WINDING DOWN THE ART BOOM

My eyes are still bad, so instead of writing, I'll make this a true "log" of websites I visited this morning.  First, I realize we're getting close to cowboy artist Charlie Russell's birthday, which is memorialized by an auction in Great Falls.  I remember it's beginning and now I'm witnessing its diminishment.  There is one Scriver bronze dating to 1983, called "When Cuttin' Was Rough".  A mounted cowboy roping a steer.  #92 of 102 in edition.

http://cmrussell.org/2020-catalog/mobile/index.html

There are two memorials to previous major figures that are included in the catalogue.  I was not aware of these deaths since I'm no longer part of the world, but they are two types that are interesting, and they are about my age, active in the Sixties.

First is Peter Hassrick, the gentleman and scholar face of the art category.  There's a lot more to say.  He was part of the circle of curators and writers who found things to say about the artists and their importance.  This is the side that keys with Republicans, esp. those who made their money through resources and then founded museums.  He followed McCracken, little autocrat and powerhouse at the Cody Museums, for twenty years with a far more elevated style of management and authorship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_H._Hassrick

Second is Jay Contway, born in Malta and beginning his adulthood by teaching in small communities all along the  High-Line.  What's remarkable is that he is never identified as Native American, though his photo shows he's an "Indian" and for some years he sponsored an alternative auction parallel to the big Russell auction that was specifically for "Indians."  Canada liked him.

https://www.schniderfuneralhome.com/obituaries/Jay-Joseph-Contway?obId=9106656#/obituaryInfo

THE FIRST CHARLES M. RUSSELL AUCTION

Joyce Thomas, artist and property developer, is about the same generation as myself, both in our Seventies and trying to get our “stuff” in order at the same time we are coping with the parent generation’s “stuff.”  It’s both physical -- lots of paper -- and mind work -- thinking about what it all might mean.  What mattered?  We’ve both figured out that one way to get rid of paper is to mail to someone else.  In Joyce’s case the catnip is her ancient aunt’s archives which includes a lot of information about Clare Sheridan.  (I blogged earlier.)

Father Wilfred Schoenberg

This last envelope contained the program from the very first CMR auction on March 6, 1969.  It was the beginning of the transformation from a loosely congenial bunch of eccentric, gifted, colorful people who “did art” into the strike-it-rich mentality of the wheeler-dealers.  It was Van Kirke Nelson’s idea but it would never have worked without Norma Ashby and the Ad Club.  In fact, he had tried his puppetry on Father Wilfred Schoenberg at Gonzaga in Spokane earlier but it didn’t take.  The account of this is in a self-published book by Schoenberg called “Indians, Cowboys and Western Art: A History of MONAC.” (Museum of Native American Culture).  Schoenberg is a story in himself.  Today he’s deceased, the museum is demolished, and the collection has been dispersed.

The point is that art was being defined, formalized, and priced in a way it had not been, and the justification and point of reference was Charlie Russell in Great Falls.  Joyce Thomas was one of those who was not captured and pinned to a gallery.  Bob Scriver (with whom I was merged at the time) also escaped in some ways but not in others.  He refused to give up any work for auction, so invented the little bison skull award. 

At this point the prices of the 65 pieces were printed in the program!  Many works were donations, most of them donated by Van Kirke Nelson.  What he was really doing was establishing the value of the works of specific artists, clearing his warehouse and -- no doubt -- getting a tax write-off.  I count 23 pieces donated by Nelson, 5 from Paul Masa, and 8 from Jim Brubaker, who later served time in prison for cutting valuable artwork out of historical books and selling them on eBay.  All three were from Kalispell.  4 were donated by Dr. Dan L. London -- all of those were by Steve Seltzer.  Prices were all between $50 and a few hundred, except for an Earl Heikka bronze and a Marjorie Reed oil painting priced at $2,000.   (Bronzes from that time and place must be carefully documented because of the amount of wild-cat casting.  Ceramic shell casting was just beginning.)

by Dr. Andrew Jordan

The “types” of artists ranged from the highly respectable dentist, Dr. Andrew Jordan, whose daughter is also a dentist and whose son, an opthamologist, later saved my eyes by sealing holes in the retinas with laser surgery, to the mercurial Ace Powell, Bob Scriver’s oldest and closest friend.  In the end both Ace and Leo Beaulaurier were felled by alcohol.  Ace painted like Charlie Russell, but Beaulaurier made painting on black velvet into a true art form instead of a carnival gimmick.  Many of his portraits hung in the supper club at the GF airport and when we shipped by air, the high point was dinner among those fine faces.

By Leo Beaulaurier

Ace, despite high hopes from Van Kirke Nelson who accumulated his work, never did pull the high dollars.   His work looked like Russell's, which Nelson evidently saw as a plus.

By Ace Powell, his signature card in the lower left corner.

His son, David, is a respected member of the Cowboy Artists of America, but has made his grubstake over and over in Hollywood as a consultant and set designer.  Both men were pretty good set decorations all by themselves.  In fact, Ace once impersonated an old medicine man in a movie.

Ace Powell

David Powell

Of the other Flathead Valley artists, Les Welliver and Bob and Geri Wood, are gone.

Fred Fellows

Jay Contway and Fred Fellows, probably the closest to real working cowboys in this remuda, are still at it.  Jay has stayed local and helps his friends at auction time in a parallel event.  Fred went to the SW to join the Big Boys and star in the Cowboy Artists of America.  Gary Schildt has married a lawyer.  Prudently, I will say nothing about him.

Weaver's statue of CMR

Bill Gebhart, noted for his tall thin figures, quietly finished out his life in Conrad after losing the competition for the Charlie Russell statue at the Washington DC Hall of Fame, the same as Bob did.  The winner of the competition, Jack Weaver, emigrated to Alberta where he was welcomed by museums.

Connected to museums and historical societies, which can never really decide whether they are commercial or public, Bob Morgan is authentic and so was Les Peters.  Steve Seltzer is grandfathered in, literally, since his ancestor painted with Russell.

by Marjorie Reed

There are two women:  Betty Magner of Great Falls and Marjorie Reed, of Arizona.   Magner’s painting on eBay right now is asking $4,700.  Her auction donation, a painting of Canada geese, was valued at $50.  Reed worked for Disney and has a website:  http://www.marjoriereed.com  Her donation was priced at $2,000.

