Robert Macfie Scriver and Art

WESTERN ART, LIT AND HISTORY: Transition

2011-12-16T21:00:00.001-07:00

WESTERN ART, LIT AND HISTORY

"Transition," a bronze sculpture by Robert MacFie Scriver, portraying generations of Blackfeet.

It was originally meant to be an heroic-sized (life-size plus one-fifth) monument in Browning.

The best of Bob Scriver’s work is finally coming online in a way we would never have anticipated. He hated computers in general, picked a BIG fight with me when I wanted to put his autobiography (the one he was writing himself on legal pads) on a little all-in-one early Macintosh I was using in Heart Butte. He never would have imagined the Internet. I’m suspecting that this casting (above) was made in the Sixties in our own Bighorn Foundry that we built in the backyard and that probably either Carl Cree Medicine or I patined it.

The early auctions began, rather transparently, as ways to clear out the warehoused art stock of certain persons under the guise of helping the CMR Museum or Indians or some other cause. When they came around to ask Bob to donate a piece of art, he was outraged. (“I’m broke already!!”) But one was frozen out of the buyer “social classes” if one didn’t, because the auction was also an important bonding event for collectors and their supplicants. So he invented the Scriver Buffalo Skull Award, which didn’t cost much to cast and wasn’t going to be affected by the general state of art sales.

Now, of course, everything has changed, but Bob was right to be wary of auctions, because now there are many auctions, the generation that was betting on which artist was going to be the next Charlie Russell is ancient or dead, and there is a Charlie Russell wannabe under every bush, painting away as fast as they can. Aside from that, works go through auctions back east where people know nothing but abstract expressionism or conceptual art and no one knows anything about Charlie -- they have a vague trace memory of Frederic Remington.

In some ways, bronze sculptures have become as much victims of technology as books have been undercut by electronics. Ceramic shell casting is so cheap and easy, with results that are so indistinguishable from fine lost wax casting (except by experts), that everyone casts everything, slaps a store-bought slick-as-plastic patina on it (maybe in COLORS !!), and sells it for trinket prices. Worse, they aren’t very particular what they make molds off of -- copyright or not -- and they aren’t particularly good at making molds.

It gets worse: with laser technology, you can stand a horse in front of a machine and have a computer-recorded exact replica of the horse without the intervention of human judgment at all. Is this art? Is an upside-down urinal art? It’s up to the buyer.

Personally, I think it is worse to have a monument-quality sculpture cast by the artist by the same lost-wax method that Rodin used, go at auction for $800. And worse than that, I resent the work being carelessly described by some racist shallow catalogue maker as a “buck, squaw and papoose.” These are portraits. Chewing Black Bone, the man sitting down, was a dignified ceremonialist, said by some to be the last warrior to have taken a scalp. He was blind, probably from trachoma. In summer he lived in his lodge on the Mad Plume ranch, mending his own moccasins and remembering the old days. He was a friend and informant of James Willard Schultz, who called him “Ahku Pitsu.” I only met him once, early in the Sixties.

Mae Williamson, the woman in the middle, was a dignified and sophisticated woman who was married to a white lawyer. (Later she had other husbands, all Blackfeet.) The dress she is wearing, embellished with the eyeteeth of elk (count’em and see how many elk it took), is worth thousands of dollars. The boy is “Tomorrow.” We’ve lost the name of the boy who posed. Maybe he’ll see this, recognize himself, and tell us how he turned out. He’d be a grandfather by now, fifty years older. None of this is romantic foofoo stuff invented by a Hollywood-hypnotized story spinner. These are just facts.

I complain a good deal about the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel, who try to lock up the value of their own acquisitions by whatever means they can. Wheelin’ and dealin’, we say. In these new phenomena of slice ‘n dice, bring-’em-faster auctions the buyers are often not present (they buy via the internet), no informed persons explain what the context of the pieces are, and everyone is monitoring a ticker-tape website that shows what the artist’s work sold for last time. They are incredibly destructive to the reputation and value of Western American art.

But at least it is not the racist divide that is presently between those who love Western art, Western literature, and Western history because they are essentially a conquerer’s account of the empire of America with a nod to the valor and glamour of the “worthy opponents” -- as opposed to the flipside: real people’s history of previously invisible kinds. (Example: Mian Situ who suddenly makes real the Chinese in the West.) This divide is in all three contexts and it is decimating the organizations devoted to the fields, especially those that include with the amateur aficionadoes some serious academics who have been alert to the re-framing of history by people like Howard Zinn. Young people are now quite different in outlook and opposed to exploitation. It may be that the buckskinners and cavalry re-enactors have smudges of fascistic elitism and triumphalism. The idea makes them so defensive that no one wants to go near the topic.

Right-wingers. God love ‘em. Bob Scriver was among ‘em. Not that the forces of Red Power didn’t do their best to change him from an innocent to an entrenched opponent. This man grew up thinking he WAS Indian and got pushed out of the category by Indian people who hated the FBI -- who did their best to reinforce hate, even though the FBI was organized in the first place to oppose the many murders that came out of the great early oil strikes in Kansas. Wounded Knee was Wounded Pride. So the foxes sit quietly in front of the hen house with their tails curled around their well-polished wingtips while the weasels come and go.

I’m not meaning to accuse the amateur aficionadoes, who are off creating sonnets that ask “Why Gone Those Times?” I’m not ignoring the young rascals who say, “Good riddance.” It’s the commodifiers I’m after. In the meantime, sales everywhere are really miserable.

"BRONZE INSIDE AND OUT"

2011-11-24T15:01:00.001-07:00

http://freebookspot.es/Comments.aspx?Element_ID=208488

http://avaxhome.ws/ebooks/biography/1552382273.html

http://ebookee.org/Bronze-Inside-and-Out-A-Biographical-Memoir-of-Bob-Scriver_1555379.html

If you've been putting off reading "Bronze Inside and Out" because of the cost, you might be happy to know it has somehow showed up on the Internet as a free download.

This is entirely without my knowledge, consent or permission. I hardly know what to think about it. If you read the book, I WOULD like to know what YOU think about the book.

ESTATE DISPERSAL: SAD OPPORTUNITY

2011-10-24T11:46:00.002-06:00

This note arrived today from a friend:

Dear Mary:

Thought you might be interested to see this private collection of Bob Scriver material for sale on eBay.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Robert-Scriver-bob-Scriver-large-collection-see-description-one-kind-lot-/160667493681?pt=Art_Sculpture&hash=item2568876531

I wondered if one of the notes listed in the sale, about an item having been stolen, might have been from you. The author is not stated.

The sale appears to be from a Montana estate.

* * * * *

This is the answer I sent back:

Uh, oh. This means either that Billy McCurdy badly needs money or that his estate is being distributed. He was about my age (70 +) and these things were from Bob's early life, before I came. Billy helped build the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife and later became the "manager" for Woody Herman as well as playing in the band. I always wondered a bit about the personal relationships. Bob's feelings for Billy were quite intense. Bob left him $10,000, which is what he did for each of his grandkids -- his children were dead. No one else inherited cash. I wondered whether he were Bob's son but the timing is wrong. Bob also left Billy his first battered old cornet, but Billy sent it back. I've tried to contact him, but no dice. The last address I had was in Minneapolis.

$20,000 is wildly optimistic in a world where a “Lone Cowboy” like mine (cast probably by Bob and I and patined by me) recently sold for $800. That's eight hundred. I would have guessed the value at $10,000. Auctions are two-edged swords. But if a person were a collector with an eye, well-informed, now would be the time to prepare for the next wave of popularity.

It's not the actual casting of the bison skull that was stolen. There was a guy who cruised the prairie souvenir shops picking up stuff and making molds of it. He made a mold of this skull and sold it far and wide. You can tell his castings because they're slightly squashed and blurred. This was a tourist item and the idea itself was much copied. The most resourceful version was an assortment of skulls and an assortment of birds with screws on the bottom so you mix and match with the skulls. They came in a molded, velvet-lined case. Not a bad idea!

I'd better look for Billy's obit.

Prairie Mary

"MASAI MORAN, KILLER OF SIMBA"

2011-09-17T09:21:00.000-06:00

This information comes from a website called "Art Fact"

There is a photo at the website. I couldn't get it to migrate. This is the url for the list of Scriver bronzes that have been auctioned. If it doesn't work, just go to www.artfact.com and use their search function for Scriver.

http://www.artfact.com/catalog/searchLots.cfm?scp=p&catalogRef=&shw=50&ord=2&ad=DESC&img=0&alF=1&houseRef=&houseLetter=A&artistRef=&areaID=&countryID=®ionID=&stateID=&fdt=0&tdt=0&fr=0&to=0&wa=Scriver&wp=&wo=&nw=&upcoming=0&rp=&hi=&rem=FALSE&cs=0

Auctions Auctioneer Directory
Braswell Galleries
06/21/10 Fine Estate, Art & 20th Century Modern
Auction Catalog
SCRIVER, BOB (AMERICAN, 1914-1999): Cast bronze. "Masai Moran, Killer of Simba." Signed, dated 1996, and titled on the base.

Auction House: Braswell Galleries Auction Location: Norwalk , CT, USA
Title of auction: 06/21/10 Fine Estate, Art & 20th Century Modern
Auction Date: June 21, 2010
Description: SCRIVER, BOB (AMERICAN, 1914-1999): Cast bronze. "Masai Moran, Killer of Simba." Signed, dated 1996, and titled on the base.
H. 30."

Artfact is the world's largest auction database!
More than 67.4 million auction price results representing over $254.6 billion in value
Includes price results and upcoming art for sale at auction for over 500,000 artists

I only saw this sculpture once while Bob was working on it in plastilene. We shared an attraction to Kenya and all the stories that came out of it.

Looking on down the list, I see Bob's self-portrait described as "Bust of a cowboy with hat inscribed © Bob Scriver / 1975 / 9/35 Bronze" (on the back of the figure)

"Lot 746: BRONZE MODEL OF A STANDING HORSE Signed "RS". Attributed to Robert Scriver. Height 2¾"" is NOT a Scriver bronze. He never signed as RS and the horse is not in his style.

'INTO THE WIND" is up for auction

2011-09-15T16:11:00.001-06:00

http://www.AskART.com/AskART/artists/search/Search_Repeat.aspx?q=2902179&searchtype=AUCTION_RECORDS&artist=19479

If you go to the url above you'll find that Bob's original graceful and simple little conception of five geese landing, a moment from a hunting expedition we made in the Sixties, is up for auction. What this means is that either someone has died so that their belongings are in an estate to be converted into cash or that someone is REALLY hard up for cash. This little bronze only sold to people who dearly loved it and would not part with it easily.

Since this bronze was made, there have been other imitations -- the idea of birds linked this way so they appeared to be in the air struck a lot of people. It was a popular notion. We weren't sure it could be cast. Bob made a later version with more geese in it.

THE FATE OF MUSEUMS

2011-04-17T11:23:00.000-06:00

When I was serving the Saskatoon Unitarian Congregation, one of the families went on a holiday trip to the Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller and came back raving. “It is a temple to Life itself!” they declared, and when I finally got there myself, I saw that they were right. www.tyrrellmuseum.com/ Other Canadian museums are just as grand and inspiring. The secret is that most of the “object focused” earlier collections had the good stuff, so the Canadians had to rely on ingenious presentation. Of course, at Drumheller the fossils wash out of the ground after every rainstorm. But “Head-Smashed-In” buffalo jump required careful thought. Check it out here: www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120137

I’m not naive about museums. I grew up in a museum-worshipping family and traveled across the US and Canada, stopping at every roadside attraction, so that I saw many a basement or garage collection as well as the great institutions of the cities, esp. the ones in Chicago where I went to university. One of my early favs was the case of rocks at the Portland Children’s Museum which looked like nothing until the room lights were off and the black light in the case was on -- then they were spectacular.

This NPR story is about a museum in the Blue Ridge mountains and is worth opening just for the photo, but the radio story is there as well.

http://www.npr.org/2011/04/16/135442423/in-shuttered-museum-appalachian-history-boxed-up The link description tells the story. Everything packed in boxes. People wanting their family history returned to them. No room. No money. And as one lady said tartly, “It doesn’t rhyme with football.”

That story is being repeated all over many countries as the notion of what a museum “is” gets reappraised. And the museums themselves are appraised as well. www.aam-us.org/ There are 6 accredited museums in Montana: the C.M. Russell Museum, the Montana Historical Society Museum, the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula, the Missoula Art Museum, the Museum of the Rockies, and the Western Heritage Center in Billings. Maybe your fav is not on the list. What would it mean? Only 4.5 % of the 17,500 US museums are accredited.

The CM Russell Museum spokeswoman said the inspectors checked “lighting, heating and air conditioning, sound systems and everything from the way the collection looks, and things such as the temperature pieces are kept.” I expect they also looked at the endowment. I do not know whether they investigated the quality of curation, security, inventory control, education programs and the like, but I would guess they did.

The Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife personally constructed by Bob Scriver would never have qualified. It had no fire suppression system, though it was built of old wood from a dis-assembled warehouse. I once overheard a little gaggle of college girls dis-assembling the captions. They didn’t knock the content, but they thought that typing words on cards with an old primary school typewriter and thumbtacking them onto homemade stands was too, too primitive. They deplored the fact that the animals weren’t under glass, and a lot of other stuff. I put my fingers in my ears. One of the things they found truly shocking was an old sofa where I snuck in for naps. After all, I was there at 6AM sweeping the floor and polishing the glass and couldn’t lock up until the last tourists were through petting the moose. There was also a matched pair of asymmetrical coral-colored boudoir chairs left behind by Bob’s second wife. The sapphire velveteen drapes behind the bronzes were an early Christmas gift from myself. This was a very "personal" place.

When the museum was dispersed after Bob’s death, the bronzes of Blackfeet went north to the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton because they had already bought the legendary “million dollar” Scriver collection of Blackfeet artifacts. But they had to leave everything in storage for lack of space. Thanks to the tar sands income, they are now able to rebuild, as you can see at http://www.royalalbertamuseum.ca/ But the bronzes are scheduled to be transferred to the Fort Benton, Montana, museum, which is developing quickly and with standards that will probably qualify them for accreditation soon.

We tend to think of museums as fusty, unchanging repositories of inscrutable objects, which becomes a problem in two ways. One is when changing times and knowledge make the previous incarnation of business and presentation so out of sync that it becomes irrelevant, even though its whole purpose may be the preservation of the past, and the other is when it comes time to raise money for the funds to renew the museum. The Montana legislature has just approved authority to borrow to build a new Montana Historical Society Museum. There will be a struggle between those whose prestige rests on the status quo and those who will want to proceed on a new paradigm of presentation.

Bob Scriver’s entire estate was given to the Montana Historical Society, though the funds that had been included to provide for building had mysteriously evaporated. The C.M. Russell Museum, somehow snubbed in what started out to be a partnership, is now busily stripping all references to Bob Scriver. I watch all this from the sidelines, legally defined as having no “standing” to advise and without any funds or clout to contribute. What I have is knowledge.

So what I commend to the Powers-That-Be is that though they are nearly overwhelmed with objects, including Bob’s collections along with the many beloved possessions of other Montanans around the state, is that they take a Canadian approach -- that is, emphasis on curation. I don’t mean just “how much is it worth” which is the focus of many people in our greed-based world, but WHY is it valuable, what does it mean, what can we learn from it? These are the values that made the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife so beloved.

The Blackfeet artifacts were never exhibited there so as not to compete with the Museum of the Plains Indian next door. You can buy a book that includes everything: “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains” if one turns up -- maybe on eBay or Abebooks or Alibris. Amazon sometimes. And you can buy my account of Bob’s life, “Bronze Inside and Out” which includes the story of the creation of the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife and how the pet bobcat napped in the horns of the mounted moose, which is NOT an accredited practice.

COMMENTS ON SCRIVER BRONZES IN THE MARCH IN MONTANA AUCTION, 2011

2011-03-16T12:33:00.000-06:00

WHAT FOLLOWS IS A LIST OF THE SCRIVER BRONZES INCLUDED IN THE CATALOG FOR THE MARCH IN MONTANA AUCTION IN GREAT FALLS, 2011, PLUS COMMENTS.

General comments: Bob Scriver’s sculpture can be grouped into periods. The earliest pieces (beginning in the Fifties) were in a smooth, detailed style. He generally worked on the scale of an inch to a foot. The animals from this time period were portraits of the game animals he shot to mount for the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife. I see none of them here. “Winter King” and “Herd Bull” often show up at auctions. This early period, up to and including the Sixties, includes many of his finest Blackfeet portraits because a series was projected with the cooperation of the Blackfeet Tribal Council. It never went through. “No More Buffalo” was made for this group.

He was often under pressure to be “looser” because it was thought to be more like Russell. The rodeo pieces, large and rough and the most celebrated, came out of the commission to make an heroic portrait of Bill Linderman for the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.

Late in life, Montana entrepreneurs would suggest subjects to Bob which they would buy with the rights to reproduce. These were generally small and often animals, meant to be collectible. They move through auctions constantly.

Much of the value of bronzes comes from tracing their provenance, which means who owned them from the time they were cast. This is a safeguard against illegal copies, which are always a danger when dealing with objects that can replicated with a mold. These bronzes are mostly from two estates. Scriver bronzes tend not to move around very much except for a few that were cast in large numbers later in his career. The bad side of this is that people don’t see the really fine ones. The Montana Historical Society has the entire estate but has not been able to develop it.

Paul Masa was a Kalispell art wheeler-dealer who commissioned Bob to make small sculptures intended for resale. High numbers of them were cast. (The most elite people limit to ten or twenty copies -- at least in theory.) They were not intended to be high end art. They were cast by using the ceramic shell method which is much more inexpensive but not quite so high quality as Roman block casting which is what Bob Scriver’s own Bighorn Foundry used.

Marquita Maytag was a world-class explorer and an important patron of Bob’s. She was a beautiful divorced redhead who traveled in and out of the reservation. She was at one time the US Ambassador to Nepal. Googling will give you interesting information. She was living in Sun Valley, ID. I’m sorry to realize she must be gone.

36. “To Ride a Bronc” 1 of 100, Masa estate.
This is a smaller version of the large spectacular event bronzes.

36. “Rodeo’s Classic Event” 28 of 100, Arrowhead Foundry, Maytag estate.
The same is true of this one.

38. “Price of a Scalp” Powell Foundry, Maytag estate
This sculpture was originally commissioned by George Montgomery but was released for sale because of his divorce from Dinah Shore.
59. Set of four game animals: “Down the Ridge,” “High Country Buck,” “On the Move,” “September Whitetail.” Masa estate
These are charming collectables.

59. (Paired with an Ace Powell bronze of a child) “Ranch Fillies” 32/55, Masa estate

59. Lot of three: “Steer #1 Special” 1974, “Colt” #12, “Enne Kaukee”, Masa estate
“Enne Kaukee” means Buffalo Woman in Blackfeet. She is meant to stand for the source and protection of life itself. (“aukee” added to the end of a word means woman. Enne is Buffalo.)

59. Pair of reclining animals: “Paul’s Bull” (Buffalo) 1/1000 and “Rex’s Ram” 1/100.
Paul is Paul Masa. Rex would be Rex Brenneman, who is recently deceased. Masa estate.

64. “Good Boy, Bart” (The Bear and Doug Seus) 1992, Arrowhead Foundry, Maytag estate.
This is a portrait for which Seus and his tame Kodiak bear posed. Bart became a big star because he made so many rousing adventure scenes possible.

81. “Spring Storm” 1976, 33/35, Maytag estate
Cowboy with a newborn calf in front of him on horseback.

88. “No More Buffalo” 1957, Maytag estate
This is a real coup for someone who’s paying attention. There are many knockoff illegal copies of this intensely popular bronze, but the provenance here proves that it is original, probably cast at the Bighorn Foundry (I think I remember helping to cast it.) and bound to hold and increase in value. See the small Proctor busts at the end of this post.

88. “Rangeland Kiss” (colt and mare) 24/35, Masa estate

88. “On the Trapline” 1977, Maytag estate
A trapper on snowshoes.

88. “Buddies” (two horses) 13/50, 1977

94. “Ace” 19/35 From Duane and Ivy Curtis in Bigfork, MT. Direct from the artist to them and then to this auction.
This is another piece that is often illegally copies, sometimes garishly patined. This provenance adds value.

97. “Self-Portrait” 1977, Maytag estate
Bob himself.

97. “Bust of CM Russell” 1966, Maytag estate
This is taken from an intermediate full-length portrait of CMR in which he stands with his thumbs in his sash. It was meant to be a better version than the portrait that Bob submitted to the contest for a statue in the Hall of Bronze in Washington, DC, but it was not the definitive statue that stands on the grounds of the CMRussell Museum.
98. “Captain Lewis & Our Dog Scannon” 18/150, 1976, Arrowhead Foundry
This was a subset of the cluster of sculpts that came out of the heroic Lewis & Clark and Sacajawea bronze in Fort Benton and then the similar statue that drops Sacajawea but adds York and the Newfoundland, both belonging to Clark. The dog’s name was thought at the time to be “Scannon,” but later was decided to be “Seaman.” You might want to spell it carefully.

135. “Prairie Buck,” 1957, Maytag estate
A woman writer showed up in the shop in 1957 and asked Bob to make a portrait of a pronghorn antelope to be photographed for the cover of her book. She never came back. This is the first of Scriver’s sculptures to be cast into bronze and always sold well.

135. “The Protector of the Vital Ground” (grizz family group) 27/150, 1993, Maytag estate “Vital Ground” is the name of Doug Seus’ project to save habitat for grizzlies.

154. THESE TWO BRONZES ARE BY PHIMISTER PROCTOR.
“Big Beaver”, 1917 #AP This is Eddie Big Beaver, who also posed for Bob Scriver’s “No More Buffalo.” There is entertaining material about him in Proctor’s autobiography, “Sculptor in Buckskin.” #AP means that the casting was the artist’s proof and therefore excused from being numbered. The notion comes more from print-making than bronze casting.
“Jackson Sundown” 1916 #AP

A COWBOY ART DREAM

2011-03-15T10:46:00.002-06:00

This morning I woke up early but unsure of the time. Some of the clocks are reset and some aren’t. It was pretty dark but I had heard the paper come, so I got up and read the section dedicated to the auctions in Great Falls at the end of the week. It’s all about new artists -- the old stalwarts swept away. Charlie Russell is there, of course, but no one is alive who knew him. Les Peters, who set up his studio for display after his death is dead himself now and never mentioned.

I went back to bed and dreamt about the Sixties when the auction commotion began. In those days a studio was often wood-heated and pretty rough. Charlie’s telephone pole cabin was mighty fancy by our standards. Our stuff was just “there” for reference or because the place might have been a back storage room in the first place. Ace Powell and Nancy McLaughlin, his wife, had a pretty nice studio with big windows in Hungry Horse, but that was because it was an old store and they ran a kind of trading post in the front while living in the back with their kids. That’s the one that burned down. Al Racine was in an old log cabin in St. Marys but you couldn’t live there in the winter: the wind whistled through it. John Clarke was in the bottom of his house in East Glacier because the top had burned out. He just walled off that part.

Nowadays artists’ studios are real layouts featured in magazines, but nowadays they make real money so they can afford spacious, furnished, properly decorated, architect-designed places. It’s the New West, a lifestyle based on money and fantasy. They have glossy bear rugs on the wall. We had real bears on the floor, waiting to be skinned. The first New West artist to show up was on the Flathead side of the mountains, naturally. It was Fred Fellows, who had been a city advertising art guy. He came over to Browning to buy some objects to arrange around here and there. He’s gone to the Southwest now.

Since I turned out to be a writer instead of an artist and since writers these days use computers and since you can’t have a computer in a cabin that goes from freezing to roasting with a wood stove throwing particulate into the air, my house is not nearly as cabin-like as I would prefer. Jack Smith, down the street at the Medicine River Gallery www.medicineriver.com/ is closer because, like Ace, he’s about as much a trader as an artist. But he’s online with a computer, so he has to use gas heat. He DOES keep it roaring and sits right next to it, so it’s a good place to sit to gab and warm up. Not that you’d get a word in edgewise with Jack, but there’s a lot of art and artifact to look at.

I don’t have bear rugs and Ralph Lauren Hudson’s Bay blankets and pole-made beds, etc. Nor do I have any Indian artifacts except for my Bundle-transfer dress and moccs, which I keep put away in case the Bundle is found and can be properly transferred again. They don’t look like much, which is often the way it is with the real stuff. What people like is parade regalia. A full set of white buckskin, beaded and painted, with ermine and falconry bells -- maybe some “scalps” -- sells for as much as a cowboy artist’s painting. I do smudge. And I do have a woodstove in the garage where there is a concrete floor. When there’s no wind and the weather is not too dry, I burn my windfall limbs and am happy.

So I went back to sleep and dreamt that a Jimmy-load of guys and their women had stopped by. I had a woodstove and a pot of cowboy coffee simmering and we all settled to spin yarns and whittle. Then the guys asked if they could take a bath and one-by-one they did. (I don’t have a bathtub anymore either -- well, I do, but it’s out in the backyard where I grow tomatoes in it.) It was like those obligatory scenes in old Westerns where the hero, modestly arranged in the soapsuds, smokes a cigar or a pipe and sticks his foot up to scrub it with a brush.

I wish I could remember what we said in the dream conversation. Some of it was olden days and a little of it was “Doomer” talk like that from Paul, who still lives with a wood stove and a spring out in the boonies. It’s just that he talks on the computer. We sorta have a suspicion that things are going to circle back to the basics here pretty soon.

Nassim Taleb has been talking about “fragility” (things that easily crash) versus “robustness” (things that are consolidated and stronger under adversity). It looks pretty clear to me and others that our infrastructure of all kinds is becoming increasingly complex and out of control. Do I have to say “Japan”? So are our political systems, which are rapidly converting into interlocking international corporations. The most fragile systems are monocultures, like our food crops. The assumption that may save the Doomers is that being prepared for the worst is never a mistake and the closer one stays to the basics, the better.

Of course, I consider art and friendship basics. What sticks with me from the dream, which wasn’t realistic but rather morphed among a number of places with an assortment of characters, was the atmosphere of inquiry and trust. You can’t buy it from Ralph Lauren. (I did once buy some Ralph Lauren sheets. Not sorry.) Neither can you buy it from an auction or find it in a studio with a hardwood floor and a high-end sound system where a nice guy paints nostalgic stuff. It’s not bad -- it’s just not the same thing. The same as the Old West, which was pretty hard on people and animals, is not the same as the New West, which is just pretty . . . and fragile.

HAS CHARLIE RUSSELL'S TIME COME AND GONE?

2011-03-14T11:35:00.000-06:00

http://fineart.ha.com/c/video.zx?src=2ndtuesday/Second_Tuesday_051110
Doodling around in search of information about the auctions in Great Falls this weekend, the ones that used to cluster around the annual auction celebrating the birthday of Charles Marion Russell, I stumbled across this video. It only mentions Russell at the beginning and is really focused on Texas rather than Montana, but it’s a VERY good job of tracing the development of the genre. The quality of the video is not the best and it doesn’t occur to the cameraman that we’re more interested in seeing the art work than looking at the speaker until partway into the lecture, but it’s worth using up some patience to struggle along. Here’s the formal description.

Lecture: Cattle Drives to Cadilacs: Visions of the West by Contemporary Artists
Lecture Date: Tue, May 11th, 2010
Speaker: Michael Duty
Speaker Bio: Michael Duty is a noted author that has spent three decades in the museum community in various Director capacities, including at the National Western Art Foundation in San Antonio, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Rockwell Museum in Corning, New York and the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indian and Western Art in Indianapolis. He is a co-founder of MuseumsWest consortium and a former Executive Director of the California Historical Society in San Francisco. Michael has organized more than 60 museum exhibitions, is a frequent lecturer, and has won multiple awards.

Evidently Heritage Auction Galleries handles just about every kind of valuable object except livestock. Given the times, this is not surprising as wealth is rearranged to better match fortunes. But other posts lead me to believe that Duty has left Heritage. This is not surprising either, since he is of retirement age and writes books, so it would be reasonable to move to a more free-lance sort of arrangement, maybe writing or visiting institutions for one-time curating jobs.

The CM Russell Museum in Great Falls is a member of the “MuseumsWest” consortium which Duty helped found. The entire list is: Amon Carter Museum, Autry National Center, Booth Western Art Museum, Buffalo Bill Historical Center, C.M. Russell, Museum, Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Gilcrease Museum, Joslyn Art Museum, national Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, National Mueum of Wildlife Art, Petrie Institute of Western American Art at Denver Art Museum, Rockwell Museum of Western Art, and the Stark Museum of Art. Duty is the founding director of the Eiteljorg Museum, which has quickly moved to the top rank of these institutions.

I have been frank -- indeed a bit rabid -- about what I call the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. Bob Scriver was coming to prominence just about the same time that the major institutions and most qualified directors were also developing in the Sixties. The Ad Club’s CMR Auction also formed about this time. Artists and markets sort of grew up together, not always watching carefully about which were public venues with nonprofit status and which were wildcat operations for personal profit. That is, this week’s road shuttler became next week’s gallery owner became the third week’s institutional director. Some of them were educated in a scholarly way (Duty clearly was) and others simply keyed off auction results, like the information on www.askart.com which runs a sort of “ticker tape” of results.

The result of this pattern was that it followed the money. The big free-standing museums were generally created by natural resource and engineering money, the state historical societies varied widely in holdings and expertise, and the line between cowboys and Indians was often split into two tracks.

There was also a major regional dynamic, so that the SW developed quite a long time before the northern plains where lesser wealth, sparse population, and long distances made life harder. The fact that Charlie Russell became such a “marker” artist was an anomaly, as was Frederick Remington, who was essentially an Easterner. Perhaps they stand out because of clever marketing, though they are both skillful and valuable artists and the times were right.

On the northern prairie in the Sixties, Dick Flood and Ace Powell were the voices of cowboy art. Flood was a definitive shuttler and gallery founder. Ace was more sophisticated because of a Russian wife who knew things. That was fifty years ago. They were operating by the seats of their pants, not through sophisticated knowledge about art. Some of the artists that Duty talks about in this lecture did not exist yet -- literally had not been born. As the genre has matured, it has acquired “middle-age spread” and now includes many paintings -- you’ll see them in this presentation -- that we would never have imagined, much less called “cowboy art.” (Mainly crossing into abstraction or landscape.) Cowboy Artists of America was an effort to define the category, maintain friendships among artists, and introduce value-based marketing -- a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Through the efforts of Dean Krakel in Oklahoma City and Harold McCracken in Cody, institutional holdings became more justified, curated, and carefully managed.

That’s where my complaints about the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel begin. Where there is carrion, there will be coyotes. I suspect that at first the “de-accessioning” -- that’s museum talk for disposing of art and objects -- was simply a matter of clearing the shelves of things that were clearly not worth saving. You won’t hear many museum people admit that. In the Sixties the director of the Montana Historical Society lost the line between his job and himself and simply gave away what he considered lesser art to friends and important people. He was caught and paid the price.

But the biggest de-accessioner is time. Especially in terms of “hard economic times.” So across the nation boards of directors have bowed to the idea that certain commercially valuable holdings are not “within the goal and mission of this organization.” When the “holding” is a giant Jackson Pollock mural worth millions (even though there are still people who consider it just dribbling), the story goes ballistic. Probably there have been smaller items quietly shifted out the back door everywhere.

A big “name” can protect some things. I doubt that the Charlie Russell mural in the Montana state legislature will be peeled off the wall and sold tomorrow. But given major aesthetic shifts and maybe politically correct rhetoric from Indians who don’t care for their depiction and never liked Lewis & Clark anyway . . . ideas could change. The most potent persuasion, of course, would be money. I wonder what the mural would look like in Dubai.

“Cowboy art” is most meaningful when connected to its roots, but the roots don’t go back more than a couple of centuries. Unless it is more than just subject matter, it might not last that long into the future. But Michael Duty can reassure you about that. He has a dry sense of humor, which is a necessity and a pleasure. At least for me.

SCRIVER BRONZE FOR SIX BUCKS !

2011-02-28T11:41:00.001-07:00

We’re getting close to Charlie Russell’s birthday, which used to be the date of the landmark Great Falls Ad Club Auction in Great Falls. Last year for the first time the main auction was not held, for various reasons, and success at the smaller ones was mixed, also for various reasons. Part of the change was due to the recession, but also the passage of time had a great deal of influence. It is getting so Charlie Russell is a senior citizen figure. When one looked at the big auction crowd, there were a lot of gray and even white heads.

The following “classifieds” are from www.askart.com which is a website that keeps track of American (a few Canadian) artists -- not just Western artists but more usually historical than contemporary. I’ve taken off the names of the people who posted these but you can find the names, conveniently linked to the person’s email, at http://www.askart.com.

In combination, auctions and this sort of website which monitors auctions, have come to act as adjuncts to galleries. If you want to know what things are selling for, this is the go-to website. If you want to know their VALUE, you won’t find much curation beyond the artist’s life stories and a list of books and magazines that consider him or her. That’s very helpful, but if you are wondering about how much something will sell for at the NEXT auction, much depends on who is there, the general economy, and other dynamics no one can control, like weather. The gambler dynamic is part of the game. You can use the site to locate an expert.

02/17/2011
found.... bob scriver sculpture " six point bull"
Hello,

Today at a thrift store in cda Idaho I found and purcheased what I am certain is an original Bob scriver bronze six point bull sculpture. It is engraved with his name and the date 1984 and 110/110. It asking says " six point bull". I paid $6 for it at St Vincent depaul. It is obviously bronze and original. I am wondering if this should be in a museum or a collection somewhere. I am not a collector and I would like it to be in the right place. Not looking for money just a good home if it is real which I am certain it is. Its about 12" tall and sits on a wood base. Very heavy..... thank you

02/14/2011
Scriver & Powell bronzes
I have several bronzes I need help pricing. Powell:Blood Man & Woman, On Alert, Sun Mt. Colt and Spring Foal.
Scriver: Iola's Otter, Paul's Bull and Sage Brush.
Any info will be helpful.

02/10/2011
Bob Scriver PAINTING
I have found a Bob Scriver Painting in my parents estate. It is signed and dated 1955. The picture is of a pronghorn antelope. There is a sticker on the back, "Bob Scriver Taxidermy and Art Studio. Western Sculpter of North America Big Game in Minature." with Phone number and address. There were other unsigned paintings of Pheasants & other birds. I don't think it's his style, but I don't think they were his. Just curious if anyone has other Scriber paintings? Thank You-Elsie Miller

01/19/2011
4 Bronzes by Scriver
I was blessed to receive as gifts 4 bronzes by Bob Scriver:

1. No 67 of 100 "1861 Mail (Pony Express)"
2. No. 84 of 110 "Six Point Bull" - a beautiful elk
3. No. 72 of 100 "In Season (Big Horn Ram)
4. No. 55 of 100 "Rex's Bull (buffalo)

These were the nicest gifts ever given to me and my family. Can someone give me an idea of their worth.
_____________

Trained by television shows that feature “experts” who tell people what their attic finds are worth, people know that they may have something that is more valuable than they think, and in this age of commodification are not backwards about pricing gifts. Particularly in the American West where Charlie Russell was famous for producing works that ended up stored someplace because inheritors thought that cowboy subjects indicated low-brow and low-value work, many alert aficionadoes have carefully worked their way through places like the St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store and a few have made major finds.

Some things are not likely to be desirable to a major gallery. Bob Scriver’s early paintings are likely to be valuable mostly to people who knew him. Some of them may be “learning copies” of work by more developed artists. With Russell there’s always the problem of Seltzer paintings looking just like Charlie’s to the untrained eye. With Scriver it was me who painted just like him sometimes because we went out to make sketches side-by-side and stole ideas from each other.

Here’s Bob at the St. Mary’s cabin with the day’s “take.” Mine is the smaller painting on the left. This was in the mid-Sixties.

When dealing with bronzes there are several different factors to consider which I have laid out in this blog and in my biography of Bob: “Bronze Inside and Out.” (Available on Amazon) The chief difficulty has been the failure of any dealer to promote his work or support his “mythology” in the way he did himself when he was alive. His estate is not even exhibited.

The second biggest problem is that a three-dimensional sculpture is vulnerable to technological advances that changed the dynamics of bronzes as much as electronic books have changed publishing. Suddenly bronzes were easy to copy, they were everywhere, an untrained eye couldn’t tell good from bad, and they were cheap to produce. The general public, esp. in a place like Montana where people know the subjects of the art but not the qualities or business of art, can only tell that a bronze is metal and doesn’t fuss around about how many were cast, what the casting flaws might be, the importance of provenance, and so on.

