HISTORY INTO ART AND ANTHROPOLOGY - Snite Museum of Art ...

THE WHITE SWAN MUSLIN:
Deeds of Honor
CANDACE S. GREENE
In recent decades, we have become increasingly aware that the meanings of objects
are never static. Views of them shift as they change locale and move through a
social world, employed by different people for different purposes. The anthropologist
Igor Kopytoff introduced the idea that objects have “cultural biographies”; this
has proven to be a productive way to think about objects in museums—exploring
the hands through which they have passed and the various meanings they have
assumed over time. 1
Kopytoff ’s approach has been applied most successfully in considerations of the life
of an object after it has left the person who made it, particularly when the maker
is from a community without a tradition of literacy; this is the method’s major
limitation. Often, considerably more information is available about the object’s
subsequent owners than about its creator. Such is the case with what is known as
the White Swan muslin, a large sheet of fabric in the Father Lindesmith collection
at the Snite Museum of Art that is covered with paintings of war scenes by a
Native American artist. Dynamically executed images of men and horses race amid
flying bullets and arrows. The clash of arms, the glorious charge, and the uncertain
outcome all impart drama to the stained and aged cloth, which the collector called
a “blanket.” This essay examines the context within which the White Swan muslin
was created and focuses on the early part of its “life.”
THE LINDESMITH MUSLIN
In August 1889, Father Lindesmith bought several items, including a pictographic
muslin, from the Custer Store at the Crow Agency in Montana. He placed a tag
on the object reading “Crow Indian Blanket. I bought it on the Big Horn River,
Montana for 6.00” and noted, in both his account book and a memorandum of that
year, “Bought a Crow Indian Blanket, Custer Store, 1889.” Lindesmith carefully
recorded specifics about his purchasing of objects but provided minimal information
about other relevant aspects of his acquisitions. As a result, in this case, several
questions arise: Who painted the muslin? What motivated him to paint it? How
did it come to be available for purchase in the Custer Store? Fortunately, careful
study of the object itself can provide some answers to these tantalizing questions.
We know, for a start, that the Crow warrior White Swan painted the muslin. His
identity was established by recognizing similarities in style and content to other
works he is known to have made. At least fifteen paintings have been attributed
to him, linked to one another by the many scenes they share and to White Swan
by the few for which his name is definitively known. Others likely remain to
be discovered. With that many examples spanning a number of years, a picture
emerges of White Swan as a professional artist who created works for sale. Like
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