REMINGTON VS. RUSSELL -- And Who's Monkman?

Charlie Russell wasn’t that fond of cavalry. His thing was Indians. After all, the family branch called the Bents (see the excellent biography called “Half-Breed”), famous for their trading fort rather than any war fort, included Indians. Charlie loved to dress up as an Indian, not a cavalryman, and it was not to mock Indians that he hung out with them as much as he could. Remington was the guy who loved cavalry, though horses groaned when they saw his size. (Anne Morand, the curator at the CM Russell Museum, made her reputation as an expert on Remington, esp. a brilliant show organizing together Remington’s night paintings.)

Genetics as a way of sorting makes less sense when dealing with so-called Western art than dividing them between Remington-types and Russell-types. Remington-types are from back east, more invested in class and education, and more aligned with the cavalry/Republican/manifest-destiny sympathies. Russell was more like James Willard Schultz, an Indian wannabe, and it is surprising that Charlie didn’t marry an Indian. He did romance a few. I would suggest that Nancy Russell was a Remington-type, if not a Mrs. Custer, who saw the route to a comfortable life as through sales in the east. Nancy was right, but she had to nearly lock Charlie up.

Remington had a shadow, an artist whose work was close enough to be easily mistaken for Remington’s, except that Charlie was pretty good friends with his own painter/shadow, O.C. Seltzer, and Remington was NOT happy about Schreyvogel. The back-east art experts have not much picked up on Schreyvogel, who was around this country in the early twentieth century, about the same time as Sharp and others. He stayed in Blackfoot, Montana, and left paintings behind him which were mostly burned when the former station agent, Mr. Carberry, had a house fire. It killed and consumed Mr. C. as well, but not his daughter who sometimes babysat Bob Scriver. It’s odd that nothing has been made of Schrevogel since Bob and I saw his studio contents at the Cowboy Hall of Fame in the Sixties, complete with an oil 8” X 10” view of the Rockies from Browning. Those were the Dean Krakel visionary years when the focus was not so much on profit and prestige.

The best overview of the Northern Plains Western artists is still Dale Burk’s “New Interpretations,” unless you’re looking for insight into politics, in which case Father Schoenberg’s account of the founding of MONAC (a museum dedicated to Indian art and attached somehow to Gonzaga University, but which collapsed after a couple of decades) is instructive. I will not summarize for fear of libel suits. Father Schoenberg is dead. Others involved are not. Dale Burk is still alive and publishing but doesn’t write about art anymore. www.stoneydale.com/

The “marker” artist for the northern plains is not a cowboy artist, but rather Carl Rungius, whose studio was in Banff. He painted scenery and animals, which have escaped politics until recently when environmental concerns heated up. Rungius is dead. But Russell Chatham is another good scenery “marker” artist (he’s alive, born on the same day as myself). Winold Reiss is another northern plains artist who has been somewhat lifted up but he’s a portrait artist, not an action painter. Cowboy art aficionadoes want action, someone being killed.

But they will NOT want Kent Monkman’s idea of action, or rather “post” action. QUOTE: "The Romantic tradition of westward expansion and colonial nation-building is radically revised by the artist Ken Monkman in his fantastic vision of idyllic free-for-all pioneer orgies, flamboyant performance personas and other high-spirited interventions into historical mythology." See www.kenmonkman.com A show of his work is just opening in Calgary. From his website: “Kent Monkman is an artist of Cree ancestry who works in a variety of media including painting, film/video, performance and installation. Monkman has exhibited widely within Canada, and is well represented in numerous private and public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. He is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, UK, and Bailey Fine Arts, Toronto.” The show is “ The Triumph of Mischief,” (solo), Glenbow Museum, Calgary, February 13 – April 25, 2010.
He’s painting Moran landscapes with NA warriors lolling along the edge of the lake among the bodies of their cavalry victims (US, not RCMP). The Indians are identified as “Achilles and Patroclus” who are figures at the heart of the Trojan War. Consult Brad Pitt rather than the condom company.



Take a look. No feathers. Not even a feather boa. (He’s gay.) His painting of a boudoir of a berdache features a French reclining couch, a bison hide rug, expensive luggage, and the kind of crystal chandelier once beloved of R. C. Gorman. (Do not ask anyone associated with either of the two Charlie Russell auctions about R. C. Gorman, though they are experts on the SW, where his studio was in Taos.)

Monkman’s version of the “End of the Trail,” centerpiece of the Cowboy Hall of Fame, is reinterpreted via the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, in which a skillful sculptor creates a statue of a young woman so beautiful that he falls in love with it. (“My Fair Lady.”) In sympathy for him, the gods bring her to life. In this case, the curly-headed sculptor is on tiptoe to kiss the Indian on his exhausted horse and the Indian has come to life.


The significance in terms of this blog post is that the show, both intellectual and socially avant garde, is in Calgary -- the northern plains. Great Falls has become an outpost of the SW. It was already a cavalry post, if you think about Malmstrom. Charlie would have laughed. Remington -- who once painted a cavalryman wearing a lady’s sunbonnet -- would have looked away, blushing.

Nancy Russell had no time for such nonsense. What counted to her was the money, honey, and if it hadn’t been for her, Charlie might have starved among his friends, who sometimes starved themselves. At least the friends he picked out himself because you can’t really count customers. The whole nation is Nancy Russell Country now. We’re all just buying and selling.

Monkman is an entirely new type, a metis in several ways, classically educated, as skillful as the new Chinese-taught painters, with the sharp satirical edge of the supposed outsider, who is now an insider. His warrior heroes wear no uniforms (they don’t wear much of anything); their allegiance is to their human relationships. Come to think about it, that’s sorta like Charlie.

