Painting Culture, Painting Nature: Stephen Mopope, Oscar Jacobson, and the Development of Indian Art in Oklahoma by Gunlög Fur

Abstract

Reviewed by: Painting Culture, Painting Nature: Stephen Mopope, Oscar Jacobson, and the Development of Indian Art in Oklahoma by Gunlög Fur Hadley Jerman Painting Culture, Painting Nature: Stephen Mopope, Oscar Jacobson, and the Development of Indian Art in Oklahoma. By Gunlög Fur. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. Pp. 368. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index.) Late in the 1920s, a group of Kiowa artists arrived at the University of Oklahoma (OU) to study under the patronage of Oscar Brousse Jacobson (1882–1966), a Swedish-born painter and head of the university’s art department. The eldest member of the influential group who would collectively become known as the Kiowa Six—and the only member of the group to make painting a lifelong pursuit—Stephen Mopope (1898–1974), forged a lasting friendship with Jacobson. Gunlög Fur’s compelling text traces Jacobson’s and Mopope’s “concurrent histories” as part of a “larger process . . . of how American Indians and immigrants in different circumstances and localities forged alliances and collaborative partnerships in order to protect and advance both cultural distinctiveness and political inclusion” (6–7). While acknowledging the power structures that pervaded their interaction, Fur explores how Mopope’s and Jacobson’s lives intertwined and shaped twentieth-century Native American art. Part 1 of Fur’s account begins in the 1860s—seven decades before Jacobson and Mopope met at OU in 1926. This long view allows her to place Mopope’s and Jacobson’s “encounter”—which does not occur until chapter four—within alternating contexts of Kiowa history and the Swedish immigrant experience on the Southern Plains. Part 2 draws on interviews, oral histories, and archival sources to reconstruct the interaction between the Kiowa artists and Jacobson. In part 3, Fur follows Jacobson’s and Mopope’s careers and influence on widening circles of artists. Thus, while in part a double biography, the book functions primarily as a narrative of a complex moment in history as told through the “entangled” interactions between two highly influential but overlooked figures in American art history. The book is significant as the first full-length, serious scholarly examination of Mopope’s life and relationship with the Swedish professor. The agency Fur accords Mopope throughout the text is refreshing, as is her deft weaving together of multiple—sometimes contradictory—perspectives on Jacobson and the Kiowa Six mined from archives across the Southern Plains. She relies heavily on what she terms “silent archives” (15)—oral histories—shared by Mopope’s granddaughter, Vanessa Paukeigope Jennings; the unpublished memoirs of Jeanne d’Ucel (Jacobson’s wife); and interviews of Mopope’s contemporaries at OU: artists James Auchiah, Lois Smoky, and Olinka Hrdy. The “silent archive” notably absent from Fur’s otherwise impressively researched study is Jacobson’s and Mopope’s art. A small section of color plates at the center of the book and black-and-white family photographs [End Page 469] spread throughout are intriguing and well chosen, but there is surprisingly minimal discussion of Mopope’s (or Jacobson’s) art in the book. Fur seems uncomfortable discussing images, often relying on the words of art historians Janet Berlo, Ruth Phillips, and Laura Smith. Her apparent discomfort in addressing art is perhaps most obvious in her mistaking a peace pipe for a gun in Chiricahua Apache sculptor Allan Houser’s bronze sculpture, May We Have Peace, on the OU campus (283). Had Fur afforded the art produced by Houser, let alone Jacobson and Mopope, the attention she devotes to oral histories, she would have found much to support her discussion. But Fur never intended to write an art history, as she states from the outset. The book instead makes an important and engaging contribution to the remarkably thin literature on the Kiowa Six. Fur succeeds in weaving together diverse perspectives to share the intersecting biographies of two men and the history of their relationship in a pivotal moment in Native American—and more broadly, American—art history. Hadley Jerman Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association