In the Remington Moment

by Stephen Tatum

For most people, the work of Frederic Remington conjures an antiquarian world of all things “western.” Why this is so, and whether it should be so, are two of the critical questions raised in this book. Stephen Tatum closely considers selected paintings from Remington’s last four years of life—his so-called years of critical acclaim. Tatum’s purpose is first, to understand these paintings, both formally and thematically, within their historical, aesthetic, and biographical contexts; and second, to account for what endows them today—after marking the centennial of Remington’s death in 1909—with continuing aesthetic and cultural significance.

 

To this end, Tatum examines these late paintings in relation to Remington’s other works, his letters and published writings, his evolving critical reception, and the writing and artwork of other cultural figures of the era, such as historian Frederick Jackson Turner and sociologist Georg Simmel. The book provides an illuminating glimpse of how and why particular Remington works might seize a viewer’s attention in his or her past or present moment of reception—how in fact their unstable visual complexity can ultimately absorb their viewer. In his “Coda,” Tatum offers a personal memoir of his own encounter with Remington’s The Love Call , a critical meditation enacting and questioning the “Remington Moment.”

280 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2010

About the author

Robert Stephen Tatum is a literary scholar specializing in Western American literature, visual culture, and cultural theory. His work explores themes such as regional identity, frontier mythology, and masculinity in both literature and visual art. He is the author of In the Remington Moment and Inventing Billy the Kid, and wrote Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses: A Reader’s Guide. He co-edited Reading The Virginian in the New West, and his award-winning essays have appeared in journals like Western American Literature and Arizona Quarterly. Tatum has also lectured widely and is currently working on Morta Las Vegas: CSI and the Problem of the West, a study of Las Vegas in Western cultural discourse.