Native
Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940-1960
by Bill Anthes
Duke University Press, Durham,
NC, 2006
304 pp., illus. 6 b/w, 28 col. Trade,
$84.95; paper, $23.95
ISBN: 0-8223-3850-5;
ISBN: 0-8223-3866-1.
Reviewed by Jonathan
Zilberg
Native Moderns
is a fascinating study of the changing
nature and reception of modern American
Indian art in relation to the history
of modern art, American society and government
policy. Herein Bill Anthes significantly
expands the canon of modern art history
while exploring the all important notion
of identity and authenticity in terms
of how particular artists, from both within
the Indian community and without, have
been inspired by native American heritages.
This always lucid book will be of tremendous
value to art historians and anthropologists
interested in the constraints modern Indian
artists faced before the 1960’s in
terms of the empowering and disempowering
legacies of invented tribal traditions
and how they responded to the contradictory
individualist and innovative expectations
of modernism.
The key symbolic focus of the book is
the exclusion of Oscar Howe’s (1915-1983)
Umine Wacipe: War and Peace Dance (1958)
from the second Philbrook Indian Annual
wherein it was rejected as "a fine
painting . . . but not Indian." Through
beginning and ending with this early Sioux
modernist’s career and this instance,
the book refutes the previously reigning
idea that modern Indian art began in the
1960’s. In doing so, Anthes selectively
focuses on the very different careers
of Howe and the Pueblo painters Jose Lente
and Jimmy Byrnes, the Ojibwe modernists
Patrick DesJarlait and George Morrison,
the Cheyenne artist Dick West and the
faux Indian Yeffe Kimball. He weaves together
a fascinating web of relations showing
how the modernist conventions in these
artists’ works connect to pre-conquest
native traditions and how artists like
Howe and West engaged modernism and modernized
native American painting in very different
ways.
Native Moderns is a powerful warhorse
connecting these artists into modern American
art history. It is equally compelling
in terms of revealing how Barnett Newman
drew on local traditions to develop his
notion of the "Inter-American Consciousness"
and the "Primitive Universal"
with which he sought to define a unique
American aesthetic while simultaneously
rescuing it from European modernism. Ever
the modernist, Anthes rescues tribal identities
from a post-modernist sense of invention
and self-invention as in the case of Yeffe
Kimball, the iconic instance of a non-Indian
claiming to be Indian. Herein Anthes and
the American Indian Movement (AIM) understand
authenticity and identity as primordial
and genealogical essences and not at all
as invented constructs. In this, Anthes
manages to very successfully reveal the
innately hybrid identities of these artists
and the cultural struggles between "tradition,"
tradition and modernity that make this
book particularly compelling.
Native Moderns does the important
of work of opening the canon of modern
Western art to "non-Western"
modern art in its broadest global dimension,
appropriately advancing this project in
the American Fourth World, that is, in
terms of the ultimate colonized Other
- those within the First World. Besides
two other studies in the same series Objects/Histories,
namely Painting Culture (2002)
and In Senghor’s Shadow (2004),
this next study adds substantial weight
to these prior studies by even more extensively
delving into the intriguing history of
non-European artists previously excluded
from canonical modernism. Hence we learn
here about the crisis situation out of
which new native traditions emerged, how
abstract expressionism and modernism deeply
informed some of these artists’ careers
and how in cases they and their descendants’
struggled to disavow any such influences
believing that it made their work somehow
less authentic. We also gain fascinating
insight into how non-Indian American modernists
spiritually and conceptually drew on an
inter-American heritage adding an important
element to the by now somewhat threadbare
debate over modern arts inspiration in
"primitivism" which usually
focuses on the early 20th century
Parisian sources of inspiration in African,
Polynesian and other Orientalist traditions.
Native Moderns is a deft example
of contemporary scholarship that is entirely
accessible to the lay educated reader.
Anthes bridges discussions on changing
government cultural policies and the arts
with how artists’ successes depend
on their skills as culture brokers to
mediate Western and non-Western worlds,
on how educators and patrons are key agents
in the emergence of new forms of modernism,
as well as on the importance of place
and experience in an artists’ evolving
corpus and consciousness. All of the artists
considered here had highly ambiguous identities
and in fact, as the author describes,
their art can be seen as conscious attempts
to mediate their experience so as to make
themselves in the modern world. In the
case of Jose Lente and Jimmy Byrnes, this
was more limited to their Pueblo heritage
and their lives and labor in the Southwest,
whereas DesJarlait, Morrison, How and
West had far more cosmopolitan life experiences.
Yet Anthes manages to show how place and
tradition continue to inform their work
and consciousness, that is, how modernism
does not necessarily preclude tradition.
For example, he details how the modernist
nature of their works in the simple planar
and uni-dimensional treatment of form
is not so much evidence of the influence
of modernism but of an affinity which
expressly refers to continuities with
their personal tribal heritages and evidence
of the multicultural heritage within modernism.
It is of note however, unfortunately,
or fortunately, that Anthes presents an
explicit critique of "traditional
art" as being degenerate tourist
art which for some might leave it on an
arguably lame horse on modernist high
desert plains as perhaps best exemplified
with the final figure The End of the
Trail (1970) by Fritz Scholder.
To conclude, Native Moderns is
an intensely rich study best instanced
in the epochal story of Howe’s origins
as an artist in which his grandmother
healed him through song and story after
he had suffered a debilitating depression
and illness brought on by the experience
of detribalizing military education. As
Howe relates through Anthes: "She
would tell these stories, true ones, about
culture and life and everything that was
fine and good about the Dakota culture
. . . . The language she used was so poetic
and beautiful that I now try to equal
them by giving the visual form."
Blind, she traced her memories in sand,
healed he made them modern.
