘The Mythmakers and the Primitive,’’ in Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 49–119. 13. Newman, ‘‘Pre-Columbian Stone Sculpture,’’ 62. 14. For biographical information on Newman, see Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971); Harold Rosenberg, Barnett Newman, 1905–1970 (New York: Abrams, 1978); Richard Schiff, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, edited by John P. O’Neill (New York: Knopf, 1990), xii–xxviii; Jeremy Strick, The Sublime Is Now: The Early Work of Barnett Newman: Paintings and Drawings, 1944–1949 (New York: Pace Wildenstein, 1994); and Ann Temkin, ed., Barnett Newman (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002). 15. Hess, Barnett Newman, 20. 16. Ibid., 21. 17. Newman, ‘‘The True Revolution Is Anarchist!’’ foreword to Memoirs of a Revolutionist by Peter Kropotkin (New York: Horizon Press, 1968), 44–52. 18. Newman and Borodulin, ‘‘Our Cultural Program’’ (1933), in Selected Writings and Interviews, 7; see also Hess, Barnett Newman, 24–25. 19. Newman, ‘‘On the Need for Political Action by Men of Culture’’ (1933), in Selected Writings and Interviews, 8. 20. Newman’s anarchist position resonates with that of the anti-Stalinist/Surrealist Left in the 1930s. See André Breton, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky, ‘‘Towards a Free and Revolutionary Art’’ (1938), which includes the statement, ‘‘No authority, no dictation, not the least trace of orders from above!’’ and ‘‘Our aims: the independence of art—for the revolution. The revolution for the complete liberation of art!’’ (The essay by Breton, Rivera, and Trotsky is reprinted in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas [Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992], 526–590.

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21. It is not clear whether Newman stopped painting in 1939 or 1940. He did not begin painting again until 1944, when he destroyed all of his previous work (see Hess, Barnett Newman 33; and Strick, The Sublime Is Now, 7). 22. Alfred M. Frankfurter, ‘‘The Editors Review: Art and the War,’’ Art News 38.1 (October 7, 1939): 9. 23. Ibid. Frankfurter’s clumsy metaphor indicates the degree to which, in the aftermath of the nonaggression pact of fall 1939, fascism and communism were conflated under the label ‘‘totalitarianism.’’ 24. Indeed, in Frankfurter’s essay the ideology of anti-Semitism vanishes. Of course this could be due to the relatively early date of Frankfurter’s writing. A useful comparison is Keith Moxey’s study of the German-Jewish art historian Erwin Panofsky, who even in the face of rising German anti-Semitism and living in exile in the United States still held up German culture as the embodiment of Enlightenment reason, even if the German state was temporarily besieged by irrationality. See Keith Moxey, ‘‘Panofsky’s Melancholia,’’ in The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 65–78. 25. Harold Rosenberg, ‘‘The Fall of Paris’’ (1940), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, 541–45. 26. Indeed, Newman never cited Nazi anti-Semitism directly, but by 1942 he knew that his parents’ town in Poland had been liquidated (see Ann Temkin, ‘‘Barnett Newman on Exhibition,’’ in Temkin, ed., Barnett Newman, 27). 27. Hess, Barnett Newman, 37. 28. Newman, ‘‘What about Isolationist Art?’’ (1942), in Selected Writings and Interviews, 23. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 27. 31. Ibid., 21, 23. 32. Ibid., 22. 33. Ibid., 23–24. 34. Ibid., 24. 35. Ibid., 25. 36. Ibid., 28. 37. Clement Greenberg, ‘‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’’ (1939), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, 539. 38. Newman, ‘‘What about Isolationist Art?’’ 27. 39. Newman, ‘‘New York’’ (1943), in Selected Writings and Interviews, 31. 40. Ibid. 41. H. W. Janson, ‘‘Benton and Wood: Champions of Regionalism,’’ Magazine of Art 39.5 (May 1946): 184–86, 198–200, quoted in Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 363. Janson left Germany in 1935 in protest of Nazi cultural policies and in solidarity with Jewish artists and his teachers, including Erwin Panofsky. After ‘‘The Horst Wessel Song’’ became the marching anthem of the Nazis, he Anglicized his name from Horst to Peter. 42. Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting (New York: Icon, 1970). Indeed, it is striking to note the degree to which the first-generation and second-generation immigrant and ethnic

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artists of the New York school were able to successfully claim the mantle of ‘‘American’’ art in the postwar era. 43. See Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2001). 44. David Craven, ‘‘Abstract Expressionism and Third World Art: A Post-Colonial Approach to ‘American’ Art,’’ Oxford Art Journal 14.1 (1991): 46. 45. Ibid. 46. Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde, 121. 47. Rockefeller’s inter-American interests included a hotel business and Creole Petroleum, a subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey, in Venezuela. See Eva Cockcroft, ‘‘Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War,’’ Artforum 12.10 (June 1974): 39–41; reprinted in Frascina, Pollock and After, 127. 48. Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 85. 49. Ibid., 86. 50. Constantino Malinovsky, ‘‘Pre-Columbian Art in Peru and Its Significance for the Americas,’’ Bulletin of the Pan American Union 75.12 (December 1941): 701. 51. Newman, ‘‘Pre-Columbian Stone Sculpture,’’ 64. Here, I am quoting the second version of this essay, which Newman revised for publication in La Revista Belga. 52. Newman to Harry L. Schapiro (amnh), August 1, 1944. ‘‘Barnett Newman/Betty Parsons Correspondence with the American Museum of Natural History, Department of Anthropology,’’ Reel no. 4588. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 53. Newman, ‘‘Pre-Columbian Stone Sculpture,’’ 64. 54. Ibid. 55. André Malraux, The Voices of Silence, translated by Stuart Gilbert (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 13, quoted in Hal Foster, ‘‘The Archive without Museums,’’ October 77 (summer 1996): 100. Malraux’s original, Le museé inimaginable, was dated 1935–1951. 56. Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde, 121. 57. Newman, ‘‘Pre-Columbian Stone Sculpture,’’ 61–62. 58. Ibid., 63. 59. Newman to Harry L. Shapiro, August 1, 1944. ‘‘Barnett Newman/Betty Parsons Correspondence with the American Museum of Natural History, Department of Anthropology,’’ Reel no. 4588, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 60. Newman to Shapiro, April 20, 1944, in ibid. 61. Newman to Shapiro, May 21, 1944, in ibid. Museum curator Harry L. Shapiro responded that indeed Newman’s aestheticized installation of amnh’s Pre-Columbian holdings had been a ‘‘highly successful experiment’’ (Shapiro to Newman, May 22, 1944). Shapiro’s response apparently encouraged Newman in his ambitions to redefine the primitive arts within the formalist framework of modernist aesthetics; he wrote back to Shapiro: ‘‘Why cannot [amnh] do the converse of the Pre-Columbian exhibition by putting on exhibits of outstanding examples of modern art? Why cannot the Museum augment these shows with exhibitions of its own art objects removed from their ethnological background in true art-gallery style? In other words, why cannot the Museum put itself on the itinerary of all those who go to art shows?’’ (Newman to Shapiro, August 1, 1944).

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62. Pal Kelemen, ‘‘America’s Middle Ages Seen Anew,’’ Art News 43.3 (March 15, 1944): 9. 63. Newman, ‘‘Northwest Coast Indian Painting’’ (1946), in Selected Writings and Interviews, 105–6. 64. Ibid. 65. Barnett Newman to Harry Schapiro, September 23, 1946, Barnett Newman Foundation archives, quoted in Temkin, Barnett Newman, 29. 66. Margaret Breuning, ‘‘Indian Design,’’ Art Digest 21.2 (October 15, 1946): 15. 67. Newman, ‘‘Northwest Coast Indian Painting,’’ 106. 68. Ibid., 106–7. 69. Ibid., 107. Tellingly, Newman associated the major works of the Northwest Coast tradition (i.e., those types of objects that he chose to showcase at the Betty Parsons Gallery) with the work of male artists, thus projecting the contemporary cultural politics of gendered creativity back onto the primitive, and thus stamping the modern with the validity of the universal. He wrote, ‘‘Design was a separate function carried on by the women and took the form of geometric, non-objective pattern’’ (106). 70. Newman, ‘‘Pre-Columbian Stone Sculpture,’’ 61. 71. Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman, ‘‘Statement’’ (1943), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, 562–63. 72. Newman, ‘‘The Painting of Tamayo and Gottlieb,’’ originally published as ‘‘La pintura de Tamayo y Gottlieb’’ (1945), in Selected Writings and Interviews, 71–72. 73. Ibid., 72–73. 74. Ibid., 74. 75. Ibid., 72. 76. Ibid., 74–75. 77. Newman, ‘‘The Ideographic Picture’’ (1947), in Selected Writings and Interviews, 108. 78. Ibid. 79. Newman, ‘‘The Sublime Is Now’’ (1948), in Selected Writings and Interviews, 173. 80. Hess, Barnett Newman, 51. 81. Yve-Alain Bois, ‘‘Perceiving Newman’’ (1988), in Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1990), 213. 82. William Rubin, ‘‘Modernist Primitivism,’’ in ‘‘Primitivism’’ in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, edited by William Rubin, vol. 1 (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 10. 83. Harold Rosenberg, ‘‘The American Action Painters’’ (1952), in The Tradition of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 27. See also Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 84. Robert Motherwell, statement in exhibition catalogue, Samuel Kootz Gallery, 1947; quoted in Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting, 93. 85. Rosenberg, ‘‘The American Action Painters’’ (1952), in The Tradition of the New, 25. 86. Newman, ‘‘Ohio, 1949’’ (original draft titled ‘‘Prologue for a New Aesthetic’’), in Selected Writings and Interviews, 174. 87. Thomas McEvilley, ‘‘Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief: 1992), 27. 88. Hal Foster, ‘‘The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art,’’ October 34 (fall 1985): 47.

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89. Steven Leuthold, Indigenous Aesthetics: Native Art, Media, and Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 51. 90. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 36–39.

4. THE IMPORTANCE OF PLACE 1. Morrison, in particular, is still assumed by many writers to be a non-Native artist because of his modernist pedigree. In reviewing the inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of the American Indian in 2004, which included Morrison and Allan Houser, the critic Paul Richard wrote, ‘‘This isn’t really a show about Indianness. It’s a show about 20th-century art.’’ Like generations of critics, Richard implied that the modernity of the artwork on view somehow precluded or erased the identities and histories of the artists (Richard, ‘‘Explorers of the New: Two Modernists Who Are Also Indian,’’ Washington Post (September 19, 2004): r02. 2. The Ojibwe of the Great Lakes region in Minnesota and Ontario are alternately known as Chippewa or Anishinaabe. Throughout this chapter, I use the term Ojibwe, but I retain the term ‘‘Chippewa’’ where it occurs in direct quotations. 3. Kate Morris, ‘‘Picturing Sovereignty: Landscape in Native American Art,’’ in Painters, Patrons, and Identity: Essays in Native American Art to Honor J. J. Brody, edited by Joyce M. Szabo (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 187. 4. Scott Pratt, ‘‘The Given Land: Black Hawk’s Conception of Place,’’ Philosophy and Geography 4.1 (February 2001): 116. See also Steven Leuthold, ‘‘Indigenous Aesthetics of Place,’’ in Indigenous Aesthetics: Native Art, Media, and Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 183–202. 5. Pratt, ‘‘The Given Land,’’ 122. 6. See, for example, Margaret Archuleta and Rennard Strickland, Shared Visions: Native American Painters and Sculptors in the Twentieth Century (New York: New Press, 1991), 90. 7. Patrick DesJarlait and Neva Williams, Patrick DesJarlait: Conversations with a Native American Artist (Minneapolis: Rune Stone Press, 1995). See also Marilee Janzer-White, Beyond Modernism: Anishinaabe Abstraction, Activism, and Traditionalism (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1998), especially chapter 1: ‘‘The Politics of Visibility’’; and Julie Ann Coleman, Rediscovering a Legacy: The Life and Art of Patrick DesJarlait (Masters thesis, University of New Mexico, 2000). 8. The Protestant First Mission at Red Lake was established in 1842 and abandoned in about 1857. The Catholic St. Mary’s Mission was established in 1858. 9. DesJarlait, Patrick DesJarlait, 26–27. 10. Ibid., 11. 11. DesJarlait quoted in Sandra Day, ‘‘Paintings Preserve His Culture, History; New Hope Man Captures Red Lake Reservation in Watercolor,’’ Brooklyn Park Sun (November 12, 1969), 1, Native American Artists Research Center, Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. 12. DesJarlait, Patrick DesJarlait, 29. 13. Ibid., 32; ‘‘With the Civilian Conservation Corps,’’ American Forests (July 1933). 14. DesJarlait quoted in Day, ‘‘Paintings Preserve His Culture, History,’’ 1. 15. DesJarlait, Patrick DesJarlait, 34.

