Today I received word from Iola Breneman that Rex, her beloved husband, has passed away after a long struggle with the consequences of strokes. For those who didn’t know Rex, I’ll say that I’m typing out the obituary here because he represents a “type” of Montanan created by the sequence of Depression and War and also that he was the kind of person who loved “cowboy art” for its own sake.
Rex Eugene Breneman, long-time resident of Coram, passed away on March 14, 2008, at the Brendan House in Kalispell.
Rex was born in Salina, Kansas, on August 21, 1918, to Arthur and Pearl (Richards) Breneman. The youngest of three children, he grew up in the Sand Hills of Nebraska and graduated from the eighth grade. During the Depression, he left home seeking work and opportunity. Rex laughed and claimed he had ridden 40,000 miles on freight trains before he was 21.
In April of 1941 Rex enlisted in the US Army. He first served in Quartermasters as a cook and baker. At the start of WWII he desired to join the US Army Air Corps and applied to enter as a cadet. Having only an eight grade education, Rex was told he could not pass the cadet school entry test. This challenged him to read the dictionary, encyclopedia, almanac, and other books. Rex succeeded in entering the cadet school. Upon graduation he was awarded the rank of first lieutenant, navigator and bombardier. He flew more than 70 missions in the South Pacific and Korea. During this time he was awarded 13 medals, some with oak leaf clusters, and the Distinguished Flying Cross. He never elaborated on any of them.
In October of 1941 he married Rosemary Hanley and they had a daughter, Rexine Rose. This war-time marriage ended in divorce.
Following WWII, Rex settled in the Centennial Valley of Monida, MT., where he worked and trapped at the Sam and Lyz Breneman ranch. This was a special time for him.
During the construction of the Hungry Horse Dam, he moved to Coram and built a service station, “Breneman’s Union,” later called “Coram Truck Stop.” This work was interrupted when, as a reserve officer, Rex was called back to military service for the Korean conflict. After the Korean War, Rex came back to Coram to run his truck stop.
He met and courted Iola Soderstrom of Kalispell. Rex built a home near Coram for Iola and her daughter, Rhonda. Rex and Iola were married on Jan. 23, 1960, in Libby. They worked side-by-side at the Coram station -- catering to loggers, truckers and the local community. In 1968, they sold the business to the Union Oil distributors.
Rex became friends with two artists, Ace Powell and Bob Scriver, which led to his love for western art and western Americana. He enjoyed the challenges of swapping and trading art and land. He was known for his knowledge of art and history and his character of honesty, generosity, dependability and independence. He authored the book, “Ace Powell in Bronze.”
With his passing, Rex took with him a huge library of knowledge. Life for him was a continual education. From the challenge of self-education, enabling him to enter and complete the Army Air Corps Cadet school, Rex realized the rewards of reading. He did not read fiction but was an avid reader of nonfiction and particularly history until his death. He also loved to fly fish, picnic and bird hunt. Rex was always ready for a cribbage game and his skill was a challenge to all opponents.
Our lives are made up of bits and pieces of those around us. Rex was a unique person and many hold special memories of him. He never shied away from hard work and strong opinions. One thing for sure, you could always depend on him to be “Rex.”
Rex was preceded in death by his parents; his brother, Louis Breneman; his brother-in-law Art Johnson; his mother-in-law, Ruth Guinard, and his granddaughter, LeAnna Bunch.
Rex is survived by his beloved wife, partner and constant companion, Iola, of Coram; two daughters, Rexine Howell and husband Bill of Texas and Rhonda Bell and husband John of Oregon; sister Nedra Johnson and family in Nebraska; sister-in-law Pauline Breneman and family in Kansas; five grandchildren, Lawrence Howell, BeLinda Shirley; KaSandra Verett and husband Don of Texas; Jacob Bell and wife Jaime of Colorado; Clinton Bell and wife Christina of Washington; six great-grandchildren: Julia and Jessica Burich; Byron and Jacob Verett; and Zane and Henry Shirley of Texas. He is also survived by sister-in-law Edna Carter, husband Ron and niece Ruth Skaggs of Kalispell; nephew Don Tomfohr, wife Jan and their families in Oregon; and nephew Cory Baker.
There will be no services at this time. The family will gather this summer.
I’m here to say that Rex really was as he is described in the obit above. The Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel auctions everywhere are full of “Rex’s Bull” and “Iola’s gopher,” among the bronzes commissioned by them from Bob Scriver. They also bought many of the big rodeo pieces and bequeathed them to the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame. Bobscriver.com & rockymountainbronze.com and http://www.jnbvideo.com/rmb/index.html will lead you to the Breneman’s nephew’s websites about the Brenemans and their collections.
I sent my biography of Bob Scriver (“Bronze Inside & Out”) to Rex and Iola just in time for him to read it before he died. He said I did a good job and one that needed to be done. From Rex that’s high praise. He was quite a guy.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
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.
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.
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.
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.
HORSEMEN, HIGH UP
HORSEMEN, HIGH UP
I have no real academic art training, so in this field I’d have to be classified as an autodidact or amateur -- maybe both. If, as my dictionary suggests, being an aficionado means being an “avid follower or fan, as of a sport or activity, a devotee,” then I’m not an aficionado though many Scriver customers were exactly that. They didn’t look at the actual work so much as they looked at the other collectors and the value of what they collected. Usually aficionados stick to one genre or category -- in this case it was Western art.
For a long time Western art was below the radar, not quite “real” art -- for kids and the naive. This seems to be because from the time the Parisian “Roman block casting” (think Rodin) replaced marble as the monumental media of choice, Paris naturally was the center of that particular medium. The “Beau Arts” school of painting and sculpture was the pinnacle of sophistication and desirability.
Then it was displaced when war brought so many sophisticated and experimenting “modern” artists to New York City where Abstract Expressionism and other vigorous but less accessible schools of work came to dominate the media. “Real” art was Picasso and Pollock.
The Sculpture Review, which is published by the National Sculpture Society, posted itself on the boundary to defend representational art throughout human history and they’ve done an exemplary job. Bob Scriver was burstingly proud of being a member of the Society. It’s the one magazine I make sure to subscribe to when I’m out of reach of libraries that carry it. Here’s the newest issue.
Each issue has a theme, which for this one is restoration, cleaning, reconstruction and even copying in the interest of recapturing the original. The story keys off the Elgin Marbles, the friezes around the eaves of the Parthenon, shattered but recovered and sort of jigsawed back together in a new museum next to the actual Parthenon in a frame that preserves the gaps as well as the fragments. In another famous example, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the statue was in 118 pieces which were re-situated where they ought to be and then a replica was made that restored the missing parts according to the best guesses. Only one wing survived, so it was copied in obverse for the second wing. The head was lost.
The latest trick in bronze cleaning and restoration, just in time to save some of the Beau Arts bronze monuments -- so familiar and dear to so many of us -- is lasers to remove corrosion. I argue that these are the true precursors of “Western” art, celebrating brave men and valiant horses in action. It’s the context that I tried to recapture for Bob Scriver’s work, though his subject matter was usually local to Blackfeet country.
This is a detail from “The Virginia State Memorial” by Frederick William Sievers (1872-1966) . It’s a figure from action clusters at the bottom of the forty foot column that supports a serene officer on his horse. The monument is at Gettysburg. Sievers was educated at the Academie Julian in Paris, part of the Beaux Arts context. What I love about Sculpture Review is that you’re never in doubt about who the sculptor was, so you can do a bit of research. I’d love to find out who his model was. It seems to be the same man most of the time and he has a truly noble face.
What I love most about Sievers’ work is a quality hard to describe: just enough evidence of the clay work -- esp. that brass serrated loop tool or the curled steel hook in several sizes that pares away clay, leaving subtle tooth lines that somehow make the sculpture realer than real -- something like fine brushwork in a painting by Sargent. With Rodin it was his finger marks in long lines clear enough to imagine the sculptor’s strong hands. For me, one of the best parts of fine sculpture is the strong kinesthetic empathy I can feel, as though I had my hands on the clay myself. Look at the clothing and hair, how real they are and yet “artistic.” No need to make a choice between the two qualities.
But I started out to talk about this issue of Sculpture Review. I love it in part because I’m a snob and like knowing about these fine public bronzes that no one “collects.” Of course, all snobs love anything Parisian and I value the French influence on America, which is why I love Jefferson (among other reasons).
I also like this issue because I understand the “hands on” things about bronze like patining or molding or, indeed, restoration. Modern Art Foundry in New York City, which was Bob’s main foundry other than his own, was one of the leaders in alerting the public to the danger threatening these hundred year and two hundred year old works, esp. in these times of acid rain.
In short, my snob’s refuge from the aficionado-overrun Western art world has always been the National Sculpture Society and Sculpture Review. Therefore it was a shock to open this issue and find a Vogue or Vanity Fair-style whole-page snaphot layout featuring a bunch of aficionados and collectors Western Art-style! An invasion from the pop mags called “Southwest Art” and “Art of the West”!!?? I mean, they’re fine and I read them, but when I was with Bob, cowboy artists were sort of an oxymoron. Now they’ve evidently not just joined the mainstream but have become the cash cows, as exemplified by a Herb Mignery corny cartoon joke about where the grass is greener. Full-page, no less.
What does it mean? There’s not much text. Most of the photos include sculptors. In fact, as I look closer I see that there are few aficionados and collectors after all, so this is still a gathering of true artists -- it just happens to be in Loveland, Colorado, with a cowboy band. Nothing wrong with that! They all seem to be having a good time.
I suppose that when it comes to sculptors, as with their works, what doesn’t stay open to new trends will stagnate and die, but what lets go of the old raison d’etre will become something else, which is also an obliteration. This new phenomenon seems to be an energizing force, so how can I object? After all, they bring their own horses.
I have no real academic art training, so in this field I’d have to be classified as an autodidact or amateur -- maybe both. If, as my dictionary suggests, being an aficionado means being an “avid follower or fan, as of a sport or activity, a devotee,” then I’m not an aficionado though many Scriver customers were exactly that. They didn’t look at the actual work so much as they looked at the other collectors and the value of what they collected. Usually aficionados stick to one genre or category -- in this case it was Western art.
For a long time Western art was below the radar, not quite “real” art -- for kids and the naive. This seems to be because from the time the Parisian “Roman block casting” (think Rodin) replaced marble as the monumental media of choice, Paris naturally was the center of that particular medium. The “Beau Arts” school of painting and sculpture was the pinnacle of sophistication and desirability.
Then it was displaced when war brought so many sophisticated and experimenting “modern” artists to New York City where Abstract Expressionism and other vigorous but less accessible schools of work came to dominate the media. “Real” art was Picasso and Pollock.
The Sculpture Review, which is published by the National Sculpture Society, posted itself on the boundary to defend representational art throughout human history and they’ve done an exemplary job. Bob Scriver was burstingly proud of being a member of the Society. It’s the one magazine I make sure to subscribe to when I’m out of reach of libraries that carry it. Here’s the newest issue.
Each issue has a theme, which for this one is restoration, cleaning, reconstruction and even copying in the interest of recapturing the original. The story keys off the Elgin Marbles, the friezes around the eaves of the Parthenon, shattered but recovered and sort of jigsawed back together in a new museum next to the actual Parthenon in a frame that preserves the gaps as well as the fragments. In another famous example, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the statue was in 118 pieces which were re-situated where they ought to be and then a replica was made that restored the missing parts according to the best guesses. Only one wing survived, so it was copied in obverse for the second wing. The head was lost.
The latest trick in bronze cleaning and restoration, just in time to save some of the Beau Arts bronze monuments -- so familiar and dear to so many of us -- is lasers to remove corrosion. I argue that these are the true precursors of “Western” art, celebrating brave men and valiant horses in action. It’s the context that I tried to recapture for Bob Scriver’s work, though his subject matter was usually local to Blackfeet country.
