The Beaux-Arts Indians of George Brush

The models at the Beaux-Arts took their assigned poses from the classics of art history. Brush's Indians do the same.

The first warrior in a row of them in "Before the Battle" (1886) takes his pose from Michelangelo's "David." The second strikes a model's pose standard in the art school, though the pole that holds his arm up has been replaced by a spear.

The two figures in the foreground of "The Picture Writer's Story" (1884) are also acting out quotations -- from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. The picture writer's pose is that of the Libyan Sibyl; his young listener's is Adam's. Of course we're meant to notice. Brush quotes the past on purpose -- to elevate the classiness of his art-for-art's-sake art.

Out in the Wild West, Brush had to have a studio. His tepee (with a wood stove) was covered in thin muslin that admitted even light. He also needed models. The first one he employed was a young Crow who was willing to strip naked and stand there without moving for four hours at a time. Brush paid $2 a session, "about what I would pay a model in N.Y.," he wrote.

First he'd drawn from plaster casts, then from the Beaux-Arts model. Now the painter was working "from the Indian."

His Indians aren't really Indians; they aren't really people. They have no history, no misery, no resentment of their foes. Like the dead birds by their sides (Brush was great at birds) or the armbands around their biceps (Brush was peerless, too, at depicting gleaming copper), they are academic props.

Brush didn't ride a horse to Wyoming. He took the train, the new wide-funneled train. Life was changing clangingly in the 19th century -- and rather than confront that change, lots of artists (not just Brush) chose to paint the pure-souled noble primitives of the pre-industrial past.

In France, Jean-François Millet painted pious peasants. In Britain, Sir Edwin Landseer painted kilted Highlanders. Paul Gauguin chose Tahitians. Such figures and Brush's Indians have a lot in common. They don't complain of poverty or gripe about injustice or dispute with their betters. Their presence in a picture reassures the viewer: Your soul is as pure as theirs.

Many writers of the time also sought to see nobility in the lower orders. "Tho' I've belted you and flayed you/By the livin' Gawd that made you/You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!" Rudyard Kipling wrote. The Lone Ranger's trusty Tonto and Natty Bumppo's Chingachgook and Brush's arty Indians are noble natives, too.

Brush belongs in the National Gallery. Curator Nancy K. Anderson, who arranged this exhibition, did so for good reason. Brush could paint. His training seems archaic now. That doesn't mean his time was wasted. Some of Brush's details are admirably fine. Take a look, for instance, at "The Indian and the Lily" (1887). The soft and beaded leather of the Indian's thigh-high leggings, and the daylight on his arm, and the white and downy feathers of the spoonbill he's just slain, are all remarkably convincing. Brush's technique is terrific. It's only when you look at the picture as a whole that its believability starts to fall apart.

In 1886, the warriors of Geronimo had been transported from the far Southwest and imprisoned in Fort Marion, an Army post in Florida. Hence this Florida Apache. Is he yearning for his captured land? No, he's reaching for a lily, an old emblem of purity. And his southwestern buckskin leggings make no sense at all. Why aren't they muddy? How come they haven't rotted in that fetid mangrove swamp?

The picture is a fiction. So are the others. When the painter shows us Indian artists working in their studios or chatting with their patrons or sketching from their props, we are nearing once again the art students of Paris. This is not how Indians lived. In 1884, when Brush came upon some Indians living, as most did then, in a "miserable condition," he turned away disgusted. To pursue the goals of art in such a situation was, he wrote, "impossible." The subject he had come to paint had proved "so unattractive" and "above all so depressing" that the painter gave it up.

Brush stopped painting Indians in 1890. For the next 50 years (the artist died, not famous, in 1941), he specialized instead in images of mothers posing with their children, smooth secular madonnas based on Florentine examples. "I live for art and not for Indians," wrote George de Forest Brush.

George de Forest Brush: The Indian Paintings, the first exhibition of his 20 Native American pictures, through Jan. 4 at the National Gallery of Art's East Building, Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW. Monday-Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sunday 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Admission is free. For information: 202-737-4215 or http://www.nga.gov.