Bonanza for Art of the West

The county cattlemen’s association’s annual sale is about to begin. As dusk falls on the Mid-State Fairgrounds, two men stand practicing lariat tosses, a barbecue drum belches tri-tip smoke, and a crowd collects in the exhibition hall, thick with Stetsons and Wranglers and leather fringe. The scene is everything a city slicker would imagine, except that the cattlemen aren’t here to sell cattle.

They’re here for the art.

“Amazing,” says one browser, admiring a stylized steer.

“The color!” says another, standing before a desert landscape.

In the unlikely event that you could haul an art critic or curator into this room, the 100-plus paintings and sculptures might well inspire scorn or giggles. But these artworks sell. Within minutes of the sale’s 7 p.m. opening, red dots are turning up next to oil paintings priced at $6,000 and $7,000.

Americans are buying Western art--pictures and sculptures of cowboys, Indians, ranch animals and the landscapes that sustain them--at a startling rate, paying prices that stretch into six and seven figures. In Los Angeles, the take of the Autry Museum of Western Heritage’s annual Western art sale has grown since 1998 from $350,000 to $1.4 million. In Reno, the annual Coeur D’Alene Art Auction jumped from $8 million in sales in 2000 to $14 million in 2001. In Oklahoma City, where the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum’s annual Prix de West sale has doubled its revenue in the last seven years, a June sale of about 275 paintings and sculptures fetched $2.5 million.

This doesn’t mean the Western art wagon train is about to roll over Monet, Van Gogh or Picasso. But a New West subculture has collected around this Old West imagery. Its mostly male ranks are populated at one extreme by genuine ranchers who want their interiors to match their outdoor lives, and at the other by wealthy indoorsmen looking to illustrate their dreams of escape.

“It’s no-nonsense art,” says Margaret L. Brown, editor of Houston-based Southwest Art magazine. “You don’t have to explain it or figure it out. It is what it is.”

In this world, cell phones may be sheathed in leather holsters, mustaches are often waxed, and belt buckles make fashion statements. Cowboys and Indians do business side by side. And though nobody can fully explain an art boom, insiders and outsiders naturally have their theories.

“It represents a clearer, simpler kind of life,” says David Pereira, a San Luis Obispo rancher on the art show committee.

And it may be no coincidence that Western art is booming just as an unprecedented number of vacation homes are rising in Jackson Hole, Wyo.; Sun Valley, Idaho; and other Western resort towns. “They don’t want modern art,” says Bob Drummond, co-founder of the Reno-based Coeur D’Alene auction. “They want Western paintings to fit their decor.”

Not every big-time aficionado, however, is merely filling wall space in a new cabin. Look, for instance, at the walls of John and Sara Lynn Geraghty. John Geraghty, 72, retired from the automotive business in the mid-1990s and has been running the American West Fine Art Exhibition and Sale at the Autry museum since 1998. Two hundred paintings and drawings hang in his comfortable Glendale home.

Geraghty, sporting a bolo tie and boots, looks at his collection like a teacher inspecting prize students.

“The cream comes to the top,” Geraghty says. “When a piece can tell a story, it’s going to last longer, and it’s got more value.”

Geraghty points out the impressionistic scenes in the dining room, the wildlife in the master bedroom, the color values in a misty scene by Richard Schmid of an Alaskan salmon trawler.

He pauses in the den, at “Army Regulations,” which shows four Indians on horses. “It’s not photorealism,” Geraghty says. “It’s real, honest-to-God masterful art. Look at the hint of veins in the horses’ legs.”

His view of abstract art: “It’s just a scam. I can’t appreciate it. It’s hard for me to have a big white canvas with a red dot in the corner and call it art.”

Attention to Detail,

and the Right Costume

Back at the fairgrounds, the Stetsons and Wranglers are jostling, and Steven Lang is talking about cowboy leggings.

“You’ve got to know when they wore shotgun chaps, and when they were batwing chaps,” says Lang. “You can’t use batwing chaps on an 1850s cowboy. I’m trying to paint for the 2% of people who know that.”

Lang, 41, plain-spoken and part Pawnee, wears a cowboy hat --”it’s almost the costume you have to wear,” he confesses--and stands in front of a booth with half a dozen of his canvases. Six years ago, he was designing characters for a video game company in San Jose.

Now Lang, who lives on the Monterey peninsula, paints Western scenes full time. The Paso Robles show, which took place April 4 to 6, is a logical place for Lang, whose works often fetch four-figure prices. The priciest works here are going for $10,000, not the $100,000 or more often seen in Phoenix, Oklahoma City, Reno and Los Angeles, not to mention Scottsdale and Santa Fe.

But here, too, signs of rising interest are clear. The San Luis Obispo County Cattlemen’s Assn. moved to Paso Robles this year because the crowds had grown too big for its home of 11 years, a barn near the Madonna Inn, outside San Luis Obispo. The change makes room for more commerce--$75,000 will change hands in the first three hours--and more stagecraft. Painter Earl Cacho has brought a bear skin and a steer skull to decorate his booth. Donald “Putt” Putman has a cowboy model pose while he works on a likeness.

Wayne Justus, the show’s featured artist, stands by his work in a tall hat, a vest, green bandanna and fancy stitched boots. Justus, who has been doing this for decades, has already sold one painting for $7,000, a few others for less.

