Regional Pieces to be Displayed With Collection

By Tracie Dungan

Posted: November 5, 2011 at noon

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BENTONVILLE — Museum goers who wonder what Crystal Bridges will display on opening day have thus far heard mainly about the American masterpieces and other prized works in its permanent collection. Visitors will also find several special exhibitions of local and regional interest, rich in art history and the story of America. They’ll include works owned by the Bentonville museum as well as works on loan.

The exhibitions will give insight into how deeply the museum will tie art and art history with American and state history. One of these showings will help unravel The Arkansas Traveler legend, which helped fuel the state’s hillbilly image in the 19th century and spawned several artworks and reproductions, a song, and names for everything from a racehorse, to newspapers and columnists and a baseball team.

Another exhibition will highlight the life of an Old West artist whose portfolio documenting American Indians of his time inspired an angry, pirated portfolio from a New York printer, while the artist himself eventually ended up in debtor’s prison in Europe.

Another exhibition entitled “Community Showcase” will allow Crystal Bridges to partner with and display works from four Northwest Arkansas museums: the Museum of Native American History in Bentonville, Shiloh Museum of Ozark History in Springdale, Pea Ridge National Military Park and Rogers Historical Museum.

THE ARKANSAS TRAVELER

Special exhibitions differ from the galleries where Crystal Bridges’ permanent collection will be displayed chronologically, said Manuela Well-Off-Man, assistant curator for Crystal Bridges.

Temporary showings have non-chronological themes, such as works by the same artist or works of a certain style of painting or other media. Special exhibitions could be an on-loan, traveling exhibition or, as is the case with Crystal Bridges’ first such showings, a blend of works on loan and the museum’s own holdings.

“The Arkansas Traveler” exhibition is an example of a blend of works from different owners.

In partnership with UA, Crystal Bridges is doing its part to further explain the “material culture surrounding the song” and the famous legend of the skit.

Jeannie Whayne, a UA history professor who is co-curator of the “Traveler” exhibit along with doctoral student Louise Hancox, said the fate of the original The Arkansas Traveler artwork is a matter of debate in the art and history fields.

As Well-Off-Man put it: “The original painting by Edward Payson Washbourne is lost, scholars believe.”

However, Whayne added: “The Arkansas History Commission believes it has the original.”

A year or so after Washbourne’s original was completed, the artist Leopold Grozelier rendered his own version of it: an 1859 handcolored, toned lithograph that had the original artist’s blessing, Well-Off-Man said.

“I think Washbourne himself had the lithograph printed,” she said. At the bottom, the first line of the melody from the sheet music for the “Traveler” song can be seen.

Grozelier’s version deviates from the usual spelling, adding an extra “l”: The Arkansas Traveller.

Crystal Bridges owns the Grozelier lithograph, Well-Off-Man said, as well as another print entitled North Bend in Residence of the Late President W.H. Harrison, a wood engraving by William Woodruff that also ties into the whole Traveler mythology.

The exhibit also will include a version of The Arkansas Traveler that the First National Bank of Berryville is loaning the museum for the show.

“That painting comes very close to the original,” Well-Off-Man said, adding that different interpretations have varying details.

“Some of them don’t have the hole in the roof,” she said, referring to the shack depicted as the gathering spot for the political discussion the painting’s characters are depicted as having.

The online Encyclopedia of Arkansas puts the Traveler legend’s origins at 1840.

That’s the year Sanford Faulkner, a supporter of Archibald Yell for governor, was campaigning in Northwest Arkansas’ Boston Mountains, Whayne said. “The story was he got lost,” she said.

Faulkner stopped at a cabin to ask for directions and found himself in a gubernatorial political debate. “The squatter in front of the shack engaged him in repartee,” Whayne said.

Faulkner then began performing this encounter in a humorous skit. The Arkansas-based version focused on the governor’s race and the wealthy versus the poor, while a national version was about the presidential campaign of 1840 between William Henry Harrison and Martin Van Buren — the famous “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” campaign in which the Whig Party of Harrison used a log cabin symbol.

