ART AND CULTURE: A CIRCLE OF FRIENDS

Bob Scriver and Ace Powell at the Moiese Bison Roundup in 1961

Much of Bob Scriver’s thinking about artists and what it meant to be an artist came from Ace Powell and much of Ace’s thinking came from his first wife, a sophisticated Russian with a pretty good education.  (Helena Sperry, whose father was killed in the Russian Revolution.  She died of cancer, which may have kicked Ace's drinking out of control.) What they struggled to understand was how the individual artist interacts with the society at large.  They spent hours talking about what would sell -- and obviously that was an interaction of desire with means on the part of customers -- but Ace also had a strong streak of idealistic Marxism.  It helped to handle being poor. http://www.narhist.ewu.edu/pnf/articles/s1/iii-4/western1/westernrealistI.html   Bob was more of a capitalist, given his family.

Both were much inclined towards Minuteman thinking of the time, which was far to the right, like the Teaparty. (When I came to Browning in 1961, the missiles were just being installed.  Men had missile cufflinks to signal their allegiance.)  There is a place on the “back” of the political continuum where anarchy bends around to meet libertarian, both of them governed by prioritizing the individual over the group, which is natural for artists and narcissists (in a gentle sense -- not as psychotics).  Standing apart to do something new interacts with needing the isolation of the studio.  But both saw the value of “tribe” since so much of their lives was with Native Americans.  This fit with both the Marxist group-leveling and with the self-governing indigenous dependence on dreams, the rising-up of self-definition through the unconscious -- to be pretentious about it.  This works better if the times allow it in terms of space, respect, and income.

an eBay artifact about Ace

Ace was big on a no-cash lifestyle, happy to pull materials sort of out of thin air, and then swap them for what he needed, something like the story about Charlie Russell: when broke he would paint something risqué on his stiff celluloid shirt front,  wear it to a bar and unbutton his jacket for a look-see in exchange for drinks.  When Nancy McLaughlin Powell Lancaster, Ace's third wife, had her babies, she spent her lying-in drawing Indian portraits to pay the bill.  Part of the catastrophic tragedy of the studio fire in Hungry Horse in the Sixties was that they had just returned from a major show where he and Nancy took most of the value in things.  A set of elegant solid silver flatware became only a melted puddle of metal and a fine green jade necklace was rendered white and powdery.

Ace also took a welcoming view of sponsors and patrons, people who were willing to back him with money and the staging of shows.  This helped him but also made him vulnerable to wheeler-dealers who exploited his alcoholism and knife-edge lifestyle.  Bob had a few sponsors but his main financial backer was always his mother.  His parents believed in independence and  self-reliance, even though art never made a lot of sense to them.  And Bob was not alcoholic.  He took his comfort from women, as he had, beginning innocently, with being Mrs. Jim Stone’s chore boy when he was entering adolescence.  (The way to survive his mother was to brace other women against her.)  He was charming, sexy, and warm enough to seduce them, but not really empathic enough to sustain them.  Ace, when he was not drunk, was far more able to sense people’s inner lives.

Blackfeet "chiefs" with Clark Gable

In the Fifties Life magazine, which had previously shaped itself around World War, took its cameras and hero-worship to the Abstract Expressionists of Manhattan and made all artists, including novelists like Norman Mailer or Ayn Rand and even movie stars like Clark Gable or Montana’s Gary Cooper, into figures of legend.  My high school teachers of those years intensely revered a Greek model, fancying America was like that, and we all learned to admire heroes, usually male, but also patriotism, group-loyalty, and the other roots of what became Number One Syndrome, justifying corner-cutting in order to win.  (Get rich.)

The times teach us who to be, making way for some traits and suppressing others.  Bob came to consciousness as a boy when the wave of monumental bronzes after WWI was celebrated in the newspapers, recycling war news.  The work of the French bronze casting foundries, just then expanding in power and skill, supported the inspired figurative work of Daniel Chester French, August Saint-Gaudens, Rodin, and Malvina Hoffman, gathered around the Beaux Arts school in Paris. Even as a boy, Bob (like Ace) was a reader and was imprinted with these graceful, much-praised works in the newspaper photos.  

At the same time there was something erotic about statues because the people, or at least  the women and children, were often nude.  When the Scrivers went to visit Thad’s wealthy brother in Minneapolis, there were some of these nude statues in the house.  (In those days sculpture was sold in furniture stores which was the uncle’s business.)  Wessie, Bob’s mother, went around the house with scarves to veil the naked women.  Of course, that only called attention to them.  In another time and place, he might have done many more nude figures but Montana is a prissy place and missionaries had made the Blackfeet -- who were always highly conscious of propriety -- into intolerant judges, though selective about applying the rules.  

One of Bob’s heartbreaks was being ejected from the Masons because of his divorces and young lady friends, though some known sharp financial operators went right on being honored.  His nude portrait of his second wife, Jeanette, was an act of defiance on both their parts.  She was an independent woman but he was a dependent man -- just adaptable.

Charlie Beil and Two Guns Whitecalf

Charlie Beil, who was a judge for the portrait of CMR that was Bob’s first attempt to be more than a “modeler” of tourist trinkets, impressed on Bob some of the technical value points like using calipers to measure and casting his own bronzes with the Roman Block technique rather than ceramic shell casting.  The latter was so cheap, easy and fail-safe that it had the ironic value of taking away the value of bronze castings.  Plaster castings and molds had been Bob’s major skill.  He had the strength to handle big heavy objects.  Ace’s asthma and heart damage meant he could never lift much more than a brush and canvas.  Not that he felt that was a limitation.

by Ned Jacob

by Ned Jacob

Bob was not a colorist and his drawing never approached that of Ned Jacob, a younger wandering artist (a year older than me) who hung around with both Ace and Bob for a while.  Ned had “line,” the ability to make a graceful mark that was both a depiction and a transformation of the subject.  But he didn’t have the drive and focus that made Bob form a career.  Since he was an Easterner, the enmeshment with the landscape and vocations of Montana never quite happened.  Instead, from a Taos base, he drifted around the planet, giving workshops if he needed money, settling mostly in Denver.  He wasn’t a family kind of guy.  Montana is a family kind of place.  East slope high prairie is hard on loners.

Joe DeYong and Dick Flood, who siphoned DeYong's CMR works to the CMR museum in Great Falls.

When it comes to art, Montana is a strictly I-know-what-I-like kind of place.  What they mostly like is something either worth money or status, which are sort of mixed together.  People seize on anything signed by Bob Scriver, even the linoleum-block Christmas cards that I made and signed M Scriver.  They will instruct me at great length about how “close” to Bob they were, even though I was there and know very well that they’re fantasizing.  It’s Charlie Russell fever, carried around the region by Dick Flood on his leather-goods salesman’s rounds with "possible"paintings by Russell in the trunk of his car, found in some old ranch chicken house and still decorated with a few feathers and droppings.  Always the hope to strike gold made the customers take the bait.  Mixed metaphor.  Mixed results.

But that was a small part of the drive on the part of the artist.  Fingers that crave clay, a nose that sniffs for molten bronze, muscles that remember weight and movement, eyes that look for line and detail.  After years the work and the person meld together, becoming the same entity.  It’s no longer conscious.