Branson Stevenson and Archie Bray, not cowboys

Lyndon Pomeroy was doing welded sculptures early on, John Segesman was national and commercial, and Branson Stevenson was the grand gentleman of the scene.  Stan Lynde was called Rick O’Shay after his comic strip character and everyone loved both of them.

The auction was a strange transfer of assets from Kalispell to Great Falls.  In those days Kalispell was small and relatively unknown, but GF still had the Big Stack.  I remember reading an economic forecast for Montana that predicted GF was shrinking -- no more refining, no more railroad hub, much diminished Malmstrom Air Base, though the missile siloes were just going in.  The other side of the coin was the idea that Kalispell and the whole top of the Flathead Valley would soon boom, in the end becoming bigger than either Great Falls or Billings.  That forecast has come true.  But anyway, Nelson is now a family operation with galleries in the Big Market of the SW.

By Mian Situ

Some things were totally unpredictable.  No one ever imagined that the most marvelous painters (Like Mian Situ) would combine classical European-style painting with a new angle on Western history, that of the Chinese labor.  Native Americans, however, remained segregated and held their own show concurrently.  The auction quickly became a status marker, esp. for right wingers, though the left remained fond of animals and plein aire.  It was a while before the Great Northern’s sponsored artists (John Sharp, Winold Reiss, John Fery) began to come to the scene along with the big scenery guns (Thomas Moran) and finally the Taos painters, though Sharp was one of them.  The Cowboy Artists of America remained centered in the SW, though a few examples would wander up this far north.  The pop illustrators from the magazine era began to filter in.

The most recent CMR catalogue had N.C. Wyeth on the cover.

The biggest surprise was that the pattern, fueled by the Internet, would explode into major national auctions, backed by online catalogues and databases, which blew individual galleries and dealers out of the water the same as books had suffered a ground-up economic reconfiguration.  The best artists of the first auction didn’t come close to the quality of those in the 21^st century as far as the painting went.  

By Tom Sander

But authenticity suffered the same way that rodeo became a sport for money-chasing athletes, presented with show-biz glamour.  Low-key Tom Sander was bumped aside by his ex-wife, Sherry Sander.  He spends half the year in Alaska on boats, half in Ledger, near Lake Elwell.

by Sherry Sander

Beyond that, the culture turned its back on cowboy stuff.  Only the white-haired and the old-fashioned still thought the 19^th century was anything more than an inflated myth and the action was in debunking, like cynical “Deadwood” instead of idealistic “Gunsmoke.”  7-11 had a huge collection of cowboy art which they quietly began to dispose of.  No one knows what will happen now.  Maybe globalization: more and more paintings appear at the auctions that are of European and Chinese peasants, African and South American animals.  

The most memorable paintings I ever saw in the auction were of old homesteads silhouetted in the night -- little house, outhouse, pump head, and clothes on the line -- with a huge, canvas-filling moon dominating the sky.  Everyone who saw those paintings remembers them.  No one remembers the name of the artist.

Couldn't find the name of this artist either.

THE CMR AUCTION

CM Russell Museum with portrait of Charlie by Bob Scriver

The Western art scene has begun with the first event being “The Russell,” the big Great Falls Auction that the GF Ad Club used to stage in order to help subsidize the Russell Museum.  Now it’s managed by the Museum itself or some sub-group.  Actually, it’s a lot more like outright advertising than it used to be, including the auction of dinners in fancy places, resort time, and face time with artists.  Strangely, it’s one of the earliest auctions because it’s Charlie’s birthday, but it’s also the farthest north and sometimes gets caught in a blizzard.  Up here even North American Indian Days in July sometimes gets snow.

Brian Dippie

The major non-artist award at the auction will go to Brian Dippie and I could not be more pleased.  This is the wise Canadian expert, professor, and author who endorsed “Bronze Inside and Out,” and wrote the introduction to it.  He really “got it.”  He has been a quiet and penetrating expert on Russell, Catlin, and the general context of Western art, a strong counterpoint to the opportunists and wheeler/dealers who ordinarily slide around in the gray areas.

Charlie Beil and Two Guns Whitecalf

The catalog for the auction is online: https://www.cmrussell.org/the-russell   The software is a little tricky.  There is no Scriver art except for one small version of the portrait of Charlie Russell that Bob did in monument size for the grounds of the museum.  A remnant of Fred Renner’s estate, it's being sold in a group with some Charlie Beil horses.  Beil is VERY much undervalued, underpromoted and undercollected.  As for Scriver, people seem to be sitting on what they own.  The work is not out moving around except for the small pieces done late in his life. There are too many pirated and unauthorized copies out there for a non-expert to mess with.  Of course, with an accurate provenance, the value can’t be lost.

Most of the artists in this auction were not born yet when it began.  Many of the stalwart original participants are dead now, or in too poor health to be active.  I see few Cowboy Artists of America members.  The two pace setters seem to be Charlie Fritz with his vast panoramas and Tom Gideon with his near-fauvist hot-color iconic arrays and tipis.  One of the more entertaining pieces (and few sculptures) is a Greg Kelsey portrait of young Charlie just back from the saloon and waltzing his wife. ( I HOPE that’s his wife!  And that it WAS the saloon!)  The “in the style of Russell” niche is filled by Steve Selzer.  I don’t see any Ace Powells.  I see two Fery’s -- one I’m surprised was included and the other one a good example.

N.C. Wyeth

The cover of the catalogue is N.C. Wyeth, but the depiction is of a fur-trappers’ fort.  Double tension here pulls between a granddaddy illustrator from back east of the sort who helped Russell perfect his skills, and the myth of the free-standing creative genius springing from the Western landscape.  Selling art, as opposed to creating art, is always in tension between directing value at something unique and emplacing it within a profitable context, between what is startling and what is merely a good example.  The genius of the collector is educating his or her eye so as to recognize each for what it is, which is why it’s important to flip through catalogues, not just noting prices and provenance, but also opening up to color, composition, narrative, moment chosen, and so on.  In this case, the execution is excellent.  Judging by the toques and capotes, this is a French fort -- possibly not so Western or even not  American.  Quebecois?

