Museum of Yippee-Yi-Yo

Amon G. Carter of Fort Worth was born too late to be a pioneer, but he more than made up for this slip-up on the part of fate. Starting out as a boardinghouse dishwasher at twelve, he ended up as the publisher of the Fort Worth Star Telegram, a multimillionaire in oil, and, by the time he died in 1955, the man most responsible for turning Fort Worth into the city it is. There was so much to Carter's rambunctious, blustering, big-hearted career that one aspect of it tended to be overshadowed: Carter was an art collector with a special passion.

Today Carter's art collection--almost entirely the Western paintings and sculpture of Missouri-born Charles M. Russell and New York-born Frederic Remington--is housed in the newest of U.S. museums, a graceful structure on a rise overlooking Fort Worth. In designing its facade, Manhattan Architect Philip Johnson (TIME, Sept. 5) to a large degree abandoned the austere international style that has dominated modern architecture, instead dipped far into the past for inspiration. The five archways and the tapered columns on the front portico go back to the Greek stoas and the Renaissance loggias that looked down upon Mediterranean plazas. The Great Hall is severe but rich, and Johnson's elegance manages to shelter whooping cowpunchers and bucking broncos without dampening their bronze spirits. The Amon Carter Museum of Western Art is meant to display the Old West, not to tame it.

Six to the Bar. It would have been unfortunate had this been otherwise, for by temperament Amon Carter was out of the Old West himself. His collecting began one day in 1928 when a Manhattan art dealer showed him six watercolors and an oil by Russell that reminded Carter of the Texas of his boyhood. Though he was not yet rich, he promptly wrote a $7,500 note, paid it in installments over the next two years.

By 1952 his appetite--and pocketbook--had grown large. He cast an envious eye on a big bunch of Russells, then housed cozily in a fine old Great Falls, Mont., saloon called The Mint. The people of Montana belatedly tried to raise the money to outbid Carter and keep the artist's work in the state he adopted, but Carter won. He hung his acquisitions in his club, at the newspaper, in the Fort Worth library, the airport terminal. His will stipulated that they should eventually have their own museum.

A Story to Tell. Though he met Russell only casually and Remington never. Carter must have felt that he knew them both well. Tough and sentimental, fiercely individualistic yet hungrily gregarious, they shared Carter's red-blooded view of life. They painted and sculpted men--red men, white men, men hunting, fighting, daring the waves, taming the beasts. If their work, mostly done between 1880 and 1910, came close to illustration, it was because they had a story to tell. As progress chuffed and shrieked across the West over newly laid railroad tracks, Remington explained what that story was. "I knew," he wrote, "that the wild riders and vacant land were about to vanish forever, and the more I considered the subject, the bigger the forever loomed. I began to try to record some facts around me, and the more I looked, the more the panorama unfolded."

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