Artist frederic remington biography of christopher

Frederic Remington, Ceremony of the Fastest Horse, c. 1900 [art institute of chicago]
Look, I’m as surprised as you are that I was stoked to see a Frederick Remington painting, but here we are.
As a card-carrying East Coast Art World Elitist, I’ve never given Remington’s work a second’s thought, not even an ironic revisionist, “Well, he’s alright, but he’s no Norman Rockwell!” Which is exactly where I placed him art historically, buried somewhere in Appendix B of Janson.
But we were at the State Department the other night, at a dinner held in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms, and a Remington painting was the freshest, most modern thing around.

When they opened in 1961, “The Rooms” looked like typical, International Style boardrooms of the period, which, oddly for a government agency housed in a 2 million-sf pile, the State Department thinks is a slam:

Then they were very much like the rest of this modern State Department building, with wall-to-wall carpeting on concrete floors, brown panelled [sic] walls such as those found in offices, and unattractive acoustical ceilings. The exterior walls of the entire eighth floor (where the Diplomatic Rooms are located) were floor-to-ceiling plate glass with explosed [sic] steel beams.

In 1969, Nixon’s newly appointed ambassador to Britain, Walter Annenberg, initiated a vast, classical makeover, replacing the steel and glass with 18th- and early 19th century-style woodwork and antique furnishings.
They’re a spectacle–the bathrooms are absurdly fantastic–but complete artifice. [Though all the artifacts are real enough. It was incredible to see the Treaty of Paris just sitting there on the desk.] Many wall texts in The Rooms and on most pages of the DRR’s website –which was also apparently last remodeled in 1969–are relentlessly dismissive of modernism:

Once paneled in brown plywood, with oppressively low ceili

Assembling a complete and thorough record of work an artist made throughout his entire career--every painting, drawing, print or sculpture that came from his hand, together with all the necessary documentary information about the circumstances of each object’s creation--is no mean feat. But the compilation of such a record, called a catalogue raisonne, is of inestimable value for subsequent scholarship. You can’t fully know an artist’s work without recognizing the breadth of its scope and the specifics of its details.

At the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Griffith Park, a current exhibition attempts to give the public an idea of what goes into assembling an artist’s catalogue raisonne. The occasion is the publication of “Frederic Remington: A Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings, Watercolors and Drawings,” which has just been issued as a book and CD-ROM by the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyo., after 11 years of research by former director Peter Hassrick and curator Melissa Webster. Remington died young (he was 48), but he produced more than 3,000 works during the 20-plus years of his career.

Remington (1861--1909) was one pivot in establishing our turn-of-the-century idea of the American West. Although he lived and worked his entire life in upstate New York and Connecticut, he traveled several times in regions ranging from Montana to Texas, making sketches and photographs. Returning east he would use these visual notes in the fabrication of narrative illustrations for popular magazines, like Collier’s, Scribner’s and Harper’s Weekly.

These illustrational paintings and graphics partly recorded the Western milieu of cowboys and Indians, which was rapidly vanishing. Likewise, though, his art was also a myth-making fabrication, which used the commercial press to establish an imaginary picture of the American West that promoted Remington’s values and ideals.

His work also participated in the creation of an unusu