La Farge and Remington

Abstract

John La Farge and Frederic Remington: The Masterworks are exhibitions of such very different late-nineteenth-century American artists that they would seem to call for separate assessment. One exhibition focuses on the intellectual, aristocratic, European-oriented La Farge, who worked on traditional themes in the mediums of oil, watercolor, illustration, murals, and stained glass; the other examines the practical, expansive, “American”-oriented Remington, who made his subject the American West in the mediums of oil, sculpture, illustration, and language. Yet these artists present similar problems in the historiography of American art. Partly because of their diversity, but even more because of the nature of their subject matter, the meaning of their achievement in the larger flow of American art history has been problematic. This review will focus not on specific choices of works in the exhibitions or even on the decisions to hold the exhibitions in the first place—there is no doubt that these artists are worthy of attention, and they are well treated by the curators' selections—but on the interpretative strategies of the exhibition organizers.