(pleasant piano music)
- [Steven] We're in the Smithsonian American Art Museum,
looking at a painting by an artist,
whose name is Leutze,
Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.
It's a study for a mural that was added the next year
in 1862 in the Capitol Building.
- [Carol] We have pioneers in wagons.
We have American woodsmen in their buckskins.
We have farmers, immigrants, children, women.
All making that treacherous journey to settle the West.
- [Steven] This painting for me has two stars.
On the one hand it is these varied figures.
But the other star is the landscape that they inhabit.
- [Carol] If you strip out all the people in your
mind's eye and just look at the land,
you can see that it's chock full of different types
of land masses and artifacts,
that you wouldn't find in one actual place.
So, huge, treacherous snow-capped mountains,
flat mesas of the desert, and eventually to the golden land
that they are journeying towards.
- [Steven] It's important to remember that in 1861
photography was still in its infancy.
People didn't have access to the western landscape,
especially people in Washington DC.
- [Carol] And this painting was created
to tell a story.
It embodies the concept of manifest destiny,
that it was our god-given right and duty
to settle the country all the way to the West Coast.
- [Steven] Manifest destiny is of course
inherently political.
Just a few years before this, much of what is
now the Southwestern United States
had been taken from Mexico,
and we were displacing Native Americans
as Europeans moved westward.
- [Carol] And in this painting, it looks as if
they are clearing the way to forge westward
to someplace, where no one has ever been,
and that's just patently not true.
In fact in the border, you see Native American figures
who are being pushed away by the eagle.
- [Steven] Let's take a look at the way
that figures move through this canvas.
You mentioned the figures at the extreme left.
They're axes are raised,
they're breaking up a large fallen tree.
So, they are clearing this path.
It is as if as you say,
nobody has ever come this way before.
- [Carol] The figures in the painting
literally move from east to west,
from the right side of the painting
to the left side of the painting.
So, on the right, we see wagons.
We see women.
We see children.
We can sense of strength and loss that's happened
on this long and treacherous journey.
We see men pulling the oxen and the horses
up a treacherous rocky hill.
We see someone has died.
There's a cross and there's someone in a burial shroud,
and there are mourners.
We see a skeleton perhaps of a horse
and a broken wagon wheel.
And all these things allude to the difficult journey
that they've had to go through.
Even the light in the painting changes.
They're going from a dark shadowed area to the left,
where they're bathed in this golden light,
and it looks as if the journey is about
to become a bit easier.
They've passed over these treacherous land masses
and now as you said they are clearing the way in the path
through what Leutze called El Dorado, the Golden Land.
- [Steven] The figures surge up to get a better look
at the vista, perhaps of the distant golden sliver
of the Pacific Ocean, which you can just make out
on the horizon and this reminds me of the great tradition
of history painting in Europe, of the surging figures
in Jericho's the Raft of the Medusa for example.
- [Carol] You're right and it even has
a very similar pyramidal composition
to some of those historical paintings.
And then we have this lovely vignette here of a man
in a coonskin cap who is cradling his wife
and newborn baby and his daughter.
His wife is swathed in red, white, and blue
and she reminds us of an American Madonna figure,
and his right hand is extended to show her
the promised land, this is where we're going.
You can imagine this baby was born on this journey.
- [Steven] So, westward expansion itself
is clothed in a kind of spirituality
in a kind of righteousness.
And the painting is literally framed with references
that make that clear.
We have the Three Wise Men that follow
the Star of Bethlehem to find the baby Jesus.
You have on the right the spies of a Esch-elle
who had entered into the promised land before Moses
and the Israelites.
- [Carol] And they're carrying between them
this humongous bunch of grapes,
which they brought back with them to show the bounty
of the land that they discovered.
So, in a sense it's a comparison to the bounty
of the land that these settlers in the painting
are heading towards.
Leutze is trying to imbue these figures
with a sense of monumentality, a sense of mythology,
a sense that they too are entering the same realm
as Christopher Columbus or Hercules or Moses.
The figures that you see in the vignettes in the frame.
- [Steven] And I love the fact that the painting
includes also their destination.
You see at the bottom, this beautiful landscape,
this beautiful vista of the Bay of San Francisco
of the Golden Gate, where we would expect now
to see the bridge.
This is the destination that will make all
of this hardship worthwhile.
- [Carol] And at the bottom we have
Captain William Clark of Lewis & Clark fame.
The idea that these pioneers are following
in the footsteps of others who have moved West,
with a sense of great discovery.
- [Steven] So Clark and Daniel Boone.
This is the creation of American heroes.
- [Carol] And the creation of American mythology
as well, that this country is ours to discover
and explore and innovate.
- [Steven] This was painted in 1861,
the year that the Civil War began,
and so we can look at this painting
as an attempt to create a mythology of national unity,
that both the North and the South could join
in this westward expansion.
- [Carol] And that idea that the nation,
which is broken can come together again.
This as we mentioned as a study for a final mural
of the Capitol, and when Leutze created the final mural,
he altered it a little bit to add in
an African-American figure.
By this time, he'd read a draft of Abraham Lincoln's
Emancipation Proclamation,
and he was very well aware of the cultural significance
of that and Leutze himself as an immigrant to this country,
coming from Germany, being the artist,
who will represent this country's nascent history
in our move westward.
- [Steven] One can only imagine how important
that mythology was in the first years of the Civil War.
(pleasant piano music)