This is a detail from “The Virginia State Memorial” by Frederick William Sievers (1872-1966) . It’s a figure from action clusters at the bottom of the forty foot column that supports a serene officer on his horse. The monument is at Gettysburg. Sievers was educated at the Academie Julian in Paris, part of the Beaux Arts context. What I love about Sculpture Review is that you’re never in doubt about who the sculptor was, so you can do a bit of research. I’d love to find out who his model was. It seems to be the same man most of the time and he has a truly noble face.
What I love most about Sievers’ work is a quality hard to describe: just enough evidence of the clay work -- esp. that brass serrated loop tool or the curled steel hook in several sizes that pares away clay, leaving subtle tooth lines that somehow make the sculpture realer than real -- something like fine brushwork in a painting by Sargent. With Rodin it was his finger marks in long lines clear enough to imagine the sculptor’s strong hands. For me, one of the best parts of fine sculpture is the strong kinesthetic empathy I can feel, as though I had my hands on the clay myself. Look at the clothing and hair, how real they are and yet “artistic.” No need to make a choice between the two qualities.
But I started out to talk about this issue of Sculpture Review. I love it in part because I’m a snob and like knowing about these fine public bronzes that no one “collects.” Of course, all snobs love anything Parisian and I value the French influence on America, which is why I love Jefferson (among other reasons).
I also like this issue because I understand the “hands on” things about bronze like patining or molding or, indeed, restoration. Modern Art Foundry in New York City, which was Bob’s main foundry other than his own, was one of the leaders in alerting the public to the danger threatening these hundred year and two hundred year old works, esp. in these times of acid rain.
In short, my snob’s refuge from the aficionado-overrun Western art world has always been the National Sculpture Society and Sculpture Review. Therefore it was a shock to open this issue and find a Vogue or Vanity Fair-style whole-page snaphot layout featuring a bunch of aficionados and collectors Western Art-style! An invasion from the pop mags called “Southwest Art” and “Art of the West”!!?? I mean, they’re fine and I read them, but when I was with Bob, cowboy artists were sort of an oxymoron. Now they’ve evidently not just joined the mainstream but have become the cash cows, as exemplified by a Herb Mignery corny cartoon joke about where the grass is greener. Full-page, no less.
What does it mean? There’s not much text. Most of the photos include sculptors. In fact, as I look closer I see that there are few aficionados and collectors after all, so this is still a gathering of true artists -- it just happens to be in Loveland, Colorado, with a cowboy band. Nothing wrong with that! They all seem to be having a good time.
I suppose that when it comes to sculptors, as with their works, what doesn’t stay open to new trends will stagnate and die, but what lets go of the old raison d’etre will become something else, which is also an obliteration. This new phenomenon seems to be an energizing force, so how can I object? After all, they bring their own horses.
WHEELER-DEALERS
Friday, March 20, 2009
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!
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!
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
DIORAMA: Grizzly, Wolverine, Eagle
GRIZZLY BEAR
As I remember, this was the first of the diorama animals that Bob made. He had a real feel for the “real bears,” as the Blackfeet called them to distinguish them from black bears or “nothing bears.” In Bob’s youth he hunted grizzlies, but at the time I knew him he was fifty and only a meat hunter. No more trophies. Instead he “was” the bear and prowled around the living room on all fours, searching under sofa cushions, in between working on his figurine.
The griz is way up in the mountains, so far up that an eagle is flying past lower than this ridge, and digging up a marmot, who defiantly sticks his head out. A wolverine is over to the right. This may be another Les Peters background -- hard to tell from only a picture of the diorama. Bob tried to imitate Les’ style and colors, with about 80% success.
As I remember, this was the first of the diorama animals that Bob made. He had a real feel for the “real bears,” as the Blackfeet called them to distinguish them from black bears or “nothing bears.” In Bob’s youth he hunted grizzlies, but at the time I knew him he was fifty and only a meat hunter. No more trophies. Instead he “was” the bear and prowled around the living room on all fours, searching under sofa cushions, in between working on his figurine.
The griz is way up in the mountains, so far up that an eagle is flying past lower than this ridge, and digging up a marmot, who defiantly sticks his head out. A wolverine is over to the right. This may be another Les Peters background -- hard to tell from only a picture of the diorama. Bob tried to imitate Les’ style and colors, with about 80% success.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
FRANCIS PAUL MASA Obituary
FRANCIS PAUL MASA (From the Great Falls Tribune)
KALISPELL -- Korean War veteran Francis Paul Masa, 80, of Kalispell, known as “Paul Masa,” a Western art dealer, died of natural causes Friday at his home in Kalispell.
Francis Paul Masa passed away peacefully at his home on Friday, October 10, 2008, surrounded by his family. Paul was born April 22, 1928, in Baker, MT, the son of Frank and Elisabeth (Sonsalla) Masa. He has two younger brothers, John and Tom Masa. Paul grew up during the Great Depression on a family farm near Marmath, N.D. and attended local schools.
Paul said, “My dad was a hard worker. I learned to work. He gave me the best education I ever got, hard work.” In his pursuit of “chasing the dollar,” he worked various positions in his life. He was a determined, strong-willed, loving man. He was a generous benefactor to many local groups and charitable causes. Paul’s work ethic carried him through life until his final days.
As a young man, he worked at the family farm and ranch. He also worked for neighbors driving tractors. Finally, at age 19, he drove his first car. Paul then worked various jobs, including on the railroad, until he was drafted to the United States Army in 1950, from Marmarth, N.D. He served in the Korean War as a mortar gunner. While in Korea, he was awarded the Bronze Star medal for unhesitant devotion to duty, tireless efforts and aggressive initiative. He contributed immeasurably to the successful accomplishment of his unit’s missions and reflects great credit on himself and the United States infantry. Paul willingly worked excessively long and arduous hours without proper food or rest under enemy fire to lend support to the infantry units in the field and to help accomplish the many other missions.
Upon his discharge he worked jobs in farming and construction. He then went to work for Montana Dakota Utility as the plant manager, and worked an additional part-time job as a bartender in Baker. There he met his wfie, Doris, at a New Year’s Dance. Paul and Doris were married in Baker on December 13, 1958. Paul and Doris leased a bar in Baker for four years.
After vacationing in the Kalispell area, Paul and Doris decided to make Kalispell, MT., their home, purchasing the Log Cabin Bar. Paul began to sell art on the side. Paul and Doris ran a successful business for more than 19 years in Kalispell. Paul then pursued his side business as a Western art dealer, full time.
Paul and Doris bought, sold and traded art and bronzes from 1953 until his death. This was Paul’s business, but also his passion. He loved every minute of wheeling and dealing when selling art with his friends and colleagues. His upbringing and belief in work kept him an active businessman. He attended more than 40 auctions in Great Falls, MT. Paul was well-known and leaves many dear family, friends and business associates behind.
Paul received many awards. In 2004 he was the winner of the “Bob Scriver Bronze Award” for his outstanding contributions to the C.M. Russell Auction and the field of Western art. In 2007 he was awarded “The Mentor Award” recognizing him as one of the most knowledgeable and informed art dealers operating in the Western United States. In this capacity he has seen fit to share his art and business expertise with others in the field.
Paul and Doris enjoyed many fishing trips together as avid fishers, including trips to Alaska for salmon. Paul greatly enjoyed spending time with his family. He hosted an annual Fourth of July party at the lake and was the grillmaster, if you like a rare burger.
Paul is survived by his wife of 50 years, Doris Masa; his children, grandchildren, and two brothers.
Comment by me would be tasteless at this time, but I’ll point out that Bob Scriver had nothing to do with choosing the recipient of the Scriver Bronze Skull -- in fact, had been dead for five years at the time it was given to Masa by the Ad Club.
KALISPELL -- Korean War veteran Francis Paul Masa, 80, of Kalispell, known as “Paul Masa,” a Western art dealer, died of natural causes Friday at his home in Kalispell.
Francis Paul Masa passed away peacefully at his home on Friday, October 10, 2008, surrounded by his family. Paul was born April 22, 1928, in Baker, MT, the son of Frank and Elisabeth (Sonsalla) Masa. He has two younger brothers, John and Tom Masa. Paul grew up during the Great Depression on a family farm near Marmath, N.D. and attended local schools.
Paul said, “My dad was a hard worker. I learned to work. He gave me the best education I ever got, hard work.” In his pursuit of “chasing the dollar,” he worked various positions in his life. He was a determined, strong-willed, loving man. He was a generous benefactor to many local groups and charitable causes. Paul’s work ethic carried him through life until his final days.
As a young man, he worked at the family farm and ranch. He also worked for neighbors driving tractors. Finally, at age 19, he drove his first car. Paul then worked various jobs, including on the railroad, until he was drafted to the United States Army in 1950, from Marmarth, N.D. He served in the Korean War as a mortar gunner. While in Korea, he was awarded the Bronze Star medal for unhesitant devotion to duty, tireless efforts and aggressive initiative. He contributed immeasurably to the successful accomplishment of his unit’s missions and reflects great credit on himself and the United States infantry. Paul willingly worked excessively long and arduous hours without proper food or rest under enemy fire to lend support to the infantry units in the field and to help accomplish the many other missions.
Upon his discharge he worked jobs in farming and construction. He then went to work for Montana Dakota Utility as the plant manager, and worked an additional part-time job as a bartender in Baker. There he met his wfie, Doris, at a New Year’s Dance. Paul and Doris were married in Baker on December 13, 1958. Paul and Doris leased a bar in Baker for four years.
After vacationing in the Kalispell area, Paul and Doris decided to make Kalispell, MT., their home, purchasing the Log Cabin Bar. Paul began to sell art on the side. Paul and Doris ran a successful business for more than 19 years in Kalispell. Paul then pursued his side business as a Western art dealer, full time.
Paul and Doris bought, sold and traded art and bronzes from 1953 until his death. This was Paul’s business, but also his passion. He loved every minute of wheeling and dealing when selling art with his friends and colleagues. His upbringing and belief in work kept him an active businessman. He attended more than 40 auctions in Great Falls, MT. Paul was well-known and leaves many dear family, friends and business associates behind.
Paul received many awards. In 2004 he was the winner of the “Bob Scriver Bronze Award” for his outstanding contributions to the C.M. Russell Auction and the field of Western art. In 2007 he was awarded “The Mentor Award” recognizing him as one of the most knowledgeable and informed art dealers operating in the Western United States. In this capacity he has seen fit to share his art and business expertise with others in the field.
Paul and Doris enjoyed many fishing trips together as avid fishers, including trips to Alaska for salmon. Paul greatly enjoyed spending time with his family. He hosted an annual Fourth of July party at the lake and was the grillmaster, if you like a rare burger.
Paul is survived by his wife of 50 years, Doris Masa; his children, grandchildren, and two brothers.
Comment by me would be tasteless at this time, but I’ll point out that Bob Scriver had nothing to do with choosing the recipient of the Scriver Bronze Skull -- in fact, had been dead for five years at the time it was given to Masa by the Ad Club.
Friday, October 10, 2008
STUDY FOR THE HEAD OF CHRIST by BOB SCRIVER
This bust was made as a study for the small corpus Bob was commissioned to make a year before his daughter died, 1965, and which became connected with that loss.
The model is Maurice Chaillot, brother to Bob’s second wife, Jeanette Caouette whom he married in Edmonton just at the end of WWII. Maurice was much younger, a “surprise” baby late in his mother’s life. Highly educated at a Jesuit boarding school, he was a professor of French for many years and is now retired to a small Canadian paradise with an historic log cabin. He is himself a fine painter and photographer.
This portrait is “romantic” in style. Marks of Bob’s fingers are dominant rather than tool marks or the absence of any marks. This is almost impressionistic. It is classical in the sense that most classical busts have no draperies or embellishments, and yet it is romantic in its asymmetry and emotion. Mrs. John Walters, who commissioned the small corpus but not the bust, specifically wanted Jesus to be still alive, looking to the heavens and crying out, “Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me.”
Bob also made a bust of Maurice in a more formal style, portraying him as himself, still without collar or drapery but in a more detailed and serene sort of way. Maurice was given a copy of this bust, but kept in the custody of his sister, it was sold by mistake while she was in the hospital. Someone in the LA area owns a remarkable portrait by Bob Scriver. It was unfinished: white plaster.