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?

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!

SHADOW COYOTES OF THE COWBOY ART CARTEL

I’ve been known to refer to the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel, by which I mean the loose network of galleries, institutions, dealers, slick magazines, auctions and, of course, actual cowboy artists who turn out an avalanche of work, not always about cowboys but always in the West. Landscape art, Native American art, coastal art (both California and Pacific Northwest) tend to separate themselves out. But cowboy and Indian artifacts are often associated, if only because the artists themselves buy them to use in paintings. The other thing the artists buy, without talking about it, is old-time glass negatives of authentic scenes in the West taken by roving photographers with dark rooms in converted wagons. Often these early photos are copied exactly, but not attributed.

What makes dealers in Western art a “cartel”? This is from Wikipedia: A cartel is a formal (explicit) agreement among firms. Cartels usually occur in an oligopolistic industry, where there are a small number of sellers and usually involve homogeneous products. Cartel members may agree on such matters as price fixing, total industry output, market shares, allocation of customers, allocation of territories, bid rigging, establishment of common sales agencies, and the division of profits or combination of these. The aim of such collusion is to increase individual member's profits by reducing competition. Competition laws forbid cartels. Identifying and breaking up cartels is an important part of the competition policy in most countries, although proving the existence of a cartel is rarely easy, as firms are usually not so careless as to put agreements to collude on paper.

It seems easy to understand that even so innocent an organization as the Cowboy Artists of America is a kind of cartel -- an ARTel, if you like. People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776. By grouping themselves, and particularly by affiliating with the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, an affiliation that broke when Dean Krakel began to try to direct the group, the CAA became a strong advantage. Belonging to this group gave a cowboy artist assurance of first class exhibits, friendships with people who had been in the business a long time, access to the A-list of customers and a certain floor on their prices. The original purpose was friendship and support, but those original founders are all dead now.

Historical museums, which often include art and paraphenalia collections, also form a loose network of professionals who guide their boards to decisions about acquisition and de-accessing -- that is, the buying and selling of materials. Even art boards are notoriously naive and historical society boards are usually drawn from lay people with no formal background in history. Since professional directors “curate” each other’s collections and write books about them, the circle becomes rather tight, even tighter when they control key publishers. Most ordinary collectors are blithely unaware of such arrangements, though key people are part of the cartel. They cannot be named without tripping a lawsuit.

Outside the official or covert circle (since cartels are not legally any more respectable than predatory money-lending) is another shadow group, MUCH more secretive, not a cartel but in symbiosis with them. At one time they were “boot-leggers,” a term which refers to what is sold out of the “boot” or trunk of a car -- often liquor, but sometimes other illicit or semi-respectable materials: art that MIGHT be by Charlie Russell, Indian artifacts that were PROBABLY acquired by legal means, old-time paraphenalia sucked up from tiny municipal museums or private collections.

In the Sixties they stopped at the Scriver Studio all the time, hoping for a little action. Sometimes Bob traded something -- he was a fur buyer and the whole business of dickering over price appealed to him. He particularly liked to trade sculpture for paraphenalia. Ace Powell always had something to trade. A few of these roving dealers were relatively honest, many were occasionally honest, and some liked making a profit off someone unawares more than anything else. They were usually male, sometimes gay which gave them a motive for staying on the move, and shuttled far and wide around the West. Because there was no Internet yet, they were human eBays, driving on cheap gas and living in cheap hotels. The advantage was that people didn’t find out what they’d really acquired or lost until quite a while later when maybe a more convincing and certified expert stopped through.

In recent years a few of these people have been caught. John Flaherty, who sold Bob the gun collections and antique mountie uniform collection which were included in the so-called “million-dollar Scriver artifact collection”, blundered when he tried to sell Sun Dance Natoas headdresses to the grandsons of the proper owners, who recognized them, and he compounded the error because he had transported a boy across the Canadian border for purposes hard to explain. He was arrested on re-entry to the US and I’m told he died in jail.

This is not unlike the LA gallery that tried to sell a Seltzer painting as a Russell original and was tripped up when Seltzer’s grandson identified it properly, documenting with his archives. Brazenly, they tried to force the grandson, also an artist, to identify the painting incorrectly by suing him for the loss of value. The difference was exactly a zero added to the price -- from $10,000 to $100,000. The painting had been sold and resold several times between unknown parties, one of whom had neatly cut off the bottom of the painting containing Seltzer’s signature.

The most recent coyote is James Lyman Brubaker who has pled guilty in federal court. He is in jail until September 15, when he will be sentenced. His crime was quite literally “cutting edge.” He was razoring historical maps and illustrations out of valuable books in libraries and selling them on eBay, the modern way to bootleg. “BOOKlegging,” you might say. But he is well-known around the Blackfeet as someone to whom one can fence or sell dubiously acquired artifacts, some of which were found in his home in Great Falls.

There are more of these shadow coyotes out there, but they are aging. When the Russell Auction happens in March, another motel sponsors rooms where many of these folks quietly sell both what is spread out on desks and beds and what is perhaps still in a suitcase until the buyer is confirmed as discrete. Many collectors now find it easier to cruise auctions on the Internet through digital catalogues and make their bids via telephone or text messaging. Occasionally, I get requests from purchasers to visit a pre-auction art work and give an opinion about its authenticity, since the actual buyer can’t see the physical object well-enough in the catalogue. Not even the back of a painting, which is often revelatory.

