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44

Property of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection THOMAS MORAN (1837-1926) Badlands of the Dakot...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:700,000.00 - 900,000.00 USD
Property of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection THOMAS MORAN (1837-1926) Badlands of the Dakot...
Property of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
THOMAS MORAN
(1837-1926)
Badlands of the Dakota, 1901
signed with monogrammed initials and dated "TYMoran 1901" (lower right)
oil on canvas
20 x 30 in. (51 x 76 cm) <p>Estimate: $700,000-900,000 <p> Provenance
Mr. and Mrs. Charles F. Calkins, Oklahoma B.M. Terzian, Wichita, Kansas Leo Sanders, Oklahoma, 1945 Ira Spanierman, Inc., New York Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation, Lugano, Switzerland, 1986 <p> Exhibited
Charlottenburg, Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie and Orangerie des Schlosses; Zürich, Kunsthaus, Bilder aus der Neuen Welt, Amerikanische Malerei des 18 und 19 Jahrhunderts, Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Thyssen-Bornemisza und Museen der Vereingten Staaten, November 22, 1988-May 1989, no. 46 Kobe, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art; Nagoya, Nagoya City Art Museum; Tokyo, The Bunkamura Museum of Art; Hiroshima, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Two Hundred Years of American Paintings from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, January 5-August 25, 1991, no. 27 <p> Literature
Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation, Mestres Americans del segle XIX de la Coleccio Thyssen-Bornemisza, Barcelona, 1988, p. 86, no. 54 (illustrated, pl. 86) <p> The Badlands stretch intermittently along the western edge of the Dakotas. David McCullough describes them as "a region of startling appearance." <p> a weird otherworld of bizarrely shaped cliffs and tablelands, ...sliced every which way by countless little ravines and draws. Stratified layers of clay, clays as pale as beach sand, [are] juxtaposed against brick-red bands of scoria or sinuous dark seams of lignite.1 <p> French-Canadian trappers, the first European visitors to the region, gave them their name: "Les mauvaises terres à traverser," bad lands to travel through. Other visitors to the Badlands described them as a Grand Canyon in miniature, or as resembling ancient ruins. But perhaps the most telling report was that of the leader of an early military expedition, who stated that they seemed to him like "hell with the fires out." Teddy Roosevelt fell immediately in love with this eerie landscape when he first began ranching in the Badlands in 1883. He called them "our ideal hero-land," and wrote home that in the midst of them he "experienced a buoyancy of spirits and a vigor of body I had never known before."2 <p>In the summer of 1892, after visiting the Grand Canyon, Thomas Moran and his close friend, the photograper William Henry Jackson, decided to revisit Yellowstone in Wyoming, which had already become a tourist mecca - and a National Park - thanks to Moran's earlier paintings of its hot springs and geysers. The two artists arrived in Wyoming in mid-June and, after a harrowing side trip to the Devil's Tower in northeast Wyoming, arrived in Yellowstone in late July. After two weeks of sketching and photographing such now-familiar sites as Mammoth Hot Springs, the Lower Basin, and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, they left the park in different directions, Jackson going south to the Grand Tetons, and Moran departing for home via the Northern Pacific Railroad. <p>Moran made one last, brief sketching stop on his way East, pausing on August 4th in the South Dakota Badlands, where he completed a group of rapid pencil sketches with color notations. As was his habit, he would later return to these sketches for painting ideas, but in this instance he waited ten years before completing Badlands of the Dakota in 1902. <p>In 1902, Teddy Roosevelt was President of the United States, and Moran's painting seems to mirror Roosevelt's irrepressible optimism, as well as his good opinion of the Badlands as an invigorating place. Moran places the viewer at a great height, an impression reinforced by the long line of Sioux horsemen descending into the abyss below. Stretching out in apparent infinity beyond is a Technicolor panorama of sun-drenched plains, deeply shaded chasms, and curiously shaped and tinted hills, many of them repetitions and even reversals of those that appear in the artist's earlier sketches. It is a landscape of heroic scale and import, which stands - as Moran would have it - not only in stark contrast to what he saw as the pastoral timidity of French landscape painting, but even more as a true expression of the American character. <p>We are grateful to Dr. Bruce Chambers for cataloguing this lot. Notes 1 David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback, New York, 1981, p. 321. 2 Ibid, p. 332.
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