It rambles, detours, and disserves the good art in the show, but there are so many wonders elsewhere in the museum.

G reetings from the bighearted, high-spirited Lone Star State and especially from Fort Worth. I’m here to speak to the Federalist Society’s Texas A&M law school chapter about art restitution and to visit art hot spots in Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio. I wanted to see East of the Pacific: Making Histories of Asian American Art at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, since I didn’t know any of the artists and the exhibition was assembled by the very good Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University’s art museum.

East of the Pacific has potential — the 31 artists are little known — but it’s unsuccessful for a lack of curatorial discipline and focus. Too bad. Amon Carter, which collects and displays American art only, is a sentimental favorite of mine for the quality of its collection and because of my friendship with Ruth Carter Stevenson. Ruth didn’t establish the museum. Her father, Amon Carter, an entrepreneur and newspaper publisher, did via a bequest of pictures by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell. Ruth later busted from old Amon’s cowboy-heavy art corral — through brilliant acquisitions, a Philip Johnson–designed building, and a good, scholarly exhibition program. Today, the Amon Carter is an encyclopedic American art center.

So my visit was a success, even with a fizzle like East of the Pacific. I reveled in old favorites such as Winslow Homer’s Crossing the Pasture, from 1871–1872, and saw a nice, new exhibition of American Modernism from the collection of the San Antonio business titan and philanthropist Charles Butt. There’s a show of seven photographs by Chuck Ramirez, too. He makes trash look like treasure.

East of the Pacific promises a look at exchange in America between Eastern and Western aesthetics from the 1870s or so until today. The curators want to give us a new way to look at American art, one that’s been neglected or removed from art history. Both the art and these new ways are called extraordinary, transformative, and indispensable, and I’m not against bold new ways. Alas, the good art just isn’t there, or isn’t there in a sufficient quantity. Toshio Aoki’s and Tokio Ueyama’s landscapes are lovely, but each artist gets one work each. In palette or composition, their art from the 1910s and 1920s has a touch of collapsed perspective and a bright palette that’s as much Japanese as it is American, but there’s no trend line. Teikichi Hikoyama crashing waves seascape from 1930 looks like a precursor to Marsden Hartley’s Maine scenes, but there’s only one work in the show by this very good Japanese-American artist, known for his Modernist woodblock prints.

There’s nothing about Japonisme in America or Meiji-period Japanese art, two eras where East and West didn’t exactly intersect, but there was a whole lot of heavy petting. What I saw is lots of skating, much over thin ice. There’s little depth. The artists whose work makes it into East of the Pacific didn’t change the direction of American art and certainly weren’t erased, negated, or neglected. Aside from fields like Arts & Crafts and Mission Revival art and architecture and, of course, movies, California art — by anyone — was a very modest player.

A narrower time frame would have helped, say, from the end of the Civil War to 1920. But, of course, no curator dealing with Japanese art in America can resist a good ruckus over the World War II internment program. East of the Pacific thus falters badly as it moves from art and artists to politics and grievance related to Executive Order 9066, President Roosevelt’s forced relocation of between 100,000 and 120,000 Japanese nationals and Americans of Japanese descent from West Coast cities to inland compounds. Americans were frightened, knowing how vicious Tokyo could be. People will succumb to anything and everything once in a panic.

This wasn’t the best idea FDR ever had, to be sure, but federal courts started to knick his plan very quickly. By 1943, tens of thousands of Japanese Americans were serving in the U.S. military. Hawaii interned mere hundreds. By the 1990s, Congress had officially apologized and billions in reparations were paid. There’s art on view made in the internment compounds, but it’s not very good. Dwelling on the incarceration tangent put East of the Pacific in free fall.

A section of East of the Pacific is dedicated to revisiting and reflecting on the 1976 San Francisco Art Institute show Other Sources: An American Essay, but I’m not sure what that 1976 show has to do with East-meets-West aesthetic dialogue. Other Sources was a program of visual arts display, poetry readings, dance, and music celebrating the Bicentennial by emphasizing feminist and multicultural takes on culture. Oh, why be diplomatic? I’m sure Other Sources has nothing to do with East-West dialogue; that wall of art in the Amon Carter show takes the exhibition nowhere. Other Sources was about San Francisco artists — gay, Native American, Asian American, women, and potheads of all races, colors, and creeds. Yes, in 1976 the mainstream view of American art rested on an assumption that only white men could be accomplished, consequential artists but that notion has been old-Stetson-hat for decades.

The space could have been devoted to American artists such as, not Mark Tobey from San Francisco but from Seattle. In the 1930s, he studied calligraphy in China and lived in a Zen monastery in Japan. His only calligraphic painting is filled with Eastern spirit. East of the Pacific ends with a section on Abstract Expressionism and Bernice Bing’s moving Blue Mountain No. 4, from 1966, and a Toshiko Takaezu pot from 2008. How dare we think, the show demands, that Asian-American artists didn’t do Abstract Expressionist art? I thought no such thing, but I’m a simple country soul and, knowing little about Asian American artists, I assumed that flat, abstract art was born in Asia.

