Volume 49, Number 18 · November 21, 2002
The Wild Card
By Sanford Schwartz
George Catlin and His Indian Gallery
Catalog of the exhibition edited by George Gurney and Therese Thau Heyman
an exhibition at the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.,September 6, 2002–January 19, 2003.
Smithsonian American Art Museum/Norton, 294 pp., $60.00; $34.95 (paper)
http://americanart.si.edu/collections/exhibits/catlin
BOOKS ALSO DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
North American Indians
by George Catlin, with an introduction by Peter Matthiessen
Penguin, 522 pp., $15.00 (paper)
Native Americans: A Portrait: The Art and Travels of Charles Bird King, George Catlin, and Karl Bodmer
by Robert J. Moore Jr.
Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 279 pp., $60.00
One of the many peculiarities of George Catlin's life and work is that while he is known as the painter of American Indian life, and is usually written about in purely historical and ethnographic terms, his pictures linger in the mind as the work of a virtuoso—an artist who wants nothing more than to show off his brilliant, improvisatory technique. It's hard to think of another nineteenth-century American painter whose painting hand is so joyously visible, or whose work continues to present, as Catlin's does, such a sense of artistic freedom and spontaneity. When we look at his various landscapes of the Plains, or his views of Indian life or of buffalo hunts, or his intense and glowing portraits of individual Sioux, say, or Mandan or Pawnee, what we see is the shimmering paintwork as much as the person or place. Catlin's pictures are bound to make many viewers reflect on the troubled history of Native Americans in their own land, but in the way he turns painting into a matter of bright, glistening color, satiny surfaces, poetically awkward drawing, and a muscular physicality, he can make another set of viewers think as easily of Raoul Dufy or Alex Katz.
Review, 3791 words
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