{"id":5622,"date":"2015-02-18T07:20:46","date_gmt":"2015-02-18T14:20:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=5622"},"modified":"2015-02-20T16:15:12","modified_gmt":"2015-02-20T23:15:12","slug":"cody-artists-lost-treasures-on-display-through-april-10-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2015\/02\/cody-artists-lost-treasures-on-display-through-april-10-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Cody artist’s ‘lost treasures’ on display through April 10"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Family\"<\/a>

Photo by Marcello Bertoni, courtesy of Harry Jackson Trust<\/p>

Harry Jackson sits in front of his abstract painting \u201cThe Family\u201d in his New York City studio circa 1970s.<\/p><\/div>\n

In a nondescript metal warehouse on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming, sits an unlikely treasure: a vast body of work by an artist praised by Jackson Pollock, displayed at prestigious museums of art across the United States, and collected by Presidents Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford and Lyndon Johnson.<\/p>\n

The artist, the late Harry Jackson, of Cody and Camaiore, Italy, left behind an extraordinary legacy reflective of a life that spanned more than eight decades and several continents.<\/p>\n

Plagued by seizures and mood disorders resulting from a brain injury Jackson sustained while fighting in the Battle of Tarawa in the Pacific during World War II, the artist also lived a life of suffering and conflict. His complex and thorny personality often alienated him from his colleagues, including curators interested in his artwork.<\/p>\n

It is perhaps for this reason that so much of his life\u2019s work sits in Cody today. Since his father\u2019s death in 2011 at age 87, Jackson\u2019s eldest son, Matthew, has worked to assemble and survey his father\u2019s pieces\u2014approximately 5,300 paintings and drawings and 1,000 sculptures. It is a collection he describes as \u201ca lost treasure of the art world that has been hiding in plain sight for years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Cody\"<\/a>

Photo by Marcello Bertoni, courtesy of Harry Jackson Trust<\/p>

\u201cMexican Composition\u201d is an oil on canvas work created by Harry Jackson in 1949. Though best known for his depictions of the American West, Jackson was hailed as an important abstract expressionist painter, and was friends with Jackson Pollock, who was born in Cody, Wyoming.<\/p><\/div>\n

A selection of this treasure is on view through April 10 at the Ucross Foundation Art Gallery in Clearmont, Wyoming. The exhibition, Jackson\u2019s first major abstract show in six decades, offers a rare glimpse into the mind of a fascinating, if controversial, man. It includes the public debut of eight paintings that are part of a major work called \u201cBetio: Light and War,\u201d which Jackson created from 2000-2001 during his re-examination of the battle for Betio Island, part of the Tarawa Atoll.<\/p>\n

Described by the artist as \u201cworks that exploded out of me,\u201d the paintings that make up \u201cBetio: Light and War\u201d were more recently described as a \u201ca monumental masterpiece\u201d by Gordon McConnell, the artist, critic and former curator of the Yellowstone Art Museum.<\/p>\n

As an artist, Jackson defied categorization. He was widely considered to be the pre-eminent Western artist of his time. He was also acclaimed as a master of realism and as one of the great mid-century abstract expressionists.<\/p>\n

LIFE Magazine devoted eight pages to a profile that hailed him as an \u201cAmerican painter of surging talent and ambition.\u201d Today his late abstract works focused on his experiences in World War II are forcing a reevaluation of his entire career.<\/p>\n

To anyone with a fascination for biography, the man\u2019s life story is as interesting as his work. His mother ran a lunchroom near the Chicago stockyards and he grew up admiring the cowboys who ate there. Inspired by them, and by a LIFE magazine photo spread about cowboy life in Wyoming, he left home in 1938 at age 14 for Cody, where he found work as a ranch-hand.<\/p>\n

Later, he worked on Meeteetse\u2019s Pitchfork Ranch, which he called his \u201cspiritual birthplace.\u201d He enlisted in the Marines at 18. Serving as a combat artist, he witnessed some of the bloodiest fighting in the Pacific. After the war, he traveled to New York to seek out and study with Jackson Pollock.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Eventually, he broke away from Pollock’s circle, leaving for Europe to study the work of the Renaissance masters. In the 1960s, he built a foundry in Italy and there cast some of his most important pieces. Although he traveled widely and lived elsewhere, Jackson always returned to Wyoming and claimed it as home.<\/p>\n

Jackson’s friends and subjects included Bob Dylan, John Wayne and C. Douglas Dillon, who served as the U.S. ambassador to France, the 57th secretary of the Treasury and chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1969 Jackson created \u201cThe Marshal,\u201d a sculpture for the cover of Time magazine of Wayne as Rooster Cogburn from the film \u201cTrue Grit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Curators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Denver Art Museum, among other institutions, collected and displayed his work. The Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody owns several bronze sculptures by Jackson as well as pieces from his abstract-expressionist period and oil-on-canvas renderings of cowboy life.<\/p>\n

\"Betio\"<\/a>

Courtesy Harry Jackson Foundation<\/p>

Harry Jackson holds several long paint brushes in front of a portion of his abstract work: “Betio: Light and War.”<\/p><\/div>\n

Today, Matthew Jackson is searching for a home for his father\u2019s work. His hope is to keep the pieces together as one collection alongside the 149 volumes of journals the artist penned and other papers that chronicle his father\u2019s life. He is also working to remodel his father\u2019s Cody studio, which houses his father\u2019s vast legacy, with the plan of opening it to the public, possibly as early as this fall.<\/p>\n

Until then, the exhibition at the Ucross Foundation Art Gallery offers a rare opportunity to view a fascinating dimension of Jackson\u2019s work. The show presents 47 paintings and drawings\u2014all abstract expressionist pieces, which by all accounts are key to understanding Jackson\u2019s artistic legacy.<\/p>\n

\u201cAny full account of his work,\u201d said McConnell, \u201cmust acknowledge the significance of abstraction to his work as a whole.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you go<\/strong>:\u00a0\u201cWell-Aimed Lightning: The Abstract Art of Harry Jackson\u201d runs through April 10, with an opening reception Saturday, Feb. 21. For more information, call the Ucross Foundation at 307-737-2291 or visit ucrossfoundation.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Alexis M. Adams writes from Red Lodge. She has also contributed to AFAR, the Boston Globe and the Utne Reader, among other publications.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a nondescript metal warehouse on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming, sits an unlikely treasure: a vast body of work by an artist praised by Jackson Pollock, displayed at prestigious museums of art across the United States, and collected by Presidents Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford and Lyndon Johnson. The artist, the late Harry Jackson, of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":5612,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[572,2116,2112,2113,2114,2117,407],"class_list":["post-5622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-cody","tag-gordon-mcconnell","tag-harry-jackson","tag-jackson-pollock","tag-tarawa","tag-ucross-foundation","tag-yellowstone-art-museum","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5622\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}