OUTDOOR SOUTHWEST - Desert Magazine of the Southwest

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... THE SAME VIEW AFTER THE LITHOGRAPHERS HAD SUPERIMPOSED THEIR OWN IDEAS UPON THE WORK OF THE ARTIST.
For Gunnison he drew some splendid
scenes of the Cochetopa Pass and
the Sangre de Cristos which appeared
with others in the second volume of the
Pacific Railroar 1 Reports, but they were
his last contribution to an image of the
West. In the Sevier Valley with Captain
Gunnison and six others he was
murdered by Ute Indians. And how
near to the bones of Ben!
Edward's days with the West were
also closed. Hereafter his talents were
expended for the navy in the far Pacific.
His return from Japan in 1860 was followed
by a short service in the Civil
War after which he died in Philadelphia
in 1863.
The Kerns had flourished in an age
of artistic Romanticism. Thomas Cole
and Thomas Doughty, Thomas Birch
and Jasper. Cropsey—these were among
the Romantic painters whose works the
Kerns absorbed during their youth. Well
they knew the Hudson River school of
landscape with its moody evocations,
and the wind from the American West
(was it Shelley's wild west wind?) blew
in the same intellectual direction. A
later group of Romantics, like Albert
Bierstadt, substituted the Rocky Mountains
for the Hudson River; the scene
changed but not the technique and the
moods. The West was attractive to
Romantics for one reason, because it
was still little enough known to be sub-
ject to legend. The trans-Mississippi
West, like the fountains of Bimini or
the pearls of Calafia, was still the stuff
of dreams. In the Kerns' day the myth
of the Great American Desert was being
supplanted by the myth of the Garden
of the West, while the myth of the
Noble Savage continued its traditional
clash with the myth of the Villainous
Indian. But all were myths and all were
Romantics; they were emotions and
wishful thinking, not rational judgments
of fact.
To what extent did the Kerns as topographic
artists Romanticize their image
of this West?
In this connection the important thing
to remember about men like the Kerns
is that their purposes were scientific
and reportorial. Simpson or Sitgreaves
or Gunnison, who hired them, did so
because, as Fremont said, they could
"hold those lovely views in all their delicate
coloring," that is, report the scene
exactly as it was seen. It is interesting
to note that Eugene Delacroix, the
French painter, was employed about the
same time to illustrate for a diplomatic
mission to Algiers. His resulting "documents,"
however, were highly Romantic,
imaginative interpretations of an exotic
land. The Kerns, even if they had
had the skill of Delacroix, had none
of his inclination to interpret Romantically.
They themselves held few illusions
about the West. They were intensely
curious, but their natural reactions
tended to be skeptical with a liberal
laugh for the overblown. Nothing in any
of their writings remotely approaches
Catlin's description of Indians "whose
daily feats with their naked limbs, might
vie with those of the Grecian youths in
the beautiful rivalry of the Olympian
games." On the contrary, the Kerns
not only, as we have seen, depicted some
Indian women as "up and down like
a plank board," but found whole tribes,
like the Mojaves, ugly, dirty, and villainous.
They did evaluate Cheyenne
art work or Pomo crafts with real appreciation,
but never did they see the
West in terms of idealized Indians surrounded
by an exotic land.
Yet judging from the lithographs
taken from Kern sketches, the brothers
seem frequently to stylize and exaggerate
for effect, rather like F. W. Egloffstein
who followed them into the Southwest.
Dick's tall, balloon-like version
of the cliffs above Casa Blanca in Canyon
de Chelly are as fantastic as were
Egloffstein's engravings of brooding
Grand Canyon spires. This, as Wallace
Stegner has said, was not falsification;
it was what the Romantic vision actually
saw. Nevertheless, it was not realism,
and the Kerns might seem, therefore,
October, 1961 / Desert Magazine / 23