IN FERNAND LUNGREN’S 1896 painting of the Grand Canyon, he bathes the immense structure in light, bringing out its natural variations. Swathes of lavender and cyan, gradations of reds and pinks decorate the canyon, all set against an unwavering midday sky. In the foreground, before the uninhabited landscape, is an Indigenous man crouching atop an enormous red rock. This man looks down at the cavern, with his hands firmly placed on the rock, grounding the image. But the man is nonspecific, faceless; he has been placed there to indicate the scale, solitude, and mysticism of the landscape.
Aesthetically modern, these paintings employ color and light in a way; the land waits for colonization. As Dr. Jennifer Henneman, Curator of Western American Art and Director of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art at the Denver Art Museum, synthesizes, these images are “restricted by limits to knowledge, responsive to the constraints and demand of Eurocentric art market dynamics, and fundamentally haunted by absences: the absence of time, modernity, and the effects of colonization, to name a few.”
