George de Forest Brush
As a sidebar to the gargantuan new "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" show, 21 paintings of American Indians by George de Forest Brush occupy two smaller, lower galleries at SAM. A contemporary of Northwest photographer Edward S. Curtis, Brush (1855-1941) came later to the Indian theme, but displays the same romanticand not always historically accuratetendencies. His subjects occupy idealized patches of wilderness, hunting free in grasslands and lakes not yet despoiled by the white man. His serene canvases look backward, before the Indian wars and reservations. There is no Trail of Tears, and the influence of James Fenimore Coopers The Last of the Mohicans is strongly felt. A Southerner who trained in Paris then returned to the U.S., Brush renders our continents original residents (and owners) as noble savages. The images are dangerously close to van murals, but theres a strangeness that pulls them back from kitsch. Brushs nature scenes, often with Audubon-style birds in them, have an under-glass airlessness to them. Theyre specimens of something extinct, a way of life that disappeared during his own lifetime. Brush drew from life, as these paintings show. I prefer the smaller adjacent gallery of Indian heads and facial sketchesthe preliminary portraiture before Brush inserted these figures into a landscape from which, in truth, they had already been removed. (Closed Mon.) BRIAN MILLER
March 12-May 24, 10 a.m., 2009
