5/31/2023 0 Comments Frederic remington bronco busterBy touching brush to wax, for instance, he could indicate the hair on the rearing bronco's leg. And because each casting required a new wax positive, Remington, for the first time, could alter little details between one cast and another. Their surfaces were more finely detailed. The "Bronco Busters" made at Bertelli's Roman Bronze Works were cast in a single piece. Then, in 1900, Remington met Riccardo Bertelli, a Genoa-born technician who introduced the sculptor - and America as well - to the far more flexible and subtle lost-wax method. eventually produced perhaps 70 "Bronco Busters," all of which were made using the same method. Various pieces of the sculpture - the right arm of the rider, his upper torso, and his stirrups, and the tail of the horse - were separately cast and then joined together. The first of these was cast - in sand molds - by the Henry-Bonnard Bronze Co. The visitor may here compare 10 quite different versions of "The Bronco Buster," Remington's first bronze. You need not be a connoisseur to see how good his own works are - or how crummy are the rest. The present exhibition, organized by Michael Shapiro of Duke University, focuses on four of his best-known images - "The Bronco Buster," "The Scalp," "The Cheyenne" and "The Mountain Man." Remington was a perfectionist. The only trouble with these sculptures is that reproductions, replicas - and rip-offs made by others long after his death - today far outnumber the statues whose fine castings he supervised. These active, graceful objects are full of vim and vinegar. Their extraordinary details - the sweat on that horse's flank, the worn heels of that cowboy's boots, the muzzle of that rifle, the rocks of that steep cliff - somehow coexist with amazing, lifelike energy. He, as much as anyone, set our image of the West. One can hardly see a rodeo, or a Western on the tube, without recalling Remington. "I saw the living, breathing end of three American centuries of smoke and dust and sweat." His illustrations of the West, his paintings and his drawings - and especially his bronzes - by then had made him famous. "I saw the wild rivers and the vacant land were about to vanish forever," he wrote in 1905. He rode with cowboys and with Indians, he was a ranch cook for a while, he prospected for gold, and ran a mule ranch in Kansas. Its side-by-side display of originals and fakes should make the bad guys squirm.įrederic Remington (1861-1909), who had spent his New York childhood dreaming of the Wild West, set out in 1880 (after two years at Yale) to find the real thing. "Cast and Recast: The Sculpture of Frederic Remington," which opens today at the National Museum of American Art, is an exhibit with a mission.
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