100th ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF ROBERT MACFIE SCRIVER

Bob Scriver, Photo by Butch DeSmet about 1960.

ROBERT MACFIE SCRIVER was born on August 15, 1914, in Browning, Montana, the capital of the Blackfeet Reservation where his father was a government licensed Indian agent.  Educated in the Browning schools, and then receiving a teaching degree from Dickinson State College in North Dakota, he focused tightly on music at Vandercook School of Music in Chicago and quickly became famous for the Browning school system bands, the Blackfeet Indian Band, local jazz and club bands, and the Malta school system bands.  He said that even junior high students could be fine players once they learned to play one note in tune with the rest of the orchestra, a harder thing to do than some expect.

Jeanette Couette Scriver Chase, Bob's second wife (about 2005)

After service in the Army Air Force Band assigned to Edmonton and Alaska, he left teaching and started a taxidermy business in Browning, accurately predicting that a stream of big game hunters would be traveling the new Al-Can highway to Alaska.  The Scriver Studio was the farthest north taxidermy business on the US side of the highway.  His second wife, Jeanette, was a major participant in his work through the Fifties.

The next stage of that career was the collection and mounting of one example of each of the Montana big game species, presented in the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife which was a neighbor of the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning.  The full-mounts were joined by a room of miniature inch-to-a-foot dioramas of each species in its habitat.  This building now houses the Blackfeet Heritage Center.  The full-mounts have been dispersed but the miniature dioramas are in storage in Helena.

Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife

The museum was meant to be a resource for artists who needed to study the animals and it did attract major figures, mostly illustrators:  Ralph Crosby Smith, John Clymer, Robert Kuhn, and Warren Baumgartner were friends and teachers.  The sculpture began modestly enough as small portraits of the animals, often designed to be useful, like ashtrays or lamps.  In the late Fifties the sculpture came to maturity in portraits of actual animals and people as well as groups.  By the early Sixties the more serious art was being cast in bronze and Scriver built his own foundry, the Bighorn Foundry, which guaranteed high quality casting with the classic Roman Block form of lost wax casting.  

Though his reputation and value grew quickly, he never left Browning and did not build the palatial studio and grounds that some recently successful cowboy artists have enjoyed.  Instead he bought a small ranch on Two Medicine River and later a ranch on Flatiron Creek west of Browning.  In the early years of his married life before WWII, he had built a little cabin near St. Mary’s, living in a tipi with his first wife, Alice Prestmo Scriver Skogen, and their newborn daughter, Margaret, while building.  The total cost of that cabin was $350, mostly for a big picture window on the lake side.

The Badger Tipi

In the Sixties, when a few old Buffalo people were still living, he and Mary Strachan Scriver (third wife) became Bundle Keepers and continued the protocols until a great scandal when he sold the family artifact collection to the Royal Alberta Provincial Museum in Edmonton.  He did not sell the Thunder Pipe Bundle that he guarded and kept active.  In fact, according to Blackfeet ways (which does not recognize governmentally legal marriage and divorce) I am technically the remaining keeper of both the Long Time Thunder Pipe Bundle transferred to us by Richard Little Dog, as well as the Badger Tipi and its bundle.  No one knows where they actually are.

At his death in 1999 his estate was quickly dispersed by his fourth wife, Lorraine Caldwell Scriver.  The bulk of the collection and all his papers went to the Montana Historical Society.  Today the sculptures of Blackfeet are protected and displayed in Fort Benton at the reconstructed fort.  His ranch on Flatiron Creek was converted to a nature reserve jointly owned by the Blackfeet Tribe and Nature Conservancy, an arrangement negotiated by Eloise Cobell.  Lorraine returned to her hometown of Vancouver, B.C. where she died in 2003.  Her ashes were dispersed in the Pacific Ocean.  The bulk of Bob's wealth disappeared mysteriously.

Alice, the first wife, is buried in the grave of the oldest daughter in Anacortes.  Bob was sometimes accused of being “bad seed,” but as it turned out it was Alice who was carrying a genetic vulnerability to cancer which killed her, her mother, and both her children by Bob.  I don’t know about her children from later marriages.  Bob’s death at 85 was probably due to heart and lung problems, partly from the materials he handled. 

Now that it’s a hundred years since Bob Scriver was born, it’s interesting to try to understand what we were thinking in the Sixties, the key years when his reputation as an outstanding sculptor of Western subjects was being formed.  Fame and fortune are something like the drive in a dog to chase a car, trying to catch it without understanding what to do with it once you’ve got it.  

While Bob’s collateral relatives from Canada were here, I rustled up the DVD that the lawyers made of Bob talking about himself when he was eighty.  It’s a 30 minute disc that includes both Bob and some “mood” images of the Blackfeet sculptures included in the book “No More Buffalo,” which Bob paid to have printed.  You can find it on the used book markets on the Internet.

