By CHERYL LU-LIEN TAN

Rob Bennett for The Wall Street Journal

Dave Arnold prepares a cocktail that includes Bombay Sapphire East, Yellow Chartreuse, mint, lime and liquid nitrogen at the Booker and Dax bar.

As cocktails have moved toward center stage at many restaurants and nightspots, both restaurants and their customers have been looking to pair cocktails with food. The trick is to compromise the taste of neither the drink or the dish, says Dave Arnold, who opened Booker and Dax bar in New York City with Momofuku chef David Chang in January.

Mixologist and owner of David Chang’s Booker + Dax, Dave Arnold, demonstrates how he uses Bombay Sapphire East and liquid nitrogen to make his signature drink that will be featured at the upcoming Lucky Rice Festival.

Generally, intensely flavored food goes best with cocktails, Mr. Arnold says, adding that “cocktail pairings work very, very well in small-bite situations, where the flavor of the food tends to be very punchy and bold. You’ve got a lot of salt, you’ve got fried things, crunchy things—things that can stand up to high-intensity flavors of cocktails,” he says.

Dishes that are bland or very subtle may not work so well with cocktails. Salads, for example, aren’t the best pairing—”unless it’s a bold salad, like a Cobb salad,” he says.

He believes some cuisines lend themselves to cocktail pairings, such as Mexican and many kinds of Asian foods, which tend to be more piquant, with a “higher level of flavor,” he says. With such cuisines, Mr. Arnold likes “citrus-forward cocktails” (traditional ones include margaritas and caipirinhas) whose tartness will be a good foil to the spices.

Mr. Arnold likes to start each meal with a classic cocktail like an Old Fashioned or a Manhattan that’s “very clean, there’s not a lot of sugar in it, it’s sophisticated and gets you in the mood” for the dinner ahead.

When deciding what to drink with a dish, Mr. Arnold thinks about what flavors will complement the main taste. Sometimes you need to look no further than a dish’s accompaniments or garnishes. “If I’m having pieces of lamb, then a mint-based cocktail would be delicious,” he says. Steaks can be enhanced by “whiskey that has a lot of oak in it.”

A touch of fruit in a drink—bananas or limes perhaps—is “awesome,” he adds, with grilled meats like pork. One of Mr. Arnold’s favorite drinks with grilled meats is a concoction he created: “Banana Justino,” which blends rum and bananas and is served on the rocks.

Cocktails often have a higher alcohol content than a standard glass of wine or beer, so Mr. Arnold cautions against having a full cocktail with each course in a meal. “If you have five courses and five cocktails, we’d be wheeling you out of the restaurant in a wheelbarrow,” he says.

If Mr. Arnold plans to slowly sip one cocktail through a meal, he avoids carbonated beverages. “They taste good for 10 minutes and they don’t get any better,” says Mr. Arnold, who also prefers stirred drinks to ones shaken with ice if he plans to drink them slowly.

Dessert can be tricky. Mr. Arnold chooses a creamy, sweet cocktail only if his dessert has very little sugar in it, and says that straight spirits often work well with sweet desserts. When finishing off a meal with cheese, Mr. Arnold likes drinks anchored with whiskey, cognac or scotch, saying those smoky flavors “can penetrate and cut through the fattiness and saltiness of the cheese.”

When entertaining at home, Mr. Arnold likes to design two cocktails that he believes go well with many dishes—often one with whiskey and one with “white spirits” like vodka or gin—and make large amounts just before guests arrive. “Mint goes very well with a lot of things,” he notes. And gin drinks work well with many spring and summer flavors, he says.

To balance out the cocktails, he often kicks up the flavor of his food. “If you grill a bunch of things, most of the flavors are bold—black pepper, salt, garlic,” he says. “This gives you a lot of wiggle room with cocktails.”

Dave Arnold

• Opened Booker and Dax bar in New York City with chef David Chang (of Momofuku fame) in January.

• Director of Culinary Technology at the International Culinary Center in New York City.

• Will be making cocktails May 1 at the Epicurean Cocktail Feast of New York’s annual LuckyRice Festival.

• Writes about food at the culinary center’s blog, cookingissues.com

Write to Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan at cheryl.tan@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared April 26, 2012, on page D6 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Pairing Cocktails With Food.

By JAMES ANGELOS

In fast food, Germany is better known for wurst. But few German street snacks are more appreciated than the Turkish döner kebab.

