French painter captured places, cultures of West
The de Young Museum will be the exclusive West Coast venue for the exhibition “Jules Tavernier and the Elem Pomo,” the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco announced.
The exhibition, as its title suggests, will look not only at the work of French painter Tavernier but also the art, culture and regalia of the Elem Pomo peoples of Northern California who are depicted in Tavernier’s painting “Dance in a Subterranean Roundhouse at Clear Lake, California,” a centerpiece in the exhibition.
The show, originally presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, will be on display at the de Young from Dec. 18 through April 17, 2022.
“‘Jules Tavernier and the Elem Pomo’ is part of the Fine Arts Museums’ ongoing efforts to partner with Indigenous communities, scholars and curators on exhibitions and permanent collection presentations that explore Indigenous cultures and works of art,” FAMSF Director Thomas Campbell told The Chronicle.
Curator Elizabeth Kornhauser and research associate Shannon Vittoria organized the original Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition. In San Francisco, Christina Hellmich, the
curator in charge of art of the Americas, Oceania and Africa for the Fine Arts Museums, is co-organizing the local incarnation of the exhibition with Elem Pomo cultural leader and regalia maker Robert Geary, Dry Creek Pomo scholar Sherrie Smith-Ferri, and Eastern Pomo artist and curator Meyo Marrufo.
The San Francisco version also will feature contributions from Oglala Lakota artist and historian Arthur Amiotte, and Healoha Johnston, curator of Asian Pacific American women’s cultural history at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center.
Tavernier arrived in New York in 1871 from France and was commissioned by Harper’s Weekly to travel across the United States to make artistic renderings of the country, capturing scenes of Indigenous peoples in areas including Nebraska, Wyoming and California, as well as the Hawaiian Islands. At the end of his expedition, he settled in San Francisco, where he became an early member of the San Francisco Art Association and the Bohemian Club, as well as a founder of the Monterey Peninsula Art Colony.
Tavernier also became associated with the Barbizon School, with his California landscapes and figural compositions that reveal intimacy in the epic natural expanses of the scenes.
While in San Francisco, Tavernier spent two years visiting the Elem Pomo Indian village at Clear Lake (Lake County) while preparing to create the painting “Dance in a Subterranean Roundhouse at Clear Lake, California” in 1878. The painting depicts the mfom Xe, or “people dance,” a sacred ritual of the Elem Pomo that takes place in an underground roundhouse known as the Xe-xwan. The dance was performed as a protection ritual for the land and peoples as new settlers brought diseases.
The painting was commissioned by San Francisco banker Tiburcio Parrott y Ochoa as a gift for business partner Baron Edmond de Rothschild, and was shipped to Europe upon completion. Despite of its immediate transit to France, local newspaper accounts of the time call the work “by far the most remarkable picture ever painted on the Pacific Coast.”
The painting was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2016; its exhibition at the de Young will be the first time the painting has been on the West Coast in 140 years.
Hellmich said, “This exhibition looks at his work in a new way that makes it perhaps more important,” noting that Tavernier’s inclusion of Indigenous people in his landscapes was itself unusual for the time, when other artists were presenting scenes of the American West as “open and ready for settlement.”
“Tavernier actually shows Indigenous communities at these historical moments when they are being displaced or when their communities are really under tremendous stress from settler incursion, genocide, displacement,” Hellmich said.
For Geary, who is also a lender to the exhibition, the painting can be “a double-edged sword.”
“It gives you a sense back in time about how things have been passed down from generation to generation, as far as regalia, the construction of the roundhouse,” said Geary. “To see that in the painting itself is just amazing because you can see that what was being told from generation to generation is really in the artwork itself, in the artwork itself.”
That said, Geary also said that the painting has inaccuracies in how it presents the Elem Pomo, notably in the color of garments and in styles of jewelry more properly associated with Southwestern peoples.
Baskets seen in the painting are also more indicative of the kind of baskets used for domestic duties, not ceremony, he said.
All the more reason the exhibition will include additional paintings, prints, watercolors and photographs by the artist, as well as depictions of the Elem Pomo by Tavernier’s contemporaries. Ceremonial regalia will also be on view, along with examples of Pomo basketry, an artform they are renowned for.
“Through the partnerships that we have with Pomo curators, scholars and cultural leaders, we are not only bringing perspectives about Indigenous representation but also issues about Indigenous sovereignty and land,” said Hellmich.
The exhibition will also feature a documentary made by the Fine Arts Museums bringing contemporary Elem Pomo perspectives to the work.
“The film highlights the history and culture of this community,” said Campbell, “as it existed when Tavernier was allowed to paint and record their ceremonies, the destructive impact of industrial mining on the community in the late-19th and 20th centuries, and the ongoing legacy of that impact.”