Bear Attacks!!!
Bear attack paintings are a time-honored tradition in Western art, with no signs of waning within the culture of the West.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: In 1823 an American trapper was nearly eaten alive by a grizzly bear. He survived, only barely—pun absolutely intended—and then was left for dead by his travel companions. After setting his own broken bones and letting maggots eat from his infected wounds, and living off berries and bison meat discarded by wolves, the trapper crawled more than 200 miles to a nearby military fort. I can see you nodding your head from the pages. Yes, this is the story of Hugh Glass. But here’s something you may not know: Hugh Glass never corroborated his story. No letters. No interviews. No exposé in Harper’s. So how then did the story endure?
Glass’ tale survived for two reasons: first, as it says on the monument for the adventurer in South Dakota, “…it was a marvelous show of stamina and courage,” and second, bears are killing machines that make for great drama, suspense and high thrills in stories of the American wilderness. Would we know Glass’ name if he were gored in equal measure by a bison, a moose or a pack of river otters? The answer to that question is no, no and maybe—come on, a pack of vengeful river otters is terrifying—but I would argue that the image of a man-eating grizzly bear is so powerful within American culture that it has attained almost mythic proportions. And that image has persisted for nearly two centuries because artists have turned to it again and again as a source of inspiration in their individual quests to tell stories of the West.
One of the earliest bear attack paintings comes from George Catlin, who created Grizzly Bears Attacking Indians on Horseback around 1832. The image, showing three Native American riders with spears and war clubs engaging two grizzly bears, was a hit at the time and turned into hand-colored lithographs that are in many museum collections today. Catlin’s earliest version of the painting shows he was still struggling with his depiction of bears— their snouts are too long and pointy, and the paws and claws are nightmarishly gouging into horseflesh—but by 1844, in a work on paper that can be seen in the collection of the Buffalo Bill
Center of the West, the image had been refined more and the bears look much more realistic and accurate. Baby steps in the bear world.
Catlin wasn’t the only one painting bears early, and he also wasn’t the only one wrestling with a more realistic depiction of the wildlife subject. Between 1858 and 1860, Alfred Jacob Miller completed The Grizzly Bear, showing a Native American rider chasing down a fleeing bear. The watercolor was part of a 200-work commission from William T. Walters, who paid the artist $12 a painting to document his famous 1837 expedition to the Green River Valley. What’s remarkable about the painting is how strange the bear is rendered, with exposed claws, lean front legs and wisps of gray hair on its back. It’s more werewolf than bear, but it’s a wonderful because it exemplifies this early period of exploration with the subject matter. “The Indians have just driven the bear from his covert among some wild cherry bushes, which fruit is decidedly one of his weaknesses; of it he is remarkably fond,” Miller wrote of the piece. “They are preparing to run him, giving him at the same time a wide berth, knowing very well the formidable qualities of the brute they have to deal with. As an arrow sometimes fails to pierce his body, owing to thick matted hair, they aim usually at the head, the most vulnerable part.”
The early game-changer for the bear attack sub-genre came in 1856 when Arthur
Fitzwilliam Tait dropped A Tight Fix—bear Hunting, Early Winter, another image that was well-received and turned into a series of prints, including a Currier and Ives lithograph in 1861. In Tait’s image, he shows an unfortunate hunter about to get a mighty swipe from a black bear’s paw. Death could be imminent, but a second figure in the background, his gun aimed and ready, raises questions about the fate of the man and bear. The painting, part of the collection at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, was an early standout for curators of the hit 2017 traveling exhibition Wild Spaces, Open Seasons: Hunting and Fishing in American Art.
“When we started developing the show, one of the first pieces to jump out to us was Tait’s
A Tight Fix. I knew the painting back when it was part of a Detroit collection, and I knew it would make a statement in the exhibition— it’s powerful, it’s big, it’s dramatic. I’ve always loved how you don’t know whether this guy is going to come out of this alive or not, with the way the bear is sitting on his rifle and the figure aims his rifle in the background,” says Kevin Sharp, director of the Dixon Gallery and Gardens. “This is a quintessentially American painting in many ways. It speaks to the struggle of taming the wilderness, regardless of whether you feel the wilderness should be tamed or not. If this piece wasn’t at Wild Spaces, Open Seasons it could have easily been at the Louvre, or any other museum anywhere in the world, because it speaks to our American identity.”
