Book Description

Beginning in 1974, the Anschultz Collection, an assemblage of over five hundred paintings of the American West, exhibited throughout the United States and in eight foreign countries. It was returned to Denver in February 1990 after an acclaimed tour of the Soviet Union. West, West, West is the revised English-language version of the award-winning catalog that accompanied the collection's USSR tour. Curator Elizabeth Cunningham has adapted the historical essay, originally written for a Russian audience, to provide an assessment of the events, locales, issues, and personalities important to the American West. She touches on key issues such as how American literature shaped ideas about the West, what role artists played in government explorations of the area, and how their paintings documented successive and overlapping frontiers. The catalog features eighty-four color plates of the collection's most important paintings, which are juxtaposed with sixty-eight artist biographies. New major acquisitions are presented in this edition that have not been reproduced elsewhere, such as William Jacob Hay's The Gathering of the Herds, Alfred Jacob Miller's Breaking Up Camp at Sunrise, and Albert Bierstadt's Wind River, Wyoming. The chronological arrangement of the text and color reproductions parallels the successive generations of artists who provided visual documentation of the West from the 1820s to the 1970s. The catalog includes paintings of American fold hero Daniel Boone and of exotic Spanish vaqueros by William Tylee Ranney and Charles Christian Nahl, of dashing cowboys and free-roaming Blackfeet Indians by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell, and of romantic nineteenth-century and modernist twentieth-century landscapes by Thomas Moran and Georgia O'Keeffe. Other highlights of this edition include a full-color topographical map with a chronology listing key dates in the history of the American West and a preface by the collector.