It’s a frontier phenomenon. The West has always been pawnshop heaven, a part of the world where people spend big when they have money, and take a loss when they have to -- which happens rather often in the West. It’s part of the on-going gambling game, the big Stick Game or Hand Game that Native peoples have always played. (Poker was more popular in cowboy saloons.) But librarians don’t like it one bit and historians shouldn’t either.

TOURIST TRADE AMONG THE BLACKFEET

Every year the School of Journalism at the University of Montana in Missoula does a newspaper insert containing stories about Montana Indian reservations. In previous years I’ve responded with letters -- this is the first time I’ve been asked for ideas beforehand. My reporter is someone named Vicki.

Where to start? First, Bob Scriver never did "Indian art" and was not part of that world. His museum was about animals though he often made sculpture about Blackfeet as well as animals, family members, and commissioned portrait busts. He employed maybe four or five Blackfeet families over decades, but they didn't do "Indian art." They helped with the taxidermy and the sculpture, both, as well as building and maintaining the ranch over towards the Rockies. Another group was paid to pose for sculpture. Bob always meant his museum to complement the Museum of the Plains Indian, not to challenge it.

It may surprise some that the categories of "Indian art" and "Cowboy art" are quite distinct with customer bases that are often quite different. “Indian art” is often abstract and always based in the Southwest, maybe in Santa Fe where there is a school that gathers young people. “Cowboy art” as it exists in Montana is dominated by the example of Charlie Russell, who was always realistic and mostly self-daught.

BUT Bob was raised among the Blackfeet (born in the house where Leland Ground now runs EagleCalf Medical Supplies, next to Cuts Wood School.) Most of the people he knew were Blackfeet and he was always friends with Claude Schaffer, Tom and Alice Kehoe, John Ewers, and Raymon Gonyea, the anthropologists at the Museum of the Plains Indian. (Gonyea is Indian, but not Blackfeet. He's now at the Eiteljorg.)

In Browning the Museum of the Plains Indian was ALWAYS the main museum from the time it was formed in the 1940's. It was seriously damaged in the Big Flood of 1965 and so were many of the materials stored in the basement which was flooded. The damage has never really been addressed and this information is suppressed. The displays were never changed and were not originally meant to be: they were supposed to be a “library” for craft workers and one wing held the work room. That room was run for many years by Jackie Parsons, now the head of the Montana Arts Council. She is Blackfeet. It’s a bit of a mystery why that system came apart.

At the height of the “Red Power” movement when anthropologists were no longer directing operations, all the files in the archives that had to do with white people were taken to the dump. That included white artists like Russell. Not long ago a Ph.D. candidate went with her professor to visit the library but was prevented from entering because she was Blackfeet. The white professor was admitted. It was another of those Simple Simon reversals that reservations are prone to perform, doing the opposite of something that got them in trouble but without understanding why. The Museum is owned by the Craft Board, which is a subsidiary of the BIA. They are much less powerful now and largely unfunded. They would like to give the museum to the Tribe, which cannot afford to maintain it.

Another blunder was an “upgrading” of some of the exhibited materials, mainly the clothing. In doing cleaning, repair, and replacement, the value of antiquity was lost. But this sort of issue is not a matter for tourists to think about. They probably didn’t know the difference. The local people who did the work thought they looked better and, of course, they made a little money.

The feeling is that tourists might not be stopping in Browning because Bob is gone and his museum has been obliterated, now existing as the Blackfeet Heritage Center. I’m not sure how many of Bob’s art customers even came to Browning. Certainly, they were not tourists if they already knew about Bob’s work. “Tourists” were people who happened by and came in out of curiosity. Once they walked through the front door, we worked very hard to get them to buy an admission to the museum. Many turned on their heel and left. Few could have afforded a bronze if they had wanted to.

The suggestion was made that Bob’s bronze customers were famous people who came from Europe because they loved Indians, but I don’t think so. Scriver customers mostly belonged to the people served by the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel, a network of auctions, institutions, and galleries -- people who swarm the CM Russell Auction every March. Very few Indians attend or participate in that Auction. Many of Bob’s customers were Montana folks and almost all were white and American. America patriotism, especially for Republicans, links far more strongly to “cowboy art” than to Indians, unless the subject is the Prairie Clearances and the resulting genocide by cavalry, where some white people weirdly identify with the victims AND the soldiers.

Indians have made it a point to preserve their own identities and to protest against governmental domination. It is said that many Europeans, particularly Germans, come to Browning for the culture and art. The Germans and French are very aware of the NA American genocide and still insist on the idea of the Vanishing Indian, though they’ve stopped vanishing! Euros want relics, they want 19th century sights (tipi villages), and so on. Darrell Norman’s operation capitalizes on that. His wife is German. Adolph Hungry Wolf actually LIVES that.

Vicki says that a survey in 1995 on behalf of the Montana Arts Council verified over 300 traditional artists practicing beautiful work on the Blackfeet reservation. She asks, “Why isn't it a draw for economic development?” It’s very hard to interface between producers and consumers because the producers tend to be free-lance individuals working out of their homes, when they have time, an idea and the right materials. The consumers come through during a ten week period in summer and there is no real “marketplace.” Producers tend to need money as they go, so they don’t stockpile for the summer.

But it’s possible to follow the Pow-wow circuit, which is a bigger market and one that grows constantly as more NA people themselves become prosperous enough to be good customers. Artists who are good enough to go to the annual Santa Fe annual fair can really clean up.

