"ROLLIN' ROLLIN' ROLLIN' KEEP THEM COWBOYS ROLLIN''"

Human organization is complex and layered.  This is natural as people gather according to affinity.  In the Sixties I was embedded in several communities, but we didn't make our money locally.  Cowboy art was our venue.  This is an example of a sub-culture over fifty years.

The complexity of the reservation capital of Browning, assigned to the historic Blackfeet tribe on the Montana side of the divided population, is not obvious unless you live there.  The most prominent element in terms of prosperity was the world of Western art.  It became a movement mostly in the SW that portrayed a century of development as the open range cattle business moved in over the top of the original People, so that there were many romantic depictions of horseback war and sentimental, often lonely, life in a vast terrain.  

In the Sixties many American resource opportunists who had grown very rich and done much damage, consoled themselves with this romanticism, full of stories.  Bob Scriver, my attachment in the Sixties, was raised on income from his father's Browning Mercantile and witnessed lives of early whites settling in this place as well as the gradual ending of the 19th century tribal People.  Born here, he had been protected and included by the indigenous People, so the later political and family struggles seemed to him a betrayal and desertion of the better old ways.  He cared nothing for wealth, but his father took it as a marker of achievement.  The Browning Merc, from which Bob was excluded as an adult, stayed pretty much unchanged from its beginning as a frontier "Indian" store.  But T.E.'s designation as an authorized Indian trader was useful for selling bronzes.

Through the Sixties many institutions were organized by resource-rich old  men, partly art galleries and partly historical societies, in the tradition of Carnegie libraries, and not-quite-covertly became high society celebrations of individuals.  Several formed the eventual money and status framework of Scriver's life: most immediately the Museum of the Plains Indian, the Montana Historical Society, the Russell Museum and later the Lewis and Clark museum -- all of them Montana institutions.  The two most powerful influences in Scriver's life were first the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody and then the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, both of them in early development at the time, depending on major private money.  Scriver offered high quality bronze sculptures, appealing and in series that could fill an exhibit hall.  They were part of the stereotypical depictions, though he also did many wildlife portraits of simple graceful accuracy. 

To serve and manage these organizations a class of manager/administrators grew up, the people quickly became promoters and advertisers when the early endowments hit limits.  The abiding success of these institutions depended upon them becoming popular sources of reassurance for people who wished to believe themselves sensitive to art and living according to American values.  They extended their circle to publishers like the U of Oklahoma press.

The Fifties boom in TV Westerns were part of this.  The relative innocence of "Gunsmoke" with Matt Dillon's sturdy sense of justice and Miss Kitty's sense of business was very much part of de-mobilization from WWII.  So were "Rawhide" and "Wagon Train" with their plots built around wise older men.  In a few years popularity had to be hyped with more violence and self-mockery, like "Bonanza".  (I've wondered whether "Lassiter" could be morphed slightly into a precursor of "gay" culture.)

By the time the Autry Museum of the American West opened in LA, it was broadened out to include indigenous peoples, early landscape painters, and the personal estate of Gene Autry, who could have hived off into country music but didn't.  The Autry bought the SW Museum of the American Indian, which housed a lot of early pots and kachinas as well as a collection of the photos of Walter McClintock which Darrell Robes Kipp and Shirley Crowfoot traveled down from here to curate.

NA curation took a turn from traditional anthropology, which had resulted in papers and lectures, when native Americans became politicized and began to take their own future in hand.  The previous aficionados of the West as "cowboys and Indians" were disconcerted and pulled back.

At the same time the purveyors of luxury picked up the Western trope, which had been strong in the SW and blended with Spanish influence.  Most tribes are not good at merchandizing because they do not imagine they must research their clientele in order to do advertising.  To them it is more fitting to simply present who they are and what they have, assuming anyone sensible will coming looking.  Also, there is the element of secrecy and exclusiveness, which pushes back against ads.