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16. By the 1930s, the curriculum and culture of the Indian schools had started to feel the effects of John Collier’s progressive philosophy of Indian education. As a result, they were beginning to recognize the importance of Indian cultures, and thus were being transformed into institutions that nurtured and reinforced Native identity. See Brenda Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). On the Phoenix Indian School, see Dorothy R. Parker, Phoenix Indian School: The Second Half-Century (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); and Robert A. Trennart, The Phoenix Indian School: Forced Assimilation in Arizona, 1891– 1935 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988). An artist’s statement for DesJarlait’s 1945 exhibition at the San Diego Fine Arts Gallery mentions that DesJarlait received ‘‘six months of training in mural painting under the direction of Olaf [aka Olle] Nordmark’’; DesJarlait likely studied under Nordmark either at the Phoenix Indian School or at Fort Sill in 1942. Nordmark was employed by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs at the U.S. Army base at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he taught fresco mural painting to Native American artists at the Indian Art Center from 1938 to 1940. Students and instructors from the Phoenix Indian School had traveled to Fort Sill to study under Nordmark in 1940. DesJarlait’s artist’s statement is in the San Diego Museum of Art reference library archival file on DesJarlait. See also ‘‘Artists Study Murals under Olle Nordmark,’’ Phoenix Redskin (September 15, 1940): 2; ‘‘Art Department,’’ Phoenix Redskin (April 1, 1942): 3; Wyckoff, Visions and Voices: Native American Painting from the Philbrook Museum of Art (Tulsa, Okla.: Philbrook Museum of Art, 1996), 35–36; and Coleman, Rediscovering a Legacy, 14 n.42. 17. DesJarlait, Patrick DesJarlait, 35. 18. The Phoenix Indian School newspaper published a number of articles urging Indian students to contribute to the war effort. See [Phoenix Indian School Principal] Otis J. Morgan, ‘‘Our Country Needs Trained People,’’ Phoenix Redskin (February 1, 1942); and Coleman, Rediscovering a Legacy, 16. 19. The interrelations between the bia and wra are indeed interesting. Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier imagined relocation camps as models of community self-government. Collier planned to use the labor of the 18,000 detainees to develop a permanent irrigation system on the 20,000 acre parcel of Indian land occupied by the Colorado River War Relocation Center, with plans to use the land after the war to relocate Navajo and Hopi families whose own land had been overgrazed. See Alexander H. Leighton, The Governing of Man: General Principles and Recommendations Based on Experience at a Japanese Relocation Camp (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1945); Paul Bailey, City in the Sun: The Japanese Concentration Camp at Poston, Arizona (Los Angeles: Western Lore Press, 1971); and Richard Nishimoto and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, Inside an American Concentration Camp: Japanese American Resistance at Poston, Arizona (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995). On the art programs at internment camps, see Vincent Tajiri, Ray C. Franchi, and Paul Takeda, Through Innocent Eyes: Writings and Art from the Japanese American Internment (Los Angeles: Keiro Services Press and the Generations Fund, 1990); and Karin M. Higa, The View from Within: Japanese American Art from the Internment Camps, 1942–1945 (Los Angeles: Japanese American National Museum, 1992).

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20. DesJarlait, Patrick DesJarlait, 39. 21. Quoted in Virginia L. Dustin, ‘‘He Paints the Story of His People,’’ Capital Saint Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch Sunday Magazine (March 26, 1972), 6; quoted in Coleman, Rediscovering a Legacy, 21. 22. ‘‘Indian Paints Own People,’’ Tribune-Sun (San Diego) (November 8, 1945). Jeanne Snodgrass King Collection, Native American Artists Research Center, Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. 23. Robert DesJarlait (b. 1946), Patrick Randy DesJarlait (b. 1952), Charmaine DesJarlait (b. 1954), Delmar DesJarlait (b. 1957), and Ronald DesJarlait (b. 1961). 24. DesJarlait, Patrick DesJarlait, 46. 25. Coleman, Rediscovering a Legacy, 48. 26. DesJarlait, Patrick DesJarlait, 23. 27. Coleman, Rediscovering a Legacy, 77. 28. See Pauline Brunette, Naomi Whipple, Robert DesJarlait, and Priscilla Buffalohead, Ojibway Family Life in Minnesota: Twentieth-Century Sketches (Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 1990). 29. Patrick DesJarlait, statement, Native American Artists Research Center, Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. 30. DesJarlait, statement for the Second Philbrook Indian Annual, June 3, 1947, Jeanne Snodgrass King Collection, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 31. Coleman, Rediscovering a Legacy, 25 (especially n.79). 32. During the 1960s, after a long period of working as a commercial artist in the Twin Cities, DesJarlait’s fine art career again developed. In 1961, Red Lake Fishermen (a 1946 painting that DesJarlait altered by adding a later date) won first prize at the Scottsdale, Arizona, Indian Arts Exhibition. Other awards included the Walter Bimson Grand Award, Scottsdale National Indian Arts Exhibition, 1963; Elkus Memorial Award, Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonials, Gallup, New Mexico, 1964; Special Award, Gallery of American Indian Art, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C., 1965; Special Award, Scottsdale National Indian Exhibition, 1968; Mr. and Mrs. Carlos Beuf Silver Cup Award, All American Indian Days Arts Exhibition, Sheridan, Wyoming, 1968; Special Award, Historic Sheridan Inn, 1968; first purchase prize, Philbrook Indian Annual, 1969; showing at the Center for the Arts of Indian America, Washington, D.C., 1969; and First Prize, Minnesota State Fair, Saint Paul, 1969. DesJarlait’s paintings were reproduced as covers of Volunteer, the magazine of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, 1969–1971, and also were included in numerous public and private collections. 33. DesJarlait is quoted in an undated biographical sketch as saying, ‘‘The militants are the symbols of the problem, and the people must wake up to what is happening . . . twenty years ago they were never militant’’ (Native American Artists Research Center, Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona). 34. DesJarlait, Patrick DesJarlait, 49. 35. Rachel Buff, Immigration and the Political Economy of Home: West Indian Brooklyn and American Indian Minneapolis, 1945–1992 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 36. Coleman, Rediscovering a Legacy, 58; DesJarlait, Patrick DesJarlait, 19–20. 37. DesJarlait, Patrick DesJarlait, 35. 38. Robert DesJarlait has suggested that his father was unaware of Picasso and Cubism when he developed his style in the 1940s. However, this seems unlikely as modern styles were well known

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in the United States by the Second World War, and he would likely have encountered modernist abstraction as a student and later when employed by the navy. He later told his artist son Robert: ‘‘Do not be afraid of looking at European Art, you can learn a lot [from it] . . . Find different ways to experiment . . . don’t get stuck!’’ See Coleman, Rediscovering a Legacy, 68–69 n.186, 187, 189. 39. DesJarlait, statement, June 3, 1947, Jeanne Snodgrass King Collection, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 40. DesJarlait, responses written on undated biographical questionnaire, Jeanne Snodgrass King Collection, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 41. See Jamake Highwater, ‘‘Controversy in Native American Art,’’ in The Arts of the North American Indian: Native Traditions in Evolution, edited by Edwin L. Wade (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, 1986), 234; and Carlo Haralson, ed., The Philbrook Museum of Art: A Handbook to the Collections (Tulsa: Philbrook Museum of Art, 1991), 208. 42. DesJarlait to Snodgrass, April 1, 1964, Jeanne Snodgrass King Collection, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 43. Robert DesJarlait, ‘‘Patrick DesJarlait: Art of Tribe and Culture,’’ in Patrick DesJarlait and the Ojibwe Tradition, edited by William Hegeman (St. Paul: Minnesota Museum of American Art, 1995), 10; Coleman, Rediscovering a Legacy, 72. 44. Quoted in Gladys Haug, ‘‘Indian Arts and Artists,’’ undated essay, Native American Artists Research Center, Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. 45. DesJarlait to Snodgrass, April 1, 1964, Jeanne Snodgrass King Collection, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 46. DesJarlait, Patrick DesJarlait, 33. 47. Coleman, Rediscovering a Legacy, 84–85. 48. DesJarlait, statement to the Fine Arts Gallery, June 1945, Library Collection, Fine Arts Society of San Diego, San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, California; quoted in Coleman, Rediscovering a Legacy, 86. 49. DesJarlait, quoted in Coleman, Rediscovering a Legacy, 86. 50. DesJarlait, statement accompanying Making Wild Rice for the 1947 Philbrook Indian Annual, Jeanne Snodgrass King Collection, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 51. Quoted in Dustin, ‘‘He Paints the Story of His People,’’ 6. 52. DesJarlait, letter to Jeanne Snodgrass, June 30, 1959, Jeanne Snodgrass King Collection, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 53. George Morrison, Turning the Feather Around: My Life in Art, as told to Margot Fortunato Galt (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1998), 21. See also Truman Lowe, ed., Native Modernism: The Art of George Morrison and Allan Houser (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of the American Indian, 2004). Gerald Vizenor’s essay on Morrison in Lowe’s volume draws primarily from Morrison’s autobiography. 54. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 30–31. Further citations of this work are indicated by page number in the text. 55. Morrison quoted in This Song Remembers: Self-Portraits of Native Americans in the Arts, edited by Jane B. Katz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980), 55–56.

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56. Moreover, this was a description that Morrison used to associate his art with that of the Abstract Expressionists. ‘‘Endless space,’’ he wrote, ‘‘was a term used by many Abstract Expressionists to define how their paintings seemed to go beyond the edges of the canvas’’ (118). 57. Morrison quoted in Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 64. 58. David W. Penney, ‘‘George Morrison,’’ in Contemporary Masters: The Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, vol. 1 (Indianapolis: Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, 1999), 22. 59. Ibid., 22. 60. Penney, ‘‘George Morrison,’’ 20. 61. Ibid., 20. 62. Jamake Highwater, The Sweet Grass Lives On: Fifty Contemporary North American Indian Artists (New York: Lippincott and Crowell Co., 1980). 63. Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Cognitive Mapping,’’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 349–50. 64. David Noble, Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 129. 65. Ibid., 171. Noble is discussing the ideology of American exceptionalism, which he argues is based on the conviction that American civilization was founded in a fundamental break with the corrupt Old World of Europe—defined by feudalism and class stratification, along with imperialism and war, against which American civilization was seen as the product of an innocent encounter with the sacred landscape, and that American culture was created by nature, and needed to be kept isolated from the corrupting influence of the Old World. As Benedict Anderson demonstrates, however, this origin myth was constructed by each modern nation, the bourgeois elites of which saw themselves as isolated in a state of nature. Thus, rather than being truly exceptional, the elites of Western Europe and North America actually shared a similar structure and class fantasy. See Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). 66. Quoted in Noble, Death of a Nation, 160. 67. Letter from Pollock to Louis Bounce, June 2, 1946; quoted in Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 391; also quoted in Noble, Death of a Nation, 164. 68. Charlotte Townsend-Gault, ‘‘Rebecca Belmore,’’ in Diana Nemiroff, Robert Houle, and Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1992), 114–18. 69. Quoted in Townsend-Gault, ‘‘Kinds of Knowing,’’ in ibid., 97.

