"The Russell" Three days of auctions in Great Falls, Montana
The Big Auction days are coming close now, and the catalogues are going online. At first there was a tendency to hide or sequester them, but now they are necessarily online so we know which pieces are meant. The numbering in the catalogue tells you when to hold up your bid paddle. You might not want everyone’s head to swivel in your direction when you’re in the room, because maybe you’d like a low profile -- just there to speculate on value. This IS a fancy gambling game. You could monitor and bid via phone. Or you could use the web. But there are advantages to watching the crowd. With a good smart phone, you could do both. Some people go to their car in parking lot to bid via cell.
I only follow Bob Scriver’s work for obvious reasons -- I am not an art dealer, though I’m happy to involve Jerry Gorowski when I get questions from customers and Gorowski can advise on the current situation. What I know covers a decade: the Sixties when Western Art was catching fire.
Bronze sculptures are exceptions from the usual flow of paintings because the manufacturing is necessarily teamwork. Sometimes the titles have drifted from the ones originally inscribed on them. Bob’s portrait of his brother, for instance, is often listed (even by the Montana Historical Society who does NOT consult me and is curated by people young enough to be his grandchildren) as “portrait of an old cowboy.” So I’m here as a kind of curator, an educator if you like. If you need educating. Don’t we all?
Bronze sculptures are exceptions from the usual flow of paintings because the manufacturing is necessarily teamwork. Sometimes the titles have drifted from the ones originally inscribed on them. Bob’s portrait of his brother, for instance, is often listed (even by the Montana Historical Society who does NOT consult me and is curated by people young enough to be his grandchildren) as “portrait of an old cowboy.” So I’m here as a kind of curator, an educator if you like. If you need educating. Don’t we all?
For what it’s worth, here is a list of Scriver bronzes that the Manitou Gallery offers in its auction. Go to http://www.marchinmontana.com/lots for the rest of what’s on offer. It looks like Van Kirke Nelson is finally selling off his hoard of Ace Powell paintings, if you're young enough to remember Ace.
#35 THE WHOLE ELK
This is the little figure that was created by Scriver to sell in volume enough to ransom the Russell painting of the “Royal Ruler” that had hung in the Great Falls Elks Club for many years. The painting was about to be caught in the mania for de-accessing art work that
had been in place for as long as a hundred years, all for expansion or building maintenance.
had been in place for as long as a hundred years, all for expansion or building maintenance.
#36 ELK HEAD
A casting of just the head off the elk above, a smaller piece suitable for maybe keeping on a desk.
#37 ON THE LOBO TRAIL
This is one of five figures created by Scriver in collaboration with Bill Ukrainetz to be cast by a New York City company. They were to be sold for window dressing to men's clothing stores. The idea of this one was to be a funky outlaw. It was so early in Scriver's career that he didn't know to put an armature in the clay to support the body on the thinner legs. One day he left it in the evening, returned in the morning, and found that it had warmed enough to squash the legs. Everyone agreed that it was somehow more appealing in its gnarly state, so he corrected the anatomy and kept the pose.The rest of the story is not about the sculpture itself. Ukrainetz failed to pay the company doing the casting, so to recover their investment in molds and so on, they began casting the sculptures and selling them on their own. Scriver discovered this and invoked the copyrights he had so carefully prepared and registered. They were of no use -- no one would enforce the copyright law, though he could hire his own lawyer for a civil suit. The advice was to get his lawyer to send a letter, which he did, and the company stopped reproducing. By then they'd probably made back their loss anyway.
This white version is hydrocal, a very hard plaster, meaning that it was cast from a mold either as a guide for making waxes as part of the bronze casting process or it was simply cast as a blank and stored until there was time to apply a lacquer bronze-imitating finish. Considering Manitou's roots in the Flathead, my guess is that Scriver sent it to one of the ceramic shell casting outfits there and they just kept it, so it escaped the destruction of all blanks, molds, and other precursor materials that his estate demanded.
Lawyers never know enough about the processes and protocols of art to be thorough enough to achieve the wanted goal. For instance, they never considered the second and third layers of profit for a sculptor: books, photos of the sculpture, posters, tools, even the clay itself. Their attention is only focused on prestige value. One of Scriver's values (which I think he got from Ace Powell) was always to provide something for the person who doesn't have a lot of money. But lawyers know a lot about bitter ex-wives, so that's the category they put me in. Not smart. Trapped by their own experience.
