He was simply indefatigable. In his day he was described as a herculean figure, boyish and brash, astride a horse racing across a limitless western expanse, whooping it up with the cowboys and living a rugged man's life in a rugged domain. But we can see from the outset the dedicated, ambitious professional staking his claim to attention. Today, the usual biographical take on Remington is that he was a spoiled, insufferable snob, woefully out of shape, the very antithesis of the masculine ideal he projected in his art. In his art, to the end, he pushed against his own limits, questing for a fulfillment that lay just beyond his grasp.
Present indicators are mixed.
The exhibition then moved on to the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum in Los Angeles, the first of three stops that will also see it at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City this year. But the motive lurking behind this wholesale dismissal was ideological, not aesthetic. No doubt contemporary critics will continue to dwell on who Remington was and what he believed. But it is not enough simply to grant him cultural importance and then ignore his art. After all, the very qualities that made him America's most popular painter of the western frontier at the end of the nineteenth century make him the most controversial at the end of the twentieth.