5. BECOMING INDIAN 1. While a number of factors relating to the allotment process would account for an individual’s absence from the 1906 rolls (e.g., in many cases the most traditional members of the tribal community may have refused to be included on the rolls that were an instrument of Indian dispossession), Kimball’s father was not such a case. My source for this information is a December 4,

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1999, phone interview with Yeffe Kimball’s sister, Mary Watson of Ada, Oklahoma. Subsequent references to Kimball’s family history are drawn from this interview. 2. Anne M. Wagner, ‘‘Lee Krasner as L. K.,’’ Representations n. 25 (winter 1989): 42–56. See also Griselda Pollock, ‘‘Killing Men and Dying Women: A Woman’s Touch in the Cold Zone of American Painting in the 1950s,’’ in Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed, edited by Griselda Pollock and Fred Orton (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 219–94; and Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997). 3. Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 4. Many Primitivists also saw their work as a challenge to European colonialism. See Patricia Leighten, ‘‘The White Peril and L’art negre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anti-Colonialism,’’ Art Bulletin 72.4 (December 1990): 609–30. 5. W. Jackson Rushing III, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), xi. 6. Jackson Pollock, ‘‘Answers to a Questionnaire’’ (1944), in Art in Theory, 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 561. 7. See Donald B. Smith, ‘‘From Sylvester Long to Buffalo Child Long Lance,’’ in Being and Becoming Indian: Biographical Studies of North American Frontiers, edited by James A. Clifton (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1989), 183–203; Alice B. Kehoe, ‘‘Primal Gaia: Primitivists and Plastic Medicine Men,’’ in The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies, edited by James A. Clifton (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1990), 193–209; Bonnie LynnSherrow, ‘‘Fakes and Imposters,’’ in Encyclopedia of North American Indians, edited by Frederick E. Hoxie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996), 190–92; and Laura Browder, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 131–39. 8. Henry McBride, Sun (New York), (1946), quoted in Donald G. Humphrey, ‘‘A Thirty-Year Retrospective of an American Woman Painter,’’ in Kimball (Tulsa, Okla.: Philbrook Art Center, 1966), n.p. 9. Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 10. Margaret Breuning, ‘‘Yeffe Kimball Interprets Indian Heritage,’’ Art Digest 23.10 (February 15, 1949): 15. 11. McBride quoted in Humphrey, ‘‘A Thirty-Year Retrospective,’’ n.p. 12. Harvey Slatin quoted in Charlotte Streifer Rubenstein, American Women Sculptors (Boston: G. K. Hall and Company, 1990), 351. 13. George Morrison, Turning the Feather Around: My Life in Art, as told to Margot Fortunato Galt (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1998), 94. 14. The ncai was founded at a conference in Denver, Colorado, in 1944 to pursue a national, pan-Indian agenda that superceded traditional tribal and regional differences between Native peoples. The ncai organized around a multiethnic platform for the protection of tribally held property, civil rights, and political enfranchisement. The organization also concerned itself with the welfare of Native veterans of World War II as well as the increasing numbers of off-

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reservation and urban Indian populations. The ncai also worked to forestall federal policies of termination, which threatened to extinguish traditional treaty rights and the federal trust relationship held by federally recognized tribes. Kimball’s political affiliation with the ncai embodied her belief that Native peoples could maintain traditional tribal identities and their unique relationship to the U.S. government and still claim a modern subjectivity and membership in the modern world. 15. Rubenstein, American Women Sculptors, 348. 16. Lydia L. Wyckoff, ed., Visions and Voices: Native American Painting from the Philbrook Museum of Art (Tulsa, Okla.: Philbrook Museum of Art, 1996), 158. 17. Perry Bear, ‘‘Yeffe Kimball,’’ in The St. James Guide to Native North American Artists (Detroit, Mich.: St. James Press, 1998), 288–90. 18. Kimball’s birth date is listed in all accounts as 1914, but this fact also appears to be a fabrication. Kimball’s sister claims that Kimball was born in 1904; Kimball’s husband believes it was 1906. Kimball’s choice to shave eight to ten years from her actual age probably was in part a matter of her career interests. 19. ‘‘Oklahoma Artist Here for Show,’’ Tulsa World, undated photocopy [January 1948?] in the Native American Artists Resource Collection, Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. 20. David Jones, ‘‘Yeffe Kimball: From Caves to the Cosmos,’’ Tulsa Tribune (January 6, 1966), 44. 21. McBride quoted in Humphrey, ‘‘A Thirty-Year Retrospective,’’ n.p. 22. Peyton Boswell Jr., ‘‘Yeffe Kimball, in Debut Show, Combines the Old with the New,’’ Art Digest 20.1 (March 1, 1946): 10. 23. Other significant venues for contemporary Native American art in the postwar period included the annual exhibitions at the Museum of New Mexico (beginning in 1954) and at the Denver Art Museum (beginning in 1951). Other exhibitions included the National Gallery of Art in Washington (1953) and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco (1954). In 1955, twelve Native artists were awarded the Palmes Académique of the French Republic. 24. Yeffe Kimball to John Clancy, July 6, 1946, Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 25. Bernard Frazier (1946), quoted in Jeanne Snodgrass King, foreword to Visions and Voices: Native American Painting from the Philbrook Museum of Art, edited by Lydia L. Wyckoff (Tulsa, Okla.: Philbrook Museum of Art, 1996), 11. 26. Wyckoff, Visions and Voices, 40. 27. King, foreword to Wyckoff, ed., Visions and Voices, 11. 28. Stylistic affinities with the mainstream of the Euro-American art world led some critics and museum professionals to argue that the new modernist art by Native American artists was in fact a complete break with traditional tribal identities. For example, Oscar Howe’s entry in the 1958 Philbrook Indian Annual passed over for an award because the jurors believed it to be ‘‘a fine painting . . . but not Indian.’’ Angered by the censorious efforts of the largely non-Native museum staff, Howe argued that his developments were grounded in traditional Sioux arts and visual culture. Howe’s experience points to the critical problems inherent in definitions of ‘‘traditional’’ and ‘‘authentic’’ in Native American culture (see chapter 6). 29. Bernard Frazier, ‘‘1946 First Annual Exhibition of Native American Painting,’’ call for entries, dated July 6, 1946, Frank Rehn Galleries Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian In-

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stitution, Washington, D.C. Bernard Frazier (1946), quoted in King, foreword to Wyckoff, ed., Visions and Voices, 11. 30. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 70–71. The Philbrook currently owns one Morrison painting, a 1964 abstraction titled Ex-Patriot, which it acquired in 1995. 31. A July 18, 1946, letter from the Philbrook to DesJarlait at Red Lake informed the artist of the jury’s decision that Maple Sugar Time, his painting of contemporary life on the Ojibwa reservation at Red Lake, ‘‘could not be rightfully called a traditional or ceremonial Indian painting . . . and therefore could not be awarded a prize such as it might otherwise have received.’’ The painting was awarded a citation of honor and was purchased from DesJarlait by the museum. 32. Kimball to Rehn, August 7, 1946, Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Indeed, Kimball’s claim to Indian identity was less compromised by her New York address than was her claim to be an Oklahoma artist. Bernard Frazier barred Kimball’s painting Faun and Spirit from consideration for the 1947 Philbrook Oklahoma Annual on the grounds that Kimball could not verify permanent residency. However, he did invite her to submit the painting to the second Indian Annual in 1947. Frazier to Rehn, April 23, 1947, Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 33. Bernard Frazier to Kimball, n.d. [1947?], Yeffe Kimball Papers, U.S. Department of the Interior, Indian Arts and Crafts Board, Southern Plains Indian Museum. 34. Yeffe Kimball, ‘‘Tulsa Awards Recognition to Our Indian Art,’’ Art Digest 21.19 (August 1, 1947): 12, 30. 35. Ibid., 12. 36. Ibid., 30. 37. William Wright, ‘‘An Interview with Jackson Pollock’’ (1950), in Francis V. O’ Connor, Jackson Pollock (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1967), quoted in David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 113. 38. Yeffe Kimball, ‘‘Tulsa Surveys U.S. Indian Art,’’ Art Digest 22.18 (July 1, 1948): 11. 39. Harvey Slatin, interview by author, Stamford, New York, January 21, 2000. 40. David Jones, ‘‘From the Galleries: Yeffe Kimball: From the Caves to the Cosmos,’’ Tulsa Tribune (January 6, 1966), 44. 41. Harold Rosenberg, ‘‘The American Action Painters’’ (1952), in Art in Theory, 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 581–84. 42. Kimball, letter to the editor, Advocate (August 4, 1960), 12. 43. National Air and Space Museum, Eyewitness to Space (New York: Abrams, 1970). 44. ‘‘ ‘Outdoor Painting in-the-Round’ is Yeffe Kimball’s Solution to New Architectural Problem,’’ New Beacon (August 15, 1962), n.p. 45. FJD (Frederick J. Dockstader) to Jeanne Snodgrass King, undated typescript note, Jeanne Snodgrass King Collection, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 46. Yeffe Kimball, ‘‘Northwest Coast Indian Art Surveyed by Portland Museum,’’ Art Digest 23.14 (April 15, 1949): 8–11; Yeffe Kimball, letter to Frank Rehn (‘‘Papa’’), March 4, 1949, Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

