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.

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.

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?

CMR MUSEUM VS CMR AUCTION (AD CLUB_

I'm not very sure about the rules of this, but consider it a promotion for the online edition of the GF Tribune.

My interpretation of what has happened is that the on-going war between the national interests and the local interests has finally ended. National won. There will be consequences.

Prairie Mary



August 21, 2009

Russell Museum, Ad Club part ways

By RICHARD ECKE
Tribune Staff Writer

Two longtime pals on the Great Falls Western Art scene are going their separate ways this week.

C.M. Russell Auction officials Thursday announced it was severing ties to the popular annual C.M. Russell Auction of Original Western Art held in March.

The auction was launched in 1969 and continues to be run by the Great Falls Advertising Federation, also known as the Ad Club. For 41 years, the Ad Club annually donated a slice of the auction's proceeds to support the C.M. Russell Museum.

At the peak, the Ad Club donated $421,280 to the museum in 2006.

However, the donation dropped sharply this year with a decrease in art sales. The donation amounted to $120,829, the smallest amount since 1970. The 2008 donation to the museum was $400,240.

The reason for this year's figure was rooted in the flagging national economy, according to Sara Becker, executive director of the Ad Club.

"We sold half as much art as we did last year," said Becker, a former marketing and publications coordinator at the Russell Museum.

Museum officials said the museum will create an independent and exclusive additional event that will feature sales of Russell works and other western art.

No date or location for that sale or auction has been chosen by the museum's board of directors, said new Executive Director Darrell Beauchamp.

"Most likely it will be held in 2010," Beauchamp said, as opposed to later this year. Beauchamp said details remain to be determined by the museum's governing board.

Ad Club officials said the much ballyhooed Russell Auction will go on as scheduled, albeit without the museum's formal participation.

Beauchamp said in a news release that it was important for the museum to directly manage any event using the museum's name and brand.

"It is not just the new guy deciding to do this," Beauchamp added. He said museum staff and board members had been discussing the issue for some time, especially in recent weeks. He said the timing appeared appropriate with a new director on board.

"It didn't have anything to do with the money," Beauchamp said. "We didn't base the decision on the low auction results from 2009." He said the museum was "very appreciative" of the Ad Club's donations of $5.7 million over 41 years.

Both sides officially wished each other well Thursday, but not all of the comments were sunny ones.

"We're still perplexed by this whole deal," said Jack May, Ad Club president. "It was very shocking. We've lost a lot of sleep over this."

An Ad Club official said the group will try to figure out other organizations to which it will donate auction proceeds.

"We will examine benefitting other worthwhile organizations in the area for the future," May said in a news release.

May also expressed surprise at Beauchamp's comment that the decision was not based on money.

"It has everything to do with money, and they've expressed that," May said.

The club released a letter from David Solberg, museum board chairman, which said the club's 2009 donation to the museum "was insufficient to cover our costs in money, facilities and staff time."

Beauchamp said the museum considered such letters private and maintained it was quoted out of context.

"It's unfortunate that he feels that way," Becker replied. She said the club was trying to explain to the public what was happening.

May said museum officials were "making it pretty plain that they think they can do it better."

Becker said the Ad Club is not planning a name change for its Russell Auction, adding the club registered the name with the state. Beauchamp said museum officials have not decided if they would have any heartburn over the club's continued use of the auction name.

A museum news release said the Russell Museum had spent "forty-one years of assisting" the Ad Club with the auction.

"There are some small, really minimal things that they have done," May replied. He said the club should have no trouble finding another location for an auction reception, for example, or another location where potential auction art would be judged.

Beauchamp said museum staff and officials spend "thousands of hours" on the auction.

May said the auction was begun as a fundraising event for Ad Club, and the museum was a secondary beneficiary.

May said he believes Ad Club's large group of volunteers worked very hard at the 2009 auction but was hurt by national financial concerns.

He said a popular art auction in Reno, Nev., the Coeur d'Alene Art Auction, three weeks ago saw those effects.

"A year ago they did $39 million (in sales)," May said. "This year they did $10 (million)." Actually, the Reno auction reported grossing $11.665 million, still far less than the $39 million figure.

Beauchamp said the Russell Museum is financially sound but would like to be able to increase revenues.

"We're wishing the Ad Club nothing but the best," he said. Beauchamp said the museum's new event should take place "as early as spring of 2010."

