Fine Arts Center Museum

Manifest Destiny as the epitome of Purchase and Ownership

            The Museum of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center offers a medley of the beautiful, the curious, and the weird. The white halls offer no destination, no end point, but they also offer everything. In John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, he proposes that oil painting offers a unique way of seeing, that is based upon a western value of acquiring and possessing.  He asserts that, “the special qualities of oil painting lent themselves to a special system of conventions for representing the visible” (Berger 109). In Earl Bliss’ oil on linen painting entitled, Warriors Crossing Gold Canyon, the painter juxtaposes Native American values with the western way of seeing that is unique to oil painting.

            Bliss’ painting depicts several Native Americans, or as the title asserts, Warriors, crossing and navigating a river. This is evocative because it seems as though these people are on a deliberate journey, perhaps due to encroaching settlers and pressures of a 19^th or 20^th century government.  The prevailing idea that pushed Indians from their ancestral lands was that of Manifest Destiny, “the doctrine or belief prevalent in the 19th century that the United States had the God-given right to expand into and possess the whole of the North American continent” (Dictionary). Manifest Destiny reinforces the basic principles of a capitalistic societies, in which, European oil painting originated.

            Two important Native American values are nonmaterialism and an open work ethic. Indians were not preoccupied with acquiring things, nor did they place importance on perpetual work, instead, work was completed for a distinct purpose, and when it needed to be done. The audience of Bliss’ painting does not even need to understand this fundamental value contrast to sense it in the painting. Each figure is paired with just one horse, and does not seem to be carrying much else with him. The painting reminiscent of the Impressionist movement,  creates a sense of contrast, the sky and other landscape is built with quick and blunt brushstrokes, that even drip, while the Native American figures are painted more delicately, and with finer detail. The figures are in opposition to and even oppression from their environment, which was quite the reality for the Indians who lived in the 19^th century.

            Now, with the unique way of seeing that oil paintings give us, Bliss provides us a sort of meta-narrative. Berger cites anthropologist, Levi-Strauss, “painting was perhaps an instrument of knowledge but it was also an instrument of possession” (Berger 86). With, Warriors Crossing Gold Canyon, the artist is able to “own” the painting, the American westward expansion –this symbol of Manifest Destiny, but he also attempts to juxtapose westward thought with Native American thought. He disrupts the way of seeing oil painting provides with indications of Abstract Expressionism and Impressionist flair. He does not take too much care in, “creating the illusion in the spectator that he is looking at real objects and materials” (Berger 90), and in this way calls attention to the contrast between this painting and traditional oil paintings, that provide this way of seeing.