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47. The Guggenheim Foundation had funded art study projects by the Chiricahua Apache painter and sculptor Allan Houser and by the Hopi painter Fred Kabotie, both of whom were wellknown graduates of Dorothy Dunn’s studio program at the Santa Fe Indian School. 48. Yeffe Kimball, ‘‘Plans for Work’’ (1949), John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Archives. Kimball, however, was given only lukewarm references by Rene d’Harnoncourt and Kenneth Chapman. 49. See Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 16. 50. David A. Hollinger, ‘‘Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism, and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligentsia,’’ American Quarterly 27.2 (May 1975): 135; Alfred Haworth Jones, ‘‘The Search for a Usable Past in the New Deal Era,’’ American Quarterly 23.5 (December 1971): 710–24. 51. Indeed, in the aftermath of the Second World War, sentiments of difference and separatism still seemed uncomfortably close to the racial politics of fascism. The universality to which so many in the American avant-garde aspired (and indeed so many among the American avantgarde were Jews or other refugees with a healthy mistrust of racialism in any form) was thus a hedge against reconstructing a postwar culture based on retrograde notions of nationalism and racial exclusivity. 52. For critical analysis of the act, see Gail K. Sheffield, The Arbitrary Indian: The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997); and William J. Hapiuk Jr., ‘‘Of Kitsch and Kachinas: A Critical Analysis of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990,’’ Stanford Law Review 53.4 (April 2001): 1009–75. 53. Julie R. Sasse, Contemporary Native American Art and the Authenticity Controversy (master’s thesis, Arizona State University, 1994), 69. This figure was quoted in H.R. Bill 2006 (1989, which was to become Public Law 101–644, aka the Indian Arts and Crafts Act), which drew on the 1985 Commerce Department report on the market in Native American arts. See also Sheffield, The Arbitrary Indian, 21–22. 54. David P. Bradley, ‘‘Written Testimony,’’ photocopied statement concerning the public hearing on the Indian Arts and Crafts Sales Act held on August 17, 1988, at the state capitol in Santa Fe, New Mexico, distributed to the press and to Santa Fe area art galleries, August 30, 1988; quoted in Sasse, Contemporary Native American Art and the Authenticity Controversy, 51. 55. pl 101–644, November 29, 1990; ‘‘Connoisseurship: Stake Your Claim for Indian Art,’’ Southwest Art 22 (June 1992): 44–51. 56. Quoted in Sheffield, The Arbitrary Indian, 19–20. 57. Sasse notes that the value of a painting by White increased from $2,000 to $25,000 as a result of the artist’s showing at the Heard Museum in Phoenix and at other prestigious venues dedicated to the collection and exhibition of Native American art. After White’s claims to Native ancestry were challenged in the late 1980s, the value of his artworks decreased (Sasse, Contemporary Native American Art and the Authenticity Controversy, 58 n.40. 58. White quoted in Ronald McCoy, ‘‘Painted Words: R. Lee White,’’ in Painted Words: R. Lee White and Plains Indian Pictography, edited by Ronald McCoy (Phoenix: Heard Museum, 1986), 33. 59. Jimmie Durham, open letter, 1991; quoted in Sasse, Contemporary Native American Art and the Authenticity Controversy, 76. 60. Durham, letter to the editor, Art in America 81.7 (July 1993): 23.

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61. Sasse, Contemporary Native American Art and the Authenticity Controversy, 77. 62. Harvey Slatin, interview by author, July 9, 1999.

6. ‘‘A FINE PAINTING . . . BUT NOT INDIAN’’ 1. Quoted in Dorothy Elliot and Irene Reynolds, ‘‘Dick West—Indian Artist,’’ Kansas! magazine (May 1981), 26. Dick West artist file, H. A. and Mary K. Chapman Library, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 2. Oscar Howe, letter to Frederick J. Dockstader, quoted in Dockstader, ed., Oscar Howe: A Retrospective; Catalogue Raisonné (Tulsa, Okla.: Thomas Gilcrease Museum Association, 1982), 15. 3. Bruce Bernstein and W. Jackson Rushing III, Modern by Tradition: American Indian Painting in the Studio Style (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1995). 4. ‘‘American Indian Painting,’’ press release, June 1947, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma, annual files. See also Rennard Strickland, ‘‘The Changing World of Indian Painting and the Philbrook Art Center,’’ in Native American Art at Philbrook, exhibit catalogue (Tulsa, Okla.: Philbrook Museum of Art, 1980), 9–25. 5. J. J. Brody, Indian Painters and White Patrons. 6. Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 60–61. 7. Helen Carlson, New York Sun, quoted in Morrison, Turning the Feather Around: My Life in Art, as told to Margot Fortunato Galt (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1998), 81. 8. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 85. 9. Ibid., 71. 10. Ibid., 81; Morrison became a keen observer of the social dynamics of race in America. As he wrote of Provincetown, Massachusetts, the summer retreat of the New York artists: ‘‘I met what they call Black Portuguese from the Azores. A lot of these people were very dark, many from North Africa, intermingled with people from Portugal and Spain. I think I got along with them maybe because of being close in color. Actually, we art students all got along with the Portuguese fishermen, became good pals, especially when we drank in the bars. But the lighter-skinned merchants in town were a little stand-offish, maybe against their own Portuguese relatives, maybe against working-class Portuguese’’ (Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 79). 11. Alfred Frankenstein, ‘‘Survey of Indian Art at de Young Museum,’’ San Francisco Chronicle (December 1, 1954), 23. 12. Gibson, Abstract Expressionism, 42. 13. Joan Scott, ‘‘Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity,’’ October 61 (summer 1991): 17, quoted in Gibson, Abstract Expressionism, 43. 14. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 15. Gibson, Abstract Expressionism, 60–61. 16. Margaret Dubin, ‘‘Sanctioned Scribes: How Critics and Historians Write the Native American Art World,’’ in Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories, edited by W. Jackson Rushing III (London: Routledge, 1999), 149. 17. Ibid., 158.

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18. Gerhard Hoffman, ‘‘Native American Artists in the Context of Modern and Postmodern Art,’’ in The Arts of the North American Indian: Native Traditions in Evolution, edited by Edwin L. Wade (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1986), 262, 276. 19. Dick West quoted in Lydia L. Wyckoff, ed., Visions and Voices: Native American Painting from the Philbrook Museum of Art (Tulsa, Okla.: Philbrook Museum of Art, 1996), 288. 20. Caroline Johnson, ‘‘Dick West: New Visions of Indian Traditions,’’ Tulsa Tribune (Wednesday, July 23, 1986), Dick West Scrapbook, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 21. ‘‘Bacone Graduate Returns to Paint Mural; Studying at O.U.,’’ Tulsa Tribune (September 23, 1939), Dick West Scrapbook, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 22. Dick West, letter to the Philbrook Art Center, July 15, 1946, H. A. and Mary K. Chapman Library, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 23. Walter Richard West, ‘‘Six American Indian Modifs [sic] Adapted to Contemporary Pictorial Principles,’’ mfa thesis, University of Oklahoma, 1950. West pursued additional graduate work at University of Tulsa; Northeast Oklahoma State University, Tahlequah; and University of Kansas. 24. Quoted in Johnson, ‘‘Dick West.’’ 25. ‘‘West’s Winning Painting in Oils,’’ Muskogee Sunday Phoenix and Times Democrat (May 8, 1955), Dick West Scrapbook, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 26. Dick West, letter to Joan Nordling May 12, 1955. Dick West artist file, H. A. and Mary K. Chapman Library, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 27. Anne L. Davis, ‘‘Art,’’ Muskogee Daily Phoenix (April 9, 1950), Curatorial Files, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 28. The paintings in the series include Indian Christ in Gethsemane, The Madonna and Child, The Annunciation, The Last Supper, The Crucifixion, and The Ascension. West’s mastery of diverse styles was matched by his many religious commitments. In addition to his connections to traditional Cheyenne spiritual practices and the Native American Church, West was also a deacon and Sunday school teacher at Bacone Baptist Church. West was drawn to the figure of Christ because, as he stated, ‘‘He was universal. He lived and died for all men’’ (West quoted in Bill Harmon, ‘‘An Indian Looks at Christ,’’ Oklahoma’s Orbit (April 14, 1963), Dick West Scrapbook, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 29. Johnson, ‘‘Dick West.’’ 30. Jeanne Snodgrass, undated typewritten notes, Curatorial Files, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Snodgrass further notes that West also taught private lessons to white students ‘‘in the European style of painting.’’ 31. Richard W. West, ‘‘Traditional Motifs and Contemporary Principles,’’ South Dakota Review 7.2 (summer 1969): 101. 32. Quoted in Johnson, ‘‘Dick West.’’ 33. West, ‘‘The Water Serpent,’’ Curatorial Files, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 34. West, ‘‘Traditional Motifs and Contemporary Principles,’’ 101. 35. Quoted in Johnson, ‘‘Dick West.’’ 36. West, ‘‘Traditional Motifs and Contemporary Principles,’’ 101. 37. Letter from West to Joan Nordling (curator of education, Philbrook museum), May 12, 1955, Curatorial Files, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 38. West, ‘‘Traditional Motifs and Contemporary Principles,’’ 101–102.

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39. West, ‘‘Here Comes the Judge,’’ Oklahoma Art Gallery Magazine 1.3 (spring 1980), 6, Curatorial Files, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 40. West, ‘‘The Water Serpent,’’ Curatorial Files, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Mark Andrew White, ‘‘Aesthetic Regeneration in Post–World War II Native American Painting,’’ paper presented at the Twenty-seventh Annual Meeting of the Midwest Art History Society, April 8, 2000, 10. I would like to thank Mark White for sharing with me his unpublished research and his thoughts on West and Howe. 44. Fortieth Congress, Second Session, Chapter 72, 19 Stat 254; Mildred Soladay, Oscar Howe: Artist Laureate of the Middle Border (Mitchell, S.D.: Mitchell Printing Co., 1968), 5. ‘‘Grandmother’s Finger Painting First Instruction of SD Artist,’’ Daily Republic (Mitchell S.D.) (December 14, 1951), Oscar Howe Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of South Dakota. 45. Oscar Howe, interview, July 12, 1977, American Indian Research Project, no. 1044, p. 10, Institute of American Indian Studies, University of South Dakota. 46. Soladay, Oscar Howe: 6; Oscar Howe, interview, July 12, 1977, ibid. 47. Oscar Howe, interview, July 12, 1977, ibid. 48. Dorothy Dunn, ‘‘Oscar Howe: Sioux Artist,’’ El Palacio (May/June 1957): 168. See also Oscar Howe, interviewed by Merry Ward, April 3, 1954, p. 5, Institute of American Indian Studies, South Dakota Oral History Center, University of South Dakota. 49. The building now houses the Oscar Howe Art Center. 50. Lora Crouch, librarian, Carnegie Library, Mitchell, South Dakota, ‘‘Indian Designs by an Indian Artist,’’ undated/uncited clipping, Oscar Howe Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of South Dakota. 51. ‘‘WPA employee gets $60 for painting local murals,’’ undated/uncited clipping, Oscar Howe Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of South Dakota. See also Julius Skaug, The Mobridge Murals by Oscar Howe, Mobridge Municipal Auditorium (Mobridge, South Dakota, 1951), Oscar Howe Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of South Dakota. Howe completed the narrative panels. The accompanying decorative designs on the framing pillars and the frieze were executed by John Saul and Tom Saul of Fort Thompson, South Dakota, in Plains abstract style. Oscar Howe, interview, July 12, 1977, American Indian Research Project, no. 1044, p. 15–16, Institute of American Indian Studies, University of South Dakota. 52. Interview with Mrs. Joseph Kondert, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, August 17, 1981, p. 7, Oscar Howe Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of South Dakota. Oscar Howe, interview, July 12, 1977, American Indian Research Project, no. 1044, p. 16, Institute of American Indian Studies, University of South Dakota. 53. Howe, letter to Bernard Frazier, August 26, 1948, Jeanne Snodgrass King Collection, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Also in the Native American Artists Resource Collection, Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. The emphasis is Howe’s. 54. Oscar Howe, interview, July 12, 1977, American Indian Research Project, no. 1044, p. 16, Institute of American Indian Studies, University of South Dakota. 55. Vincent Price, quoted in ‘‘Great S.D. Artist Receives Well Deserved National Attention on TV,’’

