CODY, Wyo. (AP) — It started with a single sculpture — a rifle-toting, horse-riding bronze of Buffalo Bill Cody by New York artist-heiress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.
Now, the Whitney Gallery of Western Art — located in Cody's namesake community just east of Yellowstone National Park — is marking its first half-century with a sweeping reinstallation. The Whitney name stands as a reminder that it was made possible with Eastern largesse, the same behind New York's Whitney Museum of American Art.
"We used to kid about how to build a Western museum with Eastern money, but it was basically true," said former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson, chairman of the gallery's parent institution, the Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
With the museum's funds now increasingly from Western donors, Simpson said, "that old slogan doesn't work anymore."
True to the museum's roots, works by "cowboy artists" such as Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington are just steps away from one of the world's most comprehensive gun collections, the Cody Firearms Museum.
Like the Colt six-shooters up the hall, the Whitney Gallery derives its reputation largely from iconic visions of a West frozen in time. The paintings and sculptures betray a nostalgia for a world now past, populated with pioneers and Indians and complicated by winter storms, stampeding cattle and aggressive bears.
In crafting the reinstallation, curator Mindy Besaw tried to push the genre to new heights. She mixed and regrouped artists, styles and media to transform what had been a conventional artistic survey — driven by chronology — into a thematic story told in the colors and textures of the West.
"You're never going to get a white canvas with a blue square on it and call it Western art," Besaw said. "But there's something about the West that's always going to be magical or powerful for people if you want to reminisce about a simpler time. It's wonderful out here, and there's something about the paintings that remind people of that."
There are other Western art museums of distinction, most notably the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the Gilcrease in Tulsa, Okla.
But Texas and, to a lesser extent, Oklahoma have in recent decades transmogrified into oil empires. The rest of the West has changed, too, with Colorado known for its ski resorts, Nevada its slot machines and Arizona its retirement communities. California? Movie sets aside, its dusty stage coach routes and rural beginnings have given way to ribbons of highway and vainglorious urban excess.
Back in Wyoming — and the Whitney — the West, as America once imagined it, lives on.
A 1911 N.C. Wyeth painting of a pair of hunters facing off against a snarling bear closely mirrors a scene that played out just last month, when a man shot and killed a grizzly near Cody after it mauled him while he was scouting for elk.
Similarly, a Russell painting of wolves circling a gaunt cow in a snowstorm — waiting for it to falter so they can move in for the kill — evokes the livestock attacks that have become increasingly common in northwestern Wyoming since wolves were restored to the region.
For years after Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's 1929 donation, her sculpture stood on an otherwise empty lot at the edge of town. Next door was a small log cabin that housed some of Buffalo Bill's memorabilia.
Bankrolled by a $250,000 donation from Whitney's son, Cornelius, the gallery opened in 1959. It bucked the going trend within Eastern and European art circles that favored abstract expressionism, typified by Jackson Pollock.
By contrast, Western art offered something uniquely American, a reminder of the pioneering spirit. Art historian Peter Hassrick called it a "foil from the tyranny of abstractionism."
Cody (population: 8,800) today attracts tens of thousands of tourists annually heading to nearby Yellowstone. But it remains a community where cowboys from surrounding ranches come for their night on the town, jeans hitched with saucer-sized belt buckles and calloused hands gripped firm around the necks of cold beer bottles.
Inside the Whitney, that theme gets an almost satirical treatment in Audrey Roll-preissler's "Western Man with Beer and Dog." The seven-foot-high sculpture depicts a pudgy cowboy leaning against a fence — beer can in hand, Marlboros in pocket and overweight "wiener dog" at his feet.
"If you think of Western art as only Remington and Russell, you've missed part of the story, because it's happening today," Besaw said.
Roll-preissler's piece, created in the mid-1980s, stands tall amid a slew of more traditional works such as W.H.D Koerner's "Madonna of the Prairie," a romanticized, 1920s painting that casts the pioneer woman as a beatific angel.
Perhaps the starkest artistic coupling at the revamped Whitney involves two divergent interpretations of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Prominently displayed at one end of the gallery's long hall is Edgar Samuel Paxson's massive 1899 work "Custer's Last Stand." It shows Gen. George A. Custer as a steady, even arrogant, presence, a buckskinned beacon of bravery standing over a chaotic sea of dying cavalry soldiers and advancing Sioux and Cheyenne warriors.
A turn to the right brings the viewer face-to-face with Allan Mardon's 1996 work "The Battle of Greasy Grass," a view of the same battle that reduces Custer to a bit player in the broader drama.
After a recent visit to the gallery, Hassrick, a leading voice on Western art who served 20 years as director of the Cody museum before leaving in the mid-1990s, was somewhat unsettled by the gallery's newly aggressive mix of the traditional and the contemporary.
"Some were stunningly wonderful and some were startlingly 'What the hell?'" said Hassrick, now director emeritus of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art at the Denver Art Museum.
The matching of Paxson and Mardon evoked both reactions, he said, adding he would need more time to see which prevails.
The layout of the gallery also was altered by Besaw. Walls erected during the last major renovation, in 1986, were removed so the main hall again faces out to Whitney's sculpture of Buffalo Bill, his rifle raised high and a Wyoming mountain range in the background.
"We get back to our roots that way," Besaw said.
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