Description:
Watercolor on Paper. Signed l.r.: C Murdock, Stamped u.r.: PLANCHE 10.
From: American Indian Painters, Vol. 1, p. 13: We were beginning to wonder if Cecil Murdock was one of the many Indians who did not return from the war, when he dropped in on us one day. He looked in perfect health, but he is not. He is living on part disability funds. Cecil caught jungle fever in the swamps of New Guinea, and he was severely injured while he was serving as an enlisted man in the 5th Air Force. Even before he went into the service, he was married, for he persuaded a little Hopi girl from northern Arizona to take pot luck with him. There he lives on his small pension, painting pictures, while she teaches at Moenkopi, north of the ancient town of Oraibi. Cecil's educational history is somewhat varied and a little erratic. He was born in 1913 and went to the Indian school of Chilocco. The old Friends' University, a Quaker institution, at Wichita, gave special inducements to Indian lads, so Murdock went there. He thought that music was to be his major, but abandoned it after a trial, feeling that it was not entirely suited to his talent. He entered the University of Oklahoma and remained for a season or two. Suddenly he disappeared, but, before the war, he came again for re-enrollment, this time as a married man; instead he was inducted into the service. While at our university, he showed no interest in Indian civilization and culture, but seemed to be headed for a complete absorption into the white pattern. Due probably to more maturity and the influence of the Hopis with whom he is now living, he has become very much interested in Indians, especially the Hopis, and the ancient, now nearly lost, culture of his own Kickapoos. The few paintings that he has done in the Indian manner have charm; but, with one possible exception, they show evidence of a struggle and are not spontaneous creations like those we find among the Navajos and Hopis, or even among the Plains tribes. The Kickapoos have drifted too far and too long from their native anchorage and it is not easy to recapture a spiritual quality lost for one hundred years or more. The paradoxical part of the story of the Red Man is that many college bred Indians are now on the return journey toward Indianization. They have had a taste of the civilization of the white race and seek refuge in the culture that was abandoned, though unwillingly, by their great grandsires. In some of them, one senses some deep feeling of disillusionment. "The Old Teller of Tales" was painted before the Great War. The Kickapoos are not tipi dwelling people, and the dress and hairdo of the narrator belong to the Plains tribes. (Collection University of Oklahoma)