American Southwest
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PROVO, UTAH
Attracted by this dramatic scenery, artists from the eastern United States and Europe faced the challenge of capturing an open, wild landscape entirely different from anything they had seen before. Of this experience, the late painter Emil Bisttram wrote, "Whenever I tried to paint what was before me I was frustrated by the grandeur of the scenery and the limitless space. Above all there was that strange, almost mystic quality of light."
A new exhibit at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art demonstrates the successful attempts of Bisttram and others to capture that elusive grandeur of the American Southwest. "Wide-Open Spaces" is a collection of 80 paintings by a variety of early 20th-century artists. The exhibit explores the artistic innovations in color, composition and technique developed by these artists to reproduce the majesty of the region. It includes works drawn from the museum's permanent collection as well as the Diane and Sam Stewart Art Collection on loan to the Church-owned school.
"Wide-Open Spaces" will be on display until March 10, 2012, in the Robert W. and Amy T. Barker and Milton and Gloria Barlow galleries on the lower level of the museum, which have been remodeled to evoke a Southwest ambiance. Admission is free.
"Many Western artists broke the rules of traditional landscape painting in order to show the vastness and overwhelming scale of the Western landscape," said Paul Anderson, the museum's curator of Southwest American art. "While traditional landscapes often include trees on both sides of the picture to contain the image and give a sense of completeness, Western landscapes generally dispense with these framing elements and emphasize unbroken horizontal lines to give a sense of incompleteness, implying that the sweeping Western landscape is too large to fit on the canvas."
The techniques enlisted by the featured artists allow museum visitors to develop a stronger appreciation for the region's unique beauty.
"Southwest art can be stunning, moving and spiritually inspiring in its depictions of one of the last remaining great wilderness areas," said Herman du Toit, an art educator for the exhibit. "I'm hoping this exhibition will draw viewers closer to the Southwest landscape and help them attain a new, more authentic relationship with this region of which we are all a part."
The BYU Museum of Art is located on the school's Provo campus. Call (801) 422-8287 for tour information.
