matic
than actuality and less realistic than real characters. Lynn Riggs of
Oklahoma, author of _Green Grow the Lilacs_, has so far been the most
successful dramatist.

34. Miscellaneous Interpreters and Institutions

ARTISTS

ART MAY BE SUBSTANTIVE, but more than being its own excuse for being,
it lights up the land it depicts, shows people what is significant,
cherishable in their own lives and environments. Thus Peter Hurd of
New Mexico has revealed windmills, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri has
elevated mules. Nature may not literally follow art, but human eyes
follow art and literature in recognizing nature.

The history of art in the Southwest, if it is ever rightly written, will
not bother with the Italian "Holy Families" imported by agent-guided
millionaires trying to buy exclusiveness. It will begin with clay
(Indian pottery), horse hair (vaquero weaving), hide (vaquero plaiting),
and horn (backwoods carving). It will note Navajo sand painting and
designs in blankets.

Charles M. Russell's art has been characterized in the chapter on "Range
Life." He had to paint, and the Old West was his life. More versatile
was his contemporary Frederic Remington, author of _Pony Tracks, Crooked
Trails_, and other books, and prolific illustrator of Owen Wister,
Theodore Roosevelt, Alfred Henry Lewis, and numerous other writers of
the West. Not so well known as these two, but rising in estimation,
was Charles Schreyvogle. He did not write; his best-known pictures
are reproduced in a folio entitled _My Bunkie and Others_. Remington,
Russell, and Schreyvogle all did superb sculptoring in bronze. One of
the finest pieces of sculpture in the Southwest is "The Seven Mustangs"
by A. Phimister Proctor, in front of the Texas Memorial Museum at
Austin.

Among contemporary artists, Ross Santee and Will James (died, 1942) have
illustrated their own cow country books, some of which are listed under
"Range Life" and "Horses." William R. Leigh, author of _The Western
Pony_, is a significant painter of the range. Edward Borein of Santa
Barbara, California, has in scores of etchings and a limited amount of
book illustrations "documented" many phases of western life. Buck Dunton
of Taos illustrated also. His lithographs and paintings of wild animals,
trappers, cowboys, and Indians seem secure.

I cannot name and evaluate modern artists of the Southwest. They are
many, and the excellence of numbers of them is nationally recogn