212 notes to chapter six

Yankton Press and Dakotan (April 18, 1960), n.p., Oscar Howe Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of South Dakota. 56. The painting is now in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library and Museum in Abilene, Kansas. 57. Soladay, Oscar Howe 19; ‘‘Oscar Howe Named Artist Laureate of South Dakota,’’ Sioux City Journal (October 21, 1960), n.p., Oscar Howe Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of South Dakota. 58. West, ‘‘Here Comes the Judge,’’ 6. 59. Brody, Indian Painters, 172. 60. Jamake Highwater, Song from the Earth: American Indian Painting (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1976), 151. 61. Milton quoted in Arthur Silberman, One Hundred Years of Native American Painting (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Museum of Art, 1980), 50. 62. John Anson Warner, ‘‘The Sociological Art of Oscar Howe,’’ in Frederick J. Dockstader, ed., Oscar Howe: A Retrospective Exhibition (Tulsa, Okla.: Thomas Gilcrease Museum, 1982), 13. Curiously, on at least one occasion Howe described his own work as ‘‘cubistic.’’ He argued that the Woodlands aesthetic was circular whereas the Plains was linear and geometric, which for Howe shared a basic visual affinity with Cubist abstraction. Oscar Howe, class lecture, May 7, 1963, American Indian Research Project, no. 1256, pp. 10–11, Institute of American Indian Studies, University of South Dakota. 63. Janet Catherine Berlo and Ruth B. Phillips, Native North American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 222. 64. Alice Marriot, Dr. William S. Price, and Jesse E. Davis, ‘‘Statement of the Jury,’’ Thirteenth Annual Contemporary American Indian Painting Exhibition (1958), Curatorial Files, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 65. Oscar Howe to Jeanne Snodgrass, April 18, 1958, Jeanne Snodgrass King Collection, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 66. Howe quoted in Mary Ellen Wagner, ‘‘Oscar Howe: Indian Artist,’’ 20, Native American Artists Resource Collection, Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. 67. Howe, ‘‘Theories and Beliefs,’’ 70 68. Ibid., 69. 69. Oscar Howe, ‘‘American Sioux Indian Painting,’’ n.d., Jeanne Snodgrass King Collection, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Also in the Native American Artists Resource Collection, Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. 70. Howe, ‘‘Theories and Beliefs,’’ 78. 71. Howe quoted in Iris Sanger, ‘‘Young Sioux Artist: Oscar Howe’s Indian Symbol Art Exhibited Widely,’’ Omaha World Herald Magazine (September 25, 1949), n.p.; Oscar Howe Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of South Dakota. 72. Howe, ‘‘Theories and Beliefs,’’ 72–73. 73. Oscar Howe, ‘‘American Indian Art (modern),’’ undated typewritten notes, Oscar Howe Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of South Dakota. 74. White, ‘‘Aesthetic Regeneration in Post–World War II Native American Painting,’’ 6. 75. Oscar Howe, undated handwritten note, Oscar Howe Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of South Dakota.

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76. Oscar Howe, interviewed by Merry Ward, April 3, 1954, p. 4, Institute of American Indian Studies, South Dakota Oral History Center, University of South Dakota. 77. Quoted in John W. Whalen, ‘‘Oscar Howe: Artist of the Sioux,’’ 12 (source unknown) copy in Oscar Howe Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of South Dakota. 78. Howe, ‘‘Theories and Beliefs,’’ 75. 79. Oscar Howe, ‘‘American Sioux Indian Painting,’’ n.d., Jeanne Snodgrass King Collection, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Also in the Native American Artists Resource Collection, Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. Mark White notes that Howe understood that his individuality as an artist was ‘‘filtered through a tribal consciousness by means of subject and, to some degree, style’’ (White, ‘‘Aesthetic Regeneration in Post–World War II Native American Painting,’’ 3). 80. Howe, ‘‘Theories and Beliefs,’’ 72. 81. Dunn, ‘‘Oscar Howe,’’ 170–71. Others noted Howe’s fusion of traditional and modern sensibilities. Frederic H. Douglas and Rene d’Harnoncourt included Howe in their exhibition Indian Art of the United States at moma in 1941, in the ‘‘Indian Art for Modern Living’’ section. See Douglas and d’Harnoncourt, Indian Art of the United States (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1941), 209. 82. Oscar Howe, ‘‘For John Milton’s Book,’’ typewritten notes, September 10, 1979, Oscar Howe Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of South Dakota. 83. Howe, ‘‘Theories and Beliefs,’’ 77. Howe’s emphasis on background as an important compositional element differs from the standard ‘‘traditional’’ style. 84. Howe, ‘‘Theories and Beliefs,’’ 76–77. 85. Oscar Howe, class lecture, November 8, 1960, American Indian Research Project, no. 1255, p. 7, Institute of American Indian Studies, University of South Dakota. (Howe’s transcribed lectures are collected at the Institute of American Indian Studies, University of South Dakota.) 86. Oscar Howe, class lecture, November 8, 1960, American Indian Research Project, no. 1255, p. 20, Institute of American Indian Studies, University of South Dakota. 87. Oscar Howe, undated handwritten note, Oscar Howe Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of South Dakota. 88. Harold Rosenberg, ‘‘The American Action Painters’’ (1952), in The Tradition of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 27. 89. Oscar Howe, interview, July 12, 1977, American Indian Research Project, no. 1044, p. 21, Institute of American Indian Studies, University of South Dakota. 90. Oscar Howe, ‘‘For John Milton’s Book,’’ typewritten notes, September 10, 1979, Oscar Howe Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of South Dakota. 91. Jeanne Snodgrass, letter to Howe, April 25, 1958, Jeanne Snodgrass King Collection, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Also in the Native American Artists Resource Collection, Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. 92. Denys P. Meyers, letter to Howe, May 13, 1958, ibid. 93. Jeanne Snodgrass, memo, July 11, 1958. Jeanne Snodgrass King Collection, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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POSTSCRIPT 1. Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 27–28. 2. Newman, ‘‘The Sublime Is Now’’ (1948), in Selected Writings and Interviews, edited by John P. O’Neill (New York: Knopf, 1990), 173. 3. As discussed in chapter 5, the 1959 winner was Yeffe Kimball’s Old Medicine Man. 4. Frederick J. Dockstader, conference address, in Directions in Indian Art: The Report of a Conference Held at the University of Arizona on March Twentieth and Twenty First, Nineteen Hundred and Fifty Nine (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1959), 3. 5. Dorothy Dunn, statement in Directions in Indian Art: The Report, 10. Dunn was not necessarily insisting that guidance be solely the responsibility of non-Native experts. Dunn’s successor as director of the studio program at the Santa Fe Indian school after 1937 was Geronima Cruz Montoya (San Juan Pueblo, b. 1915), who continued to teach in the studio through the late 1950s and who promulgated Dunn’s notions about Native art for decades after Dunn’s departure. 6. John Adair, statement in Directions in Indian Art: The Report, 11–12; Joy Gritton, ‘‘The Institute of American Indian Arts: A Convergence of Ideologies,’’ in Shared Visions: Native American Painters and Sculptors in the Twentieth Century, edited by Margaret Archuleta and Rennard Strickland (Phoenix: Heard Museum, 1991), 27. 7. Gritton, ‘‘The Institute of American Indian Arts,’’ 26. 8. Andreas Andersen, statement in Directions in Indian Art: The Report, 13. 9. Ibid. 10. Robert Quinn, statement in Directions in Indian Art: The Report, 16. 11. Ibid. 12. Resolution rf 60039, February 26, 1960, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, rf 1.2, Series 200 r, Box 430, Folder 3708, p. 60182; quoted in Gritton, ‘‘The Institute of American Indian Arts,’’ 48. 13. Ned Hatathla, statement in Directions in Indian Art: The Report, 17. 14. Allan Houser, statement in Directions in Indian Art: The Report, 25. 15. Lloyd Kiva (New), statement in Directions in Indian Art: The Report, 28. 16. New, ‘‘Using Cultural Difference as a Basis for Creative Expression,’’ 7–8. 17. See Joy L. Gritton, The Institute of American Indian Arts: Modernism and U.S. Indian Policy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 34. See also Winona Garmhausen, History of Indian Art Education in Santa Fe: The Institute of American Indian Arts with Historical Background (Santa Fe, N.M.: Sunstone Press, 1988). 18. New, statement used as wall text in the exhibit titled iaia Rocks the Sixties: The Painting Revolution at the Institute of American Indian Arts,’’ Charlotte Touchette, curator, Institute of American Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico, February 2 to September 30, 2001, quoted in Nancy Marie Mithlo, ‘‘Exhibition Review,’’ Museum Anthropology 24.2/3 (2001): 64. 19. New, ‘‘Statement of Philosophy of Art Education for Indians,’’ in ‘‘The Institute of American Indian Arts: A Basic Statement of Purpose,’’ revised February 1965, 10. 20. Mark White suggests that this is the case with Howe and West’s use of modernist form (White, ‘‘Aesthetic Regeneration in Post–World War II Native American Painting,’’ paper presented at the Twenty-seventh Annual Meeting of the Midwest Art History Society, April 8, 2000, 5). 21. New, ‘‘Using Cultural Difference as a Basis for Creative Expression,’’ 2.

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22. Ibid., 3. 23. Mithlo, ‘‘Exhibition Review,’’ 67. 24. Alfred Youngman, statement used as wall text in ‘‘iaia Rocks the Sixties,’’ quoted in Mithlo, ‘‘Exhibition Review,’’ 67. 25. Ibid., 11. 26. Scholder, quoted in Jamake Highwater, Song from the Earth: American Indian Painting (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1976), 138. 27. Fritz Scholder, ‘‘Artist’s Statement,’’ Gallery of Indian Art: Fritz Scholder (Phoenix: Heard Museum, March 1971). 28. Rushing, ‘‘Authenticity and Subjectivity in the Post-War Painting: Concerning Herrera, Scholder, and Cannon,’’ in Archuleta and Strickland, eds., Shared Visions, 16.

216 notes to postscript

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225

INDEX

Abieto, Pablo, 52–53 Abstract art: anonymity of, 145–146; as ‘‘not Indian,’’ xxvi–xxviii (see also Howe, Oscar); and Sioux visual traditions, 162 Abstract Expressionism, 120, 144, and action painting, 173; anonymity of, 145–146; taking place of Primitivism, 84–88. See also names of specific artists Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (Gibson), 144 Acee Blue Eagle, xxiii, 149 Acoma ceremonial life, depictions of, 48–49, 51. See also Ceremonial life Acoma Fire God (Byrnes), 49 Action painting, 85–86, 172–173 Adair, John, 174 African American artists, 146–147 African diaspora, culture of, xxii aim. See American Indian Movement Allotment, 3, 12–13, 25–26 All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Berman), xx–xxi ‘‘American Action Painters, The’’ (Rosenberg), 85–86 American Historical Epic, The (Benton), 115 American Indian Movement (aim), xxiv; and DesJarlait, 99; and Morrison, 111; origins of, xxiv, 28 American modernism: alternative narrative to,

Appadurai, Arjun, 36, 191 n.20 Art: as carrier of culture, xix; displaying artifacts as, 63–64, 74–79; impact of Nazi Germany on, 66–67 Artifacts, displaying as art, 63–64, 74–79 Artists: ‘‘Indian,’’ 174–175; influenced by Native American art, 61–62; and the Primitive, 81–84; Western notions of, xviii–xix. See also names of specific artists; Native American artists; Native American modernists Art of American Indian Cooking, The (Kimball), 122 Art Students League: Kimball at, 124; Morrison at, 106, 109; Newman at, 64–65 Atwood, Stella, 11 Authenticity: definition of, xxvii; and innovation, xxvi–xxviii; and modernism, 173–174; Native Modernists as not having, xi–xii; patrons on, 2; preservation of, 9–13, 143–144 (see also Pueblo secrecy). See also ‘‘Traditional style’’ Avant-garde artists, 107. See also Artists; Native American artists Awa Tsireh (Alfonso Roybal), 2 Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother (Belmore), 115–116

xix–xx; Native American modernists in context of, xii–xiii; and Primitivism, xxi–xxii. See also Modernism American Museum of Natural History (amnh), artifacts from, as art, 63–64, 74–75, 79 American Scene painters, 68–69 Andersen, Andreas, 174–175 Anderson, Benedict, 205 n.65 Angry Young Man (Kimball), 133 Api-Begay (Navajo artist), 2

