Edward Sheriff Curtis
The Apache Reaper
1906
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Edward S. Curtis is best known for his monumental project to document disappearing North American Indian tribes in the early twentieth century. Working alone or with various assistants, and with support from prominent individuals such as President Theodore Roosevelt and financier and banker John Pierpont Morgan, Curtis visited more than eighty tribes across the United States and Canada in order to record, through photography, sound recordings, and written accounts, the customs and traditions of Native Americans. "The North American Indian," published between 1907 and 1930, consists of twenty volumes of explanatory text with photographic illustrations and an additional twenty portfolios of larger, individual photogravure plates that complement the text volumes. Curtis’s complicated project illustrates, among other things, the conflicted nature of photography—part science, part art—in the first decades of the twentieth century: he employed photography to record and reveal information, yet many of his photographs are deeply influenced by aesthetic conventions borrowed from traditions of painting. Although he set out with ethnographic ambitions, the works he created are mediated though nostalgia for a preindustrial, Arcadian existence. "The Apache Reaper," a large portfolio plate, shows a man leaning forward in the act of cutting a field of wheat; the gradual blurring, subtle tonal contrasts, and artful lighting that highlight the figure against the dark hills and the setting sun monumentalize and idealize the anonymous figure in a way that recalls nineteenth-century painted depictions of rural peasant life. [Exhibition brochure text, 2010]
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Artist
Edward Sheriff Curtis
(American, 1868–1952)
- Title The Apache Reaper
- Date 1906
- Medium Photogravure on vellum
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Dimensions
image | 11 7/16 x 15 3/4 in.
sheet | 13 1/2 x 17 1/8 in.
matted | 22 x 28 in.
- Credit line Gift of Stephen Bunyard and Cheryl Griffin, 1987
- Object number WU 1987.9.2
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Technique
photogravure
black-and-white photography
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Work type
photograph
Focus on Photography: Recent Acquisitions
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 05/07/2010 - 07/26/2010
Travel and Tourism in American Culture
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 09/01/2005 - 10/21/2005
Teaching Gallery exhibition
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 01/17/2003 - 03/27/2003
The American West: Selections from the Washington University Collection
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 01/03/2002 - 04/14/2002
1987
P. Stephen and Cheryl Griffin Bunyard
This artwork record may be incomplete or need refinement. Our staff actively researches the collection and revises records when new information is available. If you have questions or comments about this record, please contact us.
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