Also, people really don’t know how to evaluate Indian work and tend to buy “trinkets,” that is, beaded barrettes and the like. If people do major, sophisticated, expensive artifacts, they get a lot more money, but have to find some other way to pay the bills in between. Those who appreciate high-end authentic artifact reproductions are not usually tourists but are more likely to work through brokers. Responding to the need for small popular items, a class of pan-tribal objects has developed, like dream-catchers or rearview mirror fetishes that include feathers and crystals. The big seller at this spring’s Indian Art Show, a separate and very nice art show at the Civic Center during the Russell Auction, was dream catchers with a wee basketball at the center!

Vicki bravely asks a painful question: “Are people afraid to stop on a reservation?” The answer is also painful: people are always afraid to stop. This was especially true when there was polio on the reservation in the Fifties (before I came) and after Wounded Knee II when the image of Indians changed drastically. I’m not afraid of street “winoes” because I know most of them (might’ve been their English teacher!) but tourists can’t tell. Anyway, they can see Glacier Park in the distance. The highway looks a little tough these days. No white money comes in from outside because there are no particular advantages for white merchants-- sometimes penalties. There is a LOT of risky traffic on the main streets, esp. in summer, because local people spend so much time cruising. Gas prices may fix that.

Indians want two mutually exclusive things at once: they want everyone to come around and love them and celebrate them, but they also want to appear potent and connected to the 19th century warrior culture. If you look at Robert Hall’s “Rez Dogs” video (created in Missoula as part of a project), you’ll see the full spectrum from the spitting contempt of the first wino to the expansive hospitality of the one at the end. (It might still be on YouTube.)

The focus gets lost. First it’s artifacts, then it’s modern art, then it’s dinosaurs, then it’s a casino, then it’s environmental studies. As leadership shifts around and the media change the subject, everyone hares off to the next idea instead of concentrating on one thing until it works. Successes like the Scriver Studio or Darrell Norman’s camp and gallery, or the Blackfeet Trading Post happen because of a near monomania over a period of years, maybe decades. Too many people want instant results. They have a deep conviction that there is a magic answer and a terrible vulnerability to the possibility that they just aren’t good enough. What wins is a lot of preparation, steady work at the project, and the ability to congratulate oneself over small but real successes.

THE CMR AD CLUB AUCTION: 2008

Like the proverbial elephant, the way a person understands the CMRussell Ad Club Auction depends on where you have ahold of the beast. So I’ll tell you about my day there from a few different points of view.

INDIANS

One of the unique aspects of this shindig is that the main auction has brought in what amounts to a captive audience of people who care about art depicting Western subject matter. Some of these very high-end people fly in on their own or specially chartered small jets, so many that it’s a problem up at the airport to find good places to put them. A new hangar is under construction. At the other end of the economic scale -- which is not the only scale one can use -- is the guy who drives down in his pickup from the rez with a lot of beadwork, carvings, dream-catchers with baseballs in the middle (a big hit this year), and modern ledger art that explores a genre invented by captives at Army forts who begged for paper to draw on and were given old bookkeeping ledgers.

I swung by the Indian Art show first because I wanted to give Carl Cree Medicine a copy of “Bronze Inside and Out,” since he’s in it. In fact, as he says, he’s at the beginning and the end. In Browning when you need more help, you don’t interview prospects or call the job bank -- you just add the brother of the guy already working there. They’re likely to have the same aptitudes and get along well together. (An old Indian chief advised that success in polygamy comes from marrying sisters for the same reasons.) If your business persists long enough, you begin to hire the sons of the men who work for you and the enterprise turns generational.

Carl came to work for Bob Scriver a year or so before I got to Browning, but he stayed for twenty-five years -- I only lasted a little over ten. David Cree Medicine, Carl’s son, became the foundry foreman when Bob went back to casting at the end of his career. Carl and I are about the same age, but he had a hard fight with the demon rum and other apocalyptic horsemen in his younger life, and now he’s on a walker and brought a “chauffeur.” Nevertheless, I gave him a book and got him to sign mine. We had a few minutes to remember old times.

This show is organized and mentored by Gladys Cantrell, who took care of Jim Welch Jr.’s father in his last years. No spring chicken herself, she never runs out of passion and the show reflects her constant urging towards more sophistication and skill. I’m of two minds about this keeping Indians apart in their own show: on the one hand, it means that they don’t have to compete with the top artists of the country, but on the other hand, if they DID compete, they would come off very well. The fact remains that the Russell Auction is a whitebread event except when Earl Old Person brings along the Blackfeet dancers to do their pow-wow stuff.

But then one must consider that the other satellite shows include an antiques and collectible gun show, sometimes a female artists’ show, “the friends of Jay Contway,” and other sub-categories and clubs that come and go. This year Pacific Galleries, which is a permanent antiques and art arcade in Great Falls, had a show, but I ran out of time and energy to get to it.

The BIG TENT

The Ad Club, which has a fine eye for the needed extra, runs a “trolley” among the various venues, so once a person finds a parking place, it’s possible to leave the vehicle all day. Security personnel on ATV’s patrol the “big” show parking which always fills blocks of lots and curbs. Two huge bronzes were being exhibited in the parking lot: a life-sized elk and a flight of huge ducks. It seemed to me that there were fewer exhibitor rooms -- the motel furniture is stored in big semi-trailers for the duration and the artists bring “liners” and screens for hanging their art work. The work was uniformly excellent. I would say there was a little less cowboy stuff and about the same amount of Indian images, but FAR more animals and scenery than ever. The animal bronzes were huge, best placed in public spaces or outside. It appears that even cowboy art is going green.