Western art was much affected by two marketing influences.  One was the Internet which allowed galleries to advertise far and wide without being blamed for politics or individuals claiming creator's rights.  The other was auctions, which could be online but also could be treated as events.  They stepped past traditional galleries -- though it was a chance for galleries to empty their back rooms of slow selling items  -- and were often held in hotels where small private rooms were perfect for deals and for getting to personally know artists, which is the way many buyers operated.  This fits with the practice of buying books autographed by known writers -- so that it's not necessary to actually read the books.  Celebrity became key to success.

All this created something like Edward Said's insight into "Orientalism," which skims off a fantasy and makes it a desirable dream.  We feel as though we know that creak of saddles, the smell of horses, the honor of cowboys like John Wayne.  The real herders of cattle who came up from the South on cattle trails were often dark, small, drunk, and incapable of doing anything else.  It was a sort of land equivalent to being ship crews in the days before scurvy was understood, but at least they had plenty of beef to eat.  Slick magazines sprang up to shape and promote all this.

Then a shadow reversal took over, one that concentrated on ghastliness, like the tales of Cormac McCarthy, with an historical gloss for an excuse.  This was to show that lovers of Westerns were not just gullible guys who merely learned the guitar.  Babies impaled on dead trees . . .  etc.

Then there are the ethnic stories, the Jewish egg peddlers, the Chinese railroad builders, the Norwegian homesteaders.  I have yet to see a painting of a man selling eggs from a handcart.  Maybe Jewish people are more into writing, like the Jewish lawyers who have made alliances with tribes.  The Chinese artists educated classically in their own countries have created many fine cherishable masterpieces.  I once stood in an exhibit in Helena, MT, listening to two Chinese artists speaking their language together.

https://cowboyartistsofamerica.com/history was a society for cowboy artists that wanted everyone to at least look like a cowboy, though people like John Clymer were certainly not.  Bob Scriver was an early member.  The group was terrific for sales and for defending members and has persisted, but the early members have faded after death.  They aren't listed on the website anymore.

More in a new post."

TWO VIEWS OF THE AMERICAN WEST

Prizes are useful for getting people to read what they ought to and also for encouraging good writers to do their best.  But the work itself must be published.  Montana, The Magazine of Western History, published by the Montana Historical Society, had two award winning essays in the Spring, 2018 issue.  One was by Peter H. Hassrich, a traditional writer about Western art, discussing the classic artist Albert Bierstadt.  The other was by Rodger C. Henderson, Associate Professor of History Emeritus at Penn State University, about what we used to call the Baker Massacre of a Blackfeet band in 1870.  I'm not entirely sure what the politically correct name of it is now.

When I came to Browning in 1961, I was walking into decades of centennial anniversaries of Blackfeet tragedies.  1884-1885 was the Starvation Winter.  In those years I was back in Montana as a Unitarian minister, but not on the Blackfeet Rez only in touch as a Unitarian Universalist graduate of seminary confronting morality.  In the Sixties people were barely beginning to speak of the massacre -- by the Eighties people could talk about the 600 people who starved to death at the hands of the Agency.  It was like reliving everything that happened in waves of sorrow and rage. and I was only white.  People remembered their elders talking about what they had witnessed.  We had known people who were born in 1870 and 1880.  Henderson's essay about the massacre does an efficient job of describing the circumstances, so far as they can be known, despite confused accounts and deliberate lies to save careers.

Bob Scriver was born in Brownng in 1914 and raised there, an early part of the Western art cowboys and Indians period.  He grew up accepting as natural the white man's supremacy.  "We killed the Indians," he said wryly, "But they refused to fall down."  His friends were all "Indians." (Jimmy Welch's father was his best childhood friend.)  Gradually and emotionally he moved over to the Blackfeet side, in spite of having friends who belonged to the ultra-right John Birch Society. I shared this shift with him as well as watching my students gradually realize that no longer did they need to feel either powerless victims or guilty of letting tragedies happen.  By now they began to see a future.  The work is not finished. Even in the apocalpyse much survived.

