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An Al-lure-ing Sight

Lure of the West: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum opens today at the Museum of Art at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

According to a review in the Akron Beacon Journal, "The exhibit showers us with the grandeur and majesty of the American landscape and the Native American and Hispanic cultures that inhabited it."

Midwinter in the Sangre de Cristos by Alice Geneva Kloss is one of many western landscape paintings in the show.

Kloss acknowledged that łAn artist must keep in close contact with nature in order to produce a significant body of work. Alert observation constantly refreshes the creative viewpoint. A love of nature, an interest in people, is so much a part of me, I must use it in art expression.˛ After her first visit to Taos on her honeymoon in 1925, the artist chose the region's broad uninterrupted spaces, clear light, and brilliant colors as her primary subject matter.

Source: Merry Foresta. Lure of the West: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).

Pictured: Gene Kloss, 1903–1996, Midwinter in the Sangre de Cristos, about 1936, oil, 20 x 30 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U.S. Department of Labor.