The story
One of the most reproduced images of America's westward expansion is surprisingly small in person. John Gast's American Progress, painted in 1872, measures about 29 by 40 centimetres. A giant woman in white floats west across the continent with a schoolbook in one arm and a telegraph wire looped over her elbow. Below her come trains, a stagecoach, covered wagons and farmers, while Native people and bison retreat ahead of them. George Crofutt, a publisher of guidebooks to the West, commissioned it to be reproduced as a print, and that is how it travelled.
The Autry Museum of the American West bought the painting in 1992. It hangs among 19th- and 20th-century landscapes, next to work by Native artists who tell the story of those same lands very differently. That pairing reflects how the museum itself has grown. It opened in Griffith Park in 1988 as the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, founded by Gene Autry, the singing cowboy of films and radio, with Joanne Hale as its first director.
In 2003 it took over the Southwest Museum of the American Indian, one of Los Angeles's oldest museums, and with it a collection of about 238,000 pieces, including some 14,000 baskets. Autry's own world is still present in the collection, down to his first Martin D-45 guitar.