Becker and May said they are not expecting the museum's decision to hurt the annual Russell Auction.

"I don't think we're going to see significant damage," Becker said. She and May said the Ad Club would have some concern if the museum event were held at exactly the same time as the Russell Auction, set to be held March 17-20, 2010.

Becker said it would be better for people to be able to attend both events, if they are held during Western Art Week in March. Beauchamp said it's possible the museum event will be held then.

May said a number of events have popped up during Western Art Week in Great Falls, which he said gives the area economy a big boost.

"We'll keep doing what we do," May said.

Beauchamp said the museum simply would like to "do a better job of controlling our destiny." As for Ad Club, he said "it's very clear to us now that their number one priority is to support the Ad Club."

CM RUSSELL MUSEUM BENEFIT AUCTION: 2009

Go to www.greatfallstribune.com/westernart if you’re a visual person who craves video.

Think of this as a three-act play, except that though I experienced it in sequence yesterday and you’ll have to read it in sequence, it was really happening all at the same time as though it were staged on three sides of the audience.

First is the main stage, which is at the Heritage Motel in Great Falls as it has been for many years. It’s the kind of huge motel with an indoor swimming pool in the middle and glass slider doors onto that space. All the furniture comes out for storage in trucks and the artists put up false walls to convert each room into a gallery. Or the less affluent just rent a regular motel room and spread their display out on the bed. There were fewer people this year -- I found a parking place right off. But there were more people eating breakfast and more of them had white hair. Some were missing. Every year more are missing. Every year the management has everything even more smoothly organized. The Ad Club, who has always sponsored this, is VERY sharp and energetic. No detail is neglected.

This year I was on the programme for the book-signing, which in this context also means signing cowboy hats, signing buckskin vests -- not just signing but also drawing a little picture. I wasn’t quite so creative, struggling hard to think of something meaningful to say in one sentence. The lawyer who destroyed Bob Scriver’s estate came on his belly to buy a book. Trying to be nice for the sake of Norma Ashby, the best I could come up with was “best wishes.” I didn’t say for what. The last time I heard from him was years ago when he sent me a letter forbidding me to ever enter his office because I told someone I wanted to punch him out.

Eric Newhouse mentioned me by name in the calendar, though there were more important people signing books. I sat next to Joan Stauffer, who wrote “Behind Every Man: The Story of Nancy Cooper Russell.” That’s Charlie Russell’s wife, whom everyone agrees put him on the map. She arranged his shows, set the prices, and ran off the little kids and loafers who kept him from working. Joan used to dress up and deliver a monologue as Nancy Russell, whose elegant portrait is on the front of her book.

I asked Joan if she thought Nancy had any regrets. She said yes, that Nancy regretted that she hadn’t shown more warmth to Jack, the couple’s adopted son. He was a little bitter and didn’t visit. Joan lives in Tulsa and is active with the Gilcrease, which has the largest and “best” Russell collection, the one that “got away” from Montana, leaving them determined never to let that happen again. Tom Gilcrease was a Native American who got rich on oil and used it to educate himself by touring Europe (a classic alternative to university) and returned to celebrate American history.

When I asked Joan if she knew Tellefero, author of a controversial tell-all bio of Charlie and Nancy Russell, she looked off into the distance and went silent.

I did sell all the books I had left and could have sold more. Hastings and the CM Russell Museum should have sold out as well. One of the most charming book buyers was Ron Ukrainetz, an artist whose saloon-keeper/hustler father sort of tricked Bob into his early career. The story is in the book, but Ron and will have to get together to tell stories. He says they have a cache of Bob Scriver letters with little sketches left from the negotiations (before I came to Montana) and have framed some, might print others, and will never let anyone read a few. I have a unique document: the letter Bob wrote in the middle of the night, consumed by panic that he had done the wrong thing and breaking off. The only paper he could find was an adding machine tape and the only pen was red. Ron and I are about the same age and he exhibits his good work in Jack Smith’s gallery down the street from me in Valier, but we’ve never met before.

The three people I always seek out are old Bob Scriver friends. One is Joyce Clarke Turvey, whose wood carver father, John Clarke, is an historic figure. I used him in what I hoped was the symphonic chord at the end of “Bronze Inside and Out:” an imagined interaction among a fine sculptor educated at Beaux Arts in Paris, named Voisin; John, who both learned from Voisin and was the subject of one of the busts the sculptor was there to do; Charlie Beil, a protegee of Russell and mentor to Bob Scriver; and Bob himself, fourteen years old.

