The Last Frontiersman

Fewer and fewer Americans, about one out of three, live in the great outdoors now celebrated almost entirely in never-ever television westerns. In a curious miracle of abandonment, Americans have become strangers in a landscape that they believe has built their national character. But not all. North of Alamogordo and east of Tularosa, south of Hondo and only six miles crow flight from an Apache reservation--in the dusty desolation of New Mexico--Artist Peter Kurd works in a perpetual state of wonderment.

A native regional realist of the Southwest, equally prized by Lyndon B. Johnson and Barry Goldwater, Kurd, now 60, is trying to preserve the look of a fading way of U.S. life. Like his brother-in-law, Andrew Wyeth, he finds all his subject matter, says he, "within five miles of my home." His ranch, The Sentinel, ranges over 2,200 acres where he raises cattle and, in less arid parts, apples, peaches and pears. It is not a big spread by Western standards, but profit is not its true purpose.

Never High Noon. "A painters life is determined by daylight," says Hurd, who knocks back an unvarying breakfast of eggnog, toast and coffee at sunup, then goes riding across the juniper-knobby hills. He may dismount, whip out a tiny watercolor set and sketch a bit of his domain. These glimpses are pulled together in his studio, where Hurd toils in the meticulous technique of egg tempera. The results, recently on view at Fort Worth's Amon Carter Museum of Western Art and opening last week in San Francisco's California Palace of the Legion of Honor, is an exhibition of 98 paintings that documents nearly 35 years of the artist's minute observations of the world he knows best (see color).

Hurd rarely paints high noon. "All phases of light, its constantly changing patterns, thrill me," he says. With each painting, he increases his dissection of his skeletal landscape through the hours and seasons of the sun. "I feel like shouting This is me.'" The wilderness, indeed, is Hurd. One of the few times he ventured abroad was as a LIFE artist-correspondent during World War II. Friends urge him to travel, but he says, "Nuts. I'd be painting postcards."

Jehovah's Witness. Though Hurd was born in New Mexico, he has Eastern ties. His father was a Boston lawyer who settled in dry New Mexico for his health. Hurd attended West Point for two years, quit because art interested him more than mathematics. He recalls that his father--apparently ignorant of the aborted West Point career of James McNeill Whistler--responded by saying, "You are an utter jackass."

The young artist's idol was the lusty illustrator, N. C. Wyeth; one fateful day the grand old man telephoned him. "It was like the Lord Jehovah calling," says Hurd.

"If you work for me," announced Wyeth, "West Point will seem like child's play." On the train to Wyeth's famous colony at Chadds Ford, Pa., Hurd met his future wife, N. C.'s daughter Henriette, then 16, and now an accomplished artist herself. N. C. taught Moby Dick and Dostoevsky as well as painting. "He was a terrific stickler for detail," recalls Hurd, who became fast friends with Andrew Wyeth during his six-year apprenticeship. "We have in common the ability to identify ourselves with objects," says he.

Ten-Gallon Tragedian. Where Wyeth identifies with the countryside around Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and Maine, Hurd loves the desert. He lives without television, owns only riding boots, and eats tortillas by preference. A bilingual Anglo don to the New Mexican Hispanos, Hurd (who once rode to the hounds along the Chesapeake) long ago started a home-grown polo team with his ranch hands. Because of their roughriding, mallet-mashing style of playing, they compete with more posh teams under the name, "the San Patricio Snake Killers."

Western in garb and still gaunt enough to wear his West Point trousers, Hurd loathes the cliches of Hollywood westerns. He is no complacent optimist, recalling the Wyethian admonition that life ends before man can exhaust it. "A painting should be a prolonged and haunting echo of human existence," he says. "I'm concerned about man the de-spoiler." Hurd would like future viewers to say of his patient, sensitive work, "Here is what the Southwest looked like in the 20th century." Like George Catlin's early sketches of the vanishing Indians or Thomas Moran's pioneer paintings of the Yellowstone, Kurd's testament of art is his way of lingering in an historic land that he must some day leave. It will linger, because Hurd sees beauty in a dust storm, challenge in the parched desert, and ghostly life in a crumbling shack, a broken fence the fragments of a man's dream.

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