Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institute. December 2021
American Indian Portraits, George Catlin, National Portrait Gallery. August 2017
A silencing
On a summer visit to DC, TFR and I visited the Renwick Gallery to see a recommended exhibit of famous American painter, George Catlin's, works. I rank it among one of the most impactful exhibits I have ever seen in my life.
George Catlin was a fellow Pennsylvanian hailing from Wilkes Barre. Given he was born in 1796, I assume that town must have been a little bit of nothing back then. He traveled to Connecticut to study as a lawyer (like his father), but later found his passion in art and moved to Philadelphia where he soon became well-known. By the 1830's, he was an established artist. Struck by seeing native American delegations visiting the East, he became interested in them as a subject matter. He made several journeys among the First Peoples to paint portraits and to depict their everyday lives. He knew what was coming and wanted to document it all before it was gone.
I remember walking into the huge gallery on the second floor of the Renwick filled with Catlin's portraits - all the walls, from top to bottom. After some time passed, like the proverbial ton of bricks, it hit me, and that realization was crushingly horrible. I could not speak. TFR and I wandered, processed what we could, and left - silently. How does one react to an artistic depiction of genocide? What should someone feel when they realize that these HUNDREDS of paintings were not from a single tribe or group, but of multitudes of different tribes and sub-tribes that are simply gone. Catlin's works are rarely displayed in their entirety for a reason I think. Owned by the Smithsonian, the national museum of the United States, the government might think we are not ready for the paintings to be on permanent display.
I remember watching Schindler's List in Montparnasse, Paris with MAP in a packed theatre. When the movie ended, a crowd of hundreds filed out of the theatre into the streets in total silence. It took time during that walk before we could even speak. I remember walking down the long stone avenue with Brian to main temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia passing all the beggars missing limbs blown off by leftover landmines of a forgotten conflict - many of those mines planted by my country. I was quiet then, too. I visited the below ground exhibits in the African American Museum in Washington with PM, and followed the development of institutionalized slavery in the USA in horror and had no words. When I saw the sign Arbeit Macht Frei and the very rail sidings where the "selections" were made at Auschwitz, I was chilled and silenced. However, none of the above for me compared to Catlin's paintings. The scale of it - there are no words. An entire continent had been emptied of people. The worst of it, it is just ignored - no hand-wringing, no navel staring, no recriminations, no amends.
Even though I have seen evidence of the brutality of humanity in my travels, I try not to get jaded. Good still exists and persists. However, how about if hundreds of peoples, customs, traditions and languages were simply erased from the face of the earth? And worse yet, this obliteration was not even recognized as having occurred? Catlin's portraits were only grudgingly obtained by the US government after his death. America was actually strong-armed into purchasing the entire collection by a few influential people before it got carved up by hungry European collectors. There was just no interest -- or was it fear of facing something so dishonorable? Even now the collection is scattered around in different museums and the bulk of it, I assume, is in storage. If there is ever to be a national monument to the demise of the Native Americans, they need only display all of Catlin's paintings close together in one huge room with a sign "They are no more". The magnitude of the horror is lost on most people because it is buried in "history" - I know it was for me.
Art is powerful and can be overwhelming. It can silence you.