Action Picture 375 by Andy Warhol is a screenprint from his Cowboys and Indians Complete Portfolio, a series that examines the mythologizing of the American West through mass media. 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. 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.
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 375 by Andy Warhol as Part of His Larger Body of Work
Warhol interspersed recognizable portraits of well-known American “heroes” with less familiar Native American images and motifs in his ironic commentary on Americans’ collective mythologizing of the historic West. Rather than portraying Native Americans within their historical landscape or Cowboys in their veritable forms, Warhol chose to portray a popular, romanticized version of the American West. The West that he chose to represent is familiar to everyone and can be seen in novels, films, TV series. Warhol’s Cowboys and Indians series is an ahistorical representation that mirrors a popular interpretation of the American West. Action Picture 375 is a fine example of Warhol’s aesthetic intent in its reduction of an entire heritage and way of life into a single “trademark” image.
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