But then, the strange provenance of the actual expansion and endowment of the Russell Museum has been as much a phenomenon of back East aficionadoes as of local fondness for a known character.  It has produced difficulties never expected, esp. as men with fortunes in mineral extraction and other exploitations of the resources of the prairie establish heritage museums and collections across the continent.  The supply of nimble and informed directors has been even more problematic -- some are a little too good and some are scrambling to acquire skills.  They're nomadic as much as academic.

Gene Autry

The Russell is famous for its quick turnover of curators and directors.  The present occupant of that hot seat is Michael Duchemin (French for “of the road”) most recently at the “Autry” in LA, another personality-based museum, but with a Hollywood vibe.  Gene Autry was probably the most all-time successful cowboy-singer businessman ever.
  

Charles Fletcher Lummis

The museum became the center of a controversy when it acquired the entire Southwest Museum of the American Indian, another funky crumbling personality-based collection that was much beloved locally.  “Charles Fletcher Lummis was an anthropologist, historian, journalist, and photographer who created the Southwest Society, which was the western branch of the Archaeological Institute of America. He . . . opened the Southwest Museum in 1907. The museum moved from Downtown Los Angeles to its current location in Mt. Washington in 1914, and has been there ever since.”  

kachinas

Darrell Kipp and Shirley Crowshoe, representing the Piegan Institute, were commissioned to evaluate the Walter McClintock photos that are housed there.  McClintock was a devoted annual visitor to the Blackfeet in the early 1900’s.  He wrote and illustrated “The Old North Trail,” an early and comprehensive documentation of the Blackfeet tribe that is one of the most trustworthy accounts.  Kipp said the museum was so chockablock with kachina dolls that they had to move them repeatedly to get at the photos.  Since the reputation of the dolls is that if disturbed they affect weather, they were a little trepidatious at first, but then began to joke about what and where things were unaccountably happening across the country.  Very few Indian artists are in the auction.

The present curator is Sarah Burt -- I think maybe the third female curator.  When I first moved back, I made it a point to go around and introduce myself, since Bob Scriver’s career was closely parallel with the museum, but it soon became apparent that these were people from elsewhere who had their own agenda.  Much of it is “identity branding” of artists -- that is, selling sizzle for the actual steaks -- which is the same thing as “genre platform” for writers.  Much of the sizzle is the idea that these painters are all cowboys, but in terms of painting, I am more impressed by the women artists in the catalogue.

Jay Contway

As alternative venues, often more local, there are several parallel events: the Western Heritage Artists Association Art Show, the Jay Contway and Friends Art Show, March in Montana (an art show and auction presented by the Coeur d'Alene Art Auction and Manitou Galleries), a Montana version of the Wild Bunch Art Show, and the Western Masters Art Show.  In the past motel rooms have become mini-galleries for individual artists and the atriums of the motels became circulating meeting spaces.  March in Montana makes almost as much money as the main auction.  (Millions.)

Wickedly, I suspect that part of the success of this event is that Montana has very weak laws concerning art: sources, authenticating, transporting, copyright, and so on.  I think things cooled with the lawsuit that arose out of a dealer suing Steve Seltzer for identifying a purported C.M. Russell painting as actually a work by his grandfather, Olaf Seltzer, who was so close to Charlie in friendship and work that they are supposed to have painted some canvases together.  The speculating dealers not only lost a zero off the value of their piece of art, they were fined.  Perhaps they woke up to the force of the actual origin of the work.  We ain't all rubes.

Art is valued for the prestige of owning high-value pieces.  An effective strategy is to buy work that is below consciousness, then to promote it as forcefully as possible until it becomes a known marker for sophistication and wealth.  I think of two men, each of whom owned a fine race horse.  They arranged to “buy” each other’s horses for a million dollars.  Then their million dollar race horses could command very high stud fees.  The CMR is about stud fees.  A person with an educated eye for horseflesh can do pretty well.

THE RUSSELL IS COMING !!

Around here the surest sign of spring is not the groundhog but rather the birthday of an old cowboy artist named Charlie Russell who created a archetype while meaning only to live in the West. The Great Falls Ad Club decided to organize a celebratory art auction on the weekend closest to his birthday every year and that proved to be a magnet for a number of intersecting forces. In the immediately past years the forces have collided and reconfigured. Now there is an auction, but the Ad Club has nothing to do with it, while the “shadow” auction called “March in Montana” continues unchanged. You can peruse the offerings of both online: http://cmrussell.org/the-russell and

http://www.marchinmontana.com/ Jay Contway http://www.jaycontway.com/

is also continuing his simultaneous show (Jay Contway & Friends) but doesn’t put a catalog online.

Lots of people speculate about what’s happening, especially behind the scenes where the CM Russell Museum has just united their two Boards of Directors, one local and one national. All the drama of horse rustling and backroom gambling deals! Of course, buying art IS gambling, esp. at an auction. Bob Scriver has been completely eliminated from the remuda of the Russell. Previous directors would have liked to get his little skulls off the door pulls and even dispense with the big portrait of the artist that Scriver made. He afflicted them while alive and bugs them even more now that he’s dead. I try to help.

There are Scriver bronzes in the “March in Montana” auction, the smaller ceramic-shell castings he made late in life to sell through entrepreneurs who were fond of series so as to encourage collecting the whole bunch. These pieces are # 322, a bucking horse at rodeo; #223, a standing mountain man; #324, a trapper on showshoes; #325, a prospector panning; #594, a mountain man on horseback; #617, a standing elk. This last might be the one sold to help acquire the painting of an elk that Charlie made for the Elks Club so it would stay in Montana. #489, an Indian woman on a horse with a travois, children, and two dogs, is identified as a Joe Beeler bronze but I think it’s actually a Scriver. As the staff gets younger and more separated from on-the-ground Western life, they make more mistakes.