I'm interested in Hassrick's essay, which is also a book with the same name and other presentations using the same material.  https://gilcrease.org/exhibitions/bierstadt/ and a series of Youtube Lectures, exhibits and lectures.  

Hassrick's VITA:  

Now at "Lone Star Ranch".  

Summers, 1960-63:  Elizabeth, CO, rancher and assistant foreman,

1963-67:  high school teacher of history, Spanish, and art history, Steamboat Springs, CO

1969-75: Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX, curator of collections, 

1976-96: Whitney Gallery of Western Art, Cody, WY, curator and director of Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 

1996-97:  Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, director, 

1998—.    University of Oklahoma, Norman, Charles Marion Russell Professor of Art History and director of Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West,(This last is a sinecure funded by the estate of the widow of Charlie Russell.)

Consider the sources of these opinions.  Born in 1951 in Philadelphia, Hassrick is clearly an authentic member of the academic/museum community that circulates around the nation from one major establishment to another.  These institutions rely on population density in cities.  For comparison, consider Scriver was 27 years older than Hassrick and even I am two years older.  Scriver was a man of the West, a white "rez boy", as close to the bone as it's possible to get unless genetically indigenous.  What qualifies me to comment on this essay is my education at the U of Chicago Div School and years as clergy in the West, reflecting on the sacrality of the land.

Bierstadt (1830-1903) was born in Prussia and brought to the US aged one.  He studied painting in Germany in 1853.  His view of life is much influenced by the German  Romantic school of nature philosophy.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Romanticism . His works of art are physically large, theatrical in their vistas, and religious in their claims for what is grand and adventurous.  He lived the life that Charlie Russell (1864 - 1936) and James Willard Schultz (1859 - 1947) wished they had lived, pretended they had, but really only imagined, arriving in Montana too late. 

The usefulness of these two essays is that they stake out the miserable and still undigested treatment of the original people of this land at one end, while at the other end Hassrick uses his essay to help Bierstadt mythologize and elevate the land itself.  Both are popular points of view -- neither is the whole truth nor entirely honorable.  Rich white men loom over both points of view, the kind of men who found major museums memorializing the looting of natural resources that made their fortunes.

The aspect of the natural world, as found by whites, is illustrated in their treatment of Indians.  The governmental military pictured them as devils, inhuman, to be eliminated.  But Bierstadt took the romantic German view.  Hassrick says that "in the painting called "Wolf River, Kansas" Bierstadt pictured a Kansa encampment enveloped in glorious suffused light, with the grand cottonwoods serving as the divine sanctuary of nature's fondest embrace."

I was disconcerted recently to read somewhere that Joe Campbell (1904-1987), revered author of "Hero with a Thousand Faces", was now outdated.  The idea of the superior and mystical adventure of climbing a mountain is no longer a valid metaphor.  Certainly the tourists in the national parks still consider them God's natural cathedrals and proof of national grandeur.  They stand on the cement path, leaning on the railing protecting them, gazing at the vistas and muttering, "Oh, how beautiful!"  They have become interested in Bierstadt and his cohort with their aesthetic position and still support, even recover, the art.  

But the locus of the mysterium tremendum outlook has moved to outer space.  The consequence has been the death of God and a moral sense of the consequences of the rich moguls who made their money by looting the planet and now try to redeem themselves with art institutions.  What we share most with Bierstadt is the sense of loss of the 19th century, verging on despair.  We can take a little refuge in his vision.

BANNON'S WORLD IN A BOTTLE

Steve Bannon in 1993

One strategy when trying to understand someone is to look at their earliest adult life (or maybe a little earlier) as a controlling metaphor for later developments.  Often the metaphor extends back or out to the larger category beyond family to the time and place of the person.  Wikipedia is mostly useless as a source of information for someone like Steve Bannon, because he undoubtedly is the source of his entry.  Still, this is included:  “In 1993, while still managing Bannon and Co., Bannon was made acting director of the Earth-science research project Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona. Under Bannon, the project shifted emphasis from researching space exploration and colonization toward pollution and global warming. He left the project in 1995.”  

