Action Picture 375 (Trial Proof) by Andy Warhol belongs to the Cowboys and Indians series. The series features many images of Native Americans in their traditional attire as well as traditional American cowboy heroes. In this print, Warhol has juxtaposed a cowboy, who is on his horse shooting a gun in the center of the image, and a Native American with a traditional weapon on the right. It is the only image in the series to feature both cowboys and Native Americans in direct action, echoing the stylized portrayals found in Western films. Based on Charles Schreyvogel’s painting Breaking Through the Line—itself inspired by Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show—Warhol’s interpretation heightens the drama with bold color and kinetic energy. The sketch type style makes it hard to tell what the characters would have looked like in the painting, but instead leave us with a fleeting idea of their essence. The use of the pink, red and maroon-brown, along with the action theme make it a very enjoyable and lively piece to experience.
By selecting Schreyvogel’s work as a source, Warhol underscores how far removed both he and earlier artists were from the historical reality they depicted. Just as Warhol, raised in Pittsburgh, absorbed the West through movies and television, Schreyvogel, living in Hoboken, New Jersey, drew on theatrical reenactments rather than lived experience. In Action Picture 375, Warhol distills this layered distance into a single, dramatic image that critiques how American history is often filtered through entertainment. His Cowboys and Indians portfolio reflects on the ways mass media transforms complex histories into familiar, romanticized icons—shaping a collective memory that is more myth than fact.
Action Picture (Trial Proof) 375 by Andy Warhol as Part of His Larger Body of Work
Action Picture 375 (Trial Proof), along with the entire Cowboys and Indians series, ties in very well with his bigger discourse about consumerism. In a sense, this series is a commentary on the heritage that has been exploited. The Native American has been removed from his historical landscape and put next to the cowboys with a plain background in Action Picture 375 (Trial Proof). This romanticized image is a very typical representation of the popular perception of the West. This familiar perception is the one that has been mass produced in a sense. The mass production of this myth through movies, TV series and novels however, is not necessarily true. But this version of the myth was nonetheless the one that was spread, because it was one people enjoyed.
Source image: Painting “Breaking through the line” by Charles Schreyvogel (1861—1912), Gilcrease Museum: Tulsa, Oklahoma. Photo credit: Wolfgang Sauber, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