Subject matter counts for a lot, with cowboys and Indians in action poses being the most valuable for a long time. Things come in and out of “political” opinion so right now you’d probably have to be a certain kind of person to want a big rodeo bronze like “Paywindow,” which goes in and out of auctions for much less that I think it will eventually be worth. I think the casting going around is one we did in Browning and that I worked on. At the time it was considered very daring. It’s BIG and that makes a difference, too. In the era of big houses, which is just ending, this would be great. In a small apartment, not so much.

From the beginning Bob Scriver sold smaller pieces to local people. Towards the end he made many modestly-sized pieces to order for entrepreneurs who “published” them using their own foundries and galleries. These have less value than scarce sculptures that he cast earlier in his own Bighorn Foundry, using a traditional method. They were meant to be that way. Most Montana people who have them are not thinking in terms of investment as much as about the direct connection with the artist.

One does wonder how that bull elk got into the St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store. Someone died? An unappreciative spouse? Just a plain outright mistake? Keep an eye peeled!

BOB AND THE ROGUE ANTHROPOLOGISTS

2011-01-14T19:37:00.002-07:00

One of the useful characteristics of rogue anthropologists is their clandestine modes of operation, so this blog is violating a few unwritten rules. But that is the nature of blogs and probably the dynamic that makes some people afraid of them. They are not accountable to any funding or otherwise controlling agency like an institution or publisher. In a way, I’m joining the rogues. This will probably eliminate me from consideration by many of the small new publishers who are replacing the old tweed Manhattan and Boston publishers. They’re gone anyway. The new publishers tend to be “nice ladies,” some of whom pulled themselves out of real trouble by struggling through school where they learned respect for authorities. Rogues put them into a state of panic.

Anyway, the two rogues I’m going to discuss are about my age. John Hellson is a half-dozen years older than 71 and Adolph Hungry Wolf might be a little younger. Both of them showed up on the Blackfeet Rez in Montana in the Sixties, not long after I did, and both of them were drawn to Bob Scriver, who often acted as an interlocutor between the outside world and the rez where he was born. John, Adolph, Bob, and I are all white, which makes us politically incorrect from birth because of the post-colonial rule that only the indigenous can write about the indigenous. (Bob was the only one of us born on the rez.) It was a useful rule for breaking up the colonial practice of ransacking cultures under the guise of “salvage anthropology,” the idea that the cultures were disappearing so “scientists” were justified in collecting artifacts, stories, and ceremonies in order to preserve them. The rogues were not so scientific and not affiliated with any institutions, but maybe because of that they acquired huge amounts of “stuff.”

Both married Blood Blackfeet women (“Blood” the tribal subdivision) from excellent families so they had unique access that by-passed the usual taboos as well as the suffocating forces of both the reservation itself, which constantly tries to present itself as more virtuous, more deserving, more missionary-responsive than they might actually be -- as well as more pleasing to publishers, universities and museums. The problem was how to make a living. One way was Adolph’s method which was self-publishing. The Good Medicine books that he and his family produced are invaluable. He was especially alert to photographs, the old kind mounted on cardboard that are called “cabinet” photographs. They are meant to be held and “read” with long scrutiny. Finding some of these in a suitcase he bought at an auction, he carried them everywhere with him and whenever he found old-timers, he ask them to “read” and interpret for him. Then he put the information on the back. He is an educated man who values history. ALL his info is now available in four volumes he self-published, expecting shouts of joy and honor. Instead, he discovered that the world had changed radically in the last fifty years. http://goodmedicinefoundation.com/media/books1.html

The nineteenth century world of James Willard Schultz, George Bird Grinnell, and even John Ewers is no longer of much interest to young people. The gray-headed white people who used to obsess over all that horse-and-feather stuff is thinning out fast. Now the cutting edge of Blackfeet anthro research is academic indigenous people and those closely associated with them (like white profs married to Blackfeet: consider Rosalyn LaPier and Dave Beck at the U of Montana; or the people who cluster around Darrell Kipp and Jack Gladstone). With modern technology like GPS or molecular analysis, these people find ancient campsites, begin to sift through the archives of Hudson’s Bay or the Roman Catholic Church, translating the first earliest letters “home,” breaking through into a far more elegant and detailed account of earlier days even before the horse.

Repatriation, the law returning every artifact and skeleton to the tribe where it originated, created a huge opportunity for clandestine profit from artifacts in much the same way as Prohibition made alcohol worth criminal attention. This change did not affect Hungry Wolf so much as it did John Hellson, who had been surviving by brokering objects. The glorious beaded buckskin suits had intrinsic value of their own because they were beautiful. But there was a lot of stuff that was just floating around -- no one knew what it was or cared very much except the very old people who remembered what it meant, not least because they were keyed into a close sensory knowledge of the land and animals as it was before the fence and the plow. These two guys who “lived the life” picked up that often religious information. They were not cynical. They LOVED this culture. Adolph still lives in a log cabin with a creek for a water source. His computer is run by a solar panel. Otherwise, no electricity.

Evolution happens when one portion of the population is separated -- usually geographically -- and in that niche evolves in a different way. Then later it may reunite with the main body and make a contribution to the gene pool. The great NA political furor over who had enough proper provenance to study Indians has obliterated far more worthy issues. Anyway Indian tribal identity is NOT determined by genetics, but by provenance: who was your grandmother? It only goes back to first official white contact, though whites were in the West almost as soon as the continent was discovered -- think of Spaniards bringing the horse. Hellson or Hungry Wolf are almost directly European, not even in America long. John is from Cornwall, England. Adolph is from California but his folks are Austro-Hungarian.

All that is old news. The problem that is now presented is how to recognize and preserve the undisciplined work of these two rogues: Adolph orderly and in plain sight (mostly), the other dubious enough to land Hellson in prison. Out of the blue Hellson called me a day or so ago. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. He was weaving the same old sorcerer’s spell that captured Bob Scriver in the Sixties, unbroken until he stole some of Bob’s artifacts while he was supposed to be curating them. Today’s accredited and honorable researchers, in particular the indigenous ones, have nothing but scorn for the rogues. As far as they’re concerned, the work is contaminated, even toxic. And yet part of the advantage these adventurers had was that they were willing to explore the taboo, the sexual that had to be written about in Latin, the unsuspected and imperceptible to other white outsiders and some red insiders.

THE CMR AUCTION

2010-08-07T12:49:00.001-06:00

SATURDAY, AUGUST 07, 2010
THE CMR ART AUCTION
The CM Russell Art Auction is like an iceberg, to use an image that this summer is more welcome back East than here. But truly there is much behind the scenes on several different levels. I was there in the beginning and I’m here at the end, without any special privilege, but still I have a few things to point out.

The major worldwide art scene has changed radically. I work with print where there has been a huge furor over the fate of paper books, now being replaced by electronic books. This has only barely begun to reach the awareness of most people. Barnes & Noble or Oasis Books in Choteau look about the same, but they are not. The difference is that the BUSINESS MODEL of books is entirely disrupted by electronics and other forces. Layers of middlemen who operated by travel, phone and mail, searching for used books or hand-selling on-site for the wholesalers, are gone. Books have always been objects and therefore samples had to be schlepped around (they are heavy en masse). Readers bought from a shelf supplied by someone -- we don’t think about that. Even the used books had to be physically found and transported to the used book store, like the wonderful accumulation at Oasis, mostly first edition American and Western books. But now finding the books, selling the books, distributing the books can all be done online.

Paintings and sculptures -- even artifacts -- are no different. The advantage of the auction was that it brought a lot of objects together to be inspected and bought. The publicity was as valuable as the schmoozing among dealers, artists and customers. Now all that can be done online where, it’s far more discrete and private -- no need to invent secret signals to keep the curious from craning their necks. But then why have an auction?

For a while there was a furor over keeping the auction catalogues off websites because some artists copied the work of other artists, but then it became clear that people were buying direct from the catalogue. One can’t really see small factors, like the back of the painting, but it’s possible to inquire through someone. Several times I’ve been asked to take a look at a specific work as it hangs and report to someone far away. If the key effective gallery is an auction website, then there’s really no reason for a bricks and mortar building.

When the auction began 42 years ago, it was modeled on an earlier experiment (also powered by Van Kirke Nelson, the doctor who has used the capital from his ob-gyn practice to subsidize Glacier Gallery in Kalispell) in Spokane. That time around it was Wilfred P. Schoenberg, S.J. (deceased) who was trying to raise money for his Museum of Native American Culture, now dispersed. Father Schoenberg’s book, “Indians, Cowboys and Western Art: A History of MONAC,” intro by Van Kirke Nelson and Paul Masa, was published in 1981. The events begin in the mid-Sixties. It was a time when Indians were still understood to be a remnant conquered population, cowboys were noblemen on horseback, and artifacts were fair game for anyone to acquire.

Probably Indian Empowerment politics did more to disperse MONAC than any other single force, but also there was a fatal mixing of charity, mystique, tax breaks, and exploitation. Many artists were barely surviving or just starting out, so they could be easily pushed into donating something. Nelson and Masa already had a backlog of art in their warehouses that needed to be promoted and cleared out. The Ad Club -- embodied by Norma Ashby -- saw at once that the product was available, the peg of Charlie Russell was a potent one in the age of Ronald Reagan, and Great Falls was outside the orbits of the giants: Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Amon Carter Museum, Cowboy Hall of Fame and several others. Since that time there have been many shifts, some political and some in product. And there are many auctions and shows.

I have argued, in the face of screams of rage from some people, that the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel is essentially Republican. They were marketing on a triumphalist platform emotionally and in capitalist unregulated mode economically, An enlightened person can now see that the prairie clearances of the Native Americans was a genocide not unlike today’s Afghanistan, Iraq, or Somali, and that the artifacts, mythology and lore of the autochthonous peoples should profit those people more than their depictors.

In the capitalist context, some kept arguing that art was no different than the stock market, derivatives of Charlie Russell, while all the time cautioning people to buy what they dearly love because that’s what really counts. (And that masks failures to invest wisely.) A whole business context, partly websites like www.askart.com that act like stock market tickers for auctions and partly slick magazines that “curate” artists, has grown up around this idea. The public, uneducated about what makes art good and resistant to fancy analysis, simply judges art by how much its worth. But the value of art is located more in the sizzle than the steak. An art work is simply worth what it will sell for, regardless of whether it is a Picasso or not.

Montana is a place where there is very little art law and the nuances of numbering, limiting, deriving, etc. are not widely known. An object is treated like an object. So when Bob Scriver was sued for selling a customers’ numbered bronze to someone else next on the waiting list because when the bronze was sent COD, they didn’t have the cash money to accept it, the Montana courts sided with Bob. When the famous lawsuit over the Seltzer that seemed to be a Russell was awarded to Seltzer, that cooled the action. Now the big NA artifact sting in the SW also chills the scene.

In fact, the SW -- which is where what I called the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel first took root -- is now saturated with Cowboy art. The Indian art of the West (meaning art BY Indians, not about them) has taken a slightly different route and so has most of the wildlife art. Scarcity raises value; plenitude drops it. The Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel is now webbed among many major institutions, enough to support a class of curators and directors who have not dropped the on-going connections among profiteers and scholars, publishers and promoters.

What made Great Falls a valuable center was the authenticity of a population and place that was in many ways innocent. The forty-two years of its run was four times longer than the typical peak production period of an artist’s work, usually about ten years between his learning curve up and his aging curve down. In the beginning the Scriver Award could be given to people who actually knew Charlie Russell. Now it just goes to patrons and customers. One lady who customarily flew in on a Lear Jet with a group of wealthy Kentucky aficionadoes said that she had “seen everything of interest” that was local. She’s been out as far as Fort Benton and Choteau. Did I know of anything she might have missed? It was all getting a little tiresome. That tells the story.

BOB SCRIVER: The Trajectory of a Career

2010-08-02T10:05:00.000-06:00

MONDAY, AUGUST 02, 2010
BOB SCRIVER: The Trajectory of a Career
This post is preparation for a talk I will give at the Gear Jammers’ Convention in East Glacier on September 9. The Gear Jammers drove the famous red tour buses in Glacier Park and returned many summers, observing local development.

When Thad and Wessie Scriver’s two sons were adolescent in Browning, Montana -- white boys on the Blackfeet Reservation -- they were not all that different from each other. Both were excellent musicians, both were hunters, both were good students and both were full of beans. But Harold was the older boy and earmarked to join his father in the family business. Robert was the younger and would have to find some other career. The possible interests and talents included art, music and taxidermy.

No one took taxidermy very seriously and his mother was indignant at the very idea of art, which to her meant a ne’er-do-well life. But she liked the idea of music -- she herself had a little musical talent -- if only it would yield a living. When Robert’s music teacher in the Browning schools pointed out that Robert had major talent and volunteered to help the boy at Dickinson State Teachers’ College where the teacher was going for more training, she agreed. In fact, later when she Robert went on to the Vandercook School of Music on the south side of Chicago, she went along to interview Mr. Vandercook herself and was entirely charmed.

Harold had been sent to Kinman Business College in Spokane, where he did fine, though he would really rather have been a rancher. Each young man embarked on his career well aware that they were meant to stay in Browning with their parents. Then came World War II and it was no longer a matter of choice in their minds: they both enlisted. Robert was already married with a daughter, teaching in Browning and then in Malta. Harold married when he was home on leave.

When the intake questionnaire was filled out, Harold had answered honestly that he was a skilled big game hunter and a crack shot. He was assigned to Patton’s forces in North Africa and refused to ever discuss it. Afterwards he returned to a quiet life managing the Browning Mercantile. Eventually he bought a small ranch on the edge of town. He ran the store alongside his father until his father’s death, then until his own death.

When Robert joined the military, Harold made him promise to answer every question with “musician.” Robert’s marriage fell apart during the war. Stationed in Edmonton, he had been assigned to the Alaskan Division of the Army Air Force Band in which he was the first chair cornet. When possible Robert, now “Bob,” played in clubs and gave private lessons. He also began to look into such projects as mink ranches and fur buying. He married a French-Canadian girl, Jeanette, in an effort to get at least partial custody of his children. Jeanette claimed that if Edmonton had been big enough to support a symphony orchestra, Bob would have stayed there. In the end he returned to Browning and resumed teaching, but it didn’t work. He began to think seriously about what sort of business he could create.

Right after WWII the national parks began to attract much attention, partly as a matter of patriotic pride and partly because the newly reunited families finally had access to tires and gasoline. It was the age of the “woody” stationwagon and the family camping vacation. Eisenhower was creating the major highway system that would unite the nation and that included the Al-Can Highway -- the ambitious route from the US to Alaska across Canada. Browning and Glacier Park were on that route through Alberta, which meant much traffic, both tourists and hunters.

Bob and Ace Powell, co-conspirators, began to think about how to produce tourist items. Ace had some training in forming plastic but it would be too expensive, so they turned to a kind of plaster as hard as ceramics. Bob went back to Vandercook for his Master’s Degree in music, just in case the idea didn’t work. Scouting the industrial south side of Chicago, he found Koroseal, a new kind of flexible material for molds, and p300, a latex mixture that could create unbreakable antlers for small game figures. These “secrets” gave him an advantage.

The experiment was launched in an old service station and seemed to work well enough to justify investment in two lots on the highway across the boundary street from the Museum of the Plains Indian; an ancient warehouse belonging to J.H. Sherburne (originally built by an earlier Indian trader), a collection of basic tools like crowbars and nail pullers, and an old red truck. Bob and his crew, mostly former students, took apart the warehouse, hauled the lumber to the lots, straightened the nails, and put together the first part of the complex that would become the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife.

In 1952 the first floor included a little sales shop, an alcove where a giant grizzly reared, and a workshop. Upstairs was storage for plaster castings and a paint booth for lacquering them with an airbrush. In the basement was a pole rack for scraping the fat off bear hides and an ancient wine vat where hides soaked all winter in mild acid to tan them. Taxidermy and small plaster casting went along together, completing each other. On a selling trip one fall Bob and Jeanette received so many orders for the little figures that they had to add staff and spend the winter working hard to cast, trim and paint them.

In 1958 the second section built was the major hall of the museum where the goal was to present an excellent example of each of the major trophy species of Montana, plus a collection of birds and small mammals. Because they needed a big high space with no columns supporting it, Jimmy Fisher suggested the rafters be designed like bridge supports. The plan was to include lectures on animal anatomy and maybe wildlife movies. By 1960 the third section to the west was two rooms, one a gallery for Bob’s sculpture and guest painters, and the other for miniature dioramas of the game animals. This last was finished in 1962.

After that came work spaces: an unheated shed for saws and plaster storage and the first version of the foundry, which was the old coal shed from the Browning Merc, expanded on the north end with a cement block space for baking molds and melting bronze. Bob’s own house, the first he had owned, was also built in the backyard, which was so crowded by this time that he considered just roofing the whole thing over.

Instead, across the highway at that time was a motel and cafe, and he bought land behind it. By 1966 this became a corral with the moved-in addition of the old stable that had sheltered the Browning Merc delivery wagon and faithful horse, Old Rock. In time he bought the motel/cafe and moved it out to his ranch west of town. When the owner of the concrete tipi threatened to demolish it, he bought it and moved it across the street from the museum, where eventually the Circle K was built. In 1988 he gave the concrete tipi to the Town of Browning and it was moved back to its original location. One might call it the creeping tipi.

By then the bronze business was major. Bob bought out his neighbor to the east and added a steel building to house a two-story gallery. Upstairs presented an example of each of his works and downstairs was an elegant setting for his portraits of Blackfeet. To the north, out back, the foundry was rebuilt, a far more ambitious and spacious industrial factory capable of casting heroic-sized bronzes. He rehung the massive skulls that gave the foundry its name: the Bighorn Foundry. When he bought a ranch west of town, called the Flatiron Ranch, the outbuildings were soon filled with molds for full-mounted animals, old farm and ranch equipment, a spring wagon, a sleigh, and a restored buggy.

By the time Bob Scriver died in January, 1999, the value of his estate was in the multi-millions. It was dispersed quickly, awkwardly and inexpertly. His sculpture molds were destroyed as he had requested and evidently the taxidermy molds were unrecognized and dumped as junk. I don’t know what happened to the original plasters. Eloise Cobell, with her usual resourcefulness, managed to preserve local ownership of the Flatiron Ranch by arranging cooperation between the Nature Conservancy and the Blackfeet Land Trust. The museum complex was sold to the Blackfeet Tribe and became the Blackfeet Heritage Center. The bronze portraits of Blackfeet went to the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton. The rest of the estate went to the Montana Historical Society where it is stored in a warehouse next to the Fish and Game complex by the airport. All the full-mounts went to the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation which already has a huge collection of such figures. The paintings, whether by Russell, Remington, Rungius or Fery, were dispersed in two auctions, one in a major Coeur d’Alene Galleries Auction held in Reno and the other in a near-private auction in Kalispell.

A great deal of Blackfeet artifact material remained even after Bob sold the Scriver collection to the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton. Much of it was intercepted and impounded at the Canadian border on one pretext or another. Some of it was stored at the Montana Historical Society alongside impounded materials from other people. Anything more than that is undisclosed. Whether all or part of it was “repatriated,” in the sense that it was given to enrolled Blackfeet members, is not known. Scriver’s personal Thunder Pipe Bundle which was never sold in his lifetime, disappeared. The judge who presided over his probate hearings lost the next election and left.

Rumors continue to circulate that millions are missing. Bob’s fourth wife’s lawyers hint that the money went to her brothers when she died in 2003, but that’s unconfirmed. Since they live in Vancouver, B.C. and are quite wary, it’s hard to investigate. There is a small “Scriver Family Trust” with a lawyer in Helena that grants an annual modest bursary to art students at Carroll College. Each of Bob’s grandchildren received $10,000, as did Bill Byrne, the student who helped demolish that original old warehouse.

After Harold’s death, the Browning Mercantile was owned and run by his daughter, Laurel, who eventually sold it. Not long afterwards it burned to the ground. The land was sold to the United States Postal Service which built a big new Post Office there. The house where Harold and Robert grew up is now the Eagle Calf Medical Supplies business managed by Leland Ground. Right next door is Cuts Wood Nitzipuwasin Real-Speak Immersion Blackfeet School. And so it is that times change. Between 1951 when Bob was 37 and 1999 when he died at 85, he created thousands of sculptures, some of them classics, mostly in storage -- unseen.

BOB SCRIVER IS ON FACEBOOK

2010-07-01T15:04:00.002-06:00

Bob has been gone almost a decade now, but I notice that's no barrier to being on Facebook! So I'm posting my hoard of photos there -- not the sculptures but just the snapshots and so on. Not everyone will be interested, but in case you are, it's there. It's interactive, so you can add messages or photos yourself.

I was in the CM Russell Museum in Great Falls and informed by one of the clerks in the gift shop that Bob Scriver has "nothing" to do with the museum, which is only about Charlie Russell. Okay. We'll compensate. Maybe they'll "get over it."

Prairie Mary

THE ART OF THE CALGARY STAMPEDE

2010-06-17T20:50:00.002-06:00

“The Art of the Calgary Stampede” is the catalog accompanying a show curated by Brian Rusted at the Nickle Arts Museum in Calgary. It’s not just that I so appreciated the lunch Brian hosted for myself and the U of Calgary Press staff at a VERY fancy restaurant after I gave a talk about “Bronze Inside and Out,” my bio of Bob Scriver. (I felt as though I’d wandered into a scene from “Sex and the City.”) It’s not just that he continues to understand what I say about Western art and, more importantly, WHY. It’s not just that he carefully reads Brian Dippie’s work, which I consider the most penetrating commentary on Western art, “even though” Professor Dippie is Canadian. In fact, maybe a main feature of my appreciation for Brian Rusted is that he IS Canadian! The American Western art melee is, well, shall we say “undignified?”

Things just happen in the world, sometimes for no obvious reason, and then in hindsight show a clear pattern. Thus, the Calgary Stampede has been a precipitating crystal that has gathered an audience interested in Western art, and therefore potential customers. California’s Ed Borein (1872 - 1945) became the trademark artist for the event which used a sinuous image of a saddle bronc rider atop a sunfishing horse, variously called “Scratchin’ High” (a reference to spurring, which is meant to be high and vigorous), “I-see-u” (is that a poker reference?) or “Stay Above Him, Old Hand.” The iconic image exists in several media, including a bronze called “Bronc Twister” by Rich Roenisch, an Alberta sculptor. (Roenisch is listed in the invaluable reference website called AskArt, but needs to have a bio added as do several other Canadian artists mentioned here.)

In my mind, which is centered on the Sixties, Charlie Beil (1894 - 1976) is the definitive Stampede artist because for many years he provided the trophies for events. Brusque and busy, Beil tried to escape mentoring other artists, but if someone captured his attention by doing good work, he immediately set to work as a mentor. Charlie Russell had done for him as he in turn did for both Bob Scriver (1914- 1999), whose best and early recognition was in Calgary where his rodeo series found a home at the airport, and later Jay Contway, also a Montana figure who provided trophies. These artists were participants in the Western life, not just studio artists. Scriver had known Beil when the former was a child and the latter was an itinerant cowboy in East Glacier Park, paid to meet the Great Northern train whooping and shooting. But Beil also taught both men to be dependable businessmen. Jay Contway has for years sponsored a significant art show, “Friends of Jay Contway,” in Great Falls as one of the cluster of art auctions around Charlie Russell’s birthday in March. (In the Sixties I taught school on the Blackfeet Reservation while Contway did the same; he is about my age.)

Rusted notes that the early exhibitions associated with the Calgary Stampede were framed as education entwined with competition and commerce. Exhibits of high school student work featured scholarships as prizes. Trying to separate art as being so elite and ethereal that it needn’t consider monetary success is useless when dealing with Western art. There is always a ranch that needs to be saved and, like bronc riding, selling art is one way to do it.

However, as time passed and the more “poetic” and aesthetic artists appealed to the growing sophistication of Calgary folks, there was a drift away from cowboy artists and subjects. Luckily, the new artists included Gissing (1895 - 1967 -- an impressionist landscape artist of enormous charm), Rungius (1869 - 1959 -- a painter of game animals and a good friend of the Beils, who looked out for him in Banff), and Grandmaison (1892 - 1978 -- a fine portraitist of Native Americans). Today the artists related to the Calgary Stampede include people who weren’t born yet in the Sixties, so I hardly know them. As is a continental phenomenon, the Native Americans, like Annora Brown (1899 - 1987) or Dale Auger (1958 - ) supply the abstract paintings, while the “cowboys” stick to the figurative. In the Thirties the rising popularity and increasing skill of photography drew it into the category of art.

Rusted says that he resisted accounting for the Stampede art in terms of a narrative line of names and dates, partly because it implies an unjustified story of steady development in a single way when it was actually the result of interacting forces, sometimes local and sometimes continental. The goal of developing local pride and identity has always grappled with continental forces of popular culture and economies. Alberta is a wealthy province in which the aboriginal population has considerable political clout, which is a unique situation. And yet the high-and-dry geography that Wallace Stegner felt defined the West extends from far north to far south, even into Mexico. Stegner himself lived on both sides of the Canada/USA border.

As centered on individual achievement in the context of a defined place as both art and rodeo must be, they are an important source of humanistic interpretation to account for how such phenomena arise and what they might mean. In the case of celebrations of the West, there has been an abiding historical consciousness, awareness that the frontier was already disappearing in 1900 -- Time’s arrow slaying a way of life that could not persist. Both rodeo and art, in spite of all the accumulated accouterments of modernity (e.g. light shows and rock music to introduce bull-riders or online bidding wars for auctioned masterpieces).

The general and global art market still anchored in Paris and Manhattan do not quite realize the existence and potential of Western art in spite of its explosive development in the American Southwest. Brian Rusted’s advantage is access to a relatively unrifled trove of materials in a place not so pressured and corrupted by the drive to “get rich.” And yet there is an abundance of evidence magnetized by the Calgary Stampede, well worth organizing. Rusted has expressed some optimism that the show at the Nickle Arts Museum, Libraries and Cultural Resources, at the University of Calgary might be expanded both as gallery exhibit and as manuscript. I sure hope so.

GAY COWBOY ARTISTS

2010-05-10T09:21:00.000-06:00

Monday, May 10, 2010
GAY COWBOY ARTISTS
The sexuality of Western artists. Well, that got your attention, didn’t it? Actually I was thinking about Deleuzeguattarian thought, specifically the concept of “lines of flight” which is a way of finding the pre-existing fractures and layers in hierarchical systems and using them to escape to a more free, just and beautiful world.

First we’d better settle the gender issue. Yes, cowboy artists can be female and, yes, they can be sexual and, yes, they can be same-sex lovers and, yes, they can be promiscuous or opportunistic or you-label-it. At this moment some people will be shaking with terror that I might name names. I’m thinking about it. But the females can be dismissed because NOBODY CARES. Unless we’re talking Emily Carr or Georgia O’Keefe, both of whom minded their own business. Most of the time. People have their weak moments. The other factor is that as soon as a woman artist shows signs of sexuality -- conventional or not -- she is likely to be re-assigned OUT of the cowboy artist remuda.

So now the guys. “Brokeback Mountain” has not reached the Western atelier and gallery and Annie Proulx has left the West. Still, after fifty years hanging around the corrals and chutes, I’ve picked up a few observations. And so have others. I note this paragaph from an article in “Big Sky Journal” Summer 2003 by Scott McMillion writing about Floyd DeWitt, a tough, reclusive, visionary sculptor (married with daughter).

“A rodeo bull obviously qualifies as Western art, as does some of his other work. But Floyd likes to pop bubbles. Witness the piece that he calls “PRCA (Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association) Cowboy, but one I always think of as the gay caballero. This is a dude [sic] so fey you can almost hear his affected lisp. Floyd says he’s a monument to the rednecks and wastrels who gave him bum advice back in Wolf Point, who told him to quit school and go bust horses.”

So DeWitt is not being friendly, and he has squarehead misconceptions about gays, but at least he knows the category exists. Being gay is defined in Montana small towns as being weak, a loser. Therefore, even the kind of big masculine hairy males that are called “bears” in certain San Francisco circles would find it bad strategy to be defined as “gay” if they lived here. Being invisible is worse than being stigmatized and DeWitt knows it, having spent a few invisible years.

Now I have to stop to say that I’m in a position (ahem -- “was”, actually) to testify that Bob Scriver desired women -- lots of them. Whether he related to men in that way is outside any knowledge I have, except that I recognized quite a few floater men who showed up and stayed around for a while because they were clearly attracted to Bob. (They liked bears.) They ignored me. One worked in the shop for a few weeks. One was a photographer who slept on our sofa and told us all about his mother. More than a few were traders with art works in the trunks of their cars. There was a pedophile author who hung around for a while, but he only wanted to use our phone. If we’d understood his predilections, he would have left in an ambulance. And then there were lawyers. One or more were very fine artists. If you cruise the dealer rooms during the March Great Falls auctions, you’ll be able to find some, often men of dignity and perception. Sometimes not.

It’s tough to live with an artist, whatever the orientation of their desire, and often it is only rich or charismatic artists who attract lovers in any committed way. But I would suggest that there is a portion of the infrastructure of Western Art that is definitively gay in a way of its own: aesthetically, commercially, and as a point of focus in a floating world, especially in this era of auction-based art rendezvousing involving hotels. “Nomadism,” would the Deleuzeguattarian theorists say. For some it is the chance encounters, the planned-but-brief reunions, and the uncertain future that is the essence of relationship. But for others it is the secret knowledge, the coded signals, the sense of being the ones who know, that is the reward and this melds very well with being an art dealer. Hotbeds for wheeling and dealing. They often strike up arrangements with stylish or motherly women, rather like Parisian couturiers with their muses. Someone to hold the fort.

Secret bonds created in one context can affect another, the way an unseen rock in a stream creates patterns in the water. Funding, exhibits, contacts, agents, patrons, written comment and galleries affect the lives (which means the works) of artists of all kinds. It was as true for Leonardo, Michelangelo and Caravaggio as it is today.

“Nomadism” is a source and result of what Deleuzeguattari call “lines of flight,” points of entry for new ideas that break up old orders. It has been proposed that Jesus made a long trip to India and brought back some of his revolutionary ideas (like compassion) to a relentless Roman Empire. Less controversially, Marco Polo was the bee who pollenated east with west and vice versa. We have all been startled by the migration of fine Chinese artists into the Western art scene, partly mediated by their portraits of the still pre-industrial people of western China, Mongolia. Before that it was the migration of the slick magazine short story illustrators out of Connecticut to fine art easel studios in Texas or Arizona. They brought rich technique to hackneyed subjects.

It may be time to open up Western art by introducing -- or rather, revealing -- the gay infrastructure and connections. I’m NOT talking about images of cowboys making love. I AM talking about a new sensibility, a new awareness. a new place for everyone. The life of the single traveling man can be very lonely, but it can also be rich with insight. We have too many repetitions of work that has already been done, not enough discussion of the true nature of people sharing a vast windswept, arid region of the planet full of endangered wild species and transplanted domestic animals. We seem unable to leave the 19th century.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE AT THE CMR

2010-05-06T16:43:00.001-06:00

One of the intriguing and problematic features of the water developments in Montana is the diversion canal and siphon that changes the destination of the Milk River, which arises pretty much in Glacier Park, from going north into Alberta and makes it travel along on the south side of the Canada/Montana border. This water has made it possible for a line of small towns to develop in country otherwise too arid for farming. It’s so old that it’s deteriorating and the small towns must either shutter themselves or find a way to repair it.

A mini-version of this has developed at one point along the piped water-course, a leak has developed that has now been exploited by plants and animals until it has formed a small and pleasant ecology, the way any natural spring would. If the pipe is repaired, that little community will be destroyed. But this is just a parable.

Auctions bring in people with money. Around here we know that water is the same as money. An ecology of art auctions has sprung up in Great Falls around the annual celebratory auction on Charlie Russell’s birthday in mid-March. In the early Sixties Van Kirke Nelson had tried to establish such an auction in Spokane through Father Schoenberg’s work to establish “MONAC,” the Museum of Native American Culture in Spokane. (See “Indians, Cowboys and Western Art: A History of MONAC” privately printed by Wilfred P. Schoenberg, S.J., 1981.) For whatever reasons, the auction collapsed, so did MONAC and, tragically, Father Schoenberg.

Beginning as a benefit for the small museum of minor Russell works the artist’s librarian friend had collected, after forty years of successful auctions the C.M. Russell Museum has grown to a city block of grounds that includes the Russell home, Charlie’s log studio, and a massive structure. Not only that, the original local gala event in the Rainbow Hotel, now a retirement home, burgeoned into a whole complex of vaguely related auctions and shows: the Indians are back with their own event, the accoutrement people show guns and so on, the women artists have a show, the local artists show together, and two major galleries clean out their back rooms with an unjuried auction ("March in Montana") that includes on-line bidding, as does the Russell Auction. The pipeline was gushing. Rich people flew in from back East. They say during that week there is a whole row of Lear Jets up at the airport.

But other dynamics took hold. The board of the CMR museum had been local people with a few wheeler-dealers protecting their interests. Now the bigtime national high-rollers came in. The board was split into two boards: one the money people who were endowing the museum and the other the local people who felt invested, including Bob Scriver -- sworn enemy of Nelson. Across the country millionaire collectors were endowing a network of fine museums featuring Western art. The biggest is still the Buffalo Bill Historical Center which consolidated different interests into one complex, earning it the nickname “The Smithsonian of the West.” Even in Great Falls, a town of less than 100,000, there are multiple museums: one for Lewis and Clark, one for modern art work, one for local history, one for children, and that’s not even counting the small cowboy museum. The fact that the CMR building was so grand meant that maintaining it was expensive and more high-powered staff was vital. The need to stage major shows thinned the always permeable membrane between profit-making galleries and more protective museums.

One of the most energetic developments in terms of the annual auction, which the museum came to see as an entitlement they could count on, was due to the structure offered by the auction events happening in a motel, convention-style. Motel management was inspired to offer the motel rooms as individual galleries, removing all the furniture to huge vans in the parking lots. It took heroic effort, but the result was a kind of artists’ rendezvous at which a person could go through the halls surveying the year’s innovations and developments among the art community, meeting and greeting old friends, and making new contacts. Artists began to come a distance, some of them with works so monumental they had to remain on trailers in the parking lot. It was great stuff and the whole community was aware if not involved.

Last year proceeds of the Ad Club Auction sank from the high of $421,280 a few years ago to $120,829. Most people blamed the depression. Others looked around the seminars with their dwindling and white-haired audiences and noted that the Ad Club is a young person’s game. Others said that Western art had become too much of a muchness, something like Scottsdale where cowboy art spills out of gallery after gallery. Where was the new insight? What did this have to do with contemporary life? Maybe Charlie had been done to death.

The consequence was splitting the Auction in half -- or doubling it -- depending on how you look at it. Now it appears that the CMR Museum version has netted $605,473. The Ad Club is not saying much except that they did all right. They have not said where the profits will be sent. Some snakebit unidentified persons suggested that if the CMR Museum had put in as much effort on behalf of the Ad Club in previous years, the original Auction might not have struggled.

But the real damage was suffered by the artists in their individual room/galleries. Though it was nice to have elbow-room and a slightly less feverish atmosphere, some artists found auction bids were low and they made fewer sales independently. Customer traffic was scattered all over town instead of concentrated in one spot. I don’t know how many Lear Jets brought in big bankrolls or how many bids were Internet. I’m not sure anyone could or should try to figure out the total of what individual artists made, though everyone is quick to publicize high amounts achieved by individual painters. It’s the possibility of “winning the lottery” that brings in the tickets.

The whole complex is an ecology, one small thing enmeshed with another to amount to something big. The public mostly sees a surface, not the global forces at work, which are as important to the auction complex as the annual snowpack in the Rockies is to the High Line water supply.

"BRONZE INSIDE AND OUT:" Review by Tom Nygard

2010-05-06T16:39:00.000-06:00

Thursday, May 06, 2010
"BRONZE INSIDE AND OUT": A REVIEW
My publisher at the U of Calgary Press surprised me with the news that a review of “Bronze Inside and Out” had been published by “Montana, the Magazine of Western Literature” in the Spring Issue. I was very pleased to see that it was written by Thomas Nygard, of Nygard Gallery in Bozeman, Montana, probably the best if not the only truly educated gallery owner in the state, at least when it comes to representational art of the West. I’ve been visiting it since my circuit-riding days took me to Bozeman every other week in the Eighties. We’ve both “morphed” a little over the years, but not unrecognizably.

