BOB MORGAN

Once he was a young man . . .

On the evening of June 20, 2015, Robert F. “Bob” Morgan died in the arms of his wife, Gen. He was surrounded by four generations of his loving family.

Bob was born Aug. 20, 1929, in Helena, to John P. and Catherine Morgan. He spent his early childhood at Stansfield Lake in the Helena Valley.

In the fall of 1948, Bob married his “bride,” Genevieve Basti. This September would have marked 67 years together.  

Bob is recognized as a noted Montana Western artist and historian. His career included design and display at Fligelman’s Department Store, assistant curator, curator and acting director of the Montana Historical Society. He was also involved in planning and design for various museums in Montana and Arizona.

He was also employed for a number of years by the Montana Army National Guard. His military service included 1946 to 1947 in the U.S. Navy Reserve and 1947 to 1967 in the Montana Army National Guard.

Bob was an avid outdoorsman and enjoyed hunting and fishing. He loved the Carroll College Saints and Helena High Bengals. He was a staunch supporter of all of his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren’s various activities.

He was a lifelong member of the St. Helena Cathedral Parish, the Elks Club and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. He was co-founder of Northwest Rendezvous of Art with Jack Hines, fellow artist, who died the same evening as Bob. He was blessed to “ride into the sunset” with one of his best friends.

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http://helenair.com/news/local/obituaries/morgan-robert-f-bob/article_a56f7983-d232-5516-b9c2-b353b814e149.html

Bob Morgan's Montana: My Life and Art,   2008,  by Bob Morgan and Norma Ashby is a “gallery” of Morgan’s work as well as text about his life.  Available on Amazon.

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When I was working on my bio of Bob Scriver, I tried to make contact with Bob Morgan, but he was already pretty sick and his wife said no.  I was sorry, but not resentful because Morgan had stored up so much good will that he’d have to live a lot longer to exhaust it. 

Sometimes I thought his good nature and failure to get tied up in the rats’ nests of politics and art hustling was because of being deaf.  Maybe he just kept his hearing aid turned off.  But he was not one to stir things up, unlike the characters a state capital seems to attract.

Of course, in the “early days” -- which for me was the Sixties -- he was already considered a “good guy” and part of a remuda of steady folks who thought art was a thing you did rather than a thing to exploit as a form of stock market investing.  This latter category started coming to the state about that time and laid down a sort of friendship ground before the Cowboy Artists of America was invented.  The fact that CAA was so explosively successful had to do with population density in the SW, Republican expansion, and Southern -- well, you can’t call it triumphalism, can you?  Defensive romanticism?  There was maybe a decade lag between the stand-down Westerns of television series in the Fifties, and the boom in Western art.

Yesterday in GF I saw that Barnes and Noble, which had closed out and removed its Western section, now had restored two cases of Westerns.  Richard S. Wheeler was included. Most of the books were Louis L’Amour.  Sort of parallel, I am reading “All Our Stories Are Here: Critical Perspectives in Montana Literature,” edited by Brady Harrison.  His introduction is entitled “Toward a Postpopulist Criticism.”  There are chapters on “place,” “women, gay and lesbian”, “Native Americans” and Missoula, defined as “Hugo-land.”  All the contributors but two are Montana academics.  Oddly, those two, Tamas Dobozy and Matthew L. Jockers are out-of state.  In fact, Dubozy is Canadian.  They wrote about “place.”  Strange.  I have no idea what "post populist criticism" is.

What impressed me was one of the two women’s chapters, written by Nancy Cook.  (The other women’s chapter was written by Bill Bevis. !!!)  Cook’s chapter is entitled “Home on the Range: Montana Romances and Geographies of Hope.”  It turns out that all those romantic Westerns (the kind that may have been written at least in part by Zane Grey’s wife instead of Zane, who preferred to go fishing, have not died out, but simply migrated to ebook romances, one of the few publishing categories that’s expanding.  The redemptive quality of land, ranching as an ideal context for marriage, and other themes that we’ve all loved long before Mary O’Hara wrote “My Friend Flicka” while struggling to keep her marriage and ranch.  She failed.  In these e-romances, the endings are happy. 

For a while, Montana writing -- like Montana art -- was a selling point, which had nothing to do with the objective quality of either one since it’s not subject matter that counts but rather the skill with which it’s addressed.   (One doesn't really need to HAVE a subject.) The problem with that is ordinary folks can usually figure out what a bit of art or writing is “about” but they are not educated by our present public and university systems to see what is good or bad.  Even the ones who did okay in high school are likely to lose the habit of reading once in the throes of exciting television, and if you don’t read enough, the nuances will escape.

Bob Morgan was not avant garde, though he could have been, but he was a literate man who set his horizon and stayed within it until he became a master.  Not that he didn’t appreciate other styles, other visions.  He was the steady dependable core family man, which is not at all what most people think of when they think of an artist.  Yet he didn’t criticize the wild men, the drunks, nor the ones rabid for success.  He just went around them.

It’s easy to understand why he would be close friends with Jack Hines, who is impossible to discuss without mentioning his wife, Jessica Zemsky.  

by Jack Hines

by Jessica Zemsky

http://bigskyjournal.com/Features/Story/a-well-curated-life   They were rather more “sophisticated,” political and involved with community.  I lived a bit of that kind of Montana life life for a while and fully expected to continue it right on as long as I could.  It was a wonderful time, full of friendship and achievement in those days.

I turned out to be peripheral to that world as soon as the wheeler/dealers invaded, and some of the time I was glad to be out of it, but in the end I value the vision we once had and marvel that some people were able to fulfill it.  I think that once the scrambling and division is over -- it takes too much energy to maintain -- that things will settle back down to a level of privacy and elbow room that is provided by the spaces of Montana.