The Valley of the Savery, Wyoming

The Valley of the Savery, Wyoming—Arms’s only image of the American West—renders the shock of vast and unfamiliar forms as a striking pattern of long, irregularly curving black lines across expanses of white. These are cut with knife-sharpness into canyons vertically striped in crisply alternating grays and blacks. The rolling waves of open land and the contrasting canyons seem oddly denatured—as if made of folded cloth and etched crystal—by the intensity of Arms’s pattern-making vision. It would be only a short step from this landscape to a fully abstract art. Ironically, however, Arms himself was a staunch opponent of the turn toward abstraction among American etchers after World War II; because of this, his influence declined in the American Society of Etchers.