I would like to introduce Kent Monkman AKA Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. Monkman rejected the end of realism in painting because he felt it left a false historical record in place. He recreates famous paintings but changes them to reflect indigenous reality.
The first piece I had the honour of seeing was at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts entitled “Trappers of Men” (2006). If you look at the lower left you will see a photographer with a suitcase. Photographers used to go around with costumes to make “natives” look more “native”. Last time I visited it was removed from view. The painting is huge, about 9 by 14 ft.
https://mbam.ficelle.app/v1/?src=https%3A%2F%2Fcollections.mbam.qc.ca%2F...
https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/imaginations/2020-v11-n3-imaginations06019/1077040ar.pdf
Monkman’s acrylic on canvas version, which is part of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts collection, resets time and substitutes the animals from Bierstadt’s painting with prominent characters in North American (art) history, emphasizing the prevailing European notion of Indigenous peoples’ romanticized relationship to nature and underscoring that often Indigenous peoples were used interchangeably or synonymously with animals such as buffalo and viewed as on par with them.
Monkman’s painting is set at midday, which, as Melissa Elston notes, is an obvious rejection of Bierstadt’s sunset, a common motif in 19th-century paintings used to symbolise the settling of the American West as the end of an era leading to the dawn of another (188). In the foreground to the right the great explorers Lewis and Clark are consulting a map, while a semi-nude cowboy seems to be helping them. The Yanktonais winter count keeper, Lone Dog, is working on the winter count that bears his name, and although not historically accurate in regard to the production of Bierstadt’s painting, this winter count is from the year the Lakota defeated Custer (1876) at the battle the Lakota call of the Greasy Grass but which is more commonly known as the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
As Monkman explains, this image displaces events deemed important or even legendary by Europeans, which the Lakota viewed as trivial or insignificant (Timm). To the left of Lone Dog and the wayward explorers, we find Jackson Pollack and Piet Mondrian, both abstract artists but at opposite ends of the abstract art spectrum. Pollack, who was born in Cody, Wyoming, and died at the age of 44 as a result of an alcohol-related single-car accident, is shown holding a bottle of alcohol while he drags Mondrian away from the abstract painting he is working on. Or is he catching Mondrian as he faints after seeing Miss Chief? Alexander Mackenzie is to the right of the painters.
Mackenzie, who completed the first crossing of America from east to west 12 years before Lewis and Clark, is trying to calm the rearing horse Whistlejacket, based on a painting by George Stubbs in 1762. Belonging to the Marquess of Rockingham, Whistlejacket was an aristocratic racehorse that Stubbs painted to perfection, highlighting the beauty of the Arabian thoroughbred (Rosenthal). By including the racehorse and the British explorer Mackenzie as he tries to control the rearing and untamed beast from the Orient, Monkman’s painting calls attention to the complicated global legacies of colonialism, exoticism, and Indigeneity.
The rest of the right-hand side of the canvas consists of half-naked cowboys, George Catlin and one of his portraits on the grass beside Lone Dog and then a Canadian moniker in the painting: a Hudson’s Bay point blanket, resting between him and a half-naked RCMP officer along with an Indigenous man smoking a pipe.
Edward Curtis, located front left, is taking contrived photos of two Indigenous men, who have removed their long hair and feathers but are wearing pink lipstick, indicating a fluidity of sexuality and an indictment of the hypermasculinity associated with both the “Dead Indian” and Curtis’ work. But Curtis has turned from his work to view the true spectacle of the piece, Miss Chief Eagle Testicle, as she rises out of the water in a style reminiscent of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1485-1486). Blonde, naked, erect, and in pink high heels, Miss Chief stares seductively at the men in the front right of the painting, all of whom have stopped what they are doing to gaze at the wonder rising from the water. Miss Chief is the “Trappers of Men,” a gender fluid figure whose re-enactment of The Birth of Venus is an example of Monkman’s provocative playing with canonical European art works. Unrivalled in her salacious beauty, she is representative of the other trappers of men, who, like Miss Chief, slip between the Euro-American understandings of sexuality, enticing the cowboy as he travels West. The Birth of Venus is widely understood as an iconic image embodying the essence of classic, virginal female beauty. In situating Miss Chief as the focal point of The Trappers of Men, Monkman translates the chaste, divine love the classical goddess represents into a wanton erotic appeal that departs from the heteronormative discourse traditionally found in Western art.
Monkman’s canvas is large at 213.4 cm x 365.8 cm (84” x 144”), but there is no second guessing the main focal point of the scene. Surrounded by her friends, lovers, and aspiring lovers, Miss Chief commands the setting as the mountains seem to fade into the background and every character is watching in wonder at her emergence from the lake. This signals the making visible of repressed histories, both Indigenous and queer, absent in the traditional genres of art, history, and the mythology of the West. Bierstadt’s painting emphasizes the absence of (white) people, showing a serene setting, waiting to be explored and settled. Unlike The Last of the Buffalo, to which I turn next, Trappers of Men does not showcase the violence and atrocities that took place in the settling of the American West. Rather, it populates the false histories Bierstadt promulgated to fulfill the expectations of viewers on the Eastern seaboard or in Europe, far removed from the realities of the American West. Trappers of Men works to subvert the mythology of the West as open and empty by recasting and reversing the gaze to subvert Euro-American norms and expectations of art history and history.
