Amon Carter Museum. The Amon Carter Museum of American Art is located in Fort Worth, Texas, in the city's cultural district. The museum's permanent collection features paintings, photography, sculpture, and works on paper by leading artists working in the United States and its North American territories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The greatest concentration of works falls into the period from the 1820s through the 1940s. Photographs, prints, and other works on paper produced up to the present day are also an area of strength in the museum's holdings. The collection is particularly focused on portrayals of the Old West by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell, artworks depicting nineteenth-century exploration and settlement of the North American continent, and masterworks that are emblematic of major turning points in American art history. The full spectrum of American photography is documented by 45,000 exhibition-quality prints, dating from the earliest years of the medium to the present. A rotating selection of works from the permanent collection is on view year-round during regular museum hours, and several thousand of these works can be studied online using the Collection tab on the ACMAA's official website. Museum admission for all exhibits, including special exhibits, is free. The Amon Carter Museum of American Art opened in 1961 as the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art. The museum's original collection of more than 300 works of art by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell was assembled by Fort Worth newspaper publisher and philanthropist Amon G. Carter, Sr. Carter spent the last ten years of his life laying the legal, financial, and philosophical groundwork for the museum's creation. Over 400 works of art by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell form the ACMAA's core collection of art of the Old West. These holdings include drawings, illustrated letters, prints, oil paintings, sculptures, and watercolors produced by Remington and Russell during their lifetimes. More than sixty of the works by Remington and more than 250 of the works by Russell were purchased by the museum's namesake, Amon G. Carter, Sr., over a twenty-year span beginning in 1935. Additions to Amon Carter's original holdings by museum curators have resulted in a collection that contains multiple examples of Remington's and Russell's best work at every stage of their respective careers. Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell were America's best known and most influential western illustrators. Working from his New York studio except when traveling, Remington produced colorful and masculine images of life in the Old West that shaped public perceptions of the American frontier experience for an eastern audience eager for information. Montana resident Charles Russell, with his cowboy dress, laconic manner, and storytelling prowess, epitomized, in the early twentieth-century, the image of the Cowboy Artist in the eyes of the eastern press. Though neither artist had lived on the frontier at the height of America's westward expansion, their drawings, paintings, and sculptures were infused with the action and convincing realism of direct observation. Russell moved to Montana Territory in 1880, nine years before statehood, and had worked as a cowboy for more than a decade before beginning his career as a professional artist. Remington toured Montana in 1881, later owned a sheep ranch in Kansas, and had traversed Arizona Territory in 1886 as an illustrator for Harper's Weekly. These and other experiences enabled both artists to convincingly portray a vast variety of Old West subject matter drawing on real world experiences, historical evidence, and their artistic imaginations.
more...