Aside from a truly terrifying Otto Sommer work in 1864, Attacked by a Bear—which shows another stalemate between a hunter with a broken rifle and a blood-thirsty bruin—the next great period of man-versus-bear imagery is at the turn of the century. It’s around here that artists such as Charles M. Russell, Philip R. Goodwin, N.C. Wyeth, William R. Leigh and others produce some great images that explore the adventure and danger surrounding the American wilderness. Russell was especially
fond of charging or attacking bears, and painted the subject repeatedly, including in Just as Everything is Turning Black, I Hear Bed Rock’s Winchester from 1899, A Disputed Trail in 1908 and In the Nick of Time from the 1890s. Russell also paints an early cowboy encounter with bears in the 1916 work Loops and Swift Horses are Surer Than Lead. While Russell often took a more violent approach to his bear subjects, Goodwin avoided blood and gore entirely with his playful bear scenes, many of which cast the carnivore as a more mischievous force that raids camp food supplies and knocks over tents— more Yogi Bear than man-eater. Goodwin did paint the potential calamity of a bear encounter in Dangerous Sport, which set a world auction record for the artist in 2017, when it sold for $339,300 at the Scottsdale Art Auction.
The next great iconic bear scene, though, is made by Leigh, who in 1914 painted A Close Call, showing eight dogs circling a ferocious grizzly that has mauled a man crumpled on the forest floor. Like Tait’s work, reinforcements are coming to the rescue, but are they too late? The work, in the collection of the Gilcrease Museum, also appeared in Wild Spaces, Open Seasons and was a fan favorite from the exhibition. “As terrifying as the bear is, this is almost a painting about how loyal dogs are,” Sharp says of the work. “It’s also interesting to remember this was painted by a human, so it’s going to have human sympathies—certainly not sympathies for the bear. This one is more debatable if the man is going to come out of this alive. The bear is right on top of the guy, and he’s one swipe away from death, if he’s not dead already.”
Cheap printing and even cheaper paper led to the next big shift in bear paintings in the 1950s and 1960s as pulp fiction and men’s adventure magazines started working their way into the culture, especially through an unlikely source, young people. Publications like Argosy, True, Stag, For Men Only and many others sold magazines by printing salacious and titillating stories and pairing them with ridiculously exaggerated illustrations. Favorite subjects included men marooned on islands inhabited by sex-starved women, explorers being captured by tribes of cannibals, mob shootouts and lots of brave American soldiers dispatching sadistic Nazis—they were rarely subtle. But another topselling subject was man-versus-animal stories. One cover image from Man’s Life in 1956 sums it up perfectly: “Weasels Ripped My Flesh!” Other blood-thirsty animals that appeared on covers were crabs, eels, scorpions, sharks, leeches, hyenas and, of course, bears. And while other creatures came in and out of favor, bears held strong throughout much of the era, perhaps because—and this is true even today—there is usually one or two bear-related deaths annually in the United States. Tha danger is real.
One of those pulp illustrators was Mort Künstler, who worked for a handful of magazines and did several dozen major bear attack paintings during his multifaceted career, which is still going strong today in Oyster Bay, New York. “I’ll never forget I did a bear painting for Outdoor Life, and it was kind of a big painting and well received, and once I did one I started getting calls about others. I would guess I did more than 20 pieces for many different magazines,” Künstler says. “The key was to make it convincing, and when you look back at the bear pieces I did, that’s what
I did. Whether they were grizzlies or black bears or Kodiak bears, I just tried to do them right in every way, even if the scenarios themselves were a little ridiculous.”
Künstler’s work, as well as work by other pulp illustrators throughout the mid20th century, connected with readers on a fundamental level. Although exaggerated, the images offered a very basic premise: “Nature is a dangerous place. Bears live in nature. You don’t.” The public was fascinated by that dynamic, which is why man-eating bears are seemingly at their peak during this time. The years that would follow would offer an exciting transition to today, including artists
such as James Bama, George Phippen, Olaf Wieghorst and others. Illustrator Tom Beecham, father of wildlife painter Greg Beecham, did a surprising number of excellent bear paintings, including illustrations for Ben East’s 1977 book Bear, which has a chapter that begins with a marvelous question: “Does the black bear ever resort to deliberate man-eating?”
Today, many living artists have explored thrilling bear scenes, including Loren Entz, Andy Thomas and Chad Poppleton, whose work The Toll Collector will be at the Cowboy Artists of America show in Fort Worth on November 1 and 2. And while some of the deeper themes related to these paintings—the untamed wilderness, man’s hubris in nature, the thrill of the hunt—have been retained from earlier generations, other artists are folding in new ideas. Kent Monkman, for instance, uses a bear attacks in several of his works to tell stories about the theft of Native American land, and how nature takes its revenge for those crimes.
And then in 2015, because history has a funny way of circling back on us, Alejandro González Iñárritu directed the film The Revenant. It’s about—and stop me if you’ve heard this one—a man who is attacked by a bear, left for dead and then claws back to civilization despite an unforgiving nature that’s working against him. His name: Hugh Glass, the man whose story launched a 200-year adventure deep into the American wild.