So far as I knew, few of either busts were ever sold to customers and only one of each was cast in bronze. But then Carroll College disclosed that they had a casting of the rough study. The Montana Historical Society ought to have both castings.
"PAYWINDOW" by BOB SCRIVER
This Bob Scriver bronze is part of his rodeo series which consists of one dynamic and romantically executed portrait of each event, plus a more classically (detailed) portrait of the animal in question, but at rest -- simply standing. The animals are the key.
in this piece the composition and challenges of bronze-casting are relevant. This “design” is an explosion, which Scriver often uses in action pieces -- diagonal arcs fly out from a center. The technical challenge is the small base of metal (one horse leg) holding up a large body, meaning the body must be hollow and thin, while the leg itself is solid and of high-quality bronze with no honeycombing or bubbles. This can be tested by sharply rapping and listening for the sound.
“Paywindow” -- which means a bucking horse so vigorous that the rider is bound to score high if he can stay on -- portrays bareback riding, which is done on a horse with no saddle but a cinch around its flanks to make it buck. The cinch is padded with sheepskin but nevertheless is a matter of worry to humane society members. Other than that, the horse wears a halter -- no bit -- and the rider has only a handhold to keep him on -- no saddle. The two parallel “rough-stock” events are saddle bronc riding, and bull-riding where the bull has the added aggravation of clanking cowbells hung on the cinch around its flanks. Aside from being huge and snaky, bulls are considered harder and more dangerous to ride because they will attack the rider once he’s on the ground. Horses occasionally do the same thing, with front feet since they have no horns. On the other hand, many bulls and horses become accustomed to “show biz” and are quite mellow when not in the arena.
This particular photograph is excellent and shows the varied green patina that Scriver worked hard to achieve, using as a model a Barye casting made in Paris It also reveals the balletic quality of the two partners in the event.
For more detail, consult Scriver’s self-published book, “An Honest Try.” The book shows each piece in black and white against a rodeo setting.
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
COWBOY ART: IS ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTIN' ?
Cultural phenomena go in huge arcs, decades long, so that students get out-of-phase with their teachers, performances get out-of-phase with their audiences, and art gets out-of-phase with public taste. There are two “long arcs” that I’m not sorry to see go on the down curve, one is the abstract movement of the first part of the last century, all those intellectual exercises in cubism and targets and Campbell’s soup cans -- though I have some favorites among them -- and the other is the outrageous career of Damien Hirst and his pickled animals, which no one dared to criticize until recently an Aussie critic (they’re still “cowboys,” unlike the metrofication of Americans) said they were “tacky.”
The new arc seems to be lifting up representational art, some of which had been reduced to the level of wallpaper in many institutions throughout the country. Not only can you tell what it is, the subject matter is often uplifting, even celebratory of the nation. Coinciding with this is a sudden realization that since real estate and the stock market have become shaky investments, art is looking pretty good. In fact, some paintings by newly admired artists have become so potentially valuable that the owning institutions have been unable to resist the temptation to sell them.
So what impact has this had on cowboy art? The Western art mags have gotten a little thinner and have included more art that is still certainly “Western” but about landscape, still-life or iconic works as well as the man on a horse with a rope. Some major corporations have sold off their collections, for instance, the 7-11 photos of the West. It’s nice to see familiar CAA artist’s names listed in the catalogues of Sotheby’s rather than the ghettoized but enormously successful annual Western auctions, and the value of the big names is holding if not increasing: Russell, Moran and so on.
At the shows in the institutions the art is increasingly skillful. One surprising factor has been immigrating Chinese artists, classically trained and seeing the terrain with new eyes. Another has been the influx to the field of cartoonists, most often the people who invented and replicated the backgrounds now drawn by computers. They are also skilled and have a kind of romantic aesthetic that goes well with Western subject matter. I hadn’t realized how many there were until I read the bios in the latest Cowboy Artists of America catalogue. I sometimes wonder whether the action isn’t with the teachers of wannabe artists, rather like the teachers of wannabe writers.
The CAA, which now often drops the second A, has had its troubles with the “arc” because of aging membership. The original group was knitted together both through friendship and from loyalty to their career-changing impact on the fortunes of cowboy artists. By joining with Dean Krakel and the Cowboy Hall of Fame, they achieved “critical mass” as a movement and respectability for pictures that appealed to a lot of rough-hewn shirt-sleeve millionaire buyers who needed to show they had “culture.” Now the founders are much outnumbered by a second and third generation of artists -- some of them literally the sons (no daughters) of the founders -- and far more competitive with each other. (Dean Krakel has been gone a while and the Cowboy Hall of Fame has changed its name again.)
Experts used to argue that Remington’s art was a better investment than stocks and bonds and had a little graph to show why. But that was before the SE Asian artisans discovered that they could eyeball any statuary and create cheap equivalents that the ordinary citizen could never distinguish from the originals. A new technology uses lasers to create a replica of any three-dimensional object, including a person, so now we’re back to the kind of accusations Rodin encountered when he created “The Age of Bronze” and was accused of simply casting his model from molds applied to his body. The tiny plastic injection toy farm animals I see at Big R are often as cunningly done as many bronzes. “Cold cast” miniatures are popular. The dime stores feature clever and fairly accurate painted animals and vignettes. And a giclee print with a few judicious paint-strokes added is for most people indistinguishable from easel art.
But probably the real key to Western art is -- as it was for most of the CAA artists -- life experience. These works appeal to people who can relate, so the success of the art is linked to people who hunt, who ride, who rope, who attend rodeos and eat beef. Thus, to some degree, the prosperity of Western art is linked to the fortunes of the Republican party. Every time I say this in front of a dealer they can hardly keep from putting a hand over my mouth. The excessive moral outrage of huggers -- whether of trees, buffalo or owls -- amounts to a form of terrorism. (Not that I disagree with the real problems -- just their methods.) At events about Western art the audience is often white-haired.
More and more, the kind of promotions that institutions like the CM Russell Museum use to build their base are programs for children, or with an interest in wildlife, or are linked with a particular lifestyle exemplified in magazines like the Big Sky Journal, based mostly on massive log, stone, plate glass, and Corten mansions in the middle of nowhere -- but a nowhere with a fine view and possibly a tennis court or ski trail. (How long this trend will continue as these people age is open to question.) Miniature art and “quick draw” events where the art is sold wet off the easel are also popular. So far I see few classes on how to tell “good art” from “bad.” Maybe it would have to be taught by some bold Aussie who isn’t afraid to bring down the wrath of artists on his or her head.
The dealers tell me that more than anything else, it is the thinning of the American middle class that affects sales. The very rich feel no constraints. The poor never bought anything but dimestore art anyway, though they might be loyal admirers of people like Charlie Russell.
In the end I think Damien Hirst’s pickled sharks are doomed -- the art reporters are saying a warehouse sale is planned. The best of the Manhattan-based abstract work will never lose its value in our lifetime because there are too many people who have taken the trouble to understand what it is about and to grow fond of it. If they pass that on to the next generation (if the experimental materials like Pollock’s housepaint and car enamel don’t just deteriorate out of existence).
I don’t think “cowboy art” -- the man on the horse with a rope -- per se will disappear. Rather it will become one figure among a whole panorama of American art. Quality will become increasingly important. The education and experience of the audience will matter. I’m very curious to see what happens to this amazing auction culture, rather like rodeo culture. Will there be on-the-spot bronze pours like rough stock events? Can’t you just imagine the searchlights sweeping over the gallery, the smoke and fireworks, the Western artists swaggering across the floor (covered in sawdust for the occasion) in chaps and Stetsons? Might work. But only for a season or so. Then back to the mantra: quality.
The new arc seems to be lifting up representational art, some of which had been reduced to the level of wallpaper in many institutions throughout the country. Not only can you tell what it is, the subject matter is often uplifting, even celebratory of the nation. Coinciding with this is a sudden realization that since real estate and the stock market have become shaky investments, art is looking pretty good. In fact, some paintings by newly admired artists have become so potentially valuable that the owning institutions have been unable to resist the temptation to sell them.
So what impact has this had on cowboy art? The Western art mags have gotten a little thinner and have included more art that is still certainly “Western” but about landscape, still-life or iconic works as well as the man on a horse with a rope. Some major corporations have sold off their collections, for instance, the 7-11 photos of the West. It’s nice to see familiar CAA artist’s names listed in the catalogues of Sotheby’s rather than the ghettoized but enormously successful annual Western auctions, and the value of the big names is holding if not increasing: Russell, Moran and so on.
At the shows in the institutions the art is increasingly skillful. One surprising factor has been immigrating Chinese artists, classically trained and seeing the terrain with new eyes. Another has been the influx to the field of cartoonists, most often the people who invented and replicated the backgrounds now drawn by computers. They are also skilled and have a kind of romantic aesthetic that goes well with Western subject matter. I hadn’t realized how many there were until I read the bios in the latest Cowboy Artists of America catalogue. I sometimes wonder whether the action isn’t with the teachers of wannabe artists, rather like the teachers of wannabe writers.
The CAA, which now often drops the second A, has had its troubles with the “arc” because of aging membership. The original group was knitted together both through friendship and from loyalty to their career-changing impact on the fortunes of cowboy artists. By joining with Dean Krakel and the Cowboy Hall of Fame, they achieved “critical mass” as a movement and respectability for pictures that appealed to a lot of rough-hewn shirt-sleeve millionaire buyers who needed to show they had “culture.” Now the founders are much outnumbered by a second and third generation of artists -- some of them literally the sons (no daughters) of the founders -- and far more competitive with each other. (Dean Krakel has been gone a while and the Cowboy Hall of Fame has changed its name again.)
Experts used to argue that Remington’s art was a better investment than stocks and bonds and had a little graph to show why. But that was before the SE Asian artisans discovered that they could eyeball any statuary and create cheap equivalents that the ordinary citizen could never distinguish from the originals. A new technology uses lasers to create a replica of any three-dimensional object, including a person, so now we’re back to the kind of accusations Rodin encountered when he created “The Age of Bronze” and was accused of simply casting his model from molds applied to his body. The tiny plastic injection toy farm animals I see at Big R are often as cunningly done as many bronzes. “Cold cast” miniatures are popular. The dime stores feature clever and fairly accurate painted animals and vignettes. And a giclee print with a few judicious paint-strokes added is for most people indistinguishable from easel art.
But probably the real key to Western art is -- as it was for most of the CAA artists -- life experience. These works appeal to people who can relate, so the success of the art is linked to people who hunt, who ride, who rope, who attend rodeos and eat beef. Thus, to some degree, the prosperity of Western art is linked to the fortunes of the Republican party. Every time I say this in front of a dealer they can hardly keep from putting a hand over my mouth. The excessive moral outrage of huggers -- whether of trees, buffalo or owls -- amounts to a form of terrorism. (Not that I disagree with the real problems -- just their methods.) At events about Western art the audience is often white-haired.
More and more, the kind of promotions that institutions like the CM Russell Museum use to build their base are programs for children, or with an interest in wildlife, or are linked with a particular lifestyle exemplified in magazines like the Big Sky Journal, based mostly on massive log, stone, plate glass, and Corten mansions in the middle of nowhere -- but a nowhere with a fine view and possibly a tennis court or ski trail. (How long this trend will continue as these people age is open to question.) Miniature art and “quick draw” events where the art is sold wet off the easel are also popular. So far I see few classes on how to tell “good art” from “bad.” Maybe it would have to be taught by some bold Aussie who isn’t afraid to bring down the wrath of artists on his or her head.
The dealers tell me that more than anything else, it is the thinning of the American middle class that affects sales. The very rich feel no constraints. The poor never bought anything but dimestore art anyway, though they might be loyal admirers of people like Charlie Russell.
In the end I think Damien Hirst’s pickled sharks are doomed -- the art reporters are saying a warehouse sale is planned. The best of the Manhattan-based abstract work will never lose its value in our lifetime because there are too many people who have taken the trouble to understand what it is about and to grow fond of it. If they pass that on to the next generation (if the experimental materials like Pollock’s housepaint and car enamel don’t just deteriorate out of existence).