Barnett, Will, 62, 107 Barrell, Robert, 62, 107 Barrer, Gertrude, 62, 107 Basket Maker (DesJarlait), 101 Beam, Carl, xxiii Begay, Harrison, 19 Bellows, George, 6 Belmore, Rebecca, xxiii, 115–116 Benton, Thomas Hart, 62, 68, 115 Berlo, Janet, xviii–xix, 160

bae (Bureau of American Ethnology), 32 ‘‘Bambi school,’’ xv, 144

Berman, Marshall, xx–xxi, 36 Bernstein, Alison, xii Bernstein, Bruce, 191 n.13 Betty Parsons Gallery, 60, 74, 79–80, 83 Bhabha, Homi, 87–88 Bigbear, Frank, Jr., 111 Blackowl, Archie, 128 Bloom, Lisa, 62 Boas, Franz, 18, 37 Bois, Yve-Alain, 85, 86 Borodulin, Alexander, 65 Boswell, Peyton, Jr., 125 Bradley, David, 138 Braque, George, 166 Brody, J. J., xiv–xv, xvi, 31, 160 Brosius, S. R., 11 Buff, Rachel, 100 Buffalo Migration (West), 150 Bureau of American Ethnology (bae), 32, 33 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 27–28 Burke Act, 12–13 Bursum, Holm O., 11 Bursum Bill, 10–11 Burton, Jimalee, xxiii Busa, Peter, 62, 107 Byrnes, Jimmy, 30–58: authenticity in paintings of, 51; as cultural mediator, 31; depicting Katsina culture, 57–58; and Harvey, xxv, 31–32, 47–52, 55; as modern figure, 30–31 Byrnes, James, Sr., 47 Campbell, Ben Nighthorse, 138 Cannon, T. C., xxiii, 133, 180 Carter, Forrest, 120 Ceremonial life: depictions of, 48–49, 51; outsiders to, 56. See also Pueblo secrecy Chapman, Kenneth, 2–3, 8, 135 Chavez, Calendaria, 52 Chief Red Cloud (Kimball), 133 Chippewa Dancers, The (DesJarlait), 99–100 Chochisi, George, 40 Chrysler, Walter, Jr., 131 Civil rights movement, 26–27 Clifford, James, 3, 57 Cockroft, Eva, 73 Coleman, Julie Ann, 95 Collier, John, 9–13, 72: criticism of policies of,

228 index

23–25; and efforts to protect Native American culture, 22–23; as Indian commissioner, 12; Indian New Deal of, 12–13, 17, 23, 25, 53; and ‘‘Red Atlantis,’’ xxii, 11; as reformer, 83–84; role of, in validating Native American art, xxiv Conversations with a Native American Artist (DesJarlait), 92 Corbino, Jon, 121 Coughlin, Charles, 68 Craven, David, 71–72 Craven, Thomas, 68 Crumbo, Woody, 159 Culture brokers, artists as, xxv, 30–58 Curtis, Edward S., 133 Curtis, Natalie, 6 Dakota Duck Hunt (Howe), 127, 157 Dancing the Scalps (Howe), 170 Daum, Howard, 62, 107 Davis, Anne, 152 Dawes General Allotment Act, 3, 12–13, 25–26 DeHuff, Elizabeth, 5, 18 DeHuff, John, 5 De Kooning, Willem, 109 DesJarlait, Elizabeth Blake, 91 DesJarlait, Patricia, 93 DesJarlait, Patrick, 91–94, 149: as artist, 99, 100– 102; background of, 91–93; compared with Mexican muralists, 95, 100–101; education of, 92–93; importance of place to, xxvi, 89–116; influence on Kimball, 127; influences on, 100– 102; and modernism, 90, 91; painting style of, 89; and Philbrook Indian Annuals, 95–97, 159; and Red Lake, 90, 94–100, 115; as representing Ojibwe community, 94; subject matter in paintings of, 95 DesJarlait, Robert, 100–101 DesJarlait, Solomon, 91 D’Ewart, Wesley, 26 D’Harnoncourt, René, 17–20, 173 Directions in Indian Art (conference), 172–173, 178. See also Rockefeller Foundation Dockstader, Frederick J., 134–135, 173–174 Dodge, Mabel, 9–13 Dorsey, H. W., 33 Douglas, Aaron, 146 Douglas, Frederic H., 17, 19–20, 214 n.81

Dozier, Edward, 35 Du Bois, W. E. B., 14–15 Dubin, Margaret, 147 Duchamp, Marcel, 76 DuMond, Frank, 106 Dunn, Dorothy: and Howe, 156, 165; ‘‘studio’’ of, xi, 8; and ‘‘traditional’’ style, xxiii, 33–34, 127–128, 143, 174. See also Jacobson, Oscar; ‘‘Traditional’’ style Durham, Jimmie, xxiii, 139–140 Eastman, Max, 37 Education of Little Tree, The (Wallace), 120–121 Emmons, Glenn L., 28 End of the Trail, The (Fraser), 181 Ernst, Max, 62, 75–76 Ethnicity, concept of, 15–16 European culture, Primitivism as challenge to, 60–61 European modernism, xix–xx. See also Modernism Ex-Patriot (Morrison), 112 Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts, 7 Fall, Albert Bacon, 11 Family, The (Parsons), 37 Faun and Spirit (Kimball), 121, 128 Fear and Conventionality (Parsons), 37 Fearless Bear, 155 Fewkes, Jesse Walter, 1–4 Field, Clark, 126 Fixico, Donald, 25, 27–28 Ford, Henry, 68 Frank Rehn Galleries, 124–125 Frankenstein, Alfred, 145 Frankenthaler, Helen, 131 Frankfurter, Alfred M., 66–67, 70–71, 198 nn.22–23 Fraser, James Earl, 181 Frazier, Bernard, 125–126, 128–129, 136, 157–159, 170 Gaugin, Paul, 100 Gibson, Ann, xxii, 144–145, 147, 183 n.4 Gleason, Philip, 13 Gods in Monument Valley (Kimball), 131 Goldfrank, Esther, 46, 190 n.1, 191 nn.9–12, 192 n.33 Goodman, Effie, 123. See also Kimball, Yeffe

Gorman, Carl, xxiii Gorman, R. C., 29 Gottlieb, Adolph, 61–62, 63, 81–82, 86, 112. See also Newman, Barnett Graham, John D., 62, 75–76 Grand Council of 1842, The (West), 150 Greenberg, Clement, xix, xx, 69, 71, 173 Gritton, Joy, 174, 178 Gutiérrez, Ramón, 39, 40, 192 n.38 Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds, xxiii Hampel, Adelheid, 157 Haozous, Bob, xxiii Harlem Renaissance, 146–147 Hartley, Marsden, 6, 62 Harvey, Byron, xxv: background of, 47; and Byrnes, 47–52, 55, 57; on Lente, 35, 46–47; on Pueblo secrecy, 44 Harvey, Joy, 47, 52 Hatathla, Ned, 176, 177 Henri, Robert, 6, 124 Herrera, Joe, xxiii, 117 Herrera, Velino Shije, 3, 128 Hess, Thomas, 64 Hewett, Edgar Lee, 2–3, 7 Highwater, Jamake, 112, 120 History along the Missouri (Howe), 157 Hoffman, Gerhard, 148 Hollinger, David, 136 Hopi artists, paintings by, 2, 4 Houle, Robert, 60, 88, 196 n.3 Houser, Allan, xxiii, 151, 177, 178 Howe, Inge Dawn, 157 Howe, Oscar: abstract art of, xii, xvi, 160; on his artistic process, 167–168; background of, 155–157; consolidating authenticity and modernism, 173–174; contradicting stereotypes, 148; debate with Philbrook over ‘‘traditional’’ style, 159–161; and Dunn, 165; education of, xi, 155–156; exhibition at moma, 19; and Kimball, 127; in the military, 157; as modernist, 166–167; as ‘‘not Indian,’’ xi, xxvi–xxviii, 143– 170; in Philbrook Indian Annuals, 157; poor health of, 156; rejection from Philbrook Indian Annuals, 29, 155–161, 172; on Sioux painting, 162–166; style of, 156; teaching career of, 157–158, 166–167; theory of art, xxvii, 162–168

index

229

Hoyt, Ester B., 5 Hungry Wolf, Adolf, 120 Hutchinson, Elizabeth, 184 n.20 iacb (Indian Arts and Crafts Board), 17, 20, 137–139 iaf (Indian Arts Fund), 7 iaia (Institute of American Indian Arts), xxiii, xxvii, 177–181 Ideographic Picture, The (exhibition), 83 Indian artists. See Native American artists Indian Art of the United States (exhibition), 16–22 Indian Arts and Crafts Board (iacb), 17, 20, 137–139 Indian Arts Fund (iaf), 7 Indian Citizenship Act, 14 Indian New Deal (Indian Reorganization Act), 12–13, 17, 23, 25, 53. See also Collier, John; U.S. Indian policy Indian Painters and White Patrons (Brody), xv, 160 Indian Removal Act, 27–28 Indian Reorganization Act. See Indian New Deal ‘‘Indian Space’’ painters, 62, 107, 120 Indianness: and Americanness, 14, 21–22; avoiding stereotypes about, 147; as cultural identity, 23–24; Kimball on, 130, 136; ‘‘traditional’’ style and, 143 Institute of American Indian Arts (iaia), xxiii, xxvii, 177–181 Isleta, New Mexico, 38–39, 53–54. See also Lente, José; Parsons, Elsie Clews Isleta, New Mexico (Parsons), 32 Isolationism, 67–68 Jacobson, Oscar, 6, 126–128, 159; Native American art program of, xxiii, 7–8, 143, 149. See also Dunn, Dorothy Jameson, Fredric, 114 Janson, H. W., 70, 71 Jewell, Edwin Alden, 81 Jewish modernists, 63. See also Modernists Johnson, Malvin Gray, 146 Jones, Lois Mailou, 146 Jonson, Raymond, 6, 8 Kabotie, Fred, 2–3, 5, 18–19, 128 Kantor, Morris, 106

230

index

Katsina ceremonies, 48, 51, 56. See also Ceremonial life Katsinas Emerging from the Sacred Spring, Goweshtaya (Byrnes), 47–48 Katz, Jane, 204 n.55 Kehoe, Alice, 120 Kelemen, Pal, 78 Kidder, Alfred, 11 Kimball, Yeffe: advantages of Native American persona, 121; audience of, 122; collections of art by, 132–133, 140–141; devotion of, to Indian issues, 122–123; education of, 124; exhibitions of, 119; heritage of, 118; identity of, 134–135; on Indianness, 130–131, 136; influences on, 127–128; legacy of, 134–141; Native American themes in art of, 121, 133–134; passing as Native American, xxvi, 117–141; at Philbrook Indian Annual, 125–127, 170; Primitivism of, 123, 129– 134; solo debut of, 124–125; stylistic shift of, 131; success of Indian persona, 125; writings of, 129–130 Kline, Franz, 109 Klumb, Henry, 17 Krasner, Lee, 118–119 Kropotkin, Piotr, 65 Kuniyoshi, Yasuo, 106 Laguna ceremonial life, 48–49. See also Ceremonial life Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada, 60 Lears, T. J. Jackson, 186 n.7 Legends of the Mighty Sioux (Howe), 157 Léger, Fernand, xxvi Leja, Michael, xxi, 61 Lemke, Sieglinde, xxii, 119 Lente, José, 30–58: accuracy of details in drawings of, 34; background of, 37–38; as cultural mediator, 31; demand of, for anonymity, 42–43; financial situation of, 38, 44–47; as modern figure, 30–31; and Parsons, 31–36, 54–55; on risk of violating secrecy, 34–35, 42–43; ‘‘secret drawings’’ of, xxv, 33–34, 41–44 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Picasso), 61, 119, 150 Leuthold, Steven, 87 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 62 Lipsitz, George, 15

