Dan Hurley: The dark side of America's frontier history
[Dan Hurley is the assistant vice president for history and research at the Cincinnati Museum Center. He is also the staff historian for Channel 12 News and the executive producer of Local 12 Newsmakers. Reach him at dhurley@cincymuseum.org.]
No painting by a Cincinnati artist is more arresting than Henry Farny's "The Song of the Talking Wire."
Owned by the Taft Museum of Art, downtown, the painting is on loan to the Cincinnati Art Museum as the opening image in its "Vanishing Frontier: Rookwood, Farny and the American Indian."
The 1904 painting depicts an Indian medicine man in the center of a snow-covered field leaning against a telegraph pole listening to the coded communications of a society whose relentless expansion over 400 years was on the verge of overwhelming its few remaining outposts.
Stylistically, "Talking Wire" is a wonderful opening for the 39 beautiful watercolor and gouache treatments of American Indians by Farny and the dozens of beautiful Rookwood vases and plaques depicting Indians in the exhibit.
Thematically, however, the pathos of "Talking Wire" is an exception in the great body of Farny's work.
The vast majority of the scenes he so skillfully paints present the American Indian nostalgically, the way that white society, and potential white buyers, preferred to imagine them.
Henry Farny and other Cincinnati artists fascinated with Indian subjects between 1880 and 1910 were struggling through a critical moment in American history.
In 1890 the U.S. Census Bureau declared the frontier had become "so broken into isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line."
The "closing of the frontier" carried sweeping psychological import for a society that believed "frontier" was essential to the nation's very identity....
Read entire article at http://news.cincypost.com
No painting by a Cincinnati artist is more arresting than Henry Farny's "The Song of the Talking Wire."
Owned by the Taft Museum of Art, downtown, the painting is on loan to the Cincinnati Art Museum as the opening image in its "Vanishing Frontier: Rookwood, Farny and the American Indian."
The 1904 painting depicts an Indian medicine man in the center of a snow-covered field leaning against a telegraph pole listening to the coded communications of a society whose relentless expansion over 400 years was on the verge of overwhelming its few remaining outposts.
Stylistically, "Talking Wire" is a wonderful opening for the 39 beautiful watercolor and gouache treatments of American Indians by Farny and the dozens of beautiful Rookwood vases and plaques depicting Indians in the exhibit.
Thematically, however, the pathos of "Talking Wire" is an exception in the great body of Farny's work.
The vast majority of the scenes he so skillfully paints present the American Indian nostalgically, the way that white society, and potential white buyers, preferred to imagine them.
Henry Farny and other Cincinnati artists fascinated with Indian subjects between 1880 and 1910 were struggling through a critical moment in American history.
In 1890 the U.S. Census Bureau declared the frontier had become "so broken into isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line."
The "closing of the frontier" carried sweeping psychological import for a society that believed "frontier" was essential to the nation's very identity....