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The American Museum journal (c1900-(1918)) (18156556422)
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Title: The American Museum journal
Identifier: americanmuseumjo13amer (find matches)
Year: c1900-(1918) (c190s)
Authors: American Museum of Natural History
Subjects: Natural history
Publisher: New York : American Museum of Natural History
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library
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Copyright by E. W. Deming interpreters of the Great Mys- tery, to make him strong, brave and generous. In his emaciated condition and with his strong faith, the visions were real to him and influenced his whole life. The white man owes the red man a debt greater than he can ever repay and is in honor bound to record as true a history of the oldtime Indian as possible, that future generations may know and appreciate this stone age people surviving until to-day. There has never been in literature or in art a more splen- did subject to treat. Here is a man different from any other, with deep poetic and religious tendencies but never a fanatic. It is this man and this race, as far as possible uninfluenced by civilization, that I wish to set forth in the decorations at the American Museum. With the Plains Indians I shall be able to eliminate everything of white influence. I have taken for the paintings that period after the horse was introduced. Horses were brought over in 1541. Afterwards they were stolen by Indians and began to drift north. The Indian at that time was in no way influenced by the white man. Each panel of the series in the Plains Indian hall is planned to tell the story of a certain stock of Indians, the way of living, customs, decoration of lodges, life in the tipi, transportation, everything that can be told; be- sides a hundred little things that there is no record of at all, children play- ing with make-believe travois, animals, tame crows, around the camp — matters that give color and reality to the life. The Indian boy of to-day does not even know of these things with the changed way of living and the lack of the oldtime way of telling stories. Other panels in the series will show the Sioux visiting the Blackfoot; a Pawnee hunting party coming in — the earth-lodge people; the return of a Comanche war party bringing in stolen horses; a sun dance, probably Cheyenne, typical of a religious ceremony; and a buffalo run with the Blackfoot and Sioux tribes. Studies for mural decorations in the Southwest Indian hall of the'Ameri- can Museum have been made during the past two years by Louis Akin, and most unfortunate was his recent death. He was not only an interpreter of the Indian, but was also one of the few, almost the only artist, who realizes in his studies and pictures the romance and mystery of the wonderful country of the Pueblo Indian. As a co-worker in recording the Indian, I grieve for his loss, and for the delay that must follow in making that true pictorial record of the American Indian which both art and science demand. 105
When he was still an infant, Deming’s family moved from his birthplace in Ashland, Ohio, to western Illinois, an area that during those pre-and post-Civil War years retained a frontier character, and where roaming Winnebago Indians were sometimes neighbors. While still in his teens, Deming traveled to Indian territory in Oklahoma and sketched extensively. Determined to become a painter of Indians, he enrolled at the Art Students League, then spent a year at the Académie Julian in Paris (1884−85), studying under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre. Back in the United States, he worked the next two years painting cycloramas. In 1887 Deming first visited and painted the Apaches and Pueblos of the Southwest. His active career of painting and illustrating took him repeatedly to the lands of the Blackfoot, Crow, and Sioux, as well as to Arizona and New Mexico. After the turn of the century, Deming devoted more time to sculpture but also began work on a series of romantic murals of Indian life, which were subsequently installed in the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of the American Indian in New York.
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