Today I wanted to head for the Amon Carter Museum, which is located in the Cultural District just in back of the Kimbell and Modern, and has long been recognized for western art. Given my mood, some cowboys and Indians were just what the doctor ordered. Besides, unlike the Kimbell, whose permanent exhibit space is pretty small, with most of the room going to traveling exhibits, the Amon Carter has a large and credible collection on display all the time, of which a group of Remington bronzes are central.

I decided to take my 12 year old son on this jaunt, because he was getting out of school at noon on this particuar day, and because he has been having some trouble with his grades. I reasoned a trip to the art museum might refocus his attention, which I knew from phone and personal conversations with his teachers, was pretty unfocussed.

We entered the museum and looked first at a painting of post-2000 vintage of the patron of this establishment, Amon Carter, who died in 1955. He is pictured extending his business card, painted in near-photorealism, a smile in his eyes, white hair crowning the lined and weathered face of a salesman who started by developing the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and finished a nationally-known businessman. The painting shows a person who seems the epitome of someone you’d like to do business with. But my son is more interested in the material of which the wall behind the portrait is made. “Look at this,” he said. “They’ve pressed seashells into the wall to make shapes.”

Well, I can see that the rock is natural stone, but he doesn’t believe me. We go on into the central gallery of the first floor, which is dominated by lithographs made by British pop-artists of the Taramind Institute. The lithos were printed around 1966, the year I was born, and some of the more abstract of them remind me of something I might have made in nursery school not too long after. My son is unimpressed. “I could have made these,” he tells me.

Again and again, he touches the walls, gets too close to the paintings, asks irreverent questions, and gives me over and over the feeling that his teachers are right when they tell me he doesn’t pay any attention. Perhaps taking him to the museum was a bad idea. He shows a little more interest in bronzesof Indians at the stairway landing of the first floor, sculpted by Dallin, Proctor, Calder, and Huntington. They are quite fine. He looks at them for a moment, then asks when we’re going to the gift shop.

The influence of New Mexico artists, including Georgia O’Keefe, is seen again and again here; an image she painted of a pink adobe church, and another of the pink sky of New Mexico, invoke a world of fantastic beauty scarcely touchable on earth but ever real in the mind. These are still, of course, abstractions. And my son is still unfocussed. I take some notes and go on. We wind our way through the upper level, past painting of trappers and rivermen, revolutionary war heros, landscapes and portraits including one by John Singer Sergeant that appears in their museum brochure, of a drummer boy not much older than my son. 

I stop a docent and ask about the stone of the walls. He explains that they are made of Austin Shale limeston, mined in Austin, and that yes, the fossilized sea creatures were real, their bodies have dissolved and washed away thorugh the porous stone, leaving only their outlines. 

Where were those Remingtons? I finally get directly above the entrance, and here they are:  four-horse bronzes, horses in full running motion, of cowboys and Indians at war and play. My son goes forward. He walkd around the glassed-in sculptures, peering in with avid eyes. He studies the bridles, the saddles, the minute details of each horse and rider. “Look at this!” he tells me. “The cowboys have shoes on their horses, the Indians don’t! Look at this saddle! What is that? Is it on fire?”

“It’s a sheepskin saddle cover,” I inform him.

“Where’s the cowboy whose horse this was?” He’s referring to the riderless horse in the set.

“I guess he fell or got shot.” He goes on to another bronze. He has changed, at the first sight of that Remingtons, from a bored kid to an active learner. How has that happened? Perhaps it’s just that he understands the language of the statue. Even he, who never watches cowboy movies, instantly “gets” the thrill of mortal combat, the grace of running horses, the facination of intricately rendered 19^th century armament and gear.

This brings up a discussion I had with my husband recently. I suggested that the finest art shows high levels of technical mastery and also demonstrates universal ideas in a medium that is as understandable as possible to the greatest number of people. Perhaps it was not an accident that the finger-painting like pop art did not interest us. It had no intelligible story for us. It offered no new information. But the Remingtons were different. That master of western art was able to bring an idea of the life of a cowboy into sharp revief, and bring a middle school boy from indifferent to interest. When I realized that, I knew the art of the Amon Carter had been vindicated, and it was worth coming just to see those Remington bronzes.

The Amon Carter Museum