Charles M. Russel: Sculpter

Fort Worth, Texas and New York: Amon Carter Museum and Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 1994. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 400 pp. Quarto [29.8 cm]. Green cloth over boards. Gilt stamped lettering on front board and back strip. Tan end papers. From the publisher: "In November 1936 James B. Rankin, who was preparing a biography and catalogue of the work of Charles M. Russell, wrote the famous American sculptor John Gutzon Borglum for an assessment of the Montana artist’s work. Borglum replied that there were three artists “deserving of great place” in their portrayal of the American West: his brother Solon H. Borglum, Frederic Remington, and Charles M. Russell. “Of the three Russell unquestionably drew action as no one else,” Borglum responded, but he was quick to add that the work of all three men exemplified different aspects of the frontier. “In Remington you feel the presence of law, order, creeping in, just on the edge of wild adventure. In Solon Borglum you feel always the inner soul…the poetry and grief belong to Solon’s work; the life in all its freedom to Russell; to Remington – even the smell, a little, of the studio – artificial – has crept in; none of this in the other two.” Like many of Russell’s contemporaries, Borglum was struck by an element of genius in the Montana artist’s work, unfettered by the constraints of artistic convention. “I think him the least sophisticated and most naturally unspoiled by academic influences of any one of our few great artists,” he wrote.