eurowera.blogg.se

Included amidst the glorious cacophony of sights and experiences of the Midway Plaisance were a significant number of Native American and western subjects, from the Wild West shows of Buffalo Bill Cody to sculptures by such artists as Alexander Phimister Proctor, Henry Bush-Brown, and Cyrus Dallin. The Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition showcased the scientific, industrial, and artistic contributions of countries from around the globe. Chicago, the geographic gateway to the American West, became the hub of a redefined artistic frontier—a window on the West. Even as the actual experience of the frontier receded, artists, ethnographers, writers, patrons, and institutions explored, documented, and preserved different aspects of the West: archaeological facts, ethnographic records, myths, and spirituality. Turner’s paper piqued interest in these vanishing aspects of American culture, promoting a rush to preserve the past.ĭuring the 1890s, beginning with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a "new" American frontier emerged in art and literature, shaped by waves of nostalgia for a lost past.

The census figures of 1890 also showed a radical decline in the Native American population, and a new fear arose concerning the extinction of the American Indian.

Thus, there was no longer a western frontier of unsettled land that represented an unknown terrain of possibility and promise. Turner’s argument, known as the Turner Thesis, was informed by statistics from the 1890 United States Census Bureau, which declared that the frontier—defined as land with fewer than two inhabitants per square mile—was closed. He also believed that the core American values—individualism, self-reliance, and a dedication to the democratic spirit—had formed in the West. According to Turner, the frontier had for years assumed symbolic significance as an escape from the institutions, traditions, and cultural dominance of the established East. Bequest of hortense Henry Prosserĭuring the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, University of Wisconsin professor of history Frederick Jackson Turner presented a paper in what is today The Art Institute of Chicago on the significance of the western frontier. The Path toward Abstraction: Georgia O’Keeffe and the Modern West