Of the works by people I knew and liked who were connected to Bob Scriver, there were fewer than usual works, but some persist. Ned Jacob http://www.nedjacob.com/ has a nice little sketch (#333) of an Indian head with a bandanna. Paul Dyck is represented by two remarkable paintings: #342, a circle of lodges (tipis) and #342, some kind of ceremonial bird. He is an abstract painter using classical techniques, very haunting. If I had money to spend, I might buy #415 which is a Russell Chatham stone lithograph, also haunting.

Ned Jacob is my age, but Russell Chatham was born on the very same day. We are an age cohort and over seventy now. When I came to Browning we were the younglings. Ace Powell, alcoholic and garrulous, energized us with his predictions of the future and he is well represented in the March in Montana auction because Van Kirke Nelson took him -- well, under his wing would be the nice way to put it -- and accumulated a LOT of his work. But there really are not a lot of Montana homegrown artists that I recognize.

There are two categories of objects that should be thoroughly researched before bidding. One is the Native American artifacts which are controversial in terms of politics and very often were stolen at some point between their creation and acquisition. In addition, many artifakes are out there and some of them are so well-done that they are nearly undetectable as phony. Of course, if they’re that good, why worry? Why not just accept them?

The concept of pedigree is not well-known but it is relevant to artifacts and also to bronzes. With modern methods and materials, it is probably easier to make an undetectable but unauthorized phony bronze casting than to make a solidly-beaded vest. In fact, some of the glamorous ceremonial shirts that occasionally come through auctions sell for thousands, more than many bronzes. Originally, back in the days of Rodin and the perfecting of lost wax casting the process was so exacting and risky that Bob and I nearly killed ourselves and our crew in the Sixties learning how to do it. Now you can just buy a low-risk kit for ceramic shell casting. There’s a definite difference in the quality, but most people can’t detect it.

Western art is an interesting category because it combines high, sophisticated works attached to high income crowds in erudite circles, very curated and controlled, with wild-ass popular creations done from the heart for personal satisfaction. Then there are the cross-overs, which would be Charlie Russell from a relatively high-toned bourgeois family in the mid-west who barely managed to catch the tail of the big open range life. In fact, he missed the bison and the pre-rez Indians. He did his best for the Metis/Cree-Chippewa people who had no rez and often visited the reservations. Some of his drawings are sharp social criticism.

Now it begins to be realized that he was considerably more sophisticated in technique than people think. He spent time in New York City, learning, and artists from back east came to visit, bringing their advice and techniques with them. The same happened with Bob Scriver. So now there are two directions of influence traveling between the “grassroots” spontaneous art and the sophisticated circles. Maybe it’s time for another book that isn’t focused on how much money can be made.

In the meantime interested parties should at least educate their eyes on the catalogues of auctions and, if possible, look carefully at the original works with as much coaching as they can glean from publications or from websites like www.askart.com which manages an index of artists and information about them.

For a reality check, here’s a blog about the planetary art world:

http://www.artsjournal.com/realcleararts/2012/03/art-by-the-numbers-a-new-report-on-the-market-in-2011.html

HOW TO GET RICH WITH ART

The way to make a profit is very simple: “buy low, sell high.” Therefore, persons who are looking for profit look for gradients of time, place or reputation. Something that was worth $5 yesterday -- let’s say shares in an automobile company -- may increase in value to $10 tomorrow. (Interest on a loan is a sort of forced gradient: you get your $5 back plus interest or else you get your $5 back or else you get whatever you put up for collateral. That’s the theory.)

Gradients of place are quite obvious when dealing with ethnic (local, regional) crafts (pots, bead work, quilts) or with natural resources like ores or certain plants (coffee, olives). The entrepreneur buys a supply, invests the cost of transportation, and sells it where it isn’t found.

The gradient of reputation is the most variable and the one most vulnerable to outside interference. Coffee became all the rage -- Starbucks now, coffee houses very early -- until doctors advise against it or the New Age people bolt to tea. Think of the fortunes of beef, profits much reduced by Oprah’s opinion. In fact, scares about health are one of the most effective gradient-factors in our world today. Not just big pharma either. I’ve never forgotten the social commenter who noted that predicting the craze for jogging let a few prescient people clean up on sports bras and big bouncy shoes. Of course, now that barefoot runners from Africa have been seen to win marathons, the trendy are buying thin-soled shoes with separated toes and have found experts to say these are healthier. Earth shoes, negative-heel shoes, went by in there someplace. Sex trumps health, so four-inch-heel platform-sole ankle-strap fuck-me sandals also sell.

A popular gallery exercise in the Cowboy Art world is comparing the gradient of stock market investments against the gradient involved in the value of Remington’s art. (This began as a back East pursuit, which is why they used Remington instead of Russell. The great thing about Russell was that he was so prolific and spontaneous that fifty years ago Dick Flood could still find Russell originals gathering dust in someone’s old chicken coop. Nice low.) Whether the stock market and Remingtons compare well depends on whose thumb is on the scale. Remington knock-offs, encouraged by the public conviction that Remingtons increase in value (and prestige) and their inability to tell a high-value Remington from a cheesy knock-off, are not usually included.

Art has always been a good way to store wealth IF one knows art values and is good at predicting what the future will think about it. What one is really investing in is not the actual object, but the reputation of the art and its maker. Norman Rockwell was famous in a popular way, then knocked off his pedestal by critics who thought the work was sentimental and slick, then replaced on a new pedestal by new critics who feel that Rockwell had his fingers on the pulse of America and that his skills were praiseworthy. There are many other examples.

This is what makes possible the present trend of museums, dedicated to aggregation, to use curation -- changing opinion -- to discard parts of their collection through auction or just slip them out the back loading platform in the middle of the night. If you watch the “stock market” indicator of www.askart.com or other similar websites, you’ll see the fortunes of artists and whole genres go up and down at the indicator auctions.

When the Cowboy Artists of America first banded together, their fortunes were not so rosy, but their association with the then Cowboy Hall of Fame and the promotions of Dean Krakel gradually made membership into markers of quality, so that they all sold much better. This, of course, prompted others to make that sort of art and apply for membership. Soon some streets of Scottsdale and other cowboy art towns were awash with galleries trying to cash in on this value gradient and touting the Remington principle. In the rush of popularity there was so much cowboy art that the value went down. Suddenly galleries began to say, “Buy only what you dearly love!”

