PDF - Jackson Hole Art Auction

The
of the
COWBOY
A century after Russell and Remington, artwork
depicting cowboys lives on through the generations
of artists who followed them. By Michael Clawson
TRIED TRUE
Melvin Warren (1920-1995), Approaching Storm, 1981, oil on linen, 36 x 60”.
Sold for $198,000, an artist record, by Altermann Galleries & Auctioneers in 2014.
A
uthor Don Hedgpeth likes to
point out that Charles M. Russell
and Frederic Remington, the
grandfathers of cowboy art, were
two very different kinds of artists.
“The contrasts are quite clear: Russell was
the cowboy artist, Remington was the curious
observer. Russell had ‘been there done that,’
and Remington was an outsider. Russell’s
intimacy with the West showed in his work,
while Remington was more of a studio artist.
Russell painted like a poet, Remington like a
journalist,” Hedgpeth says. “It’s remarkable
how different they were.”
Yet, as different as they were, their dual
influence was so vital to cowboy art as a genre
that upon their deaths—Remington in 1909
and Russell in 1926—the genre and its future
looked downright bleak. The Taos Society of
Artists, formed in 1915, largely focused on
Pueblo Indians, with exception to a certain
extent to W. Herbert Dunton. And outside
of artists such as Frank Tenney Johnson, Will
James, Edward Borein and William Gollings, a
post-Russell/Remington cowboy renaissance,
while producing stunning works, did not stun
the world the way the previous generation
had. “The artists really only had regional
representation, and it was very limited,”
Hedgpeth says. “Artists like Frank Tenney
Johnson, they were sold with two Navajo rugs
and a set of Molesworth chairs. The work was
great, but it was treated differently.”
“After Russell died in 1926,” Hedgpeth
adds, “cowboy art went into the dark ages, like
after the glory and fall of Rome.”
After several decades without a clear path
forward, cowboy art was viewed by outsiders
as a relic of America’s distant history, even as
cowboys were fully entrenched in pop culture,
including on television and in movies. What
happened next would change even that:
the Space Race, the Vietnam War, counter
culture, the Beat Generation, and turmoil and
disharmony across the country. Cowboys were
suddenly shoved off lunchboxes, TV sets and
posters hanging over children’s beds. They
were icons of the past—in art and culture—
while the world turned to science fiction,
rock ’n’ roll and abstract expressionism.
When discussing this time period of cowboy
art, Seth Hopkins, executive director of the
Booth Western Art Museum, invokes the 1995
animated film Toy Story, about a cowboy doll
being replaced in a child’s bedroom by a space
ranger. “Toy Story is not a kids movie. It’s about
the battle for the hearts and minds of young
kids. The cowboy was a hero to young people
in the late 1960s, and he was replaced by the
astronaut and the dinosaur,” Hopkins says,
adding that the adventure and poetry of the West
never lost its luster, but it was pushed aside by
pop culture. “The cowboy was still a romantic
icon of America. It had a lot of social meaning
and identified with rugged individualism and
patriotic spirit. And cowboys were still doing
their thing, even today. Like that song says, you
just can’t see them from the interstate.”
Cowboys, interstate or not, pushed back,
Tom Ryan (1922-2011), White Horns, oil on canvas, 28 x 36”. Sold for $66,000 by Altermann Galleries & Auctioneers in 2015.
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Above:
James Reynolds (19262010), Victoria Cowboy,
oil on canvas, 24 x 36”.
Sold for $54,000 by
Altermann Galleries &
Auctioneers in 2015.
Left:
Charlie Dye (19061972), Old Blue in the
Lead, oil on panel,
22 x 40”. Sold for
$240,000, an artist
record, by Altermann
Galleries & Auctioneers
in 2013.
and in the 1960s reaffirmed their presence in
the landscape of American culture. Starting
with the formation of the Cowboy Artists of
America in 1965, cowboy art slowly gained
new ground. Western-themed museums were
opened, galleries filled their walls with images
of bucking broncs and cattle drives, and painters
emerged from obscurity (and jobs in illustration)
to become masters of the genre, artists such as
Charlie Dye, George Phippen, John Clymer,
James Reynolds, Bill Owen, Tom Lovell and—
an artist Hedgpeth calls a worthy successor to
Russell and Remington—Joe Beeler.
“The artists were a reflection of a reaction
to the 1960s. These were people from the same
generation—my generation—that had grown
up with Gene Autry. Cowboys were more
influential to boys in informing their values
than Sunday school was,” Hedgpeth says. “The
radicalism of the 1960s seemed like a threat to
those old values and traditions. So we turned
back to that way of life. We turned more to the
imagined West, not the real West. The real West
was uglier and more brutal than Zane Grey and
John Wayne. The imagined West felt old and
familiar to us at that time.”
B. Byron Price, director of the Charles
61
Joe Beeler (1931-2006), XIT is Born, 1977, oil, 24 x 48”. Photo by Jordan Houston. Courtesy The Eddie Basha Collection.