Then there was Rex Rieke, whose wife is my self-declared most devoted blog fan. We have a lot of jokes about that. Rex is another of those fine artists who excels at both paint and music, which he plays at many venues around the state. He brought his so-fine Maynard Dixon-type mountainscapes, not his abstract work. While I was talking to him, his hired man called to say they had just had another lamb out at the ranch. Rex said that Dick Flood, one of the first of the art higglers, used to find Russells in the early days by simply walking down Montana streets after dark, early in the evening before the shades were drawn. He could spot them through the windows and return the next day to buy them.

Always I check out David Powell, son of Ace Powell, who in the earliest days was at the heart of Western art on the northern prairies. David and Sasha’s autistic little boy is making good progress in a special school program; their college-aged son is getting straight A’s and wants to go into airplane crash investigation as a profession. I would love to hear what Ace would say about that! There weren’t even airplanes when he started out.

This event is a niche within a niche, maybe within another niche or on another layer. First of all, this event is a friendship circle and the people who experience it that way see it as an annual reunion, like a high school class coming together. They are not a university crowd, not inclined to analyze, not sophisticated about much of anything and not defensive about it, but good-natured and generous. Good spenders! Good friends -- aging.

They interface through the Ad Club with two other groups mainly. One is the artists themselves, which can be grouped in a lot of different ways, but who address exclusively the American West and mostly the 19th century American West that white folks have made legendary. They love art that has been called illustration or calendar art, but some are pretty good impressionists. This show does not attract the big names, though long ago when they were little names, they weren’t too proud to come. There are bronzes everywhere, some of them pretty obvious copies of Scriver works. I don’t fuss about it. I DO fuss about the many illegal castings, but the entity that has the power and obligation to do something about it is the Montana Historical Society -- not me.

The other group interfacing through the Ad Club is dealers, a mixed lot. Some are honorable and fair, some are true predators, looking for weak people to exploit, whether artists or buyers. The Ad Club keeps them somewhat in check, though Montana art law is nearly nonexistent.


Besides the centerpiece auction there are six other events, at least: what they called “March in Montana” is really the same wheeler/dealers out from under the thumb of the Ad Club in a more downscale motel; the Native American Show in the Civic Center; the Western Heritage Artists Association and March Antiques Show at the Holiday Inn; Jay Contway and Friends at the Expo Center, specializing in yarning as much as sales; Studio 706, a local collective selling through their own gallery; and Western Collectibles with all the paraphenalia. There was also an auction at the Pacific Antique Mall. Maybe some action at the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center.

I only have the stamina to attend two. The Native American Show and “March in Montana.” The Native American Show was the best experience of the day for me. First, the work was vibrant, new, jumping and alive. Valentina LaPier, whose work grows constantly, really impressed me. Deborah Magee, whose family has many ties to me and Bob Scriver (Deborah's father Merle was Bob's hunting partner and on the school board that hired me.), won best of the miniature category with a “bead painting” that was a small portrait of an historic Indian woman, all done with solid beads and framed in painted rawhide. It tickles me that the newest and most intellectual art is done by the Native Americans. But it puzzles me (maybe it doesn’t really) that there is such a wall between the White Triumphalist Western Art (Kevin Red Star was the only Indian over there at the main auction.) and the Native American highly sophisticated and often hilarious work. Few whites even come over to look.

It was a great pleasure to see Carl Cree Medicine Sr. receive an award for his long-standing attendance (25 years) and work on behalf of artists. When I came to Browning, the average annual income for Indian men was $500 a YEAR and their average life-span was 47 years, or about as long as a person can live with chronic alcoholism. Carl wrestled demon rum (or rather demon Thunderbird) for a long time. He looked at his plaque and said, “Pretty good. Ought to be able to get a couple of jugs out of pawning it!” But he was only joking. One of his sculptures was called “Alley Preaching” and showed two winoes being scolded by a guy in dark glasses. For years Carl ran a centre where street people could take shelter. The place was blue with tobacco smoke and their coffee was about like battery acid.