Nygard shows his perception by taking a sword to the memoir/biography controversy. He simply calls “Bronze Inside and Out,” an expose´ which is accurate. It’s always rewarding when someone “catches your drift.” So I called him up and we had a good talk. I discover he’s on the boards of BOTH the Montana Historical Society and the CM Russell Museum. What I like most about the internet is that the ends of the tentacles reach out and reach out until they touch someone else’s tentativities and suddenly a new set of ideas come into focus.

The problem with representational Western art (okay, ONE of the problems) is that the only way to know what goes on is to have a window behind the scenes. Art is presentation as much as creation -- and I include writing. The most difficult thing in writing or running a gallery is to see work with new eyes, as it really is or has never been seen before, which might be the same. The enormous impact of the Chinese academy-trained artists like Mian Situ has been due to this: the loveliness of their technique framing the brutality of the treatment of the Chinese immigrants of the 19th century. They are expose´s.

Somehow the middlebrow, middleclass consumers of art (often conservative) have claimed Western art and made it a triumphalist scene suitable for hanging over fireplaces in dining rooms. Predictably, sentimentality has diluted, sweetened, and paled what was gut-wrenching, hard core and often fatal. Since the institutions have become invested in this way of thinking, because there is always money in the reassuring Disney and Hallmark approaches to life, they have not thrown their potential searchlights on reality.

Film-making and some kinds of publishing HAVE gone for the nitty-gritty, the reality, the tough-minded. I suspect now that no one has to push back against Bush and Cheney and now that we’ve all been chilled by terrorism, there will be more resistance to the harsh, the taboo, and the violent for fear of provoking more violence. But Bob Scriver’s sculpture was rarely violent, not even in the way that the Animaliers were so fond of predator/prey deadly wrestling matches made into beautiful masses. Bob’s best work, except for the bucking rodeo events which were balletically violent, tended to be moments of poise, balance and reflection. “Lone Cowboy,” “Transition,” “No More Buffalo.” Sad, yes. Even grieving, like his “Pieta.” The violent pieces were almost universally commissioned by someone else. (“Price of a Scalp” was commissioned by George Montgomery.)

I do not think this was because Bob was a peaceful man. In fact, he seethed with rage and was often violent, esp in his early years. It was frustration, determination to drive on through to goals . . . I do not blame him. Art was his refuge and restoration. I think Tom Nygard “gets it.”

______________

Mary Strachan Scriver’s “Bronze Inside and Out” is a focused and thoughtful appraisal of the life of the sculptor Robert MacFie Scriver. Up until his death in 1999, Bob Scriver was a mainstay of the western art world as well as the on-again-off-again pride of Browning, Montana. His legacy is preserved there and at the Montana Historical Society where his lifework is housed. It is also preserved in the pages of Mary Strachan Scriver’s expose´ on the life of her ex-husband. Married to Bob Scriver almost exactly four years, she spent a decade or more in his company. Her firsthand account of his life offers a unique view of this Montana treasure through the eyes of someone who knew him intimately and obviously loved and admired him.

“Bronze Inside and Out” relates profound and heartfelt and humorous remembrances alike. For example, the author tells how one day, “Dick Flood came in with a Russell bear he had bought. ‘This is the most fabulous bear ever made,’ he said. ‘Just look at how wonderful it is. NO ONE else could make a bear as good as this one.’ and he looked at Bob significantly. That was at lunch. Flood took his bear and went off to make his salesman’s round. Bob, aggravated by Flood’s tone (as was probably intended) grabbed some plastilene and began to model. In a short time he had a bear exactly like the Russell bear. At supper he flaunted it in front of Dick. ‘NO ONE, huh? How do you like this bear?’

“Flood liked it. ‘How much?’

“Bob took the bear out of Flood’s hands and began to twist it. ‘Russell wasn’t so very damn terrific! The nose is too big, the gait is wrong . . .’ He made corrections to suit his own notion, while Flood blanched and could hardly keep from grabbing at it to prevent the changes. ‘Now THIS is a good bear!’

“’How much?’

“‘I won’t sell it to you.’ Bob enjoyed teasing such operators as much as Picasso did by drawing in the wet sand when the tide was coming in or drawing in the dust on dealers’ cars when he knew the drive back to town would destroy the picture.” (p. 112)

“Bronze Inside and Out” is warm and often enchanting. It conveys a sense of life and times of this bronze artist that other writers looking in from the outside simply cannot capture. It is full of the kind of western lore that is routinely overlooked in today’s ever faster-paced society and contains detailed passages that provide a portrait of a mid-twentieth-century art world. Mary Scriver’s insightful portrayal of Bob’s work is, for the art historian and student of Montana history, an accounting that demands reading.

Tom Nygard
Bozeman, Montana

SCRIVER BRONZES IN MARCH AUCTIONS

2010-03-10T09:14:00.002-07:00

Saturday, March 06, 2010
SCRIVER BRONZES IN THE "MONTANA IN MARCH" AUCTION

Manitou Galleries and Coeur d’Alene Art Auction (info@cdaartauction.com)
Catalog at www.MarchInMontana.com

This is a commercial gallery auction that does not give money to any charity, including the CM Russell Museum. However, the owners of these galleries overlap with important people at the CM Russell Museum. The present director of the museum was previously the owner of a private gallery.

2010

#128 “Friend or Foe” 11 of 50, 14”x6.5”x5,” est. $1,200-1,500
On the prairie there were considerable protocols for deciding how to react to strangers. For instance, if a tribe from out of the region wanted to hunt buffalo on Blackfeet territory, they would send a person to sit within sight but some distance away from the village. An envoy would come from the village to guide that person down to the head people for a parlay. If the leaders were feeling liberal and there were lots of buffalo or they knew the outside tribe was hungry, they would give permission. If the messenger hit them when they were sore from outsiders killing them or starving themselves, the messenger might be lucky to take his message back to his people.

#130 “Charlie” (bust) (1973) 4 of ?, 5”x6”x4,” est. $500 - 900
This would have been cut from the second or third standing figure of Charlie Russell that Bob did.

#152 “Red Fox” 182 of 250, 4.5”x4.5”x4,” est. $200 - 400
We often had pet foxes in the household but they always ran away as soon as they were mature, intent on starting their own families.

#153 “Steer” (1974) 181 of 250, 3.5”x7”x4,” est. $200 - 400
Especially in the summer Bob always tried to keep on hand small bronzes within the means of admirers without major resources. Some of the earliest figures he ever made were lying down livestock, because it’s hard to make legs and they are fragile.

#188 “Running Caribou” (AKA “Winter King”) (1956) 24”x23”x6.5,” est. $3,000 - 4,000
This was a maquette from the transition period between taxidermy and sculpture when Bob was collecting one of each major game animal in Montana. The caribou, which were up by Yaak, withdrew north because of climate change, so he never did manage to get one.

#189 “Captain Lewis and Our Dog Scannon” (Dog’s name later corrected to Seaman.)
3 of 150, Arrowhead Foundry cast, 10”x12”x11, $2500 - 3500
This would be part of a small set of bronzes that came out of the big Lewis & Clark monuments in Fort Benton and Great Falls. Lewis had truly lousy handwriting, almost as bad as his spelling, so the dog’s name was in question for a while.

#378 “Trophy Rams” (1960) #4, Big Horn Foundry cast, 20”x16”x13,” est. $3,000 - 5,000
Again, this is from the overlap between taxidermy and bronze. It was meant to be educational for hunters. The legality of shoting bighorns is determined by the amount of horn they are carrying. The bottom ram is legal. The middle ram is nice. The top ram is truly a trophy, majestically full-curl.

#503 “The Winchester Rider” (1979), Big Horn Foundry cast, 150/250, 18”x21”x11, est. $10,000 - 15,000
This was commercially commissioned and advertised, which explains the higher price. The Big Horn Foundry was Scriver’s own, which adds to the value.

#557 “1861 Mail” (1991) 46 of 100, 15”x12”x9.” est. $2,000 - 3,000
Bob loved a series. This goes with the “Pony Express.” He turned out many horse and rider pairs of various periods and vocations and enjoyed the research.

#558 “On the Trap Line” (1977) 18 of 100, 14”x9”x7.5,” est. $3,000 - 4,000
Parallel with his taxidermy business Bob was a fur-buyer. He had learned the business while in Edmonton, visiting the big fur-trading convocation there and working for a mink rancher. Trappers in Blackfeet country were regular visitors to the studio all winter.

#559 “4 o’Clock in the Morning” (1961), 1 of 24 in the first edition, 9”x17”x7,” est. $4,000 - 5,000
This is Playboy, the same horse that posed for “Lone Cowboy.” The two pieces form a very nice pair. Playboy cringed away from the saddle in just this way. It is curious that all the #1 castings of Bob’s work were kept by himself, which means that this bronze ought to be cached away with the rest of his estate at the Montana Historical Society. Ask to see the provenance (the chain of ownership) since casting. I would have helped to cast and patine this bronze.

#560 “A New Camp” (1995), 33 of 50, 15”x25”x11,” est. $4,000 - 6,000
A procession bronze from late in Bob’s career.

2009

#323 “Ready for Battle” 32 of 150, 14”x14”x6.5,” est.$2500 - 3500, sold for $2,006
This elk is swollen with lust and picking fights with every other male elk as he gathers his harem. He will be bugling, fasting, and dangerous.

#324 “Part of the Job” 100 of 250, 15”x12.5”x6.5”, est. $3,000 - 4,000, not sold.
A nice portrait of a cowboy. I don’t know whether it’s meant to be a specific person.

#326 “When One Shot’s Enough” (1977) 38 of 40, 10.5”x14.5”x11.5,” est. $3500-4500, sold for $2950
This is a group “story” bronze full of diagonals and curves. Note the tails that slash out into space.

#327 “The Signal Glass” 32 of 100, 22.5”x18”x16.5,” est. $8,000 - 10,000, not sold.
Heliographs work well on the prairie if there is a high spot to signal or watch from. This triangular arrangement is full of small diagonals (the legs) to suggest stability and waiting, but contained action which will be released when the signal comes.

#477 “Budding Buckaroo.” 48 of 150, 11”x22”x10, est. $4,000 to 5,000. not sold.
A sweet little portrait of a boy luring a horse with an apple.

#480 “The Dakota Bull” 35 of 48, 7.5”x10”x4.5,” est. $2,000 to 3500. Sold for $1770
Very nice portrait. The bulls from the Niobrara Federal Bison Range are occasionally brought in to improve the genetics of the Moiese Bison Range.

#481 “Headin’ Out” 104 of 250, 12”x12”x8,” est. $5,500 - 7500. Sold for 5130
A horseback hunter has made his quota and is headed for home. The slanted base means that the group has tension, the animals showing exertion.

#570 Group of three bronzes. “Northfork Wolves,” 32 of 200, 9”x10”x6.5;” “Middle Fork Grizzly” 32 of 200, 8.25”x9”x5.5”; "South Fork Spring" (Elk) 32 of 200. 8.5”x10”x7”. As a set est. $3500 -4500. Not sold.
Meant for collectors, this is a sort of indicator of the area on the west side of Glacier Park.

#574 “Enemy Tracks” (Known here as “Following the Trail”) #10. 16”x14”x10”. est. $5500 - 7500. Sold for $3540.
This sculpture was originally commissioned by George Montgomery about 1960. The idea is that the scouts are tracking a cavalry man whose empty canteen is on the ground among the cactus. I made some of the cactus.

#575 “The Fast Blanket” (1978) #2, 18”x10”x9”, est. $5,000-7,000 Sold for $4,130
Another form of long-distance communication was blanket-signalling, a kind of semaphore. No smoke involved. I suppose a “fast” moving blanket signaled urgency.

2008

#189 “Calf in the Way” (1981) 13 of 150, 22”x19”, est. $3,000 - 5000
A story group that repeats a tale often told with cattle.

SCRIVER BRONZES IN THE CM RUSSELL MUSEUM AUCTION, 2010

http://www.therussell.org

#17 “Budding Buckaroo” (1993) 12 of 150, 12”x22”x8,” est. $2500 - 3000
A “cute” little story vignette.

#22 “CM Russell, The Cowboy Artist” (1977) 6 of 100, 17.25”x7.25”x5.5,” est.$4000 - 6000
This is the “bust” separated from the full figure. Bob did three full figures: the original one for the contest in the Fifties, a corrected version he did in the Sixties after his skills improved, and the one that became the monumental bronze outside the CMR Museum. I can’t tell which figure this bust was cut from until I can compare in reality.

#35 “Counting Coup” (1990) 98 of 175, 17”x14”x8,” est. $2500- 3000
“Price of a Scalp” was an early version of this sort of conflict. It was commissioned by George Montgomery in the late Fifties and the edition was small. This one is more merciful, since “counting coup” means making a blow with killing. The Blackfeet family called "Ground" today is descended from a warrior called "Jumps to the Ground," because he preferred to fight on foot. Others wanted the advantage of the horseman.

#75 “King of the Marsh” (1966) 82 of 150, 11”x11”x6,” est. $2500 - 3500
This is a beautiful small moose, much influenced by a Rungius moose sculpture that Bob owned. Rungius was one of his primary influences.

#108 “Moving On” (1995) 2 of 50, 17”x17”x10,” $5,000-7,000
A story procession made late in life and also sold in sections. It is ethnographically accurate right down to the type of horse and dog but is not so elaborate as the portraits with a lot of war or ceremonial gear.

SCRIVER BRONZES IN THE AD CLUB AUCTION

2010-03-05T16:20:00.002-07:00

SCRIVER BRONZES IN THE AD CLUB AUCTION

This is a cross between “aggregation” and “curation.” That is, I’m going to list and discuss all the bronzes by Bob Scriver in each of three auctions to be presented in Great Falls over the weekend of March 20, 21, and 22. I’m drawing on their online “catalogs” which are also available from them as printed books. If the websites include past auctions, I’m listing those bronzes as well. I have never seen any of the many hydrocal castings we sold show up in an auction. They are durable if left in place but probably would be damaged by the kind of shifting, storing, and shipping necessary for auctions.

Today’s list is from the classic CM Russell Auction that was previously always a benefit auction for the Charles M. Russell Museum. www.cmrauction.com

2010:

#16: “War Prize” Casting 189 of 210. 14.5”x4”x8”
A warrior holds a rifle high overhead. I can’t see what kind of gun it is, but I suspect it might be a Hawken, which Bob was especially fond of and which is an excellent steady and accurate long-distance rifle. Great for buffalo hunting when one wants to shoot from a distance, dropping a group one by one. This a later piece and begins to show a strange “Giacometti” effect on Bob’s figures, which became very small-headed and thin-armed, perhaps the effect of strokes on his perception. By this time he was no longer using calipers except on portraits.

#66 “The White Flags” Casting 3 of 125 16”x14”x1”
A beautiful grouping of whitetail deer, famous for their big white tails which wag behind them when they flee. From the angle pictured, it’s easy to see the Rungius theory of composition, which was based on an X to show action. Bob’s animals never lost their accuracy and he never lost his love for them, which was his first kind of sculpture. The casting looks quite smooth and the patina quite light. Later castings were mostly done by ceramic shell foundries which end up with a smooth surface. This smooth/light patina can look disturbingly like plastic.

#87 “A New Camp” Casting 3 of 50. 11.75”x8”x24”
This is a simpler version of a later series of horse/rider/dog pieces. A woman rides the horse which pulls a travois and is followed by a dog. She has a baby on her back.

#141 “CM Russell, the Cowboy Artist” Casting 6 of 35. 24”x10.5”x7 3/8”
A small version of the portrait of Russell at the Russell Museum, probably meant for sale to pay for the big monumental-sized emplacement. Portraits of Russell haunted Bob because his entry in the 1960 competition which he lost but which provided him the impetus and connections necessary to start his career.

#245 “Winter King” Casting 49 of 110 24”x10x23”
From the original series of maquettes meant to guide full-mounts of all the game animals in Montana for the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, now dispersed. The caribou occupied the extreme NW corner of the state near Yaak where a bit of rain forest is far enough north to have moss good for them to eat. Climate change has eliminated themhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif. Bob never acquired a caribou to mount. This figure was created in the Fifties and is classic Scriver animal portraiture.

#246 “Moon of the Yellow Leaves” Casting 8 of 125. 14”x17”x9”
This elk group echoes the group of whitetail deer. It is again composed around a dynamic diagonal line though the animals are simply standing in alert. That spike bull at the bottom of the group won’t be around much longer. Technically, the casting appears smooth, like a ceramic-shell casting. Actually, Scriver made all his animals smooth in the early years and was criticized for it.

2009:

#51 “Moving On” Casting 44 of 50. 14.5”x33.5”x8” Sold for $5,000.
This procession represents a family group. The casting called “A New Camp” is the rear half of this sculpture, minus the colt, and I suppose the front half was also sold separately. Lines of figures are appealing to buyers who want to put sculpture on a fireplace mantel or in silhouette against a window. This is sort of an Indian version of a pack string.

#52 “Race to the Rendezvous” Casting 52 of 75 14”x22”x95” Sold for $3,500
Here’s another action piece full of slant lines. It is a story and I’d bet that rifle is a Hawken. Scriver undoubtedly made a small mold specifically to produce them to scale. Collectors of Western bronzes tend to group by subject matter, so here’s one for the mountain men.

#110 “Too Late for the Hawken” Casting 19 of 50. 23”x30”x24” Sold for $7,000
This time the mountain man has been surprised by a warrior, but the principles are the same as the bronze above. This looks more like a typical Scriver patina which was influenced by the French Animaliers we saw in New York City in 1965 when Bob was on “To Tell the Truth.”

#125 “The Holy Woman” Casting 6 of 40. 13.5x23x10 Sold for $2,000.
Another horse-and-travois piece, but this one is based on Agnes Mad Plume who always wore her Horn Society headdress in the North American Indian Days Parade in the early days when the whole event put much more emphasis on the Old Days. Her daughter has kept up the tradition.

#138 “Ready for Battle” Casting 69 of 150. 13”x11”x6” Sold for $2,000
This bull elk is “in rut”, aroused, starving, his neck thickened by hormones, bugling to announce his potency. They are easy to call when in this state and Bob loved to do it. One evening, a little too dark, we called one nearly nose-to-nose. They don’t taste good when in rut, so calling one means trophy hunting. We didn’t even take a gun along.

#170 “The Spotted Colt” Casting 100 of 100. 11”x14”x6.5” Sold for $2,500
Another “going along” story group: a mare with her colt, a woman with her children. The “spotted” is a reference to Appaloosa horses.

#171 “Silence is Safety” Casting 21 of 150. 12.5”x15x7” Sold for $2,000
A story piece about a warrior and his horse, which is a exceptionally nice one. The accouterments will be of interest to some collectors. This warrior is not quite so Giacometti/basketball player as some of the others. The slight hill gives the triangular composition a little dynamism.

2008

#24 “The Outfitter” Casting 18 of 40. 13”x9”x4” Sold for $2,500
A simple portrait of a hunting outfitter on his horse, alert and experienced. It might be based on an actual person. The chaps imply riding in brush or trees, since they are meant to protect one’s legs.

#126 “Counting Coup” Casting 62 of 175. Sold for $6.500
The first sculpture on this theme was commissioned by George Montgomery and in that one the man on the ground is simultaneously killing the man on the horse. Counting coup doesn’t mean that the man on the ground will be killed, only that the opportunity was there.

#173 “New Camp” Casting 5 of 50. Sold for $6,000
See remarks for the same sculpture in 2010. #87 in that catalogue.

2007

#28 “Budding Buckaroo” Casting 54 of 150. Sold for $3,500.
A little boy with a rope offering an apple to a colt.

#83 “White Flags” Casting 102 of 125. 16”x14.5”x11” Sold for $4,500
See remarks for the same sculpture in 2010, catalogue #66.

#178 “Sky Climbers” Casting 7 of 10. 20”x25.5”x15 Sold for $6,000
In 1965 Bob created a smaller version of this idea, calling it “Into the Wind.” It proved very popular and by now many artists have created groups of waterfowl landing. This is a relatively early piece so was probably cast in Bob’s own Big Horn Foundry. The small limit on the number of castings also makes it more valuable.

#225 “Moon of Yellow Leaves” Casting 102 of 125. 14”x17”x9” $5,000
See remarks on the 2010 list, catalogue #246

#264 “Too Late for the Hawken” Casting 45 of 50. 223”x30x24. Not sold.
See remarks on the 2090 list, catalogue #110

SUMMARY:

Most of these pieces were produced late in Scriver’s career and were much influenced by entrepreneurs suggesting what would sell. Some of them commissioned pieces and bought the copyright along with the original so they could cast them. They planned large editions which reduces the value and castings were ceramic shell process which also makes them less valuable. “Winter King” and “Sky Climbers” were earlier.

What I’m saying is that though these bronzes are appealing, they are the low end of the Scriver range of a thousand bronzes so the prices are lesser. None of the big rodeo pieces are here -- in fact, no rodeo pieces at all, maybe because the jury felt they didn’t relate to Charlie Russell. There are a few of the bigger, more significant bronzes cast in the Bighorn Foundry moving around out there, but not many. People are holding onto them or they are moving privately through galleries.

THE WESTERN ART SEASON BEGINS

2010-01-23T13:30:00.002-07:00

The Western Art season starts north and works its way south for some counter-intuitive reason, probably because Charlie Russell’s birthday, which was the original inspiration for the CMR Auction, falls on March 19, 1864. The auction began as the inspiration of the Great Falls Ad Club, particularly its spearhead personality Norma Ashby. The thing grew and grew until the little corner building that once sheltered the collection of personal objects owned by a little old lady librarian fan of Charlie’s had become one of the swarm of massive Western art institutions across the USA. Now the institution is a huge building, very expensive to maintain, and really NEEDS the auction.

The most recent development is the split of the auction into two parts. (This is not the same as the half-dozen me-too satellite shows and auctions.) Eric Newhouse writes in the Great Falls Tribune of January 20, that “Both of the art auctions named for famed cowboy artist C.M. Russell introduced their catalogs electronically this week with each presenting a wide range of artwork.” You can access both through the newspaper: www.gftrib.com, then click on the Western Art Week icon, which is a buffalo skull. Or you can enter www.greatfallstribune.com/museumartauction for the “new” auction or www.greatfallstribune.com/adclubart for the "old" one.

Eric’s story emphasizes that there is an assortment of good art at each location, and I’m willing to believe that except that radical difference in the software of the two locations rather complicates the matter. The Museum Art Auction program works smoothly, one piece of art following the next quickly. (I’m on Mac OSX 10.3.9.) The Ad Club Auction program is slow, balky, doesn’t show pictures, and is full of bugs. This is not new. And the difference is a quick computer demonstration of what is going on. The short version is that the Museum is the Big Boys of Western Art with major resources and the Ad Club is working with volunteer amateurs locally. The latter might be more lovable, but the former is far more powerful.

Eric reports, “The museum’s events will begin with a wall art sale and reception from 5 to 8 PM Thursday, March 18.” The paintings are hung and lit, I presume, which saves all those girls in high heels from having to stagger down the catwalk with them.

“Thirteen of the pieces will go to the highest bidder above a set minimum, opening with a Russell watercolor/pen and ink, “Happy New Year Greeting,” which starts at $90,000.

“There’s also a 25-inch-30-inch oil on canvas, “Canyon del Muerto -- Coronado Rock,” by Maynard Dixon that has a minimum asking price of $750.000, and there’s an oil on board, “Archer Beside a Lake,” by Eanger Irving Couse that requires at least $100,000 s an opening bid. Among the 13 sealed-bid pieces of art are four other Dixons. . .

“The remainder of the 132 pieces in the fixed wall sale have set prices. . .

“Among the pieces are a mixed media on canvas, “Winter Kill Shaker” by Oleg Stavrowsky for $65,000, an oil on canvas, “Montana Morning,” by Gary Lynn Roberts for $30,000; an oil, “Bargaining for a Bride,” by Steve Seltzer for $18,500; and an oil on canvas tepee, “L’Avocet,” by Tom Gilleon for $15,000.”

The second auction is at the museum from 11AM until 2PM on Saturday. “Among the highlights of that show will be “Ah Wah Cous,” a 60”X60” oil by Gilleon that features Russell among Indians -- it’s valued at $65,000 to $75,000.

“A pen and ink by Russell, “The Medicine Man No. 3” is estimated at $80,000 to $85,000.

“A big oil by Roberts, “The Scouts,” is valued at $25,000 to $30,000, while another big oil by Andy Thomas, “Stampede Stampede!” is pegged at $52,000 to $58,000. Charlie Fritz adds another big oil, “Emerging from a Storm -- the Packet Benton on the Upper Missouri River,” which is estimated at $14,000 to $15,000.”

On the Ad Club side, the list includes:

Several small Russell Bronzes.
O.C. Seltzer 18”X22” oil, “The Mad Cow”
Several unspecified paintings by Steve Seltzer, Bob Morgan and Ace Powell (including a 20”X30” painting called “Prairie Powwow”).
Gary Lynn Thomas: 30”X45” oil, “Ambush on the Bandit Trail” and 24”X36” oil, “Pride.”
Tom Gilleon: 30”X30” oil, “Mountain Crow Horses.” (Eric says it’s an “iconoclastic tepee” which is a slip. Gilleon’s tepees are actually ICONIC, simplified and idealized images.)
Larry Zabel: 30”X40” acrylic “The Buckskin”
Tara Moore: “Roping Duo and “Hold Your Horses” (no sizes given)
Carol Hagen: “Don’t Mess with Momma” and “Brown Noser”
Sherry Salari Sander: 38”X18” bronze, “Horses of the Mountain.”
“Art by many newcomers.”

Alert onlookers could have spotted developments as soon as B. Byron Price showed up with his CMR Catalogue Raisonee. Over the last decade he has managed to encircle and dominate CMR matters. Here is his bio from the University of Oklahoma website:

“B. Byron Price currently holds the Charles Marion Russell Memorial Chair and is Director of Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West [funded by Nancy Russell’s estate] at the University of Oklahoma. He is a 1970 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and earned an MA in Museum Science at Texas Tech University in 1977. [plus a quick one-year art degree.]

“Before taking his current position, Price spent nearly 25 years in the museum profession. He served as executive director of the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas (1982-1986); the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma City (1987-1996); and the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming (1996-2001).

“Price is the author of more than three dozen journal articles on western American history and art and has written several books including Fine Art of the West (2004); The Chuck Wagon Cook Book: Recipes from the Ranch and Range for Today’s Kitchen (2004); Cowboys of the American West (1996) and Erwin E. Smith: Cowboy Photographer (1997). Price is currently editing the Charles M. Russell catalog raisonné.

“In addition to his published works, he has served as a consultant for several television series on the History and Discovery Channels, most recently: Unsolved History:The Gunfight at the OK Corral and Cowboy Tech.

“In August 2007, Price also became the Director of the University of Oklahoma Press.”

Put the photo of his “mini-me” Darrell Beauchamp [formerly the owner of an art gallery] next to the photo of B. Byron Price. They represent a particular kind of enthusiast of Western matters: the cavalry side.

REMINGTON VS. RUSSELL -- And Who's Monkman?

2010-01-23T13:27:00.001-07:00

Charlie Russell wasn’t that fond of cavalry. His thing was Indians. After all, the family branch called the Bents (see the excellent biography called “Half-Breed”), famous for their trading fort rather than any war fort, included Indians. Charlie loved to dress up as an Indian, not a cavalryman, and it was not to mock Indians that he hung out with them as much as he could. Remington was the guy who loved cavalry, though horses groaned when they saw his size. (Anne Morand, the curator at the CM Russell Museum, made her reputation as an expert on Remington, esp. a brilliant show organizing together Remington’s night paintings.)

Genetics as a way of sorting makes less sense when dealing with so-called Western art than dividing them between Remington-types and Russell-types. Remington-types are from back east, more invested in class and education, and more aligned with the cavalry/Republican/manifest-destiny sympathies. Russell was more like James Willard Schultz, an Indian wannabe, and it is surprising that Charlie didn’t marry an Indian. He did romance a few. I would suggest that Nancy Russell was a Remington-type, if not a Mrs. Custer, who saw the route to a comfortable life as through sales in the east. Nancy was right, but she had to nearly lock Charlie up.

Remington had a shadow, an artist whose work was close enough to be easily mistaken for Remington’s, except that Charlie was pretty good friends with his own painter/shadow, O.C. Seltzer, and Remington was NOT happy about Schreyvogel. The back-east art experts have not much picked up on Schreyvogel, who was around this country in the early twentieth century, about the same time as Sharp and others. He stayed in Blackfoot, Montana, and left paintings behind him which were mostly burned when the former station agent, Mr. Carberry, had a house fire. It killed and consumed Mr. C. as well, but not his daughter who sometimes babysat Bob Scriver. It’s odd that nothing has been made of Schrevogel since Bob and I saw his studio contents at the Cowboy Hall of Fame in the Sixties, complete with an oil 8” X 10” view of the Rockies from Browning. Those were the Dean Krakel visionary years when the focus was not so much on profit and prestige.

The best overview of the Northern Plains Western artists is still Dale Burk’s “New Interpretations,” unless you’re looking for insight into politics, in which case Father Schoenberg’s account of the founding of MONAC (a museum dedicated to Indian art and attached somehow to Gonzaga University, but which collapsed after a couple of decades) is instructive. I will not summarize for fear of libel suits. Father Schoenberg is dead. Others involved are not. Dale Burk is still alive and publishing but doesn’t write about art anymore. www.stoneydale.com/

The “marker” artist for the northern plains is not a cowboy artist, but rather Carl Rungius, whose studio was in Banff. He painted scenery and animals, which have escaped politics until recently when environmental concerns heated up. Rungius is dead. But Russell Chatham is another good scenery “marker” artist (he’s alive, born on the same day as myself). Winold Reiss is another northern plains artist who has been somewhat lifted up but he’s a portrait artist, not an action painter. Cowboy art aficionadoes want action, someone being killed.

But they will NOT want Kent Monkman’s idea of action, or rather “post” action. QUOTE: "The Romantic tradition of westward expansion and colonial nation-building is radically revised by the artist Ken Monkman in his fantastic vision of idyllic free-for-all pioneer orgies, flamboyant performance personas and other high-spirited interventions into historical mythology." See www.kenmonkman.com A show of his work is just opening in Calgary. From his website: “Kent Monkman is an artist of Cree ancestry who works in a variety of media including painting, film/video, performance and installation. Monkman has exhibited widely within Canada, and is well represented in numerous private and public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. He is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, UK, and Bailey Fine Arts, Toronto.” The show is “ The Triumph of Mischief,” (solo), Glenbow Museum, Calgary, February 13 – April 25, 2010.
He’s painting Moran landscapes with NA warriors lolling along the edge of the lake among the bodies of their cavalry victims (US, not RCMP). The Indians are identified as “Achilles and Patroclus” who are figures at the heart of the Trojan War. Consult Brad Pitt rather than the condom company.

Take a look. No feathers. Not even a feather boa. (He’s gay.) His painting of a boudoir of a berdache features a French reclining couch, a bison hide rug, expensive luggage, and the kind of crystal chandelier once beloved of R. C. Gorman. (Do not ask anyone associated with either of the two Charlie Russell auctions about R. C. Gorman, though they are experts on the SW, where his studio was in Taos.)

Monkman’s version of the “End of the Trail,” centerpiece of the Cowboy Hall of Fame, is reinterpreted via the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, in which a skillful sculptor creates a statue of a young woman so beautiful that he falls in love with it. (“My Fair Lady.”) In sympathy for him, the gods bring her to life. In this case, the curly-headed sculptor is on tiptoe to kiss the Indian on his exhausted horse and the Indian has come to life.

The significance in terms of this blog post is that the show, both intellectual and socially avant garde, is in Calgary -- the northern plains. Great Falls has become an outpost of the SW. It was already a cavalry post, if you think about Malmstrom. Charlie would have laughed. Remington -- who once painted a cavalryman wearing a lady’s sunbonnet -- would have looked away, blushing.

Nancy Russell had no time for such nonsense. What counted to her was the money, honey, and if it hadn’t been for her, Charlie might have starved among his friends, who sometimes starved themselves. At least the friends he picked out himself because you can’t really count customers. The whole nation is Nancy Russell Country now. We’re all just buying and selling.

Monkman is an entirely new type, a metis in several ways, classically educated, as skillful as the new Chinese-taught painters, with the sharp satirical edge of the supposed outsider, who is now an insider. His warrior heroes wear no uniforms (they don’t wear much of anything); their allegiance is to their human relationships. Come to think about it, that’s sorta like Charlie.

WESTERN ART IN THE NAUGHTY OUGHTIES

2010-01-08T15:47:00.001-07:00

My knowledge of Western art is about a half-century of direct experience plus a lot of talking and reading. Since moving back to Valier in the last decade I’ve seen more change than in the previous forty years.

1. The internet has transformed everything. What was a small local auction in Great Falls has multiplied into a cluster of varied but peripherally related auctions and shows: one of secondary “gray” sales meant to move art and artifacts not acceptable to the curated auction; one of Indians; one of women; one of guns; and so on. Now the original auction has split down the middle with results no one can predict yet. (A few more months: this is a March event.) There are new auctions all across the continent around the calendar.

Buyers no longer have to come and look, which curbs impulse sales at the heart of auction. Bidding may be via computer monitor, having already investigated provenance and quality by proxy or online. I was vividly impressed by the man who said he went in to the gun show, looked carefully at them, made a list, and then sat in the parking lot bidding on his mobile phone because he did NOT want people to know what he would be carrying home. Likewise, at auctions there are people who do NOT want to be known and maybe don’t even want a proxy to bid for them. For them secrecy is part of the excitement, not sitting in the audience to see the other bidders.

The values of this artwork are no longer determined by expert dealers and galleries. Websites like AskArt.com are a ticker tape keeping track of previous auction transactions so that one knows what the last bids were on similar art. One sits in the audience with a laptop. This has had various effects on the market. One is that a series of auctions attended by people who dislike a certain artist or just don’t know that work can send values spiraling down. Or the opposite can happen if there’s been a recent article praising the work or a prominent statement by someone important. Many more people are becoming much more aware. Probably some of them are misled by using numbers instead of reality, including informed curators of value. The old idea that it’s better to invest in art, that one can store value in art, has been encouraged by the stock market catastrophe, but others who bought early in the belief that they were acquiring valuable work are now crushed to discover their standards were local. The stuff is merely a curiosity, the artist unknown.

Another dynamic is more scurvy. Individuals with capital, like professionals, have “invested” by buying up work from starving artists and holding it in warehouses against the day it would be worth lots of money. In the meantime, it was worth their while to hold down the value of the art, at the expense of the artist. Now, the hour for profit may have passed.

2. More than other categories, except perhaps Manhattan-based abstract art of the Fifties and Sixties, the constituency for Western art is aging. (Same thing for Western history and fiction.) The fans of action art showing roping and bar fights or military events tended to be the ages of WWII veterans. Many of the buyers who could pay Charlie Russell’s prices made their money in the original development of natural resources before regulation. The Cowboy Artists of America has lost nearly all its original members and was most grievously injured by the loss of Joe Bieler, who was able to reconcile some strong personalities. At the first CMR Auction, it was possible to recognize people who knew Charlie personally. Not now.

3. The major jump in value of Western art during the last part of the twentieth century has attracted a great many more artists with much more sophisticated training and this has meant both an increase in quality and a shift away from first-hand content. Dealers have redefined “cowboy art,” broadening it to include the first painters to record the West and particularly the very fine landscape painters. VERY fine genre Chinese painters have joined the category. This helps to get the category out of the bunkhouse, but it also means that someone’s naive but earnest depiction of corral events has to hold up against a huge, mystical, elegantly framed, Moran landscape.

4. Other modern technology has allowed the mass production of inexpensive art knockoffs. Even bronze casting is much easier and cheaper when ceramic shell molds are used and the technicians are not particularly well-trained. Asians can duplicate bronzes using cheap artisans outside the reach of copyright. Another example is Giclee prints, which are ballyhoed as much more than what they are: xeroxes. Value is supposed to be added if the artist signs the copy or even adds a few paint strokes. When the prices come down, the subject matter also becomes less grand, more like greeting card subjects meant to appeal to the unsophisticated.

The backside of this is that now it is possible to analyze bronze molecules in a kind of metal DNA and there are many more scientific analyses to perform on dubious paintings. Of course, common sense will never be amiss in a world where simply scissoring the signature off the bottom of a Seltzer transforms it into a Russell worth ten times as much.

5. Developments in the larger world have also affected the Western art genre. De-accessioning has become a huge public controversy, though it has always gone on in a low-grade behind-the-scenes manner. The ethics codes of museum associations forbid the selling of art work in order to maintain the building or pay salaries, but this is exactly how Harold McCracken started the Whitney Gallery of Western Art with paintings from a crumbling local Remington archive. Since then, some institutions have become threshing floors (especially historical societies) where objects that people think have great value are brought in the front door, held for a while, then sold out the back door. Tax structures and exemptions have aggravated this. The laws are now changing. One deaccessioning event was so notorious (Brandeis proposed to close its gallery and sell all the contents) that the issue is now VERY hot.

6. The relationship between donors and patrons and the possibilities for increasing the value of their collections by paying to have them shown in curated institutions so they collect fame and increase value is another little strategy that is being questioned. It has long been a practice in Western art. Some art zines are now running stories on the fabulous collectors, rather than what they collect. There is a thin wall between curators, collectors, and institutional administrators with cross-overs like the Renners or B. Byron Price. There is also a symbiosis between curating and writing, so that an “expert” book on a particular artist can increase its value. But so many glowing accounts of artists have been written, that the value of such books is diminished. Of course, those who control publishing, control artists to some degree and therefore sales of art.

THE CALICO AD CLUB & THE GINGHAM CMR MUSEUM

2009-08-31T10:32:00.001-06:00

The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat
by Eugene Field

The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
'Twas half-past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t'other had slept a wink!
The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate
Appeared to know as sure as fate
There was going to be a terrible spat.
(I wasn't there; I simply state
What was told to me by the Chinese plate!)

The gingham dog went " Bow-wow-wow!"
And the calico cat replied "Me-ow!"
The air was littered, an hour or so,
With bits of gingham and calico,
While the old Dutch clock in the chimney place
Up with it hands before its face,
For it always dreaded a family row!
(Now mind: I'm only telling you
What the old Dutch clock declares is true!)

The Chinese plate looked very blue,
And wailed,"Oh dear! What shall we do!"
But the gingham dog and the calico cat
Wallowed this way and tumbled that,
Employing every tooth and claw
In the awfullest way you ever saw-
And oh! how the gingham and calico flew!
(Don't fancy I exaggerate!
I got my news from the Chinese plate!)

Next morning where the two had sat
They found no trace of dog or cat;
And some folks think unto this day
That burglars stole the pair away!
But the truth about the cat and pup
Is this: they ate each other up!
Now what do you really think of that!
(The old Dutch clock, it told me so,
And that is how I came to know.)

I reprint the entire poem in case there are young ‘uns who don’t know it. My Prot Irish grandfather used to quote it. It seems apt in a town (Great Falls) with an abundance of museums elbowing each other for shelf space among the precious objects. Many of us have been watching this for decades as the stakes grew higher and the reputation grew wider. Players have changed, sometimes through death and sometimes through a growing number of national players. If Norma Ashby ever writes the true story of these two “animals,” it will be a blockbuster. She took notes, I’m sure.

The most obvious bone of contention was between the local Ad Club and the increasingly national nature of the board and Auction attenders. Most local Montanans pay no attention to what goes on outside the state, so they may not have been aware that “Western art” has been growing into a gargantua, many dealers and endowed institutions in a sprawling network around the whole continent, all ambitious and mostly funded by millionaire aficionadoes of the West who identified with both the cowboys and the oil millionaires at the fulcrum of frontier. Each has ambitious administrators who are often very well paid, but there are far fewer actual art experts and curators specifically trained to address Western art. Most people judged art according to the price it would command (at auction maybe) and the prestige it conferred.

These are the people who wanted to rent the museum premises for cocktail parties and weddings. It was the art experts who cringed to see smoke and alcohol-fueled behavior near their precious collections. Think of the damage to the carpets! But it helped the endowment greatly. Until many aficionadoes began to age out of the picture. Now the market for Western art is shrinking.

The CMR Museum tried to solve the schism by forming two boards: one a local board of concerned and influential Montanans and the other a national board of big money folks. The Blackfeet tribe does the same thing: a board of elders and a board of actual council members. Let the elders speak their good words, just what everyone wants to hear, and then let the council members quietly meet, maybe through the windows of their pickups. When I was at seminary, the board of trustees of the seminary was supposed to include one student, which was intended to keep them from rioting or picketing. I was that student one year and I did my best to rock the boat. The students was expected to show how dignified and adult they were by representing everything in the kindest and most helpful tones. But I was forty and on the prod. I drew wild cartoons and declared a crisis.

That’s when I found out the truth about boards (and Congress and any other body of big shots). I had ruined my reputation and chances for a big time church by making trouble. (It didn’t really matter as I only wanted to return to Montana anyway.) It was revealed to me that there were only about four trustees (all older men with big churches) who quietly made all the decisions after everyone had gone home. Both the CMR Museum and the Ad Club are no different. That’s where the roots of the split really are. Norma Ashby knows, though she’s not one of them. Bob Scriver, on the Montana honorary board, tried to raise an alarm and was shut out. Many small people know.

There is another relevant literary tale, a novel by Mary Kay Zuravleff called “The Bowl Is Already Broken.” She used her knowledge of the Smithsonian to create this much-praised tale of museum politics that spirals around a priceless porcelain bowl, dropped and shattered. Though the story winds in and out of all sorts of worldly pressures, the end is philosophical: as soon as anything exists, it will end. That’s true for all objects, for humans, and for mountain ranges. Even the continents and even the planet. The timing and manner of the end might be unfortunate, but nothing is eternal except eternity.

In the fifty years since the auction was founded, partly as a convenient way to launder art acquired by hook or crook, it has been marbled with dubious practices as well as celebrated as a Great Falls triumph. But what is constantly overlooked is the growing-but-stretched bubble of Western art value that fuels auction profits and, beyond that, a world culture shift that asks “what IS a museum?” “What IS value?” Beginning with the early Pope’s cabinet of priceless treasures, all the way up to the Virginia rec room with a Russell over the fireplace, questions at this level have not been asked or answered.

Is there anything more at stake than a boy’s collection of treasures: pretty rocks, tin soldiers, and the collar off a pet dog that died long ago? It’s only a matter of time before the Chinese plate and the old Dutch clock begin to talk.

WESTERN ART MAGAZINES

2009-08-23T15:33:00.001-06:00

Beside me is a foot-high stack of ‘zines that I’m supposed to sort and file as archives. But I’m running out of room and now there are two new magazines to consider. I’ve already got a backlog of Art of the West and Southwest Art as well as Wildlife Art. These have been engines of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel for years now, though they’re a little different from each other.

Art of the West is bi-monthly and comes from Minnetonka, MINN, where the co-Publishers, Allan J. Duerr and Thomas F. Teirney, and the editor, Vicki Stavig, have their offices. But Bill Frazier, who is a Big Timber attorney specializing in art issues, is a contributing writer. He writes a back page noting scams and issues that have less to do with aesthetic questions than consumer affairs. Interestingly, the consumer in question is often the artist! Fraser was recently the head of the Montana Arts Council which also works for the benefit of artists.

One of the major aspects of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel is the print market, which Bill Frazier recommends against, saying that artists occasionally become convinced -- often through the persuasions of an optimistic brother-in-law trying to help out -- that getting prints made of the more popular paintings will be a major economic breakthrough. But without contacts, a marketing plan, and other machinery of the industry, the artist merely ends up with boxes of prints in the garage, gradually wrinkling in the damp. My own bias is a little different: I see the reproduction market as the source of much of the industrializing, the coarsening if you like, of mass producing (the whole point of industrialization) and moral weakening of art. Think Thomas Kinkade. But then I’m an idealist and a romantic who thinks art should be “pure,” approaching religion. The print industry people, who have made Terpning a wealthy and rather callous man, try to keep that sort of fancy talk while all the time cranking out “limited editions” that are anything but -- merely “print runs.”

Art of the West was started iin 1987. They do self-publishing, book-binding, and other related technologies, including print-making so it is rather surprising that Frazier takes a dour point of view.

Southwest Art is more broad-based in terms of genre and also in terms of geography: partly in San Francisco, partly in Florida, partly in Colorado, and with an editor, Susan Freilicher, of unspecified location. This mag is owned by Cruz Bay Publishing Co. which is owned by Active Interest Media. Inc. (“Log home dwelling vegetarian karate adepts,” according to Yahoo. 13.80 M in revenue in 2006 with 99 employees. Doesn’t say whether the head guy, Efrem Zimbalist III -- “Skip” if you know him personally -- is counted in that number. The official contact is in California.)

SWA is much more open to abstract art and Native American art (which are sometimes the same thing), but if you follow these 'zines you will see the same ads for the same galleries and auctions over and over. The editorial copy will support those ads so that you will see the same paintings and sculptures over and over, read the same names of the same artists again and again, until they’re far more familiar than the content of the art history course you took in college. Yet the content rarely says a lot that’s enlightening. NEVER anything that is critical. Everyone is the greatest.

American Art Review is out of Kansas and casts a much wider net in terms of subject matter, though it’s all representational. The articles themselves are written by professional academically trained curators and directors, which is quite different from the two ‘zines above. They tend to be formal and historical as well as analytical. They are attached to specific institutions, generally exploring one exhibit.

Wildlife Art is published by “Pothole Publications” based in California. You can buy a business profile for thirty bucks. (I won’t.) It overlaps a good bit with the “cowboy” subject matter but it is a distinct genre and I’ll come back to it in a later post. It’s a dollar less, a little more naive, a little thinner in size.

So now back to the newer ‘zines. Western Art Collector is a frank guide to the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. Same familiar ads, same subject matter, but now more than ever like a race horse guide. What auctions are coming, what artists are promising, and -- most important -- constant attention to the prices: the estimated worth, the auction total, the rate of increase over the years of an artist’s career. Lots of “society” photos of customers and dealers partying in their fancy dress, champagne glasses in hand as they celebrate snatching a “masterpiece” from the jaws of some other white-haired matron who offered them five figure checks to give it up because it is her “heart’s desire.”

This ‘zine comes from Scottsdale, AZ, where they say the streets are lined with Industrial Cowboy Art Galleries, and it is under the umbrella of International Art Publishing, or if you prefer, Libri dell'editore. (Spaghetti Western Art, perhaps?) It’s seven bucks and monthly. You can get it online ten days ahead of the poor schmucks who have to wait for the mail or ride their horse a hundred miles to a newsstand. There’s an interesting emphasis on tourism: what to see when you travel to participate in the auction events, which have settled into seminars, quick draws, banquets and awards. Friendship circles charter a plane to fly out West.

But if you OWN your own jet, the high end mag you want is Western Art & Architecture, from Cowboy to Contemporary which is an eight dollar mag (ten in Canada -- they’re aren’t keeping up with the exchange rate) and has a lot of overlap with the Bozeman-based Big Sky Journal. (Though it’s an inch taller and a quarter-inch wider -- more white in the layouts.) BSJ is seasonal and WA&A also appears to be quarterly. Same editor and publisher. Ads are an intermix of the Big Sky Journal architecture and real estate with the usual galleries as the other Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel ads. But this publication is trying to step away from the Industrial Mass-Produced style into something more sophisticated. The writers are from the House & Garden-type high-end shelter mags. (H&G has just folded.) More Taos here, elegant art-centered hotels, timber-and-boulder houses mixed with glass-and-steel houses. An interesting close relationship with the Thomas Nygard Galleries in Bozeman.

What will happen next? I’m fascinated.

BET ON THE BLACKFEET GRANDMA

2009-08-23T15:31:00.001-06:00

Wilfred P Schoenberg, S.J., never got no respect though he was a Jesuit which showed he was not stupid and was part of a long tradition of dealing with Native Americans. However, he was no match for a determined Blackfeet woman, Mae Williamson (Many Victories, a name she bestowed on Barbara Stanwyck when the latter was on the rez filming “Cattle Queen of Montana.”) Here’s a story that is NOT in Schoenberg’s book, “Indians, Cowboys and Western Art: A History of MONAC.” (Museum of Native American Culture)

Schoenberg had a vision for a museum next to Gonzaga University and covered the country begging and leveraging donations, either of objects themselves or for donors, subsidizers, benefactors, etc. He heard that Mae Williamson had an exquisite elk-tooth-decorated traditional dress. When he came to Browning, Montana, in search of it, he stopped at the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife where he saw a sculpture called “Transition,” which depicted Mae -- who was an official interpreter as well as being the first female member of the Blackfeet Tribal Council back in the Thirties -- standing in the middle with one hand on Chewing Black Bone, ancient blind warrior, and the other on a school boy. It’s a very fine piece and Schoenberg felt he just had to have it. He wanted a bronze, $3500, and soon realized that Bob Scriver had NO intention whatsoever of giving a casting to any itinerant priest intent on creating a competing museum, though it would be in Spokane. But at Mae’s house he saw a casting of “Transition” and expressed desperate interest in both that and the dress. She put him off. He went home to search for money.

In those days Bob always gave his models a hydrocal casting of the piece for which they posed. Hydrocal ™ is a very hard form of plaster which sets up to be something like china, but is never fired in an oven. It is susceptible to shattering and chipping, but if that doesn’t happen, hydrocal should last indefinitely: forever. They were finished to look like bronzes and sold for 10% of the price of a bronze: $350. This was how Bob got started before he could afford to cast bronzes. Local people and George Montgomery bought hydrocal castings made by Bob himself.

At this point Mae brought into the shop her casting of “Transition,” complaining that it had a few unsightly chips in it where the white hydrocal showed through and would Bob fix those places? It only took a few moments to repair the damage and Mae took her casting home. When Schoenberg showed up again, hoping for the best, Mae sold him her hydrocal for $2000, which the Father thought was a wonderful bargain. Until he got it back to Spokane, went to unload it from the car and dropped it. Then he was probably more shattered than the sculpture, esp. since he had twisted the arm of some donor for the $2,000 who was shortly coming to view it.

The chances of getting the money back from Mae were nil. In the first place she was in residence on the reservation and had put her land and house back into trust with the US Government. In the second place, he had never asked what the sculpture was made of though he should have realized it if he’d had any background in art. In the third place she’d already spent the money on a splendid coffin for her newly deceased husband -- it had a tooled leather cover lining that said “Empty Saddles.”

At an early point in her life Mae had been married to a white lawyer and ran rather a splendid household by local standards. (She was Gary Schildt’s grandmother and had a hand in raising him.) When Bob and I married, her gifts to us included a purple Hudson’s Bay blanket created to honor Queen Elizabeth II at the time of her coronation. It’s in the artifact book, “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains,” so it ought to be in the collection of the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton now.

I have no idea where the elktooth gown went. Schoenberg managed to ace out the Buffalo Bill Historical Society for the entire Sherburne Collection of artifacts -- a far more splendid, complete and historic collection than the Scriver Collection that raised such a furor. It was transferred to MONAC with no publicity at all, despite Eula Sherburne’s daughter Faith objecting even as she wrote an expensive insurance policy for the transfer, which Father S. resented. Not the insurance, the cost. Eula was the wife of J.L. Sherburne, the second generation trader who had a hand in almost everything financial around the reservation, quite unlike his father, J.H. Sherburne who was the original owner of the collection.

When MONAC went belly up, the collection, along with everything else, went to Cheney-Cowles, a second Spokane museum, and from there it has wandered in de-accessioned bits throughout the world. A Blackfeet man who tried to trace as much as he could said he located one piece in a collection in Chile. The inventory listed it as “a duplicate.” What Father Schoenberg achieved, in essence, was to create a depot for fine things where wheeler-dealers could find them. He is deceased. I hope Saint Peter has him by the nape of the neck and is forcing him to look.

Father S. reports that his health was bad his whole life -- terrible headaches coming from a drive to overachieve, weak lungs, etc. -- and the book mixes accounts of terrible bouts of vomiting with marathon narrow escapes in millenial storms driven through in faulty old cars -- regular Oregon Trail stuff, easily rivaling the exploits of Father DeSmet if not his achievement. There is constant noting of his poverty, the lack of heat where he worked, the various injustices and misunderstandings imposed by his superiors. He was evidently a veritable Rodney Dangerfield of Jesuits.

But oddly, the foreword, written by Van Kirke Nelson and Paul Masa, appeals to a quote in a letter from Charlie Russell to the Methodist Brother Van, who didn’t even have a second-hand car but walked everywhere. “Saints and Sinners were gathered there that night.” I didn’t identify any known saints. Plenty of sinners. These years were the beginnings of the Flathead Valley Art Mafia, a subsidiary of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. A little cadre of physician opportunists stripped several artists. Tom Sander paid the highest price: his wife, his house and his son, now attached to Dr. Vranish.

The trouble with Father Schoenberg, and many another, was that he knew nothing about art except what he was told by wheeler-dealers, whom he believed because they flattered him. Fortunes were made, but not by MONAC.

REX BRENEMAN 1918 - 2008

2009-08-23T15:29:00.000-06:00

Today I received word from Iola Breneman that Rex, her beloved husband, has passed away after a long struggle with the consequences of strokes. For those who didn’t know Rex, I’ll say that I’m typing out the obituary here because he represents a “type” of Montanan created by the sequence of Depression and War and also that he was the kind of person who loved “cowboy art” for its own sake.

Rex Eugene Breneman, long-time resident of Coram, passed away on March 14, 2008, at the Brendan House in Kalispell.

Rex was born in Salina, Kansas, on August 21, 1918, to Arthur and Pearl (Richards) Breneman. The youngest of three children, he grew up in the Sand Hills of Nebraska and graduated from the eighth grade. During the Depression, he left home seeking work and opportunity. Rex laughed and claimed he had ridden 40,000 miles on freight trains before he was 21.

In April of 1941 Rex enlisted in the US Army. He first served in Quartermasters as a cook and baker. At the start of WWII he desired to join the US Army Air Corps and applied to enter as a cadet. Having only an eight grade education, Rex was told he could not pass the cadet school entry test. This challenged him to read the dictionary, encyclopedia, almanac, and other books. Rex succeeded in entering the cadet school. Upon graduation he was awarded the rank of first lieutenant, navigator and bombardier. He flew more than 70 missions in the South Pacific and Korea. During this time he was awarded 13 medals, some with oak leaf clusters, and the Distinguished Flying Cross. He never elaborated on any of them.

In October of 1941 he married Rosemary Hanley and they had a daughter, Rexine Rose. This war-time marriage ended in divorce.

Following WWII, Rex settled in the Centennial Valley of Monida, MT., where he worked and trapped at the Sam and Lyz Breneman ranch. This was a special time for him.

During the construction of the Hungry Horse Dam, he moved to Coram and built a service station, “Breneman’s Union,” later called “Coram Truck Stop.” This work was interrupted when, as a reserve officer, Rex was called back to military service for the Korean conflict. After the Korean War, Rex came back to Coram to run his truck stop.

He met and courted Iola Soderstrom of Kalispell. Rex built a home near Coram for Iola and her daughter, Rhonda. Rex and Iola were married on Jan. 23, 1960, in Libby. They worked side-by-side at the Coram station -- catering to loggers, truckers and the local community. In 1968, they sold the business to the Union Oil distributors.

Rex became friends with two artists, Ace Powell and Bob Scriver, which led to his love for western art and western Americana. He enjoyed the challenges of swapping and trading art and land. He was known for his knowledge of art and history and his character of honesty, generosity, dependability and independence. He authored the book, “Ace Powell in Bronze.”

With his passing, Rex took with him a huge library of knowledge. Life for him was a continual education. From the challenge of self-education, enabling him to enter and complete the Army Air Corps Cadet school, Rex realized the rewards of reading. He did not read fiction but was an avid reader of nonfiction and particularly history until his death. He also loved to fly fish, picnic and bird hunt. Rex was always ready for a cribbage game and his skill was a challenge to all opponents.

Our lives are made up of bits and pieces of those around us. Rex was a unique person and many hold special memories of him. He never shied away from hard work and strong opinions. One thing for sure, you could always depend on him to be “Rex.”

Rex was preceded in death by his parents; his brother, Louis Breneman; his brother-in-law Art Johnson; his mother-in-law, Ruth Guinard, and his granddaughter, LeAnna Bunch.

Rex is survived by his beloved wife, partner and constant companion, Iola, of Coram; two daughters, Rexine Howell and husband Bill of Texas and Rhonda Bell and husband John of Oregon; sister Nedra Johnson and family in Nebraska; sister-in-law Pauline Breneman and family in Kansas; five grandchildren, Lawrence Howell, BeLinda Shirley; KaSandra Verett and husband Don of Texas; Jacob Bell and wife Jaime of Colorado; Clinton Bell and wife Christina of Washington; six great-grandchildren: Julia and Jessica Burich; Byron and Jacob Verett; and Zane and Henry Shirley of Texas. He is also survived by sister-in-law Edna Carter, husband Ron and niece Ruth Skaggs of Kalispell; nephew Don Tomfohr, wife Jan and their families in Oregon; and nephew Cory Baker.

There will be no services at this time. The family will gather this summer.

I’m here to say that Rex really was as he is described in the obit above. The Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel auctions everywhere are full of “Rex’s Bull” and “Iola’s gopher,” among the bronzes commissioned by them from Bob Scriver. They also bought many of the big rodeo pieces and bequeathed them to the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame. Bobscriver.com & rockymountainbronze.com and http://www.jnbvideo.com/rmb/index.html will lead you to the Breneman’s nephew’s websites about the Brenemans and their collections.

I sent my biography of Bob Scriver (“Bronze Inside & Out”) to Rex and Iola just in time for him to read it before he died. He said I did a good job and one that needed to be done. From Rex that’s high praise. He was quite a guy.

TOURIST TRADE AMONG THE BLACKFEET

2009-08-23T15:27:00.000-06:00

Every year the School of Journalism at the University of Montana in Missoula does a newspaper insert containing stories about Montana Indian reservations. In previous years I’ve responded with letters -- this is the first time I’ve been asked for ideas beforehand. My reporter is someone named Vicki.

Where to start? First, Bob Scriver never did "Indian art" and was not part of that world. His museum was about animals though he often made sculpture about Blackfeet as well as animals, family members, and commissioned portrait busts. He employed maybe four or five Blackfeet families over decades, but they didn't do "Indian art." They helped with the taxidermy and the sculpture, both, as well as building and maintaining the ranch over towards the Rockies. Another group was paid to pose for sculpture. Bob always meant his museum to complement the Museum of the Plains Indian, not to challenge it.

It may surprise some that the categories of "Indian art" and "Cowboy art" are quite distinct with customer bases that are often quite different. “Indian art” is often abstract and always based in the Southwest, maybe in Santa Fe where there is a school that gathers young people. “Cowboy art” as it exists in Montana is dominated by the example of Charlie Russell, who was always realistic and mostly self-daught.

BUT Bob was raised among the Blackfeet (born in the house where Leland Ground now runs EagleCalf Medical Supplies, next to Cuts Wood School.) Most of the people he knew were Blackfeet and he was always friends with Claude Schaffer, Tom and Alice Kehoe, John Ewers, and Raymon Gonyea, the anthropologists at the Museum of the Plains Indian. (Gonyea is Indian, but not Blackfeet. He's now at the Eiteljorg.)

In Browning the Museum of the Plains Indian was ALWAYS the main museum from the time it was formed in the 1940's. It was seriously damaged in the Big Flood of 1965 and so were many of the materials stored in the basement which was flooded. The damage has never really been addressed and this information is suppressed. The displays were never changed and were not originally meant to be: they were supposed to be a “library” for craft workers and one wing held the work room. That room was run for many years by Jackie Parsons, now the head of the Montana Arts Council. She is Blackfeet. It’s a bit of a mystery why that system came apart.

At the height of the “Red Power” movement when anthropologists were no longer directing operations, all the files in the archives that had to do with white people were taken to the dump. That included white artists like Russell. Not long ago a Ph.D. candidate went with her professor to visit the library but was prevented from entering because she was Blackfeet. The white professor was admitted. It was another of those Simple Simon reversals that reservations are prone to perform, doing the opposite of something that got them in trouble but without understanding why. The Museum is owned by the Craft Board, which is a subsidiary of the BIA. They are much less powerful now and largely unfunded. They would like to give the museum to the Tribe, which cannot afford to maintain it.

Another blunder was an “upgrading” of some of the exhibited materials, mainly the clothing. In doing cleaning, repair, and replacement, the value of antiquity was lost. But this sort of issue is not a matter for tourists to think about. They probably didn’t know the difference. The local people who did the work thought they looked better and, of course, they made a little money.

The feeling is that tourists might not be stopping in Browning because Bob is gone and his museum has been obliterated, now existing as the Blackfeet Heritage Center. I’m not sure how many of Bob’s art customers even came to Browning. Certainly, they were not tourists if they already knew about Bob’s work. “Tourists” were people who happened by and came in out of curiosity. Once they walked through the front door, we worked very hard to get them to buy an admission to the museum. Many turned on their heel and left. Few could have afforded a bronze if they had wanted to.

The suggestion was made that Bob’s bronze customers were famous people who came from Europe because they loved Indians, but I don’t think so. Scriver customers mostly belonged to the people served by the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel, a network of auctions, institutions, and galleries -- people who swarm the CM Russell Auction every March. Very few Indians attend or participate in that Auction. Many of Bob’s customers were Montana folks and almost all were white and American. America patriotism, especially for Republicans, links far more strongly to “cowboy art” than to Indians, unless the subject is the Prairie Clearances and the resulting genocide by cavalry, where some white people weirdly identify with the victims AND the soldiers.

Indians have made it a point to preserve their own identities and to protest against governmental domination. It is said that many Europeans, particularly Germans, come to Browning for the culture and art. The Germans and French are very aware of the NA American genocide and still insist on the idea of the Vanishing Indian, though they’ve stopped vanishing! Euros want relics, they want 19th century sights (tipi villages), and so on. Darrell Norman’s operation capitalizes on that. His wife is German. Adolph Hungry Wolf actually LIVES that.

Vicki says that a survey in 1995 on behalf of the Montana Arts Council verified over 300 traditional artists practicing beautiful work on the Blackfeet reservation. She asks, “Why isn't it a draw for economic development?” It’s very hard to interface between producers and consumers because the producers tend to be free-lance individuals working out of their homes, when they have time, an idea and the right materials. The consumers come through during a ten week period in summer and there is no real “marketplace.” Producers tend to need money as they go, so they don’t stockpile for the summer.

But it’s possible to follow the Pow-wow circuit, which is a bigger market and one that grows constantly as more NA people themselves become prosperous enough to be good customers. Artists who are good enough to go to the annual Santa Fe annual fair can really clean up.

Also, people really don’t know how to evaluate Indian work and tend to buy “trinkets,” that is, beaded barrettes and the like. If people do major, sophisticated, expensive artifacts, they get a lot more money, but have to find some other way to pay the bills in between. Those who appreciate high-end authentic artifact reproductions are not usually tourists but are more likely to work through brokers. Responding to the need for small popular items, a class of pan-tribal objects has developed, like dream-catchers or rearview mirror fetishes that include feathers and crystals. The big seller at this spring’s Indian Art Show, a separate and very nice art show at the Civic Center during the Russell Auction, was dream catchers with a wee basketball at the center!

Vicki bravely asks a painful question: “Are people afraid to stop on a reservation?” The answer is also painful: people are always afraid to stop. This was especially true when there was polio on the reservation in the Fifties (before I came) and after Wounded Knee II when the image of Indians changed drastically. I’m not afraid of street “winoes” because I know most of them (might’ve been their English teacher!) but tourists can’t tell. Anyway, they can see Glacier Park in the distance. The highway looks a little tough these days. No white money comes in from outside because there are no particular advantages for white merchants-- sometimes penalties. There is a LOT of risky traffic on the main streets, esp. in summer, because local people spend so much time cruising. Gas prices may fix that.

Indians want two mutually exclusive things at once: they want everyone to come around and love them and celebrate them, but they also want to appear potent and connected to the 19th century warrior culture. If you look at Robert Hall’s “Rez Dogs” video (created in Missoula as part of a project), you’ll see the full spectrum from the spitting contempt of the first wino to the expansive hospitality of the one at the end. (It might still be on YouTube.)

The focus gets lost. First it’s artifacts, then it’s modern art, then it’s dinosaurs, then it’s a casino, then it’s environmental studies. As leadership shifts around and the media change the subject, everyone hares off to the next idea instead of concentrating on one thing until it works. Successes like the Scriver Studio or Darrell Norman’s camp and gallery, or the Blackfeet Trading Post happen because of a near monomania over a period of years, maybe decades. Too many people want instant results. They have a deep conviction that there is a magic answer and a terrible vulnerability to the possibility that they just aren’t good enough. What wins is a lot of preparation, steady work at the project, and the ability to congratulate oneself over small but real successes.

SHADOW COYOTES OF THE COWBOY ART CARTEL

2009-08-23T15:25:00.000-06:00

I’ve been known to refer to the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel, by which I mean the loose network of galleries, institutions, dealers, slick magazines, auctions and, of course, actual cowboy artists who turn out an avalanche of work, not always about cowboys but always in the West. Landscape art, Native American art, coastal art (both California and Pacific Northwest) tend to separate themselves out. But cowboy and Indian artifacts are often associated, if only because the artists themselves buy them to use in paintings. The other thing the artists buy, without talking about it, is old-time glass negatives of authentic scenes in the West taken by roving photographers with dark rooms in converted wagons. Often these early photos are copied exactly, but not attributed.

What makes dealers in Western art a “cartel”? This is from Wikipedia: A cartel is a formal (explicit) agreement among firms. Cartels usually occur in an oligopolistic industry, where there are a small number of sellers and usually involve homogeneous products. Cartel members may agree on such matters as price fixing, total industry output, market shares, allocation of customers, allocation of territories, bid rigging, establishment of common sales agencies, and the division of profits or combination of these. The aim of such collusion is to increase individual member's profits by reducing competition. Competition laws forbid cartels. Identifying and breaking up cartels is an important part of the competition policy in most countries, although proving the existence of a cartel is rarely easy, as firms are usually not so careless as to put agreements to collude on paper.

It seems easy to understand that even so innocent an organization as the Cowboy Artists of America is a kind of cartel -- an ARTel, if you like. People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776. By grouping themselves, and particularly by affiliating with the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, an affiliation that broke when Dean Krakel began to try to direct the group, the CAA became a strong advantage. Belonging to this group gave a cowboy artist assurance of first class exhibits, friendships with people who had been in the business a long time, access to the A-list of customers and a certain floor on their prices. The original purpose was friendship and support, but those original founders are all dead now.

Historical museums, which often include art and paraphenalia collections, also form a loose network of professionals who guide their boards to decisions about acquisition and de-accessing -- that is, the buying and selling of materials. Even art boards are notoriously naive and historical society boards are usually drawn from lay people with no formal background in history. Since professional directors “curate” each other’s collections and write books about them, the circle becomes rather tight, even tighter when they control key publishers. Most ordinary collectors are blithely unaware of such arrangements, though key people are part of the cartel. They cannot be named without tripping a lawsuit.

Outside the official or covert circle (since cartels are not legally any more respectable than predatory money-lending) is another shadow group, MUCH more secretive, not a cartel but in symbiosis with them. At one time they were “boot-leggers,” a term which refers to what is sold out of the “boot” or trunk of a car -- often liquor, but sometimes other illicit or semi-respectable materials: art that MIGHT be by Charlie Russell, Indian artifacts that were PROBABLY acquired by legal means, old-time paraphenalia sucked up from tiny municipal museums or private collections.

In the Sixties they stopped at the Scriver Studio all the time, hoping for a little action. Sometimes Bob traded something -- he was a fur buyer and the whole business of dickering over price appealed to him. He particularly liked to trade sculpture for paraphenalia. Ace Powell always had something to trade. A few of these roving dealers were relatively honest, many were occasionally honest, and some liked making a profit off someone unawares more than anything else. They were usually male, sometimes gay which gave them a motive for staying on the move, and shuttled far and wide around the West. Because there was no Internet yet, they were human eBays, driving on cheap gas and living in cheap hotels. The advantage was that people didn’t find out what they’d really acquired or lost until quite a while later when maybe a more convincing and certified expert stopped through.

In recent years a few of these people have been caught. John Flaherty, who sold Bob the gun collections and antique mountie uniform collection which were included in the so-called “million-dollar Scriver artifact collection”, blundered when he tried to sell Sun Dance Natoas headdresses to the grandsons of the proper owners, who recognized them, and he compounded the error because he had transported a boy across the Canadian border for purposes hard to explain. He was arrested on re-entry to the US and I’m told he died in jail.

This is not unlike the LA gallery that tried to sell a Seltzer painting as a Russell original and was tripped up when Seltzer’s grandson identified it properly, documenting with his archives. Brazenly, they tried to force the grandson, also an artist, to identify the painting incorrectly by suing him for the loss of value. The difference was exactly a zero added to the price -- from $10,000 to $100,000. The painting had been sold and resold several times between unknown parties, one of whom had neatly cut off the bottom of the painting containing Seltzer’s signature.

The most recent coyote is James Lyman Brubaker who has pled guilty in federal court. He is in jail until September 15, when he will be sentenced. His crime was quite literally “cutting edge.” He was razoring historical maps and illustrations out of valuable books in libraries and selling them on eBay, the modern way to bootleg. “BOOKlegging,” you might say. But he is well-known around the Blackfeet as someone to whom one can fence or sell dubiously acquired artifacts, some of which were found in his home in Great Falls.

There are more of these shadow coyotes out there, but they are aging. When the Russell Auction happens in March, another motel sponsors rooms where many of these folks quietly sell both what is spread out on desks and beds and what is perhaps still in a suitcase until the buyer is confirmed as discrete. Many collectors now find it easier to cruise auctions on the Internet through digital catalogues and make their bids via telephone or text messaging. Occasionally, I get requests from purchasers to visit a pre-auction art work and give an opinion about its authenticity, since the actual buyer can’t see the physical object well-enough in the catalogue. Not even the back of a painting, which is often revelatory.

It’s a frontier phenomenon. The West has always been pawnshop heaven, a part of the world where people spend big when they have money, and take a loss when they have to -- which happens rather often in the West. It’s part of the on-going gambling game, the big Stick Game or Hand Game that Native peoples have always played. (Poker was more popular in cowboy saloons.) But librarians don’t like it one bit and historians shouldn’t either.

HORSEMEN, HIGH UP

2009-08-23T15:22:00.000-06:00

HORSEMEN, HIGH UP

I have no real academic art training, so in this field I’d have to be classified as an autodidact or amateur -- maybe both. If, as my dictionary suggests, being an aficionado means being an “avid follower or fan, as of a sport or activity, a devotee,” then I’m not an aficionado though many Scriver customers were exactly that. They didn’t look at the actual work so much as they looked at the other collectors and the value of what they collected. Usually aficionados stick to one genre or category -- in this case it was Western art.

For a long time Western art was below the radar, not quite “real” art -- for kids and the naive. This seems to be because from the time the Parisian “Roman block casting” (think Rodin) replaced marble as the monumental media of choice, Paris naturally was the center of that particular medium. The “Beau Arts” school of painting and sculpture was the pinnacle of sophistication and desirability.

Then it was displaced when war brought so many sophisticated and experimenting “modern” artists to New York City where Abstract Expressionism and other vigorous but less accessible schools of work came to dominate the media. “Real” art was Picasso and Pollock.

The Sculpture Review, which is published by the National Sculpture Society, posted itself on the boundary to defend representational art throughout human history and they’ve done an exemplary job. Bob Scriver was burstingly proud of being a member of the Society. It’s the one magazine I make sure to subscribe to when I’m out of reach of libraries that carry it. Here’s the newest issue.

Each issue has a theme, which for this one is restoration, cleaning, reconstruction and even copying in the interest of recapturing the original. The story keys off the Elgin Marbles, the friezes around the eaves of the Parthenon, shattered but recovered and sort of jigsawed back together in a new museum next to the actual Parthenon in a frame that preserves the gaps as well as the fragments. In another famous example, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the statue was in 118 pieces which were re-situated where they ought to be and then a replica was made that restored the missing parts according to the best guesses. Only one wing survived, so it was copied in obverse for the second wing. The head was lost.

The latest trick in bronze cleaning and restoration, just in time to save some of the Beau Arts bronze monuments -- so familiar and dear to so many of us -- is lasers to remove corrosion. I argue that these are the true precursors of “Western” art, celebrating brave men and valiant horses in action. It’s the context that I tried to recapture for Bob Scriver’s work, though his subject matter was usually local to Blackfeet country.