I don’t think “cowboy art” -- the man on the horse with a rope -- per se will disappear. Rather it will become one figure among a whole panorama of American art. Quality will become increasingly important. The education and experience of the audience will matter. I’m very curious to see what happens to this amazing auction culture, rather like rodeo culture. Will there be on-the-spot bronze pours like rough stock events? Can’t you just imagine the searchlights sweeping over the gallery, the smoke and fireworks, the Western artists swaggering across the floor (covered in sawdust for the occasion) in chaps and Stetsons? Might work. But only for a season or so. Then back to the mantra: quality.
Monday, August 04, 2008
WHAT'S IT WORTH?
Clearly in these times monetary compensation is NOT going to most artists, but rather to the great swarm of curators, directors, archivists, critics, buyer’s guides, and other managers of opinion and valuation that surround and control the artists. This is true of writers as well as painters and sculptors, though the writers now have the escape valve of blogging just as the print media has begun closing down review sections for all humanities. (This seems to accompany the closing down of humanities themselves, which are giving way to technology and the less-humanities-like sciences, with the “soft” sciences migrating over to the arts.)
Therefore, I’m going to begin positioning myself as an arts critic! After all, I’ve been watching the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel for fifty years which means about since the beginning of the current wave, long enough to have been significant changes in most everything except the actual painting. (Sculpture has taken some economically significant technical turns with aesthetic consequences.) I’m NOT going to put price tags on art nor am I going to “deal” art. Just watch and comment on others who do those things, a third circle outside the established critics, looking for uber-trends.
Recently, with real estate engulfed in floods and scandal and the stock market also submerged in scandal, some investors have looked around for a new category of acquisitions for money storage and increase. They have no interest in tulip bulbs (though ag categories like genetically altered seeds might interest some who aren’t afraid of the politics) maybe because most of these people seem to be urban. Or maybe because they don’t like to be at the mercy of weather in a time when weather in the macro-sense has become so politicized and terrifying. But art is a nice manageable sort of stuff and artists are much nicer to cultivate. (Though their wives maybe be, well, weeds. More about that in later posts.)
Several instruments of measurement of art value have popped up. David Galenson, an economist at the U of Chicago who used to specialize in colonial America (where the main criterion for the value of art was whether it were imported from England), has proposed a system like that of “valuing” research at universities. This system depends upon the scientific and academic custom at universities like U of Chicago of valuing work according to how much it is cited in subsequent professional journal articles and books. (Which is why grad students are constantly pressed to include many citations, esp. of works by their mentors, and to build their work on the cite-able concepts of their predecessors.) So Thomas Kuhn, with his definitive idea of paradigm shift, is a big winner, I’m sure, quite apart from his impact on analysis. We don’t even know who the losers of the citation competition might be, since there is no trace of them in anyone’s footnotes.
Galenson proposes that art be valued similarly by simply counting the number of times an artwork appears as an illustration or is referred to an example in published textbooks. The article to which I’m referring is by Patricia Cohen and appeared in The New York Times on August 4, 2008. She cites seventeen works of art by title in her article, all presumably top-of-the-list anyway. She also notes Galenson’s actual books for those who wish to delve further into the theories. All the works are part of the major art world in Manhattan in the first half of the Twentieth Century, a world as much rooted in Europe as Colonial “American” art, though we’re all supposed to be post-colonial now. The article ends with Mr. John Elderfield (one always refers to such persons as “Mr.”), chief curator emeritus at the Museum of Modern art, asking plaintively, “Where surrealism?”
Well, shucks, where’s cowboy art? Arthur C. Danto, art critic for The Nation, points out that art textbooks now include many more women, African-Americans, and American Indians. “The art world itself became politicized and that has affected textbooks and the illustrations.” (No need to call him “mister.” He probably doesn’t wear a bowtie either.) So now we have to consider the politics of the art, eh? Both in terms of content and in terms of the nature of the artist.
As far as that goes, where Indian art? Coming in mostly from the West side of the US, it is often surreal, abstract, inventive, mixed-media, and all the things proposed as values by the East Coast establishment (make that NORTH East Coast) except they don’t seem to have any awareness of it. In fact, awareness concentrates in the Southwest.
Consider this current cover of Southwest Art magazine:
This beautiful incised vase is by Paponee. She is not listed in Askart.com, one of the websites that monitors art auctions, but Southwest Art has a nice article about her and I daresay she’ll soon be there. Still, so far, objects like these do not show up in the big Western art auctions much.
Auctions and their monitoring websites are now largely how investors figure out the value of Western art. This is true for the big Manhattan artists as well -- everyone waits to see what the French Impressionists will bring in, often millions at Sothebys or Christies or the other major auction houses. Art work with profiles as high as Monet’s water lily paintings move around the globe and sometimes end up in Japan as the latter become ever more open to the old-concept Western world in the sense of mostly white/male/European. I have not heard of them collecting new-concept Western art in the sense of the American prairie, Southwest desert, and California impressionism. Auctions seem to be a force for globalization. Nationalism, not so much.
In the meantime, some of the “cowboy” artists are now Chinese and others (including those who were always illustrators anyway) go global in the search for pre-industrial people: Mongols, Russo-peasants, Arabs, South American Indians. Maybe in time the genre will become “global pre-industrialism.” But there is an internal movement towards early industrial nostalgia: old pickups and the like.
There appears to be a steady market for the good old-fashioned horse-and-rider, esp. if it looks a bit antique like this sample on the front of “Art of the West.”
An interesting development, parallel to the Wyeth family, is the number of generational artists. This is by John Moyers, son of William Moyers. Both are listed in www.Askart.com and are members of the Cowboy Artists of America, which now tend to use the brand CA, since they seem to be reaching out to Canada and so on. One member, Oreland Joe, is explicitly Indian, though others have Native Americans in their family trees. Oreland Joe’s stone carving is more like Paponee than Charlie Russell, who remains the point of reference for many collectors, not least because of the phenomenal increments in value. Will that trend continue? Stay tuned.
Therefore, I’m going to begin positioning myself as an arts critic! After all, I’ve been watching the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel for fifty years which means about since the beginning of the current wave, long enough to have been significant changes in most everything except the actual painting. (Sculpture has taken some economically significant technical turns with aesthetic consequences.) I’m NOT going to put price tags on art nor am I going to “deal” art. Just watch and comment on others who do those things, a third circle outside the established critics, looking for uber-trends.
Recently, with real estate engulfed in floods and scandal and the stock market also submerged in scandal, some investors have looked around for a new category of acquisitions for money storage and increase. They have no interest in tulip bulbs (though ag categories like genetically altered seeds might interest some who aren’t afraid of the politics) maybe because most of these people seem to be urban. Or maybe because they don’t like to be at the mercy of weather in a time when weather in the macro-sense has become so politicized and terrifying. But art is a nice manageable sort of stuff and artists are much nicer to cultivate. (Though their wives maybe be, well, weeds. More about that in later posts.)
Several instruments of measurement of art value have popped up. David Galenson, an economist at the U of Chicago who used to specialize in colonial America (where the main criterion for the value of art was whether it were imported from England), has proposed a system like that of “valuing” research at universities. This system depends upon the scientific and academic custom at universities like U of Chicago of valuing work according to how much it is cited in subsequent professional journal articles and books. (Which is why grad students are constantly pressed to include many citations, esp. of works by their mentors, and to build their work on the cite-able concepts of their predecessors.) So Thomas Kuhn, with his definitive idea of paradigm shift, is a big winner, I’m sure, quite apart from his impact on analysis. We don’t even know who the losers of the citation competition might be, since there is no trace of them in anyone’s footnotes.
Galenson proposes that art be valued similarly by simply counting the number of times an artwork appears as an illustration or is referred to an example in published textbooks. The article to which I’m referring is by Patricia Cohen and appeared in The New York Times on August 4, 2008. She cites seventeen works of art by title in her article, all presumably top-of-the-list anyway. She also notes Galenson’s actual books for those who wish to delve further into the theories. All the works are part of the major art world in Manhattan in the first half of the Twentieth Century, a world as much rooted in Europe as Colonial “American” art, though we’re all supposed to be post-colonial now. The article ends with Mr. John Elderfield (one always refers to such persons as “Mr.”), chief curator emeritus at the Museum of Modern art, asking plaintively, “Where surrealism?”
Well, shucks, where’s cowboy art? Arthur C. Danto, art critic for The Nation, points out that art textbooks now include many more women, African-Americans, and American Indians. “The art world itself became politicized and that has affected textbooks and the illustrations.” (No need to call him “mister.” He probably doesn’t wear a bowtie either.) So now we have to consider the politics of the art, eh? Both in terms of content and in terms of the nature of the artist.
As far as that goes, where Indian art? Coming in mostly from the West side of the US, it is often surreal, abstract, inventive, mixed-media, and all the things proposed as values by the East Coast establishment (make that NORTH East Coast) except they don’t seem to have any awareness of it. In fact, awareness concentrates in the Southwest.
Consider this current cover of Southwest Art magazine:
This beautiful incised vase is by Paponee. She is not listed in Askart.com, one of the websites that monitors art auctions, but Southwest Art has a nice article about her and I daresay she’ll soon be there. Still, so far, objects like these do not show up in the big Western art auctions much.
Auctions and their monitoring websites are now largely how investors figure out the value of Western art. This is true for the big Manhattan artists as well -- everyone waits to see what the French Impressionists will bring in, often millions at Sothebys or Christies or the other major auction houses. Art work with profiles as high as Monet’s water lily paintings move around the globe and sometimes end up in Japan as the latter become ever more open to the old-concept Western world in the sense of mostly white/male/European. I have not heard of them collecting new-concept Western art in the sense of the American prairie, Southwest desert, and California impressionism. Auctions seem to be a force for globalization. Nationalism, not so much.
In the meantime, some of the “cowboy” artists are now Chinese and others (including those who were always illustrators anyway) go global in the search for pre-industrial people: Mongols, Russo-peasants, Arabs, South American Indians. Maybe in time the genre will become “global pre-industrialism.” But there is an internal movement towards early industrial nostalgia: old pickups and the like.
There appears to be a steady market for the good old-fashioned horse-and-rider, esp. if it looks a bit antique like this sample on the front of “Art of the West.”
An interesting development, parallel to the Wyeth family, is the number of generational artists. This is by John Moyers, son of William Moyers. Both are listed in www.Askart.com and are members of the Cowboy Artists of America, which now tend to use the brand CA, since they seem to be reaching out to Canada and so on. One member, Oreland Joe, is explicitly Indian, though others have Native Americans in their family trees. Oreland Joe’s stone carving is more like Paponee than Charlie Russell, who remains the point of reference for many collectors, not least because of the phenomenal increments in value. Will that trend continue? Stay tuned.
Friday, August 01, 2008
Review of "Bronze Inside and Out"
BRONZE INSIDE AND OUT Review from “Alberta History”, Summer, 2008
Mary Scriver loves to write and she has chosen an ideal topic -- Bob Scriver, her late husband, a sculptor of international fame. A resident of Browning, Montana, he is particularly remembered for his bronzes of Indians, rodeo cowboys, and prominent figures, and prominent figures. Included among them is a 53 piece series of bronzes of Blackfoot culture entitled “No More Buffalo,” a 33 piece set entitled “Rodeo in Bronze,” and individual figures such as Eric Harvie of Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, rodeo star Casey Tibbs, “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Teddy Roosevelt, and others.
In this book, Mary also tells her own story, of how she came to Browning and her experiences with the Blackfoot people. She met her husband there and tells of his life and accomplishments in an engaging and literary style.
Bob was born on the Blackfeet Reservation in 1914 where his father owned a store. After a stint at teaching, he opened a taxidermy shop which grew into a foundry for his sculptures. As one who grew up with the Blackfoot, he had a keen interest in their cultures, and participated with them in their ceremonies. His love for them is reflected in his many sculptures. He also collected many artifacts, as had his father, to preserve a disappearing culture.
