COWBOYS AND VERTIGINOUS ARCHITECTURE

To see two competing visions of the American West, visit the Denver Art Museum's current exhibition on Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), a cowboy turned artist who preserved scenes of the moribund open range. The museum is impossible to miss: it is a titanium-clad piece of architectural origami designed by Daniel Libeskind, the high-flying architect who designed the Jewish Museum in Berlin (2001), the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester (2002) and the original plans to redevelop New York's Ground Zero. Completed in 2006, the Denver structure was his first American project and is one of two buildings that comprise the museum; the older one, designed by Gio Ponti, and looking rather strange itself, sits in the background.

The spacious interior is as vertiginous as the outside looks structurally unsound. The geometry continues inside with a confluence of shapes, angles and slanted walls, which test the boundary between architectural artwork and spatial functionality. The result is Denver's version of Marmite: some love it, others loath it.

Still, it is a testament to America's intrepid frontier sensibility, and to Denver's cultural aspirations. America's cultural hubs—New York, Chicago, San Francisco—have long cast supercilious glances at Denver's quaint sense of culture. Perhaps sensing the city's insecurities, Libeskind sold his building to match Denver's ambitions (captured in a film on the museum's website): "The building is a nexus. It is the binding together. Denver is not a point between New York and San Francisco; it is a centre, the nexus that binds together all America."

In a sense, Russell's works hang here like a contradiction: they are visions of the Old West, of cowboys and Native Americans at a time when railroads and new farm plots were changing it all.

It was Montana, not Colorado, that served as Russell's Western sublime: a harsh landscape that bred hardscrabble characters. A restive youth, Russell left his parents at 16 and boarded a westbound train from St Louis to play out his boyhood dream of a life on the open range. He achieved this to an extent, wrangling in the Judith River Basin, but found more success drawing and painting. His West was defined by cattlemen roping a wayward steer in a dry riverbed, and herds of bison swarming across the prairie. In another painting called "When Shadows Hint Death" (pictured above), two wayward pioneers hide along a canyon wall as a band of American Indians traverse the plain overhead, their shadows splashed across the cliffside opposite.

Mercifully the Denver Art Museum has hung these works in a space with straight walls. The show is magnificent, and a rare opportunity to see such a large swath of Russell's career in one place (it is apparently the largest exhibition ever assembled). This is long overdue for an artist whose work rivals that of better-known names in Western art, such as Edward Curtis and Frederic Remington. Still, Russell's pieces seem strange here, hanging in a building that represents a Western ideal so foreign to his own.

"The Masterworks of Charles M. Russell" remains at the Denver Art Museum until January 10th, when it moves to the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

~ ALEXANDER EWING

Picture credit: photo of museum by Jeff Wells, courtesy the Denver Art Museum; "When Shadows Hint Death" (1915), Charles Marion Russell, courtesy of the Duquesne Club, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania