84
PARTISAN REVIEW
bold patterning, and lively color, within a circumscribed palette; images are
oriented towards all four points of the compass, spinning dizzyingly , wi th
wonderful effect, across the ledger pages. But even the crudest efforts are
noteworthy for their passionate intensity, and the great majority, while
quite conventionalized, have a great deal of formal power and considerable
invention - for example, a rather clumsy but unignorable shorthand ren–
dering of a circle of galloping Crow warriors as overlapping, outlined
horses' heads, with the riders' profiles superimposed to conjure up agile
horsemen pressed f1at to their mounts' bodies.
What all the drawings share is evidence of scrupulous observation
transformed into expressive shape: witness the long necks and narrow ears
of a row of soldiers' mules, the powerful haunches and straining necks of
speeding horses, the massed poles of tipis. An extraordinary drawing made
about 1876-77, by Making Medicine, a Cheyenne prisoner, depicts "Fowls
of Indian Territory," including a bald eagle, a turkey, a magpie, a king–
fisher, and four different kinds of hawks, each readily identifiable as it f1ies
across the page. Making Medicine's
Killing an Elk
powerfully overlaps the
mounted hunter and his collapsing victim, and situates them with the
massed tracks of the herd and the trailing prints of prey and pursuer. The
Plains Indian drawings are schematic, stylized, and sometimes expedient,
but like the amazingly vivid images in prehistoric caves, they distill typi–
cal features into essentials, and achieve an eloquent balance between the
particular and the abstract.
The most memorable drawings need no anthropological or historical
justification. A fierce, confrontational image of a Sun Dance Lodge by
Wohaw, a young Kiowa imprisoned in the mid-1870s, is as striking for its
vigorous touch, strange color, dizzying shifts of scale, and variety of marks
as for its hovering supernatural beings - like scrawled clouds with beaks.
A mystical scene drawn in 1882 by an Arapaho known as "Henderson
Ledger Artist A" - some artists, like medieval masters, are nameless,
although recognizable as distinct individuals - is another knockout, a free–
for-all of spots, feathers, f10ating bullets (maybe), and wavy lines of power
exploding from one page of the ledger into a second, the whole anchored
by the implacable gaze of an atypically frontal, magical Thunder Horse. As
the curators,janet Catherine Berlo and Gerald McMaster, remind us, mak–
ing these images was both celebration and mourning, commemoration and
act of subversion. Whatever the motivation. the best works in this won–
derful show leap off the page, not only for their force of feeling, but for
their freshness, vigor, and immediacy.
The context of this constellation of drawing exhibitions may explain
why "drawing issues" seemed crucial to the recent work of Louise Fishman
and Harriet Korman, shown at about the same time, at Robert Miller
