A Visit to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art
By Chadd Scott on
I made my first visit to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art in May of 2024. The modestly sized museum has fine holdings of mostly 20th century American art and boasts one of the largest collections of Dale Chihuly glass anywhere in the world. I found myself especially drawn to four Western landscapes.
The museum doesn’t specialize in Western art, but these items would hold their weight among the best from the genre. Each shares a fascinating story in addition to their aesthetic appeal.
Oscar Brousse Jacobson, The Needles, Colorado Desert (1923)
Oscar Brousse Jacobson, 'The Needles, Colorado Desert,' 1923. Collection of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. Photo by Chadd Scott
What first attracted me to this painting by Oscar Brousse Jacobson (1882-1966) was its resemblance to the work of Birger Sandzen (1871–1954). Sandzen is one of my favorite Western artists. I had never heard of Jacobson before coming across this piece. Shame on me. I would later learn about his extraordinary influence upon Western art.
Closing the loop on The Needles, Colorado Desert’s resemblance to Sandzen, Jacobson studied under Sandzen at Bethany College in Lindsborg, KS. Sandzen and Jacobson are both Swedish, and Lindsborg became a popular site of emigration for Swedes looking for farming opportunities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sandzen came to Kansas alone, Jacobson with his family.
Jacobson would go on to study at the Louvre in Paris, across Europe, and earn a master of fine arts degree from Yale University in 1916. Not bad.
His greatest influence would come at the University of Oklahoma where he served as director of the School of Art from 1915 through 1954 – an astonishing stretch during which he taught, influenced and mentored thousands of artists. Among them were the artists who came to be known as the Kiowa Five or Kiowa Six.
It’s another story for another day, but the Cliff Notes is that in the 1920s, six Kiowa enrolled in art classes at the University of Oklahoma. Jacobson was a champion of Native artists and organized a traveling exhibition of their work in 1928 that made it all the way to Europe. Their paintings were included in the 1932 Venice Biennale.
The Kiowa Six were instrumental in the development of Native American easel painting and Jacobson supported them all the way. Today, the Jacobson House Native Art Center in Norman, OK, where OU is located, dedicates itself to the promotion and celebration of Native American art.
Jacobson also built and curated the collection at what is now the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University. In an especially farsighted move, he arranged for the purchase of 36 modernist American paintings and watercolors from the controversial “Advancing American Art” exhibition in 1948. Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Stuart Davis, and Romare Bearden were just a few of the icons picked up.
At the time, Modern art was thought to be infiltrated by Communists – anathema in post-war America – and Jacobson acquired the paintings cheap. If you find yourself visiting the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art and wondering why all these paintings that could be in MoMA are hanging in the middle of Oklahoma, that’s why.
Jacobson was a damn fine painter who loved portraying the West and Southwest, as this picture indicates, but his titanic influence as an educator and curator vastly outshines his artmaking.
John Sloan, Two Black Crows (1924)
John Sloan, 'Two Black Crows,' 1924. Collection of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. Photo by Chadd Scott.
A great little painting of the northern New Mexico mountains outside of Santa Fe where Sloan (1871–1951) first visited in 1919 upon the recommendation of Robert Henri (1865–1929). Henri is one of the most celebrated early American modern artists and visited New Mexico three times in the early 20th century producing a large number of portraits from those visits now found in the nation’s top art museums.
Henri and Sloan were both members of a group of artists working in early 20th century New York that would come to be known as the Ashcan School, so named for their sooty, gritty, realistic depictions of the rapidly industrializing city with smoke ash bellowing from ships and buildings.
Many city painters from “back East” could be flummoxed by New Mexico’s glaring light when trying to capture the landscape there; Sloan resolves this problem through use of a passing cloud. The darkened cloud and distant mountains hints to his Ashcan DNA.
John Steuart Curry, Sunset (1934)
John Steuart Curry, 'Sunset,' 1934. Collection of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. Photo by Chadd Scott.
Curry (1897 –1946) is the most renowned of the four artists being highlighted here. He, along with Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood (American Gothic), defined the Regionalist movement of painting centered on the nation’s rural heartland during the Great Depression and post-war years.
Curry was a Kansan, and while this scene could be Kansas, with the prickly pear cactus, Yucca, undulating topography, and distant hills, I’d guess Texas or Oklahoma is more likely.
Nan Sheets, Arroyo Hondo (undated)
Nan Sheets, 'Arroyo Hondo,' undated. Collection of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. Photo by Chadd Scott.
Another painting of northern New Mexico, this one near Taos. Like Jacobson, despite her talent as a painter, Sheets’ (1885–1976) legacy comes through advocacy on behalf of the arts.
She opened the first commercial art gallery in Oklahoma City. She was appointed by FDR in 1935 to direct the Works Progress Administration Art Project for Oklahoma during which she championed local artists including Jacobson. She founded what is now the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, acting as director for nearly 30 years. She wrote art reviews and commentaries for the Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City from 1932 to 1962.
But she was an esteemed artist, too.
She traveled widely throughout the West and Europe. Her work was exhibited in the Dallas Museum of Art and institutions across Texas. She became the first Oklahoma artist mentioned in “Who’s Who in American Art” in 1923. That same year, she was granted membership into the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors of New York, an honor the Oklahoma Historical Society calls “the greatest honor ever bestowed on an Oklahoma artist” at the time.
An art gallery continues operating out of the studio Sheets originally built for herself in what is now OKC’s Paseo Arts District.
Four fantastic Western landscapes hung side-by-side at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. Give yourself about an hour to go through the galleries.