Until I began to look for the background of Bannon to try to understand why he is so toxic, I had forgotten about Biosphere 2.  It was a experiment in creating a sort of giant terrarium, a planet in a bottle, to try to understand how an ecosystem works with the idea that the knowledge could be used on a space ship or maybe the moon.  Bannon was one of the managers and so controversial, so feared and hated, that he left once, but then came back again — which prompted some of the participants to smash the glass wall, letting the world back in.  By that time the humans were suffocating and starving, the plants were dying, the bugs were nearly gone except (as you might guess) the cockroaches.  

Bannon’s specific function in this mess is muted, possibly erased.  I suspect that his concern was not for the life in the terrarium, but rather control of the reputation of the experiment and its funding millionaire.  He is an Iago.  (By the end oxygen was being secretly pumped in to keep the eight people alive, though listless.)  It was less than scientific from the beginning, eutopia that became dystopia.  Bannon is NOT a scientist nor is he governed by any other higher principles than success.  His success in this instance was his grip on the psyche of the millionaire, a man named Ed Bass whose fortune came from Texas oil.  

When I was with Bob Scriver, Western sculptor, we were aware of Bass’ bachelor uncle, Sid Richardson, who endowed an art museum named for himself in Fort Worth, Texas.  It features the work of Remington and Russell, which explains why the Remington bronze of the bronc buster is so often in Oval Office photos.  This whole movement celebrating the exploitation of Western resources is a hagiography of the frontier as uniquely American, combining anthropological “big man” phenomena with ironic grieving for the potential opportunity that was apocalypse for the indigenous people, justifying it with white man’s obsession with control, tenacity, and manliness.  (This may explain why Bannon often looks as though he’d just returned from a camping trip.)

When democrats, liberals, urban, Eastern, European ideas expanded for a few decades, Western art and movies withered.  Now we see the return of frontier images in films like “Frontier” and “The Revenant.”  Its accompanying set of images has always been the saloon/whorehouse with lots of red plush and pneumatic women displayed behind the poker players.

Ed Bass funded Biosphere 2 partly to explore a survival strategy in a polluted world, a kind of bomb shelter, but also fought the idea of global warming by denying it.  After all, his fortune was from oil.  When there began to be conflict among managers over scientific approaches versus idealism, Bass supported Bannon’s firm grip and when Bannon was removed, Bass restored him.  Accusations that Bannon is a “monster” seem to date from this uproar and are often relayed by women, but there has clearly been a lot of suppression of accounts.  Suppression seems to be characteristic of Bannon enterprises, including now.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/the-strange-history-of-steve-bannon-and-the-biosphere-2-experiment   There is also a description of the experience on TED, recounted by a woman who was sealed in for more than two years.  She gives a rather positive version of what must have been terrifying, near starvation and near suffocation when the calculations and bad science made predictions go wrong.  It was a “sim-planet,” with the negative results watched through glass as though on a screen.

Bannon’s entree to the world of venture capital as expressed in media images begins with a 2004 film called “In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed”.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlzPkpBthfA is the trailer.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVkmi90nXP4  is the whole film.  Andrew Breitbart . . . would later describe him as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement.  Riefenstahl was a female cinematographer who glamourized the German Olympics with beautiful filming and clever editing.  For instance, the diving competition begins conventionally, but by the end the sequence seems to show handsome blonde men actually flying off into a shining blue sky.  