The politically correct crowd will ask me, when I say I know some Blackfeet person, “Have you ever invited them to your house for dinner? Have they ever invited you over for dinner?” Suburban culture and corporate culture both organize around dinner parties. When I say I know Carl, I mean that we ate many a coffee break donut and long john (maple bar) at the bakery lunch counter with our elbows bumping, and I had many an argument with him drunk while Bob hid, and we risked our lives together in the foundry pouring molten bronze. The boy who posed for the bust of a child in Bob’s group of Blackfeet portraits was there with Carl. His name is Tim. He’s one big dude these days. I suppose he’s about forty and looks healthy. Carl is my age. His life shows.

I’ll post more about Carl later. And also about Terrance Guardipee, about whom I’ve been asking people for years and who turns out to be Darrell Kipp’s NEPHEW! His mother was Geraldine Kipp, who was my student once, and who keeps the Piegan Institute organized and on time now, ever quietly and gracefully as she always does everything.

Then I went, sighing, over to the “other” auction, where there were no pretty ladies in evening gowns to carry the paintings, and the auctioneer was running the art and NA artifacts through the process as fast and hard as he could. A small audience, mostly dealers, sat in front; probably a hundred more were invisibly streaming and bidding online, another double-dozen were perched alongside the upstairs balcony railings, and some were watching from inside dealer rooms, both on laptops and by craning their necks. Conversations were often interrupted as some choice item looked momentarily promising. This was where the economy and the general down-curve of nineteenth-century American West enthusiasm was being felt. There weren’t as many white heads as dyed heads, mostly male. The rooms had not been emptied, so the beds were covered with tomahawks and rare books. These are the last of the “higglers,” though they call themselves “antiquarians.” This is where you can find out the real truth of things.

I checked in with Adolf Hungry-Wolf who was not glad to see me because “nineteenth century Blackfeet braves” are never glad to see white women, and said hello to his best friend, Paul Raczka, who keeps a low profile over in Choteau. They know more about the Blackfeet than the Blackfeet know about themselves.

By then my back ached, my head swam, I could barely pronounce words -- much less remember names --so I went home. It was a gray day, mixed clouds moving slowly in a high stratus sheet and patterns of cumulus over the mountains. Not too cold and not too hot. No green yet. The question I pondered as I drove was the one we were all asking ourselves and each other: “what about twenty years from now? Will there be an auction? Will anyone care about Charlie Russell?”

More later.

WHEELER-DEALERS

My movie this week included “Country Matters” which is a compendium of dramatized English short stories from the Edwardian times. One of them was called “The Higgler,” which is their word for a man who goes around the country with a wagon, buying small things low and reselling them somewhere else for a higher price. Eggs, produce, pans and the like. There are art higglers in Great Falls today as the CM Russell Museum benefit auction that the Ad Club puts on each year begins. Satellite shows are also open. Most people operate out of motel rooms, but some use RV’s or car trunks or even, in the case of monumental sculpture, flatbed trucks, which can be rather startling when encountered in traffic.

In the old days, by which I mean the Sixties which I suppose could be called the JKF times, the wheeler-dealers were still cruising the Eisenhower highway network to search the country for art bargains and then sell them as great treasures elsewhere. Sure enough, in those years original Russells were still being found stored in attics and chicken houses across the high prairie. One could buy an old book in a junk store and shake out an illustrated letter. Not many people got rich but some did well enough to keep going. Certainly, it’s how Dick Flood got his start.

The higgler wheeler-dealers of the last half of the twentieth century are a little thin in the ground now. Instead they use computers. But some have galleries. A few, knowing there are rumors about them and famous swindles that they made, have come to self-proclaiming their wheeler-dealer status. Others are disguised as patrons who pretend to be helping the alcoholic or improvident artists from whom they buy, later inflating their reputations. Running art through an auction is a good way to attract attention, even if quietly buying it back through a front is the main way to establish a high selling price.

We used to think of gallery owners, publishers, and other impresarios as people who knew quality plus a formidable amount of art history and who were prepared to see potential in beginners or to find quiet rural geniuses. That was back in the days when professionals, like doctors and lawyers, were seen as “professing” something and to self-monitor for ethics. Nowadays, of course, the waves of greed have transformed them into profit-meisters whose high pay makes them able to accumulate the capital to play games with people’s lives, though they really rather prefer them dead. And they like the artists to fit into a “brand” expectation on the part of the buyers.

For their part the bourgeoisie are likely to be buying to be part of the crowd, to do the “in” thing, to be able to say to their friends, “Oh, I picked up a bluhbluhbluh for a real bargain price!” Also, like high school kids, they love the party atmosphere of auctions and high brow (they think) shopping in galleries. Around here, of course, the Western art has the huge advantage of being subject matter that has been experienced by many people who then buy portrayals that remind them of their own lives. Neither buyer nor seller is likely to have studied much about art and their “eye” these days is mostly taught by movies and television.