Locke, Alain, 146 Loloma, Charles, xxiii, 178 Long Lance, Chief Buffalo Child, 120 Lowe, Truman, 204 n.53 Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 7 Lummis, Charles Fletcher, 52 Luther, Eleanor, 93–94 Making of Man, The (Byrnes), 50–51 Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Smith), xx Making Wild Rice (DesJarlait), 96–98, 127 Malinovsky, Constantino, 74–75 Malone, George, 26 Malraux, André, 76 Manabozo and Friends (Kimball), 128 Maple Sugar Time (DesJarlait), 96–97, 159 Marin, John, 6 Martinez, Crescencio, 2 Martinez, Maria, 121 Masked Dancers, The (West), 150 Matisse, Henri, 61 McBride, Henry, 121, 125 McEvilley, Thomas, xxii, 87 McMaster, Gerald, 60, 88, 196 n.2 McNickle, D’Arcy, 122 Means, Russell, 117 Meriam, Lewis, 187 n.26 Meridas, Chief Two Moons, 120 Meyers, Denys P., 168–169 Milton, John, 160 Minneapolis School of Art, 104–106 Modern: as term, xiii–xvi; vs. traditional, 29 Modernism: American, xii–xiii; connection to the local in, 114; definition of, xx–xxi; European, xix; Native American, 143–170; Ojibwe, 89–116 Modernists, Native American. See Native American modernists Modernity, as urban phenomenon, xx moma. See Museum of Modern Art Moore, Edward, 25 Mootzka, Waldo, 128 Mopope, Stephen, 128 Morris, George L. K., 6, 62 Morris, Kate, 90 Morrison, George: and Abstract Expressionism, 108–109; and the American Indian Move-

ment, 111; background of, 102–104; collages of, 111–112; and desire to avoid stereotypes about Indianness, 147; education of, 104–105; health of, 104; importance of place to, xxvi, 89–116; influences on, 112–113, 144–145; and Kimball, 117, 122; as modernist, 90, 143; in New York, 106–110, 144, 180; painting style of, 89; ‘‘Red Rock’’ series of, 112, 115; rejected from Philbrook Indian Annuals, 29; returning to reservation, 110–113; teaching art, 109–110 Motherwell, Robert, 86 Mount Maude (Morrison), 105 Moxey, Keith, 198 n.24 Museum of Modern Art (moma): Indian Art of the United States exhibition, 16–22; Native American Sources of Modern Art exhibition, 7; Pre-Columbian art exhibition, 75; Primitive art exhibition, 72–73 ‘‘Museum without Walls’’ (exhibition), 76 Myers, Fred, xvi nasa (National Air and Space Administration), 132–133 Nationalism: and appeal of Native American culture, 5–7; in New York school, 66–67; and Regionalist artists, 70 Native, as term, xiii–xvi Native American art: influence on modern artists, 61–62; and modernism, 4–8; at the Museum of Modern Art, 16–22; patrons validating, xxiv; post-WWII perception of, 24–25 (see also Perceptions); as sign of cultural difference, 21; style of, 28–29; and U.S. Indian policy, 1– 29, 137–139; value of, xxvi, 3–5. See also Art; Patrons; Primitivism; ‘‘Traditional’’ style Native American Art Alliance (naaa), 138 Native American Art and the New York AvantGarde (Rushing), 61, 120 Native American artists: adopting Western artistic practices, xvi–xvii; agency of, xvii–xviii; consolidating authenticity and modernism, 173–174; crossing into ‘‘mainstream,’’ xxvi; as culture brokers, 30–58; drawings by, xvi; education of, 7–8; and experience of modernization, xxi; identity of, xxi; making modern, 172–181; paintings by, xvi; perceptions of, xviii–xix, xxiii–xxiv, 20–21; as ‘‘primitives,’’

index

231

Native American artists (continued ) 147; sponsorship of, 20; vs. ‘‘artists,’’ 174–175. See also Native American modernists; Patrons; and names of specific artists Native American Arts Alliance (naaa), 139 Native American culture, 5–7, 52–55 Native American modernism, 143–170. See also Modernism Native American modernists: in context of American Modernism, xii–xiii; distancing of, from ‘‘traditional’’ style, 143–148 (see also ‘‘Traditional’’ style); and European modernism, xix; importance of place for, xxvi; issues of authenticity for, xxvi–xxviii (see also Authenticity); overview of, xxii–xxviii. See also Native American artists Native American paintings: ‘‘discovered’’ by patrons, 1–2 (see also Patrons); formative years of, xxiii; invention of, 1–29; market for, xvii–xviii Native Americans: image of, xv; participation of, in U.S. economy, 23; perceptions of, xv– xvi, 24–25; place in American culture, 15–16; struggles for sovereignty, xxiv; treaty relationship with U.S. government, 26–27 (see also U.S. Indian policy) Nazi Germany: impact of, on art, 66–67 Needham, Ramona, 94 New, Lloyd Kiva, xxiii, 117, 177, 179 Newman, Barnett: on American Scene painters, 68; background of, 64; education of, 64–65; employment of, 65–66; exhibitions curated by, 74–80, 83; on influence of Native American art, 81–82; on isolationism, 67–68; on New York City, 69–70; political beliefs of, 65; and Primitivism, xxi–xxii, xxv–xxvi, 60–88, 136, 172; reasons behind fascination with Native American art, 62–63; run for mayor, 65; on transcendence of art, 81–83; value of Native American art for, xxvi; writings of, 67–68, 83–84, 173; ‘‘zip’’ paintings of, 85, 112 New York school, 60–88: abandoning Primitivism, 172; and action painting, 172–173; male dominance in, 118–119; and Morrison, 106, 144; nationalism in, 66–67; Native American artists in, 180 Noble, David, 114–115, 205 n.65

232 index

Nordling, Joan, 151 Nordmark, Olle, 93, 149 Northwest Coast Indian Painting (exhibit), 60, 79–80 Ojibwe modernism, 89–116. See also Modernism Old-Fashioned Woman, The (Parsons), 37 Old Medicine Man (Kimball), 130–131, 170 Olitski, Jules, 131 Omi, Michael, 16 Onement I (Newman), 85, 86 Orton, Fred, 206 n.2 Pach, Walter, 6 ‘‘Painting of Tamayo and Gottlieb, The’’ (Newman), 81–82 Parsons, Elsie Clews, xxv, 51, 187 n.24: access to Pueblo rituals, 39–41, 52; appeals on behalf of the Pueblo Indians, 11; background of, 36–37; and Lente, 32–36, 41–47, 54–55 Patrons: artists’ relationship with, 31–32; on authenticity, 2, 9–13; and defense of Indian culture, 10; ‘‘discovering’’ Native American painting, 1–2; and Native American modernists, 172–173; and Pueblo artists, xvi, xviii–xix; relationship with Native American artists, 4; valuing Native American art, 1–8. See also names of specific patrons Penney, David, xviii, 112 Perceptions: of Native American art, 24–25; of Native American artists, xviii–xix, xxiii–xxiv, 20–21; of Native Americans, xv–xvi, 24–25 Peters, Susie, 126, 159 Peyote Dream (West), 151 Philbrook Indian Annuals: commitment to ‘‘traditional’’ style, 129–130, 159–161; and DesJarlait, 95–97, 100, 159; and Howe, xi, 143, 155–161, 157–159, 172; and Kimball, 125, 126–127, 130– 131, 170; transforming, 168–170; and West, 150–152, 154 Phillips, Ruth, xix, xv, 160 Phoenix Indian School, 93 Picasso, Pablo, 61, 84, 119, 150, 166 Place, importance of, xxvi, 89–116 Poitras, Edward, xxiii Polcari, Stephen, xxi, 61 Polelonema, Otis, 3, 5

Pollock, Jackson, 62–63, 85, 109, 115, 120, 130 Poolaw, Horace, xxiii Pousette-Dart, Richard, 63 Pratt, Mary Louise, 184 n.15, 185 n.3, 190 n.3 Pratt, Richard, 4 Pratt, Scott, 90, 113, 201 nn.4–5 ‘‘Pre-Columbian Art in Peru and Its Significance for the Americas’’ (Malinovsky), 73–74 ‘‘Pre-Columbian Stone Sculpture’’ (exhibition), 74–76 Price, Vincent, 158 Primitive art: Newman on function of, 80; nonWestern art as, xiv; before and during the war, 72–73 Primitive Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (Lemke), xxii Primitivism: abandoning, 84–88, 172; and African American artists, 146–147; giving way to Abstract Expressionism, 84–88; and Kimball, 123, 129–134 (see also Kimball, Yeffe); and the postwar American artist, 81–84; in twentieth century culture, 61. See also Newman, Barnett ‘‘Princess’’ Wa Wa Chaw, xxiii, 159 Pueblo artists: agency of, xviii; Collier on, 9–10; and Dunn, 128; early encounters with white patrons, xviii–xix, xvi; as ‘‘Red Atlantis,’’ 9–10. See also Lente, José; Pueblo secrecy Pueblo ceremonies, art depicting, 50. See also Ceremonial life Pueblo Indian Folktales (Lummis), 52 Pueblo Indian Journal (Parsons), 40 Pueblo Indian Painting: Tradition and Modernism in New Mexico 1900–1930 (Brody), xvi Pueblo Indian Religion (Parsons), 37 Pueblo Indians, 53–54 Pueblo Indians in Story, Song and Dance, The (Kimball), 121–122 Pueblo Lands Act, 11 Pueblo Madonna (Byrnes), 49 Pueblo secrecy, xxv, 33, 35, 39–40, 44–47, 56–57. See also Ceremonial life Quinn, Robert, 175–176 Randolph, A. Philip, 21–22 ‘‘Red Atlantis, The’’ (Collier), 11