I don’t go to the big expensive events: brunches and dinners and cocktails, all with vigorous presentations by and for the Ad Club, wedged in among the actual auctions. A big crew of beefy guys do nothing but arrange and reconfigure the tables and chairs through the big indoor plaza of the motel where the swimming pool is. I associate this show with the smell of chlorine, which is NOT green.

This time I located Dave and Sasha Powell right away, so there was enough time among potential customers to visit for a bit. At last I got the real story of an event in the Sixties that has become famous over the years. We were in the front of the Scriver Museum during North American Indian Days, which is analgous to the Russell Auction in some ways, when someone came running in the front door puffing, “Jimmie Welch just punched out Richard Lancaster at the campgrounds!” Good news! We heartily disliked Lancaster, author of one of those tarted-up Indian books (“Piegan.”) But puzzling -- Jim Welch was not a likely street fighter. Years later I asked him whether it was true and he laughed, but said it wasn’t him. I didn’t press any further.

But now I find out that Jim was THERE on the campgrounds among a little group of loungers among the lodges, a favorite occupation of young Indian men since long before forts. Along came Lancaster with his usual self-important swagger. He was a big guy, very full of himself. The guys began to call out, “How ya’ doin’, Moochie? Where did you mooch your breakfast this morning?” His nickname on the rez was “Moochie” because that’s pretty much how he lived.

Lancaster took offense and came over to demand that they stop calling him that. Eddie Livermore stood up to him, Lancaster spat on Eddie, and it was Eddie who laid him out on the ground. Then the others, except Welch I’m sure, put the boots to him. Since he was so proud of the effect of his face on the ladies, they gave it special attention. It was a while before he’d be back in action. This guy left single mothers and traumatized daughters all over the West. We’re told that now he’s dead or as good as.

A little before lunchtime, in order to beat the rush, I slipped into the motel cafe for a sandwich and found Brian and Ann Elliott just finishing up. Brian and Ann own The Blackfeet Trading Post in Browning, which locals call “Faughts” because of the previous owner, and have been trying to order my book from Michigan State University, where they evidently don’t teach geography as the distribution people couldn’t find Montana. That’s been straightened out now. They were just headed over to the Indian show and then to the Browning basketball game in town.

REMINISCENCE

Right after lunch was the seminar about the forty years that the Ad Club has presented this event. Bob Morgan, Ginger Renner, Steve Seltzer and Van Kirke Nelson formed a panel and Norma Ashby moderated from a lecturn. The swapping of stories, often corrected or contradicted by the others, was augmented by two video compilations of events over the years. Bob Scriver appeared in quite a few, partly because back in the beginning he refused to give them art work to auction but offered to make a bison skull on a plaque for an annual award and in later years he sometimes presented it himself.

So here’s the straight story on how the auction got started. Norma Ashby had been to a ranch estate auction sale, because her husband worked for a bank. Sad as these dispersals can be, she had had a marvelous time looking at old things and schmoozing with the characters. So when the Ad Club’s annual money-raising event selling raffle tickets for a donated Cadillac was ruled illegal, she suggested an art auction instead. There were a lot of wrinkles and objections, but when Norma has an idea, she doesn’t let it go.

What I didn’t know at the time was the extent of the involvement of Van Kirke Nelson, a gynecologist/obstetrician in Kalispell who was also, to quote Norma “a wheeler/dealer and conniver.” He and his doctor buddies had a profound effect on cowboy art in Montana. Nelson, at the heart of what I call the Flathead Art Mafia, had a gallery (His family also owns Manitou.) and found that he could scoop up quite a lot of respectable art if he bought from hard-up artists, esp. someone like Ace Powell who had “shaken hands with the Devil alcohol and was sometimes pulled into hell.” But then how could he sell it? Auctions turned out to be the answer: locals understood them, they could provide drama, they weren’t just for snobs, and they only lasted a couple of days -- then most of the participants could get out of town. He had organized a few in Kalispell, and lead Father Schoenberg out into the swamp for the sake of the big Indian Arts center (MONAC) he was building next to Gonzaga University. It was Nelson’s gallery’s paintings and those of his buddies that were at the core of the first auction. The Russell Auction is juried, but many times the art sold there is recycled a few years later through the satellite auction sponsored by Coeur d’Alene and Manitou Galleries, with luck at much higher prices. To Nelson it was a poker game: Montana Hold'em!

But it was Norma that made the Russell Auction into a smash hit, a pattern now followed all over the country. Father Schoenberg was invested in keeping control. I just finished reading his analysis of what went wrong, eventually crashing both his auctions and his institution. (“Indians, Cowboys and Western Art: a History of MONAC”) He felt it was politics, since Red Power was at its peak then and the surrounding tribes ungratefully demanded that THEY have control. Norma had the Ad Club at her side and the CM Russell Museum already existed -- the Club was only contributing funds to it, plus the glamour, of course. But the Ad Club folks were shrewd, hip, plugged-in people, with no specific political ax to grind. Brilliant ideas came a’poppin’ and they knew how to make them work. Every year they rejiggered the whole thing, reconsidering every small practice so that flow and liveliness has been kept vital for forty years. They dressed up as Russell characters, they invented things like “quick draw,” or artists swapping each other’s paintings mid-creation and finishing them, and once Arlene Hooker Fay created a “paint by numbers” portrait of an Indian cherub which Norma filled in while everyone watched.

