Six milestones in the new frontier
From among the 400-plus items on display in Once Upon a Time … The Western, here are six not to miss, as recommended by curator Mary-Dailey Desmarais.
THE STAGECOACH
Once owned by William F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody, who used it in his immensely popular Wild West travelling show, and featured in the 1953 presidential inauguration parade of Dwight D. Eisenhower, this is a two-thirds scale model of the coaches built by Wells Fargo for overland use in the 1860s. Viewed close-up, it’s a thing of beauty, evincing essentially the same craftsmanship and materials used by the ancient Romans to build their chariots.
THE MOTORCYCLE
Attendees of a certain age had better be prepared for an intense flashback on encountering the very chopper used in Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, a film that took the iconography of John Ford classics like The Searchers and subverted it for the hippie era. “It’s not technically a western, but when Hopper and Peter Fonda are shown riding through Monument Valley in Utah, it’s clear what they had in mind.”
LEDGER DRAWINGS
Twelve journal drawings made by plains people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries form a corrective to grander-scaled, white-perspective works that, in the words of Desmarais, “spectacularized a tragedy lived by the Indigenous community. These drawings are self-taught art, sincere reactions to how they were living, a testament to the real lives at stake behind the rah-rah aspects of the western. They offer a completely different point of view.”
QUEBEC WESTERNS
A room at the exhibit is dedicated solely to showing excerpts from the little-seen sub-genre that flowered in Quebec in the 1970s, with singing cowboy Willie Lamothe a particular star. “It was a real revelation for me to discover these films,” said Desmarais, a born New Yorker who now calls Montreal home. “They employ some of the standard western tropes, but the themes are deeply rooted in a specific Québécois identity, employing local humour and telling really touching stories. I was surprised by how different and moving these films are.”
FRANZ KLINE AND JACKSON POLLOCK
The thematic parallel between what was happening to the western in the post-Second World War era and concurrent breakthroughs in modern art is probably best left to the viewer to glean. Suffice to say that the exhibit’s inclusion of works by abstract expressionists Kline and Pollock, and other decidedly non-traditionalist figures like pop artists Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, is among the show’s most compelling cases of new ground being struck.
BEYOND REDEMPTION
Adrian Stimson’s haunting installation, comprising a stuffed buffalo encircled by bison skins draped over crosses, can stand for one of the exhibit’s motifs: the eradication of the plains bison to the very verge of extinction and the subsequent calamitous effect on food sources and way of life.