‘‘Red Atlantis,’’ Pueblo Indians as, 9–10 Red Lake Fisherman (DesJarlait), 95–97 Red Lake Ojibwe reservation, 90–91 Red Painting (Franz Kline Painting) (Morrison), 109 Red Pond (West), 150 Regionalism, 68–70 Rehn, Frank, 125 Religious Chastity (Parsons), 37 Relocation, 27–28. See also U.S. Indian policy Renehan, A. B., 11 Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 62 Rivera, Diego, 95, 100 Rockefeller, John D., 173 Rockefeller, Nelson, 74 Rockefeller Foundation, xxvii, 172–173, 176, 180 Rogers, Will, Jr., 117, 122 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 17 Roosevelt, Theodore, 73–74 Rosenberg, Harold, 67, 70, 85–86, 167, 172–173 Rothko, Mark, 63, 81 Roybal, Alfonso (Awa Tsireh), 2 Rubin, William, 85 Rushing, W. Jackson, III, 17, 61, 76, 120, 181 Sacred Buffalo (Kimball), 117, 125–128, 159 Said, Edward, xiv Sandler, Irving, 71 Santa Fe Indian School (sfis), xi, xxiii, 8, 33–34. See also ‘‘Traditional’’ style Scholder, Fritz, xxiii, 133, 178, 180–181 Scientific value, of Native American art, 3–5 Scott, Joan, 146 Serricino, Margaret, 47 sfis (Santa Fe Indian School), xi, xxiii, 8, 33–34 Shapiro, Harry, 79 She Wolf (Pollock), 62, 85 Shell Face, 155–156, 162 Sioux Ceremonial (Howe), 156 Sioux Girl (West), 150 Sioux Painter (Howe), 162 Sioux visual practices, and abstract art, 162–166 Siskind, Aaron, 74, 79 Slatin, Harvey, 121, 131, 140–141 Sloan, John, 6–7, 72, 124 Smith, Jaune Quick-to-See, xxiii, 112 Smith, Leon Polk, xxiii, 180

index

233

Smith, Martha Clementine, 123 Smith, Terry, xx Snodgrass, Jeanne, xi–xii, 98, 100, 134, 152, 168– 170 Social Freedom (Parsons), 37 Social Rule (Parsons), 37 Solar Continuum (Kimball), 133 Soldier Dance (West), 150 Sollers, Werner, 15–16 Song From the Earth: American Indian Painting (Highwater), 160 South Dakota Artists Project, 157 Southwest Indian Art Project, 176, 177 Spinden, Herbert, 11 St. James Guide to Native North American Artists, 123 Stirling, Matthew W., 49 Story of the Totem Pole, The (Kimball), 121–122 Strong, Pauline Turner, 41 ‘‘Studio Style.’’ See ‘‘Traditional’’ style ‘‘Sublime is Now, The’’ (Newman), 84–85, 173 Sun and Rain Clouds over the Hills (Howe), 157, 162 Sun Bear, 120 Sweet Grass Lives On, The (Highwater), 112 Szasz, Margaret Connell, 31 Tamayo, Rufino, 81–82 Termination bills, xxvii, 25–28, 26–27, 172. See also U.S. Indian policy Thanksgiving Prayer (West), 150 ‘‘Third space,’’ 87–88 Thunder Bull, 148 To the Happy Hunting Ground (Kimball), 128, 131 ‘‘Traditional’’ style, xxiii; debate over, 159; defense of, 174; disenchantment with, 153; institutionalization of, 7–8; legacy of, 28–29; Philbrook’s commitment to, xiv–xv, 143–144, 159–161; and West, 152–154. See also Authenticity; Dunn, Dorothy; Howe, Oscar; Jacobson, Oscar Triumph of American Painting, The (Sandler), 71 Tsatoke, Monroe, 128 Turning the Feather Around: My Life in Art (Morrison), 102, 122 Twitchell, Ralph E., 11 ‘‘Two worlds,’’ Indian and artist as from, xvi–xvii, 55–56, 147–148

234

index

Udall, Lee, 121 Udall, Stuart, 121 Umine Wacipi: War and Peace Dance (Howe), xi–xii, 1, 131, 143, 158–159, 161. See also ‘‘Traditional’’ style University of Oklahoma, Native American art program at, xxiii, 7–8, 127–128, 143, 149 Unspensi (Don’t Know How), 155 U.S. Indian policy: and changing perceptions of Native Americans, xxiv; and Native American art, 1–29, 137–140; and treaty relationship with Native Americans, 26–27. See also Dawes General Allotment Act Value, Native American art as having scientific, 3–5 Van Gogh, Vincent, 100 Varnedoe, Kirk, 61 Velarde, Pablita, xxiii, 8 Victory Dance (Howe), 158–159 Visions and Voices (Philbrook Musuem of Art), 123 Vlaminck, Maurice de, 61 Vytlacil, Vaclav, 106 Wagner, Ann, 119 Wakan (Howe), 170 Wakefield Gallery, 74–78 Walkingstick, Kay, xxiii Wallace, George, 120 Wallace, John, 17 Warner, John Anson, 160 Water Serpent (West), 143, 150–151, 154 Wedding of Art and Science, The (West), 151 West, Dick: abstract art of, 150–151; background of, 148–150; consolidating authenticity and modernism, 173–174; contradicting stereotypes, 148; education of, 149–150; in the military, 150; as modernist, 143–170; and Philbrook Indian Annuals, 29, 144, 150–151, 154; teaching career of, 152; and ‘‘traditional’’ style, 151–154; understanding of art, xxvii ‘‘What about Isolationist Art?’’ (Newman), 67–68 Wheeler, Burton K., 68 Wheeler, Steve, 62, 107 White, Amelia Elizabeth, 7 White, Leslie, 51

White, Mark, 164 White, R. Lee, 120, 139 White Bear, 155 White Buffalo (Kimball), 131 White promoters, of Native American art, xxiv. See also Patrons Wilson, Charles Banks, 126, 159 Winant, Howard, 16

Woodruff, Hale, 146 Wounded Knee, 3 Young, B. G., 32, 33 Youngman, Alfred, 180 ‘‘Zip’’ paintings, 85, 112 Zuni Maiden (Kimball), 124

index

235

Bill Anthes is an assistant professor of art history at Pitzer College. He has been a visiting scholar at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a fellow in the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anthes, Bill. Native moderns : American Indian painting, 1940–1960 / Bill Anthes. p. cm.—(Objects/histories) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-8223-3850-5 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-8223-3850-5 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-13: 978-0-8223-3866-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-8223-3866-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Indian painting—United States. 2. Modernism (Art)—United States. I. Title. II. Series. nd238.a4a58 2006 759.13—dc22 2006008056

FIGURES

1. Oscar Howe, Yankton Sioux, 1915–1983, Umine Wacipe: War and Peace Dance, 1958. Watercolor on paper. (Copyright Adelheide Howe, 1983)

2. Andrew Van Tsihnahjinnie, Navajo, 1916–2000, Male Sand Painting, 1954. Oil on canvas board. (Museum purchase, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 1954.6)

3. Anonymous, Hopi, Kachina, Kerwan or Juwan (Brightly Colored) and Kachina Mana (Kachina Maiden) Wearing Masks and Body Paint in Costume with Bean Sprouts in Flat Basket between Them; Pomanu Ceremony When Beans Brought into Plaza and Distributed, 1899. Watercolor on paper. (Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives. NAAINV 08547224)

4. Crescencio Martinez, San Ildefonso Pueblo, 1879–1918, Buffalo Dancers, 1918. Watercolor on paper. (School of American Research, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture. IAF.P19)

5. Gerald Nailor, Navajo, 1917–1952, Untitled (Navajos and Tourists Looking at Rug), 1937. Watercolor on paper. (Museum of New Mexico, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology. Bequest of Dorothy Dunn. 51404/13)

6. Pablita Velarde, Santa Clara Pueblo, b.1918, Santa Clara Corn Dance, 1940. Watercolor on paper. (Museum of New Mexico, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology. Bequest of Dorothy Dunn. 53943/13)

7. Review of Pre-Columbian Galleries, American Museum of Natural History, Art News, March 15, 1944.

8. Barnett Newman, American, 1905–1970, Onement 1, 1948. Oil on canvas. (Image copyright Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. Artwork copyright 2006 Barnett Newman Foundation/Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York)

9. Patrick Robert DesJarlait, Ojibwe, 1921–1972, Red Lake Fishermen, 1946. Watercolor on paper. (Collection of the Minnesota Museum of American Art)

10. Patrick Robert DesJarlait, Ojibwe, 1921–1972, Maple Sugar Time, 1946. Watercolor on paper. (Museum purchase, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 1946.31)

11. Patrick Robert DesJarlait, Ojibwe, 1921–1972, Making Wild Rice, 1946. Watercolor on paper. (Museum purchase, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 1947.22)

12. Patrick Robert DesJarlait, Ojibwe, 1921–1972, The Chippewa Dancers, 1968. Watercolor on paper. (U.S. Department of the Interior, Indian Arts and Crafts Board, Sioux Indian Museum)

13. Patrick Robert DesJarlait, Ojibwe, 1921–1972, Basket Maker, 1970. Watercolor on paper. (The Richard E. and Dorothy Nelson Collection)

14. George Morrison, Ojibwe, 1919–2000, Mount Maude, 1942. Oil on canvas. (Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Local Purchase Fund)

15. George Morrison, Ojibwe, 1919–2000, Untitled (Pink, Black, Gray), 1950. Oil on canvas. (Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota, Duluth, Gift of the Artist)

16. George Morrison, Ojibwe, 1919–2000, Collage IX: Landscape, 1974. Wood. (Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Local Purchase Fund)

17. George Morrison, Ojibwe, 1919–2000, Red Rock Crevices. Soft Light. Lake Superior Landscape, 1987. Oil on canvas. (Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota, Duluth, Alice Tweed Tuohy Foundation Purchase Award)

18. Yeffe Kimball, American, 1904?–1978. Sacred Buffalo, 1945. Oil on canvas. (Courtesy of Harvey Slatin)

19. Yeffe Kimball, American, 1904?–1978, Faun and Spirit, 1948. Oil on canvas. (Portland Art Museum, Gift of Dr. William K. Livingston)

20. Yeffe Kimball (center, right) photographed with Secretary of the Interior Stuart Udall and wife Lee Udall, along with the San Ildefonso Pueblo artist Maria Martinez. (Photo by U.S. Department of the Interior. Collection of Harvey Slatin)

21. Yeffe Kimball, American, 1904?–1978, Zuni Maiden, 1939. Oil on board. (Gift of Yeffe Kimball, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1968.2.1)

22. Yeffe Kimball’s review of the Philbrook Annual, Art Digest, August 1, 1947.

23. Yeffe Kimball, American, 1904?–1978, Old Medicine Man, 1951. Oil on board. (Museum purchase, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 1959.5)

24. Yeffe Kimball photographed with her painting Gods in Monument Valley, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1957. (Photo by John D. Bell. Collection of Harvey Slatin)

25. Yeffe Kimball, American, 1904?–1978, Solar Continuum, installed at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1962. (Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York)

26. Yeffe Kimball, American, 1904?–1978, Angry Young Man, 1970. Oil on canvas. (Collection of Brandy and Jeremy Young)

27. Yeffe Kimball, American, 1904?–1978, Self-Portrait, 1978. Oil on canvas. (Collection of Harvey Slatin)

28. Dick West, Cheyenne, 1912–1996, Water Serpent, c. 1951. Oil on canvas. (Museum purchase, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 1951.11)

29. Dick West, Cheyenne, 1912–1996, The Wedding of Art and Science, 1950. Oil on canvas. (Museum purchase, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 1950.3)

30. Oscar Howe, Yankton Sioux, 1915–1983, Sioux Ceremonial, 1937. Watercolor on paper. (Museum of New Mexico, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology. Bequest of Dorothy Dunn. 53939/13)

31. Oscar Howe, Yankton Sioux, 1915–1983, Sun and Rain Clouds over the Hills, mural at Carnegie Library, Mitchell, South Dakota, 1940. (Copyright Adelheide Howe, 1983)

32. Oscar Howe, Yankton Sioux, 1915–1983, Victory Dance, 1954. Watercolor on paper. (Museum purchase, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 1954.6)

33. Oscar Howe, Yankton Sioux, 1915–1983, Sioux Painter, 1948. Watercolor on paper. (U.S. Department of the Interior, Indian Arts and Crafts Board, Sioux Indian Museum)

34. Fritz Scholder, Luiseño, 1937–2005, The End of the Trail, 1970. Oil on canvas. (Museum purchase, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 1993.6)