This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: If you've recently found yourself lost in the St. Louis Art Museum, you are forgiven. So much has changed in the old Cass Gilbert building that almost all once familiar galleries are now full of surprises, with the airing of paintings, sculptures, installations and decorative arts that were hiding in storage.
While many of the new gallery installations are likely to stay somewhat constant – with occasional outside lending, rotation or removal for preservation sake – others are only temporarily installed. The Edward Curtis: Visions of Native America special exhibit in the small hallway space of Gallery 321 is worth catching while on view. This display of 11 photogravure prints is drawn from the many hundreds of Curtis prints in the museum collection.
Curator Eric Lutz presents gallery text that provides entry into the complex relationship between Curtis and his Native American subjects. The gallery text reveals a tension between Curtis’ stated intent of documenting the history of 80 tribes west of the Mississippi from the Mexican border to northern Alaska and his commercial interest in constructing a record of Western expansion.
Curtis’ pictorialist style was and is aesthetically pleasing. His photography shows him to have been a masterful storyteller.
But Curtis dressed his subjects in inaccurate traditional costume (see: A Medicine Head-dress – Blackfoot) to create an ethnographic simulation of intact Native American peoples (Acoma Water Girls). By the time Curtis found support by Theodore Roosevelt and Pierpont Morgan for his “salvage ethnology,” the posed images he’d fabricated were already nostalgic tropes. Curtis did not, however, wish to change the fate of his subjects, the “disappearing race.” He wrote, “Civilization, with its tremendous force and its insatiable desire to possess all, must necessarily crush the weaker life of primitive man.“
In, Ready for the Charge – Apsaroke, a man on horseback wears a feathered headdress, holds a bow and arrow at the ready. The scene contrasts with the reservation reality of the model photographed. Because he positioned his work as field research, Curtis’ depictions carried influential authority. Curtis used photography to make the subjective appear objective. Examining his images with a critical eye is good practice for developing media savvy.