This is the initial post on this new blog.  More than sixty years ago, when I became involved in study of the Art History, the very first courses I had to take were two entitled "The History of Western Art." At that time, Art History having its academic roots in 19th-century England and Germany, defined Western Art as encompassing generally Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (The Major Arts) from prehistoric European Caves to the early 20th century in Europe, Ancient Egypt, and the pre-Islamic Near East.    It was a very typical academic discipline as defined by educated Western European and some American white men. Most of this Art was judged as worthy of being hung in splendid isolation in great museums, or in the private collections of the wealthy. American Art itself was generally ignored until the early 20th century. All the other material produced, embroidery, metalwork, furniture, popular prints and such things as comic books were dumped into the category of The Minor Arts.  I am only exaggerating a little.

Even the field I chose as a graduate student, painting in late medieval Spain, was considered by the professional establishment as an outlier: "provincial," of low quality and of no more value than the wood it was painted on.  As for the artists of the American West, they were dismissed as mere "illustrators," and the people who collected such stuff were themselves often thought of as ignorant ranchers.

By the mid 20th century, all of these views had begun to change. There was all the visual material produced in time by everyone else in the world.  Many art historians became cultural historians, studying and writing--and making documentary films and TV shows about the visual arts in the context of the environments that produced them and the people who consumed them.  Finally, we started to understand that all of it is art, whether something just to be seen or made for uses apart from just something aesthetic.

That's why I began exploring the Briscoe Museum and its Western (American) Art after I retired in 2016.  As in anything a person investigates the Good, the Bad and the Ugly to be found there, but which  depends on who is looking at it and what they want to find.  What you as a reader here finds interesting is a personal thing.  I won't at all be offended if you never look at this site again, though I hope you will.

There will be no scholarly-type footnotes here.  Instead, all references to sources, pictures and quotes will grouped together at the end of each post.

The next post will be on a subject I wrote about on another blog, but will start as a good way to see where this blogger is coming from.  Read it and weep! Or not! or Delete it!