Many US artists working in the American West acquired Native American art as a method to “authenticate” the accuracy and legitimacy of their paintings’ narratives. The fantasy of the Lakota-US military battle in De Cost Smith’s Driven Back, for instance, is affirmed by the bonnets, blankets, buckskin, and beadwork worn and used prominently by the Native American figures in the foreground of the painting. Smith acquired these objects in the Northern Plains in the 1880s, an acquisition which was part of ongoing settler appropriations of Native American art and culture in the context of repressive regimes of assimilation and as part of salvage ethnography. But is this where the message of these objects ends when they are re-figured in Smith’s, and other western American, paintings? Is there an echo of Plains meaning retained by the refiguring of these objects in paint? Do these objects, in practice, supersede and also inform the practice of painting? This talk analyzes Smith’s painting and collection, which is today held in the Museum of the American Indian, alongside other paintings by Charles M. Russell and other western American artists that engage with Native American art objects through the lens of metamorphosis. As art historian Jessica Keating interprets in an analysis of representations of a Diana and the Stag Hunt automaton, which had adorned a Hapsburg table, in Mughal court painting, this refiguring of meaning does not fully occlude originary context. What messages and meanings unfold in objects’ intermedia translation?
De Cost Smith, Driven Back, 1892, oil on canvas, 26 1/4 × 46 in. (66.7 × 116.8 cm), Birmingham Museum of Art, Museum purchase with funds provided by Dr. and Mrs. Harold E. Simon, 1973.123
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