Brought to Germany four decades ago, the döner is to Berlin what pizza is to New York: a transplanted food that has taken on a new life in its adopted land. Today, there are more döner stands in Berlin than in Istanbul. And about 720 million servings are sold nationally each year according to an industry association.

German-style döners are seasoned meat processed into a large cylindrical loaf, roasted on a vertical spit, then thinly sliced with a long knife and wrapped in flat bread with vegetable toppings and, sometimes, a spicy sauce.

As Germany recently marked the 50th anniversary of the guest worker treaty that brought hundreds of thousands of Turkish workers to fuel its booming postwar economy, the ubiquitous street snack is held up as a prominent symbol of the cultural and economic influence of Turkish immigration on German society.

But few events signal the food’s rise as did its own recent trade fair, attended by 4,000 döner aficionados, who consumed a ton of it. Döner industry suppliers in suits, hawking everything from spits to pita bread hashed out deals between seminars on quality standards and problems in the meat industry.

“Döner makes you pretty!” Remzi Kaplan, the owner of Kaplan Dönerproduktion GmbH, one of Europe’s largest döner meat producers, bellowed into a microphone as several young men devoured his product during an eating contest with a €500 prize ($655). “Döner makes you healthy!” he continued. “Clever! Slim!”

Thanks to its sheer size and an ethnic Turkish population of more than 2.5 million, Germany is the leader of a growing European döner industry, generating €3.5 billion in annual revenue and 200,000 jobs across Europe, according to the Berlin-based Association of Turkish Döner Producers in Europe. As with many goods, Germany has turned döner into an export advantage, producing about 400 tons of the meat daily and selling much of it to France, Poland and other European neighbors.

The fair lured big brands such as Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen, eager to sell trucks to döner producers. French-fry giant Lamb Weston also attended.

Döner kebab

“It’s a fast-growing market,” said Dietmar Pagel, an account manager for Lamb Weston’s Germany and Austria operations, as he cleaned a deep fryer he had used to fry up samples. Mr. Pagel said he had just scored a deal to supply nearly 50 tons of fries a week to a major döner distributor.

The booming döner business is also spawning innovation. At one of the fair’s 100 exhibits, Sönke Puls, a representative for Kiesling Fahrzeugbau GmbH, a German maker of refrigerated truck bodies, showed off his company’s “Döner Streaker,” a vehicle customized for the transport of frozen döner. Its special feature: a “döner blocker,” or bar, built into the cargo door to keep the cylinders of meat from rolling out when the door is opened.

Without it, a frozen döner roll weighing between 70 and 220 pounds could tumble out just “like a stone,” said Mr. Puls, sliding the bar into place to demonstrate how it works.

A lamb version of the döner has long been a staple of Turkish cooking. Its German descendant, more likely to be beef, was developed by Turkish guest workers in Berlin in the early 1970s. Though the claim is disputed, Kadir Nurman, a 78-year-old who came to Germany from Turkey in the 1960s, was honored as its inventor at the fair.

Mr. Nurman’s restaurant at the time was located near the Zoologischer Garten train station, a main transport hub in West Berlin. Noticing how workers craved something to eat on the go, he decided one day to wrap döner meat in bread to make it portable.

“When Kadir Nurman gazes at a döner, it’s with the look of a father proud to behold his baby,” the fair organizers wrote of Mr. Nurman.

In a nation that incessantly discusses the role immigration has played in its society, the döner is often cast as a political symbol.

Recently, Thilo Sarrazin, a former Bundesbank official who ignited a simmering debate about immigration with his controversial best seller, “Germany Abolishes Itself,” visited Kreuzberg, a neighborhood in Berlin famous for its large Turkish population. Among Mr. Sarrazin’s many contentious claims was that immigration from Turkey and other Muslim-majority countries has harmed Germany culturally and economically.

With a public-television crew in tow to film his visit, Mr. Sarrazin was asked to leave a well-known Turkish restaurant because of angry reaction to his presence on the street. “No Döner for Sarrazin,” blared German newspaper headlines.

For many Turkish immigrants, the döner has come to represent both opportunity and the limited chances of earlier generations to expand into other fields.

“Many immigrants live from this,” said Levent Cibik, an engineer who was attending the döner trade fair with his father, Mehti, a 50-year-old who came to Germany from east Anatolia 36 years ago and worked as a metal worker in a chocolate factory in Berlin. They were there to promote a product the father had developed, an energy-efficient rotating spit called a Universal Döner Motor.

