Of the inaugural exhibitions in the National Museum of the American Indian, "Native Modernism" is the best looking and the least amorphous. That's because it shows you beauty steadily evolving, and skill expanding, and history in detail, which most of the others don't.
In it are two artists -- Allan Houser (1914-1994) and George Morrison (1919-2000). Both were beloved teachers, and steady pros. Houser lived in Santa Fe. He made prideful statues of carved stone and cast bronze. George Morrison was born and died in northern Minnesota but lived for many years in Greenwich Village, Provincetown and Paris. He made abstracted landscapes, assembling the largest from pieced-together planes of sawed-and-sanded wood. A divide afflicts their show.
"Native Modernism," inevitably, pulls in two directions. You know that from its title. "Native" carries with it a sense of the primordial, of being on this continent, as the Indians put it, "since the beginning of time." "Modernism" makes you think of hunting for the new.
The show -- which inaugurates the third-floor space for changing exhibitions -- would like to be perceived as Chippewa and Apache. That both these men were Indians and sometimes treated Indian themes, however, is a truth that doesn't tell one much about their works of art. The "Indianness" proclaimed throughout the new museum is not core to this exhibit. Morrison and Houser shared another heritage. Their objects, when examined, lead the mind through resonant and rooted visual traditions that aren't Indian at all. The intricate and honorable traditions that wind through it instead are Arcadian, abstract-expressionist, classroom academic and neoclassical. Both these men were modernists.
This isn't really a show about Indianness. It's a show about 20th-century art.
W. Richard West Jr., the museum's director, likes to call his institution "the museum different." Fortunately "Native Modernism" is "the exhibition same" -- it has a catalogue, and traditional wall labels so that you know what you're looking at, and oil paintings, and statues on pedestals, and a chronology. In all this it resembles other modern-art shows long seen on the Mall.
The new museum knows this but has something else to stress: Houser and Morrison, writes director West, "hold our attention for another reason as well: They were Indians, and every inch so."
But they were different kinds of Indians. One came from the woodlands, one came from the West. And though both of them were modernists, they made different kinds of art.
George Morrison belonged to the Grand Portage Band of the Chippewa. The museum identifies all of its exhibitors by tribal affiliation. Morrison, "every inch" an Indian, was also part Scottish, hence his name. In a book of reminiscences, "Turning the Feather Around" (1998), he says his totem was the raven, and that his father hunted beaver. Morrison was born, and died at age 80, on the forested shores of Lake Superior, long his people's land.
As a kid he made $1 tomahawks and canoe-themed tie racks, but not for long. The craft of his art isn't Chippewa-traditional -- no basketry, no beadwork. Nor did he spend his childhood drinking in ancient Indian lore. ("There wasn't much more than a smattering of Indian stories left," he remembered.) The key traditions in his art are those he was exposed to in the progressive, non-Indian art schools where he learned and taught -- the Minneapolis School of Art, the Art Students League in Manhattan and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris.
In 1963 Morrison was appointed assistant professor of art at the Rhode Island School of Design. He became a full professor -- in studio art, at the University of Minnesota -- in 1971.
Allan Houser was a Chiricahua Apache. His people, unlike Morrison's, had been moved around a lot, partly by their nomadism, partly by the U.S. Army. "The mountains and deserts of Arizona and New Mexico were the landscape of his blood," N. Scott Momaday writes in the catalogue, but "he knew Fort Sill, where his father was Geronimo's interpreter." Like Morrison, he was indebted to non-Indian art teachers, in his case especially to Dorothy Dunn, the progressive young woman from the Art Institute of Chicago who started the painting studio of the Santa Fe Indian School in 1932. Her students shared a style, and Houser was one of her best. She taught them what to paint, and how. They were all to show Indian scenes they'd seen themselves -- of sandstone buttes, and ponies, and Indians being Indian. Dunn's school provided water-soluble paints, and expected a certain look. The style she promoted was decorative, depictive, strongly-outlined and exact.
Houser, for a while -- but only for a while -- did just as he was bid.
Morrison was a second-generation abstract expressionist. That art-historical label, with its hints of Eighth Street in Manhattan and automatic drawing and explosive "one-shot" paintings all done in one go, rises like a perfume from his almost-abstract art.