This is a quote from Dr. Andrew Gordon, a board member of the PsyArt Foundation.  “Psychometrics, or personality targeting, may have played a major role in Brexit and in the recent American election. Psychologist Michal Kosinski developed a method to analyze people's personalities, preferences, and fears in minute detail based on their Facebook activity.  He concluded that our smartphone is a psychological questionnaire we are constantly filling out. Companies such as Cambridge Analytica (of which  Steve Bannon is a board member) starting using this method in elections. Trump's scattershot messaging was actually data-driven: a different message for every voter.”

At first glance this might seem like a variation on the “Trump is crazy like a fox” idea, but the real significance is that this is the “tell” of the shift to advertising as the third political force.  One of the evils of it is the substitution of indicator for reality: this time statistics instead of story.  The world under glass, a bottled world, a handheld world whose grip can be broken only by real life demonstrations.  

The message need not be apocalyptic.  Part of the reason it is so grim is that our political system, which clearly IS paralyzed and rotted, is run by those notorious old white men with lots of money.  Trump and Bannon are in poor health supported by disease and bad habits.  Their values are left over from the Cold War and their vision of the future is locked into the seeming collapse we call the Anthropocene, but it is supported by images of disaster instead of scientific optimism and biometrics.  

When the cause of the collapse of the Biosphere 2 was found, it turned out to be the concrete cement that was much of the shape and substructure under the glass.  The chemistry of the concrete was seizing oxygen out of the air and converting it to its own substance, calcium carbonate.  Tiny molecular dynamics that were beneath the notice of those in control.  A useful political metaphor.  Not flattering to Bannon.

THE IVAN DOIG PAPERS

Ivan Doig at his Puget Sound home

When I first came to Browning, Montana,  I didn’t hear much about “Montana Writers.”  Maybe A.B. Guthrie, Jr. (b. 1901) because of the movies made of his books.  Dorothy Johnson (b. 1905) the same.  A few miscellaneous people wandering around, mostly “poets” who wrote people-pleasing doggerel.  The old-timers sometimes self-published through a “vanity press,” which set the pattern of a peddler with a box of unimportant books under his bed and the general conviction that being published was equivalent to a college degree, a certificate of quality.  Mildred Walker (b, 1905) was writing best-sellers that have held their appeal.

I mostly came to the “Edwardians”, James Willard Schultz (b. 1859), Frank Bird Linderman (1849), George Bird Grinnell (b 1869), Walter McClintock (1870) et al from reading Bob Scriver’s library.  John Ewers (b. 1909), Harold McCracken (b. 1894).  The category of Western Art or Montana Writing, were both as yet uninvented as sales categories, but just about to take hold.  Native American Writing was still a bit of a paradox, since most of it was oral transcription of legends recorded by white people.

By the time I returned in 1982, “Montana Writing” was as hot and revered a category as genuine imitation pearls.  Very appealing but always a little bogus around the edges.  “Montana Margins: A State Anthology” (1946) by Joseph Kinsey Howard (b. 1906) was a little too early to define this group.  Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917) had just exploded still waters with his 1960 essay, ”Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” which set the key Western archetype as two men escaping to the wilderness together.  Fiedler was an East Coast ethnic Leftie with streaks of Red. 

Leslie Fiedler

Now it was the gentleman chroniclers of the West who got out of Dodge.  (Richter (b. 1890), Stegner (b. 1909), and Walter van Tilburg Clark (1909), who was gratefully claimed by Nevada.)  Now Missoula was not just a hotbed of liberalism as the humanities center, but also the experimental edge of what became a time of drugs and iconoclastic politics.  We’re living with the mixed consequences.  A different sort of group developed in Bozeman/Livingston.

So it was with a certain amount of amusement and even cynicism that I reacted when the Valier librarian handed me a postcard announcement about Ivan Doig, “one of Montana’s most cherished writers.”  His papers have gone to MSU, the rival Montana university.  I approve.  I even celebrate.  But it’s all very ironic.  Go to ivandoig.montana.edu for the whole story and DO watch the short video interview to get a sense of the man.  There’s a link on the website, but here’s a straight shot to YouTube.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C20ONfvcZCw  

Doig in the 1980's at Annick Smith's ranch

Quite apart from that, I have such a tumble of responses.  Ivan Doig and I were both born in 1939.  We were both in the National Merit Scholar program at NU but we didn’t know each other.  His roommate, the fabulous piano player, Ralph Votapek, dated my roommate, Gwen Cline.  But Ivan and I were never introduced.