With his laborer’s rough hands, the elder Mr. Cibik showed off the benefits of his creation, particularly a ball-bearing system that allows one to bring the skewer closer to the flame as the roll of meat gets thinner.

The family, the son said, hoped to profit from the expanding döner industry. He then pointed to a group of döner-industry moguls in suits who were chatting in Turkish. “See those people over there,” he said. “They’re all millionaires.”

A version of this article appeared April 19, 2012, on page A1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: There’s Nothing More German Than a Big, Fat Juicy Döner Kebab.

George Balanchine, the greatest choreographer of the 20th century, believed that all ballets, even his, were like butterflies: “A breath, a memory, then gone.” Twenty-nine years after his death, Mr. Balanchine’s ballets continue to be performed throughout the world, but it’s also true that the way in which they are danced today is not the way in which they were danced when Mr. Balanchine himself was around to rehearse them. The steps may be the same, but the nuances are different—sometimes joltingly so—and to compare a modern-day performance of, say, “The Four Temperaments” or “Stravinsky Violin Concerto” to an old video of a Balanchine-supervised performance by the New York City Ballet, the company that he founded in 1948, is to receive a lesson in the fundamental impermanence of dance.

Condé Nast Archive/Corbis

Lee J. Cobb, Mildred Dunnock and Arthur Kennedy in a performance of ‘Death of a Salesman,’ around 1949.

What is true of ballet is no less true of the other lively arts. Change is built into their natures. You watch a performance and then…it’s gone. All that work, all that passion, all that dedication, and when it’s over, it’s over, leaving nothing but memories—and, if you’re lucky, a recording that can serve as a souvenir, however imperfect, of the experience.

To be sure, great theatrical performances of the past leave behind a different kind of souvenir, which is their décor. Mike Nichols’s production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” which opened on Broadway this week, is being performed on a reproduction of the set that was created by Jo Mielziner, America’s most admired and innovative theatrical set designer, for the play’s original 1949 production, and it also makes use of the incidental music composed by Alex North for the same production. Mr. Nichols, who saw “Death of a Salesman” performed on Broadway when he was 17 years old, never forgot the impression made on him by Mr. Mielziner’s skeletal set and Mr. North’s fragile, wistful score, and so he decided to incorporate them into his own staging 63 years later. “When something is so completely achieved by the people who made it, you better know how they got there,” he said in an interview with New York magazine. “Not to include that in your work is to miss the play.”

Such exhumations are not unprecedented. The New York City Ballet still dances Mr. Balanchine’s “Prodigal Son” in front of faithful reproductions of the backdrops that were painted by the French artist Georges Rouault for the 1929 Ballets Russes premiere. And major opera companies occasionally keep on performing an entire production for decades, as the Metropolitan Opera has done with John Dexter’s monumental staging of Francis Poulenc’s “Dialogues of the Carmelites,” which was created for the Met in 1977 and will be seen there again in May 2013.

Even so, it is rare for anyone to try to “revive” any aspect of a historically significant theatrical performance, even one as durable as its décor. Why should this be so? I found out when I watched a video of a version of “Oklahoma!” that was mounted last spring by the gifted students of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and subsequently telecast on North Carolina’s public-television stations. In addition to Agnes de Mille’s well-known dances, which made it into the 1955 film version of “Oklahoma!” and continue to be used in modern stagings of the Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein II musical, the UNC staging incorporated every other reproducible element of the original Broadway production, including Lemuel Ayers’s sets, Miles White’s costumes and Robert Russell Bennett’s orchestrations for a 24-piece pit band.

Watching the UNC “Oklahoma!” was like stepping into the Wayback Machine and setting the controls for 1943. I can’t think of a more valuable student project, and I’m immensely grateful that it was taped for TV. (Take note, PBS!) But as I watched, I asked myself whether such a production could succeed on Broadway today—and my reluctant answer was no. The problem is that the visual taste of American theatergoers has changed radically since 1943. To contemporary eyes, the Ayers-White décor, whose bold primary colors and simplified shapes were modeled on the regional paintings of Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, looks like nothing so much as an old-fashioned comic strip. It’s wonderful in its gaudy way, but should “Oklahoma!” look like “Li’l Abner”? Not if you want viewers born after 1960 to take it seriously as anything other than a charming period piece.

Yes, it’s sad—tragic, really—that great theatrical experiences are destined to fade from memory. Would you buy a ticket to see a film of the very first production of “Hamlet,” “Swan Lake” or “La Bohème”? I would, in half a heartbeat. But I also know that it is because of the inexorable perishability of such productions that younger performers, directors and designers are able to reimagine the classics in ways that make visual and emotional sense to successive generations of audiences. That’s a big part of what keeps them alive.