But then, we didn’t know a lot back in the Sixties either. Ace and Bob used to muse over what made a really “good” painting. Ace kidded about how a painting on stretched canvas was worth more than one painted on canvasboard, but then there were the gimmicks of a painting by Charlie on a windowshade or a silk petticoat that belonged to winkwink. Did using a lot of different colors mean that the painting was worth more money? Was an oil painting worth more than a watercolor? Surely it was worth more than a print? (This was before giclée prints made fortunes for some artists.) Was it more valuable if an artist taught himself, thus avoiding the contamination of scholars and professors, or was it better to have gone to prestigious schools? (Which WERE they? We knew about the Famous Artists correspondence courses.)

Would it be better to own a painting that had actually appeared on a calendar? Calendars and magazines were the art most people knew and they weren’t surprised when suddenly those same people turned up as high-dollar easel painters in the Western mode. Now that so many have eyes educated by animation, a surprising number of Western artists come from Disney. Among the most skillful and accepted painters are Chinese artists, but people here still aren’t quite sure about Native American painters who paint abstractly. We don’t know how to look at them. How do we know what they’re “about?”

Sculpture is both easier and harder. Wood carving is easy, though many of the old timers used a lathe-type machine to make multiple bears and mountain goats. After all, they finished them by hand. Marble is like that, too. Bronze casting baffles people, though not many still believe that they are whittled out of metal. We’ve seen too many photos of Charlie Russell with clay or beeswax in his hands. But many still believe that the modeled product is somehow “bronzed” like electroplated baby shoes.

If you say “mold,” people see in their heads a machine, though old-fashioned French or Roman block investment is pretty much back-bending labor. Modern ceramic shell casting is far more industrial, cheaper, faster, less skill-demanding, much better suited to mass production -- natural enough since it was developed to cast parts for space-age rockets in military applications. All the little signs of excellence in casting and patining metal are harder to learn.

The three main categories of Scriver bronzes for sale might be labeled white, black and gray. The “white market” bronzes are those cast in his lifetime in his own foundry in Browning with his skilled Blackfeet crew (plus me). They were sold with a certificate of authenticity showing the limits of the edition and that was registered in a book that the Montana Historical Society refuses to search for in his estate, thus crippling estimates of value. But very few of them go through auctions anyway.

The black market bronzes are flatly illegal castings, often originating in the Flathead Valley. They are invariably ceramic shell castings and usually have lousy patinas, often looking like paint instead of the subtle depths of a true patina.

The gray market castings come from sculptures that were commissioned by entrepreneurs, a new kind of wheeler-dealer, who suggested subjects, bought them WITH the copyright, set their own edition numbers (often as high as a hundred copies) cast them through some Montana ceramic-shell foundry, and sold them through their own galleries. Now they show up at all the auctions and on eBay. When Bob died ten years ago, his will specified that all molds should be destroyed. But he didn’t own the molds that belonged to these speculators and most of them didn’t have warehouses to store them, so they remained with foundries that later dispersed. No one knows where they went then, or even whether they still exist. It’s hard to maintain even today’s durable molds in prime condition.

A whole new field of expertise has developed -- not in higgling -- but in tracking the activities of the wheeler-dealers and how they parlayed opportunism into high dollar SW galleries. (I can’t think of any who ended up in New York.) There are books, some of them autobiographical. We need some good novels. I’ll get right on it!

ADVICE FOR THE COWBOY ART AUCTION SEASON

The “Cowboy Art” auction season is beginning with the posting of the CM Russell Auction in Great Falls. The auction itself is on the weekend nearest Russell’s birthday, this year March 20, 21 and 22. The website is www.cmrauction.com. I’ll be participating in the Autograph Party on Saturday from 10:30 AM to 11:30 AM.

The main auction is at the Heritage Inn and occupies many of the rooms that are normally rented overnight. For this event the usual furniture is removed and artists bring set-ups to make the rooms into mini-galleries.