M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the
American West at the University of Oklahoma,
says a new generation of art collectors and artists
were drawn to the authenticity of the West. Take
painter Tom Ryan, for example, who didn’t paint
cowboys from the 1880s, but painted modern
cowboys from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. “Tom
Ryan really found his niche on the Four Sixes
Ranch dealing with the milieu of that time
period and the cowboys of that era, as opposed
to recycling from Russell-esque or Remingtonesque characters,” Price says. “He painted
contemporary views of traditional subjects, and
it set him and his art apart from others.”
While cowboy artists from the 1960s and ’70s
were offering new views of an old subject, they
were also delivering that timeless iconography
that cowboys inspired—they were blending old
Frank Tenney Johnson (1874-1939),
The Night Hawk, 1936, oil on canvas,
24 x 30”. Sold for $700,000 at
Scottsdale Art Auction in 2007.
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Maynard Dixon (1875-1946), Cowpuncher, oil on canvas, 30¼ x 25”.
Sold for $402,500 at the Jackson Hole Art Auction in 2011.
and new, and reinvigorating the genre while
doing it. Consider the bucking bronco, one of
Western art’s most enduring images. It was an
image that both Russell and Remington had
painted, with Remington’s Bronco Buster being
one of the most recognizable sculptural works
in American art. It was also an image painted
by pre-CAA artists such as Maynard Dixon and
Dunton, and artists from the mid- to late-20th
century, such as Dye, Beeler, Olaf Wieghorst
and Frank McCarthy. So influential is that image
that somewhere at this exact moment an artist is
painting an airborne horse underneath a cowboy
rider with one arm raised high.
“The imagery was iconic. And as long as
we have American history there will be people
interested in that imagery, in cowboys and
Native Americans and landscapes and so forth,”
Price says, adding that cowboy artists started
painting the West to preserve the West, and that
dynamic is now a self-fulfilling prophecy.
From the mid-1960s onward, the CAA
founders and their contemporaries quickly
gained momentum and eventually created a
sprawling market for cowboy and Western art.
With expansion came some growing pains,
but cowboy art gleefully persisted, even as it
surged out of the 20th century and into the 21st.
Today those mid-tier, post-Russell/Remington
artists are collected not just for the aesthetic
value of their compositions, but also because
the time and place they represent through their
works. And auction records support that with
banner sales numbers, many of them achieved
within the last decade, proving that cowboy
art, especially mid- to late-20th century cowboy
art, has impressive staying power.
Consider Melvin Warren, a CAA member
whose trail-themed works in the 1970s and
1980s are classics of the genre. All three of
Warren’s top auction records occurred within
the last four years—his top piece, Approaching
Storm, realizing $198,000 at an Altermann
Galleries & Auctioneers sale in 2014. He’s not
the only artist with a spree of recent records:
Beeler’s Spellbound sold for $69,000 in 2014;
Dye’s Old Blue in the Lead sold for $240,000 in
2013; Ryan’s The Impressionable Years realized
$203,150 in 2007; and Owen’s Winter Work
sold for $50,000 in 2008.
“I see a corollary between cowboy art and
the entrepreneurial spirit of the person who
buys the art. To succeed you have to work hard,
get dirty and sometimes go into unfamiliar
territory. There are big risks and, if you succeed,
great rewards and another exciting adventure,”
Altermann co-owner Tony Altermann says.
“I’m convinced that the viewer and ultimate
buyer has a vicarious experience and imagines
himself to be that character depicted in the
painting or sculpture by Joe Beeler, Frank
Tenney Johnson, Harry Jackson, Johnny
Hampton, Jim Norton, Bill Nebeker, Gary
Niblett or Olaf Wieghorst.”
Altermann adds, “There are more buyers
out there now than there ever has been. There
63
Robert Lougheed (1910-1982), Open Range Encounter, oil on canvas, 29½ x 59½”.
Estimate: $40/60,000. Available at the 2016 Jackson Hole Art Auction.
are more museums dedicated to Western
art than before. The collectors are more
geographically diverse than ever before. It
certainly helps that the economy is continuing
to expand out West. There is still room for
growth in Western art.”
Brad Richardson, owner of The Legacy
Gallery and partner of Scottsdale Art Auction,
has also seen considerable interest in what
he calls “first-generation CA artists.” He says
that the market for some of the more famous
artists—Russell, Remington, William R.
Leigh, N.C. Wyeth—is so competitive that
collectors on a budget are usually priced out.
A Remington could easily sell in the high six
figures, but a terrific cowboy piece from the
1970s could sell in the mid-five figures, a
considerable difference to new collectors.