This is a detail from “The Virginia State Memorial” by Frederick William Sievers (1872-1966) . It’s a figure from action clusters at the bottom of the forty foot column that supports a serene officer on his horse. The monument is at Gettysburg. Sievers was educated at the Academie Julian in Paris, part of the Beaux Arts context. What I love about Sculpture Review is that you’re never in doubt about who the sculptor was, so you can do a bit of research. I’d love to find out who his model was. It seems to be the same man most of the time and he has a truly noble face.

What I love most about Sievers’ work is a quality hard to describe: just enough evidence of the clay work -- esp. that brass serrated loop tool or the curled steel hook in several sizes that pares away clay, leaving subtle tooth lines that somehow make the sculpture realer than real -- something like fine brushwork in a painting by Sargent. With Rodin it was his finger marks in long lines clear enough to imagine the sculptor’s strong hands. For me, one of the best parts of fine sculpture is the strong kinesthetic empathy I can feel, as though I had my hands on the clay myself. Look at the clothing and hair, how real they are and yet “artistic.” No need to make a choice between the two qualities.

But I started out to talk about this issue of Sculpture Review. I love it in part because I’m a snob and like knowing about these fine public bronzes that no one “collects.” Of course, all snobs love anything Parisian and I value the French influence on America, which is why I love Jefferson (among other reasons).

I also like this issue because I understand the “hands on” things about bronze like patining or molding or, indeed, restoration. Modern Art Foundry in New York City, which was Bob’s main foundry other than his own, was one of the leaders in alerting the public to the danger threatening these hundred year and two hundred year old works, esp. in these times of acid rain.

In short, my snob’s refuge from the aficionado-overrun Western art world has always been the National Sculpture Society and Sculpture Review. Therefore it was a shock to open this issue and find a Vogue or Vanity Fair-style whole-page snaphot layout featuring a bunch of aficionados and collectors Western Art-style! An invasion from the pop mags called “Southwest Art” and “Art of the West”!!?? I mean, they’re fine and I read them, but when I was with Bob, cowboy artists were sort of an oxymoron. Now they’ve evidently not just joined the mainstream but have become the cash cows, as exemplified by a Herb Mignery corny cartoon joke about where the grass is greener. Full-page, no less.

What does it mean? There’s not much text. Most of the photos include sculptors. In fact, as I look closer I see that there are few aficionados and collectors after all, so this is still a gathering of true artists -- it just happens to be in Loveland, Colorado, with a cowboy band. Nothing wrong with that! They all seem to be having a good time.

I suppose that when it comes to sculptors, as with their works, what doesn’t stay open to new trends will stagnate and die, but what lets go of the old raison d’etre will become something else, which is also an obliteration. This new phenomenon seems to be an energizing force, so how can I object? After all, they bring their own horses.

WHEELER-DEALERS

2009-08-23T15:20:00.000-06:00

Friday, March 20, 2009
WHEELER-DEALERS
My movie this week included “Country Matters” which is a compendium of dramatized English short stories from the Edwardian times. One of them was called “The Higgler,” which is their word for a man who goes around the country with a wagon, buying small things low and reselling them somewhere else for a higher price. Eggs, produce, pans and the like. There are art higglers in Great Falls today as the CM Russell Museum benefit auction that the Ad Club puts on each year begins. Satellite shows are also open. Most people operate out of motel rooms, but some use RV’s or car trunks or even, in the case of monumental sculpture, flatbed trucks, which can be rather startling when encountered in traffic.

In the old days, by which I mean the Sixties which I suppose could be called the JKF times, the wheeler-dealers were still cruising the Eisenhower highway network to search the country for art bargains and then sell them as great treasures elsewhere. Sure enough, in those years original Russells were still being found stored in attics and chicken houses across the high prairie. One could buy an old book in a junk store and shake out an illustrated letter. Not many people got rich but some did well enough to keep going. Certainly, it’s how Dick Flood got his start.

The higgler wheeler-dealers of the last half of the twentieth century are a little thin in the ground now. Instead they use computers. But some have galleries. A few, knowing there are rumors about them and famous swindles that they made, have come to self-proclaiming their wheeler-dealer status. Others are disguised as patrons who pretend to be helping the alcoholic or improvident artists from whom they buy, later inflating their reputations. Running art through an auction is a good way to attract attention, even if quietly buying it back through a front is the main way to establish a high selling price.

We used to think of gallery owners, publishers, and other impresarios as people who knew quality plus a formidable amount of art history and who were prepared to see potential in beginners or to find quiet rural geniuses. That was back in the days when professionals, like doctors and lawyers, were seen as “professing” something and to self-monitor for ethics. Nowadays, of course, the waves of greed have transformed them into profit-meisters whose high pay makes them able to accumulate the capital to play games with people’s lives, though they really rather prefer them dead. And they like the artists to fit into a “brand” expectation on the part of the buyers.

For their part the bourgeoisie are likely to be buying to be part of the crowd, to do the “in” thing, to be able to say to their friends, “Oh, I picked up a bluhbluhbluh for a real bargain price!” Also, like high school kids, they love the party atmosphere of auctions and high brow (they think) shopping in galleries. Around here, of course, the Western art has the huge advantage of being subject matter that has been experienced by many people who then buy portrayals that remind them of their own lives. Neither buyer nor seller is likely to have studied much about art and their “eye” these days is mostly taught by movies and television.

But then, we didn’t know a lot back in the Sixties either. Ace and Bob used to muse over what made a really “good” painting. Ace kidded about how a painting on stretched canvas was worth more than one painted on canvasboard, but then there were the gimmicks of a painting by Charlie on a windowshade or a silk petticoat that belonged to winkwink. Did using a lot of different colors mean that the painting was worth more money? Was an oil painting worth more than a watercolor? Surely it was worth more than a print? (This was before giclée prints made fortunes for some artists.) Was it more valuable if an artist taught himself, thus avoiding the contamination of scholars and professors, or was it better to have gone to prestigious schools? (Which WERE they? We knew about the Famous Artists correspondence courses.)

Would it be better to own a painting that had actually appeared on a calendar? Calendars and magazines were the art most people knew and they weren’t surprised when suddenly those same people turned up as high-dollar easel painters in the Western mode. Now that so many have eyes educated by animation, a surprising number of Western artists come from Disney. Among the most skillful and accepted painters are Chinese artists, but people here still aren’t quite sure about Native American painters who paint abstractly. We don’t know how to look at them. How do we know what they’re “about?”

Sculpture is both easier and harder. Wood carving is easy, though many of the old timers used a lathe-type machine to make multiple bears and mountain goats. After all, they finished them by hand. Marble is like that, too. Bronze casting baffles people, though not many still believe that they are whittled out of metal. We’ve seen too many photos of Charlie Russell with clay or beeswax in his hands. But many still believe that the modeled product is somehow “bronzed” like electroplated baby shoes.

If you say “mold,” people see in their heads a machine, though old-fashioned French or Roman block investment is pretty much back-bending labor. Modern ceramic shell casting is far more industrial, cheaper, faster, less skill-demanding, much better suited to mass production -- natural enough since it was developed to cast parts for space-age rockets in military applications. All the little signs of excellence in casting and patining metal are harder to learn.

The three main categories of Scriver bronzes for sale might be labeled white, black and gray. The “white market” bronzes are those cast in his lifetime in his own foundry in Browning with his skilled Blackfeet crew (plus me). They were sold with a certificate of authenticity showing the limits of the edition and that was registered in a book that the Montana Historical Society refuses to search for in his estate, thus crippling estimates of value. But very few of them go through auctions anyway.

The black market bronzes are flatly illegal castings, often originating in the Flathead Valley. They are invariably ceramic shell castings and usually have lousy patinas, often looking like paint instead of the subtle depths of a true patina.

The gray market castings come from sculptures that were commissioned by entrepreneurs, a new kind of wheeler-dealer, who suggested subjects, bought them WITH the copyright, set their own edition numbers (often as high as a hundred copies) cast them through some Montana ceramic-shell foundry, and sold them through their own galleries. Now they show up at all the auctions and on eBay. When Bob died ten years ago, his will specified that all molds should be destroyed. But he didn’t own the molds that belonged to these speculators and most of them didn’t have warehouses to store them, so they remained with foundries that later dispersed. No one knows where they went then, or even whether they still exist. It’s hard to maintain even today’s durable molds in prime condition.

A whole new field of expertise has developed -- not in higgling -- but in tracking the activities of the wheeler-dealers and how they parlayed opportunism into high dollar SW galleries. (I can’t think of any who ended up in New York.) There are books, some of them autobiographical. We need some good novels. I’ll get right on it!

DIORAMA: Grizzly, Wolverine, Eagle

2008-10-22T21:34:00.001-06:00

GRIZZLY BEAR

As I remember, this was the first of the diorama animals that Bob made. He had a real feel for the “real bears,” as the Blackfeet called them to distinguish them from black bears or “nothing bears.” In Bob’s youth he hunted grizzlies, but at the time I knew him he was fifty and only a meat hunter. No more trophies. Instead he “was” the bear and prowled around the living room on all fours, searching under sofa cushions, in between working on his figurine.

The griz is way up in the mountains, so far up that an eagle is flying past lower than this ridge, and digging up a marmot, who defiantly sticks his head out. A wolverine is over to the right. This may be another Les Peters background -- hard to tell from only a picture of the diorama. Bob tried to imitate Les’ style and colors, with about 80% success.

FRANCIS PAUL MASA Obituary

2008-10-12T10:31:00.002-06:00

FRANCIS PAUL MASA (From the Great Falls Tribune)

KALISPELL -- Korean War veteran Francis Paul Masa, 80, of Kalispell, known as “Paul Masa,” a Western art dealer, died of natural causes Friday at his home in Kalispell.

Francis Paul Masa passed away peacefully at his home on Friday, October 10, 2008, surrounded by his family. Paul was born April 22, 1928, in Baker, MT, the son of Frank and Elisabeth (Sonsalla) Masa. He has two younger brothers, John and Tom Masa. Paul grew up during the Great Depression on a family farm near Marmath, N.D. and attended local schools.

Paul said, “My dad was a hard worker. I learned to work. He gave me the best education I ever got, hard work.” In his pursuit of “chasing the dollar,” he worked various positions in his life. He was a determined, strong-willed, loving man. He was a generous benefactor to many local groups and charitable causes. Paul’s work ethic carried him through life until his final days.

As a young man, he worked at the family farm and ranch. He also worked for neighbors driving tractors. Finally, at age 19, he drove his first car. Paul then worked various jobs, including on the railroad, until he was drafted to the United States Army in 1950, from Marmarth, N.D. He served in the Korean War as a mortar gunner. While in Korea, he was awarded the Bronze Star medal for unhesitant devotion to duty, tireless efforts and aggressive initiative. He contributed immeasurably to the successful accomplishment of his unit’s missions and reflects great credit on himself and the United States infantry. Paul willingly worked excessively long and arduous hours without proper food or rest under enemy fire to lend support to the infantry units in the field and to help accomplish the many other missions.

Upon his discharge he worked jobs in farming and construction. He then went to work for Montana Dakota Utility as the plant manager, and worked an additional part-time job as a bartender in Baker. There he met his wfie, Doris, at a New Year’s Dance. Paul and Doris were married in Baker on December 13, 1958. Paul and Doris leased a bar in Baker for four years.

After vacationing in the Kalispell area, Paul and Doris decided to make Kalispell, MT., their home, purchasing the Log Cabin Bar. Paul began to sell art on the side. Paul and Doris ran a successful business for more than 19 years in Kalispell. Paul then pursued his side business as a Western art dealer, full time.

Paul and Doris bought, sold and traded art and bronzes from 1953 until his death. This was Paul’s business, but also his passion. He loved every minute of wheeling and dealing when selling art with his friends and colleagues. His upbringing and belief in work kept him an active businessman. He attended more than 40 auctions in Great Falls, MT. Paul was well-known and leaves many dear family, friends and business associates behind.

Paul received many awards. In 2004 he was the winner of the “Bob Scriver Bronze Award” for his outstanding contributions to the C.M. Russell Auction and the field of Western art. In 2007 he was awarded “The Mentor Award” recognizing him as one of the most knowledgeable and informed art dealers operating in the Western United States. In this capacity he has seen fit to share his art and business expertise with others in the field.

Paul and Doris enjoyed many fishing trips together as avid fishers, including trips to Alaska for salmon. Paul greatly enjoyed spending time with his family. He hosted an annual Fourth of July party at the lake and was the grillmaster, if you like a rare burger.

Paul is survived by his wife of 50 years, Doris Masa; his children, grandchildren, and two brothers.

Comment by me would be tasteless at this time, but I’ll point out that Bob Scriver had nothing to do with choosing the recipient of the Scriver Bronze Skull -- in fact, had been dead for five years at the time it was given to Masa by the Ad Club.

STUDY FOR THE HEAD OF CHRIST by BOB SCRIVER

2008-10-10T13:04:00.002-06:00

This bust was made as a study for the small corpus Bob was commissioned to make a year before his daughter died, 1965, and which became connected with that loss.

The model is Maurice Chaillot, brother to Bob’s second wife, Jeanette Caouette whom he married in Edmonton just at the end of WWII. Maurice was much younger, a “surprise” baby late in his mother’s life. Highly educated at a Jesuit boarding school, he was a professor of French for many years and is now retired to a small Canadian paradise with an historic log cabin. He is himself a fine painter and photographer.

This portrait is “romantic” in style. Marks of Bob’s fingers are dominant rather than tool marks or the absence of any marks. This is almost impressionistic. It is classical in the sense that most classical busts have no draperies or embellishments, and yet it is romantic in its asymmetry and emotion. Mrs. John Walters, who commissioned the small corpus but not the bust, specifically wanted Jesus to be still alive, looking to the heavens and crying out, “Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me.”

Bob also made a bust of Maurice in a more formal style, portraying him as himself, still without collar or drapery but in a more detailed and serene sort of way. Maurice was given a copy of this bust, but kept in the custody of his sister, it was sold by mistake while she was in the hospital. Someone in the LA area owns a remarkable portrait by Bob Scriver. It was unfinished: white plaster.

So far as I knew, few of either busts were ever sold to customers and only one of each was cast in bronze. But then Carroll College disclosed that they had a casting of the rough study. The Montana Historical Society ought to have both castings.

"PAYWINDOW" by BOB SCRIVER

2008-10-10T11:46:00.003-06:00

This Bob Scriver bronze is part of his rodeo series which consists of one dynamic and romantically executed portrait of each event, plus a more classically (detailed) portrait of the animal in question, but at rest -- simply standing. The animals are the key.

in this piece the composition and challenges of bronze-casting are relevant. This “design” is an explosion, which Scriver often uses in action pieces -- diagonal arcs fly out from a center. The technical challenge is the small base of metal (one horse leg) holding up a large body, meaning the body must be hollow and thin, while the leg itself is solid and of high-quality bronze with no honeycombing or bubbles. This can be tested by sharply rapping and listening for the sound.

“Paywindow” -- which means a bucking horse so vigorous that the rider is bound to score high if he can stay on -- portrays bareback riding, which is done on a horse with no saddle but a cinch around its flanks to make it buck. The cinch is padded with sheepskin but nevertheless is a matter of worry to humane society members. Other than that, the horse wears a halter -- no bit -- and the rider has only a handhold to keep him on -- no saddle. The two parallel “rough-stock” events are saddle bronc riding, and bull-riding where the bull has the added aggravation of clanking cowbells hung on the cinch around its flanks. Aside from being huge and snaky, bulls are considered harder and more dangerous to ride because they will attack the rider once he’s on the ground. Horses occasionally do the same thing, with front feet since they have no horns. On the other hand, many bulls and horses become accustomed to “show biz” and are quite mellow when not in the arena.

This particular photograph is excellent and shows the varied green patina that Scriver worked hard to achieve, using as a model a Barye casting made in Paris It also reveals the balletic quality of the two partners in the event.

For more detail, consult Scriver’s self-published book, “An Honest Try.” The book shows each piece in black and white against a rodeo setting.

COWBOY ART: IS ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTIN' ?

2008-09-09T13:40:00.001-06:00

Cultural phenomena go in huge arcs, decades long, so that students get out-of-phase with their teachers, performances get out-of-phase with their audiences, and art gets out-of-phase with public taste. There are two “long arcs” that I’m not sorry to see go on the down curve, one is the abstract movement of the first part of the last century, all those intellectual exercises in cubism and targets and Campbell’s soup cans -- though I have some favorites among them -- and the other is the outrageous career of Damien Hirst and his pickled animals, which no one dared to criticize until recently an Aussie critic (they’re still “cowboys,” unlike the metrofication of Americans) said they were “tacky.”

The new arc seems to be lifting up representational art, some of which had been reduced to the level of wallpaper in many institutions throughout the country. Not only can you tell what it is, the subject matter is often uplifting, even celebratory of the nation. Coinciding with this is a sudden realization that since real estate and the stock market have become shaky investments, art is looking pretty good. In fact, some paintings by newly admired artists have become so potentially valuable that the owning institutions have been unable to resist the temptation to sell them.

So what impact has this had on cowboy art? The Western art mags have gotten a little thinner and have included more art that is still certainly “Western” but about landscape, still-life or iconic works as well as the man on a horse with a rope. Some major corporations have sold off their collections, for instance, the 7-11 photos of the West. It’s nice to see familiar CAA artist’s names listed in the catalogues of Sotheby’s rather than the ghettoized but enormously successful annual Western auctions, and the value of the big names is holding if not increasing: Russell, Moran and so on.

At the shows in the institutions the art is increasingly skillful. One surprising factor has been immigrating Chinese artists, classically trained and seeing the terrain with new eyes. Another has been the influx to the field of cartoonists, most often the people who invented and replicated the backgrounds now drawn by computers. They are also skilled and have a kind of romantic aesthetic that goes well with Western subject matter. I hadn’t realized how many there were until I read the bios in the latest Cowboy Artists of America catalogue. I sometimes wonder whether the action isn’t with the teachers of wannabe artists, rather like the teachers of wannabe writers.

The CAA, which now often drops the second A, has had its troubles with the “arc” because of aging membership. The original group was knitted together both through friendship and from loyalty to their career-changing impact on the fortunes of cowboy artists. By joining with Dean Krakel and the Cowboy Hall of Fame, they achieved “critical mass” as a movement and respectability for pictures that appealed to a lot of rough-hewn shirt-sleeve millionaire buyers who needed to show they had “culture.” Now the founders are much outnumbered by a second and third generation of artists -- some of them literally the sons (no daughters) of the founders -- and far more competitive with each other. (Dean Krakel has been gone a while and the Cowboy Hall of Fame has changed its name again.)

Experts used to argue that Remington’s art was a better investment than stocks and bonds and had a little graph to show why. But that was before the SE Asian artisans discovered that they could eyeball any statuary and create cheap equivalents that the ordinary citizen could never distinguish from the originals. A new technology uses lasers to create a replica of any three-dimensional object, including a person, so now we’re back to the kind of accusations Rodin encountered when he created “The Age of Bronze” and was accused of simply casting his model from molds applied to his body. The tiny plastic injection toy farm animals I see at Big R are often as cunningly done as many bronzes. “Cold cast” miniatures are popular. The dime stores feature clever and fairly accurate painted animals and vignettes. And a giclee print with a few judicious paint-strokes added is for most people indistinguishable from easel art.

But probably the real key to Western art is -- as it was for most of the CAA artists -- life experience. These works appeal to people who can relate, so the success of the art is linked to people who hunt, who ride, who rope, who attend rodeos and eat beef. Thus, to some degree, the prosperity of Western art is linked to the fortunes of the Republican party. Every time I say this in front of a dealer they can hardly keep from putting a hand over my mouth. The excessive moral outrage of huggers -- whether of trees, buffalo or owls -- amounts to a form of terrorism. (Not that I disagree with the real problems -- just their methods.) At events about Western art the audience is often white-haired.

More and more, the kind of promotions that institutions like the CM Russell Museum use to build their base are programs for children, or with an interest in wildlife, or are linked with a particular lifestyle exemplified in magazines like the Big Sky Journal, based mostly on massive log, stone, plate glass, and Corten mansions in the middle of nowhere -- but a nowhere with a fine view and possibly a tennis court or ski trail. (How long this trend will continue as these people age is open to question.) Miniature art and “quick draw” events where the art is sold wet off the easel are also popular. So far I see few classes on how to tell “good art” from “bad.” Maybe it would have to be taught by some bold Aussie who isn’t afraid to bring down the wrath of artists on his or her head.

The dealers tell me that more than anything else, it is the thinning of the American middle class that affects sales. The very rich feel no constraints. The poor never bought anything but dimestore art anyway, though they might be loyal admirers of people like Charlie Russell.

In the end I think Damien Hirst’s pickled sharks are doomed -- the art reporters are saying a warehouse sale is planned. The best of the Manhattan-based abstract work will never lose its value in our lifetime because there are too many people who have taken the trouble to understand what it is about and to grow fond of it. If they pass that on to the next generation (if the experimental materials like Pollock’s housepaint and car enamel don’t just deteriorate out of existence).

I don’t think “cowboy art” -- the man on the horse with a rope -- per se will disappear. Rather it will become one figure among a whole panorama of American art. Quality will become increasingly important. The education and experience of the audience will matter. I’m very curious to see what happens to this amazing auction culture, rather like rodeo culture. Will there be on-the-spot bronze pours like rough stock events? Can’t you just imagine the searchlights sweeping over the gallery, the smoke and fireworks, the Western artists swaggering across the floor (covered in sawdust for the occasion) in chaps and Stetsons? Might work. But only for a season or so. Then back to the mantra: quality.

WHAT'S IT WORTH?

2008-08-04T09:38:00.002-06:00

Clearly in these times monetary compensation is NOT going to most artists, but rather to the great swarm of curators, directors, archivists, critics, buyer’s guides, and other managers of opinion and valuation that surround and control the artists. This is true of writers as well as painters and sculptors, though the writers now have the escape valve of blogging just as the print media has begun closing down review sections for all humanities. (This seems to accompany the closing down of humanities themselves, which are giving way to technology and the less-humanities-like sciences, with the “soft” sciences migrating over to the arts.)

Therefore, I’m going to begin positioning myself as an arts critic! After all, I’ve been watching the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel for fifty years which means about since the beginning of the current wave, long enough to have been significant changes in most everything except the actual painting. (Sculpture has taken some economically significant technical turns with aesthetic consequences.) I’m NOT going to put price tags on art nor am I going to “deal” art. Just watch and comment on others who do those things, a third circle outside the established critics, looking for uber-trends.

Recently, with real estate engulfed in floods and scandal and the stock market also submerged in scandal, some investors have looked around for a new category of acquisitions for money storage and increase. They have no interest in tulip bulbs (though ag categories like genetically altered seeds might interest some who aren’t afraid of the politics) maybe because most of these people seem to be urban. Or maybe because they don’t like to be at the mercy of weather in a time when weather in the macro-sense has become so politicized and terrifying. But art is a nice manageable sort of stuff and artists are much nicer to cultivate. (Though their wives maybe be, well, weeds. More about that in later posts.)

Several instruments of measurement of art value have popped up. David Galenson, an economist at the U of Chicago who used to specialize in colonial America (where the main criterion for the value of art was whether it were imported from England), has proposed a system like that of “valuing” research at universities. This system depends upon the scientific and academic custom at universities like U of Chicago of valuing work according to how much it is cited in subsequent professional journal articles and books. (Which is why grad students are constantly pressed to include many citations, esp. of works by their mentors, and to build their work on the cite-able concepts of their predecessors.) So Thomas Kuhn, with his definitive idea of paradigm shift, is a big winner, I’m sure, quite apart from his impact on analysis. We don’t even know who the losers of the citation competition might be, since there is no trace of them in anyone’s footnotes.

Galenson proposes that art be valued similarly by simply counting the number of times an artwork appears as an illustration or is referred to an example in published textbooks. The article to which I’m referring is by Patricia Cohen and appeared in The New York Times on August 4, 2008. She cites seventeen works of art by title in her article, all presumably top-of-the-list anyway. She also notes Galenson’s actual books for those who wish to delve further into the theories. All the works are part of the major art world in Manhattan in the first half of the Twentieth Century, a world as much rooted in Europe as Colonial “American” art, though we’re all supposed to be post-colonial now. The article ends with Mr. John Elderfield (one always refers to such persons as “Mr.”), chief curator emeritus at the Museum of Modern art, asking plaintively, “Where surrealism?”

Well, shucks, where’s cowboy art? Arthur C. Danto, art critic for The Nation, points out that art textbooks now include many more women, African-Americans, and American Indians. “The art world itself became politicized and that has affected textbooks and the illustrations.” (No need to call him “mister.” He probably doesn’t wear a bowtie either.) So now we have to consider the politics of the art, eh? Both in terms of content and in terms of the nature of the artist.

As far as that goes, where Indian art? Coming in mostly from the West side of the US, it is often surreal, abstract, inventive, mixed-media, and all the things proposed as values by the East Coast establishment (make that NORTH East Coast) except they don’t seem to have any awareness of it. In fact, awareness concentrates in the Southwest.

Consider this current cover of Southwest Art magazine:

This beautiful incised vase is by Paponee. She is not listed in Askart.com, one of the websites that monitors art auctions, but Southwest Art has a nice article about her and I daresay she’ll soon be there. Still, so far, objects like these do not show up in the big Western art auctions much.

Auctions and their monitoring websites are now largely how investors figure out the value of Western art. This is true for the big Manhattan artists as well -- everyone waits to see what the French Impressionists will bring in, often millions at Sothebys or Christies or the other major auction houses. Art work with profiles as high as Monet’s water lily paintings move around the globe and sometimes end up in Japan as the latter become ever more open to the old-concept Western world in the sense of mostly white/male/European. I have not heard of them collecting new-concept Western art in the sense of the American prairie, Southwest desert, and California impressionism. Auctions seem to be a force for globalization. Nationalism, not so much.

In the meantime, some of the “cowboy” artists are now Chinese and others (including those who were always illustrators anyway) go global in the search for pre-industrial people: Mongols, Russo-peasants, Arabs, South American Indians. Maybe in time the genre will become “global pre-industrialism.” But there is an internal movement towards early industrial nostalgia: old pickups and the like.

There appears to be a steady market for the good old-fashioned horse-and-rider, esp. if it looks a bit antique like this sample on the front of “Art of the West.”

An interesting development, parallel to the Wyeth family, is the number of generational artists. This is by John Moyers, son of William Moyers. Both are listed in www.Askart.com and are members of the Cowboy Artists of America, which now tend to use the brand CA, since they seem to be reaching out to Canada and so on. One member, Oreland Joe, is explicitly Indian, though others have Native Americans in their family trees. Oreland Joe’s stone carving is more like Paponee than Charlie Russell, who remains the point of reference for many collectors, not least because of the phenomenal increments in value. Will that trend continue? Stay tuned.

Review of "Bronze Inside and Out"

2008-08-01T15:20:00.000-06:00

BRONZE INSIDE AND OUT Review from “Alberta History”, Summer, 2008

Mary Scriver loves to write and she has chosen an ideal topic -- Bob Scriver, her late husband, a sculptor of international fame. A resident of Browning, Montana, he is particularly remembered for his bronzes of Indians, rodeo cowboys, and prominent figures, and prominent figures. Included among them is a 53 piece series of bronzes of Blackfoot culture entitled “No More Buffalo,” a 33 piece set entitled “Rodeo in Bronze,” and individual figures such as Eric Harvie of Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, rodeo star Casey Tibbs, “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Teddy Roosevelt, and others.

In this book, Mary also tells her own story, of how she came to Browning and her experiences with the Blackfoot people. She met her husband there and tells of his life and accomplishments in an engaging and literary style.

Bob was born on the Blackfeet Reservation in 1914 where his father owned a store. After a stint at teaching, he opened a taxidermy shop which grew into a foundry for his sculptures. As one who grew up with the Blackfoot, he had a keen interest in their cultures, and participated with them in their ceremonies. His love for them is reflected in his many sculptures. He also collected many artifacts, as had his father, to preserve a disappearing culture.

In 1990 he became the centre of controversy when he feared his entire Indian collection would be seized from under a newly-passed “Repatriation of Indian Artifacts Act.” To prevent this from happening, he took his collection to Canada and sold it to the Provincial Museum of Alberta for $1 million.

This whole story of Bob Scriver is a fascinating one, and a good read.

BLOGGING AT PRAIRIEMARY.BLOGSPOT.COM

2008-01-03T14:12:00.000-07:00

FOR THE LAST THREE DAYS I'VE BEEN BLOGGING SUBJECTS OF INTEREST TO READERS OF THIS BLOG ON A SISTER BLOG: www.prairiemary.blogspot.com.

I'm particularly addressing "Bronze Inside and Out: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver" which is now shipping to bookstores. It can also be ordered through Amazon.com.

Prairie Mary

THE 19TH CENTURY MUSEUM IN POST MODERN TIMES

2007-12-02T11:07:00.000-07:00

This posting begins as a post already made on www.prairiemary.blogspot.com, but continues with a few more specific questions.

WHAT IS A POST-MODERN MUSEUM?

Unintelligible as much of the theory-based post-modern culture criticism has been over the last few decades, many far-reaching questions have emerged that are quite significant in terms of Montana lives. Naturally, much of it has had to do with Native Americans, but much of it also is very relevant to European-based peoples, to say nothing of the African and Asian heritages. Many of these issues are about education or museums, which most of us probably think of as educational. Since Montana formed as the Industrial Revolution was transforming the planet, much of this material is crucial to the future.

What IS a museum? In preparing Bob Scriver’s biography, I read a number of books that examine the origins of museums and the history and development of collections. Mostly they seem to have arisen from people’s natural inclination to save things they liked or that seemed to have value. The early Popes had a room like a vault where they kept precious objects, often commissioned from outstanding artist/craftsmen or perhaps gifts from great kings and leaders. In the modern United States, objects created in crystal by someone like Steuben Glass -- gorgeous, fragile, and one-of-a-kind -- might be presented.

In the 19th century, when taxonomies were the great obsession, natural history buffs (often amateur) required extensive accumulations of insects, bird skins, eggs, and so on, all in the interest of grouping them into categories and thus discovering something about creation. This was one of the duties of Lewis and Clark. (Now, of course, all those taxonomies and “family trees” have been blown away by DNA analysis.)

In those times anomalies and freaks interested a lot of people. Bob was of a “one excellent example of each” turn of mind, probably coming from the assumptions of taxidermists with hunter clients. He was always having to shoo away people who wanted to give him albino skunks or two-headed calves for the Scriver Museum. (This museum is dispersed now.) He continued this frame of mind with the bronzes, keeping “one of each,” which is now the basis of the estate entrusted to the Montana Historical Society.

Another influence from the 19th century was the growing awareness of “the last of these.” This continues today with even more anguish as we see whole species, whole languages, entire peoples, whole life-works, disappear under the wheels of time. Rare-ness has always been a criterion for value. Museums treasure the last dodo bird, the last passenger pigeon.

At present we see a great fascination with family trees so that -- running parallel with DNA studies of inheritance -- many people are looking up their own pedigrees, the begats that brought them to this place and time and the stories of those lives. My newly discovered branch of the Welsh sister descendants brought me two new documents, one a transcription of a Christian Oklahoma homesteader family and the other a book length account complete with photos. The closer we get to the present, the easier it is to find documents such as letters -- until we get to email. The Internet, of course, has been an amazing help when things are scanned and posted.

The idea that a museum is a repository for documents and objects is a strong one with an intense emotional engine, whether or not values are shared by others. When my mother died, one of the hardest problems was finding new homes for her most prized objects: the bisque porcelain hen that had been brought intact in a pioneer wagon by burying it in a barrel of flour, the huge blown-glass bluegreen Japanese float found at the beach, a gold lustreware vase that had been saved from disaster many times. We were shocked to discover that no one wanted them, not even dealers.

19th century anthropologists collected skeletons with no particular thought for their meaning to families. 20th century accumulators stole the heads off “death house” burials with grisly disrespect. Sometimes they kept such objects secret, showing them only to their closest friends, and other times skulls rested on the back bars of taverns, grinning at the clients. Reversing this practice has been a battle for NA activists.

Family is such a deeply embedded aspect of humans that the celebration of family versus their branding as traitors and failures has dominated much of historical interpretation. Quite aside from the discomfort of homesteaders living next to the Native Americans pushed off the same land, is the on-going rivalry among families of both populations, so strong that it still affects ordinary commerce in towns. My cousin once remarked to me that the “Pinkertons” which are the branch of my maternal grandfather were not as good as the “Cochrans” which are the branch of my maternal grandmother, because the Cochrans walked to the West on the Oregon Trail -- making them tougher -- but the Pinkertons came on the train, which was somehow weaker. I pointed out that the Pinkertons came quite a bit later than the Cochrans and would be FOOLS not to take the train, since by that time there WAS one! I think he had gotten the idea partly because a Cochran ranch was honored by the state of Oregon as a “Centennial” 100-year ranch. The Pinkertons never had anything but a prune orchard that went bust. Prosperity and endurance are the pioneer criteria. Maybe they’re pretty basic to all humans.

But there ARE other issues of value. For instance, whether or not Two-Guns Whitecalf posed for Fraser when he created the buffalo nickel is a matter involving considerable prestige and people have spent hours poring through archives to figure it out definitively.

What I’m leading up to is that the Montana Historical Society, kindly accepting papers, collections, and family heirlooms for decades and decades, is bulging at the seams. Storage is so crammed as to make items impossible to locate. Staff works in a small labyrinth, elbow-to-elbow. Yet there has been little discussion of what the real defining goal of the historical society -- much less its museum which many people see as its only function -- ought to be in the future. By what principles are decisions to be made? And if there is anything that the post-modern critique insists upon, it must be a “people’s” decision, not fiats from high-status, high-power, high-dollar experts.

Is the point of an historical museum to interpret what has happened? Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is my favorite example of interpretation-based exhibits, though the Glenbow is Calgary is also outstanding. Or is it to show off the importance of an area or a people? Might it be to store information as a way of researching and developing the future?

Should it be a way of preserving valuable objects like the CM Russell paintings? Or should it be a kind of public gallery developing art in general, as the CM Russell Museum in Great Falls has become, raising questions about the relationship with private for-profit galleries? The CM Russell, which needs to build an endowment for maintenance, lately put its Couse paintings up for auction. Couse was a major SW painter of Native Americans, but the curator felt they were “outside the mission” of the museum. The Montana Historical Society owns works by de Kooning and Picasso, which would fetch a pretty penny on the current hot art market. Can these be defended as part of Montana’s heritage? Or consider the Alberta Bair ranch, stocked with fabulous European objects.

Questions abound and should not be answered by decisions already made without realizing the limitations they can impose.

Some of the issues specific to the Scriver Estate are as follows:

The records of which casting was sold to which customer have not been located by the MHS staff. Many people contact me to find out the pre-stated limit of an edition was and who bought their casting from Bob, because the provenance, especially in the case of bronzes (because the ease of making counterfeits) affects the market value. In the recent case of the Seltzer originally thought to be a CMRussell painting, provenance was a crucial element and the difference in value was tenfold.

There are more than a few duplicate bronzes in the estate. Some customers have told me that they had ordered and even paid money down on bronzes that they never received. They suspect these may be among the duplicates. But where are the records?

Because Scriver's career began with many small tourist objects and because when he made the transition to "art" bronzes rather than what he would call "modeling," and because he never threw anything away but had stored hundreds of "blanks" of these little animals, and because the MHS took these, there arises the problem of how to value them. They are unfinished, originally sold for a few dollars, but are quite charming. I'm told the intention might be to give them away as "party favors" for fund-raising banquets. One of these early pieces was bought from a local person for thousands of dollars and marketed by a private gallery as an "original Scriver." It was, but hardly the same as the later works that sold for thousands of dollars.

Scriver had some collections of his own that he acquired as investments. Aside from the NA artifacts, the Mountie uniforms and the guns, there was a collection of Fery mural-like paintings and another of John Sharp paintings of Blackfeet country. These were dispersed, sold at auction. But he told me about a collection of John Rogers plaster genre scenes, sort of Norman Rockwell scenes. See www.AskArt.com for more information, such as: The John Rogers Museum is located in New Caanan, CT. on the property of the Historical Society. It has many groups displayed in Roger's original studio and a collection of J Rogers Bronzes on display. I haven't seen this on any list, or unpacked in the Scriver Center warehouse out by the airport, or mentioned by any staff member. Was it quietly sold before the estate was transported? Or since?

Many of these troubling questions are not in the awareness of MHS Trustees. Addressing them will require some expertise. I'm told that it will also require money which the museum does not have. Even in a new building, will there be money for the staff and maintenance that's needed?

