Go West Again, Young Man

Harry Jackson is a stocky man of 36 who sports a beatnik beard, wears a handsome pair of cowboy boots, and is just about as restless as an artist can be. Ten years ago he was hailed as one of the most promising newcomers to the New York school of abstract expressionism. But last week he had on display at Manhattan's Knoedler Gallery a series of brilliant little bronzes of cowboys and cattle, proving himself an apt pupil at an older school, that of Frederic Remington.

As a boy growing up in Chicago, Jackson had two passions: drawing and horses. A headache to his truant officer, he decided at 14 to skip town altogether. He had heard of a romantic place called Cody, Wyoming, and without even a word to his mother, he headed west.

At Cody, he recalls, he "saddled horses for dudes, slopped hogs, and generally didn't do anything romantic." In World War II, he joined the Marines to do reconnaissance sketches, was wounded at both Tarawa and Saipan. By the time he got home, his non-reconnaissance "war painting" had begun to attract attention.

It was in New York, where he began studying art under the G.I. bill, that Jackson underwent his first transformation. "It was just bad luck that I didn't run into any realist painters like Hopper," says he, "for all I could see in realism was dried-up old people worried about whether there were fingerprints on their canvases." He fell "like crazy" for Jackson Pollock. He studied with Mexico's gentle Rufino Tamayo ("He never taught you anything, but at least he left you alone"), came to know De Kooning, the new panjandrum of action painting, and for a while was married to Grace Hartigan, one of the lady prophets of abstract expressionism. Then, in 1954, Harry Jackson suddenly stopped painting abstractions and set off for Europe to copy the old masters. "I wanted to get back to my old point of view," he says, "yet I wanted to bring to the old way the freedom I'd been given. That's the artist's secret, you know: to put that freedom into forms anyone can recognize." In his bronzes, Jackson found what he was looking for.

His cowboys battle a thundering stampede, sing their long ballads, rope their steers, and, in solemn ritual, bury a friend under the big sky. They manage to combine power and tenderness. "I like taking something the movies and TV screwed up," says Jackson. "I like taking something they have made saccharine and make it real again."

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