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Art at Tippet Rise
Isabelle Johnson
Wediscoveredafterawhilethatthemysterious withhereyes,youcometoseetheerasures,the
Johnson ranch was actually one of three ranches owned by Isabelle Johnson and her two sisters, where they hayed and ran cattle. She always considered
herself a rancher first. But second- ly she was Montana’s first Mod- ernist paint- er. She lived down by the Stillwater River, but she came up to what
is now part of Tippet Rise and did many of her great paintings in the meadows, in the snow, among the wildflowers.
The land hasn’t changed much since Isabelle Johnson painted it. Not much has happened to Fishtail. But what really happened to Fishtail was that Isabelle Johnson went to Paris. She went to New York, and Rome.
And she brought home the light from distant worlds. The Hudson River light of Thomas Moran, the chalk glaze of Cézanne, the yellowed clay of the Camargue, the arid, blockish hills and riverish fields of Winslow Homer.
After Isabelle Johnson, Western light could finally be described in terms of other civilizations, of New Jersey industrial haze and Norwegian angst. When you look at the barren folds of glaciated wastes around Fishtail
gaps. You see her idea of how the world worked, her personal mechanics of wheat and cottonwoods.
Leger, cut out from faded newspapers; Stuart Davis, the polluted pastels of the industrial revolution; the faded pera of Giotto; the angularity of Thomas Hart Benton—all worked their way into her sandstone arroyos, coulees edged with Corot pinyons: what the West came to mean to people who had never gone West, to workers in East Coast factories, to existential- ists in European cafés, to people at John Ford movies. Such Western pentimenti are nothing that can be seen; they are hidden under guidebook photos, accumulat- ed over the years, suggested in silos, smelled in the pollution of big city sunsets, mixed into ordinary fields of grain by ions in the clouds, the way you can smell the rain before you see it.
You can’t visit the Alpilles around Les Baux without seeing them the way Cézanne did. In the same way, Isabelle Johnson lent Mondrian angles and Kandinsky chords to tufts in the Stillwater River, which flowed through her ranch in Fishtail.
Johnson’s West is the whorl in the hay, the sharp edge between the bales and the sky. Valleys howl with gouache, the knife slathers on the evening dark while morning continues to bend in the wheat, and sun beats on the trunk.
She saw nature as an adversary, the early winter that cuts in half the benefice of fall, the vast cumulus that rots the harvest with the scythe of storm light, the early flood that carries summer seeds into distant valleys: volcanic folds in the land that are gorgeous but sprung from ruin.
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About Tippet Rise