Oklahoma is a touch of the Midwest, with green rolling hills, grasslands, and humid climate, and a touch of the Southwest, with the cowboy culture, oil, and warmer climate.  I like the western flavor, but with a bit cooler climate and more greenery added.  It straddles both regions, southwest and midwest, like the Big 12 Conference, which has Iowa State to the north and Texas to the south.  There is a comfortableness about Oklahoma.  The people have carved out a nice, separate lifestyle for Oklahomans, with nice housing and low cost of living.  There is a calmness about the world, a provincial feel.  Weather is a part of your life.  You are close to it in Oklahoma.  Balmy skies and thunder storms.  Mostly, that is a nice feeling.  However, Oklahoma is also about tornado alerts and warnings breaking into television programs.  It is driving along the highways, listening to the radio to know where funnels are touching down, which counties.

I am driving east from Denver, towards Salina, Kansas, where I will turn south towards Oklahoma.  Once again, I am on the open Interstate.   Although America has been homogenized by the Walmarts, Exxons, and McDonalds, you can still find beauty and solace on the Interstate, in the scenery you drive through, as on autopilot.  You can get off the Interstates and take back roads if you wish.  There is still something to the open road.  Perhaps I am not really going anywhere, just going.  Perhaps there is a lostness in me which I disguise by creating artificial destinations.  Perhaps I have wanderlust genes, going back to my Dad, who moved the family every year from town to town, doing sales, or perhaps further back to my family which left Holland in 1848.  One of my film heroes is Kowalski, who races from Denver to San Francisco in his Dodge Challenger, chased by police all the way, in “Vanishing Point.”  I am clearly enchanted by travel, the freedom of the open road, the wide spaces, the movement, the exploration of the country, new discoveries.  I envy the motorcyclists, caught in the rain, putting on wet gear beneath underpasses, riding the roads in open weather, with no canopy around them, the air in their faces, their oneness with nature.  They really experience the countryside they travel through.

I am in somewhere in western Kansas, flat and plain.  As a child, the great plains of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas were my life: Dodge City, Great Bend, Garden City, Duncan, Amarillo, and Levelland.  The towns talked about and traveled through, where Dad trained salesmen: McPherson, Pratt, Hutchinson, El Dorado, Hays, Newton, Meade, and Liberal.  Places on the Kansas Turnpike (KTA), others on the Will Rogers Turnpike, where we overnighted on the way between Roswell and Des Moines.   My thoughts go to my Uncle who was my Dad’s boss, who opened memorial parks, and who helped “all boats rise” in the family.  I remember the kitchen tables, with the old timer salesmen  sitting around it talking about  “big deals,” and the young salesmen, students at O.U.  Stories are being told of other old salesmen, one last seen driving, oblivious, down a one way street the wrong way in Hobbs, New Mexico, yelling at an oncoming car to get off the blinking road.  Each year for me was a new school in a new town.  I don’t remember much of it.

The fields I am passing now are wheat fields, golden, with farm houses in the distance, modest with modest barns, always white board.  Signs on the road point to Abilene, Ike’s birthplace, and to Russell, home to Bob Dole and Arlen Specter.  Turning south at Salina, I travel a while entering Oklahoma, then exit in the evening to Blackwell, Oklahoma.  I am looking for memories of my childhood.  We lived here for a summer after my 6th grade.  I remember my mother, my younger sister, and I walking each day to the public swimming pool, new and clean, crowded with families.  But, as I drive through town with my window down, I am taken back by the fact that many buildings are empty, with only a few older people sitting on main street, the city pool in disrepair, long closed.  Has this happened in the past 50 years, or was my memory wrong?  I got back on the freeway.

