Books & Poetry
Real. Big. Books.
By CHUCK THOMPSON
Forget Kindle and Google Books and "Web editions" of anything. One feel of these collector's masterpieces and the timeless notion of the book as art is commuted through the hands.
Before The Beatles and the British Invasion, before Elvis and the birth of Rock, there was Hoppymania," explain the authors of this magnificent volume tracing the legend of Hopalong Cassidy. There was also in those early days of pop media a Brooklyn tomboy named Grace Bradley, who at age 12 saw film-starring actor William Boyd (who made Cassidy a household name) and vowed to marry him. In 1937 Bradley did just that, exchanging vows with Boyd a mere three weeks after their first date, when she was 23 and he was 42.
Co-written by Grace Boyd, who was 94 at the time of the book's publication, this $300 limited-edition photo-and-text homage - with foil stamping, gilded pages, and tooled-leather cover mimicking its subject's signature holsters - bursts with surprises. It's a find even for those who followed "Hoppy" in the 1950s, when he became one of TV's first stars and probably the most famous celebrity in the free world.
While filming 66 Hopalong movies, Boyd's life and career took an unexpected turn as the actor gradually transubstantiated himself into the "real" Hopalong Cassidy, the fictional hero of Western dime-store novels created in 1904. In time, Boyd appeared in public and sat for interviews only as Hopalong Cassidy. He wouldn't accept other acting roles because, as Grace explains, "to do so would've been a betrayal ... to himself." "He surrendered his personal identity to endow a fictitious character they both believed in with life and purpose," writes co-author Cochran, explaining the fascinating love triangle between a man, a woman, and a fictional character that wound up seducing much of the world.
Charles Russell's reputation as one of the great Western artists will never be in dispute. The St. Louis native, who moved to Montana as a teenager in 1880, produced thousands of paintings and sculptures romanticizing the Old West - a legacy that by the time of his death in 1926 had already brought him lasting acclaim.
Less-known is the quirky facility he had with the written word, despite the fact that schooling for him had been "a horror" and his aversion to proper grammar and spelling would embarrass a 10-year-old. Nevertheless, as one tribute noted, "Everyone now knows that education does not lie between the covers of books," and Russell possessed such a depth of thought and genial humor that Will Rogers called him "the finest man I ever met." All of Russell's talents - as artist, thinker, writer - are evident in this collection of letters he wrote throughout his career. Below the buffalo-skull insignia adorning his stationery, Russell augmented pithy notes with everything from ink drawings of Native Americans, cowpunchers, and Eastern dandies to miniature landscape masterpieces in watercolor.
In 1917, writing to a friend about one Montana old-timer, Russell displays the crooked wit - and creative phonetics - that run through these pages: "Peet comes to town quite often ... time aint improved his looks non you know he never was verry slender through the flanks, but now you could eat a sandwich while you walk around the middle of him."
Through drawings and writing, Russell expresses an abiding love for the West, as well as a humble personal philosophy that imbues letters written to everyone from adolescent fans to wealthy benefactors: "Nobody is important enough to feel important."
As artistic themes go it might seem odd to mix bow ties and rhinestone jackets with barren fields and tumbledown shacks. But this photo study of country music takes in every piece of the genre's style and history - rural roots to Carnegie Hall - from the point of view of the musical pioneers who interpreted "the rural conscience" of a nation.
Arriving in Nashville as a 13-year-old guitar prodigy with Lester Flatt's band in 1972, Marty Stuart was already a walking encyclopedia of country and bluegrass history. Even then he grasped "how so many of the people, places, and treasures of a music and culture that I loved were vanishing." Stuart set about documenting in pictures the onstage, backstage, and no-stage periods of legends such as Johnny Cash, Porter Wagoner, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Ernest Tubb, Connie Smith, and dozens more.
As much as Stuart is hooked on the fabulous era of sequin-studded country fashion, his eye is sharpest when focused on grittier details. The '70s and '80s were tough for many artists who'd reached the peak of their profession only to find audiences drifting away. Thus, we find Lester Flatt in a leisure suit (Haggar double-knit, and if I'm wrong on that guess, it's not by much) with a group of very square dancers in Kentucky; Cowboy Jack Clement in sport shirt and white loafers; and middle-aged female stars in voile and polyester meringue dresses looking slightly uncertain of their "country" bona fides. Where a lesser artist might have offered up these moments with an ironic smirk, Stuart's sense of history and respect for his subjects transmits an uncommonly rich sense of the rich sense of commoners.