Another element in the value of art is its connection to status, education and class. Partly because of the leverage of Life magazine pursuing the wild and romantic lives of Pollock and Picasso, the ordinary person was amazed that something that didn’t look like anything ("my kid could paint like that!") could sell for huge amounts of money. They also got the idea that being an artist, daringly romantic and probably drunk, was a prerequisite. This factor, a kind of frontier style, merged with the “free-range” wildcat aspect of unregulated profit-making, and an association between the political right wing and cowboy art grew up. (“At least I can tell what it is! In fact, I rode a horse like that once!”) Some of the biggest institutions that focused on cowboy art were originally endowed by natural resource millionaires. There is a reason that the Oval Office of the White House is decorated with cowboy art.

But times change. The major curators of cowboy art, let’s say Harold McCracken and Fred Renner, have ridden away over the horizon. Anyway, they were authenticators and enumerators, list aggregators. Rarely did they weigh in about composition or use of color or quality of casting. One of this type, B. Byron Price, has been shepherding a compilation of all known Russell art, with the backing of the CMRussell Museum. This will improve the value of the art work that is listed and devalue those who don’t make the list. Price is also the director of the University of Oklahoma Press and the CM Russell Center for the Study of Western Art. His friends and close associates are well-placed in institutions around the country. He has the ability to suppress all dissenters or to raise up those who will enhance his reputation. Not that McCracken and Renner didn’t do that earlier. Or even Krakel.

This is why I refer to the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. I would love to catch someone from the Great Falls Ad Club in an unguarded moment to pick up the real causes of the breakup of the Auction. Some are probably nearly unconscious: the aging of the people who took the brunt of the work, the proliferation of other auctions with access to far more significant work. ("More significant" is not the same as “better.” It just means more aggregated and curated.) The decline in the reputation of natural resources industries, which are now often seen as plunderers and exploiters. In short, the gradient is changing, much of it depending on the popularity of the subject matter. Fascinating to watch. Full of anguish if you have a horse in the race.

CMR: NOT JUST A MAN

There are two important functions of a museum: aggregation (the collection of things together) and curation (their interpretation). That’s pretty clear. The problem comes when greed and status are involved. Suddenly the monetary value of the aggregation and the status of the curator begin to put political spin on what most people would suppose to be a rather objective function. In fact, we are used to thinking of museums and historical societies as either governmental (tax-supported, which is more common in Canada or Europe than the US) or non-profit (even when they were originally started with endowments from very rich people). The idea was either that they were part of a cultural heritage that makes the nation stronger or that their purpose was so significant in the eyes of the original founders that they would underwrite them the way they might underwrite a cancer hospital. (We aren’t very used to hospitals being profit-makers on today’s scale either. But in Great Falls and Billings, Montana, health care is a major part of the economy.)

Let’s go back to aggregation. Small towns have often been the locus of personal collections of oddities, like arrowheads or albino animals or pioneer implements. Sometimes the things are there just because they are odd (we never lose our fascination with two-headed calves) and sometimes because they are nostalgic and occasionally because the owner simply had a lot of money, and used it to create an aggregation. They aren’t always in accessible places so after the original collectors, who housed them in a basement or garage or -- in the case of one small town in Saskatchewan -- an abandoned movie house, everything is simply dispersed or maybe there’s an effort to raise money through charging admission.

One of my favorite remnants of history now supported as a museum is in North Dakota. Medora was founded in 1883 by French nobleman Marquis de Mores who named the city after his wife Medora von Hoffman. Originally simply the graceful and elegantly appointed ranch house of the Marquis and his wife, who were driven out by meat-packing competitors, it’s something like the Conrad mansion in Kalispell which was emptied by changing times but left intact with furniture. The rather remote ranch home of Alberta Bair is in the category. Such places are heavily curated: the point is preservation rather than aggregation. The Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center is based on the curation of a place, how Lewis & Clark made the change from boats on the Missouri to horses as they continued their journey across the continent. A certain amount of aggregation of authentic equipment or art works are included as well as a point of scholarship, which is a form of curation, explanatory exhibits and talks by guides as well as small events that help people with hands-on experience of one thing or another, like faux parfleches made from brown wrapping paper.

The CM Russell Museum in the same town also organizes such events, especially for kids, who need more than tours to hold their interest. The point of the CMR Museum is aggregation of all things Charlie Russell. By association other artists have been included, though none as the primary focus. The original “seed” for the museum was Charlie’s good librarian friend, Josephine Trigg, who saved small things like letters or the clever little place markers from parties. Charlie’s original house and log cabin studio were there. Someone saw the potential for development and in the last fifty years the place has mushroomed into a major installation. Such a place offers a range of jobs from janitors and security guards to receptionists (originally volunteers), aficionado groups, and a small gift shop.

At the top is the director, who is presumably both an administrator and a curator -- that is, can manage organizational issues like building maintenance and the dynamics of a board of directors, but also is enough of an art expert to mount exhibits worth scholarly attention and to interact with other experts. Nowadays fund-raising is even more important than in the past. Beyond that, the CM Russell Museum has influence clear into Oklahoma where the residue of Nancy Russell’s estate now endows the CMR Center for the Study of Western Art at the University of Oklahoma. The University of Oklahoma Press (along with the University of Nebraska Press) is a major vendor of books about Western subjects.

The Great Falls CMR Museum had the good fortune to attract the attention of the GF Advertising Club, a dynamic group who sponsored an annual art auction on Russell’s birthday. This money-maker, soon imitated by the sincere flattery of other entities, not only attracted a cluster of side-kick auctions all over town, but attracted the interest of people working in the American Southwest on the crosshairs of cowboys and Indians. One example there, the Cowboy Hall of Fame, now called the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, was a major player in the development of Western art because of an alliance with the Cowboy Artists of America, a confederation of buddies who marketed together and gradually became an imprimatur of quality that meant a major uptick in artists' income. This interaction is occasionally challenged -- the motivation for, let's say, "accommodation" becomes a little too strong.