All praise, then, to Mr. Nichols for giving us a glimpse of what “Death of a Salesman” looked and sounded like when it was new…but let’s not make a habit of it, OK?

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, writes “Sightings” every other Friday. He is the author of “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.” Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

A version of this article appeared March 16, 2012, on page D10 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Sometimes in the Arts, Impermanence Is Good.

By JACK FLAM

Masaccio’s “Holy Trinity,” in the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella, is one of the most intellectually complex and deeply moving pictures ever painted, remarkable not only for its precocious naturalism, which initiated the Renaissance painting style, but also for the way its depiction of the material world is infused with deep metaphysical significance. It is both the most rational and the most mysterious of images.

Erich Lessing / Art Resource

One of the most intellectually complex and deeply moving pictures ever painted, Masaccio’s ‘Holy Trinity’ demonstrates a number of groundbreaking innovations. Pictured here, a detail of the painting.

The painting owes its verisimilitude to a number of groundbreaking innovations. Its life-size figures are rendered with a new kind of sculptural modeling, which makes them seem to occupy real space. And its architectural setting, based on elements from classical antiquity, is constructed with “scientific” one-point perspective. This creates a convincing sense of depth and places the viewer in a fairly specific physical relationship to what is depicted. Masaccio creates the illusion that a whole new space has been opened up before us, as if a new chapel had been cut into the wall. At the time it was painted, the realism of this picture was so startling that viewers could well have believed the Holy Trinity was actually right there in the church.

Masaccio’s painting is unusual in combining the Trinity with a Crucifixion scene: The Virgin Mary and St. John stand under the cross, which is set on a mound of dirt that symbolizes Golgotha. Mary, in particular, lends a moving human element to this austere image. She is rendered as if clearly seen from below and in three-quarter view, which gives her greater physical presence than the other figures, who are depicted in profile or full-face and seen as if at eye level. The resigned, matter-of-fact gesture by which she invites us to contemplate her Son on the cross is not only profoundly moving but also emphasizes her role as an intercessor.

Below the patrons who kneel just outside the sacred space is a skeleton laid out on a sarcophagus. Above it, an inscription reads: “I once was what you are now, and what I am you also will be.” This memento mori, placed under a symbol of Golgotha, suggests that the skeleton represents both Everyman and Adam, widely believed to have been buried under the place where Christ was later crucified. The reminder of physical death is contrasted with God the Father holding the cross, offering the promise of everlasting life.

The perspective construction plays a central role in creating levels of meaning. The vanishing point, and thereby the viewer’s eye-level, is just below the foot of the cross; this places us in a position of submission, below the donors but above the skeleton. The deep space described by the coffered vault relates the sanctity of the figures to how far away from us they seem to be. In earlier painting, the hierarchy of sanctity was expressed by the relative height of the figures within the composition. Here, for the first time, sanctity is also directly coordinated with depth: the patrons are lowest and closest, while God the Father is highest and farthest away.

The picture’s unprecedented realism posed philosophical problems for the painter. In medieval representations of the Trinity, God the Father was represented as much larger than Christ, who was in turn taller than any other figures; and all were usually set against a flat, gold-leaf ground. In such images, the Divine figures exist outside space and time. Masaccio, by rendering his figures with such realism in a tangible architectural space, subjects them to the laws of nature. This is clear in the way God the Father stands so firmly on the ledge beneath him, His feet depicted in foreshortened perspective, rather than floating free as in earlier works.

Such a rendering ran the risk of having the physical realism of the image overwhelm its spiritual presence. To prevent this, Masaccio built a number of adjustments and subtle contradictions into his apparently rational perspectival composition. For example, since the figures are roughly life-size, the artist had to deal with the problem of maintaining the hierarchy between them without sacrificing the illusion of real space. When figures are rendered in perspective, those farthest away seem to be the smallest; but following that principle too literally here would run counter to the sanctity of the subject. Masaccio found a brilliantly simple solution: Because they kneel, the two donors, who by the laws of perspective should be the largest, look shorter than the holy figures behind them.