In 1990 he became the centre of controversy when he feared his entire Indian collection would be seized from under a newly-passed “Repatriation of Indian Artifacts Act.” To prevent this from happening, he took his collection to Canada and sold it to the Provincial Museum of Alberta for $1 million.
This whole story of Bob Scriver is a fascinating one, and a good read.
Mary Scriver loves to write and she has chosen an ideal topic -- Bob Scriver, her late husband, a sculptor of international fame. A resident of Browning, Montana, he is particularly remembered for his bronzes of Indians, rodeo cowboys, and prominent figures, and prominent figures. Included among them is a 53 piece series of bronzes of Blackfoot culture entitled “No More Buffalo,” a 33 piece set entitled “Rodeo in Bronze,” and individual figures such as Eric Harvie of Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, rodeo star Casey Tibbs, “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Teddy Roosevelt, and others.
In this book, Mary also tells her own story, of how she came to Browning and her experiences with the Blackfoot people. She met her husband there and tells of his life and accomplishments in an engaging and literary style.
Bob was born on the Blackfeet Reservation in 1914 where his father owned a store. After a stint at teaching, he opened a taxidermy shop which grew into a foundry for his sculptures. As one who grew up with the Blackfoot, he had a keen interest in their cultures, and participated with them in their ceremonies. His love for them is reflected in his many sculptures. He also collected many artifacts, as had his father, to preserve a disappearing culture.
In 1990 he became the centre of controversy when he feared his entire Indian collection would be seized from under a newly-passed “Repatriation of Indian Artifacts Act.” To prevent this from happening, he took his collection to Canada and sold it to the Provincial Museum of Alberta for $1 million.
This whole story of Bob Scriver is a fascinating one, and a good read.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
BLOGGING AT PRAIRIEMARY.BLOGSPOT.COM
FOR THE LAST THREE DAYS I'VE BEEN BLOGGING SUBJECTS OF INTEREST TO READERS OF THIS BLOG ON A SISTER BLOG: www.prairiemary.blogspot.com.
I'm particularly addressing "Bronze Inside and Out: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver" which is now shipping to bookstores. It can also be ordered through Amazon.com.
Prairie Mary
I'm particularly addressing "Bronze Inside and Out: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver" which is now shipping to bookstores. It can also be ordered through Amazon.com.
Prairie Mary
Sunday, December 02, 2007
THE 19TH CENTURY MUSEUM IN POST MODERN TIMES
This posting begins as a post already made on www.prairiemary.blogspot.com, but continues with a few more specific questions.
WHAT IS A POST-MODERN MUSEUM?
Unintelligible as much of the theory-based post-modern culture criticism has been over the last few decades, many far-reaching questions have emerged that are quite significant in terms of Montana lives. Naturally, much of it has had to do with Native Americans, but much of it also is very relevant to European-based peoples, to say nothing of the African and Asian heritages. Many of these issues are about education or museums, which most of us probably think of as educational. Since Montana formed as the Industrial Revolution was transforming the planet, much of this material is crucial to the future.
What IS a museum? In preparing Bob Scriver’s biography, I read a number of books that examine the origins of museums and the history and development of collections. Mostly they seem to have arisen from people’s natural inclination to save things they liked or that seemed to have value. The early Popes had a room like a vault where they kept precious objects, often commissioned from outstanding artist/craftsmen or perhaps gifts from great kings and leaders. In the modern United States, objects created in crystal by someone like Steuben Glass -- gorgeous, fragile, and one-of-a-kind -- might be presented.
In the 19th century, when taxonomies were the great obsession, natural history buffs (often amateur) required extensive accumulations of insects, bird skins, eggs, and so on, all in the interest of grouping them into categories and thus discovering something about creation. This was one of the duties of Lewis and Clark. (Now, of course, all those taxonomies and “family trees” have been blown away by DNA analysis.)
In those times anomalies and freaks interested a lot of people. Bob was of a “one excellent example of each” turn of mind, probably coming from the assumptions of taxidermists with hunter clients. He was always having to shoo away people who wanted to give him albino skunks or two-headed calves for the Scriver Museum. (This museum is dispersed now.) He continued this frame of mind with the bronzes, keeping “one of each,” which is now the basis of the estate entrusted to the Montana Historical Society.
Another influence from the 19th century was the growing awareness of “the last of these.” This continues today with even more anguish as we see whole species, whole languages, entire peoples, whole life-works, disappear under the wheels of time. Rare-ness has always been a criterion for value. Museums treasure the last dodo bird, the last passenger pigeon.
At present we see a great fascination with family trees so that -- running parallel with DNA studies of inheritance -- many people are looking up their own pedigrees, the begats that brought them to this place and time and the stories of those lives. My newly discovered branch of the Welsh sister descendants brought me two new documents, one a transcription of a Christian Oklahoma homesteader family and the other a book length account complete with photos. The closer we get to the present, the easier it is to find documents such as letters -- until we get to email. The Internet, of course, has been an amazing help when things are scanned and posted.
The idea that a museum is a repository for documents and objects is a strong one with an intense emotional engine, whether or not values are shared by others. When my mother died, one of the hardest problems was finding new homes for her most prized objects: the bisque porcelain hen that had been brought intact in a pioneer wagon by burying it in a barrel of flour, the huge blown-glass bluegreen Japanese float found at the beach, a gold lustreware vase that had been saved from disaster many times. We were shocked to discover that no one wanted them, not even dealers.
19th century anthropologists collected skeletons with no particular thought for their meaning to families. 20th century accumulators stole the heads off “death house” burials with grisly disrespect. Sometimes they kept such objects secret, showing them only to their closest friends, and other times skulls rested on the back bars of taverns, grinning at the clients. Reversing this practice has been a battle for NA activists.
Family is such a deeply embedded aspect of humans that the celebration of family versus their branding as traitors and failures has dominated much of historical interpretation. Quite aside from the discomfort of homesteaders living next to the Native Americans pushed off the same land, is the on-going rivalry among families of both populations, so strong that it still affects ordinary commerce in towns. My cousin once remarked to me that the “Pinkertons” which are the branch of my maternal grandfather were not as good as the “Cochrans” which are the branch of my maternal grandmother, because the Cochrans walked to the West on the Oregon Trail -- making them tougher -- but the Pinkertons came on the train, which was somehow weaker. I pointed out that the Pinkertons came quite a bit later than the Cochrans and would be FOOLS not to take the train, since by that time there WAS one! I think he had gotten the idea partly because a Cochran ranch was honored by the state of Oregon as a “Centennial” 100-year ranch. The Pinkertons never had anything but a prune orchard that went bust. Prosperity and endurance are the pioneer criteria. Maybe they’re pretty basic to all humans.
But there ARE other issues of value. For instance, whether or not Two-Guns Whitecalf posed for Fraser when he created the buffalo nickel is a matter involving considerable prestige and people have spent hours poring through archives to figure it out definitively.
What I’m leading up to is that the Montana Historical Society, kindly accepting papers, collections, and family heirlooms for decades and decades, is bulging at the seams. Storage is so crammed as to make items impossible to locate. Staff works in a small labyrinth, elbow-to-elbow. Yet there has been little discussion of what the real defining goal of the historical society -- much less its museum which many people see as its only function -- ought to be in the future. By what principles are decisions to be made? And if there is anything that the post-modern critique insists upon, it must be a “people’s” decision, not fiats from high-status, high-power, high-dollar experts.
Is the point of an historical museum to interpret what has happened? Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is my favorite example of interpretation-based exhibits, though the Glenbow is Calgary is also outstanding. Or is it to show off the importance of an area or a people? Might it be to store information as a way of researching and developing the future?
Should it be a way of preserving valuable objects like the CM Russell paintings? Or should it be a kind of public gallery developing art in general, as the CM Russell Museum in Great Falls has become, raising questions about the relationship with private for-profit galleries? The CM Russell, which needs to build an endowment for maintenance, lately put its Couse paintings up for auction. Couse was a major SW painter of Native Americans, but the curator felt they were “outside the mission” of the museum. The Montana Historical Society owns works by de Kooning and Picasso, which would fetch a pretty penny on the current hot art market. Can these be defended as part of Montana’s heritage? Or consider the Alberta Bair ranch, stocked with fabulous European objects.
Questions abound and should not be answered by decisions already made without realizing the limitations they can impose.
Some of the issues specific to the Scriver Estate are as follows:
The records of which casting was sold to which customer have not been located by the MHS staff. Many people contact me to find out the pre-stated limit of an edition was and who bought their casting from Bob, because the provenance, especially in the case of bronzes (because the ease of making counterfeits) affects the market value. In the recent case of the Seltzer originally thought to be a CMRussell painting, provenance was a crucial element and the difference in value was tenfold.
There are more than a few duplicate bronzes in the estate. Some customers have told me that they had ordered and even paid money down on bronzes that they never received. They suspect these may be among the duplicates. But where are the records?
Because Scriver's career began with many small tourist objects and because when he made the transition to "art" bronzes rather than what he would call "modeling," and because he never threw anything away but had stored hundreds of "blanks" of these little animals, and because the MHS took these, there arises the problem of how to value them. They are unfinished, originally sold for a few dollars, but are quite charming. I'm told the intention might be to give them away as "party favors" for fund-raising banquets. One of these early pieces was bought from a local person for thousands of dollars and marketed by a private gallery as an "original Scriver." It was, but hardly the same as the later works that sold for thousands of dollars.
Scriver had some collections of his own that he acquired as investments. Aside from the NA artifacts, the Mountie uniforms and the guns, there was a collection of Fery mural-like paintings and another of John Sharp paintings of Blackfeet country. These were dispersed, sold at auction. But he told me about a collection of John Rogers plaster genre scenes, sort of Norman Rockwell scenes. See www.AskArt.com for more information, such as: The John Rogers Museum is located in New Caanan, CT. on the property of the Historical Society. It has many groups displayed in Roger's original studio and a collection of J Rogers Bronzes on display. I haven't seen this on any list, or unpacked in the Scriver Center warehouse out by the airport, or mentioned by any staff member. Was it quietly sold before the estate was transported? Or since?
Many of these troubling questions are not in the awareness of MHS Trustees. Addressing them will require some expertise. I'm told that it will also require money which the museum does not have. Even in a new building, will there be money for the staff and maintenance that's needed?
WHAT IS A POST-MODERN MUSEUM?
Unintelligible as much of the theory-based post-modern culture criticism has been over the last few decades, many far-reaching questions have emerged that are quite significant in terms of Montana lives. Naturally, much of it has had to do with Native Americans, but much of it also is very relevant to European-based peoples, to say nothing of the African and Asian heritages. Many of these issues are about education or museums, which most of us probably think of as educational. Since Montana formed as the Industrial Revolution was transforming the planet, much of this material is crucial to the future.
What IS a museum? In preparing Bob Scriver’s biography, I read a number of books that examine the origins of museums and the history and development of collections. Mostly they seem to have arisen from people’s natural inclination to save things they liked or that seemed to have value. The early Popes had a room like a vault where they kept precious objects, often commissioned from outstanding artist/craftsmen or perhaps gifts from great kings and leaders. In the modern United States, objects created in crystal by someone like Steuben Glass -- gorgeous, fragile, and one-of-a-kind -- might be presented.
In the 19th century, when taxonomies were the great obsession, natural history buffs (often amateur) required extensive accumulations of insects, bird skins, eggs, and so on, all in the interest of grouping them into categories and thus discovering something about creation. This was one of the duties of Lewis and Clark. (Now, of course, all those taxonomies and “family trees” have been blown away by DNA analysis.)
In those times anomalies and freaks interested a lot of people. Bob was of a “one excellent example of each” turn of mind, probably coming from the assumptions of taxidermists with hunter clients. He was always having to shoo away people who wanted to give him albino skunks or two-headed calves for the Scriver Museum. (This museum is dispersed now.) He continued this frame of mind with the bronzes, keeping “one of each,” which is now the basis of the estate entrusted to the Montana Historical Society.