The granddaddy museum of them all, the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, sometimes called “the Smithsonian of the West,” is in Cody, Wyoming, where it originally formed out of Buffalo Bill memorabilia, mostly guns, and the patronage of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, from the same family that created the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York City. I hope I am making the point that the aggregation and curation of Western art, artifacts and memorabilia is an international network. (Alberta alone has some remarkable museums, including the Glenbow in Calgary, the Royal Alberta Provincial Museum in Edmonton, Head-Smashed-In in Fort Macleod, and the Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller.)

Truly qualified directors and curators are hard to find. Individuals shuttle around among institutions, sometimes museums, sometimes publishers, and sometimes academia. Even artists and gallery owners become players. This is not different from other categories of art or natural history museums.

Recently, as the interest of humanitarian millionaires (I mean Billionaires, since millions are small change now) has shifted to international issues (AIDS, starvation, disaster relief) and the big spectacular art museums have been built overseas in Europe or oil country, Western art has changed. Things are leaner. The most nimble of the curator/aggregators have had to mix and match. Take the example of B. Byron Price who is the director of the University of Oklahoma Press (where the editor-in-chief is Charles Rankin who was once the editor of Montana, the Magazine of Western History with its heavy CMR emphasis), also writes books published by the press and/or sponsored by the CM Russell Museum, and is the director of the CMR Center for the Study of Western Art, where staff from the CMR Museum in Great Falls occasionally lecture. Price’s good friend, who previously ran a commercial art gallery, now is the director of the CM Russell Museum in Great Falls.

The Ad Club, which sees itself as local, has decided to change its focus to something else, letting go of the regional network of Western artists who supplied infrastructure for the auction by renting motel rooms and converting them into mini-galleries. The artists are organizing among themselves to maintain this part of the event, but the lucrative auction has moved to the C.M. Russell Museum itself where the director will take on the challenge.

More about this in the future, since my past and, in particular, the career of Bob Scriver is deeply woven into all these institutions even as his estate sits uncurated at the Montana Historical Society.

THE CMR ART AUCTION

The CM Russell Art Auction is like an iceberg, to use an image that this summer is more welcome back East than here. But truly there is much behind the scenes on several different levels. I was there in the beginning and I’m here at the end, without any special privilege, but still I have a few things to point out.

The major worldwide art scene has changed radically. I work with print where there has been a huge furor over the fate of paper books, now being replaced by electronic books. This has only barely begun to reach the awareness of most people. Barnes & Noble or Oasis Books in Choteau look about the same, but they are not. The difference is that the BUSINESS MODEL of books is entirely disrupted by electronics and other forces. Layers of middlemen who operated by travel, phone and mail, searching for used books or hand-selling on-site for the wholesalers, are gone. Books have always been objects and therefore samples had to be schlepped around (they are heavy en masse). Readers bought from a shelf supplied by someone -- we don’t think about that. Even the used books had to be physically found and transported to the used book store, like the wonderful accumulation at Oasis, mostly first edition American and Western books. But now finding the books, selling the books, distributing the books can all be done online.

Paintings and sculptures -- even artifacts -- are no different. The advantage of the auction was that it brought a lot of objects together to be inspected and bought. The publicity was as valuable as the schmoozing among dealers, artists and customers. Now all that can be done online where, it’s far more discrete and private -- no need to invent secret signals to keep the curious from craning their necks. But then why have an auction?

For a while there was a furor over keeping the auction catalogues off websites because some artists copied the work of other artists, but then it became clear that people were buying direct from the catalogue. One can’t really see small factors, like the back of the painting, but it’s possible to inquire through someone. Several times I’ve been asked to take a look at a specific work as it hangs and report to someone far away. If the key effective gallery is an auction website, then there’s really no reason for a bricks and mortar building.

When the auction began 42 years ago, it was modeled on an earlier experiment (also powered by Van Kirke Nelson, the doctor who has used the capital from his ob-gyn practice to subsidize Glacier Gallery in Kalispell) in Spokane. That time around it was Wilfred P. Schoenberg, S.J. (deceased) who was trying to raise money for his Museum of Native American Culture, now dispersed. Father Schoenberg’s book, “Indians, Cowboys and Western Art: A History of MONAC,” intro by Van Kirke Nelson and Paul Masa, was published in 1981. The events begin in the mid-Sixties. It was a time when Indians were still understood to be a remnant conquered population, cowboys were noblemen on horseback, and artifacts were fair game for anyone to acquire.

Probably Indian Empowerment politics did more to disperse MONAC than any other single force, but also there was a fatal mixing of charity, mystique, tax breaks, and exploitation. Many artists were barely surviving or just starting out, so they could be easily pushed into donating something. Nelson and Masa already had a backlog of art in their warehouses that needed to be promoted and cleared out. The Ad Club -- embodied by Norma Ashby -- saw at once that the product was available, the peg of Charlie Russell was a potent one in the age of Ronald Reagan, and Great Falls was outside the orbits of the giants: Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Amon Carter Museum, Cowboy Hall of Fame and several others. Since that time there have been many shifts, some political and some in product. And there are many auctions and shows.

I have argued, in the face of screams of rage from some people, that the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel is essentially Republican. They were marketing on a triumphalist platform emotionally and in capitalist unregulated mode economically, An enlightened person can now see that the prairie clearances of the Native Americans was a genocide not unlike today’s Afghanistan, Iraq, or Somali, and that the artifacts, mythology and lore of the autochthonous peoples should profit those people more than their depictors.

In the capitalist context, some kept arguing that art was no different than the stock market, derivatives of Charlie Russell, while all the time cautioning people to buy what they dearly love because that’s what really counts. (And that masks failures to invest wisely.) A whole business context, partly websites like www.askart.com that act like stock market tickers for auctions and partly slick magazines that “curate” artists, has grown up around this idea. The public, uneducated about what makes art good and resistant to fancy analysis, simply judges art by how much its worth. But the value of art is located more in the sizzle than the steak. An art work is simply worth what it will sell for, regardless of whether it is a Picasso or not.