Within the hallowed sanctum, the adjustments of space are more subtle. The perspective is constructed inconsistently, which some have seen as evidence of Masaccio’s imperfect understanding of it. But these inconsistencies are in fact central to the compressed levels of meaning the picture conveys. For example, Masaccio seems to have combined optical perspective with a surface geometry based on the calibrations of an astrolabe, used by astronomers and understood at the time to be a symbol of a divinely ordered universe. By overlapping two mathematical systems, he merged the depiction of time-bound surface appearances with an awareness of eternal underlying causes.

The perspective in this painting is sufficiently accurate to be convincing, but purposely inexact enough to make space for the supernatural. This is strikingly evident in the representation of God the Father, who stands on the narrow ledge attached to the back wall of the barrel-vaulted space, which would appear to be about nine feet deep. Yet at the same time, He is also present at the front of this same vaulted space, supporting the body of his Son on the cross. This discrepancy in perspective allows God to be in more than one place at a time—a supernatural phenomenon made all the more remarkable by the painting’s apparent realism.

Among other things, this great fresco, painted on the wall of a Dominican church, is a stunning affirmation of the great Dominican theologian St. Thomas Aquinas’s assertion that to be “everywhere primarily and absolutely is proper to God.” What better place could there be to state this with such subtlety than in a representation of the Holy Trinity, whose paradoxical consubstantiality—distinct, yet of one being—is a central mystery of Christian faith.

To have been able to convey such a dynamic amalgam of reason, compassion, mysticism and grace in the static medium of paint on plaster is surely the greatest of Masaccio’s achievements.

—Mr. Flam is an art historian and former art critic for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared February 18, 2012, on page C13 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Convergence of Faith and Reason.

By JOHN WILMERDING

Whitney Museum of American Art, N.Y.

Detail, “Second Story Sunlight.”

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) holds the reputation of being one of the great American realists of the 20th century. His painting career spans the first two thirds of that century, and includes numerous indelible images of rural and urban scenes, from the lighthouse series painted near Portland, Maine, in the 1920s to “Nighthawks” (1942) set in New York City. Often he depicted three of his favorite themes together: isolated human figures, landscape and architecture—usually defined by a bright but cold light. But while his scenes are grounded in observed reality, the most compelling pictures have an unsettled and even mysterious character. Often simplicity of design shields a complexity of emotions, and an impending narrative yields only to inexplicability.

Such is the case with one of his great later works, “Second Story Sunlight.” The title itself suggests doubled visual and verbal meanings: We are looking at the upper floors of two gabled houses, while on the balcony in the foreground sit two women of different generations, thus introducing a second personal story. Mr. Hopper’s descriptive impulses, economies of design and stagelike settings have not accidentally drawn the critical attention of novelists like Ann Beattie, John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates, the poets John Hollander and Mark Strand, and actor-writer Steve Martin.

Pairings are everywhere in this picture: Each figure sits framed by two windows behind; single matching windows are repeated above in each gable, and each window is divided into equal upper and lower rectangles. Even the yellow square window shade at the left balances its counterpart of sunlight on the wall within. And of course the severely drawn and illuminated architecture plays off against the amorphous green landscape of woods to the right, with the four second-floor windows in front contrasted with the four sunlit tree trunks, which also frame dark spaces behind. (At the same time Mr. Hopper always allows for irregularities, lest we overlook the lone side window and sliver of a third structure on the left side.)

Where are we? It’s not entirely clear. Certainly not within a town, such as Gloucester or Provincetown, nor in open rural landscape. With the summer sunlight, young bather and poses of leisure, we seem to be near the shore, probably somewhere on Cape Cod. Mr. Strand notes that the rising angle of trees would indicate a hillside, and indeed the soft rounded crests above almost read like hilly dunes on the Cape. The repeated row houses suggest a middle-class rather than spacious resort community. The style of the buildings is a simple country classical, with its plain wood cornices, corner pilasters and flat-planked balcony. In front no ground or road or further open space is evident.

And who are the women? Because they sit on the same balcony we presume they are related, as grandmother and granddaughter, though Mr. Updike speculated that the older woman was thinking about her younger self. The first is reading, most viewers initially assume, but appears rather to be looking up from her magazine or newspaper, interrupted by something or someone in the unseen distance off to the right. The girl is in a bathing suit the color of the ocean. She sits up straight with her chest thrust out as if to catch attention, and looks out to the same space beyond the picture’s frame. Close as the two figures are physically within the balcony, the older is more confined by it, the younger on the edge of open space. Also, the darkened sidewall of the farther building creates a strong vertical panel visually separating them. Whatever they share, they are a contrast not only in age, but also of the cerebral and the physical.

