Cedar Grand Canyon

Gustave Baumann

The Grand Canyon, a mile-deep gorge in northern Arizona, began taking shape approximately six million years ago as the Colorado River began to carve a deep channel through layers of rock. The canyon is over 270 miles long and up to 18 miles wide. The human history of the canyon stretches back 12,000 years and Native Americans have inhabited the Grand Canyon and the surrounding area for at least 4,000 years. Ancestral Pueblo people following by Paiute, Navajo, Zuni and Hopi tribes once inhabited the Grand Canyon. Today the Havasupai people claim the Grand Canyon as their ancestral home and, in 1975, the Havasupai people regained a large portion of their land from the federal government. President Benjamin Harrison protected the Grand Canyon in 1893 as a forest reserve, and in 1919 Woodrow Wilson signed the Grand Canyon National Park Act.

Cedar Grand Canyon was Gustave Baumann’s first color woodcut of the Grand Canyon. Baumann described the difficulties of rendering the vastness of the canyon: “I was sitting back of a rock screened by an old windblown Cedar from where only yesterday I had seen the composition for my masterpiece that was to be the sum total of pictures of the grandest of all Canyons. The forms in the picture had haunted me all night so that I could hardly wait until morning to get to work. It is reasonably simple to approximate size and space dimensions, what I had not counted on was what the atmosphere contributed in space. The Canyon was there as always but the thing that made my picture had vanished completely. There is a subtle difference between scenery and landscape. What I saw held no interest whatever—a fleeting moment of time may come again when something more than a soft cuff is available to fix it in or there should be a fence around the canyon with a large sign ‘Artists keep out this area bewitched.’”