Another influence from the 19th century was the growing awareness of “the last of these.” This continues today with even more anguish as we see whole species, whole languages, entire peoples, whole life-works, disappear under the wheels of time. Rare-ness has always been a criterion for value. Museums treasure the last dodo bird, the last passenger pigeon.
At present we see a great fascination with family trees so that -- running parallel with DNA studies of inheritance -- many people are looking up their own pedigrees, the begats that brought them to this place and time and the stories of those lives. My newly discovered branch of the Welsh sister descendants brought me two new documents, one a transcription of a Christian Oklahoma homesteader family and the other a book length account complete with photos. The closer we get to the present, the easier it is to find documents such as letters -- until we get to email. The Internet, of course, has been an amazing help when things are scanned and posted.
The idea that a museum is a repository for documents and objects is a strong one with an intense emotional engine, whether or not values are shared by others. When my mother died, one of the hardest problems was finding new homes for her most prized objects: the bisque porcelain hen that had been brought intact in a pioneer wagon by burying it in a barrel of flour, the huge blown-glass bluegreen Japanese float found at the beach, a gold lustreware vase that had been saved from disaster many times. We were shocked to discover that no one wanted them, not even dealers.
19th century anthropologists collected skeletons with no particular thought for their meaning to families. 20th century accumulators stole the heads off “death house” burials with grisly disrespect. Sometimes they kept such objects secret, showing them only to their closest friends, and other times skulls rested on the back bars of taverns, grinning at the clients. Reversing this practice has been a battle for NA activists.
Family is such a deeply embedded aspect of humans that the celebration of family versus their branding as traitors and failures has dominated much of historical interpretation. Quite aside from the discomfort of homesteaders living next to the Native Americans pushed off the same land, is the on-going rivalry among families of both populations, so strong that it still affects ordinary commerce in towns. My cousin once remarked to me that the “Pinkertons” which are the branch of my maternal grandfather were not as good as the “Cochrans” which are the branch of my maternal grandmother, because the Cochrans walked to the West on the Oregon Trail -- making them tougher -- but the Pinkertons came on the train, which was somehow weaker. I pointed out that the Pinkertons came quite a bit later than the Cochrans and would be FOOLS not to take the train, since by that time there WAS one! I think he had gotten the idea partly because a Cochran ranch was honored by the state of Oregon as a “Centennial” 100-year ranch. The Pinkertons never had anything but a prune orchard that went bust. Prosperity and endurance are the pioneer criteria. Maybe they’re pretty basic to all humans.
But there ARE other issues of value. For instance, whether or not Two-Guns Whitecalf posed for Fraser when he created the buffalo nickel is a matter involving considerable prestige and people have spent hours poring through archives to figure it out definitively.
What I’m leading up to is that the Montana Historical Society, kindly accepting papers, collections, and family heirlooms for decades and decades, is bulging at the seams. Storage is so crammed as to make items impossible to locate. Staff works in a small labyrinth, elbow-to-elbow. Yet there has been little discussion of what the real defining goal of the historical society -- much less its museum which many people see as its only function -- ought to be in the future. By what principles are decisions to be made? And if there is anything that the post-modern critique insists upon, it must be a “people’s” decision, not fiats from high-status, high-power, high-dollar experts.
Is the point of an historical museum to interpret what has happened? Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is my favorite example of interpretation-based exhibits, though the Glenbow is Calgary is also outstanding. Or is it to show off the importance of an area or a people? Might it be to store information as a way of researching and developing the future?
Should it be a way of preserving valuable objects like the CM Russell paintings? Or should it be a kind of public gallery developing art in general, as the CM Russell Museum in Great Falls has become, raising questions about the relationship with private for-profit galleries? The CM Russell, which needs to build an endowment for maintenance, lately put its Couse paintings up for auction. Couse was a major SW painter of Native Americans, but the curator felt they were “outside the mission” of the museum. The Montana Historical Society owns works by de Kooning and Picasso, which would fetch a pretty penny on the current hot art market. Can these be defended as part of Montana’s heritage? Or consider the Alberta Bair ranch, stocked with fabulous European objects.
Questions abound and should not be answered by decisions already made without realizing the limitations they can impose.
Some of the issues specific to the Scriver Estate are as follows:
The records of which casting was sold to which customer have not been located by the MHS staff. Many people contact me to find out the pre-stated limit of an edition was and who bought their casting from Bob, because the provenance, especially in the case of bronzes (because the ease of making counterfeits) affects the market value. In the recent case of the Seltzer originally thought to be a CMRussell painting, provenance was a crucial element and the difference in value was tenfold.
There are more than a few duplicate bronzes in the estate. Some customers have told me that they had ordered and even paid money down on bronzes that they never received. They suspect these may be among the duplicates. But where are the records?
Because Scriver's career began with many small tourist objects and because when he made the transition to "art" bronzes rather than what he would call "modeling," and because he never threw anything away but had stored hundreds of "blanks" of these little animals, and because the MHS took these, there arises the problem of how to value them. They are unfinished, originally sold for a few dollars, but are quite charming. I'm told the intention might be to give them away as "party favors" for fund-raising banquets. One of these early pieces was bought from a local person for thousands of dollars and marketed by a private gallery as an "original Scriver." It was, but hardly the same as the later works that sold for thousands of dollars.
Scriver had some collections of his own that he acquired as investments. Aside from the NA artifacts, the Mountie uniforms and the guns, there was a collection of Fery mural-like paintings and another of John Sharp paintings of Blackfeet country. These were dispersed, sold at auction. But he told me about a collection of John Rogers plaster genre scenes, sort of Norman Rockwell scenes. See www.AskArt.com for more information, such as: The John Rogers Museum is located in New Caanan, CT. on the property of the Historical Society. It has many groups displayed in Roger's original studio and a collection of J Rogers Bronzes on display. I haven't seen this on any list, or unpacked in the Scriver Center warehouse out by the airport, or mentioned by any staff member. Was it quietly sold before the estate was transported? Or since?
Many of these troubling questions are not in the awareness of MHS Trustees. Addressing them will require some expertise. I'm told that it will also require money which the museum does not have. Even in a new building, will there be money for the staff and maintenance that's needed?
Monday, November 19, 2007
BIOGRAPHY OF BOB SCRIVER
BRONZE INSIDE AND OUT: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver is now available through Amazon.com with a nice price knock-down. The book will be ready to ship in a week or so, I'm told.
Amazon also carries new and used copies of Bob Scriver's own books: the one about the rodeo series ("AN HONEST TRY"), the one about the Blackfeet series ("NO MORE BUFFALO"), and the one about the Scriver artifact collection that caused a furor when it was rumored to be worth a million dollars ("THE BLACKFEET: ARTISTS OF THE NORTHERN PLAINS").
If you asked for all books written by Scriver, you will also bring up one written by Phil Scriver which shows a photo of Bob Scriver's Fort Benton monument of Lewis, Clark, Sacajawea, and Pompey. Phil Scriver is no relation to Bob Scriver and has taken advantage of having the same name, hoping to attract attention.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
CMR CATALOGUE RAISONNE SYMPOSIUM
Today I posted an account of the CMR Catalogue Raisonne Symposium on my other blog: http://prairiemary.blogspot.com. It was an excellent event!
Prairie Mary
Prairie Mary
Friday, September 28, 2007
COLLECTOR-DRIVEN ART MARKETS
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article01.asp?id=681
From Editorial and Commentary:
The problem with a collector-driven market
By Jane Kallir | Posted 12 July 2007
For the past century or so, the art world has been supported by four principal pillars: artists, collectors, dealers and the art-historical establishment (critics, academics, and curators). From a wider historical perspective, the latter two entities are relative newcomers. The development of art history as an academic discipline, and of public museums, dates back only to the 19th century. Only in the 20th century did dealers evolve from passive shopkeepers to pro-active impresarios, promoting the often difficult efforts of the pioneering modernists with missionary zeal. Public resistance to modernism, coupled with the pressures of international capitalism, gave new importance to dealers and museums, both of which played key roles by superintending the distribution of new art and ratifying its seriousness. At varying points in the course of the past 100 years, the weight of the art world has shifted from one of the four pillars to another. Artists made the modernist revolution; dealers recognised and supported it before academia did; in the post-war period, critics became so dominant that Tom Wolfe lampooned their influence in his 1975 book The Painted Word. And now, it seems, collectors have taken charge.
Over the long term, art-historical value is determined by consensus among all four art-world pillars. When any one of the four entities assume disproportionate power, there is a danger that this entity’s personal preferences will cloud everyone’s short-term judgement. Put bluntly, the danger of a collector-driven art world is that money will trump knowledge. Great collectors should ideally become nearly as knowledgeable as the curators and dealers who help them build their collections. But not all of today’s collectors have the passion or the time necessary to develop this depth of knowledge. Collecting, once the pursuit of a relatively small number of driven individuals, has become far more common among far more people.
This expansion of the art market, made possible by the broader dissemination of concentrated pockets of wealth and by the globalisation of art and related information, has drawn in players who do not have the focused commitment of the traditional collector. The exponential growth of the market, and the genuine gains realised by those who got in early, inevitably fuel the tendency, justifiable or not, to view art as an asset class comparable to stocks or real estate.
Art has also become the greatest common denominator in the new global social order. Today’s rich are an international elite whose members can measure their cachet by the level of VIP services given them at Art Basel and Art Basel/Miami Beach. Anointed by the glamour that today attends the public display of great wealth, the art world has acquired the patina of trendiness that was formerly exclusive to the entertainment and fashion industries. The contemporary focus on trendiness and investment potential, each of which operates on a relatively short timeline, obscures the fact that lasting value in art accrues in the course of generations.
The corollary to a collector-driven art world is that the canon of ostensibly great artists is being largely determined by market forces. The huge prices that have been achieved lately at the top of the market are the result not only of new concentrations of wealth, but of the fact that many people are pursuing the same handful of artists and works of art. Therefore the drop-off from the peak can be steep, becalming the middle market and consigning lesser works and lesser artists to also-ran status.
This is a market with a voracious appetite for alleged masterpieces, and little patience for historical or developmental nuances. It encourages superficiality: rather than collecting a single artist or group of artists in depth, collectors now often prefer to amass scattered masterworks: here a Matisse, there a Picasso, and then perhaps a Schiele. In an overheated environment, the art-historical establishment often finds itself chasing rather than guiding the market. The press must keep up with the latest trends, and coverage of social events and record prices often takes precedence over quiet critical reflection. Museums need the support of trustees, but the most powerful collectors no longer need the imprimatur of an existing museum; they can simply open their own.
If it sometimes seems that the art-historical establishment is missing in action, this is in part because, while the market has been aggressively constructing a new canon, academia has been busy deconstructing the old one. For several decades now, scholars have generally agreed that the white, male, Eurocentric canon that traditionally dominated Western art evolved from historical biases that are no longer morally or intellectually justifiable. Although this change in orientation has literally opened up a whole new world of aesthetic possibilities, it has discouraged academics from making qualitative judgements. Scholarship in areas that are useful to the marketplace, such as provenance and authenticity, has flourished, but overall connoisseurship has declined. Similarly, market pressures push dealers to become generalists, showcasing a hodge-podge of high-ticket items instead of specialising as they formerly did. Auctioneers, operating within a timeframe that seldom extends much beyond the next sale date, focus most of their energies on the highest priced lots. Novice collectors, justifiably wary and insecure, engage consultants who often know far less than the dealers and auctioneers. At every level of the art world, deeper knowledge and principled guidance seem to be in short supply.