Windows regularly play a crucial role in Mr. Hopper’s compositions, whether in indicating or hiding the human presence. Besides their geometries, here the shade levels appear to amplify the inner nature of the sitters. Behind the girl the shades are half or fully lowered, hinting at a closed-off or unformed private life, while the elder woman sits by a more open, sun-flooded interior. Revealing a glimpse of a sofa arm and hanging picture, the room within is spare and orderly, the taste of someone set in her ways. Both women are relaxing in their own manner; are they vacationing? There is no indication whether this is a permanent residence or a second home just for the season. We do not know what brings them together.

Then there is Mr. Hopper’s control of color and light. Of the latter he once famously, if disconcertingly, declared that he was only “interested in painting sunlight on buildings.” Light and shadow for him served both formal and emotional roles in a painting’s expression, clarifying as well as obscuring. In this instance the strong sun falls directly on the front facade of the buildings, anchoring our attention on the center of the composition. Blues of varying intensity frame this white geometry: the cloudless sky above, bluish tree trunks and blue shadowed sides of the houses and balcony. The yellow shades and red building details complete a design based on primary colors. Subordinate contrasts exist in the complementary juxtapositions of red-green and lavender-yellow.

Countering the sunshine that crosses the view from outside the right frame are the diagonals leading the eye from upper left to lower right: the large steps from building cornice to balcony railing to lower porch roof, reinforced by two bright red forms of chimney above left and roof below right. All this sets up a visual and even psychological dialogue between what is painted within the canvas and what or who may be imagined if we, too, were to look off to the right. This summary work by Mr. Hopper epitomizes his ability to complicate the seen with the unseen.

—Mr. Wilmerding’s current projects include preparing exhibitions on Robert Indiana, Wayne Thiebaud and Pop art still life.

A version of this article appeared March 31, 2012, on page C13 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Double Exposure.

By ALLEN BARRA

On the football field, the University of Alabama had a great season, winning the BCS national championship for the second time in three years. In the courtroom, however, there’s been less cause for celebration.

For seven years now the university has been locked in a bitter legal struggle with Alabama artist Daniel Moore over his right to depict scenes from Alabama games in his paintings. The university argues that it has exclusive rights to its trademark, which includes the Tide’s famous crimson-and-white colors. Mr. Moore maintains that his paintings are covered under his right to free speech. Appealing to a higher court, he says the freedom to paint what he chooses is a “God-given right.”

Simply put, the University of Alabama is telling Mr. Moore that he can’t portray its football players unless he purchases a license from them.

In a recent account of the case, the Birmingham News called the lawsuit “embarrassing.” News reporter Jon Solomon said in a phone interview last week that “Alabama couldn’t have picked a worse PR fiasco than the one they’ve created.”

To put it in football terms: Picture Alabama’s 2012 national champs playing a junior highschool squad—and going into the fourth quarter with the junior high leading. At least that’s what it looks like as the university, using the lawyers and other “material and financial support” provided by Collegiate Licensing Co., Alabama’s licensing agent, lines up against Mr. Moore and his Birmingham-based lawyer, Steve Heninger. (In addition to Alabama, CLC represents the NCAA and 100 other universities.)

So far, according to the Birmingham News, the university has spent nearly $1.4 million in legal expenses battling Mr. Moore. The irony is almost dizzying: Mr. Moore’s works have boosted Alabama football’s prestige, bolstering fan support for the same self-sustaining athletic department that is now seeking to restrict the artist’s right to portray the team in paint.

The late, great Bear Bryant must be spinning in his grave. As his career neared its end, Bryant himself selected Mr. Moore to commemorate his assault on Amos Alonzo Stagg’s record for coaching victories. In fact, several of Mr. Moore’s works are on display in the Paul W. Bryant Museum on the university’s campus in Tuscaloosa.

The legal wrangling began back in 2005 when the university filed suit against Mr. Moore to prevent him from using Alabama’s trademarks, including colors and logos, in his popular paintings. Many legal observers believe that Mr. Moore won a major victory in 2009 when a U.S. District Court in Birmingham ruled that the First Amendment gave him the right to paint, but that this right did not extend to merchandise such as coffee mugs, calendars and other items that the court considered commercial products rather than art.

The ruling satisfied neither party. The university appealed in an attempt to claim its trademark interests on any and all depictions, while Mr. Moore appealed on behalf of his right to use his artwork in all mediums.