One of the results that I doubt anyone really anticipated was that for some high-income customers, who at first thought that traveling to Great Falls, Montana, in the middle of March was an insane idea, gradually became emotionally invested in Russell and the other art work to the point that Ginger Renner, a tough gallery owner and wife of the foremost CMR art expert (Fred Renner, whose profession was NOT art and who courted Ginger at the Auction), said with wet eyes, “This is a beloved community and a family. I have never felt so loved and safe in my life as I do here.” Plainly this was true for others as well, especially Norma. It’s a white-haired bunch of folks, but they function very much as a once-a-year congregation in a near-religious sense. Now they tire easily, walk with canes and sometimes oxygen, wear hearing aids, but somehow manage to get to the auction. Events happen earlier in the evening to keep them from wearing out too soon. The glow from them spreads to people who are not part of their group.

Norma knows everyone and introduced many luminaries, asking them to stand. She included her daughter -- and me, to my surprise, whom she calls “Bob Scriver’s widow,” though there’s really no term for what I am really: “Bob Scriver’s third-wife of four, divorced thirty years ago, childless, nothing to do with the estate, the only survivor.” We only have circumlocutions, though such relationships become more common every day.

I sold a book to each of three of what I call “white hat cowboy artists,” guys who don’t participate in the seething mass of jostling, jealous, conniving, money-obsessed Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel bigshots. One went to Don Greytak’s wife for a gift to him. She says he’s so content with his life and what he has that it’s tough to buy him anything. He does graphite pencil drawings of real ranch and ag scenes, not excluding the tractors and thrashing machines. Gentle and accurate, they are much underestimated by the people going after technicolor special effects. (I’m a little surprised as how many of the cowboy artists these days formerly worked in Hollywood as background painters rather than the generation before them who got their training doing magazine illustration and advertising in New York City or Connecticut.)

Another book went to Joe and Margaret Halko. Joe is a sculptor who does mostly animals these days. He began as a taxidermist like Bob Scriver and they’ve always had respect for each other. Halko has probably exceeded Bob in his skill and the grace of his work. He hasn’t gotten so deeply into casting. They live in Choteau, not far from me.

The third went to Rex and Judy Rieke, my all-time favorite art couple since I first met Bob in 1961. Rex has a music connection with Bob and still plays with his son and their combo, but they also run a ranch over by Garrison where they raise threatened domestic animal breeds like Joseph’s sheep -- or is it Joseph’s goats? (The Joseph in the Bible, the one with the coat, got all the spotted ones, you’ll remember.) Rex paints in several different modes, but he brought to the show his landscapes which have a lot of Maynard Dixon influence. The young artist sharing his room, Higgins(?), was more modern, less “cowboy art,” but very skillful. His slices of watermelon and jagged abstract mountains are more like what most contemporary artists in Southwest Art magazine or on the Art and Perception blog are doing. [Rex says that Judy reads my blog every day and believes everything I say, so I promised Rex to mention that “Rex Rieke is a great guy!” It comes from the heart!]

These three sets of artists and non-artist but participating wives are all native Montana folks living quiet lives without any pretenses or feverish pursuits. If I had a windfall of money, it is their works I would buy. I passed through the rooms of the Black Hats, but was not tempted.

SATELLITE AUCTION

At a different, more low-rent, motel there is a small version of the big Heritage Inn auction. The sponsoring galleries (usually Coeur d'Alene and Manitou) shift around a bit, as do the dealers in the rooms which are not usually artists. These folks sell books, Indian regalia, some art, ephemera, jewelry, and other debris from the early days in the West. Many are single guys and I noticed this year that two had canine companions: one was an exceedingly clean and fluffy Australian shepherd who came to say hello and the other was an Italian greyhound, graceful and loyal. Neither of them has written a book, unlike the governor’s dog.

In an end room, quietly sitting among his things, was Adolph Hungry-Wolf. He is subdued. People have not realized what an amazing achievement his four archive books about the South Piegans really is. They haven’t grasped the lesson that the art purveyors have got hold of: the paintings that sold in the early days of the auction are now quadrupled and more in value. Books do the same. Bob’s book about his art collection, “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains,” originally sold for sixty dollars and now sells on the Internet for $800 -- IF you can find a copy. If a person bought these four books and salted them away, they would amount to an excellent investment. Part of the problem is that the Blackfeet Heritage Center had a gifted and well-connected Indian manager who had agreed to publicize and distribute the book in the US, but he left the position too soon. A repeating reservation problem. No solutions.

I did a bad thing. A woman and several kids came in and for some reason they kept asking me their questions instead of Adolph. I ought to have diverted them over to him, but I wanted to talk to him, so I gave the answers hoping they’d be quick. There was a photo on the wall of Adolph next to a real wolf that fascinated the little boy. “Is that a real wolf? Would he attack Adolph?” Etc. But then, I was asking MY questions when in walked a beautiful young Indian woman all in red and that was the end of his attention to me!

THE WAY HOME

By this time it was late afternoon and I left for home. Only two books unsold from this shipment. A year to the next CMR auction and not all of that “beloved community” will make it back. Norma Ashby and Bob Morgan, who has also been a state-wide force for good since the very early days and who is the sparkplug for the Western Art Rendezvous in Helena (an August show which happens as much “en plein air” as indoors), have written a book about all this which will be out in August. That ought to be well worth buying and reading! This has been a significant era in Montana, quite apart from the main engine of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel in the SW.

I often use the drive back as a kind of metaphor. This time the sky was full of moving March clouds that appeared to be battles at sea, erupting geysers, prairie fires, hurricanes, and dragging gray gauzes of rain streaks. No wind. When I got home, to unwind enough to sleep, I watched “3:10 to Yuma,” in which the oddly noble anti-hero (Russell Crowe) is an artist who draws birds. He’s not quite ready for the Auction yet.

