It was a great Month in Ohio!!!!!!! I have a meeting with the Historical Society regarding the collection. It might not be Montana, but we might have a shot to keep the collection together.
We made the New in TV, Newspaper and also did an interview with "Wild West Magazine"
The People of Van Wert were Great!! The Wassenberg Art Center put on a great Show. I want to thank all the Members for helping get the "Miller Story Out" I have been contacted by several other museums and art centers to show the collection. This show just proves to me that the David Humphreys Miller collection needs to be preserved.
www.journalgazette.net/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090210/ENT/302109948&template=printartTreasures of traveling
In the ’30s, area artist befriended the victors of the Little Big Horn
Stefanie ScarlettThe Journal Gazette
Courtesy of Wassenberg Art Center
This scene was painted by David Humphrey Miller’s father, Lew, when Lew and wife Edna visited their son out West in 1939.
Bird Horse is a mixed media acrylic by Miller, a Van Wert, Ohio, native.
Among David Humphreys Miller’s 72 works was Chief Ben American Horse.
Photos courtesy of Wassenberg Art Center
Miller’s father, Lew, also painted. This portrait is of Joseph White Cow Bull.
David Humphreys Miller sketches Joseph White Cow Bull circa 1939. Miller believed White Cow Bull may have killed Gen. George Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876.
Art in the Family
What: An exhibit of artist David Humphreys Miller
When: Today through Feb. 28
Where: Wassenberg Art Center, 643 S. Washington St., Van Wert, Ohio
Hours: 1 to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays (closed Mondays)
Information: Call 419-238-6837
Admission: Free
Armed with art supplies, $100 and an audacious mission to document a contentious piece of history, David Humphreys Miller headed for the West in 1935.
With his parents’ blessing, the 15-year-old drove alone from their home in Van Wert, Ohio, to South Dakota. He planned to spend the summer interviewing and sketching American Indian survivors of the 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn, an event with which he was obsessed.
And that’s exactly what he did.
During the next 20 years, he would paint 72 survivors’ portraits, learn a bit of the Indian languages, and be adopted by Black Elk, a Sioux spiritual leader and healer.
Miller also went on to write books, including “Custer’s Fall: The Indian Side of the Story” and “Ghost Dance.” He served as a consultant on several Western movies. And he apparently returned to the reservations regularly until his death in 1992.
An exhibit of his work, “Art in the Family,” will be at the Wassenberg Art Center in Van Wert until Feb. 28.
It also includes a few pieces by his parents, Lew and Edna Miller, artists who were friends with founders Charles and Vera Wassenberg.
The exhibit pieces are part of a private collection owned by Brent Stevens, another Van Wert native who lives in Michigan. His grandfather knew Miller and got Stevens hooked on collecting the artist’s work.
“A lot of people don’t know who he is and the place in Western history that he had a part in creating,” Stevens says.
He compares Miller’s work with that of Western artists George Catlin and Winold Reiss. Miller studied with Reiss and Harvey Dunn, and he was friends with another key Western painter, Olaf Wieghorst.
“I look at his work almost more as historical documents than as paintings, because they are the only portrayals of many of these warriors,” says Doug Johns, owner of Johns’ Western Gallery. (The gallery is handling the sale of the art collection from Miller’s estate, which is now in the hands of a family friend since Miller’s wife died a few years ago.)
Miller’s survivor portraits feature Sioux (Lakota), Crow, Cheyenne and Blackfoot Indians, whom he met while traveling through the Dakotas and Montana each summer, except during World War II, when he was serving in the military.
Initially, he used interpreters for the interviews, but eventually he learned enough of their languages to communicate on his own. He took notes, using phonetic spelling first and later translating them into English. (He never used tape recorders because they were too heavy and expensive back then.) He often was able to interview a survivor multiple times to verify details.
“Black Elk instructed me in the religion of his people. Through him I came to learn a great deal of the workings of the Indian mind and spirit and gained an understanding of the Indian sense of values. I feel this knowledge has been vital in portraying these first Americans,” Miller wrote in his artist’s statement for “Brand Book No. Six; The San Diego Corral of the Westerners” in 1979.
He did the initial portrait sketches in crayon or pencil and went over them with pastels and tempera. Eventually, he turned to oils, although it meant carrying more supplies and equipment into the field.
“I learned to under-paint the faces in green earth, imparting cool tones to offset the Indians’ rich copper and brown coloration,” Miller wrote. “Since I wanted the features to have maximum impact, I painted many of the portraits on flat, white acrylic backgrounds, often eliminating shoulders. I omitted necks as well, unless the Indian wore a distinctive necklace or other special ornamentation.
“Whether it involves painting Indians or cowboys, mountain men or stagecoaches, Western art entails meticulous research and the most patient fidelity to detail on the part of the artist. Connoisseurs of the genre are highly critical of the slightest historical or technical inaccuracy. Nothing can be faked in terms of correct gear, clothing or weapons – not to mention the artist’s usual considerations of composition, color, tone and anatomy,” Miller wrote.
Because Miller kept much of his work during his lifetime instead of selling it, there isn’t a strong commercial market for it these days, Stevens says.
Besides promoting Miller’s work, he also is helping Johns’ Western Gallery of San Francisco find a buyer for Miller’s estate collection. It includes about 2,000 items: paintings, sketches, photographs, documents and various artifacts ( http://www.johnswestern.com).
The gallery hopes to find a buyer who will donate the entire collection to a public institution, ideally in the West, where descendants of the survivors in the portraits can see their relatives, Stevens says.
Doug Johns also plans to take the estate collection on the road this year to various American museums, and is still working on a catalog and a schedule for those exhibits.
He’s amazed at how a “kid in Van Wert” developed into a nationally recognized artist, author and oral historian.
“He becomes so fascinated, he has to go out there himself, and it becomes his life,” Johns says.
The gallery has video of Miller standing next to a wall in his California home, where about 50 of the survivor paintings were hanging.
“He talks about them and he almost breaks down. … He gestures to the wall and says, ‘These people, they are my family,’ ” Johns says.
sscarlett@jg.net