Bob's cousin, watching the DVD, asked whether he was a drunk.  He’d had a stroke and he has trouble with his teeth, but also he has adopted a defiant, boasting, false humility about his place in history.  Actually, I agree with him.  His claim is based on being in a certain place (the Blackfeet rez) at a particular time (the booming popularity of Western art) and taking advantage of it with the skills and drive he had developed since his earliest years.  He shows the tiny figures he made as a first grader, developed into his basic skills by the time he was in high school.  He puts considerable force and eloquence into explaining why he took the detour into music, describing “foul” years.  Actually, they were considered quite brilliant at the time, with his school bands winning prizes and praise.

Bob Scriver and the Rodeo Cowboys Association monument

He wanted to be a star.  Not a high school band conductor but first chair in a major orchestra.  Of course, that would have meant leaving Browning.  Much of the guidance and energy in his life came from his mother who was determined that Robert would be outstanding but also that he would NEVER leave her.  His father had no use for art, but understood brass bands from his own years with a cadet band in rural Quebec.  His father’s idea of a proper man was Bob’s older brother, Harold, who ran the Browning Merc when his father was too old but still wasn’t trusted with the key to the rolltop manager’s desk.  

Both parents had made a huge leap -- across the continent -- away from their own families.  They had not gotten rich nor become famous, except that Thad’s brother had indeed become enormously rich, but by chance.  He owned land that turned out to be in the center of Minneapolis.  No other Scriver, MacFie, Creller, or Hawley became rich or famous, but Wessie’s mother, maiden name Creller, had a cousin who became “Lady Kemp” (her husband owned a machinery business that was of service to the crown) which gave them all that confounded Brit Gentry complex that the BBC has been wrestling with in series after series.

Nothing short of a knighthood would have satisfied Bob’s mother.  This is part of the reason he focused his efforts on Alberta instead of the American SW where the other cowboy artists were getting rich.  Also, he was as interested in animals as people (also characteristic of his mother) so that the Connecticut illustrators and the Society of Animal Artists were personal friends.  Those artists didn’t get pulled into the “cowboy” obsession until the demand began to boom and more work was needed.  Also at that point, the “other” Western artists, including those who were interested in Indians (Joseph Sharp, Winold Reiss, Hart Schultz, Charlie Beil, John Clarke) and subsidized to visit Glacier National Park by the advertising campaigns of the Great Northern, began to sell big.  Bob knew many of them personally, learned from them.  The Carberry family was friends with both the Scrivers and the arts community of the park.  Their collection of Blackfeet artifacts is in the Field Museum in Chicago.

When Bob went to Chicago to study at the Vandercook School of Music, he haunted the Field Museum and connected with Leon Walters, a major diorama taxidermist, who taught him many things as well as causing him to take a serious scientific approach to animal preservation.  Also at the Field Museum there was a room called the Hall of Man that contained a series of life-sized portraits of what were then considered “races,” each individual carefully portrayed.    Malvina Hoffman had been subsidized to undertake this massive project as an aspect of anthropology.  This whole concept has since been attacked as a source of racism and hatred.  The bronzes have been put into storage except for the judicious use of a few with other exhibits.  But for Bob, Malvina was his Muse Mother.

Malvina Hoffman's "Hall of Man" at the Field Museum

Because of Bob’s devotion to these bronzes, both the geography dimension and the skill of the work, we went to see Malvina Hoffman and also became friends with Joy Buba, her friend.  The two women proposed him for the National Sculpture Society.  Warren Baumgartner, another illustrator friend, proposed him for the National Academy of Design, and these were key connections to the certifiers of value in realistic art.  Because I had been a theatre student and accustomed to read The New York Times, which I purchased in Great Falls at Val’s Cigar Store, I prompted Bob to send his work to the major Manhattan shows of realistic sculpture, where they were accepted.  The scrapbook of these honors was reassuring to novice art buyers.  

But his father always demanded “Are you making any money, Robert?”  He didn’t until the Calgary Stampede, backed by Colonel Harvie who had made a fortune in the equivalent to a Bakken strike between Calgary and Banff, bought the entire set of rodeo bronzes.  When Bob divorced me in 1970, he had just finished those bronzes.  The sale was completed just after I was gone.  I don’t know what his dad said then, but I suspect he found some way to undercut his son’s pride.  His mother was delighted and told all her friends.  This was her audience, not the art world, which she didn’t grasp anyway -- not the in-state promotions nor the big Manhattan scene.  None of my praise meant anything because we had agreed from the beginning to merge egos -- I’d just be praising myself.

Contemporary art writing is often contemptuous, mocking, and intent on finding the cracks in the golden bowl of fame and fortune.  It’s always easy to do, since anyone with a hard drive to achieve is going to expose an underside and trampled bodies love to rise up to make accusations.  That's just realistic.  So why do it?  If family doesn’t get it, if the professional world is oblivious, if the money means nothing in terms of improving the quality of one’s life, if friends turn to competitors, if all anyone what to know is "how much is it worth?" -- what’s the point?

Bob and Mary Scriver, 1965

It’s the doing of it.  “Art is the expression of the relationship between a person and the universe.”  I think I’ll change that definition again.  I think it should be “art is the expression of the universe through a person.”