The UA-curated exhibit focuses on the Traveler legend’s connection to the national race, Whayne said.

Harrison was trying to make himself appear downhome and folksy, she said, “When he actually owned a plantation and lived in a big fancy house.”

“In that way, the Whigs were able to appropriate the symbols of the frontier, when in fact the frontier belonged to the Democrats,” she said, and Arkansas also belonged to the Democratic Party.

The exhibit connects the Arkansas tale to the presidential race.

“The take-home message I guess we want is Arkansas, four years after achieving statehood, is already connected to the national stage in important ways,” Whayne said.

THE OLD WEST

For those who love the nostalgia and romance of the art of the Old West, Crystal Bridges will have an exhibition entitled “The Explorer and Pioneer Artists of the 1820s and 1830s.” It will feature works by George Catlin, Karl Bodmer, Peter Rindisbacher and George Winter, Well-Off-Man said.

“We have a really fascinating collection of color-plate books and portfolios,” she said, referring to Catlin, Bodmer and Rindisbacher.

These books and portfolios allowed artists to, in their day, promote their drawings, oil paintings, watercolors, sketches and lithographs, she said.

David C. Hunt of Tulsa, an author and expert on Old West art and a former museum curator and director, said most government and military expeditions out West in the 1800s — in the days before photography was widely used — included artists, map makers, topographers and others who could draw, primarily to document what they saw in their travels, not to mention newspapers who employed their own artists and draftsmen.

One of Catlin’s works in North American Indians, an 1844 hand-colored lithograph mounted on card, measuring 231/2 by 19 3/4 inches. It is part of an original Catlin portfolio entitled: “North American Indian Portfolio. Hunting Scenes and Amusements of the Rocky Mountains and Prairies of America,” according to Crystal Bridges.

“We will have another interesting little thing,” Well-Off-Man said. “There are some real gems in our rare book collection.”

The fact that Catlin had his original 1844 portfolio printed in London stirred the ire of a New York printer, Martin Ackerman. Offended at what he perceived as Catlin’s audacity not to print it in America, Ackerman decided to print his own Catlin portfolio.

“He printed that without permission from Catlin, so it was a pirated book,” Well-Off-Man said, adding that even Ackerman’s forward to his version of the portfolio was penned with angry words.

Hunt added: “I think in those days, there wasn’t any copyright back then — so they couldn’t really do anything to him.” (Or, at the very least, the copyright laws of the time didn’t appear to apply to artists who published works in foreign lands).

He explained that the artist probably hadn’t given a thought to the notion of anyone in America caring where he sold: He was the archetypal starving artist, always desperate to sell his work, lived a “tragic life.”

“He was always out of money, and he got thrown in debtor’s prison in London,” Hunt said. “Catlin was not the iconic person that he is today: He was just another guy out there.”

Furthermore, Catlin had hardly found a welcoming market in America.

“Pictures of Indians weren’t all that exotic in the United States,” Hunt said. “When he tried to sell his whole collection to Congress, Congress said they didn’t want pictures of Indians — they wanted art.”

“Now we look at the pictures and think they’re just marvelous, because they capture a vanished time and people,” he said. “You can’t go out on the prairie and see it” like Catlin did.

Catlin found that the Europeans of his day also thought his western art was exotic and marvelous, and they bought lots of it, enthusiastically. He would take his large collection of paintings, watercolors, artifacts and even American Indian costumes around in a sort of Wild West show for Europe.

“He had live dancers — it was practically a circus,” Hunt said.

Still, the sales and excitement didn’t keep him out of debt or out of jail.

A man named Joseph Harrison from Philadelphia saved the day. Harrison, a wealthy railroad-engine manufacturer, went overseas and saw him.

“There was poor Catlin in jail. Harrison bought his collection,” Hunt said. “With that money, you see, Catlin could get out of debtor’s prison.”

Harrison’s wife would ultimately donate this Catlin collection to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, Hunt said.

This article was previously published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on Sept. 4.

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