BET ON THE BLACKFEET GRANDMA

Wilfred P Schoenberg, S.J., never got no respect though he was a Jesuit which showed he was not stupid and was part of a long tradition of dealing with Native Americans. However, he was no match for a determined Blackfeet woman, Mae Williamson (Many Victories, a name she bestowed on Barbara Stanwyck when the latter was on the rez filming “Cattle Queen of Montana.”) Here’s a story that is NOT in Schoenberg’s book, “Indians, Cowboys and Western Art: A History of MONAC.” (Museum of Native American Culture)

Schoenberg had a vision for a museum next to Gonzaga University and covered the country begging and leveraging donations, either of objects themselves or for donors, subsidizers, benefactors, etc. He heard that Mae Williamson had an exquisite elk-tooth-decorated traditional dress. When he came to Browning, Montana, in search of it, he stopped at the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife where he saw a sculpture called “Transition,” which depicted Mae -- who was an official interpreter as well as being the first female member of the Blackfeet Tribal Council back in the Thirties -- standing in the middle with one hand on Chewing Black Bone, ancient blind warrior, and the other on a school boy. It’s a very fine piece and Schoenberg felt he just had to have it. He wanted a bronze, $3500, and soon realized that Bob Scriver had NO intention whatsoever of giving a casting to any itinerant priest intent on creating a competing museum, though it would be in Spokane. But at Mae’s house he saw a casting of “Transition” and expressed desperate interest in both that and the dress. She put him off. He went home to search for money.

In those days Bob always gave his models a hydrocal casting of the piece for which they posed. Hydrocal ™ is a very hard form of plaster which sets up to be something like china, but is never fired in an oven. It is susceptible to shattering and chipping, but if that doesn’t happen, hydrocal should last indefinitely: forever. They were finished to look like bronzes and sold for 10% of the price of a bronze: $350. This was how Bob got started before he could afford to cast bronzes. Local people and George Montgomery bought hydrocal castings made by Bob himself.

At this point Mae brought into the shop her casting of “Transition,” complaining that it had a few unsightly chips in it where the white hydrocal showed through and would Bob fix those places? It only took a few moments to repair the damage and Mae took her casting home. When Schoenberg showed up again, hoping for the best, Mae sold him her hydrocal for $2000, which the Father thought was a wonderful bargain. Until he got it back to Spokane, went to unload it from the car and dropped it. Then he was probably more shattered than the sculpture, esp. since he had twisted the arm of some donor for the $2,000 who was shortly coming to view it.

The chances of getting the money back from Mae were nil. In the first place she was in residence on the reservation and had put her land and house back into trust with the US Government. In the second place, he had never asked what the sculpture was made of though he should have realized it if he’d had any background in art. In the third place she’d already spent the money on a splendid coffin for her newly deceased husband -- it had a tooled leather cover lining that said “Empty Saddles.”

At an early point in her life Mae had been married to a white lawyer and ran rather a splendid household by local standards. (She was Gary Schildt’s grandmother and had a hand in raising him.) When Bob and I married, her gifts to us included a purple Hudson’s Bay blanket created to honor Queen Elizabeth II at the time of her coronation. It’s in the artifact book, “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains,” so it ought to be in the collection of the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton now.

I have no idea where the elktooth gown went. Schoenberg managed to ace out the Buffalo Bill Historical Society for the entire Sherburne Collection of artifacts -- a far more splendid, complete and historic collection than the Scriver Collection that raised such a furor. It was transferred to MONAC with no publicity at all, despite Eula Sherburne’s daughter Faith objecting even as she wrote an expensive insurance policy for the transfer, which Father S. resented. Not the insurance, the cost. Eula was the wife of J.L. Sherburne, the second generation trader who had a hand in almost everything financial around the reservation, quite unlike his father, J.H. Sherburne who was the original owner of the collection.

When MONAC went belly up, the collection, along with everything else, went to Cheney-Cowles, a second Spokane museum, and from there it has wandered in de-accessioned bits throughout the world. A Blackfeet man who tried to trace as much as he could said he located one piece in a collection in Chile. The inventory listed it as “a duplicate.” What Father Schoenberg achieved, in essence, was to create a depot for fine things where wheeler-dealers could find them. He is deceased. I hope Saint Peter has him by the nape of the neck and is forcing him to look.

Father S. reports that his health was bad his whole life -- terrible headaches coming from a drive to overachieve, weak lungs, etc. -- and the book mixes accounts of terrible bouts of vomiting with marathon narrow escapes in millenial storms driven through in faulty old cars -- regular Oregon Trail stuff, easily rivaling the exploits of Father DeSmet if not his achievement. There is constant noting of his poverty, the lack of heat where he worked, the various injustices and misunderstandings imposed by his superiors. He was evidently a veritable Rodney Dangerfield of Jesuits.

But oddly, the foreword, written by Van Kirke Nelson and Paul Masa, appeals to a quote in a letter from Charlie Russell to the Methodist Brother Van, who didn’t even have a second-hand car but walked everywhere. “Saints and Sinners were gathered there that night.” I didn’t identify any known saints. Plenty of sinners. These years were the beginnings of the Flathead Valley Art Mafia, a subsidiary of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. A little cadre of physician opportunists stripped several artists. Tom Sander paid the highest price: his wife, his house and his son, now attached to Dr. Vranish.

The trouble with Father Schoenberg, and many another, was that he knew nothing about art except what he was told by wheeler-dealers, whom he believed because they flattered him. Fortunes were made, but not by MONAC.

