Post by Cliff Krainik on Jul 24, 2002 23:09:40 GMT -5
The Vanishing West, Restored to View
400 Catlin Portraits to Hang in Renwick
By Bret Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 24, 2002; Page C01
The American Indian portraits of George Catlin originated in the frontier plains of the 1830s. They were shown in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and New York and then they floated abroad to tour the great capitals of Europe. Forty years later, the Smithsonian had them in its possession, claimed as national treasures.
Now they're moving again, about eight blocks or so.
Two weeks ago, after planning a vast installation campaign, museum coordinators launched a much-anticipated move of the restored 400-plus paintings to a new home at the Renwick Gallery at 17th and Pennsylvania streets NW, where they'll go on view Sept. 6 through Jan. 19.
Previously able to display just a fraction of these, curators are draping the walls with Catlins in two of the Renwick's largest rooms. The result is a gripping collage of dead stares, emanating from civilizations long decimated.
The Pennsylvania-born Catlin, a passionate supporter of Western tribes, gained renown for his touring Indian Gallery -- oil paintings depicting posed warriors, implacable women and their environs. Financial straits forced him to give up his collection; the Indian Gallery was sold en masse to an industrialist named Joseph Harrison, who stored it in his steam boiler factory. Harrison's widow donated the collection to the Smithsonian in 1879. A few Catlins remained on display until 2001, when the American Art Museum shut its main branch at Eighth and G streets NW for a seven-year renovation.
Tony Giuffreda, a project coordinator, works in the Renwick Gallery's Grand Salon, where 111 of the pieces have already been hung on the north and west walls. He reaches the room's top corners with a mobile lift that elevates him 40 feet. As he climbs he gazes at the stacked faces of Omaha, Cheyenne, Crow and Blackfoot Indians -- painted in red or blue or green, tufts of feathers rising from their dark hair.
The portraits hang from thin strands of what Giuffreda calls "airplane wire." Only a few millimeters thick, it can withstand a weight of 700 pounds. "They use this as aircraft control cable, basically." Giuffreda explains. "It's used to move rudders and that kind of thing."
At the Renwick, Giuffreda loops the wire over a "hanging rail" near the top of each wall, and drops it to just few feet above the floor. Portraits are fixed on the wires with a Japanese-made device called an "earthquake clamp," which is easily adjusted with a touch of a button, but impossible to shake loose once it's set.
The show's catalogue will have a distinctly old-timey feel; it's based on an 1848 Catlin catalogue for European patrons.
In designing the wall display, museum curators drew a draft much like an architect's blueprint. Pictures were measured and drawn to scale, then arranged to fill wall space. But no reasonable approach to art is entirely scientific. Curators finally figured out what arrangement looks best by simply looking at them. On the floor.
"We have large templates here that mimic these windows," Giuffreda says, looking toward two towering, arched windows on the west wall. "They're the same dimensions. We lay them out on the floor and then we lay the paintings in the order the curator and designer want to see them on the wall. If they don't look quite right, they shift around a couple.
"Then they go up in that lift and they look down," he says.
(This might be why you've never seen an exhibition-in-progress. It begs for audience participation.)
Laura Baptiste, a public affairs officer at the Smithsonian, says Catlin went West "because he thought Native Americans as a culture would disappear. He wanted this to be a record of those cultures."
Painted just before the advent of the camera, and as countless tribes faced the terror of the Indian Removal Act, Catlin's paintings survive as testimonials to a way of life that is now the stuff of legend, and of art.
"George Catlin and His Indian Gallery" will be the most comprehensive display of Catlin's work in more than a century.
Divided between two floors, the exhibition will offer an audio tour of Catlin's diary entries, a surround video experience of thundering buffalo, and a half-hour educational video.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
Cliff Krainik
400 Catlin Portraits to Hang in Renwick
By Bret Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 24, 2002; Page C01
The American Indian portraits of George Catlin originated in the frontier plains of the 1830s. They were shown in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and New York and then they floated abroad to tour the great capitals of Europe. Forty years later, the Smithsonian had them in its possession, claimed as national treasures.
Now they're moving again, about eight blocks or so.
Two weeks ago, after planning a vast installation campaign, museum coordinators launched a much-anticipated move of the restored 400-plus paintings to a new home at the Renwick Gallery at 17th and Pennsylvania streets NW, where they'll go on view Sept. 6 through Jan. 19.
Previously able to display just a fraction of these, curators are draping the walls with Catlins in two of the Renwick's largest rooms. The result is a gripping collage of dead stares, emanating from civilizations long decimated.
The Pennsylvania-born Catlin, a passionate supporter of Western tribes, gained renown for his touring Indian Gallery -- oil paintings depicting posed warriors, implacable women and their environs. Financial straits forced him to give up his collection; the Indian Gallery was sold en masse to an industrialist named Joseph Harrison, who stored it in his steam boiler factory. Harrison's widow donated the collection to the Smithsonian in 1879. A few Catlins remained on display until 2001, when the American Art Museum shut its main branch at Eighth and G streets NW for a seven-year renovation.
Tony Giuffreda, a project coordinator, works in the Renwick Gallery's Grand Salon, where 111 of the pieces have already been hung on the north and west walls. He reaches the room's top corners with a mobile lift that elevates him 40 feet. As he climbs he gazes at the stacked faces of Omaha, Cheyenne, Crow and Blackfoot Indians -- painted in red or blue or green, tufts of feathers rising from their dark hair.
The portraits hang from thin strands of what Giuffreda calls "airplane wire." Only a few millimeters thick, it can withstand a weight of 700 pounds. "They use this as aircraft control cable, basically." Giuffreda explains. "It's used to move rudders and that kind of thing."
At the Renwick, Giuffreda loops the wire over a "hanging rail" near the top of each wall, and drops it to just few feet above the floor. Portraits are fixed on the wires with a Japanese-made device called an "earthquake clamp," which is easily adjusted with a touch of a button, but impossible to shake loose once it's set.
The show's catalogue will have a distinctly old-timey feel; it's based on an 1848 Catlin catalogue for European patrons.
In designing the wall display, museum curators drew a draft much like an architect's blueprint. Pictures were measured and drawn to scale, then arranged to fill wall space. But no reasonable approach to art is entirely scientific. Curators finally figured out what arrangement looks best by simply looking at them. On the floor.
"We have large templates here that mimic these windows," Giuffreda says, looking toward two towering, arched windows on the west wall. "They're the same dimensions. We lay them out on the floor and then we lay the paintings in the order the curator and designer want to see them on the wall. If they don't look quite right, they shift around a couple.
"Then they go up in that lift and they look down," he says.
(This might be why you've never seen an exhibition-in-progress. It begs for audience participation.)
Laura Baptiste, a public affairs officer at the Smithsonian, says Catlin went West "because he thought Native Americans as a culture would disappear. He wanted this to be a record of those cultures."
Painted just before the advent of the camera, and as countless tribes faced the terror of the Indian Removal Act, Catlin's paintings survive as testimonials to a way of life that is now the stuff of legend, and of art.
"George Catlin and His Indian Gallery" will be the most comprehensive display of Catlin's work in more than a century.
Divided between two floors, the exhibition will offer an audio tour of Catlin's diary entries, a surround video experience of thundering buffalo, and a half-hour educational video.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
Cliff Krainik