2025 Coeur d’Alene Art Auction47 / 120 • View Catalog •
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Art critic James D. Balestrieri writes, “Pale pointillist patterns – some loose, some tight – cover the entire surface of Oscar Howe’s Man, Horse, Buffalo. Bubbles within bubbles, the varying concentrations effervesce, suggesting that we are looking in on a mythical space, space outside of space and time, a space and a moment conjured by a force or forces beyond our understanding. One might see the conjuror as a spirit. One might see the conjuror as science and the bubbles as bubbles of space foam, anticipating the notion of the multiverse. One might see Howe himself as the conjuror. One might see all three.
“One most certainly sees a trio in the painting, a trio that might better be termed a triad – a three-in-one composition of man, horse, buffalo – a Lakota Holy Trinity, perhaps. There may be a story somewhere that explains the painting, but only in a 1999 children’s book – S. D. Nelson’s Gift Horse: A Lakota Story – did I find a brief image of a buffalo lifting both horse and rider. Perhaps Man, Horse, Buffalo is Howe’s take on the many Plains stories of hunters who got too close to their fiery quarry, and were compelled to leap from horse to buffalo to avoid being trampled. Stacking man atop horse atop buffalo may well be Howe’s own addition to the stories, his literal ‘I can top that,’ which would not be surprising among storytellers of all kinds, even those who tell stories with brush and paint. Furthermore, Howe takes the tale to the next level, setting it not in the middle of a hunt on the earthly Plains – or plane – but in the cosmos, behind swirls of scrims and bubbles. The impossibility of the moment, as Howe conceives it, detaches it from the historical reality of the hunt and sends the arrow of time on a more mythological course.”
PROVENANCE
Frank and Jan Gibbs Collection, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, ca. 1980s
Reynolds Family Collection, Sioux Falls, South Dakota