“I’ll stay three weeks on end at a ranch in Texas or Arizona, where they still have chuck wagons on a million acres,” he tells admirers. “A lot of artists will go out there and snap a bunch of photos, then paint from the photos. I always think they oughtta take a bedroll along and ride 30 miles a day, so they can know what they’re seeing.” Collector Jerry Cowdrey, a landscaper from Sebastopol and a regular at sales in Los Angeles, Oklahoma City and Phoenix, lingers near Justus’ booth, then pounces at Lang’s: He’ll buy a 16-by-20-inch oil, “Cautious Approach,” which shows two Plains Indian hunters hunched under a bison pelt. The price: $4,200.

“I’ve always been interested in the Western scenes, more the Native American than the cowboy,” says Cowdrey. “I have a lot of empathy for what they’ve gone through. And how many paintings can you have of a cowboy on a horse?”

Even a Remington Can Receive Harsh Criticism

The problem with most Western art, curators and critics say, is that it’s nostalgia-driven illustration that reads like propaganda for Manifest Destiny. In short, says Albert Boime, a UCLA art history professor who has written extensively on 19th century American painting, “it’s the tinge of kitsch.”

Even the genre’s foremost figure takes frequent beatings in critical circles. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York dared mount a Frederic Remington retrospective in 1989, New York Times critic John Russell let the artist and curators have it with both barrels. Remington, wrote Russell, had “a macho, pre-Freudian and blatantly racist conception of American manhood” and produced paintings that are “hopelessly labored and inert, secondhand and second rate.”

Peter Hassrick, who co-curated that exhibition and serves as director emeritus of the University of Oklahoma’s Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West, notes that Western art’s role has always been problematic. From the time the first images were carried east from the frontier, Hassrick says, the painters were viewed as “pictorial storytellers” who illustrated history, or fed Eastern fantasies, but didn’t grapple with truth and beauty in the established way of the fine artist.

Since World War II, many museums have sprung up to celebrate the genre, but the country’s most revered art institutions continue to consider 20th century Western realists to be backward-looking and largely beside the point. In John Geraghty’s house or at the Paso Robles fairgrounds, however, looking backward isn’t a flaw, just a choice.

The market that these venues represent, says Southwest Art magazine’s Brown, grew in the 1960s, surged during the oil boom in the 1970s, then lagged after the oil bust of the 1980s. These days, sales of Western art’s twin giants, Remington (1861-1909) and Charles Russell (1864-1926), have never been stronger. In 1999, a Remington oil sold for $5.2 million; in 2001, a Russell went for $2.3 million--highs for each artist. In general, says Eric P. Widing, head of the Christie’s American art department in New York, Western works produced before 1950 are “one of the fastest-growing areas in American painting.”

Life is more complicated for living artists. Dealers and collectors may take notice when a buyer spends $100,000 on a new work, but the greater commercial test, professionals agree, is what that work fetches the next time it’s sold.

Because there are so many novice collectors--as many as one in four buyers at Western sales are first-timers--Geraghty and others warn that prices can rise and fall dramatically. Auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s, which happily handle works by living artists in other genres, steer clear of post-1950 Western works.

In this uncertain landscape, collectors might find comfort in a reliable brand: the letters “CA.” That abbreviation near the artist’s signature can add thousands to a sales price, because it means the artist is among the 27 men alive who have been invited to join Cowboy Artists of America.

Since four painters hatched the idea 37 years ago in a Sedona, Ariz., bar, the members of CA have built a modern medieval guild, granting membership to the artists they consider most accomplished, sustaining a museum in Kerrville, Texas, and staging a sale every fall at the Phoenix Art Museum.

In this group, none outsells a man in Tucson named Howard Terpning. Raised in Illinois and trained in Chicago, he served as a New York-based illustrator for magazines and the movie industry in the 1960s. He created the poster art for “The Sound of Music” and the re-release of “Gone With the Wind.”

In the mid-1970s, Terpning moved west and began studying and painting the Plains Indians. In 1979, he was invited to join the Cowboy Artists of America, and since then his prices have marked a remarkable trajectory. In the mid-’70s, recalls Stuart Johnson, owner of the Settler’s West Gallery in Tucson, Terpnings sold for $2,000 to $4,000. At auction in Reno last July, his painting of cavalry troops in full gallop, “Flags on the Frontier,” fetched $302,500. A few months later, Johnson sold another--three Blackfeet Indians riding on a backbone trail, for more than $400,000.

“A lot of critics will simply say, ‘That’s bad taste’ and ‘That’s vulgar money,’” says Hassrick. But, he suggests, Western art’s unique position in American culture makes it worth more scrutiny than it has gotten.

UCLA’s Boime goes one step further. One day, he suggests, “there will be scholars dealing with the Cowboy Artists of America.”

Something Irresistible

Rounds Up Buyers

Jerry Cowdrey is back, and only a little bit sheepish. It’s Day 2 of the Paso Robles sale and Cowdrey, the same collector who mused the night before about how tired he was of cowboys, now stands in certified cowboy country, at Wayne Justus’ booth.

“I thought all night about that little ‘Noon Meal’ piece,” Cowdrey says. “So I came back and bought it.”

“Noon Meal” is a picture of cowboys lined up at a chuck wagon. Cowdrey pays $3,500, which puts his weekend’s contribution to the boom at $7,700.

And just wait until next year. David Pereira of the cattlemen’s association reports that the 2003 show will be timed to coincide with local wineries’ zinfandel festival and the West Coast Cutting and Reining championships.

“Horses, art and zinfandel,” says Pereira. “What else is left in life?”