Montana is a place where there is very little art law and the nuances of numbering, limiting, deriving, etc. are not widely known. An object is treated like an object. So when Bob Scriver was sued for selling a customers’ numbered bronze to someone else next on the waiting list because when the bronze was sent COD, they didn’t have the cash money to accept it, the Montana courts sided with Bob. When the famous lawsuit over the Seltzer that seemed to be a Russell was awarded to Seltzer, that cooled the action. Now the big NA artifact sting in the SW also chills the scene.

In fact, the SW -- which is where what I called the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel first took root -- is now saturated with Cowboy art. The Indian art of the West (meaning art BY Indians, not about them) has taken a slightly different route and so has most of the wildlife art. Scarcity raises value; plenitude drops it. The Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel is now webbed among many major institutions, enough to support a class of curators and directors who have not dropped the on-going connections among profiteers and scholars, publishers and promoters.

What made Great Falls a valuable center was the authenticity of a population and place that was in many ways innocent. The forty-two years of its run was four times longer than the typical peak production period of an artist’s work, usually about ten years between his learning curve up and his aging curve down. In the beginning the Scriver Award could be given to people who actually knew Charlie Russell. Now it just goes to patrons and customers. One lady who customarily flew in on a Lear Jet with a group of wealthy Kentucky aficionadoes said that she had “seen everything of interest” that was local. She’s been out as far as Fort Benton and Choteau. Did I know of anything she might have missed? It was all getting a little tiresome. That tells the story.

BIG TIME ART AUCTION ADVICE

Since I grew up in Portland, Oregon, which is a dynamic art town, art has been a major part of my life, or maybe I should say “arts” since I’m including film, dance, theatre, public monuments, the Portland Art Museum, so on. Music, less. For the Sixties decade that I was with Bob Scriver it was as an insider but an insider in a small part of the Big Time Art world. I saw that Bob’s work was good enough for New York City and pushed him to join the National Sculpture Society and the National Academy of Design, which took him into the historical context of the Paris Beaux Arts rather than the smaller Russell/Remington circle. In his later years he fell back into the local Montana scene.

But Beaux Arts representational art, which can be said to include the Animaliers and Rodin, is hardly relevant to the modern planetary landscape. These days one can monitor some of the latter by subscribing to free automated e-newsletters like Art Journal and ArtDaily, plus a lot of email auction monitors limited only by one’s capacity to handle foreign languages (there are auction aggregators like “Invaluable Live!”) and a lot of institutional newsletters like the lively one put out by the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole. enews@wildlifeart.org I have a two-foot tall stack of downloads.

Major forces have changed the art landscape. One is the growth (some might say “overgrowth”) of new major art mortar-and-brick institutions (maybe beyond the supply of informed and capable managers, let alone fund-raisers) side-by-side with the decay of some of the hoary old museums full of prestige but short on cash. Often seen as Chamber of Commerce fodder or memorials to individuals, art always lives in tension between local or national and international interests.

The same forces that brought us stock market “instruments” of dubious quality and mortgages that go “underwater” also underlie a lot of recent shocking art world developments. One is secretive “de-accessioning” which is a euphemism for selling museum assets, sometimes to underwrite salaries and operating expenses. The boards of the institutions are the ones responsible for controlling such actions but they often don’t quite realize what they are approving. Proper curators, of course, know it is at least unethical and sometimes simply in-house theft by people who carry the house keys. Part of the problem is that art goes in and out of fashion, so what seems reasonable to discard in one decade might turn out to be quite valuable later. But no institution has infinite storage.

Brandeis University ran aground when they despaired of making their Rose Gallery pay for itself and didn’t want to wrestle with piecemeal de-accessioning, so proposed just selling all the art and closing the gallery down. Not only did they trigger outrage, but also were forced to realize that they hadn’t carefully read the will that endowed the installation in the first place. The Barnes Museum near Philadelphia found themselves trapped in a bad part of town where they attracted very little traffic but the will was so restrictive that the board had to go to court to get permission to move the institution to a better place. The appetite for de-accessioning conflicts with the pride of “ownership” on the part of the public or, in the case of historical societies, the wish to memorialize one’s family in perpetuity -- followed by the later shock of realizing the bequest has been sold or discarded or “lost.”

Related to the above is the porous wall between private galleries and “public” museums, which may be either free-standing foundations or governmentally supported. If a private art dealer can manage to get a piece or a show into the institution, it legitimizes and inflates the value of that artist. The collector may “gift” art to the institution for the sake of the enhanced reputation of the artist and of the collector’s other holdings. The little game of gifting art of high value but keeping it in one’s home has attracted the interest of the IRS. There are other games.

Auctions are notorious ways to slip through walls and encourage sleight-of-hand in quickly moving circumstances where inquiries into provenance can be deflected and people have no time to consult experts as to authenticity. It’s the perfect place to sell a Seltzer with the signature cut off so it can be represented as a Russell, esp. if the event is full of CMR admirers. Occasionally in various auctions people have spotted stolen art and other collectibles zooming past the auctioneer’s gavel.

On the other hand, online catalogues mean that specific works and artists can be tracked and researched ahead of time. Websites like www.askart.com list almost all the American and Canadian artists, which of their works come to auction, the artists’ biographies and, for a fee, will tell you what the auction prices have been. There are other websites that will do the same thing for no fee. This can reveal the “gradient” factor (see a previous post on this blog) so that, for instance, the Taos Seven artists (quite fabulous!) are moved from the SW where they are relatively common and familiar, to the northern prairie where people haven’t grown accustomed to them. Auctions might not work so well for local artists of lesser reputation whose works are bought because people know and love the artist and want a connection. This is especially effective if one buys the art directly from the artist in person.

Art entrepreneur-ship, commonly called “wheeling and dealing,” depends on capital. Part of their reputation as shady comes from capital underwritten inventory created by one management strategy: buy low/sell high. The morality is profit, so whatever pushes down the buying price and pushes up the selling price is just fine. The gradient here is greater knowledge on the part of the dealer. Buyer beware. Full disclosure is only a theory. The push/pull is generally based on theories about what will gain in value or prestige. Art is a good marker of status for a plutocrat, implying good taste and resourcefulness. The plutocrat then becomes agreeable to supporting institutions and patronizing galleries and auctions.

