The enormous popularity of “Western American Art” followed on the trail of the crowd of Fifties cowboy television series like “Gunsmoke,” “Wagon Train,” “Rawhide,” “Cheyenne” and so on. These developed after WWII, during the Korean War, and captured the role of the male hero on the country’s continent, defining the nation. But there was a strong theme of "standing down" -- keeping the peace.
The prairie was the ground of two movements: one from East to West that was the continuation of the constantly moving frontiers, always pushing the indigenous people farther and killing many of them. That was not emphasized, though Indians were often in the story.
The other movement was from the South and was exemplified by the cattle drives after the Civil War that moved North to exploit the “free” grass of the open range and supply ranches that confined the reservations and constantly shrank them.
The art followed the stories, because the subject was narrative depictions of the high drama imagined by writers of cowboy series. A major related art was that of landscape when awareness grew of places like Yellowstone, Glacier, and Yosemite — high dramatic opportunities to explore plein aire and impressionist techniques. Some, like Catlin, became a recorder of the tribes before there was photography.
The development of artist groups, like the cluster in Taos, started in the Southwest and took a long time to reach the northern US. When the galleries and museums, often created by historical societies, finally developed in the North they also appeared in southern Canada, like those connected to the Calgary Stampede. A major creator of the field was the Great Northern Railway which was built just south of the border with Canada — which was constructing a parallel railroad just north of the border. The governments were highly involved since they knew these lines were key to developing tax-paying citizens in towns along the way.
The Great Northern was tied into the Blackfeet Tribe in several ways. Glacier National Park, meant to be a little Switzerland to carry tourists on the train, was torn out of the side of the Blackfeet Reservation — a sale forced by starvation. The area held the only reasonable pass for the railroad, Marias Pass, and the tribal warriors were the only one who knew how to find this war path. The story is told in A.B. Guthrie Jr. five-book account of this high slope of the Rockies.
As when demand develops anywhere, a little partnership rose to meet it, aiming to supply and control the sale of Western art. This happened in the Sixties so I witnessed it. Until Bob’s death he warred with these entrepreneurs who became exploiters until finally they fed on his estate.
One end of the dealers was a Kalispell ob-dyn doctor who made enough money to sponsor his side-hustle of a gallery. The other was an academic priest at Gonzaga in Spokane trying to build a museum focused on the tribes. Together the loose partnership developed the idea of auctions as more profitable marketing than galleries.
The location was in neither Kalispell nor Spokane where famliarity lessened their reputations, but in Great Falls, attached to Charlie Russell’s birthday and a small personal gallery belonging to a school teacher, which was as much about the clever little artifacts he made from natural materials as it was about the paintings. His studio was preserved, a log cabin built by his wife as a gift.
Mamie Russell was an opportunist who realized that the great resource-developing moguls taking advantage of government subsidies had ended up with a lot of money and slightly guilty consciences. It was the perfect entry for fine large much-admired paintings like Charlie’s.
Those early days were followed by the two exploiters who enticed Great Falls into sponsoring the annual auction. A local motel emptied its rooms, storing the furniture in semi-trucks, so as to make the spaces into mini-galleries for artists alongside the main auction full of glamour and hullabaloo. This lasted for decades and came to seem permanent, surrounded by little peripheral shows for Native Americans and other entrepreneurs. It only died a few years ago.
This was enough to motivate the media into wide coverage and praise for Western Art as a known entity with a reputation for big money. Even gallery owners back east began to pay attention. At first the whole thing was about the authenticity of the artists but pretty soon the skill of the artists began to prevail. Magazine illustrations were collapsing markets because of photography, so many of those people turned to easel art — major spectacular pieces— though they weren’t from the West and didn’t ride horses. They were familiar and much beloved.
In the SW to counter this trend, Joe Beeler and a few of his friends saw that the future would belong to consortiums that could guarantee quality and authenticity. They started “Cowboy Artists of America” that worked loosely with new institutions like National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. Now that the early rough frontier resource developers were aging and gaining culture, this appealed to them and they invested.
Many had enough money to start their own “museums” of fine art and accoutrements, usually naming them for themselves like the Autry Museum in LA. The most successful and grand of these began with the Easterners who had established ranches in Cody, Wyoming, with the help of Buffalo Bill. This became the complex we now know as the Buffalo Bill Heritage Center which includes a museum of guns, another of Native American artifacts, and so on.
For a while a rival institution was the Glenbow, powered by a lawyer who represented the early developers of the oil and coal field near Calgary. But once Colonel Harvie, that strong personality, had aged and the oil had been pumped, things began to shrink. The truth is that such organizations are dependent on populations. As the demographics grow smaller and more varied, they are less enchanted by cowboys and Indians.
A fascinating development just as the old assumptions faded was the advent of highly trained realistic artists from China who brought forward their own part in the development of the West in even bigger and more exquisite paintings. After all, it was Chinese labor that built the railroads.
No comments:
Post a Comment