Amon Carter Museum: The West as Fine Art

At the north end of Fort Worth's Cultural District, a low tan building of Texas shellstone looks out over a broad lawn with a long view toward downtown. It is the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and it was born from one man's obsessive love for the mythology of the American West.

Amon G. Carter Sr. was the founder and publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and one of the most powerful civic boosters Texas ever produced. He spent decades collecting paintings and bronzes by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell, the two artists most responsible for shaping how America imagined its own frontier. Cowboys in snowstorms, Sioux warriors on horseback, cattle drives at dusk: Carter amassed more than four hundred works by these two painters and sculptors, a collection of singular depth.

Carter died in nineteen fifty-five. His children, Amon Jr. and Ruth Carter Stevenson, honored his wish to share the collection publicly. They commissioned architect Philip Johnson to design a building, and the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art opened in nineteen sixty-one. Johnson's design was restrained and elegant: a covered loggia of five arched bays opening onto the lawn, the buff shellstone warm in the afternoon light. The building was expanded in nineteen sixty-four, again in nineteen seventy-seven, and a major addition by Johnson himself opened in two thousand one.

The museum's scope has grown well beyond Remington and Russell. Today the collection encompasses several thousand works of American painting, sculpture, and decorative arts, along with one of the finest photography collections in the United States, including early daguerreotypes, nineteenth-century landscape photographs of the West, and major holdings of twentieth-century American photographers.

The name was updated to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art to reflect the broader mission, but the original Remington bronzes and Russell canvases remain the emotional center of the collection, the works that a Fort Worth publisher spent a lifetime gathering because he believed the West deserved to be taken seriously as art.