Oral arguments were heard by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta on Feb. 2 of this year, and the court’s decision, which will reverberate through all of college sports, is expected soon. There have been few relevant cases regarding art and trademark infringement, the most important being a 2003 decision by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. In 2000 Tiger Woods’s licensing company, ETW Corp., filed suit against artist Rick Rush to prevent him from selling prints made from his painting of Mr. Woods winning the 1997 Masters. The court decided that Mr. Rush’s painting, like Andy Warhol’s depictions of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and Mick Jagger, was sufficiently “transformative” to fall under First Amendment protection because the work—with Mr. Woods in three different poses with several past winners of the Masters—contained the artist’s own creative component and was not simply a likeness of Mr. Woods. Messrs. Heninger and Moore are hoping for similar logic from the Atlanta court.

Mark McKenna, a Notre Dame professor specializing in trademark law, is an amicus attorney for the case. In a phone interview last week, he said: “CLC and the university are using Daniel Moore as a test case. The bottom line is that Alabama and other schools want to control all the merchandise carrying an image associated with their schools. If they win, it isn’t clear how far they could take this. If Daniel Moore isn’t free to use an image from an Alabama game, how do we know that, say, Sports Illustrated wouldn’t be able to use a photo from an Alabama football game without the university’s approval? How do we know it would be OK for a newspaper to print a game photo? For that matter, could they even say ‘University of Alabama’ or ‘Crimson Tide’ in print?”

Does Mr. McKenna think that magazines and newspapers are concerned as they await the court’s decision? “They ought to be,” he says.

The University of Alabama responded by email: “While we regret the necessity of having to involve the courts in this matter, the lawsuit was necessary since UA must protect the value and reputation of our trademarks, name, colors, indicia, and logos by determining who uses them, as well as when and how they are used.”

Mr. Moore’s attorney, Mr. Heninger, says that “Alabama and CLC have made it clear from the start that they’ll go straight to the Supreme Court on this issue if necessary.”

It’s fourth-and-goal, and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has the ball.

Mr. Barra writes about sports for the Journal. His next book, “Mickey & Willie: The Parallel Lives of Baseball’s Golden Age,” will be published this fall by Crown.

A version of this article appeared March 22, 2012, on page D4 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Who Owns Crimson and White?.

By BARRYMORE LAURENCE SCHERER

Fort Worth, Texas

Thanks largely to the urging of his humorist friend Will Rogers, Amon Carter (1879-1955), a Fort Worth newspaper publisher and industrialist, began collecting American art during the 1930s. Today the Amon Carter Museum of American Art houses an exceptional collection of painting, sculpture, graphics, photography and works on paper from about 1820 to 1950, including representative works by Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt through Childe Hassam, Charles Sheeler and Louise Nevelson. It is particularly rich in works by artists who depicted the American West, especially Frederic Remington and his greatest rival, Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926).

The museum is now exhibiting “Romance Maker: The Watercolors of Charles M. Russell,” the first comprehensive show to focus on this artist’s important place in 19th-century America’s watercolor tradition. One hundred Russell works selected from the museum’s own trove and from other public and private collections document his singular career. These range from sketches and notebook leaves showing Russell’s early, crude efforts to record his rugged cowboy life during the 1880s, through his mastery of the medium during the 1890s and 1900s, to his very last watercolor, “When Cows Were Wild,” painted shortly before his death.

Although renowned as “The Cowboy Artist,” he was not to that manner born. A St. Louis native, Russell grew up in urban prosperity. But he yearned to experience the prairies and eventually hired on for 11 years as a genuine cowboy. In and out of the saddle, Russell sketched in his ubiquitous pocket notebooks. A selection of early sketches from 1882-83 reveals his keen eye roving from cowboys herding to lyrical studies of deer at a waterfall. Their technical naiveté makes that much more impressive the increasing assurance of his draftsmanship during the early 1890s, because he was entirely self-taught.

This is not just a show of Russell’s watercolors but also about Russell’s often innovative watercolor technique. Russell’s affinity for his preferred medium coincided with a general surge in watercolor activity following the Civil War, when commercially manufactured paints and papers became increasingly available for mail-order shipment. Earlier, John James Audubon had made his meticulous ornithological studies in watercolor, and artists like Thomas Sully, Asher Durand and George Caleb Bingham painted and sketched in watercolor. Nevertheless, the medium had been a lesser ancillary to oil painting until Winslow Homer emerged about 1875 as the first important American to embrace both transparent and opaque watercolor for their own unique properties, rather than merely to add color to line drawing.