BIOGRAPHY OF BOB SCRIVER

2007-11-19T16:50:00.000-07:00

BRONZE INSIDE AND OUT: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver is now available through Amazon.com with a nice price knock-down. The book will be ready to ship in a week or so, I'm told.

Amazon also carries new and used copies of Bob Scriver's own books: the one about the rodeo series ("AN HONEST TRY"), the one about the Blackfeet series ("NO MORE BUFFALO"), and the one about the Scriver artifact collection that caused a furor when it was rumored to be worth a million dollars ("THE BLACKFEET: ARTISTS OF THE NORTHERN PLAINS").

If you asked for all books written by Scriver, you will also bring up one written by Phil Scriver which shows a photo of Bob Scriver's Fort Benton monument of Lewis, Clark, Sacajawea, and Pompey. Phil Scriver is no relation to Bob Scriver and has taken advantage of having the same name, hoping to attract attention.

CMR CATALOGUE RAISONNE SYMPOSIUM

2007-10-21T11:39:00.000-06:00

Today I posted an account of the CMR Catalogue Raisonne Symposium on my other blog: http://prairiemary.blogspot.com. It was an excellent event!

Prairie Mary

COLLECTOR-DRIVEN ART MARKETS

2007-09-28T11:17:00.000-06:00

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article01.asp?id=681

From Editorial and Commentary:
The problem with a collector-driven market

By Jane Kallir | Posted 12 July 2007

For the past century or so, the art world has been supported by four principal pillars: artists, collectors, dealers and the art-historical establishment (critics, academics, and curators). From a wider historical perspective, the latter two entities are relative newcomers. The development of art history as an academic discipline, and of public museums, dates back only to the 19th century. Only in the 20th century did dealers evolve from passive shopkeepers to pro-active impresarios, promoting the often difficult efforts of the pioneering modernists with missionary zeal. Public resistance to modernism, coupled with the pressures of international capitalism, gave new importance to dealers and museums, both of which played key roles by superintending the distribution of new art and ratifying its seriousness. At varying points in the course of the past 100 years, the weight of the art world has shifted from one of the four pillars to another. Artists made the modernist revolution; dealers recognised and supported it before academia did; in the post-war period, critics became so dominant that Tom Wolfe lampooned their influence in his 1975 book The Painted Word. And now, it seems, collectors have taken charge.

Over the long term, art-historical value is determined by consensus among all four art-world pillars. When any one of the four entities assume disproportionate power, there is a danger that this entity’s personal preferences will cloud everyone’s short-term judgement. Put bluntly, the danger of a collector-driven art world is that money will trump knowledge. Great collectors should ideally become nearly as knowledgeable as the curators and dealers who help them build their collections. But not all of today’s collectors have the passion or the time necessary to develop this depth of knowledge. Collecting, once the pursuit of a relatively small number of driven individuals, has become far more common among far more people.

This expansion of the art market, made possible by the broader dissemination of concentrated pockets of wealth and by the globalisation of art and related information, has drawn in players who do not have the focused commitment of the traditional collector. The exponential growth of the market, and the genuine gains realised by those who got in early, inevitably fuel the tendency, justifiable or not, to view art as an asset class comparable to stocks or real estate.

Art has also become the greatest common denominator in the new global social order. Today’s rich are an international elite whose members can measure their cachet by the level of VIP services given them at Art Basel and Art Basel/Miami Beach. Anointed by the glamour that today attends the public display of great wealth, the art world has acquired the patina of trendiness that was formerly exclusive to the entertainment and fashion industries. The contemporary focus on trendiness and investment potential, each of which operates on a relatively short timeline, obscures the fact that lasting value in art accrues in the course of generations.

The corollary to a collector-driven art world is that the canon of ostensibly great artists is being largely determined by market forces. The huge prices that have been achieved lately at the top of the market are the result not only of new concentrations of wealth, but of the fact that many people are pursuing the same handful of artists and works of art. Therefore the drop-off from the peak can be steep, becalming the middle market and consigning lesser works and lesser artists to also-ran status.

This is a market with a voracious appetite for alleged masterpieces, and little patience for historical or developmental nuances. It encourages superficiality: rather than collecting a single artist or group of artists in depth, collectors now often prefer to amass scattered masterworks: here a Matisse, there a Picasso, and then perhaps a Schiele. In an overheated environment, the art-historical establishment often finds itself chasing rather than guiding the market. The press must keep up with the latest trends, and coverage of social events and record prices often takes precedence over quiet critical reflection. Museums need the support of trustees, but the most powerful collectors no longer need the imprimatur of an existing museum; they can simply open their own.

If it sometimes seems that the art-historical establishment is missing in action, this is in part because, while the market has been aggressively constructing a new canon, academia has been busy deconstructing the old one. For several decades now, scholars have generally agreed that the white, male, Eurocentric canon that traditionally dominated Western art evolved from historical biases that are no longer morally or intellectually justifiable. Although this change in orientation has literally opened up a whole new world of aesthetic possibilities, it has discouraged academics from making qualitative judgements. Scholarship in areas that are useful to the marketplace, such as provenance and authenticity, has flourished, but overall connoisseurship has declined. Similarly, market pressures push dealers to become generalists, showcasing a hodge-podge of high-ticket items instead of specialising as they formerly did. Auctioneers, operating within a timeframe that seldom extends much beyond the next sale date, focus most of their energies on the highest priced lots. Novice collectors, justifiably wary and insecure, engage consultants who often know far less than the dealers and auctioneers. At every level of the art world, deeper knowledge and principled guidance seem to be in short supply.

The writer is co-director of Galerie St Etienne in New York

© The Art Newspaper 2007
70 South Lambeth Road, London SW8 1RL

ED MITCH & THE CM RUSSELL MUSEUM

2007-09-19T08:12:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I went to Great Falls in order to attend a presentation by Ed Mitch, an entrepreneur who produced speculator bronzes by Bob Scriver and who has now donated his personal collection of sixty or so of them to the Charles M. Russell Museum. He has also given the museum the rights to an excellent DVD of Bob talking about his career and especially his Blackfeet series of bronzes which are also shown in the video. This DVD is available through Pat Bryan, Museum Shop Coordinator, at the CM Russell Museum, 400 13th St. North, Great Falls, MT 59401. 406-727-8787. pbryan@cmrussell.org. Mitch is sharing his profit with the Cut Bank kids through some sort of program. $10 plus throw in another few dollars for packing and postage. I recommend the DVD for libraries and schools.

I was late getting to the meeting of “Charlie’s Top Hands,” which is meant to reward people who promote the museum. This is part of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel activity that I talk about, which is more a matter of enmeshed museums, historical societies, publications, and gallery owners than the artists themselves who are simply “product” in today’s commodified world. Mitch and his friends were from Cut Bank, where a circle of businessmen tried to get some kind of profit out of Bob’s career and Bob tried to do the same with them, mostly by finding a community that would finance and support his museum, which politically could not exist in Browning. The Cut Bank version as disguised as a World Peace Center with Jesus on top. When that effort failed, the C.M Russell Museum fully expected to receive Bob’s estate and were part of the negotiations after his death. In the end, they were excluded -- some say by trickery. The estate of 1,000 bronzes plus much other material like saddles, wagons, paraphenalia and so on, went to the Montana Historical Society which simply stashed it in a warehouse.

Glacier is a county in the NW corner of east slope Montana where the Rocky Mountains intersect with the Canadian border. The county is almost entirely Blackfeet Reservation except for a little piece where Cut Bank is. A piece of the reservation also extends over into Pondera County, where I live in order to escape the jurisdictions of both the reservation and Glacier County. Cut Bank began as an oil boom town more than half a century ago. Valier started as an irrigation-based town, deliberately separate from Cut Bank, which was considered an inappropriate environment for families. Even in 1961 when the wells were mostly pumped dry, the roughneck bars boomed in Cut Bank. (I was taken pub-crawling by a fellow teacher and swore "never again.") The boom was based on a huge underground pool of oil that was mostly under the reservation but accessible from around Cut Bank, esp. after the east boundary was conveniently moved closer to the west.

Now both the reservation and Cut Bank struggle to replace the oil economy with something else. Corruption comes to mind. When the tribe wants to scare Cut Bank, they threaten to become a separate county. This would mean separating the soft underbelly of Cut Bank corruption from the great deadlocked tribal/federal softly corrupt placenta of the reservation and weaken the soft corrupt underbelly of the state in Cut Bank. The tribe, representing a large and growing population of voters, is attracting considerable state support at last, at the expense of Cut Bank except to the degree that tribal members live there, more and more all the time.

Now back to the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. Most people envision the art economy as an artist who sells art, either to the public directly or through a gallery. But there are concentric circles that grow up around that nucleus. One is a circle based on selling advice, information and promotion. Another is a circle based on second-level objects. In terms of paintings, those would be prints or what has come to be called “giclees” which are simply high-quality computer printouts. Well-marketed, these products account for most of the millions of dollars accumulated by people like Terpning or Kinkade.

In terms of sculptures, one can achieve second-level products by creating small, easy-to-produce sculptures like belt buckles -- as the speakers last night were saying, “real bronzes for $35” -- or one can go to a different material. Before Bob could afford to have his work cast in bronze, he was casting them in a very hard kind of plaster, which (alas) is quite breakable though resistant to disintegration. (Pristine plaster castings have been found in the Egyptian pyramids.) The plethora of clever and inexpensive little “bronzes” seen everywhere now are plastic mixed with powdered bronze and called “cold cast bronze” or something similar. They are produced by injection in machinery that uses space age technology for molding. They might cost $20 or less and are not necessarily very accurate.

When he had enough reputation, Bob expanded his sculpture business in two ways. One was by collaborating to make monumental bronzes, which satisfied him the most because of his original love of Beaux Arts equestrian monuments and which were financed by the sales of many small replicas. This was made possible by the invention of ceramic shell casting, also developed for space age needs, which was so much easier and cheaper than the Roman block investment process that foundries sprang up on all sides.

Entrepreneurs saw the potential in this kind of many-small-copies technology and Bob saw the advantages (esp. as he aged) of getting away from the constant struggle of casting. He began to sell the original plaster or plastilene models WITH the copyright -- that is, the right to reproduce for sales. The price to the entrepreneur, of course, was much higher because he was selling the potential profits of an entire edition. Sometimes Bob might contract to sell them the figure for a percentage of future profits and some, like Ed, took out their profit by keeping one of each for themselves. The molds for these sculptures belong to the entrepreneurs and were not destroyed at Bob’s death. One can still buy them.

One of the ways of creating value in the art world is the principle of scarcity. Some dealers will not touch editions over twenty or even less. But these entrepreneurs had no sense of the traditional art marketers and put the edition size up into the hundreds. These were small, charming, traditional pieces, sometimes on subjects suggested by the entrepreneur. My objection to them, and something I argued strongly with Bob which was part of the rupture of our marriage, was that they cheapen the prestige of the work. Some of them Bob would have to admit were “modeling” rather than sculpture, esp. after his serious stroke in 1988 which damaged his talent and left him unable to think straight about business.

There’s nothing wrong with these works except that they violate another of the principles of traditional value: that the sculpture is from the “heart and soul” of the artist, inspired, unique. These pieces tend to be along the lines of what some call the “Grand Narrative” of the settlement of the West which so hypnotizes a certain kind of person who ironically is white but idealizes the Plains Indians, esp. the ones who didn’t survive the genocidal Clearances of the Prairie. The more cynical believers in this point of view admire “Deadwood,” while the more idealistic prefer John Wayne and “Gunsmoke.” Bob Scriver accepted that but at the same time did NOT accept that. He was a complex person. The difference is obvious when one considers, say, “Transition” alongside the “Taking of a Scalp.” At least he spared us his interpretation of an Indian baby being born, though other artists did not.

There were probably a half-dozen of these bronze speculators and the pieces that come out of that context are the great majority of what circulates through the Western art auctions, a vital part of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. Ed Mitch came up with the successful idea of a small series of “coffee drinkers,” characters swigging their non-alcoholic standby. Bob always produced a steady stream of small animals which have been sold more by Rex Brenneman than Mitch.

To keep these entrepreneurs interested, Bob used the same seductive strategies he had always used on customers. He invited them into his small private office (which he had to create when his fourth wife failed to keep the studio decent enough to take people out there) where he would show them art work he’d bought, suggesting that they were the only ones to see it, and telling them little tidbits about his history. Sometimes he suddenly had a cowboy accent, which always aggravated me. He’d pretend to be dumb and outmoded, outclassed by his customer. Once in a while he’d take someone out to the ranch and get them to smoke kinnikinnick in his tipi or ride his horse. Hey, it worked on me! Why wouldn’t it work on others?

These small-town whites were wary of Indians, but fascinated at the same time. Bob had grown up with them. (He was the same age as George Kicking Woman. His best grade school buddy was Jim Welch, the father of the writer. The writer was my age.) The entrepreneurs had no way of knowing just how initiated into secret ceremnies Bob really was, but they felt sympathy for him after the well-publicized dive-bombing attacks of the AIMsters, which they thought represented the whole tribe. As soon as Cut Bank people have enough money, they move over to the Flathead Valley to escape the climate and the Indians, but they are proud of the fact that Bob is buried in the Cut Bank cemetery. The only reason he’s buried there is that Lorraine, the fourth wife, ignored his wishes, which were to be buried on his ranch alongside his horse. Burying him there might have diminished the saleability of the ranch (it was bought by a coalition of Nature Conservancy and the tribe) and anyway, Lorraine’s goal was like that of Mamie Russell: prosperity and respectability. She buried him with his white family.

People asked about the Museum of Montana Wildlife in Browning. It was also bought by the tribe and is run by Siyeh, the wholly-owned business subsidiary of the tribe. The main hall, which once housed the full-mounts, was redesigned by a professional museum team and now shows “Leonardo” the baby tyrannosaurus rex. The workshop part is now the Blackfeet Heritage Center, a shop that is a source of crucial reference materials and novelties.

Del Gage, who was at last night’s meetiing with his wife, has been a state legislator. He is not an entrepreneur in the same way as Ed but he is someone I remember from the Sixties. (I don't remember Ed.) The third speaker I only know because he stepped into the shoes of Wilbur Werner, a friend of ours and supporter of Bob for many years. Wilbur’s law practice was based in part on being the county attorney and much of his power around the state was through his brother, a high official among the Catholics. He was also very active in local history organizations. Epstein married his daughter and when Wilbur retired, sat at his desk as county attorney and history buff.

Most of the information he supplied was wrong and I said so, which was the first that some people realized I was there. I was not invited to attend or to speak. Epstein made several remarks about Indians, which I doubt that he recognized as belittling nor his audience either. They have very little consciousness of “politically correct” protocols, only a nervous awareness that they’re Out There. As soon as the speeches were over, he hastened to me to mend fences. I shall have to write to Miss Manners for advice about how to handle lawyers who put their hands all over people in order to show relationship, dominance and ownership.

I led Epstein over to the Winold Reiss painting of “Old Lady Cree Medicine” to impress upon him that Bob’s foundry was competently run by two generations of her descendants. His reaction was “Oh, I have that print” and then, “Migod, is that an original Reiss? Where did they ever get such a valuable thing?” He knows damn well that Reiss’ family gave the whole collection that was hanging in the room to the Russell Museum. He never heard what I said about Carl and David. He went back to organize select members of Charlie’s Hands to go drinking while the rest of us sat with our coffee.

Even the best-hearted among these people (all men except Norma Ashby) who believe they were dear friends of Bob Scriver do not know and would be hard to persuade that they really WERE NOT part of his inner circle. In fact, Bob’s closest friends were either Indians, wives or Ace Powell. Small-town middle-class people were his family’s friends and peers -- not his. He didn’t drink, he didn’t play bridge except in the very earliest years with his second wife, and he always hunted with a wife and a buddy. But to point this out is to spoil sales and to diminish the prestige of donations. I wonder how parallel this is with Charlie Russell. Actually, I don’t wonder. I’m pretty persuaded.

THREE MAGS ON THE CULTURE CONTINUUM

2007-07-19T13:46:00.000-06:00

For a while now I haven’t taken a friendly walk through the Western art mags, so I thought I’d give a catch-up tour today. Southwest Art: Fine Art of Today’s West (July, 2007), Art of the West: For All Fine Art Collectors (July/August, 2007) and Wildlife Art, The World’s Foremost Wildlife Art Magazine (May/June, 2007).

First some logistical orientation. Most disciplines that lean heavily on culture can be sorted from “low” to “high.” For instance, “low” religion is folk, maybe superstitious, informal, rural, inspired rather than learned, not usually wealthy. “High” religion depends upon education (theology, a “learned” ministry with graduate degrees), wealth and architecture (beautiful furnishings, expensive supplies), and high status in the larger society. All up and down the scale it is possible to accumulate enormous power, to be vulnerable to corruption, or to be captured by the status quo, habits and assumptions that haven’t been challenged for a long time, and the interests of a class of people who derive power from believing that the way things are is the way things ought to be.

Art is very much like that. It can be spontaneous and charming, like grandpa’s whittling, mom’s scrapbooks and the kids’ refrigerator art. It can be as mammoth and intimidating and globally famous as European masterpieces. And then there’s art of the American West. Cowboy art, some assume. The panorama landscape, think others. And a few love charismatic animals of every kind and continent.

For a long time Europe and the closed “academies” that controlled the big shows dominated American art. Then the focus shifted again, thanks partly to some intense characters and partly to war in Europe that pushed some of them to New York City. Then we had Pollock and deKooning and all that shocking abstract stuff. (It’s surprising that all this “modern” art is so old now.) American Western art formed partly in reaction to that, both the snobbery and the puzzlement of figuring out out why anyone would want a painting of “an explosion in a shingle factory.”

Going naively and happily along their own trails, some artists used fine European technique to describe a striking new world, maybe Taos and environs. The living was cheap, shacks were available, the subject matter was intriguingly anthropological. Farther north the clearance of the prairie was underway and artists sat in for photographers, until cameras were ready to pick up the story.

More recently, there were a few ways to save the ranch: rodeo, writing or painting. These WERE cowboys so they painted their own world. Eventually they banded together into the Cowboy Artists of America. All the founders are dead now. There was a major renaissance when the east coast magazine illustrators joined up. They’ve dropped the second “A,” maybe because some of the best artists of the American West are now Chinese, classically trained. They mix yurts and Chinese peasants in with their tipis and Mexicans.

Actually, the Society of Animal Artists formed a little earlier than the CAA. They were sports illustrators at first, calendar artists and so on. They came out to the West to look for animals and backgrounds -- pick up some ideas. Then the natural history history types, the ecologists and buffalo huggers took an interest.

With this as our map “rose,” let’s walk along.

Southwest Art says it is paying tribute to sculptors in this issue, and puts a splendid bronze eagle gripping a salmon on the cover. (The patina helps indicate this is a “bald” eagle, which fishes rather than catching mammals like a golden.) As usual, much of the emphasis in all the articles is about the artists: where they grew up, how they got the bug, how they educated themselves, what they feel about it all. But there are two interesting articles that hinge on materials: one about sculptors working in stone at the Purple Door Studio (I love the photo of the group all wearing their respirators) and one about a couple, Allen and Patty Eckman, who have taught themselves paper casting, lately going to a style of shredded, fringy paper that lends itself to fancy dancers with ribbons swirling or horses with manes flying.

The featured bronze artist is Ken Rowe, who did the eagle on the cover. He came to portraits of animals through taxidermy (one classic path in the West) and --to my eye -- is pretty damn good. Joe Brubaker is a mixed media guy, a California academic fabulist who begins with a wood figure, then goes to ... somewhere in his mind. It’s haunting and means to be.

Advertisers tend to be galleries that pick up on the main stories, rather like fashion mags, but there is always abiding the same scatter of “real” cowboy artists, not-quite-ready-for-prime-time optimists, and historic paintings -- historic both in subject matter and in terms of when they were painted. My own love is always the strong color-work (I don’t even care whether you can tell what is, so long as the colors are wonderful) and there is a lot of it in this issue, some of it with pastels rather than oil paint. Melinda Hall uses it to be witty; Tony Saladino makes it schematic.

The real capper, saved for last, is a dandy: a marble portrait of an octopus, both formally patterned and realistically organic, fifteen feet tall and thirty-five feet long -- not intended for the average sitting room. By Bela Bacsi (there are accents on the first e and the second a), it won the Gold Medal for Sculpture at the California Art Club’s 96th annual Gold Medal Exhibition. Southwest Art makes an Award of Excellence at this show, which went to Brian Blood for a Carmel landscape.

Art of the West is a more modest enterprise, Minnesota rather than Denver based. It is more classically “Western” with scenery and guys on horseback. The painting is not quite so adept, but there is an article on one of the true greats, Maynard Dixon, a man who really sets the high mark for Western painters. Another article is about David Drummond, an elvish-looking fellow who paints Lake Powell and iris in watercolor in a way transcendently pure. He attributes this to a previous career in astrophysics, specializing in optics.

The back page in this mag goes to Bill Frazier, the only attorney in Montana who really knows art. He speaks common sense and practical wariness for both artist and customer. This time, remarkably, both he and Allen Duerr and Thomas Tierney, the publishers, were saying, “Beware of sharks.” Today’s enthusiasm for parking money in artwork has been “blood in the water” for a lot of fast talkers and grifters. Believe them!

Wildlife Art is the most low-rent and this issue’s cover really looks it. One would expect it on the rack next to True West. With the cover off, it would be harder to distinguish from the others. There’s that Terpening again, not so much a man as an industry. A nice lady sculptor of Cowboys and Indians, J. R. Eason. A guy (Bob Boomer) who does Indians in wood. B.C. Nowlin who has developed a shimmering style of Indians just leaving. Don Weller: immaculately skillful watercolors of cowboys on horses. Karen Cooper who works on (gulp) not quite black velvet, but black sanded paper which comes out about the same. Susan von Borstel who paints on slabs of stone. You’ve gotta have a gimmick.

The editorial comment is from Keith Hansen, who just LOVES horses but has nothing to contribute the wrenching controversy over horse slaughter in the US. What about old, broken, blind horses? Oh, look over there at that cute little colt! (He’s on the California coast.)

In summary, Southwest Art is the highest on the sophistication ladder. Art of the West frankly takes the burghers’ point of view in a pitch for good commerce. (They publish “Artfacts Newsletter” bimonthly, including auction info, bios, and so on -- the same stuff you could get from a website like “AskArt.com” but handy if you’re a geezer who hates keyboards.) Wildlife Art is riding drag, a little dusty, but someone’s gotta do it.

Keep them dogies movin’!

PROVISIONAL LIST OF SCRIVER BRONZES

2007-07-14T09:44:00.000-06:00

MASTER SCULPTURE LIST

Chronological

In the Fifties there were a great number of small sculptures meant for tourist souvenirs. One of the very first was a seated musketeer. A horse with an ashtray attached sold very well. A bear against a tree trunk was wired as a lamp. A mountain goat and a cougar stretched out along the ground have shown up on the Internet auctions. A two-piece hunting scene shows the hunter coming over a boulder but the other side shows a grizzly rearing by the mountain goat he just shot. (This has been cast in bronze.) The list below doesn’t specify these pieces.

1953: Whitetail Buck (Single deer, 1/5 scale)

1956: Large Bison Skull (Two more were made later: a smaller one and a bolo-sized one, which is also cast into the door handles at the CMRussell Museum in Great Falls.)

1957: No More Buffalo (Indian series -- old warrior with spear)
On the Lobo Trail (horse and rider series)

1958: Bellowing Bull (small figure)

1959: On the Prowl (small grizzly)
Ace (portrait of Ace Powell)
Grizzly in Trap (large grizzly, seated)
Hunting Party (pack train)
Say That Again and I’ll Knock your Block Off (2 separated cubs)

1960: Ideal Galway Bull (Commission, head only)
Lone Cowboy (1960 cowboy)
Buffalo Hunter (horse and rider series)
Boss of the Trail Herd (horse and rider series)
Standing Grizzly (large, upright)

1961: Transition (Blackfeet series: old Indian, woman and child)
Last of the Warriors (the old man from Transition, alone)
Pronghorns in Action (three pronghorns leaping)
Frontier Scout (horse and rider series)
Arlene (portrait bust of Arlene Lightfield)
Jay (nude portrait of Jeanette Scriver, his second wife)
Trophy Rams (3 rams, one legal, one very nice, one amazing)
Pullin’ Leather (horse and rider series)
Buffalo Calf (small, with cow)
Four o’Clock in the Morning (cowboy about to saddle horse)
Return of the Blackfeet Raiders (Blackfeet series: 4 warriors on horseback)
Reynard’s Brood (fox with kits)

1962: Reclining Bighorn (small figure from diorama)
(None of the other diorama figures were copyrighted to be sold as individual castings.)

1963: Boss of the Trail herd (horse and rider series)
Fighting Elk (2 bulls, one cow, in a tangle)
Casual C.M. Russell (1/5 scale portrait)
Enemy Tracks (2 Blackfeet trackers on horseback)
Price of a Scalp (2 warriors & horse, in battle)
Mary’s Horse (portrait of head of Mary Scriver’s horse)
Pet Fawn (grandchilden Michelle and Lane with a fawn)

1964: Real-Meat (2 Blackfeet hunters and buffalo)
The Buffalo Runner (One of the hunters plus buffalo cow & calf)
The Attacker (just the hunter)

1965: Angry Grizzly (Small grizzly rearing)
Aces High (a card game gone wrong -- a diorama)
Starving She-Wolf (she crouches into moose horns)
Lunging Lobo (the companion male to above)

1966: Buffalo Cow and Calf (small pair)
U.S. Marshall (A revision of a Heikka sculpture)
El Bandito (a matching bad guy)
Into the Wind (a cluster of Canada geese landing)
Coyote (study for museum full-mount)
Fritzie (commissioned portrait of a pet)
Homestead diorama for the Hill County Museum in Havre, MT.

1967: Heroic sized portrait of Bill Linderman Hall of Fame
Life-sized welded steel bison for Great Falls High School
Sheepherder (seated with dog)
Liver-Eatin’ Johnson (portrait of the historical figure)
Tintype (portraits of Bob and Mary Scriver, in costume)
Walking Moose (small)
Christ Head (a study bust for the head of “Eli, Eli”)
Eli, Eli (traditional corpus for a cross)
Chaillot (a study bust of the model for Jesus, Maurice Chaillot.)
R. Walter on “Why Worry?” (Commission -- polo player)
When You Need a .45 (a longhorn right behind a man on a horse)
Dusting Bull Buffalo (small, mopping his head in the dust)
Going Home (fox carrying pheasant)
The Mighty and the Many (Moose on ice brought down by wolves)

1968: Saturday Night in Cowtown (2 cowboys shoot at drummer’s feet)
Mountain Sentinels (mountain goats)
Mountain Goat (portrait)
Ram Looking Back (small, mountain sheep)
Walking Bull Buffalo (small bison)
Jackrabbit (study for museum mount)
Bobcat (study for museum mounta0
Watchin’ the Back Trail (horse and rider)
Butch (commissioned portrait of a pet)
No Hoss for a Lady (humped up horse)
Mother (portrait bust of his mother)
Dad (portrait bust of his father)
To See Eternity (romanticized bust of his daughter)
Pieta (the traditional tableau of Mary and Jesus)
The Wolfers (2 guys)
Silent Death (owl grips rabbit)
Fighting Dalls (small, heads rammed together)
Parade Indian (man in buckskins with horse wearing gear)
Montana Blizzard (Our 5-horse remuda)
The King (small version heroic portrait of Linderman at Cowboy Hall of Fame)
The Contestant (informal Bill Linderman fastening chaps)
Beatin’ the Slack (large calf-roper)
Layin’ the Trap (large team roping)
Headin’ for Home (large barrel racing -- Ann Weathered)
An Honest Try (large bull riding -- Bill Cochran)
Let ‘er Buck (large saddle bronc)
Reride (Large fallen bronc)
Headin’ for a Wreck (large bull-dogging)
Paywindow. (Linderman on a bronc)
Ten Seconds Flat (calf roper signalling “done”)
Twistin’ his Tail (small bull dogger)

1969: Opening of the Sacred Medicine Pipe Bundle (an accurate portrayal of the ceremony with portraits of those who were Bundle Keepers at the time)
Welded Steel 12 foot high “Rustler” for CM Russell High School
Lone Cowboy 1880 (A remake of the popular Lone Cowboy)
Brangus Roping Calf (Portrait of Topsy)
Mexican Bull-Doggin Steer (Portrait of Turvey)

1970 Heart attack

1971 Portrait of Chief Joseph.commissioned by Marquita Maytag
Freckles Brown on Tornado (double portrait)
Tornado (Portrait)
Brangus Bucking Bull (portrait of White Lightning)
Saddle Bronc (Portrait of Jack, our harness horse)
Bareback Bronc (portrait of Playboy)
Twister (bucking bull)
Spinner (bucking bull)
Hooker (bucking bull)
Not for Glory (large pickup men)
Steer Jerker (large single rider roping)
Bullrider’s Best Friend ( rodeo clown)

1972 Rodeo Entry (Bobbie Wirth, rodeo queen)
The Cowboy’s Working Quarter Horse (portrait of Printer’s Devil)
National Finals (Saddle bronc with rider)
A Short Trip (Descent bucking off the rider)
Two Champions (large bareback bronc with rider)
Rodeo’s Most Dangerous Game (Chuckwagon races)
Gold medal designed for Cut Bank, MT Chamber of Commerce to present to the U.S. Olympic basketball team.
The Producer (Oral Zumwalt on Rainbow)

1973 Heroic-sized statue of Jim Shoulders commissioned by Cowboy Hall of Fame.
The Champ (portrait of Jim Shoulders)
Heroic-sized sculpture of Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea commissioned by the Fort Benton Community Improvement Association to do as a Montana Bicentennial Project.
Commemorative medal for Dempsey/Gibbons World Heavyweight Championship fight.
Life sized bust of Harold McCracken to present at his retirement on his 80th birthday by the Trustees of Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
Bust of Phil Lynde commissioned by the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association

1974 Bust of Larry Mahan for the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association.

28 original sculpts for reproduction by the owners:

for Rex Breneman:

Warrior’s Pony
The Lookout
The Golden Dragon
Bronco Head
No Meat
King of the Crag
Horse Wrangler
Rocky Mountain Ram

For Glacier Bronze: Darrel Peterson:

Twins
Sign Reader
The War Cry
The Way Home
Scoring High

For Paul Masa:

4 Steer
Red Fox
The Fawn
Buffalo Birds
Prairie Picnic
Nature’s Children
Rangeland Kiss
Morning Warm-up
Pigeon Brave

for Stremmel Galleries, Inc.:

Two Seconds to Go
Friend or Foe
An Early Arrival
Kicking High

for The Outlaw Inn, Kalispell, Mt.:

The Outlaw

for Robert Warden:

When I Was a Kid

1975: “An Honest Try,” the book
Buffalo Bill Cody heroic-sized commission for the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming.
5 1/2 foot circular plaque of Buffalo Bill commissioned for the apex of the Whitney Gallery building at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
Bust of Eric Harvie for the rotunda of the new museum, commissioned by the Riveredge Foundation in Calgary.
Heroic-sized version of “Transition” commissioned by the Pacific Northwest Indian Center in Spokane. Cancelled when the institution collapsed.
Rodeo’s Classic Event. (bronc riding)
Belt Buckle for Phillip Morris Marlboro commissioned as a Bicentennial promotion.

1976
Heroic statue of Jim Shoulders commission which was destroyed in fire.
Bust of Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler. a commission
Montana trapper and a belt buckle commissioned by the Montana Historical Society to raise funds to buy the C.M. Russell painting “When the Land Belonged to God.” Raised $96,000. Edition of 100 sold out in 29 days.
Elk statue commissioned by Dean Krakel II for his book, “Season of the Elk.”
Heroic statue of Charlie Russell commissioned by the CMR Museum in Great Falls.
Bust of Dean Oliver commissioned by Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association
Buffalo Bill (3 sizes)
Lewis, Clark, Sacajawea and Pomp (1/2 lifesize)
Attack on the Wagon Trail
Mounted Trapper
When One Shot Is Not Enough
Buddies
Howling Coyote
Range Mother
Otters at Play
War Sign
Spring Cow and Calf
Watching the Herd
No Room for Two
Ranch Fillies
Pomp
The King of the Prairie
Horned Owl on Stump
Bob Cat
Ground Squirrel #1
Prairie Partners
Ground Squirrel #2
Herd Bull
Hereford Bull
Just Sleepy
Prairie Bull
Rodeo Bull
Six Bits
Bob Scriver, Sculptor (Bust self-portrait)
Easy Does It
Cold Maker
40 Below on Snow Shoes
Fluffy Owl
Johnny Appleseed (the legendary character with a saucepan on his head)
The Holy Woman (The most sacred figure from the Sun Ceremony with her attendants)
Untitled geese, ducks, swans and owls

1977
The Explorers at the Marias
Captain Lewis and Dog Scannon, commissioned by Lewis & ClarkTrail Heritage Foundation, Inc.
Bust of Casey Tibbs commissioned by PRCA

1978
Grandfather Tells of the Horse (old man speaks to children)
On the Trap Line (man setting a trap)
At the Beginning (a lone man on a rock)
Before the Horse (family with a dog travois)
The Way it Was (an old woman is seized by death AKA “I am many”)
Coming of the Elk-Dog (an astonished group)
The First Horse (three men try to subdue a Barb)
A Warrior’s Prize (a man has a rope on a rearing horse -- Zuke posed)
The Buffalo Decoy (a man disguised runs for the cliff)
The Buffalo Horse (a man on horseback leads his fast horse)
Yellow Wolf, Setter of Snares (a famous trapper)
The Hide Scraper (a bent woman scrapes a buffalo hide)
Firewood (a bent woman brings a bundle of sticks)

Blackfeet Family Portrait (separate busts)
Old Man (the grandfather)
Kip-Ah-Talk-Ee (the old woman)
White Quiver (a famous warrior)
Pitamakin (Running Eagle, a woman warrior)
Timmy (a child, actually Timmy Cree Medicine)

Three Courtship Scenes (sequence of three vignettes)
At the Spring (first approach)
Prairie Romance (conversation)
The Proposal (a gift)

Owner of the Lodge (the patriach sits on his couch with his pipe)
Hand Game (players and spectators)
Waiting for the Dance (woman in shawl)
Dance Contest (two pieces: drum group and dancers)
Little Brother Goes Swimming (kids bareback on a horse)
The Horse Race (two horses with riders)
Standing Alone (a warrior is picketed in place to fight to the end)
Winter Scouts (two horseback men are muffled for winter)
Straight-Up Bonnet with Boss-Ribs (man wearing Blackfeet bonnet with trailer-- the “boss ribs”)
The Split-Horn Bonnet (seated man with powerful headgear)
The Fast Blanket (man on horseback signalling)
To Take a Scalp (The victim is on his stomach whle the victor saws away)
War Pony (a fine pony, painted and equipped)
End of the War Trail (Tree burial with grieving woman)
He-That-Looks-at-the-Calf Meets Captain Lewis (historical group)
Trade Goods (vignette, 2 Indians, horse and trader)
Onesta and the Sacred Bear Spear (legendary character)
A Warrior’s Vow (sun dance piercing ordeal)
Dance of the Beaver Women (Beaver Bundle ceremony)
The Story of Miscinskee (Bob’s personal badger lodge dream)
Tailfeathers Woman and Morning Star/Scarface (Blackfeet legend)
The Raven Speaks (spiritual guide brings a gift)
The Beaver Lover (origin myth of the Beaver Bundle)
Secrets of the Night (a night horse herder is visited by an owl)
Napi Teaches Them the Dance (a trickster story)
Four Winds (originally created to be a gavel end)
Let the Curs Yap (illustrating a cautionary tale)
Life’s Stream (mother and child with buffalo calf)
Legends of the Blackfeet (an abstract pillar -- might be smoke)
Rodeo’s First Event (bronc)

1979
Winchester Rifle” commissioned by Buffalo Bill Historical Center and Winchester Rifle.
Belt buckle of a grizzly head for the Montana Fish and Game.

Four belt buckles,for the Lewis & Clark Festival Committee, Cut Bank, MT, Chamber of Commerce:
Explorers of Marias
At Camp Disappointment
Near Cut Bank, Montana
Lewis Meets the Blackfeet

Two belt buckles and sculpture, commissioned by Northwestern Bank, Helena, MT.
The Cowboy
The Prospector
Sculpture of “The Prospector,”
Sacagawea for Marguita Maytag
PRCA logo bucking horse (small).
Bridger bust and two frisky colts, commissioned works.
Bust of Corrie, commissioned by.Leonard F. Llewlleyn, her husband.
Johnny Bench, renowned baseball player and catcher.commissioned by Cincinnati Reds
Everett Bowman, RCA roper, commissioned for the new Professional Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs..