In Norman, I have lunch at Taco Bueno, one of my favorite fast food places, and drive over to Fred Jones Gallery on the University of Oklahoma campus, where I see a wonderful exhibit of Edward Curtis late period (1926) photographs of the Oklahoma plains tribes, the Cherokee, Cheyenne, Pawnee, Osage, Wichita, and Arapaho.  Curtis retired in 1930, but lived until 1952, suffering depression and not working, the exhibit said.  His gold toned, silver plate photographs show native Americans who still lived in the old world, even in the 1920s.   We see a traditional world, apart from modernization, except for some cowboy clothes.  It is a world of traditional societies, “sky” and “deer,” and bundled babies in wooden child carriers, and buffalo herds, and dancers, and teepees, and pumpkin carving to make bowls, and lot of native dress.  My favorite item in the museum is the painting of “Vanessa Bell,”  done in 1912, by fellow Bloomsbury Group member Duncan Grant.  The Bloomsbury is a new discovery for me.   The painting is post impressionistic, of Vanessa sitting in a chair and reading.  It consists of broad strokes in brown, purple, and green.  The colors are those of colored chalk.   Another favorite item is a painting entitled “Prune Trees in Belgium,” done in 1998 by another new discovery for me, Brad Aldridge.  Other favorites include Rousseau’s “Stark Street in the Suburbs,” of black, white, and gray geometric buildings, not his usual animal and nature themes.  There is a beautiful still life, “Study of Roses,”  by Julian Alden Weir, a wonderful watercolor, with clear glass vase to die for.  Raoul Dufy, the Fauvist, was represented by his “Beach in France,” in violet and aquamarine pastels, swirling colors.  Finally a ceramic Tan Dynasty (907-618 BCE) Chinese horse, painted gold.  There are some good Vuillard, Hassam, and Bonnards, and Taos painters Conger Irving Crouse and Leon Gaspard.  Walking out of the museum, I walk over to my car parked on the oval nearby, and start the engine, pausing a moment to remember a girl who studied art here a long time ago, when I was a student at Texas Tech.  I slowly drive away.

After Norman, I drive to Oklahoma City, to a downtown area near “Brick Town.”  I have a great steak at the stockyards before going to the Oklahoma City Art Museum.   There, i find  some good works, including Taos painters: Robert Henri’s “Tesuque Buck”  of a young native American, mainly in reds, showing the subject’s inner calm, nobility, and dignity; a Georgia O’Keefe, “Yellow Lilly,” of a light green flower with yellow bloom, very fine; John Sloan’s two black crows amid a palette of blue sky over a village; and Ernst Blumenschein’s “New Mexico,” 1922, expressionistic, in reds and tans, of a pueblo.   The museum also has American Impressionist William Merritt Chase’s “Venice” (1877) of an arch-windowed palazzo, which seems to show Whistler’s influence.  Other notable paintings includ Eugene Boudin’s “Portreaux Harbor, Brittany,” (1873) with white and blue boats in the harbor; Renoir’s “Girl in the Woods” blending the girl and garden with thick orange and gren strokes, almost post impressionistic in its vagueness; and the Fauvist, Maurice de Vlamminch, using typical Flemish dark greens and blues, creating an image of a “Village” using bold strokes and colors.   The gallery also has a nice collection of Hugenot-influenced, English 17th and 18th Century silverware, a silver mounted flintlock pistol, plus some modern art: Chihuli glass in sea shapes with translucent whites and carbon lip wraps; a Harry Bertoia sound structure, using copper rods; a John Henry Jasper large aluminum structure, painted orange and red, like a Calder, but on the ground; and a Harry Kramer wire cage with Rube Goldberg device inside which you set into motion by pressing a button.

From Oklahoma City, I drive to Bartlesville, about forty miles from Tulsa, a company town and financial center for Phillips Petroleum and its pipeline subsidiary under Harold Price.  It is a nice small town with some very interesting architecture, in particular Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower, 19 stories tall, made of concrete and lots of glass, with copper trim, and with each floor cantilevered off a central core.   This is Wright’s only skyscraper, originally designed in 1929 for New York, but finally built in 1952, standing alone on the rolling prairie.  Wright, with his usual genius, called it “a tree escaped the (skyscraper) forest.”  The great thing is that Price Tower is a hotel, one of the few Wright buildings you can actually stay in.  My wife and I stayed there once.  It was beautiful inside as well, very 1950ish, with pastel colors, and rooms built on a diamond module, everything angular inside, and steel framed windows which open outward.  Our room was chartreuse, and the furniture pine.  On that night, It was stormy outside, and there was the possibility of tornadoes.   High winds whistled around the tower, and rolling thunder passed over us that night, growling and rumbling, low, close above.  It is my favorite hotel anywhere.  In addition to Price Tower, there is a Clifford May ranch house in Bartlesville, built for the Phillips family, plus eight or nine Bruce Goff houses, and a civic center designed by Wright’s son-in-law Wesley Peters, which resembles Wright’s Grady Gammage Auditorium in Phoenix.  There are also a number of beautiful WPA style masonry buildings built in the 1930s.