Although Russell’s work doesn’t exhibit Homer’s bright Impressionist palette or his sometimes innovative sense of compositional space, he often uses looser brushwork for backgrounds and foregrounds of his compositions, while painting his figures tightly—a manner allied to the French juste milieu style that influenced Paris-trained contemporaries like Sargent and Daniel Ridgway Knight. Russell “constantly experimented with technical ideas in order to record accurately the minute details of cowboy and especially Indian culture and dress,” says the exhibition’s curator, Rick Stewart, author of the splendid catalog. For example, in “The Story Teller” (1893-95) Russell depicted the characteristic tacks on a Blackfeet Indian pipe by “kissing” the paper with the mouth of the open tube of raw-sienna paint, according to the museum’s paper conservator, Jodie Utter, then applying highlights with thick blobs of impasto (i.e., undiluted) white, pin-pricking each blob to achieve the 3-D effect of actual brass tacks. In “Hiawatha’s Wooing” (1903), inspired by Canto 10 of Longfellow’s poem, Russell uses layered transparent washes and strokes of semiopaque wash to build up the texture and depth of the forest behind the figures.

“Russell was also a superb storyteller who conveyed his thoroughly unique understanding of every professional trick of the cowboy trade,” says Mr. Stewart, while pointing out a particularly subtle backhanded rope maneuver in “When Cows Were Wild.” By the late 1890s, his quick eye and firsthand experience of galloping steeds and bucking broncos enabled him to depict the most complex, fleeting equestrian positions. Meanwhile, the care with which Russell details the sinewy arms and hand of the Indian bowman in “Wild Man’s Meat” (1899) reveals his proficient observation of human anatomy as well, often gained by modeling poses himself and using a mirror.

Recording a Wild West that had virtually disappeared after the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889, Russell reminisced about the uneasy relationship between the cowboys and their environment in “Rainy Morning” (1904) and the uneasy truce between Indians and encroaching white men in “A Doubtful Handshake” (1910). He even documented uneasy relationships among animals in the fierce horse fight of “The Challenge No. 2″ (1898) and in the faceoff between a marauding wolf and a large male buffalo in “Guardian of the Herd” (1899).

Considerable violence marks such works as “Buffalo Hunt [No. 15]” (1896), showing an Indian brave and his agonized horse crushed by their enraged quarry. In contrast, humor and affection characterize the two versions of “Beauty Parlor” (1897 and 1907) showing a squaw arranging her brave’s hair as he examines the process in a hand mirror. In a way, these two pictures offer Indian-themed ripostes to Cassatt’s intimate domestic scenes.

Through books, periodicals and occasional travel, Russell kept abreast of developments in the art world, adding these to his vast knowledge of prairie anthropology. Hence in “Sun Worship in Montana” (1907), the precisely rendered details of the tepee, the decorated cradle and the mother’s garments convey Russell’s profound sympathy for the religion and culture of the Blackfeet Indians. At the same time, the mother’s swaybacked ceremonial posture recalls—to these eyes—Sargent’s striking portrait of the actress Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, while suggesting Russell’s awareness of contemporary urban fashions.

Russell’s book illustrations, especially for his popular anthologies of traditional Indian tales, bespeak his gift for mystical imagery and caricature. Among these, the mist-shrouded atmosphere of “Ho!—When the Ghost-People Saw the Unlucky-One They Rushed at Him With Many Lances” (1915) and the pen-and-ink overlay of “Yes—The Mice People Always Make Their Nest in the Heads of the Dead Buffalo-People, Ever Since the Night” (c. 1915) approach the linear texture and even grotesquery of Arthur Rackham. Many are particularly beautiful because of the enriched palette of Russell’s late period, especially his liberal use of purple for skies and shadows. Though not intended for any publication, “Lewis and Clark on the Lower Columbia” (1905)—one of several watercolors he painted of events during the Lewis and Clark expedition—embodies the spacious grandeur of academic history painting. In his magnificent though diminutive “Storm on Lake McDonald from Bull Head Lodge” (1906) he meets Homer on his own ground, exploiting the transparency of watercolor on white paper to render the effects of light against rocks, and through water and quick-moving clouds.

Whether you regard Russell as a visual counterpart to the authors Bret Harte and Zane Grey or as a Western American rejoinder to Europe’s Orientalist painters, this fine exhibition proves that his technical mastery and narrative power transcend all boundaries.

Mr. Scherer writes about music and the fine arts for the Journal.