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The execution is phlegmatically deliberate. “Dakota Modern,” crisply curated by Kathleen Ash-Milby, consists almost exclusively of works in tempera, watercolor, gouache, or casein on paper. Their daughter, Inge Dawn, who was born in 1948, still administers her father’s legacy. degrees at universities there and in Oklahoma. The couple reunited in New York and, travelling west by train, married during a stopover in Chicago, to elude a law against miscegenation in South Dakota, where they settled. She was to be an astute and redoubtable partner for the rest of his life. in 1945, he was joined two years later by his fiancée, a German woman named Heidi Hampel, whom he had met and courted during the war. (His unflagging goal, he remarked, was to avoid earning a Purple Heart.) Returning to the U.S. Howe served in Europe as an Army artillery soldier during the Second World War, almost never speaking of the experience except sardonically. By the early fifties, after the Studio movement had begun to devolve into gift-shop fare, Howe was onto something rangier, informed by an avid appreciation of Western modern art, if at first only by way of reproduction, while being sustained, in South Dakota, by teaching jobs and, eventually, by commissioned work on public murals. One example in the show, “Blue Antelope” (circa 1934-38), delicately represents the eponymous animal beneath a floating, austerely geometric arch. Howe quickly became a leading light in what was dubbed the Studio Style, which originated at the school, elegantly arraying linear tribal motifs in negative space with sparing touches of color. Photograph courtesy National Museum of the American Indian / Oscar Howe Family Oscar Howe, photographed on March 30, 1958, at South Dakota State University, with a selection of his paintings. After graduating, in 1933, he enrolled in a trailblazing art program at the Santa Fe Indian School, in New Mexico. (Manual labor was then the all but obligatory horizon of ambition for most reservation-raised boys.) Howe subsequently returned to the school, which, in the interim, had undergone humane reforms. Such matters were alien to his father, who scorned his artistic aspirations.
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He spent roughly a year back on his home reservation with a sage grandmother, Shell Face, whose exciting stories imbued him with a profound knowledge of tribal history and myth. Beset by eye and skin diseases and, in 1924, traumatized by news of the death, from an illness, of his mother, he contemplated suicide. At the time, these schools harshly endeavored to suppress Native youths’ ancestral ways. Born in 1915, with the tribal name Mazuha Hokshina, on an impoverished reservation in South Dakota, he was shipped off, seven years later, to one of the United States’ federally run boarding schools. Howe owed the flowering of his genius to silver-lined childhood bad luck. Such paintings embody no rationale except their own. Yet more peekaboo are bits of figures in the plangent gallimaufry of “Dance of the Heyoka” (1954).
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In “Bear Dancer” (1962), illustrative details-a bear’s head, a wielded spear-lurk unobtrusively amid cubistically distributed abstract forms. But racial identity wasn’t so much asserted as baked into Howe’s pragmatic appropriation, and advancement, of sophisticated aesthetics. A palette of russet, yellow, and black has precedents in the Lakota and Dakota crafts of hide painting and beadwork. The vertiginous composition incorporates tropes of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, which, having become second nature to Howe, hardly vitiate the intensity of this particular religious rapture. In Howe’s “Sacro-Wi-Dance (Sun Dance),” from 1965, sacrificially self-wounded male celebrants are seen from an improbable viewing point, below and looking up, as they tumble from a foreshortened, serpentine rendering of the rite’s lofty, horizontally striped central pole. He bridged ethnic authenticity and internationalist derring-do, though condescension from establishment institutions and proprietary tribute from some sectarian advocates have hindered his recognition as a straight-up canonical modernist. (Some days, you may have the place and its spectacular collection of Native American art and artifacts almost to yourself, except for the occasional school group.) Howe is a frequently misunderstood American master.
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Custom House-a prodigy of Beaux-Arts architecture by Cass Gilbert, from 1907-hard by Battery Park. The show graces the always enthralling New York branch of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, housed in the Alexander Hamilton U.S. In town with some summer hours to spare? Visit “Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe,” the overdue retrospective of a remarkable Yanktonai Dakota painter, who died in 1983, at the age of sixty-eight.