1980
Hugh Bennett, first Secretary of the Turtle Rodeo Association commissioned for the new PRCA outdoor sculpture garden at Colorado Springs.
One-and-one-half sized bucking horse of the PRCA logo commissioned by the PRCA Museum.
Dale Smith and Poker Chip commissioned portraits.
One-and-one-half sized portrait of Bill Ward on Sea Lion commissioned for hill in front of the PRCA Museum.

Three one-fourth life-sized pieces commissioned:
Tail Stander
Hard Way to Get Off
Calf in the Way

1981
Five rodeo pieces commissioned by the National High School Rodeo Association depicting rodeo events of the early 1900’s
1919 Saddle Bronc
1918 Wild Horse Race
1917 Single Steer Jerking
1916 Bull Dogger
1915 Steer Rider

One-third life-sized statue of Descent, famous bucking horse, commissioned to be placed on Descent’s grave.
Calf Tangle
A Bad Draw
Daybreak
Hang in There, Cowboy
First Event
Main Event
Final Event
The Broken Rein

1982 “No More Buffalo” the book
Battle of the Prairie 1/5 life-sized
Too Late for the Hawken 1/5 life-sized

Steve and Phil Mayre, Olympic gold medal skiers, portraits commissioned by White Pass Alpine Ski Area.
World Champions (Mahre twins)
“Gold Medal Knees (Steve),
"Going for It" (Phil)

Belt Buckles:
Fort at Fort Benton
Riverboat at Fort Benton

1983
Del Gish
To the Victor
Christ the Teacher (2 sizes)
Prince of Peace
Paul’s Bull
Sagebrush Bronc
When Cutting Was Rough.

Belt buckles:
First sight of the Great Falls of the Missouri
Portage around the Great Falls of the Missouri

1984
Max (Max Baucus)
To Ride a Bull
To Ride a Bronc
HTS Rancher (portrait bust of Harold Thaddeus Scriver, Bob’s brother)
Spanish Barb commissioned by Breyer for their plastic collectible horse series
Spanish Barb ponyhead
Grizzly sketch
Six-point bull,”
Nature’s Beef: Bull head,”
Nature’s Beef Bull Bison #1
Nature’s Beef, Bull Bison #2
Johnny Appleseed
The Orphan
Race to the Rendezvous
Bridger - Mountain Man
Bat Wing Chaps
Coffee Break

1985
The Threat
The Trial
Silvertip
Backscratcher
Moonlight Hunter
Pronghorn ‘85
Go for It, Cowboy
The Outlaw
I’m Sheriff Here, Now Git!

Belt Buckles:
Lewis, Clark and Sacajawea
Sacajawea and Pom

1986
An Honest Try one and one-half life-sized for Kansas City Board of Trade Building.
Explorers at the Portage, with Lewis, Clark, York and Scannon. (heroic-sized for Great Falls)
Billy ‘86 (Mountain goat)

1987
Wells Fargo Cargo

1988
Equestrian Teddy Roosevelt. Commissioned by Boone and Crockett for their ranch outside of Dupuyer)
Heroic-sized guardsman with eagle commissioned by Montana National Guard. Not completed.

1989
Scriver Museum belt buckle for the high school rodeo champion.

1990
Counting Coup

1991
Sculpture version of Hornaday’s diorama of the last bison (commissioned in order to finance the restoration of the diorama.)
Tall Tales to Tell (Outfitter pack string)

1993
A Budding Buckaroo
Silence is Safety
The Exalted Ruler (commissioned to help buy the CMRussell painting.)

1994:
Part of the Job

1995:
Partners
Ready for Battle
Movin’ On (Indian woman with travois and dog)

1996: Heart By-Pass Surgery

1997:
His First Real Arrow

1998
Heroic-sized portrait of Mike Mansfield -- barely begun

1999 Death on January 29

THE FOLLOWING LISTS ARE ORGANIZED FROM THE ABOVE LIST.

STUDIES FROM LIFE
as preparation for full mounts

1951 Whitetail Deer (White Tail Buck)
1956 Mountain Sheep (Bighorn Ram)
1956 Customer’s animal (Javelina)
1956 Black Bear
1959 Grizzly (Standing Grizzly)
1961 Caribou -- no specimen (Winter King)
1961 Cougar (Deerslayer)
1961 Mule Deer (Mule Deer Buck)
1961 Bison Bull (Herd Bull)
1961 Elk (Bugling Elk)
1961 From a customer’s animal (Ovis Dalli)
1961 Pronghorn (Prairie Buck)
1965 Charlie (Lunging Lobo)
1965 Charlie’s Lady (Starving She-Wolf)
1967 Moose (Walking Moose)
1968: Mountain Goat (Mountain Goat)
1968: Bobcat (Bobcat)
1966 Coyote (Coyote)

Horse & Rider series
intended for Ukrainetz

1957 On the Lobo Trail (geezer on horse with buckled legs)
1960: Pullin’ Leather (bucking horse with fence)
1960 Lone Cowboy (cowboy on ground by horse’s head)
1960 Buffalo Hunter (with his horse and Sharps)
1960 Boss of the Trail Herd (in hair chaps with lariat)
1961 Frontier Scout (in buckskins)

DIORAMAS
groups of small animals
(All done over the winter of 1961-62)

1. Whitetail deer coming down to a stream to drink.

2. Packtrain just leaving the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Background by Les Peters.

3. Mule deer at a mountain spring with a cougar lurking above.

4. Grizzly trying to get at a marmot.

5. Black bear and cubs encountering a porcupine.

6. Moose in the moonlight along a beaver dam.

7. Bison on the prairie with pronghorn antelope and other animals.

8. Elk harem with the male bugling.

9. Forest fire with cremated elk.

10. Mountain sheep high in the mountains.

11. Mountain goats along the cliff face.

AMERICAN PERSONALITIES

1966 U.S. Marshall (A revision of a Heikka sculpture)
1966 El Bandito (a matching bad guy)
1967 Sheepherder (seated with dog)
1967 Liver-Eatin’ Johnson (portrait of the historical figure)
1967 Tintype (portraits of Bob and Mary Scriver)

CHRISTIAN RELIGIOUS

1968 To See Eternity (A portrait of Bob’s daughter, Margaret as she was dying of cancer)
1967 Eli, Eli (A “corpus” or body of Jesus as he was dying on the cross)
1967 Head of Christ (A study of the head of the corpus with Maurice Chaillot posing)
1967 Chaillot (A bust of Maurice Chaillot as himself)
1968 Pieta (The traditional mother and son after Jesus is taken down from the cross)
1983 Christ the Teacher (A commission by Carroll College that was never completed.)
198? The Prince of Peace (Jesus sitting and overlooking the land, to be placed on the top of a World Peace Center which would contain a museum of all Bob’s works.)

The Rodeo Series:
(The main pieces are pictured and described in Bob’s book, “An Honest Try”)

All copyrighted in 1968
“Headin’ for a Wreck” (Bull-dogger)
“Beatin’ the Slack” (Calf roper)
“Headin’ Home” (Barrel racer)
“Paywindow” (Bareback bronc)
“Let ‘Er Buck” (Saddle bronc)
“Reride” (Saddle bronc)
“Layin’ the Trap” (Team roping)
“An Honest Try” (Bucking bull)
“The King” (Linderman with saddle)
“The Contestant” (Linderman buckling chaps)
“Brangus Roping Calf” (portrait)
“Ten Seconds Flat” (Calf roper)
“Twistin’ his Tail” (Bull-dogger)
“Mexican Bull-Doggin’ Steer (portrait)
“Buckin’ Horse” (portrait)

All copyrighted in 1971
“Freckles Brown on Tornado” (double portrait)
“Brangus Bucking Bull” (portrait)
“Tornado” (Portrait)
“Twister” (Bucking Bull)
“Spinner” (Bucking Bull)
“Hooker” (Bucking Bull)
“Bareback Bronc” (portrait)
“Steer Jerker” (Bull-dogger)
“Bullrider’s Best Friend” (Rodeo Clown)

All copyrighted in 1972
“Rodeo Entry” (Rodeo Queen)
“A Cowboy’s Working Quarter Horse” (Portrait)
“National Finals Rodeo”
“A Short Trip” (bronc)
“Two Champions” (bronc)
“Rodeo’s Most Dangerous Game” (Chuckwagon race)

All copyrighted in 1981
“A Hard Way to Get Off”
“Calf Tangle”
“A Bad Draw”
“Calf in the Way”
“Hang in There Cowboy”
“First Event”
“Main Event”
“Final Event”
“Tail Stander”

All copyrighted in 1983:
“Del Gish”
“Sagebrush Bronc”
“When Cutting Was Rough”

All copyrighted in 1984:
“To Ride a Bull”
“To Ride a Bronc”

Copyrighted in 1985:
“Go for it, Cowboy.”

Also: many commissioned bust portraits.

The Blackfeet Indian Series
All ought to be pictured in “No More Buffalo,” the book.

1957: No More Buffalo

1961: Transition
Return of the Blackfeet Raiders

1963: Price of a Scalp
Enemy Tracks
The Last Warrior
Real-Meat

1968: Parade Indian

1976: Opening of the Sacred Medicine Pipe Bundle
Buffalo Runner with Cow and Calf
Attack on the Wagon Train
War Sign
Cold Maker
40 Below on Show Shoes
The Holy Woman

1977: Grandfather Tells of the Horse
On the Trap Line
At the Beginning
Before the Horse
The Way it Was
Coming of the Elk-Dog
A Warrior’s Prize
The Buffalo Decoy
The Buffalo Horse
Yellow Wolf, Setter of Snares
The Hide Scraper
Firewood

Blackfeet Family Portrait (separate busts)
Kip-Ah-Talk-Ee (old woman)
White Quiver (warrior)
Pitamakin (woman warrior)
Timmy (child)

Three Courtship Scenes (sequence of three)
At the Spring
Prairie Romance
The Proposal

Owner of the Lodge
Hand Game
Waiting for the Dance
Dance Contest
Little Brother Goes Swimming
The Horse Race
Parade Indian
Standing Alone
Winter Scouts
Straight-Up Bonnet with Boss-Ribs
The Split-Horn Bonnet
The Fast Blanket
To Take a Scalp
War Pony
End of the War Trail
He-That-Looks-at-the-Calf Meets Captain Lewis
Trade Goods
Onesta and the Sacred Bear Spear
The Holy Woman
A Warrior’s Vow
Dance of the Beaver Women
The Story of Miscinskee
Tailfeathers Woman and Morning Star/Scarface
The Raven Speaks
The Beaver Lover
Secrets of the Night
Napi Teaches Them the Dance
Four Winds
Let the Curs Yap
Life’s Stream
Legends of the Blackfeet

BELT BUCKLES

Gold medal designed for Cut Bank, MT., Chamber of Commerce to present to the U.S. Olympic basketball team. 1972
Commemorative medal for Dempsey/Gibbons World Heavyweight Championship fight. 1973
5 1/2 foot circular plaque of Buffalo Bill commissioned for the apex of the Whitney Gallery building at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. 1975
Montana trapper and a belt buckle commissioned by the Montana Historical Society to raise funds to buy the C.M. Russell painting “When the Land Belonged to God.” Raised $96,000. Edition of 100 sold out in 29 days. 1976
Belt buckle of a grizzly head for the Montana Fish and Game. 1979

Four belt buckles, for the Lewis & Clark Festival Committee, Cut Bank, MT, Chamber of Commerce: 1979
Explorers of Marias
At Camp Disappointment
Near Cut Bank, Montana
Lewis Meets the Blackfeet
Two belt buckles and sculpture, commissioned by Northwestern Bank, Helena, MT. 1979
The Cowboy
The Prospector
Belt Buckles 1982
Fort at Fort Benton”
Riverboat at Fort Benton
Belt buckles 1983
First sight of the Great Falls of the Missouri
Portage around the Great Falls of the Missouri
Belt Buckles 1985
Lewis, Clark and Sacajawea
Sacajawea and Pom
Scriver Museum belt buckle for the high school rodeo champion. 1989

MONUMENTS

Charles M. Russell for a competition 1958
Bill Linderman for the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City 1967
Welded Steel Bison for Great Falls High School 1967
Welded Steel Rustler for Russell High School in GF 1969
Jim Shoulders for the Cowboy Hall of Fame 1973
Lewis, Clark, Sacajawea, and Pomp for Fort Benton 1973
Buffalo Bill Cody for the Buffalo Bill Historical Center 1975
Charles M. Russell for CMR Museum in Great Falls 1976
PRCA Logo bucking horse for their museum in Colorado Springs, 1980
Bill Ward on Sea Lion for Colorado Springs, 1980
Descent 1/3 scale for the grave in Oklahoma City 1981
Earl Old Person 1/2 scale for Browning Indian Health Service Hospital 1982
An Honest Try 1 1/2 scale for Kansas Board of Trade 1986
Lewis, Clark, York and Scannon for the Lewis & Clark Trail Heritage Foundation in Great Falls 1986
Teddy Roosevelt half size for Boone & Crockett ranch outside Dupuyer 1988
Composite Lewis and Clark statue in fiberglass for the Lewis & Clark Overlook museum in Great Falls 1998

HUMAN PORTRAITS, Friends and Family

First Easter Bonnet (Charmaine, Bob’s granddaughter) 1958
Ace (portrait of Ace Powell) 1959
Arlene ( Bust of Arlene Lightfield) 1961
Jay (full-length nude of Jeanette Caouette Scriver, Bob’s second wife) 1961
Pet Fawn (grandchilden Michelle and Lane with a fawn) 1963
Tintype (Bob and Mary Scriver as old-timers) 1967
Chaillot (Bust of Maurice Chaillot, brother-in-law) 1967
To See Eternity (Bust of Margaret Scriver DeSmet Paul) 1968
Pieta (Hélène DeVicq & Maurice Chaillot as Mary and Jesus) 1968
Mother (Bust of Ellison Westgarth Macfie Scriver) 1968
Dad (Bust of Thaddeus Emery Scriver) 1968
Bob Scriver, Sculptor (self-portrait bust) 1976
HTS Rancher (Harold Thaddeus Scriver, Bob’s brother, bust) 1984

LOCAL BLACKFEET
No More Buffalo (Eddie Big Beaver as an old-time Indian) 1957
Transition (Chewing Black Bone, Mae Williamson, and an unidentified schoolboy) 1961
Earl Old Person (full figure, half-sized) 1982
Opening the Mediciine Pipe Bundle (Charlie Reevis, Mary Blackman, George and Molly Kicking Woman, Louis and Fish, Louis and Plenty Treaty, Dick Little Dog, Joe Gambler, Jim Whitecalf, Jr.,

OTHER

Casual C.M. Russell (1/5 life size full-length)1963
Bill Linderman (various sized, with the saddle) Heroic version in 1967.
Robert Walter on Why Worry? 1967
Freckles Brown on Tornado 1970
Jim Shoulders (Heroic full-figure) 1973
Harold McCracken (bust) 1973
Phil Lynde (bust) 1973
Larry Mahan (bust) 1974
Eric Harvie (bust) 1975
Senator Burton K. Wheeler (bust) 1976
Charles M. Russell (heroic) 1976
Dean Oliver (bust) 1976
Casey Tibbs (bust) 1977
Corrie (bust, Mrs. Leonard F. Llewelleyn) 1979
Johnny Bench (full figure) 1979
Everett Bowman PRCA Roper (bust) 1979
Hugh Bennett, first Secretary of the Turtle Rodeo Association (1980)
Dale Smith and Poker Chip (1980)
Bill Ward on Sea Lion (one and one-half sized) 1980
Steve and Phil Mayre, Olympic gold medal skiers (full figure, 3 sculptures) 1982
Del Gish 1983
Max Baucus (small bust, quick draw) 1984

Two small nudes: one standing, one lying on stomach

ARTS BLOGGING IN MONTANA (from Prairie Mary)

2007-07-09T16:28:00.000-06:00

Monday, July 09, 2007

ARTS BLOGGING IN MONTANA

As you may have noticed, I’ve become interested in the Arts Journal blog called “FlyOver Country” (artsjournal.com) and have been growling at Joe Nickell, who is in Missoula and therefore doesn’t realize there is anyone on the eastern side of the Rockies and thinks there is no other arts blogger in the state, totally overlooking “The Eye of the Beholder,” arts blog for the Great Falls Tribune. (http://www.greatfallstribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=BLOGS07 In my opinion she has the most elegant logo in the newspaper of any I’ve seen, though it’s not the same as her banner. Maybe I don’t know what’s going on in other places either (like Missoula), but I have a half-century history with GF.

The comment I’ve reprinted below is not a response to a post by Joe Nickell, but rather by his fellow blogger, Jennifer Smith, inviting a report on the scene where the reader is. This is my report to her.

___________

Montana is said to be a town with a main street 500 miles long. Another version of the same thing is that the arts here are a mile wide and about a quarter-of-an-inch deep. In short, in order to get enough critical mass to talk about the arts here, one must just about necessarily talk about the whole state at once.

Yet, the paradox is that visual art is very much Balkanized. The two university towns have their own little circles, the three or four mini-cities (Great Falls, Kalispell, Billings, Butte) and the two valley refuges of wealth and culture (Livingston and Hamilton), each have their own idea of what good art might be, their own icons, and their own aspirations.

What I know best is the sector called "Art of the American West," meaning "art that sorta reminds you of Charlie Russell." In a thinly populated state like this one, it is less represented by the few galleries and museums than it is by auctions (the one in Great Falls on Charlie's birthday in March or the Western Art Rendezvous in Helena in August) and magazines, especially "Southwest Art" and "Art of the West." Because Western art is often taken to be a record of history in the West (Remington and others came to notice by suppling art to go in newspapers before there were photographs) the Montana Historical Society magazine also serves, though at one time it came to notice that it had sunk to "pandering" to certain speculators and since has had a policy forbidding living artists. (This policy is not enforced in their museum.)

A strange ambivalent symbiosis connects Western art collectors in other more "high-rolling" places back east or in the Southwest and people who live in Montana. Partly the situation is that the collectors live in population centers where they make enough money to buy a little prestige-enhancement and the artists at least pretend to live in-country where the subject matter actually exists and the cost of living is a little lower.

But in Helena just a few blocks away from the Historical Society is the Holter Museum, contemporary, frisky, and willing to venture ideas about the future. They accept Native American art, but not "Cowboy" art. They are also much friendlier to contemporary writing and such phenomena as ceramics.

Across the state in Livingston is a genuine Renaissance man, Russell Chatham, son of a noted California impressionist. He has run a fine bistro, a publishing house, a gallery, a fine arts press, and so on -- while befriending the wild movie types who have bought ranches around there. He paints landscape in a romantic, atmospheric, yearning way that finances all his other interests and makes book covers so fabulous that I'm sure they've contributed to the success of Jim Harrison's novels. Missoula knows him as a man who attends the Montana Festival of the Book as a publisher. His art? Eh.

There is a Montana Arts Council, whose executive grew up on a grain farm outside Great Falls and who once worked for the Metropolitan Opera in NYC, and whose president (also female) is a Blackfeet Indian. They spend a lot of time thinking about money and hardly glance at "cowboy art." The past president (male) is an "art lawyer" who constantly tries to coach both artists and community about common sense business practices. Art law in the state is very weak, which encourages buccaneers.

I've been here, off and on, since 1961, and am still surprised by what turns up or turns around.
_________

End of comment.

I’m going to take this discussion to my other blog, scriverart.blogspot.com to clear the way for backed-up posts I want to make here, so you might want to migrate with the subject. I get incensed when people who purport to know all about “what’s on the ground” when they don’t, but one can hardly blame them if no one fills them in, especially when so much of what goes on in a place like Montana started to happen before they were born. It’s a circle -- they ignore us, so we ignore them. When it comes time to raise money -- ouch.
Posted by prairie mary at 3:54 PM 0 comments
Labels: arts
Sunday, July 08, 2007

JOE NICKELL: "FLYOVER COUNTRY"

This is from www.slog.the stranger.com. “The Stranger” is a Seattle newspaper, I assume an alternative paper, which I haven’t ever read.

Know Who I Like Reading?

Posted by Jen Graves on June 11 at 18:15 PM

Joe Nickell, the Missoulian writer who is part of a new blog on ArtsJournal called Flyover: Art from the American Outback. Nickell writes at the heart of his subjects (chiefly music), he’s mellifluous in print, and, in person, he has a hell of a way with old-timey shirts.

The blog is a group portrait of art in smaller cities by arts journalists of all kinds. It’s exactly the sort of thing I wish had been around (Nickell and co. invented it several months ago) when I was writing about art in Denton, Texas, and in Tacoma, where my boss once asked me whether the dancers at the ballet also sing while they’re performing.

These writers have tough jobs, jobs with high highs and low lows, jobs where cynicism is not an option. Read them. Throw in your comments.

Poor Joe Nickell, I read his blog for the first time through Arts Journal, which comes to me as an automatic daily newsfeed and which often points me to really useful stories. But, as is often the case when one expects one thing and gets another, I was upset because I thought that Joe would be writing about Montana arts, the whole state, but he sticks to Missoula. Missoula is NOT flyover country -- it’s a destination for global hipsters. What he’s picking up is the hem of Seattle, not the robes of the prairie.

But Joe’s only been there ten months and his specialty is music, so he must be forgiven for not understanding what the arts in Montana really are. He could start his research -- should he be interested -- by contacting Arlynn Fishbaugh, the executive for the Montana Arts Council. (Her background includes being staff for the Metropolitan Opera -- I haven’t asked her whether she has any “Bubbles” Sills stories.) But even Arlynn and the MAC have little consciousness of the 500 pound gorilla in this state, which is the legacy of Charlie Russell.

I jabbed Joe with a sharp stick in the comments for “Flyover Country” saying the Montana art world needs some REAL criticism, distinguishing good art from schlock. The response was not “ow” but “huh?” His assumption seems to be that he never writes about the annual March Russell Auction so therefore he never writes about art schlock. But he mistook me (and I did a bad job of commenting) because in my opinion and that of expert others, the auction often includes fine examples of American Impressionism which simply have Western subject matter. The point I was chasing is that most of the people who attend the auction and the complex of accompanying auctions where the schlock is most often found (the Russell auction itself is formally curated/juried) can only tell good art from bad by looking at the name of the artist and knowing how much money it is thought to be worth. (This is why bad art sells better if it’s priced high.)

That flashed past Joe like a pursued fox. But I regret using the term “schlock.” It means tawdry, inept, poorly done -- which is too much of a pejorative for a genre that has steadily improved and took a major leap with the newest influx: classically trained realistic painters from China. (They show regularly at the Western Art Rendezvous coming up in Helena. It’s really a kick to stand close enough to small groups of them to hear their chatting in Chinese. Can it be called eavesdropping if you can’t tell what they’re saying?) But even these fine artists, who make all the self-taught cowboy painters look desperate, are rather prone to “schmaltz,” which means over-sentimentality. The core of East Coast illustrators who galvanized the Cowboy Artists of America had the same combination of fine technical skill with a sort of sweet vignette sensibility drawn from the short stories they enlivened in slick magazines.

“What’s not to like?” many of my friends would ask. Well, I dunno. I have this sort of crazed romantic idea left over from my undergrad training in theatre: stuff about the heart of human meaning, a distinctive vision of the world, and all that.

Joe’s background sounds also romantic but more from a later generation than mine, the one that found their soul in music, oddly parallel but not the same as Bob Scriver’s “swing” generation. Bob’s kind of music got the soldiers through WWII. I think Joe must be from the Vietnam Era.

Those people don’t respond to sharp sticks, so I will try -- as here -- a little more courtship and networking. Part of my reaction to Joe is really about Missoula. On this side of the Rockies we see them as the home of snobbery, xenophobia, and fancy drugs. For the music freaks, it’s much closer to George, the fount of hip music. (The name is a play on the location in the Columbia Gorge. It’s an ampitheatre rather than a dive.)

The “pitch” for flyover country is that it is about the arts in “small cities,” but too many Montana small cities appear to be beneath notice here. Somebody send Joe Nickell some gas money.
Posted by prairie mary at 12:05 PM

UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS ONLINE

2007-05-28T12:30:00.000-06:00

http://www.uofcpress.com/1-55238/1-55238-227-1.html

The University of Calgary Press now shows this book in their on-line catalogue and is taking orders for September, 2007, delivery.

The photo shown in the catalogue is provisional and not the final cover. It shows Bob trimming the blank plaster of a baseball catcher, not his typical subject but a commission from the Mahre brothers. Instead of that one, I've posted a photo of Bob about to make the waste mold of the plastilene of his well-known bucking bull, "An Honest Try."

Bronze Inside and Out: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver
By Mary Strachan Scriver

$44.95
October 2007
ISBN 978-155238-227-1
6" x 9"
400 p.p.
B&W photographs
Legacies Shared No. 25
Biography, Art

About the Book
Bronze Inside and Out is a literary biography of sculptor Bob Scriver, written by his wife, Mary Strachan Scriver. Bob Scriver is best known for his work in bronze and for his pivotal role in the rise of “cowboy art.” Living and working on the Montana Blackfoot Reservation, Scriver created a bronze foundry, a museum, and a studio – an atelier based on classical methods, but with local Blackfoot artisans. His importance in the still-developing genre of “western art” cannot be overstated.

Mary Strachan Scriver lived and worked with Bob Scriver for over a decade and was instrumental in his rise to international acclaim. Working alongside her husband, she became intimately familiar with the man, his work, and his process. Her frank and uncensored narration includes details that give the reader a unique picture of Scriver both as man and as artist. Mary Strachan Scriver also provides a fascinating look into the practice of bronze casting, cleverly structuring the story of Bob Scriver’s life according to the steps in this complicated and temperamental process.

About the Author
Mary Strachan Scriver lives in Browning, Montana, where she has worked as a teacher, a writer, and a Unitarian minister.

"MONTANA'S OWN" By Dave Crowell

2007-05-27T20:23:00.000-06:00

Now and then I go scrounging around in my limited archives for something I only dimly remember. That’s what led me to a 1970 self-published book written by Dave Crowell. It’s basically a list of the Montana Western artists of the time, a catalog that presents a photo of their art, a photo of the artist, and a half-page or so of description. It didn’t include any of the academics, like Branson Stevenson or Rudi Autio, or any of the abstract artists. I have no memory of Dave Crowell at all, though I must have met him. In fact, Bob had just had his heart attack so I wrote the entry for him.

What impresses me is how few of these artists stayed in the biz or are still noted today. I count about 20. I googled every name and got no hits for 28 people. Ten have died, that I know of. A few have books of their own, either that they wrote or that someone else wrote about them.

What impresses me even more is that this simple little book is selling for as much as $375 dollars (see alibris.com) if it is signed by the author and includes a couple of original sketches by the illustrators. (Ron Bailey and Fred Fellows) This little book can sell for more money than some of these artists’ work at the time!

Here’s who’s in the book:

Bill Bailey Hungry Horse
Ron Bailey Hungry Horse
Tom Balazs Polson
Lou Blaskovich Butte
Sheryl Bodily Columbia Falls
Virginia Boegli Bozeman
Dan Bull Plume Glasgow
Bill Chapman Gardner
Clarence Cuts the Rope Hayes
Clay Connick Missoula
Fred Fellows Kalispell
Loren Dolln Butte
Bob Earhart Bigfork
James Flansburg Missoula
Bill Gebhart Conrad
Bob Hall Butte
Granville Hawley Hayes
James Haughey Billings
Bud Helbig Kalispell
Sandy Ingersoll Stevensville
Ron Jenkins Missoula
Andrew Jordan Choteau
King Kuka Missoula
Gordon Laridon Missoula
Betty Magner Great Falls
Marilynn Mason Missoula
Dutch Metesh Philipsburg
Darlene Morgan Bigfork
Bob Morgan Helena
Bill Ohrman Drummond
Merle Olson Bigfork
Hazel Ostrom Kalispell
Jack Olson Bozeman
Ace Powell Kalispell
Rex Rieke Helena
A.J. Richardson Great Falls
Tom Sander Kalispell
Bob Scriver Browning
John Segesman Cascade
Gary Schildt Hungry Horse
Steve Seltzer Great Falls
Tom Schenarts Missoula
Irvin Shope Helena
Elmer Sprunger Bigfork
Frankie Stratton Missoula
Les Welliver Kalispell
Bob Wood Kalispell
Geri Wood Kalispell

SCRIVER COLLECTION AT THE CMR

2007-04-25T15:08:00.000-06:00

When I tackle the problem of defending Bob Scriver’s heritage, I’m really being self-serving. Not because I expect to make money or gain prestige (which is what some assume), but because I sank a dozen years of my life into the enterprise. We agreed that in all written materials he would be represented as a solitary entity, but the truth is that “Scriver Studio” and especially “Bighorn Foundry” were complexes that involved at least a dozen people, mostly Blackfeet plus me.

So when I walked into the part of the CM Russell Museum where their new gift of Scriver bronzes were on display, nicely placed on Navajo rugs and Metis sashes and interspersed with the Winold Reiss portraits of Blackfeet whom Bob knew personally, I was not surprised to see the grandmother or great-grandmother of the Cree Medicines among them. But I was upset that no connection was made to the Cree Medicine contribution to the Scriver oeuvre. Carl Cree Medicine and I were the most consistent members of Bob’s crew in the Sixties -- we learned bronze-casting together -- and Carl’s son David was the foreman of the Bighorn Foundry and Scriver Studio in recent years. In fact, in 2000 it was David who patiently showed the Montana Historical Society how to pack bronzes for safe transport to Helena. They didn’t know how: they are paper-pushers.

Loving Bob Scriver meant loving three intertwined things: Bob and his work (one and the same), the Blackfeet, and the land itself. My adult life has been shaped by these three things.

So it breaks my heart when the connections are unknown, broken, and disregarded. These bronzes came from a white man who acquired them for speculation, who moved away as soon as he had enough money, and who is not what one would call an “Indian lover.” They have had their community relationships stripped from them.

I’ve been keeping a master list of all the Scriver sculptures I know about, since the MHS is doing so little with their huge acquisition, so I went to the CMR Museum in part to add those pieces to my list. ($7 for senior citizens now.) But the receptionist said I was not to take a pen or pencil into the galleries. I had planned to slip in and out anonymously, which I do every now and then. But I lost my temper, told her who I was, why I was there and a few other things besides.

It would not have mattered except that my arrival happened to coincide with a special prestigious luncheon laid on for the volunteers and patrons. My voice went high and loud enough for even the little old ladies to pay attention. Security guards appeared out of nowhere -- about four of them.

Having vented, I calmed down and went to the gallery to make my list. Then, bless her heart, here came Anne Morand to see what was the matter. At last she was looking at me and seeing me. When she first came to Montana, I had sent her a welcoming email. When there was no response, I made it a point to go down and introduce myself in person. She was pretty busy. I’ve tried to sell my little homemade books about Bob Scriver in their gift shop but the manager wouldn’t even come out of her office. The embarrassed clerk said they didn’t want anything I had. I’ve said good things about Anne in my blog -- I so much want her to succeed in a really tough job. But I could never get her attention. NOW I may have it. She said she’d get back to me. We’ll see.

As time goes on, the field of Western art has grown more and more complex and is competitive to the point of being cut throat. The field is not one thing, but a cluster of styles and subject matters, some historic (which is why the MHS thinks it should have art dealing with the West), some commercial art converted to cowboy subject matter, some fine and famous landscape artists (Moran, Bierstadt), some Taos Seven artists who portrayed Indians, and a lot of self-taught people who have roots deep in the West. There are sharp feelings among those folks -- one sub-group against another or individuals at odds -- especially now that the CAA is into its fifth generation or so and the founders, most importantly, the patriarch and peace-maker Joe Beeler, are dead of old age.

But the real trouble is with the circle of coyotes around the artists, the dealers, speculators and sometimes curators who make their living by buying low and selling high. There are many dubious ways of pushing prices down or up. Art law in Montana is almost nonexistent, so outsiders think it’s the frontier. One sculptor had work in a west side Montana gallery where it didn’t sell after two years of exposure. Or so he thought. When he asked for the work back, it turned out that the pieces HAD sold but the gallery refused to send his money until he brought a lawyer to bear. Luckily, ordinary commercial law was relevant, as it was in the scandalous Steve Seltzer case, but paying a lawyer cut into the profits. That kind of constant chiseling is not unusual.

More than that, there’s a certain amount of price-fixing, colluding, and other funny business behind the scenes that justify the paranoia of artists. One little strategy is to place a collection of art work by some artist in the galleries of a museum, either by gifting it or just offering to loan it. The museum does all the work of setting up a flattering display and curating it as significant. This reassures prospective customers that the art is worthy of high prices, certified by a “public,” semi-academic institution. In truth, many museum directors know little or nothing about art except biography, genre and mediums.

How to recognize “speculator bronzes:”

1. High numbers of castings in the edition. The most elite dealers won’t look at any edition bigger than 24.
2. Many small bronzes on popular familiar subjects (often suggested by the dealer).
3. Bronzes the copyright of which is owned by someone other than the artist. (I had major arguments with Bob over this. He wanted to get rid of the trouble of records. So far, the MHS has not released the provenance records of the copyrights and sales of bronzes for which he kept copyrights. This is to the benefit of speculators.)
4. Casting not under the direct supervision of the sculptor, esp if it’s sold by the foundry itself.
5. Bronzes that constantly circulate among auctions, which proliferate more and more. There are several websites that monitor this action, plus other information. (AskArt.com is the one I watch most.)
6. Bronzes that other artists and some dealers disparage. When a real masterpiece comes over the horizon, few argue.

In Bob’s case, after his major stroke in 1988, few of his bronzes reached the same level of competence as his work in the late Fifties, through the Sixties, and the early Seventies. The ill-advised “Christ the Teacher” is a good example of seriously strange work. There is a casting of it in this CMRussell gifted collection. You’ll see what I mean. But there are a few others of high quality, too. Look carefully at each piece.

These are the Cree Medicines, Carl and Carma to the left and David and Rosemary to the right. Carl and David look quite a bit like "Old Lady" Cree Medicine. They are in the CM Russell Museum on the occasion of Bob Scriver being given the Governor's award years ago.

SCRIVER CATALOGUE RAISONEE

2007-04-05T22:01:00.000-06:00

AT WWW.RAISONEE.BLOGSPOT.COM I've started a list of all the Scriver sculptures I know about and am posting whatever it is that I know. I'll try to keep it in chronological order.

TEDDY ROOSEVELT ON HORSEBACK

2007-01-30T20:27:00.000-07:00

According to AskArt.com, there is now a bronze of this Scriver portrait of Teddy Roosevelt available on one of the auctions. I thought it might be interesting to look at the main sculpture commissioned by Boone and Crockett for their ranch on the east slope of the Rockies. To access the ranch, one must go up a dirt road from Dupuyer, Montana. The bronze is out in a field and is not large. It's best to stop at the headquarters to ask for directions.

Boone & Crockett is one of a series of nature education centers along this side of the Rockies as well as a working ranch. The location was in the news a few years ago when a grizzly sow with two yearling cubs was accidentally shot in the face by hunters who blundered onto her bedding spot. (They were not ON but NEAR the ranch.) For quite a while she wandered with her cubs, confused and dislocated. Finally, Mike Madel -- the "bear guy" -- managed to trap them and wrap their container up in tarps and straw to trigger hibernation. In spring they were released. One cub was killed and eaten by a boar grizzly. The others have returned to their previous range and habits. This gives an idea of the remoteness of this location.

Since I grew up in Portland, Oregon, I knew well the Proctor portrait of Teddy Roosevelt, heroic sized, that stands in front of the Portland Art Museum downtown on the Park Blocks. When Bob and I were married, we took a tour of all the Beaux Arts style monumental bronzes in the city -- there are quite a few -- and we lingered the longest at Teddy Roosevelt.

RMS WIKIPEDIA ENTRY

2007-01-11T11:31:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia, as many know, is a publicly-driven encyclopedia of knowledge. I'm finding that the entry for Bob Scriver tends to be erroneous (They assumed that since Bob was born in Browning, Montana, he was Native American.) and dealer-driven, meaning that what is entered is what they think will help sales of the works they are selling.

I've tried to add material that is more inclusive and will be monitoring in the future.

Mary Scriver

TWELVE BLACKFEET STORIES by Mary Scriver

2006-12-03T11:37:00.000-07:00

NOT YOUR USUAL MYTHS AND LEGENDS!!