There is a second auction at a different motel, plus a half-dozen additional spin-offs. These smaller events are less predictable and not confined to art. They may include books, Indian artifacts, or cowboy gear. Sometimes they are the work of an artist who is present and sometimes they are of dubious provenance. The actual CMR auction is a collection of art juried by experts and there are reliable protocols, but the smaller entrepreneurs may be floaters from out-of-state. Montana art law is nearly nonexistent.

www.askart.com sent me a tip-link to the Scriver bronzes in the upcoming Ad Club official CMR Auction:
http://www.askart.com/askart/artist.aspx?q=7283028&artist=19479

At the Scriver location on that website are many requests to know “how much this piece is worth,” as though one were able to determine such a thing, esp. in the art world. A piece of art is worth what someone will pay for it at the moment it is for sale. Much depends on the times, the event, the attendance, and who went to the bathroom at just the wrong moment. Putting those variables aside, here are some thoughts to consider when deciding whether to buy a Scriver bronze.

1. What year was it actually created (rather than cast)? Bob’s career falls roughly into three parts:

A. The Fifties when he was making tourist trinkets from hydrocal (very hard plaster) and painting them with lacquer. Hundreds of these were hand-produced in Browning and mostly sold for less than ten dollars. Some of them have been posthumously cast in bronze, since they have the Scriver name on them, but they are not Great Art and their value is mostly as a novelty.

B. From the mid-Fifties to the mid-Seventies is the period when Bob’s work was at its peak. The sculptures themselves ARE fine work, heart-felt, and often cast in the Bighorn Foundry by Bob, myself, and the Blackfeet crew. Bob liked to work in series, so these works include the Blackfeet series and the rodeo series plus many, many animals. These are the pieces of most value, but they rarely show up at auctions. The people who bought them are reluctant to let them go, and if they do, they usually move quietly through prestige galleries. As Bob’s reputation slowly grows back after damage at the end of his life, these are the bronzes of investment quality.

C. Later in Bob’s life his health prevented him from bronze casting. He began to use small ceramic-shell foundries and cast larger editions. Sometimes he would create a piece at someone’s suggestion and sell them the right to cast (the copyright). Quality control on these castings was much lower, the pieces themselves were smaller, and many copies were made in each edition. They were done quickly in order to pay the bills. Though they are popular favorites, usually story-based, they are generally what travels the auction circuit, around and around, in search of profit.

In addition there are an increasing number of posthumous and black market castings, some with stories about how Bob “gave me the wax.” The ones I have seen have bad patinas, esp. one that Arrowhead used that makes the bronze look like plastic or the ones that are multi-colored: red shirts, blue jeans, and so on. (Arrowhead is no longer in business.)

I’ve seen figures of Ace, Charlie Russell, and a nude of Bob’s second wife, Jeanette, which have probably been recast from the early hydrocal versions that Bob sold at the beginning of the Sixties. The people who are selling them may be assuming that they are out of copyright, which they would have been by old rules, but a new law has been passed that makes them still illegal. However there is no responsible party able or willing to prosecute. Bob’s lawyer was ignorant on the subject (and others).

The advantage of casting a bronze from a hydrocal is that the main way to discover a recasting is by comparing an original with the knock-off, which will be slightly smaller because metal shrinks when it cools. Also, detail may be blurred. A mold from a hydrocal will be indistinguishable unless it is badly done. For a while there was an artist attached to a major institution who would sit and copy with his eyeball the major sculptures of the collection. He usually made the size markedly different, hoping that this would put the copy out of copyright. He’s had to stop.

Since that time, technology is so incredibly resourceful that machinery exists to make a perfect copy of a living human model by using lasers and computers. This factor has been around for a while, but not so technological. Rodin’s Age of Bronze was so beautifully accurate that the sculptor was accused of simply making a mold of his model. Also, SE Asian craftsmen have become very adept at eyeball copies, esp. garden sculptures which may be offered in fiberglas. The only REAL way to detect copies is through provenance, tracing the bronze from casting through all subsequent owners.

Much Western art around Montana has been subsidized by people who make enough money to have an excess to invest. Unfortunately, they rarely have the time and interest to develop their aesthetic or historical faculties, so their interest is not always a good indicator of long-term value. Most of them judge art by how much it reminds them of Charlie Russell’s work. If you are of that inclination, the auction in Great Falls will give you the opportunity to look at a major museum collection, well-presented in that the viewer can see the work arranged to show Charlie’s development as an artist.

If you are planning to bid for art, do your homework, don’t risk more than you can lose, and buy what you really love. Those have always been the rules for a prudent person. Aside from that, the festival atmosphere of the show is often its own reward!