CATALOGUE RAISONNE SYMPOSIUM, Oct 20, 2007

This event was organized to celebrate the publication of a complete list of the work of C.M. Russell in two modes: one a very expensive book (for sale on the spot, which was the CMR Museum in Great Falls) and the other a website which will continue to be updated, since there are over a thousand CMR paintings known and probably more unknown. (Dick Flood combed the territory in the middle of the last century, always hopeful of finding an original in some attic or chicken coop. Or something that LOOKED like a Russell. Someone remarked in a loud voice, “They say that Dick Flood could sign Russell’s signature better than Russell himself.” Heresy!) A humonguous amount of information and disinformation to sort out.

Much of the value of art depends upon “provenance” -- an account of where the object has been from the time it was created -- and that information along with size, subject, media, and other remarks are included in a “Catalogue Raisonne.” (I’m creating a primitive version of one for Bob Scriver’s work in a blog elsewhere.) When one buys the book, one also gets a password that allows access to the website which is the truly useful acquisition for research. It’s just that you can’t put a website on your coffee table. It looked as though sales were brisk.

The concern I discussed the day before in Helena with a friend popped up again at this meeting when I was visiting beforehand. A famous prize-winning book was mentioned by a fan of the Blackfeet who remarked that it would be interesting to find the original journals from which this book was supposed to be derived. As it happens, this author was a predator and a faker. I told the fan that there probably were NO journals. The fan said, “Gee, I thought it must be okay, since it fitted with Ewers.” Of course it did. He was QUOTING Ewers. But faking journals isn’t a particular crime. Victimizing an old man and his family certainly is.

But -- the agenda on this day was CMRussell and, remarkably, the major Russell scholars were all on hand. Anne Morand is the Chief Executive Officer of the CMR Museum. B. Byron Price is the Director of the CMR Center for the Study of Western Art in Oklahoma City and I think I heard someone say he is now the head of the University of Oklahoma Press. Anne’s presentation was on other artists of the time who had influenced Charlie’s painting and, remarkably, projected side-by-side versions of very similar compositions and subject matter. Of course, there are not a lot of ways to depict riding up alongside a buff and shooting an arrow into it. On the other hand, there was a derived version of Hiawatha that mostly just converted him from a Woodland Indian to a Plains Indian. B. Byron Price simply explained how to operate the website.

Peter H. Hassrick is the Director of the Institute of Western American Art at the Denver Art Museum and here’s where my inner pessimist began to take it on the chin. Instead of talking about how much money the art was worth and who collected it, he talked about the ACTUAL WORK and how it developed over the years. Clearly Charlie was going along doing his own thing with happiness and success until he and Nancy went to New York City about the turn of the century. Quality makes a huge jump at that point, which plainly came from visiting galleries and interacting with other artists. Since he often returned to the same subjects, it’s easy to find comparisons of, say, a bronc invading the cook’s campfire from both early and later periods. Anyone could see the difference in color, design, paint-handling and so on.

Brian Dippie is a professor of history at the University of Victoria in B.C., Canada, and a native of Edmonton. As such, he kindly wrote the foreword for my book about Bob Scriver which just went to the printer in Calgary. Since meeting Brian in Helena at a previous History Conference, I’ve always thought he was such a joyfully erudite person that I would love to run off with him. But now that I’ve met his wife, I think I would do just as well to run off with HER! I doubt anyone could separate them nor should they. But I see now that the reason Brian could see something in my book that others could not was simply that he is married to that lively woman and therefore able to accept women in general. Brian’s presentation wittily argued that Charlie, who rode up into Alberta as though no border existed and had some of his best early experiences there, was actually a Canadian. He cinched his argument with the address on a letter from the Prince of Wales, whom Charlie met up there. “Great Falls, CANADA.”

Raphael James Cristy, CMR impersonator, walked us through some of Charlie’s writing. Dyslexic and dysgraphic, something in Charlie’s brain wiring prevented proper spelling or even decent hand-writing, but in terms of narrative and image, he was unbeatable, exactly suited to his time and place. Cristy is able to make this immediately vivid.

Rick Stewart, Curator of Western Painting and Sculpture at the Amon Carter Museum, addressed Charlie’s watercolors and proposed that the only American artist to touch him was Winslow Homer -- that in fact the two men separately took a similar trail through the flood of popular information about water color painting that washed through the country around the turn of the century. Stewart was able to specifically name the pigments used, how that shifted when the just-founded chemical industries provided new paints, what Charlie’s strategy was (working from dark to light or light to dark, from figure to background or background to figure, treating foreground loosely or with detail, achieving transparency in shadows, how much to underdraw and why to use graphite rather than charcoal) -- it was a revelation. He talked about the size of brush Charlie used (often sable #2 or 7) and how he sometimes modified them by pulling out or trimming hairs. He talked about working flat on the ground or floor and how naturally that came to Russell who began drawing and painting “en plein air” -- as is fashionable now -- because he was camping and had no table! He showed how the painting would have been turned to make the paint run in long washes for a sky and pointed out in one photo that Charlie’s fingertip was dirty from pushing puddles of pigment around. Stewart is an artist himself and by the time he got through, one began to think that art must be the most rewarding sort of enterprise there is!

I drove home seeing Charlie Russell colors on all sides: the purply “gentle” gray from cobalt blue, the arsenic green to gold ochres and Naples Yellow of ground, the transparent blues from ultramarine, the warm grays from rose madder as sunset approached. The buttes and coulees are still there. One’s vision is renewed by Charles M. Russell, which is the whole point in the end.