The writer is co-director of Galerie St Etienne in New York
© The Art Newspaper 2007
70 South Lambeth Road, London SW8 1RL
From Editorial and Commentary:
The problem with a collector-driven market
By Jane Kallir | Posted 12 July 2007
For the past century or so, the art world has been supported by four principal pillars: artists, collectors, dealers and the art-historical establishment (critics, academics, and curators). From a wider historical perspective, the latter two entities are relative newcomers. The development of art history as an academic discipline, and of public museums, dates back only to the 19th century. Only in the 20th century did dealers evolve from passive shopkeepers to pro-active impresarios, promoting the often difficult efforts of the pioneering modernists with missionary zeal. Public resistance to modernism, coupled with the pressures of international capitalism, gave new importance to dealers and museums, both of which played key roles by superintending the distribution of new art and ratifying its seriousness. At varying points in the course of the past 100 years, the weight of the art world has shifted from one of the four pillars to another. Artists made the modernist revolution; dealers recognised and supported it before academia did; in the post-war period, critics became so dominant that Tom Wolfe lampooned their influence in his 1975 book The Painted Word. And now, it seems, collectors have taken charge.
Over the long term, art-historical value is determined by consensus among all four art-world pillars. When any one of the four entities assume disproportionate power, there is a danger that this entity’s personal preferences will cloud everyone’s short-term judgement. Put bluntly, the danger of a collector-driven art world is that money will trump knowledge. Great collectors should ideally become nearly as knowledgeable as the curators and dealers who help them build their collections. But not all of today’s collectors have the passion or the time necessary to develop this depth of knowledge. Collecting, once the pursuit of a relatively small number of driven individuals, has become far more common among far more people.
This expansion of the art market, made possible by the broader dissemination of concentrated pockets of wealth and by the globalisation of art and related information, has drawn in players who do not have the focused commitment of the traditional collector. The exponential growth of the market, and the genuine gains realised by those who got in early, inevitably fuel the tendency, justifiable or not, to view art as an asset class comparable to stocks or real estate.
Art has also become the greatest common denominator in the new global social order. Today’s rich are an international elite whose members can measure their cachet by the level of VIP services given them at Art Basel and Art Basel/Miami Beach. Anointed by the glamour that today attends the public display of great wealth, the art world has acquired the patina of trendiness that was formerly exclusive to the entertainment and fashion industries. The contemporary focus on trendiness and investment potential, each of which operates on a relatively short timeline, obscures the fact that lasting value in art accrues in the course of generations.
The corollary to a collector-driven art world is that the canon of ostensibly great artists is being largely determined by market forces. The huge prices that have been achieved lately at the top of the market are the result not only of new concentrations of wealth, but of the fact that many people are pursuing the same handful of artists and works of art. Therefore the drop-off from the peak can be steep, becalming the middle market and consigning lesser works and lesser artists to also-ran status.
This is a market with a voracious appetite for alleged masterpieces, and little patience for historical or developmental nuances. It encourages superficiality: rather than collecting a single artist or group of artists in depth, collectors now often prefer to amass scattered masterworks: here a Matisse, there a Picasso, and then perhaps a Schiele. In an overheated environment, the art-historical establishment often finds itself chasing rather than guiding the market. The press must keep up with the latest trends, and coverage of social events and record prices often takes precedence over quiet critical reflection. Museums need the support of trustees, but the most powerful collectors no longer need the imprimatur of an existing museum; they can simply open their own.
If it sometimes seems that the art-historical establishment is missing in action, this is in part because, while the market has been aggressively constructing a new canon, academia has been busy deconstructing the old one. For several decades now, scholars have generally agreed that the white, male, Eurocentric canon that traditionally dominated Western art evolved from historical biases that are no longer morally or intellectually justifiable. Although this change in orientation has literally opened up a whole new world of aesthetic possibilities, it has discouraged academics from making qualitative judgements. Scholarship in areas that are useful to the marketplace, such as provenance and authenticity, has flourished, but overall connoisseurship has declined. Similarly, market pressures push dealers to become generalists, showcasing a hodge-podge of high-ticket items instead of specialising as they formerly did. Auctioneers, operating within a timeframe that seldom extends much beyond the next sale date, focus most of their energies on the highest priced lots. Novice collectors, justifiably wary and insecure, engage consultants who often know far less than the dealers and auctioneers. At every level of the art world, deeper knowledge and principled guidance seem to be in short supply.
The writer is co-director of Galerie St Etienne in New York
© The Art Newspaper 2007
70 South Lambeth Road, London SW8 1RL
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
ED MITCH & THE CM RUSSELL MUSEUM
Yesterday I went to Great Falls in order to attend a presentation by Ed Mitch, an entrepreneur who produced speculator bronzes by Bob Scriver and who has now donated his personal collection of sixty or so of them to the Charles M. Russell Museum. He has also given the museum the rights to an excellent DVD of Bob talking about his career and especially his Blackfeet series of bronzes which are also shown in the video. This DVD is available through Pat Bryan, Museum Shop Coordinator, at the CM Russell Museum, 400 13th St. North, Great Falls, MT 59401. 406-727-8787. pbryan@cmrussell.org. Mitch is sharing his profit with the Cut Bank kids through some sort of program. $10 plus throw in another few dollars for packing and postage. I recommend the DVD for libraries and schools.
I was late getting to the meeting of “Charlie’s Top Hands,” which is meant to reward people who promote the museum. This is part of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel activity that I talk about, which is more a matter of enmeshed museums, historical societies, publications, and gallery owners than the artists themselves who are simply “product” in today’s commodified world. Mitch and his friends were from Cut Bank, where a circle of businessmen tried to get some kind of profit out of Bob’s career and Bob tried to do the same with them, mostly by finding a community that would finance and support his museum, which politically could not exist in Browning. The Cut Bank version as disguised as a World Peace Center with Jesus on top. When that effort failed, the C.M Russell Museum fully expected to receive Bob’s estate and were part of the negotiations after his death. In the end, they were excluded -- some say by trickery. The estate of 1,000 bronzes plus much other material like saddles, wagons, paraphenalia and so on, went to the Montana Historical Society which simply stashed it in a warehouse.
Glacier is a county in the NW corner of east slope Montana where the Rocky Mountains intersect with the Canadian border. The county is almost entirely Blackfeet Reservation except for a little piece where Cut Bank is. A piece of the reservation also extends over into Pondera County, where I live in order to escape the jurisdictions of both the reservation and Glacier County. Cut Bank began as an oil boom town more than half a century ago. Valier started as an irrigation-based town, deliberately separate from Cut Bank, which was considered an inappropriate environment for families. Even in 1961 when the wells were mostly pumped dry, the roughneck bars boomed in Cut Bank. (I was taken pub-crawling by a fellow teacher and swore "never again.") The boom was based on a huge underground pool of oil that was mostly under the reservation but accessible from around Cut Bank, esp. after the east boundary was conveniently moved closer to the west.
Now both the reservation and Cut Bank struggle to replace the oil economy with something else. Corruption comes to mind. When the tribe wants to scare Cut Bank, they threaten to become a separate county. This would mean separating the soft underbelly of Cut Bank corruption from the great deadlocked tribal/federal softly corrupt placenta of the reservation and weaken the soft corrupt underbelly of the state in Cut Bank. The tribe, representing a large and growing population of voters, is attracting considerable state support at last, at the expense of Cut Bank except to the degree that tribal members live there, more and more all the time.
Now back to the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. Most people envision the art economy as an artist who sells art, either to the public directly or through a gallery. But there are concentric circles that grow up around that nucleus. One is a circle based on selling advice, information and promotion. Another is a circle based on second-level objects. In terms of paintings, those would be prints or what has come to be called “giclees” which are simply high-quality computer printouts. Well-marketed, these products account for most of the millions of dollars accumulated by people like Terpning or Kinkade.
In terms of sculptures, one can achieve second-level products by creating small, easy-to-produce sculptures like belt buckles -- as the speakers last night were saying, “real bronzes for $35” -- or one can go to a different material. Before Bob could afford to have his work cast in bronze, he was casting them in a very hard kind of plaster, which (alas) is quite breakable though resistant to disintegration. (Pristine plaster castings have been found in the Egyptian pyramids.) The plethora of clever and inexpensive little “bronzes” seen everywhere now are plastic mixed with powdered bronze and called “cold cast bronze” or something similar. They are produced by injection in machinery that uses space age technology for molding. They might cost $20 or less and are not necessarily very accurate.
When he had enough reputation, Bob expanded his sculpture business in two ways. One was by collaborating to make monumental bronzes, which satisfied him the most because of his original love of Beaux Arts equestrian monuments and which were financed by the sales of many small replicas. This was made possible by the invention of ceramic shell casting, also developed for space age needs, which was so much easier and cheaper than the Roman block investment process that foundries sprang up on all sides.
Entrepreneurs saw the potential in this kind of many-small-copies technology and Bob saw the advantages (esp. as he aged) of getting away from the constant struggle of casting. He began to sell the original plaster or plastilene models WITH the copyright -- that is, the right to reproduce for sales. The price to the entrepreneur, of course, was much higher because he was selling the potential profits of an entire edition. Sometimes Bob might contract to sell them the figure for a percentage of future profits and some, like Ed, took out their profit by keeping one of each for themselves. The molds for these sculptures belong to the entrepreneurs and were not destroyed at Bob’s death. One can still buy them.
One of the ways of creating value in the art world is the principle of scarcity. Some dealers will not touch editions over twenty or even less. But these entrepreneurs had no sense of the traditional art marketers and put the edition size up into the hundreds. These were small, charming, traditional pieces, sometimes on subjects suggested by the entrepreneur. My objection to them, and something I argued strongly with Bob which was part of the rupture of our marriage, was that they cheapen the prestige of the work. Some of them Bob would have to admit were “modeling” rather than sculpture, esp. after his serious stroke in 1988 which damaged his talent and left him unable to think straight about business.
There’s nothing wrong with these works except that they violate another of the principles of traditional value: that the sculpture is from the “heart and soul” of the artist, inspired, unique. These pieces tend to be along the lines of what some call the “Grand Narrative” of the settlement of the West which so hypnotizes a certain kind of person who ironically is white but idealizes the Plains Indians, esp. the ones who didn’t survive the genocidal Clearances of the Prairie. The more cynical believers in this point of view admire “Deadwood,” while the more idealistic prefer John Wayne and “Gunsmoke.” Bob Scriver accepted that but at the same time did NOT accept that. He was a complex person. The difference is obvious when one considers, say, “Transition” alongside the “Taking of a Scalp.” At least he spared us his interpretation of an Indian baby being born, though other artists did not.
There were probably a half-dozen of these bronze speculators and the pieces that come out of that context are the great majority of what circulates through the Western art auctions, a vital part of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. Ed Mitch came up with the successful idea of a small series of “coffee drinkers,” characters swigging their non-alcoholic standby. Bob always produced a steady stream of small animals which have been sold more by Rex Brenneman than Mitch.
To keep these entrepreneurs interested, Bob used the same seductive strategies he had always used on customers. He invited them into his small private office (which he had to create when his fourth wife failed to keep the studio decent enough to take people out there) where he would show them art work he’d bought, suggesting that they were the only ones to see it, and telling them little tidbits about his history. Sometimes he suddenly had a cowboy accent, which always aggravated me. He’d pretend to be dumb and outmoded, outclassed by his customer. Once in a while he’d take someone out to the ranch and get them to smoke kinnikinnick in his tipi or ride his horse. Hey, it worked on me! Why wouldn’t it work on others?
These small-town whites were wary of Indians, but fascinated at the same time. Bob had grown up with them. (He was the same age as George Kicking Woman. His best grade school buddy was Jim Welch, the father of the writer. The writer was my age.) The entrepreneurs had no way of knowing just how initiated into secret ceremnies Bob really was, but they felt sympathy for him after the well-publicized dive-bombing attacks of the AIMsters, which they thought represented the whole tribe. As soon as Cut Bank people have enough money, they move over to the Flathead Valley to escape the climate and the Indians, but they are proud of the fact that Bob is buried in the Cut Bank cemetery. The only reason he’s buried there is that Lorraine, the fourth wife, ignored his wishes, which were to be buried on his ranch alongside his horse. Burying him there might have diminished the saleability of the ranch (it was bought by a coalition of Nature Conservancy and the tribe) and anyway, Lorraine’s goal was like that of Mamie Russell: prosperity and respectability. She buried him with his white family.
