Biography Delves Into The Legend Of Charles Russell
“Charles M. Russell, The Life and Legend of America’s Cowboy Artist” by John Taliaferro (Little, Brown, 318 pp., illustrated, $27.95)
Charlie Russell’s art has appeared on three postage stamps, the most recent commemorating the 1989 Montana centennial.
The identifying mark of a buffalo skull, which he scratched upon his work, appears in the corner of every Montana license plate.
A national wildlife refuge bears his name; so do a high school, a motel and a credit union.
He is, as biographer John Taliaferro reminds us in “Charles M. Russell,” the patron saint of the Big Sky.
To make a “cowboy artist” involves the closing of a frontier, since the role of the artist is superfluous in an actual frontier society. And it also needs the myth of a Golden Age.
Charlie was a rich kid from a St. Louis family with Yale connections, a 16-year-old school dropout who headed for “the pristine frontier only to discover that railroad tracks had arrived ahead of him.”
In 1880 Montana, he joined the last of the great cattle roundups and mingled with cowpunchers, Indians, itinerant preachers and prostitutes.
A self-taught painter, bartering his pictures in saloons and brothels, he based his compositions on nostalgia. “He belonged in the West, but he wasn’t from the West; he had been a cowboy, but he wasn’t exactly one anymore.”
He was an acclaimed artist regionally, but hardly an accomplished one.
Like Charlie, most of his contemporaries appear to have strayed from Someplace Else: Frederic Remington, born in Canton, N.Y., who hired an Indian to stand in his driveway when he required a model; William S. Hart, born in Newburgh, N.Y., a stock-company actor and the first cowboy movie star; and another actor, Harry Carey, born in White Plains, N.Y., whose vision of what a Western hero should be rubbed off on John Ford (born Sean O’Fienne, in Portland, Maine) and through Ford eventually reached apotheosis in John Wayne (born Marion Michael Morrison, in Winterset, Iowa).
The nativism of an Owen Wister, who proclaimed that the Anglo-Saxon cowboy constituted a master race (evidently he had never seen a Saturday night in Great Falls’ Silver Dollar saloon), echoed in the speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, but Charlie was good-natured, passive, an amiable drunk awash with sentiment, not unmerited, about the passing of the Old West.
Without the dynamism of his wife, Nancy, it seems probable that he never would have left a trace. She got him the commissions, pushed the pictures, arranged the publicity, trained his eye; surprisingly enough, they took in the landmark Armory Show of 1913. Nancy was unpopular with Charlie’s drinking pals, who resented losing him; nor was he the most ardent of suitors.
“Dear Nancy,” he wrote his bride, a fortnight before their wedding, “I reached home all ok and everyone was glad to her (sic) that you were better I hope you got your tooth bruch (sic) all right.”
Is it possible to categorize a genre artist whose picture-postcard scenes capture a transitional phase of American experience?
Taliaferro observes that the typical Russell collectors were male, subscribers to the strenuous life, often upper-management or executive types. “They saw themselves as captains of capitalism, men of reflex and decision, corporate cowboys of sorts.”
The art, with its toylike figures against high horizons, its florid naturalism and finicky attention to the details of costume and action, reminds one of the salon pictures of Jean Louis Meissonier.
Ironically, the real sweep of American space appears in Georgia O’Keeffe and Jackson Pollock.
Anecdotal portrayals of cowboy bunkhouses have a narrative value, though, and Charlie’s titles illustrate his interests: “Waiting for a Chinook,” “Attack on the Mule Train,” “Navajo Horse Thieves Hotly Pursued by Mexicans.”
Taliaferro’s biography, the first full-dress account, delves into long-forgotten areas such as B.M. Bower’s novel “Chip of the Flying U” (1905), the first feminist Western, but his subject’s personality overshadows his art.