Dogwoman (1742 - 1766)
An old woman protests that dogs were good enough for the ancestors -- who needs horses?

Eats Alone (1767 - 1791)
A chief has everything but confidence in the Sacred.

Two Medicine (1792 - 1821)
A young two-spirited man falls in love with a little blonde priest, thinking he is also a man in a dress.

Horse Healer (1821 - 1841)
A woman warrior is captured and taken over the Continental Divide.

Horizon (1843 - 1859)
An exploring Indian goes back East and is mistaken for an insane person.

Eclipse (1860 - 1882)
A priest and a doctor puzzle over what to do with an old dead woman.

Whiteout (1883 - 1900)
An abusive wolfer is killed by his woman and her niece.

Cutnose Woman (1901 - 1924)
A woman unjustly punished for being unfaithful finds happiness unexpectedly.

Gay Paree (1924 - 1953)
Three Blackfeet soldiers, very different from each other, accidentally meet in Paris at the end of WWII.

Basketball Warrior (1953 - 1969)
A young athlete goes off to fight at Wounded Knee but never makes it.

Sweetgrass Hills (1969 - 1991)
A young man takes his Vision Quest in the Sweetgrass Hills, not knowing a rancher’s daughter is nearby.

The Sun Comes Up (1992 - now)
A female Blackfeet Fish & Game warden picks up a Blackfeet man (who has never seen the reservation) plus the bones of the ancestors so that both can come home.

ORDER ONLINE FROM:

http://www.lulu.com/content/393261
POWELLS, AMAZON, AND SO ON.

OR NOW in bookstores:
ISBN 978-1-84728-453-2

“Mary Scriver is an unruly fireball of writing talent -- full of horsepower, information, soul, brains, and juice.” MICHAEL B.

NANCY MCLAUGHLIN POWELL

2006-10-18T20:15:00.000-06:00

“I enjoyed reading your stories. I found your blog while doing a search on Nancy McLaughlin Powell. I have some Nancy McLaughlin art and am interested in her history, personality, etc. Do you have first hand knowledge of her or people who knew her?”

This query came in on my prairiemary blog, but I’m going to answer it on scriverart.blogspot.com, where I talk about artists. The inquirer didn’t give me any way to respond directly to her.

Nancy McLaughlin Powell was a little older than myself and married to Ace Powell while I was with Bob Scriver. Since Bob and Ace were close friends from childhood, we often formed a foursome. But Ace and Nancy lived on the west side of the Rockies, where there is money, rain and a lot of art predation. Bob was on the east side where the wind sweeps everything down to essentials and the cold discourages predators of all kinds. Nancy was Ace’s third wife, I think. There is a book wandering the universe, privately published, that is her life story with photos. I’ve seen it but never bought it.

Nancy and I were both the sort of women who are vulnerable to older men with big dreams. We believe in them, support them, mainline our energy and very blood into them, and suffer when they are neither grateful nor faithful -- sometimes not even successful. Nancy was high-headed and independent (Her white wedding dress was edged with scarlet ribbon.) and absolutely moral in terms of her husband and children. The devil was alcohol. Ace never pretended he was not alcoholic and what that does to a marriage is well-known. When it’s a third marriage, things are even worse: more to hide, more debris and baggage, more bad habits.

In spite of all that, which is more or less what people expect of artists, Ace and Nancy did pretty well. They aligned themselves as sort of hippie, Mother Earth, creative, counter-cultural types, though Nancy did most of the work. Ace couldn’t -- by the Sixties his heart and lungs were only partly operating. He’d say, “For Christmas I bought Nancy a new ax and I promised to go out and hold up the lantern for her.” It was a joke but probably the truth.

Nancy was also physically vulnerable: asthma could absolutely flatten her. The two of them were a kind of type, not-quite-blonde, thin, pale. They had huge amounts of courage and general attitude. Something vaguely Appalaccian in their Western world-view, like Ed Abbey. They were funny. Once we were talking and someone said something about having Ace in the hole. Nancy quipped, “I’m the only one with Ace in the hole!” and then turned bright red!

Their way of going at art was to produce lots of it with prices an ordinary guy could afford. They never made a big deal about being geniuses. Nancy did Indian portraits on velour paper with pastels, cool colors (blue and green) on one side of the face and warm colors (red, orange, yellow) on the other side. It was a gimmick, but very effective, and the works sold well. In addition, she would do charcoal drawings with white and red highlights on buckskin-colored paper, and some illustrations for books. She loved Indian legends and had close friends in the tribal world. There was always enough money for her Arabian horses.

The next devil entered through the book door. A writer crazier, needier, and much more demanding than Ace. He seemed strong, maybe a genius, and a way out after Ace and Nancy’s studio had burned, leaving them with very little except talent. For a while, she lost her nerve and that broke the attachment to Ace. She left with the writer. (Ace remarried.)

It was a huge mistake. The writer was a monster who made her and her children suffer badly. Eventually, having re-established and expanded her art career in Washington State, she built a new life, but it was late and she finally died of emphesema, asthma, “obstructive pulmonary disorder” -- whatever they called it. The year was 1985. She was born in 1934. Ace had died in 1978.

David, the oldest of Nancy and Ace’s children, is a member of the Cowboy Artists of America. He is happily married, has a son of his own, and an upstanding stepson, now adult. Before returning to easel painting in his studio in Simms (classic Charlie Russell country), he made quite a name for himself in Hollywood doing sets and costumes and providing advice on authenticity. Sometimes one can pick him out of a crowd of extras. The two younger children, both girls who look much like Nancy, have established their own lives with children of their own. Nancy would be proud. So would Ace. I don’t think he ever stopped loving Nancy.

Both Nancy and her son, David, are listed on the reference website called http://www.askart.com.

7-ll Collection at Sotheby's

2006-08-27T14:00:00.000-06:00

It appears that “cowboy art” is finally making it into the mainstream of art in America. Sotheby’s Auction House -- not any of the auction houses that specialize in Western art -- will auction drawings, paintings and sculpture on September 13 in New York City in a catalogue simply described as “American” but including well-known Cowboy Artists of America figures alongside the more familiar landscapes and portraits from across the country.

It never really occurred to me before, but 7-11 does sound kind of like a ranch brand, so maybe that’s why they bought so much Western art for the walls of their headquarters. It never occurred to me that 7-11 stores might go bankrupt, either, but I gather that this development, plus merging with another chain, has meant that much of the collection has been let go. A spokesperson says that there is still plenty of art left, which makes me wonder who made the choices about what to sell which leads to wondering who made the purchases in the first place. As I say, it appears that they just backed a truck up to a CAA show.

Weighorst, Payne, Sharp, Gary Niblett, Joe Neil Beiler, Gordon Snidow, James Elwell Reynolds (value estimated at $50,000 to 80, 000), Bill Owen, Jim Boren, John Wayne Hampton, Tom Ryan, Fred Fellows, U Grant Speed, Ned Jacob, Robert Elmer Lougheed are included among others. It gives me a jolt to realize how many of these men are dead of old age. Another jolt from realizing that some of the living are about my age (Fellows, Jacob). And a rueful note: who knew about these crazy middle names and suppressed first names their Mama gave ‘em? Most of the estimated values are around $10,000, give or take $5,000. Some of the works are bronzes.

For comparison, Macmonnies’ “Diana,” a familiar American bronze by a recognized master, is on auction also, valued between $20,000 and $30,000. She seems to have left her bow somewhere.

At this URL are the online catalogue pages. Cowboy stuff is late on the list. http://search.sothebys.com/jsps/live/event/EventDetail.jsp?event_id=27910

A good deal of optimism accompanies this auction because of an earlier set of auctions of the 7-ll photographs. Quotes as follows:

“You may be surprised to learn that behind your favorite Slurpees in the 7-Eleven convenience market chain lay a rich cache of 2500 works on paper and classic vintage photographs collected in the early 1980's to decorate company headquarters. It was an auspicious, low-priced time to collect, especially photographs.

“The Southland Corporation, as the business was then named, subsequently endured a leveraged buyout, a real-estate collapse, downsizing, and other pressures that drove a good chunk of their great photographs into storage for the last ten years. This year it was time for a change. Richard Allen, manager of The Collection of 7-Eleven, Inc., as it is called, explained that even after offering 126 top 19th- and 20th-century photographs at Sotheby's, they retain plenty of great images for their own use.

“...The 7-Eleven corporation originally acquired most of its photographs from the early established galleries, especially the Weston Gallery, Carmel, California, which had an arrangement with the Paul Strand archive; Foster Goldstrom Fine Arts, San Francisco; and Galerie Rudolf Kicken, Cologne, Germany for European images.

“...Altogether, the 7-Eleven collection pictures at Sotheby's brought a rousing $3,607,160, a record for a single-owner photograph sale in New York City and outstripping expectations.

“...Nine lots sold in the $100,000 to $300,000 range; 57 sold in the five-figure range; 48 at four figures; and two in the hundreds..”

“... The Stephen R. Anaya collection of California gold rush photographs brought $1.3 million for its 48 offerings, with three major bidders trampling the estimates and slugging it out for the golden 19th-century spoils.

“Anaya, a Santa Monica College faculty member, discovered gold rush images in the 1970's as a graduate student and then assembled a celebrated collection of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, and paper prints often tapped by museums and television producers. For example, many of Anaya's images appear in The West, a documentary by Ken Burns, and in its companion book. The auction offered Anaya's wide selection, from California prospectors out digging to the rudimentary towns that sprang up to service them.”

One wonders what the Adolf Hungry-Wolf photo collection will eventually bring at auction. Be nice to the guy! Get your set of “The Blackfoot Papers” early!

“An Edward S. Curtis bound volume with 101 large-format photogravure plates, The North American Indian, 1899-1914, went to a private collector for the sale's top lot at $101,500 (est. $40,000/ 60,000).

“In a four-way phone battle, The Wild Bunch, circa 1900, a group portrait including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, by Texas photographer John Swartz escalated from the $25,000/45,000 estimate to the final $85,000 from an anonymous private collector. The last of the American frontier bank and train robbers, the five remaining members of the Wild Bunch sat proudly for their portrait, wearing identical shiny black derby hats. In its prime the legendary group had over 20 members and cut a swath from Wyoming to Texas.”

My considered opinion (and warm hope) is that all the print debunking of the Wild Old West will be brushed aside by love for the images in photos and movies. Maybe the New West is a matter of Santa Fe Cuisine and Sundance decor, but that doesn’t photograph so well. And why buy a Terpening painting of Indians at an inflated price, when one could buy a Sharp or Jacob for less?

Sotheby’s. No need to fly out to Texas.

TWO HUGE MONUMENTS IN BABB

2006-08-23T19:27:00.000-06:00

When I told Ray Djuff, author of many books about Glacier Park or rather Waterton Peace Park since he comes from the Canadian side, that I had a better library on the Blackfeet than some public libraries, he called my bluff by arriving to spend a couple of days at my work table going through what I had. As a sort of “hostess gift,” he sent me these photos he had taken of the Scriver sculptures now emplaced at the public schools in Babb.

These are fiberglass monuments that were in front of the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife and Hall of Bronze in Browning. When the Montana Historical Society arrived to take away all of Bob’s work, they were hard-pressed to know how to transport these monster statues or where to put them if they got them safely to Helena, so they loaned them to the Blackfeet Tribe. The Tribe has a lot of empty warehouse space up at the Industrial Park by the railroad depot, so they stashed them in there to save them from vandals. There is still enough animosity against Bob for renegades to feel justified in spray-painting or otherwise defacing his works. (Of course, there was a great outcry of protest when the statues were missing!)

In fact, the rumor went around that the big bull-rider statue was dropped at some point and was “busted.” However, Gordon Monroe was on the tribal council at that point and he was the person who had made the casting from the original mold in the first place, so he was perfectly capable of fixing it. Gordon has done all of Bob Scriver’s fiberglass casting as well as creating some major works of his own. For instance, his huge “corpus” of Jesus on the Cross is in the Church of the Little Flower in Browning.

These two huge works come out of the rodeo phase of Scriver’s work, which is all some people really think of when they reflect on his entire body of a thousand sculptures, partly because the rodeo sculptures are what he always sent to the Cowboy Artists of America shows. “An Honest Try,” which is a portrait of Bill Cochran on a Reg Kessler bull, became Bob’s trademark and motto, replacing the “Lone Cowboy” motif he used earlier. This one-and-a-half life-sized version was commissioned for the Inland Trade building in Kansas City in 1986.

The other big statue is a version of the PRCA (Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association) figure on their official belt buckle. A bronze version of it is behind the Montana Historical Society building in Helena. They gave Bob one of these buckles and he may have been buried wearing it.

The tribe didn’t mess around with deliberations over where to put these statues. They just did it. The Montana Historical Society didn’t know until I told Arnold Olsen and I didn’t know until I was Googling School District #9 and came across the pictures on their website. I still haven’t seen them in person.

Bob had many connections to Babb, mostly from the days when he lived all summer in a cabin he’d built halfway between Babb and St. Mary. I had connections there myself, partly through some of the Blackfeet Sandwich Shop and Free School faculty who later taught at that school and probably had something to do with this, and partly through the year I was the Methodist minister for the Blackfeet Reservation and preached in Babb every Sunday. Because the St. Mary Valley opens to Canada rather than the reservation, the culture is a little different there. It’s more of a tourist town with white businesses that have been there since homesteader days, gradually becoming Indian businesses as the generations intermarry -- but with a strong strain of Metis.

Anyway, they look great in front of the new Babb school and I hope they have a long and happy life there.

THE ROYAL ALBERTA MUSEUM SCRIVER SHOW

2006-06-18T13:10:00.000-06:00

The Royal Alberta Museum Scriver Show continues through the summer and into November.

After I wrote the just previous blog, I sent copies to the Montana Historical Society, the Royal Alberta Museum, and the Evans and Cree Medicine families. The families just grinned. The Montana Historical Society said I was unfair. Bruce McGillivray, the director of the Royal Alberta Museum, thought there was some justice in what I said. He arranged for Bob’s second wife’s sister, Helene, who was also Bob’s model for the Pieta and his “muse” and encourager in the late years, to be invited to the Opening.

Helene was thrilled. She lives only blocks from the museum, in a river-view condominium in an older building. She has known Bob since he began to date her sister during WWII, when she was 17. When Jeanette divorced Bob in 1959, it only created a temporary gap in his complex and long-standing friendship with her family. The commission to make a “corpus” (Jesus on the cross) brought Bob back into active relationship with both Helene and her and Jeanette’s brother, Maurice. That commission became entangled with the death of Bob’s daughter, Margaret, who was about the same age as Maurice. Bob’s way of handling her death was the creation of his “Pieta,” for which Maurice and Helene were the models.

Helene says she’s not ashamed of her age (81) but she has always warred against actually aging, with considerable success. If the Royal Alberta Museum was expecting a white-haired granny in sensible shoes, they must have been disconcerted by this elegant petite woman clicking through the entryway in her usual high heels. She had brought with her an escort, someone younger and quite handsome. When she saw the big portrait of Bob at the entrance of the display, she burst into tears. “He was grinning, Mary,” she said in her telephone report. “He was like he used to be in the happy days!”

A second-hand report is what I have. I was invited once Bruce saw what the signficance of the claim was, but have no money and am wrestling to understand a recent diagnosis of Diabetes II, which is significantly affected by travel and meals “out.” But Helene’s report was vivid and I thought she should be the star anyway. Her patience and faithfulness have been unending. She is really VERY charming and glamorous and she appreciated the whole scene, the grace and society of it. “All my relatives have gotten old,” she wailed on the phone. Jeanette herself died just a few months ago after years of bedridden pain. “I hope she knew I was at this show and that she was pleased,” declared Helene.

Doug Macfie, head of Clan Macfie in Canada and maintainer of the genealogy website for the family, was also pleased and told the Quebec cousins including Margaret, the cousin for whom Bob named his daughter. Doug tells me that Bob’s grandfather, George Macfie, had two brothers who headed west. I had thought they landed in California and Seattle like the Scriver ancestors, but in fact they remained in Western Canada and have spread across the prairie provinces as the generations multiplied. This suggests to me a new project: making a family tree for the Macfies into a mailing list. There are several cornet players among them -- might there be another sculptor?

Museums and historical societies are nervous about families hanging around, because they often interfere -- sometimes even try to take back donations of objects, claiming they were only loans. Historical societies are particularly tricky because so much of history is about families who are happy to be supportive so long as the accounts are flattering, but inclined to be unhappy when skeletons fall out of closets. For an historical society to double as an art museum is quite common in the West because the value of Western art is often seen as rooted in the history of the frontier. This means that the twists and turns of history can affect the actual cash value of an art collection.

The tendency of Western art curators and dealers has been to find a template that has been successful in the past, and then to force every new artist into that same pattern. All his life Bob was pushed to be like Charlie Russell, both in his technique and as a person -- but he was NOT Charlie. Not even Charlie was the stereotypical person created by legend! To commodify an artist like this is to destroy the very uniqueness that makes him or her valuable.

The enormous contribution of the Royal Alberta Museum in this show of Scriver bronzes is to separate Scriver from the distant SW Western Art Money Machine, as well as the perhaps too-close cliches of Charlie Russell, and to show Bob in his own right. The strangest reactions by pre-readers of “Bronze Inside and Out,” the biography of Bob that the University of Calgary Press will publish in the spring, were those that wanted to remove the genealogy and those who wanted to remove the hunting stories, both important keys to his personality. (Charlie Russell was not a hunter -- he would skin and pack, but would not shoot.)

Edmonton was a major part of the Bob Scriver’s life. The support of the wife he found there, Jeanette, was one reason he was able to move from music to sculpture -- though it meant returning to Browning, Montana, when she would have preferred to live in Edmonton. Her family remained dear to him. For the RAM to include Helene DeVicq in the opening of this exhibit was an act of generosity and justice. Surely it will create good karma. Maybe enough to rub out the curses of the jealous malcontents who invaded the opening of the Scriver Artifact Collection years ago.

SCRIVER NEAR-SONS

2006-05-23T19:54:00.000-06:00

Thad and Ellison Scriver had two sons, one for him and one for her, but the sons themselves either had no sons (Harold) or had a “lost” son (Robert). The solution in Bob’s case was to informally involve -- not quite adopt -- the sons of two other families: Evans and Cree Medicine.

The Joe Evans family, Catholic, had plenty of kids and they related to Bob and his wives because Joe helped to invent the Bighorn Foundry and kept the Scriver Studio in general up and running. Joe was one of those people who can do sheet metal, HVAC, plumbing, or any other mechanical puzzle that came along, aside from the building skills that many folks around here assume they have -- whether or not they do. Anyway, Joe built a big house on the road out to the dump and, with the steady help of his hard-working wife, raised a heap o’ kids who came and went through the studio.

The first funeral I ever attended in Browning was that of Lila Evans, a daughter and fearless horse-rider, who’d pitched off and hit her head on a big stone. It was in the stone Church of the Little Flower, a funeral mass for a child, the Mass of the Angels, and a choir of nuns sang in the balcony. Bob and I were sitting way in the back, so I didn’t even realize the loft was there. When the beautiful voices of the nuns first raised in song, I thought for a moment it was angels indeed.

When Bob sold the rodeo series to the Riverside Foundation and inherited his mother’s money, which made it possible for him to buy the Doane ranch, he hired Corky Evans to live out there for security and to finish off the cows by raising them to the point where they were saleable. Boyd Evans married Lila Walter, whose brother had dated Laurel, Harold’s daughter, who spent enough time with the Walter family to be a sort of honorary daughter in that family. In the 1930 Browning High School yearbook photo of Bob’s sophomore class, Lila’s mother is sitting next to him. According to the Browning newspaper, Bob and Hiram Upham once went out to visit Lila’s mother in the badlands east of the rez and came back with some nice rattlesnakes.

When Bob was commissioned to create a Lewis and Clark monument for Fort Benton, it was Boyd who wore a buckskin suit around on horseback for a few months of ranch chores so it would be authentically creased and greased. When the actual parade celebrating the unveiling came on July 4, 1976, it was Corky who had grown a beard, donned a fur cap, wore the buckskins and rode a horse so skittish that when he got it home it vamoosed, never to be seen again. (After being exposed to bagpipes, Uncle Sam on stilts, and other remarkable sights, it probably never wanted to be in another parade!)

Tony was mortally stricken with cancer. Bob made a sculpture of him on horseback: “Our Tony,” to help raise money to pay the bills. A quick 8”X10” painting Bob made of one of the boys feeding orphan calves -- green hooded sweatshirt with the hood up, tan and white calf, bright yellow straw -- disappeared when Bob died, but remains in all our minds one of the best paintings Bob ever made: simple, vivid, real.

When no one else was around to ride with Bob (usually meaning no female), he’d take an Evans boy with him. Boyd rode with him in the Indian Days Parade. Corky was riding with him, late in life, when he had some kind of episode that knocked him off his horse. Corky figured a heart attack, but Bob would admit nothing and would do nothing about it. Later he did make Boyd promise to bury him beside his horse, Gunsmoke, after Boyd came out with the backhoe and buried the old horse.

The Evans family was an archetypal High Line Montana small town and ranch family -- lank, droll, teasing, almost Ozarkian in their independence and free lance spirit, which occasionally got them into trouble. Think of the parts played by Lucas Black in movies like “Slingblade” or “All the Pretty Horses.”

The Cree Medicine family has no equivalent in movies. They are full-blood, not really traditional, but the old days are very close under the surface. Carl, by now the grandpa and patriarch, is about my age and was Bob’s best shop helper when I came. He did taxidermy, sculpture molds and castings, and building with equal attention and skill. He worked in the shop for all the years I was with Bob. After I left, Bob hired his sons. I don’t know what the circumstances were or the time-line, but I did see the certificates of achievement Bob had given Carl and that Carl kept on the wall of his little office when he was running a program to help street people. I know Carl and Carma managed to kick alcohol and find a home in the Catholic church. Sometimes now we meet at funerals.

David Cree Medicine became Bob’s foreman with Jody as dependable helper. This is a family with many deaths, tragedies and addictions. For people who live on a reservation, that’s the legacy of conquest. Many whites deny it, but others treat even the troubled as individuals deserving respect. In return, the Cree Medicine family never turned away from Bob, either in sickness or when he raged or as the women came and went. They managed the animals and fixed the fence and -- when necessary -- carried Bob in or out of the shop. Rumors went around the rez that they secretly did Bob’s sculpture for him and they did put clay on the armataures. It was David who broke the door down to get to Bob’s body. It was David who helped the Montana Historical Society crew who came suddenly to take everything away, needing to know how to crate bronzes.

The great irony is that these two families of near-sons have been completely invisible to the Montana Historical Society and the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton. They are not invited to openings or shows or even advised that there are such events. It was not Lorraine, Bob’s widow, who cut them off or left them out, but rather the officials, who cannot imagine that they exist. Neither do they think of Bob’s five grandchildren, who are nearly fifty now with children of their own.

I suppose a case could be made that Bob Scriver and his work belong to the ages and that these institutions are the guardians. But to the Evanses and the Cree Medicines, Bob’s work was a major part of their lives and they have many stories to tell. Instead, somehow, the lawyers and entrepreneurs have elbowed them aside. The result has been a paralysis, a void, an ignorance.

The Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton will be showing the sculpture of Bob Scriver all this summer, beginning June 8 and ending in November. Maybe some of Bob’s real friends and family will manage to go see the exhibit.

SCULPTURE REVIEW, Spring 06, "Education of a Sculptor"

2006-05-18T16:09:00.000-06:00

When I was in seminary (1978-1982), there were two lively currents of dissent and argument in the student body about the seminary itself. The first one was whether a seminary ought to be only for dedicated persons who wished to become denominational ministers (which was the original definition and founding goal) or ought to be a place to explore oneself, expand, and hopefully become a better person but not necessarily a leader of congregations. (The seminary itself -- always in need of tuition-paying students -- was happy to broaden the goal. The denomination was kicking in money for the program specifically to make sure there were high-quality ministers.)

The other argument was about whether the seminary should be giving us the actual skills we needed for success in the ministry or whether they ought to be giving us broad principles from which we could develop our own understandings, principles and tools. A subset of this argument argued we should sue the seminary for failing in its duty, since some felt a major shortfall when they got into their job placements, a suit that might have had some teeth if anyone had any idea exactly what it was that the place was promising to do.

I say this is as introduction to a discussion of the latest “Sculpture Review,” Spring, 2006, which focuses on “Education of a Sculptor” and puts on its cover aspiring sculptors rather than the usual fine sculpture. (Earnest young men in smocks at Greenwich workshop in NYC, 1935-39, gathered around a serious older man in a three-piece suit.) Though the magazine is sponsored by the National Scupture Society, which seeks to support figurative sculpture, the problems of sculpture are widely shared among all the humanities now that everything, even education, is commodified.

Some argue that if a person goes to an art school and emerges unable to earn a living, that person has been tricked. In music they say that since symphonies are more penniless than ever, more musicians (granted that they are fine) are being produced than there are jobs. (In fact, this was the situation for Bob Scriver right after WWII when his skills would seem to qualify him for a fine orchestra, if those entities hadn’t already been packed.) Others would say that a humanities or fine arts degree and/or any education (since they don’t always coincide!) is such a valuable thing in itself, that no one should complain at having their life enriched.

With characteristic humor, Giancarlo Biagi illustrates his editorial on entering art school with Rodin’s “Gates of Hell!” “Make me into another Michelangelo, Rodin, Saint-Gaudens,” the student begs. But do they know what path they are entering upon? Biagi concludes: “To the layperson’s eyes, the life of an artist appears to be filled with glamour, passion, and success. In truth, however, the path is forged in dedication and humility, enlightened by an intellectual zest and virtuosity, and a unique style that belongs to each artist, in my point of view.”

The first article is a review of The Art Student’s League and the National Academy of Fine Arts, illustrated with two sharply contrasting photos: a cluster of young men in vested suits without jackets, earnestly drawing a naked lady, versus a class of mixed ages and genders sculpting a naked man. Student and faculty works used as illustration mix fusty old Zorach with such modernities as a humorous mixed media polychrome bust of a woman with real hair.

The second article gives us Elisabeth Gordon Chandler, a sculptor and teacher as well as founder of Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in Old Lyme , Connecticut. She is 92 and still working. A review of the program fills a page.

Another sculptor/teacher is Evangelos Frudakis who describes both his learning and his teaching, especially at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the oldest art museum and art school in America. (Founded in 1885.) Frudakis and his work look the way most of us (and Hollywood) think a sculptor should look.

The two articles I liked best have long titles: “Teaching the Basics to Foster Mastery: a Survey of Figurative Sculpture Programs” and “Sculptors Educating Sculptors: A Panel Discussion of the New York Academy.” They are about what their titles say they are about. Following the same compare-and-contrast principle, the New York Academy of Art and the Florence Academy in Italy both stick to figurative work. The tricky question of academic credit and degrees is mentioned -- some offer them and some don’t, though one can always petition for equivalence.

The University of California at Berkeley and the University of Oklahoma programs do not stick to figurative sculpture. The latter program was reinstated after a lapse of thirty years by sculptor Paul Moore. Moore’s classroom is pictured, but not his work. Attention is paid to how to run a studio and capture public commissions for monuments, how to relate to a foundry, how to design contracts, how to relate to clients. It is unclear what relationship the program has to the C.M. Russell Center for the Study of Western Art which is funded by the Nancy Russell Foundation and housed at the U of Oklahoma.

The panel discussion had the most striking illustrations. Judy Fox’s super-realistic portraits of children in terra cotta are almost disturbing, as is Laura Frazure’s “Self Portrait as a Japanese Bride.” I was very grateful that the captions for these works were where I expected them to be, so that my eye could find them quickly! I urgently needed to know what I was looking at! (Really, my thanks for this change!) Harvey Citron’s “Charon,” a clay near-diorama of Charon perilously ferrying a couple over a tossing sea (I know -- it’s supposed to be a river, but these huge curling waves are like surf!) kept me looking for a long time.

Taplin, whose work was not illustrated, had an interesting idea about the difference between “hand/eye sculptors” and “conceptual skills.” He wishes for a close relationship between having an idea and having the hand/eye skills to bring it to reality. My guess is that none of these sculptors was particularly enamored of giant clothespins, no matter how realistic.

Fox thought that it was important for an artist to define to his or her self just what they were doing. “It should not be done in a naive way.” (Corrals of home-taught cowboy sculptors bite the dust. Maybe they ought to!)

Visco wanted people to consider their materials and their audience -- why is it important for works to be in a certain medium? I was interested that he said, “Some students can get too involved in process -- they sculpt because they like to touch stuff.” (Very much the way Bob Scriver was. He loved the substances in his hands. Charley Russell was famous for the dirty ball of beeswax he kept in his pocket and constantly modeled.)

Taplin and Eardley contrasted the freedom of Bernini to design the architecture around his figures with the hostility of modern sculptors to being defined by any one place. Citron offered Rodin’s "Balzac" as an example of a monument that could hold its own in many contexts and pointed out that it took over forty maquettes to get to that level.

This whole issue of Sculpture Review, whether approached through the photos of sculpture or through the content of the articles was deeply engaging for both professional and fan.

A Birder's List from Southwest Art, April 2006

2006-05-17T21:36:00.000-06:00

The April 2006 Southwest Art chose as a focus “Animals in Art.” Since many of the animals in question are birds, I thought I’d just treat the whole issue as birding expedition. What I found was a flock of birds in every style and medium. I don’t know quite what conclusion to draw except that artists love birds -- and why not?

I also found that I didn’t know my birds very well! I simply couldn’t tell what species some of them were. Have to work on that! In the meantime, here’s my list. You might enjoy spotting them yourself.

Heron (sculpture)
2 shrikes (sculpture)
Hummingbird (stylized painting)
Pigeon or dove (realistic painting)
Geese (underfoot in a family portrait)
Chicadee (realistic painting)
Heron (“natural impressionism” painting)
Heron (Even more impressionist painting)
Shorebirds (Godwit? Yellowlegs? Painting)
Flying birds (? Painting)
“Canadian Geese” (Giclee print)
Bluebird (stylized painting)
Eagle (Eagle sculpture)
Crow (one live and one dead, with sculpture figure)
2 crows (realistic painting)
Magpie (realistic painting)
Heron? (painting)
Swans (painting)
Parrots (painting)
Coot (painting)
Peacocks (painting)
Sparrowhawk? (painting)
Cedar waxwing (stylized painting)
Roseate Spoonbills (painting)
Magpies (stylized painting)
Terns (realistic painting)
Golden eagle (realistic painting)
Crow (stylized abstract)
Domestic geese (realistic painting)
“Japanese Bantam Rooster” (sculpture)
China pheasant roosters (sculpture)
Bird on a branch (realistic painting)
Owl (realistic painting)
“Tufted Cranes” (realistic painting)
English sparrows (“poetic expressionist” painting

$831,00 PAINTING

2006-05-17T20:57:00.000-06:00

Though I’ve fallen far behind with my art mag readalongs, I’ve still been acquiring and reading art mags. Not with subscriptions but as a kind of fox hunt on occasions when I get to Great Falls.

I want to comment on the column called “Straight Talk” which is written by Allan J. Duerr and Thomas F Teirney, the publishers of “Art in the West.” The issue with this column in it is May/June 2006, and has a lovely fuzzy elk monarch with his harem around him, standing in a meadow backed by yellow aspen. The subject the writers chose for their column was the value of art, comparing Michelangelo’s Pieta with Terpening’s recent sale of a painting for $831,000.

First maybe we can deal with the Pieta, which is the name for a whole cluster of sculptures, not just Michelangelo's. The name refers to a group based on Mary holding her dead son, Jesus, in her lap. In fact, when I got curious about who made the statue of Paris Gibson in Great Falls, the town he founded, I searched the bronze monument for a name and came up with a fellow named “Partridge.” He was also the sculptor of the Pieta that is in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Bob Scriver made a Pieta after the death of his daughter. I’ve never made an exhaustive list and don’t know whether any one else has either, but I’ll bet the National Sculpture Society could. And my guess is that the skill and the value of them is all over the place, from high to low.

A commentator contemporary with the making of the Pieta by Michelangelo said (in Italian or maybe Latin) “No one else could make a statue this good.” I’ve heard that said about a lot of statues, some of them of the Western persuasion.

Duerr and Tierney were challenged by someone who said that no painting could be worth $831,000, much less by a popular illustrator who used to be published with slick stories about girls in love. (His girls used to alternate with those of Jon Whitcomb. I was much smitten with them and yearned to be like them. I suppose some young folks must have the same reaction to romantic paintings of 19th century Indians.)

Terpning himself is becomingly humble about all this and says it’s a great responsibility.

What no one is saying is the obvious: Terpning, like Bev Doolittle and Norman Rockwell, is a one-artist print industry. I would be very curious who bought that painting and how the rights to reproduce were handled, because that’s the real value of the painting -- not a yard or so of canvas on sticks, but the promotion and sale of the industrially reproduced image.

This means that he, like a movie star, has a battalion of accountants, lawyers, printing technicians, and publicity managers who must be paid. None of us are ever going to see how that $831,000 divvies out -- unless we work for the IRS, who will get its share. But we should at least be aware that we are not talking about one man in one studio.

Of course, Michelangelo had a studio full of helpers as well. And when the Pope tells you to make something, one doesn’t have the option to decline.

Some years ago a nasty little incident occurred. Terpning had bought a box of glass negatives taken by an unknown photographer. He painted many appealing and saleable works verbatim for these images. What he didn’t know was that they had been stolen decades ago from a woman photographer who lived among the Crow Indians. Her son, an elderly man who was retired in poverty, recognized the images and approached Terpning.

The next thing the old man knew, he was being confronted by hostile lawyers denying him any claim, rights or compensation. He was not even to admit that Terpning had used the images as reference. The whole $831,000 or whatever was evidently committed, with nothing left over for old janitors. He’s gone now, I guess. It's a pity.

ART MARKET CYCLES

2006-04-05T10:41:00.000-06:00

This material comes from New York magazine (nymag.com), an article entitled, “Five Theories On Why the Art Market Can’t Crash and Why It Will Anyway” by Marc Spiegler

The article wasn’t written about Western art, but it is relevant. The categories referred to are Impressionism and Modern (which have been dynamic for quite a while) and Postwar and Contemporary (which are just now taking off).

Here are the five theories:

1. “The Expanded Art World.” Up to twenty times more people are buying art now as in 1990.

2. “The Art World’s Gone Global.” The big recent contemporary-art collectors have been from Brazil, Mexico and South Korea. Next might be Russia and China -- maybe India or Arab emirates. For cowboy artists, Japan and Germany have always been happy. But an interesting “Western art” trend is paintings of and by Russians, Chinese, Mongolians, and so on.

3. “Art is the New Asset Class.” Compares well with real-estate or bonds. Mei-Moses, two NYU economists, did a study that shows contemporary art compares well with the S&P 500. This is constantly pushed among some dealers.

4. “Diversification As a Safety Valve.” Because there are so many different kinds of art (think of video, etc) the action rolls through them so that there are many small corrections to the big category of Art. This is probably less true of Western art, which is not so diverse. The diversity tends to be in the subject matter: still-life, landscape, portraits, wildlife, etc. All representational, if occasionally a little surreal or abstract.

5. “The Japanese.” The last boom (esp. in Impressionism) and bust (linked to a crashing Japanese real estate scene) were both Japanese, but they seem stable now.

Advice: Watch Christie’s and Sotheby’s. In the past they wouldn’t sell works less than ten years old, but now they’re taking works three or four years “out of the studio.” Though their sales are only a tiny part of the art market, they are so public that they tend to control impressions of how the art market is doing. If both major houses have failed auctions back-to-back, people will panic. But in fact, private and gallery sales might be quite different.

“The defining characteristic of the current art world is speed.” People are buying online after seeing “only a J-PEG” image, as opposed to having to travel to a different country and taking months to make a decision. “Speculators, private dealers and consultants” abound and can disappear overnight. (Posting JPEG versions of paintings in online catalogues for auctions has become very sensitive and may diminish online sales.)

The bad words are “correction, contraction or crash,” which mean that prices will be abruptly cut, galleries will disappear, and some artists will become unsaleable. (Anyone want to buy a pickled shark?) Some aspects of some artists (cheap prints) will be worthless. (Hello, Terpning.)

The bright side: Of course, great opportunity for those with reserve cash for buying! And all the softwood imitative artists will drift off to something easier -- maybe rodeo competition -- while those who truly love it for its own sake will continue to follow their vision and sharpen their skills. The best art is always done by hungry artists who aren’t distracted by cocktail parties and opportunists looking for someone to exploit.