#137 INDIAN ON REARING HORSE
This is an uninspired but popular cliché subject. The naive Indian fan will love this example of one of Scriver's main themes, the Blackfeet. Nothing wrong with that! It paid a lot of bills. But it is not "high art." It stoops to the American fascination with mythic warriors.
#180 BUFF COW AND CALF
Scriver had a strong domestic side which he sort of displaced over to animals for fear of it being seen as "feminine." He loved the intimacy and nurturing of mother and child and he was well-aware that the most vital key to Blackfeet life was the buffalo. Anyway, this is an appealing bronze, small enough to be affordable and to keep on a tabletop.
#184 BOY OFFERING SOMETHING TO A HORSE
Of course, this is from the cowboy bag of clichés and a sentimental favorite. Beautiful horse and cute little boy, though he's a bit stiff. People were always telling Scriver what he "should" make next, though some would directly commission something. I'm not sure which this was.
#227 WARRIOR HOLDING GUN OVERHEAD
A cliché for everyone, but a good marker for the importance of the gun trade in the dynamics of the prairie tribes confronting Europeans. Now the action has shifted back to the MIddle East, but in those days the symbolic weapon would also be a gun, not even the notorious AK47, but an early rifle. It wasn't just a war weapon, but an accurate rifle. A careful hunter could set up a tripod far away to become a buffalo sniper, picking off as many buffs as could be skinned before the carcass spoiled -- without spooking the animals. They had no brain imprint about danger that came as a small pellet from a great distance -- just a template for large moving animals coming close, like a wolf. A rifle meant feeding a lot of people with little danger.
Bob became a gun collector mostly to use them for reference -- the Hawken, the Golden Dragon, the Winchester they called "Yellow Boy" because of the brass works, a Sharps. They're all in the book he self-published called "The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains." This was another small popular bronze meant for everyone.
#257 PONY EXPRESS
Winchester commissioned this and promoted the hell out of it, which means it sold well. Harry Jackson also made a piece on the same subject. He and Scriver were friendly rivals, Harry being a decade younger and far more sophisticated. Not necessarily an advantage.
#420 TRAVOIS WOMAN AND DOG
Another domestic scene. It might be nice to pair with the warrior holding up his gun.
#448 CMR MAQUETTE
Many of these were sold to pay for the monumental version on the grounds of the CMR Museum in Great Falls, the beneficiary of all this auction commotion, at least in part.
The main CMR AUCTION, called "The Russell," now managed by a consortium of artists. It includes only one Scriver bronze: #257 THE NINE MILE WOLVES #7 You'll have to go to the online catalogue to see the sculpture as images can't be downloaded from this catalogue. It's meant to be a portrait of a specific pack of wolves described by Rick Bass in his book by that name. Maybe it looks better in the actuality. It is a very late piece when Scriver was losing control of both design and anatomy.
With my constant stream of comment and (often) criticism, I’ve inadvertently slowed sales of some of Bob Scriver’s work, the ones with origins and manufacture in the Flathead Valley ceramic-shell-casting foundries, a process that took little skill or investment up front. Scriver ended up using some of those foundries to produce smaller more numerous pieces, even after he had recreated his own Bighorn Foundry to cast the larger ones. The consequences of making something previously difficult and therefore valuable -- undercut by ceramic shell casting -- went the same way as the arts that shifted to electronic distribution, like music, books. information. The relative cheapness and ease of copying meant that a lot of lower-grade work was widespread. The pieces above circulate around the auctions that are like pop-up galleries across the country. The major "high art" pieces don't move, or if they do change ownership it is privately, still through established and trustworthy dealers. Even things as solid as a bronze can be bought online at an auction through the websites, so the buyer remains cloaked and doesn't have the effort of travel.
Bronze Inside and Out by Mary Scriver
Available at the major on-line sources.
Now that computers can make 3-D copies of objects, some acquisitions will move to them, if only because of the novelty. There will be a lag while even the ceramic-shell foundries that are left, many fewer than a decade ago, are dismantled. Then the original Roman block bronzes, esp. the ones that were cast and patined by the sculptor himself, will by their rarity and quality become more valuable. They are often more careful, accurate, and beautiful than the grifter and pirate versions, but buyers must check out the provenance of each piece they consider buying.
No comments:
Post a Comment