At Northwestern, Doig was in journalism and history.  I was in theatre with Alvina Krause, at a time when the School of Speech was quietly a haven for gay male theatre people, like Marshall W. Mason, Laird Williamson, and Tom Foral.   They were among my best friends though I’m not gay.  It was their kindness and intelligence that attracted me, and I was a bit of a disguise for them in a closeted, criminalized time for gays.  As soon as I could, I made a beeline for Montana — not the university towns, but rather Browning, Montana.  Doig was traveling as fast as he could in the opposite direction.  He never returned to live in Valier where he had graduated as class nerd, and has lived ever since near Seattle.  The comparison might be Sherman Alexie.

I spent the Sixties on the Blackfeet Rez with Bob Scriver, a sculptor twice my age.  Bob’s daughter, Margaret, went to Valier HS one grade ahead of Ivan, who said he sort of knew her but she seemed very grownup and not part of his group.  After a retread and an interim as the first lady dogcatcher in Portland, I became a student at the U of Chicago Div School in 1978. There I read the newly published “This House of Sky” right straight through and called him up.  He wasn’t famous yet, so he answered the phone and we visited a while, tears streaming down my face.  That was the end of it.  When I graduated from seminary, I spent three years as a circuit-rider in Montana.  By that time he was long-gone to Seattle, but considered a Montana writer because of his content.
   

Mary Clearman Blew

Over the years I’d make brief contact, more often with Carol at a reading, but it never went anywhere.  We didn’t correspond.  No one saw me as a writer, just as an appendage to Bob Scriver.  In 1977 Mary Clearman Blew was just beginning to be published and some said she was the only female writer in Montana, though she soon migrated to Idaho.  The same people claimed Jim Welch was the only “Indian” worth reading.   Jim Welch’s father, who was also Jim Welch, was Bob Scriver’s best friend in grade school.  So I knew Jim Welch in a sort of private way.  I’m not welcome in the tight Missoula Circle that “owns” Jim and makes these judgements.  I barely publish and am not their kind of academic.

Writers are defined partly by sales and partly by academic studies.  Lately academics have minds only for Cormac McCarthy, who is close to an opposite of Doig.  As a youngster, Doig absorbed the attitudes of what he called “sharecroppers of the West,” which is to say someone who raises livestock on shares — not that different from the Southern share-cropping experience and as low-pay/low status.  It gave them an abiding yearning for legitimacy, recognition, security.  In his teens he and his family were raising sheep near Heart Butte, and the sociological dynamics did not cause him to romanticize Indians.  He never wrote about them.  

Late in his career he was friends with the Welches, more Lois than Jim, who was not so much an academic as a visionary poet.  Doig was a bit of a snob and sexist (women who wrote surprised him) but Jim was neither.  Both men could be writers because their academic wives paid the bills.  Jim was not much a rez boy — his HS years were in Minneapolis.  His mom’s rez was Fort Belknap.  His sibs were successful urban people, I suppose “assimilated.”

Both Doig and Welch were defined by marketing, locked into stereotypes, just as much as L.M. Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott were trapped into writing the same story over and over.  Both of them tried to escape, but the atypical books (for example, Doig's "Prairie Nocturne" or Welch's "Indian Lawyer") wouldn’t sell.  

Doig’s underlying poor health put a lid on him too early.  He was pretty much an author who wouldn’t have pleased Leslie Fiedler by going for the deep mythic dimensions.  But he is deeply satisfying to the ranchers and farmers he wrote about — second generation immigrants with high values on work, respectability, and family.  They all love a good joke, even if it’s on themselves.  Life itself is one of those jokes.  But Doig defined himself a relic, son and grandson of relics.

