The Oklahoma and New MexicoNative American art movements in the first half of the 1900s share similar traits that define the Native American art market, including patronage, mentoring, community-based collectives, and new structures of support through education and museums. The Bacone school art movement was influenced by the Bacone College, as well as art programs of Chilocco Indian School, and Haskell IndianIndustrial Training Institute, all of which were located in a similar geographic region. Tribes from the Southeastern, Prairie, and Central Plains regions each have their own historical practices of pictorial representation, whether in carving or painting; however, removal to Indian Territory in the 19th century disrupted many customary art practices. Access to Western art materials gave Native artists a new means of self-expression, as well as a new way of recording history and daily practices.
"Flatstyle"
The Bacone style differs from the two other prevalent flat styles of Native American painting in Oklahoma of the time: Kiowa style and the Studio style. The "Flatstyle" painting, was in part made popular in the 1920s by the Kiowa style of painting by the Kiowa Six, this was rooting in the teachings by Oscar Jacobson at the School of Art at the University of Oklahoma where he served as Director from 1915 to 1945. However the Bacone style was specifically different from the Kiowa style because it had brighter colors, more movement and action, and visual perspective. The Southern Plains style had its origins in Plains hide painting and winter counts. After the decline of buffalo herds in the late 19th century, Plains painting shifted to Ledger art, which, under the stewardship of such artists as Silver Horn, evolved into easel art. The Studio style, as taught at the Santa Fe Indian School, first by Dorothy Dunn followed by Gerónima Cruz Montoya, built upon the accomplishments of the San Ildefonso school of painters and Hopi painters such as Fred Kabotie, who were successful "Flatstyle" easel artists in the 1910s and 1920s in Arizona and New Mexico. These artists were inspired by Pueblo mural painting and pottery painting traditions. Their work often features pastoral scenes in muted colors. Collectively, these three Flatstyle movements were sometimes derided by Native artists in the 1960s as "Bambi Art," which has been criticized as nostalgic, sentimental, and limited in scope.
Bacone College influence
was a student at Chilocco Indian School and a student of Oscar Jacobson's at OU, Blue Eagle helped shape the Bacone style. Blue Eagle, being Muscogee Creek, Pawnee, and Wichita, used Southeastern Woodland and Central Plains influences in his work, which frequently portrayed cultural or historic information about his tribes in a stylized, narrative form. The first Bacone College's art department director was musician/storyteller, Mary "Ataloa" Stone McLendon from 1932 until 1935, she had built the structure that later became an early classroom for the art department. She was followed by Blue Eagle serving as the second director from 1935 to 1939. Woody Crumbo succeeded him in 1938. 1938 is the year artist Ruthe Blalock Jones gives for the establishment of the Bacone School of Indian painting, while some would give the year 1935.
Style and media
Both Blue Eagle's and Crumbo's styles were also influenced by the streamlined, bold look of Art Deco. Casein on illustration board was a popular medium, as well as gouache and watercolor. Technical skill in draftsmanship was emphasized, as was the ethnographic accuracy of subjects portrayed. Paintings were aesthetically pleasing, with contours of a certain hue often surrounded by outlines of lighter tints, to emphasize the spiritual nature of the subject. Figures were brilliantly colored with backgrounds of a "subdued palettes of greens, blues, and browns," as Ruthe Blalock Jones writes. Blue, in particular, is a color representing sorrow, loss, and memory for some Southeastern tribes, and is often a preferred background color. Implied narrative gave the Bacone style a sense of drama.