The Philbrook Museum

From Bartlesville, it is an easy jump to Tulsa, where, in one day, I visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1929 concrete and glass home for his cousin, s modernist masterpiece named “Westhope,” drive by the Art Deco Boston Street United Methodist Church, and end up at the Philbrook Museum of Art, located on Waite and Genevieve Phillips’ estate with Italianate mansion and 70 acres of gardens.  Waite was the younger brother of Franklin Phillips, and he and his wife collected only the finest works of art from a wide range of interests: Roman, Egyptian, Italian Renaissance, Impressionist, 19th Century French, African, native American, etc.  Walking through the quiet Italianate mansion is like walking though a Tuscan villa, with views  from the windows of Renaissance pools, trellises, and statuary on the grounds.  As I left, I tell the curator that this is one of the finest collections I have ever been to.  I am not being generous.  It joins the Freer, Chicago Art Institute, and Seattle Art Museum, among my favorite galleries anywhere.

Among my favorite works at the Philbrook are first, Raoul Dufy’s “View of Nice” (1927), with its broad expanse of light blue and aquamarine water, the Cote d’Azure, covering the canvas, and coral-and white coastal town crammed at the edge of the bay, on the right edge of the canvas.  Two palm trees stand up in front in a painting which is all curves.  This painting, which joins my “very favorites list,” I read, is from Duffy’s late period, when one color would dominate the surface in a single area.  It reminds me of the Duffy at the Fred Jones, with a curving bay, but in that case, a bit more variety, not all water.  Another favorite at the Philbrook is John Singleton Copley’s “Portrait of a Lady,” 1771,  with such great clarity of the lit face, the oil on canvas so clear and pure.  Then I come upon another painting to go on my top list:  a spectacular Corot, “Pleasures of the Evening,” a large canvas, almost a  center piece for the Museum, it is pre-impressionistic, like Millet, displaying a sunset in the country.  A rather dark canvas, in browns, the description says it is from Corot’s late, gauzy, period, evoking mood more than subject.  It is very elegant and moving, like Millet’s gleaners and harvesters in the evening.   Next in order cames four beautiful still lifes: George Braque’s painting of black flowers in a black pot; Julian Alden Weir’s roses in crystal, reminding me again of the Fred Jones Weir still life; William Hannett’s “Still Life and Music Items” 1885, very austere and New England; and Picasso’s “Less Pommes,” blue potatoes, great quality.   Other favorites this day include Andrew Wyeth’s charcoal colored painting of three large millstones on a New England farm; Vuillard’s “post-impressionistic “Madame des Jardins-Fontaine, of the lady in her sitting room, done in browns rather than the usual Vuillard maroons and dark blues, a touch of his Japanese influence, without use of kimonos; and Childe Hassam’s “The Surf,” in blues with broad brush strokes, of the tide coming in.  There is a nice collection of Taos painters: Nicoli Fechin’s “Albedia,” between realistic and expressionistic, of a native American woman wearing a white robe made up of white squares; Robert Henri’s “Mary Patton” (1927) in reds, simplified but with the sitters’ character coming through, Leon Gaspard’s “1918 Taos,” with adobe shapes and colors dominating, and others by Bert Phillips, Ken Miller Adams, and Oscar Berninghaus, the latter of a native American couple in a Northern New Mexico village.

The Philbrook has the best collection I’ve seen of Pueblo indian jewelry, especially the Santo Domingo and Zia silver, turquoise, and coral; a wonderful Egyptian bas relief of the god, Amun Ra, on white slate; a beautiful wood and enamel Egyptian middle dynasty falcon; and African works from the best artistic groups in Africa, including masks and musical instruments. These include the Dogon (Mali)  carved wood “Chirousos,” or antelopes, with horns sweeping  back over the body, a triangular arrangement; a  rather small Guro (Ivory Coast) elephant mask with white ivory tusks; a Sinufo (Mali) “Bird Standard”  consisting of two black birds, like crows, with wings extended and connected at the tips; a white Dogon elongated antelope mask; a white Gabon mask;  An Ashanti (Ghana) fertility goddess and large kettle shaped drum with carved cornice around the exterior  brim; a Dan (Liberia) finger harp with metal strips; and a Mali harp with one string.  The Philbrook also had for sale beautiful Robert Held vases , blue glass and hand painted flowers; a good collection of Italian Quatrocentro religious paintings, one by a Mategna Follower, of “Madonna and Child,” lighter colors than usual, with beautiful, clear female features, dated 1431; and wonderful sculptures by Giaocometti, a bronze statue entitled “Annette VI” ( 1962), in rough metal state, thin and elegant, and by Archipenko, “Standing Concave,” (1925) a symbolized standing female in bronze.

