In the Galleries: The American West at Wigmore
Western Mountain Scene by Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902); Centennial by Ilya Bolotowsky (1907-1981), 1949. The New York gallery D. Wigmore Fine Art has a special talent for discovering affinities and relationships between works of art from disparate eras and in different styles, and the gallery’s current exhibition—The Changing West: 1865 to 1965—is another potent manifestation of that ability. The show includes thirty works of art inspired by the American West, mostly landscapes, and demonstrates how, for example, a geometric abstraction from 1949 can commune and communicate with a Hudson River school mountainscape painted nearly a century before. Indian Encampment by Ralph Blakelock (1847-1919). For its compact size, the exhibition offers a surprisingly rich survey of genres and artistic perspectives. Some of the oldest works in the show, by Albert Bierstadt and Worthington Whittredge, convey the sense of majesty and mystery the first artists to venture from the East must have felt. By contrast, Indian Encampment by the tonalist Ralph Albert Blakelock—who traveled into the West on his own and spent time among Native communities—seems almost intimate in comparison. Installation view of The Changing West: 1865-1965 By the early decades of the twentieth century, the Western landscape as depicted by John Sloan, Ernest Lawson, John Marin and others appears gentler and more accessible, if still rugged and desolate. Fixed human habitation, as rendered by William Gropper and Henry Varnum Poor, is dwarfed by the mountains and canyons but seems peaceful if somewhat fragile. It’s difficult to know what to make of Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s mesmerizing 1941 gouache Virginia City, Nevada and its strange, near ground-level point of view: is the town rising out of the desert, or is the land