East of the Pacific is, in a way, a hangover from the Amon Carter’s hilariously disastrous Cowboy. The exhibition, developed by Denver’s Contemporary Art Museum, ran earlier this year or, more precisely, opened, ran, shut, reopened, and ran to an inglorious, edited end, with warnings in place that it wasn’t for the faint of heart. I didn’t see the show, so I can’t say much about it except that it adopted an intensely critical, even satirical point of view to challenge the myth of the cowboy as a white male.

Cowboy seemed to have lots of bad art in it: a film showing John Wayne morphing into Satan; an animated sculpture of a cowgirl on a bustin’ bronco resting on a rocking chair; black cowboys, gay cowboys, a saddle made from barbed wire, Asian pantomime cowboys, and cowboys from outer space; Richard Prince’s Marlboro Man, the most boring work of art ever, not even so bad that it’s good; Andy Warhol’s Horse, about a strip poker game and a stallion.

It all sounds silly to me and, of course, most of us know that cowboys, however we define them, came from a broad cross-section of humanity. The Amon Carter’s audience, mostly from Fort Worth, did tend to feel that Cowboy ridiculed them and suggested that the major part of the local culture was playing cowboy. Them’s fightin’ words. A mortified board of trustees closed the show, put warnings in the galleries, canceled some of its programming, removed an object or two, and reopened with marketing as quiet as a cricket’s chirp. East of the Pacific seems to be, if not cut from the same elk hide, at the very least about picking grand themes and either jamming the art into them or, in desperate moments, showing art that’s just not good. It’s by no means a bad show. It’s just sloppy and thin.

I liked another show at the Amon Carter, American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection. Butt (b. 1938) comes from an old San Antonio family and is worth billions after running a supermarket chain founded by his grandmother in 1905. Still based in San Antonio, he supports Texas charities and is sending many of his very good 20th-century paintings on tour to Texas museums. I always enjoy seeing private collections built over decades, and it’s not only because the art is rarely available. The art reveals at least something of the collector.

Butt is a man of the ocean, for instance. He loves Texas’s big, beautiful coastline, though he focuses less on Texas painters and more on John Marin and artists connected to him. That’s a measure of good taste. He sees Marin much as I do. Marin’s seascapes are mostly of Maine — crashing-waves pictures with wild forms and thick paint. He thus connects the 19th-century American seascapes tradition to Abstract Expressionism. There are at least a dozen Marins in American Modernism. Marin’s Maine painting in the show are bursting with sea power. Marin also painted the more industrial coastline near Weehawken, in New Jersey. Many of those are on view. He’s cornered the market in these scenes.

The exhibition is smartly divided in five sections. Intimate Perspectives pairs works by artists who were close friends or who had a teacher-student connection. Edward Hopper’s beautiful, early portrait of Guy Pène du Bois, an unaccountably overlooked artist, is next to a Pène du Bois picture of subway riders. One revelation of a section called Language of the Sea focuses on Marin since there are so many of his paintings and most people today don’t know him. There’s a landscape section and a section on abstract Modernism from the Teens into the 1930s. The latter section includes Oscar Bluemner’s In Scarlet and Black, from 1932. Bluemner, a Prussian American, immigrated to the U.S. in his 20s. His work is eerie, ghostly, often carnival-garish, but it’s a carnival in Limbo. Scarlet and Black is an extreme Bluemner.

Many of the artists in the show, like Blanche Lazzell, are women, and it’s true, as the curators say, that abstraction attracted women painters since it wasn’t gendered. Many of my favorites were little things like Georgia O’Keeffe’s tiny My Backyard, a New Mexico mountain view from 1945. Jackson Pollock’s Camp with Oil Rig, from the early 1930s, is from his time as Thomas Hart Benton’s student. It’s splendid. From seemingly barren, raw land in the middle of an unruly Texas sky comes the oil that powers the world and helps make America rich.

There’s no dogmatic curatorial blather in American Modernism. Artists were enlisted for some of the interpretation. None seems inclined to look at O’Keeffe’s little picture and cry “It’s the genocide in Gaza.” They tend to focus on materials but also — in the case of Frederick Waugh’s 1909 view of Casco Bay, in Maine — on memories. Texas artist Brenda Ciardiello lived near Casco once, she said, and the waves gently hitting the beach in Waugh’s picture reminded her of good and not-so-good memories coming and going. The Fort Worth crochet artist Dizzy Orbit — yes, that’s her name, and she crochets masks for every taste — wrote about the secrecy implicit in the Bluemner painting. Something’s hiding, and it moves.

The Seven Days photographs by Chuck Ramirez (1962–2010) from around 2003 were a particular treat. His big still lifes of dining room tables packed with the residue of parties are so dazzling, you’d definitely want to leave cleanup for the morning. The images of food, half-empty wine bottles, and table trash we jettison are sharply focused, intensely chromatic, 48-by-60-inch photographs, so they seem bewitched. The still life in Western art is 500 years old, but his are originals. They remind me of Spanish and Dutch Old Master still lifes except they’re giddy and chaotic. They also show the staples of working-class Latino life, down to the Lone Star beer can. There are seven of them in the show along with a small personal Day of the Dead altar he made in 2004 in memory of his grandmother. Ramirez died in a freak bike accident just as he was a truly hot artist, so it’s good to see his work. Like the best artists, he found beauty in everything, even trash.