The best advice remains the same: study the catalog, do research before attending an auction, buy what you really like, buy what you can afford, buy from the artist or a local and stable gallery, and don’t drink at auctions. I presume the advice also applies to livestock auctions.

THE FOUR "R'S" OF WESTERN ART

A good theory is simple enough to apply in a lot of places, so let’s try the aggregator/curator idea (collecting things together, versus analyzing what they are) on a current vexed situation in Great Falls. For many decades the Great Falls Ad Club has sponsored an auction to benefit the CM Russell Museum. Now they have parted company. Originally there was ONE auction on ONE night. It was mostly local. The Russell Museum was small, quietly managed (too quietly, some might say, since a certain amount of mutual back-scratching went on), and though the SW cowboy art scene was heating up, not much attention had been paid to the northern prairie. The Ad Club had been raffling off a high end automobile for their benefit project. So it was all simple -- one celled. Horizontal. One small event in the lives of Montana folks.

Over time the museum itself has swollen into a huge building that gobbles money, the auction has become a year-round industry, and other auctions have joined the first, for various reasons, with none of their money going to the Russell Museum. The event is now vertical, an aggregate of Western art -- some of it, like the customers, coming from back East. From the beginning dealers have auctioned works that weren’t moving from their galleries, and now the many rooms that wrap around the actual auction are filled with dealers as well as artists. Recently, the original wheeler-dealers are aging out and even dying -- after all, this end of the movement began in the Sixties -- but there are plenty of replacements and they are far smoother, more hip, and not so local.

If one looks at Western art vertically, not as part of horizontal Montana life, it is much expanded across the continent. Major institutions and dealers have learned how to manage “the auction” as an event of aggregation and as a price-curator. Now websites like Askart.com are aggregators of auctions. Catalogues are aggregators of content useful for dealers and collectors, who curate at various levels of education and straightforwardness. Western art has grown powerful enough to support slick magazines and to engage some serious scholarship. But it also pulls along with it a bit of the horizontal: guns, uniforms, Indian artifacts, military paraphernalia, cowboy gear, overlapping a bit with popular history of the West, which sustains a parallel network of aficionados.

Over the years tensions developed between the local horizontal, which claims this category as part of their own history, daily life, friends and neighbors, and those who see it in the vertical, part of a “brand,” a sales and scholarship category responding to theory somewhat but far more controlled by profit. The vertical commercial interests were committed to cloaking, because some of the profit came from playing poker with art. it helped to have uninformed enthusiasts around. The artists themselves ended up on both sides. Some of them were not Westerners. Some of them were not great artists. Not many were like Charlie Russell.

Local Westerners tend to judge art on the basis of what they know of real life. Is that good horse anatomy? Would a person throw a rope that way? Would griz act like that? Is that the right period of rifle? But the academic art curators, who deal with many kinds of art, think in terms of skilled brush strokes, color values, composition and the like. They posit major art movements and look for dates of birth and death, who the teachers were, what other artists traveled with them, and so on. All this “privileged” book learning increases expert importance and their ability to earn money by using their knowledge. So they value the vertical. The dealers, who are operating as middle men between the two approaches, just want to convert both local lore and specialized erudition into cash.

In the beginning, back in the Sixties, when Van Kirke Nelson was experimenting with auctions by working with Father Schoenburg, whose museum of Indian art (MONAC) in Spokane finally failed, and when these auctioneers were going around asking artists to donate art for the good of the cause, Ace Powell and Bob Scriver were always trying to figure out what people valued when they bought art. Their naive ideas were things like how many colors were used, how many figures were in the painting, whether it was action or just a still-life, whether it was painted on stretched canvas or canvasboard. Originality figured large in their minds, but it was hard to know how not to be so original that one left the cowboy category. These days the talk is a whole lot more fancy.

There is a layer of thought that goes up and up from the horizontal, through the vertical “brand” of cowboy art. It is theoretical, philosophical, dominated by academics. They publish books, though the movement still doesn’t support books with no pictures. There is another layer that goes down and down from the horizontal, about how to make deals in cowboy art, not written out since some of it is not just down but also dirty. Horse trading stuff. Buyer beware. Is this a Russell or a Seltzer with the signature sheared off?

On the up and up is the issue of status. If a millionaire (esp. the Western shirt-sleeves type based on mineral development or industrial development) wants to show he’s not just some uneducated bozo who can be patronized, he might want to have some pretty nice art in his game room. And to him, Western art is likely to hit the spot. Rough-hewn manly stuff, but respected by the experts. That sort of buyer is likely to need a gallery or advisor just to find out where things are. He's used to hiring experts.

Recently Western art as a marker of status and discrimination has gotten tricky. The PETA crowd doesn’t want to see dirty old cowpokes roping a poor innocent wolf just for the fun of it. They don’t like rodeo, either. Or branding. Must everything be so violent?? So sales action has shifted from cowboys, hunting, and so on over to the idealization of animals in the wild. Suddenly Remington and Russell were joined by Rungius, even though the latter painted moose and mountain sheep so well because he regularly shot himself a model and strung it up too look at. Which is also what Audubon did. At this point the art begins to leave reality and soon there are Rainbow Grizzlies.

As the RR and R available oeuvre has thinned down, scenery came into vogue, esp. the early mystical aggrandizement of American “cathedrals,” illuminating the connection between patriotism and Christianity. Add a fourth R, “Republican.” Now the center of Western art, which has flooded (Dick Flooded, you might say, if you knew that dedicated entrepreneur) the Southwest, shifts slightly to the American South and East. They’re the ones who have had the money, honey, for the last eight years.

All of these countervailing forces, but primarily the one between the horizontal locals who have little notion of what the continental scene and values might be and the vertical experts who chase a narrow goal in a way that includes a certain amount of flim-flam, make the Great Falls art politics and power struggles almost more interesting than the art work. One again, too much aggregation. Not enough curating, or maybe meta-curating. Who’s curating the curators when the curators come from outside?