Browsing by Author "Bishop, Storrs Myron, IV"

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Chathamesque: Russell Chatham's Montana vernacular
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2024) Bishop, Storrs Myron, IV; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Melissa Ragain
Painter and lithographer Russell Chatham introduced a Tonalist aesthetic to Montana's art scene in the 1970s, making way for a new aesthetic relationship between humans and nature. His work is recognizable by its gray-and-brown palette, horizontally structured compositions, and his signature envelope of atmospheric haze. When Chatham depicted a scene with fog, snowfall or rain obscuring parts of the landscape, he evoked a quiet mood conducive to introspection. People familiar with his work, especially those living in rural Park County, Montana, might look out their window and call the view, "Chathamesque." This term--along with other commonplace statements like, "It's a Russell Chatham kind of day"--became tightly bound to his artistic style and public identity. In contrast to the romanticized mythology of C.M. Russell's Old West, or the sublime grandeur of Thomas Moran's panoramic landscapes, Chatham offered a depiction of the intermountain West as a place for private, transcendental intimacy with nature. This thesis will analyze two series of Chatham's works he created in the 1980s: The Seasons, a series of twelve paintings commissioned by the Museum of the Rockies (MOR) in 1990, and The Missouri Headwaters Suite, twelve lithographs he made between 1985 and 1987. Through three stages of comparative analysis of his paintings and lithographs, this paper will trace Chatham's aesthetic development from conventional California Tonalism toward his transcendental Montana landscapes. The first stage connects Chatham's style to the nineteenth century's California Tonalist movement and its Transcendentalist relationship with nature. The second stage traces his struggle and resolution with interpreting Montana's mountainous landscape. The third stage ties his development as a lithographer to the establishment of his aesthetic vernacular. Each of these stages was another step toward a distinctive style which came to be uniquely identified with Russell Chatham. By the early 1990s, his local audiences had internalized his approach to landscape, and the term "Chathamesque" became a vernacular way of expressing their relationship with Montana's changeable appearance.