“Not to mention that many of the great
Russells and Remingtons will never be
available to the public again because they’re
owned by museums and other institutions, so
64
collectors are turning to these first-generation
CA artists because they’re more accessible
and affordable,” Richardson says. “We’re
finding this market to be very strong. These
artists—such as Tom Ryan, Bill Owen, James
Reynolds, and Olaf Wieghorst—they have
unique individual styles. These artists are not
being replaced, and they’ve weathered the test
of time, which is appealing to a collector.”
With sustained growth from these artists
in museums, auctions and galleries, the
question of how long this 50-year cowboy
renaissance is going to last comes into play,
but the answer can be found in the next
generation of artists, which has picked up
right where Warren, Reynolds, Wieghorst and
all the other cowboy artists left off.
“Western art is uniquely American, and it
has a romance to it. People travel to the West
to experience the views, the vistas, the light…
they have a tendency to fall in love with it, and
that’s something you’ll see in this next group
of artists,” says Richardson, who represents
painters such as Glenn Dean, Kyle Polzin,
G. Harvey and many others. A number of his
artists are already collecting auction records—
Polzin’s Mystic Warrior sold for $287,500 in
2014, and Harvey’s History in the Making
achieved $409,500 in April—something
that was paved for them first by Russell and
Remington, and then again by the artists that
found success in the 1960s and 1970s.
Other contemporary cowboy artists making
waves include Logan Maxwell Hagege, Jason
Rich, Teal Blake, Bill Anton, Shawn Cameron,
Tom Browning, Grant Redden, Bruce Greene,
Andy Thomas, and R.S. Riddick. Some of them
are actual cowboys and a cowgirl, and others
just paint them.
Don Hedgpeth—who’s written important
books on Beeler, Robert Lougheed, Howard
Terpning, Tom Lovell, among others—is
optimistic about the future of cowboy art, but
admits that children and young people don’t
Bruce Greene, The Watchin’ Grey, oil, 36 x 26”
have as many opportunities to see it.
“It doesn’t forecast well when Westerns
aren’t on TV or in the movies anymore, at least
not like they used to be. Even kids in New
York City and Philadelphia, far away from the
West, grew up with cap guns and cowboy
hats. Those kids grew up, went to law school
or Ivy League schools, and turned into the core
group of collectors today, which is why they
fill their houses with Western artwork. But kids
today don’t have heroes like that. Kids have
stronger links to Star Wars than cowboys,”
he says, adding that young people have to be
exposed to Western art for them to appreciate
it. The cowboys, for their part, they’ll just
keep cowboying. “The real cowboys won’t be
bothered, because as long as McDonald’s sells
hamburgers and Ruth’s Chris sells T-bones then
they’ll be out there doing what they do.”
Glenn Dean, Forging Ahead, oil, 36 x 42”
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The
of the
COWBOY
JULIE NIGHSWONGER
(307) 534-5314
www.julienighswonger.com
Price Range
$500 to $7,500
By living in Wyoming, Julie
October Morning, oil, 10 x 20"
Nighswonger is surrounded with
the beauty and charm of the
art because of the variety surrounding
Western lifestyle. The day-to-day
me at any given moment,” she says.
traditions of cowboys are a living heritage
“I cannot think of a more perfect day
to a way of life in the West. The unique
than to be on horseback, trailing cattle
qualities of the people and landscape
in the company of cowboys who love
provide endless opportunities to explore
the lifestyle that has chosen them. In
and paint. Her deep love of the West
my paintings I try to capture the sights
encourages her to observe and feel, to
and sounds of the cattle on the trail
process and envision her next painting.
and the feel of the sunshine in the crisp
“I choose to paint Western-themed
morning air. My hope is to portray the
smell of the pine trees that follow the
creek bed and my love of the meadows
and mountains where these cowboys
call home. My paintings are my visions
of the cowboy lifestyle.”
Nighswonger currently has paintings
hanging in the Mountain Oyster Club
Art Show in Tucson, Arizona. She is
represented by Deselms Fine Art in
Cheyenne, Wyoming.
DAN HARE
dan@jlhare.com
www.danhareart.com
Price Range
$1,000 to $6,000
Dan Hare was always determined
to be an artist. He studied art all
through his pre-college career and
through his first four years of college.
He also went on to study architecture,
construction technology and business
administration, after which he
went on to a successful career in the
corporate world.
Upon leaving the corporate world
15 years ago, Hare came back to his
first love…art. He began to study art
again under the tutelage of Philip
66
Dog Day Afternoon, oil on canvas, 21 x 36"
Journeay. They have been associates
for over 10 years and Hare is
currently a part-time art instructor at
Journeay’s studio.
Ever since coming west from eastern
Canada as a young boy, Hare developed
a love for Western cowboy culture.
Th is love has guided him to painting
contemporary Western culture.
Hare’s paintings and drawings range
from landscapes and portraits to
contemporary Western scenes.
His works reflect much of the
painting techniques developed by the
impressionist masters in their use of
color and application. His combined
use of realism and impressionist color
techniques is evident in his paintings.