A couple of days ago a comment showed up on a prairiemary post about  “My Friend Flicka,” by Mary O’Hara.  http://prairiemary.blogspot.com/2011/02/where-did-my-friend-flicka-go.html  (The comment is there.)  “My Friend Flicka” was a book that literally saved O’Hara’s ranch, but not her marriages nor the lives of her children.  Promoted as a kid-book, it’s one of those semi-autobiographical tales that will stay with you the rest of your life, worth rereading now and then.  The comment was from her great-niece, Adele Alsop, who is living in Utah.  The Alsops were a privileged, wealthy, highly educated, well-connected family who were exactly the kind of person an author hopes to be.  

Patricia Nell Warren

Several of that family did write books, something like writing by the descendants of the Conrad Brothers who founded Valier and Conrad, as well as building a mansion in Kalispell.  The sociology of writing in Montana has not been explored.  It drops out many people.  I wonder where Patricia Nell Warren (b. 1936), author of the much beloved “The Fancy Dancer” will leave her papers.  The history of the Grant-Kohrs ranch where she was born is already recorded.  But she’s part of the same cohort (b. 1936) as Doig, Welch, Blew, Warren, and others, including myself (b. 1939).  Maybe this bequest of Doig papers to Montana State University will trigger something.

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.

__________

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.

__________

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.

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.

FAUVIST, TAOS GROUP & WESTERN ART: HOT !!!

The Western art season is heating up as people begin to travel, some of them actually visiting the West and others visiting the major institutions that exhibit Western art and artifacts, both Indian and other.  But you can also “visit” by cruising the web.  In fact, you’ll probably see more by looking at auction lists than by going onto the floor of a museum or gallery.

To become a player -- or just a gazer -- you’ll need deep pockets most of the time, but not always.  Then you’ll need a list of the auctions which appear in the Western art mags or on AskArt.com.  Or I subscribe to Art Daily at artdaily.org, which provides a daily overview of all kinds of art and the related scene.  In fact, that’s where I found this story about Sandzen.  You’ll remember that when I reviewed auction offering a few days ago, I skipped Sandzen.  He’s a little TOO Fauvist for me, though one of my most cherished pictures IS Fauvist, painted by Bob’s teacher Zoe Bieler at Dickinson College in North Dakota.  The name of the category comes from the “wild colors.”


The startling news today is the sale of a Sandzen painting for $262,900 at the Heritage Fine Art Auction.  Details from their website just below.  The website makes it possible to examine the signature up close as well as the back of the painting.  This information from the website. If you were wanting to look for similar paintings, you google things like “Fauvist” or “Taos” (VERY popular now) or “American Colorist.”  The auctions are less specialized than they used to be, branching out from “Western art.”  The MOST important thing about buying art is training your eye, which can only be done by looking and looking and looking, the same as the way to learn about writing is to read and read and read.  Thicken the brain cells, broaden the mind.

FIREFOX PREVENTED ME FROM ADDING ANY IMAGES.  You can see it at the link below.


http://fineart.ha.com/common/view_item.php?Sale_No=5062&Lot_No=64233
10 internet/mail/phone bidders
1,868 page views
FROM A PRIVATE INDIANAPOLIS COLLECTION

BIRGER SANDZÉN (American, 1871-1954)
Late Moon Rising (Wild Horse Creek), 1923
Oil on canvas
36-1/4 x 48-1/4 inches (92.1 x 122.6 cm)
Signed and dated lower right: Birger Sandzén / 1923

PROVENANCE:
Acquired from the artist by a former student, 1923;
Thence by descent.

This painting titled Late Moon Rising is an important motif of Wild Horse Creek, which ran through land owned by Birger Sandzén's in-laws near Bogue, Kansas. The creek provided an endless source of imagery for the artist and he once told his daughter Margaret, "Wild Horse Creek was a blessing to me and a lesson in simple construction - construction of earth, of ground itself - water, sandstone, hills and pasture."

