In the Remington Moment

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In the Remington Moment

Stephen Tatum

280 pages
8 color plates, 34 b-w images

Hardcover

June 2010

978-0-8032-2528-2

$55.00 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

June 2010

978-0-8032-3038-5

$55.00 Add to Cart

About the Book

For most people, the work of Frederic Remington conjures an antiquarian world of all things “western.” Why this is so, and whether it should be so, are two of the critical questions raised in this book. Stephen Tatum closely considers selected paintings from Remington’s last four years of life—his so-called years of critical acclaim. Tatum’s purpose is twofold: first, to understand these paintings, both formally and thematically, within their historical, aesthetic, and biographical contexts; and second, to account for what endows them today—after marking the centennial of Remington’s death in 1909—with continuing aesthetic and cultural significance.
 
To this end, Tatum examines these late paintings in relation to Remington’s other works, his letters and published writings, his evolving critical reception, and the writing and artwork of other cultural figures of the era, such as historian Frederick Jackson Turner and sociologist Georg Simmel. The book provides an illuminating glimpse of how and why particular Remington works might seize a viewer’s attention in his or her past or present moment of reception—how in fact their unstable visual complexity can ultimately absorb their viewer. In his “Coda,” Tatum offers a personal memoir of his own encounter with Remington’s The Love Call, a critical meditation enacting and questioning the “Remington Moment.”

Author Bio

Stephen Tatum is a professor of English and director of the Environmental Humanities Graduate Program at the University of Utah. He is the author and editor of several books, most recently coeditor, with Melody Graulich, of Reading “The Virginian” in the New West (Nebraska 2003).

Praise

"Can the work of an artist like Remingtonnostalgic even in his timebe considered as more than a relic in ours? Might it still have an affecting presence a century after Remington's passing? Tatum's book is a palpable affirmation."Brian Rusted, Great Plains Quarterly

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations  

Acknowledgments  

Introduction: In the Remington Moment    

1. Looking at Water

On Coming to the Call (1905) 

2. Looking at Sky

On With the Eye of the Mind (1908) 

3. Looking at Fire

On The Hunters’ Supper (c. 1909)   

4. Looking at Earth

On The Outlier (1909)  

In the Remington Moment, Part Two; or, The Love Call 

Notes

Index

 

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