Russell's West: Artist gives idealized look at the Western landscape

DENVER • You can almost hear the words as you walk through the Denver Art Museum galleries.

“Those were the days,” the rooms whisper.

Here, the West is truly wild, and the cowboys don’t look all that much different from outlaws. Buffalo rule untouched land that stretches farther than imagination. Indians live proudly. Horses have attitude and a loyal dog can mean the difference between life and death.

But even as artist Charles M. Russell created the 60 works in “The Masterworks of Charles M. Russell: A Retrospective of Paintings and Sculpture,” those days were already long past — if, indeed, they ever really existed as he pictured them. For Russell, interlopers brought by new railroads — the influx fueled by ubiquitous images of noble savages and wide open spaces — had destroyed a way of life.

“He aspires to get back to a West that was gone,” says Joan Carpenter Troccoli, as she looks at “When the Land Belonged to God” (1914). Against a backdrop of a pristine (maybe even primordial) Montana, the lead buffalo in a thundering herd rushes toward you, meeting your eyes with what has to be described as reproach. Many critics say this painting represents the peak of Russell’s art and his preservationist ideology. “He couldn’t do it in reality, so he’d do it in his art.”

Like many boys in the late 1800s, Russell yearned for adventure: to discover the rugged, exciting life he knew from dime novels, to glimpse the hardscrabble existence of the boatmen and traders coming upriver.

Hoping that the hard life of Montana might realign his priorities, his wealthy St. Louis family allowed him to drop out of school

and travel there with a family friend in 1880. He wasn’t yet 16.

It turned out to be all he’d hoped for, and for 11 years he worked as a Montana wrangler. He did all the things that cowboys do, although reportedly with no gift for it (lazy, some called him).

In his off hours, though, Russell, who lived in Montana until his death in 1926, drew images of the men, the back-breaking work and the world he so admired.

In 1893, he put aside the cowboy life to become a full-time artist. He married Nancy Cooper three years later, and as his agent, she helped make him one of the country’s most beloved Western artists.

“She was the enforcer,” says Troccoli, laughing. “She made sure he worked.”

Troccoli has been working on this project, which is the first Russell retrospective ever, for four years. Some pieces came from the museum’s Petrie Institute of Western American Art. Others came from the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, the Amon Carter Museum and the Sid Richardson Museum in Fort Worth, the Montana Historical Society in Helena and others. (Material the Fine Arts Center recently sold to the Gilcrease — gathered after his death, in 1926 with the help of Russell’s wife — was, unfortunately, not included.)

Many of these paintings and sculptures have never been loaned out before.

“We gutted some galleries for this show,” says Troccoli, senior scholar with the Petrie Institute. “There was a general feeling amongst the curators and directors that Charlie Russell deserved a show like this.”

Wander through the exhibition, which is arranged around Russell’s favorite themes, and Russell’s voice is loud and unmistakable. Not only evident in letters full of folksy observation and trademark misspellings — “The cliffs make a natural fense for everything but buffalo,” he writes of a failed wrangling — or the visual vocabulary Russell returned to again and again, but in his growth as a storyteller.

Ultimately, everything — the action, the color, the details, the figures, the animals — is in service to his narrative.

And Russell liked to tell stories.

Take “The Hold Up” (1899) and “Innocent Allies” (1914). The first depicts the infamous hold-up of the Miles City-Deadwood stagecoach by “Big Nose George” Parrott. Like the cover of a dime novel (which Russell also illustrated during his career), it’s all about the climax, rendered here in muddy hues and vaguely painted peripheral details. As in much of his earlier work, Russell keeps the viewer at a comfortable distance from action.

Over time, though, Russell developed a muscular, almost-cinematic way of telling visual stories. As in many of his mature works, he grounds the viewer below the action in “Innocent Allies,” practically shoving you into the scene.

Once there, you have to work to find the distant hold-up, which is at the right of the frame. Instead of voyeuristically reveling in the robbery, you find yourself siding with the horses, which are the real focus of the painting: three unwitting accomplices waiting for this momentary distraction to end.

It’s clever, a sly indoctrination to a personal philosophy that embraced the West with a surprising understanding. Unlike such painters as Frederic Remington, Taos painters such as Eanger Irving Couse and Ernest Blumenschein, Russell didn’t use the denizens of his Wild West as props. He tries to insinuate a little of the empathy he felt for the often ignored (horses, buffalo or other animals) or the debased by society (Indians, women, cowboys, outlaws).

“One thing Russell had that Remington didn’t was humanity,” Troccoli says, walking over to a luscious painting of an Indian woman waiting on a bluff for the return of the hunters. She is strong, a force to be reckoned with.

“He really saw how people looked and acted.

“He has so many dedicated fans because he was so human,” she says and then, she smiles. “You just kind of fall for the guy.”

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Contact the writer at 476-1602.

“The Masterworks of Charles M. Russell”

When: Through Jan. 10

Where: Denver Art Museum, 100 W. 14th Avenue Parkway, Denver

Admission: $10 Colorado residents and $13 others, $8/$10 seniors and college students, $3/$5 ages 6-18, members free; 1-720-865-5000,      denverartmuseum.org

Something else: Admission is free the first Saturday of every month.

Worth the drive: Even if you’re not a diehard Russell fan, you’ll get a lot out of these images of the West.

More of the West in denver

• “Allen True’s West” This three-part exhibition of True’s legacy runs in walking distance from each other at the Denver Art Museum (100 W. 14th Avenue Parkway), Denver Public Library (10 W. 14th Avenue Parkway), and the Colorado Historical Society (1300 Broadway). Closes March 28.

• “At the Foot of the Rockies: Art from the Moffett Collection” Three rooms of Western art of the Rockies, Fine Arts Center, 30 W. Dale St., Colorado Springs. Closes Nov. 15.