People asked about the Museum of Montana Wildlife in Browning. It was also bought by the tribe and is run by Siyeh, the wholly-owned business subsidiary of the tribe. The main hall, which once housed the full-mounts, was redesigned by a professional museum team and now shows “Leonardo” the baby tyrannosaurus rex. The workshop part is now the Blackfeet Heritage Center, a shop that is a source of crucial reference materials and novelties.
Del Gage, who was at last night’s meetiing with his wife, has been a state legislator. He is not an entrepreneur in the same way as Ed but he is someone I remember from the Sixties. (I don't remember Ed.) The third speaker I only know because he stepped into the shoes of Wilbur Werner, a friend of ours and supporter of Bob for many years. Wilbur’s law practice was based in part on being the county attorney and much of his power around the state was through his brother, a high official among the Catholics. He was also very active in local history organizations. Epstein married his daughter and when Wilbur retired, sat at his desk as county attorney and history buff.
Most of the information he supplied was wrong and I said so, which was the first that some people realized I was there. I was not invited to attend or to speak. Epstein made several remarks about Indians, which I doubt that he recognized as belittling nor his audience either. They have very little consciousness of “politically correct” protocols, only a nervous awareness that they’re Out There. As soon as the speeches were over, he hastened to me to mend fences. I shall have to write to Miss Manners for advice about how to handle lawyers who put their hands all over people in order to show relationship, dominance and ownership.
I led Epstein over to the Winold Reiss painting of “Old Lady Cree Medicine” to impress upon him that Bob’s foundry was competently run by two generations of her descendants. His reaction was “Oh, I have that print” and then, “Migod, is that an original Reiss? Where did they ever get such a valuable thing?” He knows damn well that Reiss’ family gave the whole collection that was hanging in the room to the Russell Museum. He never heard what I said about Carl and David. He went back to organize select members of Charlie’s Hands to go drinking while the rest of us sat with our coffee.
Even the best-hearted among these people (all men except Norma Ashby) who believe they were dear friends of Bob Scriver do not know and would be hard to persuade that they really WERE NOT part of his inner circle. In fact, Bob’s closest friends were either Indians, wives or Ace Powell. Small-town middle-class people were his family’s friends and peers -- not his. He didn’t drink, he didn’t play bridge except in the very earliest years with his second wife, and he always hunted with a wife and a buddy. But to point this out is to spoil sales and to diminish the prestige of donations. I wonder how parallel this is with Charlie Russell. Actually, I don’t wonder. I’m pretty persuaded.
I was late getting to the meeting of “Charlie’s Top Hands,” which is meant to reward people who promote the museum. This is part of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel activity that I talk about, which is more a matter of enmeshed museums, historical societies, publications, and gallery owners than the artists themselves who are simply “product” in today’s commodified world. Mitch and his friends were from Cut Bank, where a circle of businessmen tried to get some kind of profit out of Bob’s career and Bob tried to do the same with them, mostly by finding a community that would finance and support his museum, which politically could not exist in Browning. The Cut Bank version as disguised as a World Peace Center with Jesus on top. When that effort failed, the C.M Russell Museum fully expected to receive Bob’s estate and were part of the negotiations after his death. In the end, they were excluded -- some say by trickery. The estate of 1,000 bronzes plus much other material like saddles, wagons, paraphenalia and so on, went to the Montana Historical Society which simply stashed it in a warehouse.
Glacier is a county in the NW corner of east slope Montana where the Rocky Mountains intersect with the Canadian border. The county is almost entirely Blackfeet Reservation except for a little piece where Cut Bank is. A piece of the reservation also extends over into Pondera County, where I live in order to escape the jurisdictions of both the reservation and Glacier County. Cut Bank began as an oil boom town more than half a century ago. Valier started as an irrigation-based town, deliberately separate from Cut Bank, which was considered an inappropriate environment for families. Even in 1961 when the wells were mostly pumped dry, the roughneck bars boomed in Cut Bank. (I was taken pub-crawling by a fellow teacher and swore "never again.") The boom was based on a huge underground pool of oil that was mostly under the reservation but accessible from around Cut Bank, esp. after the east boundary was conveniently moved closer to the west.
Now both the reservation and Cut Bank struggle to replace the oil economy with something else. Corruption comes to mind. When the tribe wants to scare Cut Bank, they threaten to become a separate county. This would mean separating the soft underbelly of Cut Bank corruption from the great deadlocked tribal/federal softly corrupt placenta of the reservation and weaken the soft corrupt underbelly of the state in Cut Bank. The tribe, representing a large and growing population of voters, is attracting considerable state support at last, at the expense of Cut Bank except to the degree that tribal members live there, more and more all the time.
Now back to the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. Most people envision the art economy as an artist who sells art, either to the public directly or through a gallery. But there are concentric circles that grow up around that nucleus. One is a circle based on selling advice, information and promotion. Another is a circle based on second-level objects. In terms of paintings, those would be prints or what has come to be called “giclees” which are simply high-quality computer printouts. Well-marketed, these products account for most of the millions of dollars accumulated by people like Terpning or Kinkade.
In terms of sculptures, one can achieve second-level products by creating small, easy-to-produce sculptures like belt buckles -- as the speakers last night were saying, “real bronzes for $35” -- or one can go to a different material. Before Bob could afford to have his work cast in bronze, he was casting them in a very hard kind of plaster, which (alas) is quite breakable though resistant to disintegration. (Pristine plaster castings have been found in the Egyptian pyramids.) The plethora of clever and inexpensive little “bronzes” seen everywhere now are plastic mixed with powdered bronze and called “cold cast bronze” or something similar. They are produced by injection in machinery that uses space age technology for molding. They might cost $20 or less and are not necessarily very accurate.
When he had enough reputation, Bob expanded his sculpture business in two ways. One was by collaborating to make monumental bronzes, which satisfied him the most because of his original love of Beaux Arts equestrian monuments and which were financed by the sales of many small replicas. This was made possible by the invention of ceramic shell casting, also developed for space age needs, which was so much easier and cheaper than the Roman block investment process that foundries sprang up on all sides.
Entrepreneurs saw the potential in this kind of many-small-copies technology and Bob saw the advantages (esp. as he aged) of getting away from the constant struggle of casting. He began to sell the original plaster or plastilene models WITH the copyright -- that is, the right to reproduce for sales. The price to the entrepreneur, of course, was much higher because he was selling the potential profits of an entire edition. Sometimes Bob might contract to sell them the figure for a percentage of future profits and some, like Ed, took out their profit by keeping one of each for themselves. The molds for these sculptures belong to the entrepreneurs and were not destroyed at Bob’s death. One can still buy them.
One of the ways of creating value in the art world is the principle of scarcity. Some dealers will not touch editions over twenty or even less. But these entrepreneurs had no sense of the traditional art marketers and put the edition size up into the hundreds. These were small, charming, traditional pieces, sometimes on subjects suggested by the entrepreneur. My objection to them, and something I argued strongly with Bob which was part of the rupture of our marriage, was that they cheapen the prestige of the work. Some of them Bob would have to admit were “modeling” rather than sculpture, esp. after his serious stroke in 1988 which damaged his talent and left him unable to think straight about business.
There’s nothing wrong with these works except that they violate another of the principles of traditional value: that the sculpture is from the “heart and soul” of the artist, inspired, unique. These pieces tend to be along the lines of what some call the “Grand Narrative” of the settlement of the West which so hypnotizes a certain kind of person who ironically is white but idealizes the Plains Indians, esp. the ones who didn’t survive the genocidal Clearances of the Prairie. The more cynical believers in this point of view admire “Deadwood,” while the more idealistic prefer John Wayne and “Gunsmoke.” Bob Scriver accepted that but at the same time did NOT accept that. He was a complex person. The difference is obvious when one considers, say, “Transition” alongside the “Taking of a Scalp.” At least he spared us his interpretation of an Indian baby being born, though other artists did not.
There were probably a half-dozen of these bronze speculators and the pieces that come out of that context are the great majority of what circulates through the Western art auctions, a vital part of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. Ed Mitch came up with the successful idea of a small series of “coffee drinkers,” characters swigging their non-alcoholic standby. Bob always produced a steady stream of small animals which have been sold more by Rex Brenneman than Mitch.
To keep these entrepreneurs interested, Bob used the same seductive strategies he had always used on customers. He invited them into his small private office (which he had to create when his fourth wife failed to keep the studio decent enough to take people out there) where he would show them art work he’d bought, suggesting that they were the only ones to see it, and telling them little tidbits about his history. Sometimes he suddenly had a cowboy accent, which always aggravated me. He’d pretend to be dumb and outmoded, outclassed by his customer. Once in a while he’d take someone out to the ranch and get them to smoke kinnikinnick in his tipi or ride his horse. Hey, it worked on me! Why wouldn’t it work on others?
These small-town whites were wary of Indians, but fascinated at the same time. Bob had grown up with them. (He was the same age as George Kicking Woman. His best grade school buddy was Jim Welch, the father of the writer. The writer was my age.) The entrepreneurs had no way of knowing just how initiated into secret ceremnies Bob really was, but they felt sympathy for him after the well-publicized dive-bombing attacks of the AIMsters, which they thought represented the whole tribe. As soon as Cut Bank people have enough money, they move over to the Flathead Valley to escape the climate and the Indians, but they are proud of the fact that Bob is buried in the Cut Bank cemetery. The only reason he’s buried there is that Lorraine, the fourth wife, ignored his wishes, which were to be buried on his ranch alongside his horse. Burying him there might have diminished the saleability of the ranch (it was bought by a coalition of Nature Conservancy and the tribe) and anyway, Lorraine’s goal was like that of Mamie Russell: prosperity and respectability. She buried him with his white family.
People asked about the Museum of Montana Wildlife in Browning. It was also bought by the tribe and is run by Siyeh, the wholly-owned business subsidiary of the tribe. The main hall, which once housed the full-mounts, was redesigned by a professional museum team and now shows “Leonardo” the baby tyrannosaurus rex. The workshop part is now the Blackfeet Heritage Center, a shop that is a source of crucial reference materials and novelties.
Del Gage, who was at last night’s meetiing with his wife, has been a state legislator. He is not an entrepreneur in the same way as Ed but he is someone I remember from the Sixties. (I don't remember Ed.) The third speaker I only know because he stepped into the shoes of Wilbur Werner, a friend of ours and supporter of Bob for many years. Wilbur’s law practice was based in part on being the county attorney and much of his power around the state was through his brother, a high official among the Catholics. He was also very active in local history organizations. Epstein married his daughter and when Wilbur retired, sat at his desk as county attorney and history buff.
Most of the information he supplied was wrong and I said so, which was the first that some people realized I was there. I was not invited to attend or to speak. Epstein made several remarks about Indians, which I doubt that he recognized as belittling nor his audience either. They have very little consciousness of “politically correct” protocols, only a nervous awareness that they’re Out There. As soon as the speeches were over, he hastened to me to mend fences. I shall have to write to Miss Manners for advice about how to handle lawyers who put their hands all over people in order to show relationship, dominance and ownership.
I led Epstein over to the Winold Reiss painting of “Old Lady Cree Medicine” to impress upon him that Bob’s foundry was competently run by two generations of her descendants. His reaction was “Oh, I have that print” and then, “Migod, is that an original Reiss? Where did they ever get such a valuable thing?” He knows damn well that Reiss’ family gave the whole collection that was hanging in the room to the Russell Museum. He never heard what I said about Carl and David. He went back to organize select members of Charlie’s Hands to go drinking while the rest of us sat with our coffee.
Even the best-hearted among these people (all men except Norma Ashby) who believe they were dear friends of Bob Scriver do not know and would be hard to persuade that they really WERE NOT part of his inner circle. In fact, Bob’s closest friends were either Indians, wives or Ace Powell. Small-town middle-class people were his family’s friends and peers -- not his. He didn’t drink, he didn’t play bridge except in the very earliest years with his second wife, and he always hunted with a wife and a buddy. But to point this out is to spoil sales and to diminish the prestige of donations. I wonder how parallel this is with Charlie Russell. Actually, I don’t wonder. I’m pretty persuaded.
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