The Gilcrease Museum

The following day, I visit another wonderful art museum in Tulsa, “The Gilcrease,” dedicated to the American West.  The Museum is located on the western outskirts of town, a beautiful landscape.  I visited in the pouring rain.  The Museum is elegant, quiet and refined, the staff is very personable, and there is a wonderful attached restaurant overlooking the grounds.  I love the native American artifacts, especially the beaded clothing, such as a black beaded skirt of the Ka Poltawotamie, dated 1900, with blue patterns on it, the best individual piece I’ve seen anywhere, including the Denver Art Museum.  Also, a Cheyenne buckskin shirt, with blue strips of attached cloth running down the chest from over the shoulders, and a Cheyenne blue beaded large occasional bag, dated 1890.  Finally, there is a Brule Sioux beaded long dress, medium blue, dyed buckskin and a smaller Sioux beaded short dress, lighter blue, looking more like a man’s shirt.  In addition to crafts, the gallery has some fine native American artists (all new discoveries for me) like Virginia Stroud’s “Ledger of Indians Stealing Military Horses,” done on ledger paper with drawings of angular shaped horses; Walter Tutsi Wai Bigbee’s contemporary black and white photographs of native American life and lands, of tee-pees and animals as they were; and Cherokee Renaissance artist Jeanne Rorex Bridges’ water colors done on board of Choctaw stories from Mississippi and Florida before the “Trail of Tears,” one a haunting piece entitled “Journey to Freedom” showing moonlight nights with African Americans clad in white sheets crossing a river, escaping slavery in the night.

There are other excellent paintings and sculpture by renown artists.  Foremost are four George Catlin oil paintings, panoramas, of beautiful landscapes from a distance, first of buffalo herds on the salt meadows of the Upper Missouri river, then snowy white fields with buffalo, and a pale green landscape and prairie dog villages on rolling hills that look Oklahoma, and finally, all in tans, “Catching the Wild Horse,” in hill country.  These are simple paintings, almost with a touch of Rousseau or Thomas Hart Benton,  giving a real insight into prairie life.  For me, they are even better than his famous reddish portraits on board of native American chiefs hanging in the Renwick Gallery in D.C.  There is also a George de Forest Brush, “Crossing the Prairie,” 1888, showing a native American on horseback at the riverbank, a winter scene with snow covered sage, memorable.  The Gilcrease had a special exhibit on display when I visited called “The Road to Freedom,” depicting the U.S. march through history, and including a 19th Century embroidered waistcoat (vest), a St. Gaudens sculpture in bronze, “The Puritan,” with cape bellowing out in the wind behind the figure, and a painting of the “Battle of Buena Vista,” in the Mexican War, showing Zachary Taylor’s vastly outnumbered troops holding off a mass charge of Mexican Army regulars.  The caption said Taylor was lucky, the Mexican force ran out of ammunition, but that Taylor was cool in battle, telling a messenger only he would decide if things were going badly or not.  There was also a painting of Winfield Scott’s troops at the Mexican War Battle of Moliano del Rey.   The museum also has a number of Frederick Remington paintings on permanent display: “The Stampede” 1908, in blue, a night scene, of a man on horseback watching his cattle, illuminated by a yellow, jagged lighting flash; “The Escort” of a cavalry officer in dress uniform with his girl friend riding together near the fort; “The Bell Mare” of a white horse leading a file of men on a mountain trail; “Coming and Going of the Pony Express,” 1900, with the wonderful Remington yellows; and “Missing,” 1899, of a captive blue coated cavalry man being led between two files of native American fighters.   The Pony Express and Escort pieces were comparable to the Remingtons at the Carter Gallery in Ft. Worth, with large yellow scenes and light blue skies.   You can almost taste the desert dust in these.  With distance, I remember “The Escort” and “Missing” best, due perhaps to the subject matter.

I leave Oklahoma with a bit of regret.  I will probably make it back as far as Western Kansas tonight, maybe even jog over to Great Bend, to my 3rd Grade town.  Maybe I’ll capture some memories on the way home. (2009)