Mr. Ron Michael
Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery
Estimate: $80,000 - $120,000.

Sandzén, Birger: An associate member of the Taos Society of Artists, Birger Sandzén was a Swedish artist famous for his vibrant landscape paintings of the American southwest. The son of a minister, Sandzén displayed an early artistic talent which was encouraged and cultivated by well-educated parents. His formal artistic training was completed in Europe, and in 1894 he immigrated to America where he had accepted a teaching position at Bethany College. For more than 52 years Sandzén was a professor of art history, drawing and painting in the small Kansas town of Lindsborg. He was a staunch advocate of the arts and worked within his community to organize art clubs, exhibitions, and lectures. Throughout his career, however, Sandzén’s own painting was relegated to late night sessions until 1945, when he retired from teaching in order to devote himself to painting full time. Sandzén’s early artistic style was heavily influenced by tonalism and Scandinavian Romanticism, but once he began spending his summers in the American southwest his palette exploded with color. He began visiting Taos in the summer of 1918 at the height of the artist colony. Four years later Sandzén was elected an associate member of the Taos Society of Artists. That same year, 1922, he exhibited with the group in New York where he also had a one-man exhibition at the Babcock Gallery. Sandzén's Fauvist palette and strong brushwork energize the landscapes for which he is best known. His thick impasto layers are reminiscent of Impressionism but tempered by a modernist execution. As with many of the Taos artists, Sandzén painted en plein air in order to work directly from nature and there is a resulting vibrancy and purity to his canvases. .

Condition Report*:
The following condition report was prepared by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This painting was removed from its original stretcher sometime in the last 25 - 30 years and mounted using a synthetic adhesive onto a fiberglass fabric, which in turn was mounted onto a stable piece of aluminum with a latticework of "honey comb" construction within. Effectively, there are two sheets of aluminum sandwiching this light weight, stable and technically reasonably appropriate surface. The paint layer is very lively and stable; the impasto is in beautiful state which for a picture of this scale is a major benefit. There do not appear to be any retouches and if desired, the painting can be hung as is.

DALLAS, TX.- Birger Sandzén's Late Moon Rising (Wild Horse Creek), 1923, brought a stunning $262,900 as the top lot in Heritage Auction's May 17 combined Signature® Fine American, European Art & Western Art sale, held May 17 at Heritage's Design District Annex at 1518 Slocum Street. The auction realized $2,597,907 total, with a sell-through rate of 71.7% by value. All prices include 19.5% Buyer's Premium.

"Prices realized across the board were solid," said Ed Beardsley, Managing Director of Heritage's Department of Fine Art. "We saw more than 750 bidders vying for 391 lots across three different categories. Interest was strong and the bids were there to back that interest up."

The $262,900 realized for Sandzén's Late Moon Rising (Wild Horse Creek) is the second highest price ever realized for the artist at auction.

"Sandzen's works are among the most highly desirable paintings on the market today, as evidenced by the fierce bidding we experienced for this breathtaking piece," said Kirsty Buchanan, Consignment Director for Heritage's Art of the American West department. "This painting is truly an iconic depiction of Wild Horse Creek, which ran through land owned by Sandzén's in-laws, near Bogue, Kansas, and provided an endless source of inspiration for the artist throughout his career."

A diverse trio of fine paintings, Eanger Irving Couse's haunting oil painting The Spirit of the Pool and Wilhlem Kuhnert's dramatic Zebras, 1912 and Guy Carleton Wiggins The Empire State Building, Winter, all booked a final price realized of $44,813.

Rounding out the auction's Top 10 are Birger Sandzén's Early Fall, Smoky River, 1927, and Lorser Feitelson's Bathers, 1923, both realizing $38,838.

This material is from: http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=47708