Western Art Masterpieces

From prehistoric pottery to modern expressionism, the 48 artworks reproduced here with facing-page commentaries provide a stunning panorama of the American West. Pictures by familiar favorites who shaped popular romantic images of the West, such as George Catlin, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Remington, jostle with little-known realistic masterpieces like English artist Frank Marryat's hand-colored lithograph of boomtown San Francisco in 1849, or Joseph Becker's starkly beautiful oil painting of a locomotive crossing the snowy Sierra Nevada mountains. Also here are Native Americans' strong pictorial statements, including Kicking Bear's intricate rendition of the Battle of Little Big Horn (ca. 1895); Cheyenne warrior Howling Wolf's ink-and-watercolor of a medicine lodge sun dance (1875); and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith's devastating, ghostlike collage, Buffalo (1992). Bitingly ironic modern paintings by Ben Shahn, Red Grooms and David Hockney turn inside-out the imagined reality of the West. Wilderness magazine editor Watkins wrote The Great Depression, for which his wife, Joan Parker Watkins, was picture consultant. (Apr.)