Frederic Remington and the West

<p><i>Frederic Remington and the West</i> sheds new light on the remarkably complicated and much misunderstood career of Frederic Remington. This study of the complex relationship between Remington and the American West focuses on the artist's imagination and how it expressed itself. Ben Merchant Vorpahl takes into account all the dimensions of Remington's extensive work-from journalism to fiction sculpture and painting. He traces the events of Remington's life and makes extensive use of literary and art criticism and nineteenth-century American social cultural and military history in interpreting his work.</p> <p>Vorpahl reveals Remington as a talented sensitive and sometimes neurotic American whose work reflects with peculiar force the excitement and distress of the period between the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. Remington was not a western artist in the conventional sense; neither was he a historian: he lacked the historian's breadth of vision and discipline expressing himself not through analysis but through synthesis. Vorpahl shows that even while Remington catered to the sometimes maudlin sometimes jingoistic tastes of his public and his editors his resourceful imagination was at work devising a far more demanding and worthwhile design-a composite work executed in prose pictures and bronze. This body of work as the author demonstrates demands to be regarded as an interrelated whole. Here guilt shame and personal failure are honestly articulated and death itself is confronted as the artist's chief subject.</p> <p>Because Remington was so prolific a painter sculptor illustrator and writer and because his subjects techniques and media were so apparently diverse the deeper continuity of his work had not previously been recognized. This study is a major contribution to our understanding of an important American artist. In addition Vorpahl illuminates the interplay between history artistic consciousness and the development of America's sense of itself during Remington's lifetime.</p>