The love for horses is a passion beyond all reason," writes photographer and editor Kelly Klein. "Once you have that feeling for this animal, it's impossible to shake." Klein's selection of more than 200 horse photos - photographers include Helmut Newton, Annie Leibovitz, and Herb Ritts - becomes largely a tribute to the stirring relationship between horses and human beings.
More than a foot wide and a foot and a half tall, this gorgeous volume is filled with unforgettable images of humans riding, racing, jumping, grooming, feeding, breaking, training, caring for, loving, and, in one memorable shot taken from beneath the water in the Caribbean Sea, even swimming with horses. Celebrities on horseback pop up here and there, among them Pee Wee Herman, Bianca Jagger, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (try to find those three connected by anything anywhere else). Answering Klein's complaint that other books about horses "never really express the passion these creatures evoke in people," there are also images of tragedy, melancholy, and mild eroticism.
The most emblematic photo, taken by Tom Chambers, is titled Way Out West. In the left of the frame, a young boy slouches in the back of a roomy, old American sedan. Out the window, a blurry horse rushes across flat scrubland toward distant mountains. There's much to study in this picture - the kid and the horse, of course, moving in opposite directions, but also the car itself, the only item in clear focus, the inevitable modern barrier separating the two; the horse, clear about where he's heading; the distracted kid, just along for the ride.
If Joseph Henry Sharp was destined to capture in paint the waning of the Native American way of life, Forrest Fenn was destined to capture in print Sharp's monumental artistic achievement. When The Beat of the Drum and the Whoop of the Dance came out in 1983, Fenn definitively delivered what his subtitle promised: A Study of the Life and Work of Joseph Henry Sharp. Fourteen years after the book went out of print, demand for the rare first edition was so high that secondary sources like eBay were commanding impressive prices for it. Good thing for the Western art world that Fenn knew it was time for a new edition.
Teepee Smoke: A New Look Into the Life and Work of Joseph Henry Sharp is new in more than title. A heightened interest in Sharp, largely spurred by the original book, surfaced many newly discovered paintings and photo-graphs - 200 of them. The new edition includes 175 color plates, some of them paintings never exhibited in public, all of them capable of commanding your gaze.
But it's not just Sharp's paintings that make this book such a compelling lapful. His life story is as gripping as his compelling Native portraits, and Fenn's elegant storytelling renders the artist's biography as if in the same firelight that warms the painter's most evocative canvases. Possessed by a fervent interest in Indian culture and artifacts as a child growing up in Ohio, Sharp turned to Native subject matter in his art even as a young boy. At 12 he barely survived a near drowning - his frantic mother rolled him repeatedly over a barrel to get the water out of his lungs - and he suffered total deafness as a result. In his silent world, he went deeper into pictures. Education in art schools in Cincinnati and Europe trained him, but it was a trip to Taos, New Mexico, that inspired him.
"The most significant consequence of this trip occurred almost three years later in Paris while Sharp was attending classes at the Académie Julian. He met two fellow American artists, Bert Phillips and Ernest Blumenschein, who shared with him an interest in Indian culture. One wet spring afternoon in a coffeehouse in Montmartre, Sharp regaled his friends with accounts of the wonders of Taos, enthusiastically describing its colorful history, its magnificent scenery, and its rugged individualistic people. It was this conversation along the rain-damp boulevards of Paris that, according to Blumenschein, marked the 'official beginning' of the Taos Society of Artists."
So ends the book's prologue and so begins Sharp's great journey into painting the Indians of Taos. It was a beautiful and bittersweet odyssey: "In the twilight of his life, Sharp was asked by a reporter, 'Of all the things you've seen and all the things you've done, what is it that you regret the most?' The deaf artist slowly replied, 'I never heard the beat of the drum or the whoop of the dance.' "
Fortunately, Joseph Henry Sharp's paintings and Forrest Fenn's book ensure that we might.
Issue: December 2009
