In Arizona: A Million Dollar Sale of Cowboy Art

By John Skow

The cowboys are doing all right these days. Gordon Snidow has a gold watch that is like to give him a sprained wrist. Jack Swanson hasn't quit breaking horses, because he is only 53, but he is in a position to ease off a bit. Fred Fellows doesn't have to rope in rodeos for a living any more, which is just as well, since roping is no living at all, unless you can eat the silver belt buckles they give away for prizes. Joe Beeler is pushing the outer limits of legal bliss, because he doesn't have to wear those damn black business shoes.

Never did wear them, as it turned out. Bought them, and a suit to match, but they stayed in the closet, curling up at the toes. In the late '50s, he and Snidow studied art at a school in Hollywood, of all places, and his G.I. Bill ran out, so he went back to Oklahoma. There he set himself up as an easel painter; commercial art didn't interest him. The paintings he liked to do interested almost no one else. What he painted was scenes of the Old West, cowboys and Indians, cattle and horses. Pictures scraggly with sagebrush, that nobody bought. He lugged his canvases to stock shows trying to peddle them. To keep his family alive, he says in his soft Western voice, "Ah punched cattle, shot squirrels in the streets."

"In the streets?" asks a listener, because Beeler has been known to improve on the facts when he is telling a story. "Oh, absolutely," he says. "Skinny little suckers." Things got worse, and finally Beeler took an offer to move East and work as an illustrator. He doesn't bother to say what city. It's just "East," a sorry region, though no doubt there's a lot of nice folks there. That's when he bought the black shoes and suit to match. But then came a commission to do a Western scene for $350, and Beeler went on wearing cowboy boots.

He is in Phoenix, installed in some luxury at the Hyatt Regency, wearing jeans, a belt buckle the size of a locomotive headlight and a fine-looking Stetson. He and the 23 other members of the Cowboy Artists of America are having a show and sale at the Phoenix Art Museum. Beeler and John Hampton, who was born in New York City--dropped down the wrong chimney by the stork, he says--and two other men founded the group back in 1965 to tip the odds on Western art in the direction of survival. Last year the 14th annual sale brought in over $870,000, but this year the cowboys hope to make real money. They are, in fact, on the point of becoming trendy. A group of oilmen plans to build a substantial museum for them over in Kerrville, Texas. A few months ago, they sent paintings, on invitation, to the 91st Salon of the Societe des Artistes Independents in Paris.

Fame and money clearly bring satisfaction to these Westerners. Yet there is a common note to their recollections, mostly expressed without bitterness, but not without hurt. Virtually every man was made to understand, on his first contact with the teachers and critics who guarded the doors of the art world, that representational art was not to be taken seriously, and that art depicting cowboys was kitsch, so corny as to be laughable.

Jack Swanson, a big, easy-talking fellow, was in his 20s, breaking horses up in Oregon, when he got a box of paints for Christmas. As a boy he'd drawn horses. Now he took a horse out into the corral, tied it to a post and began to paint. And felt sweat break out on his forehead. "I had never had the experience of being so excited." So he enrolled in art school in Oakland, taking with him a couple of his horses. He lasted less than a term. "They'd have all these pots on a table, and you were supposed to paint them, but I'd paint a horse. And this big lunk of a professor, a guy about my age, he only stood about six foot six, he came over and took one of my horse drawings up to the front of the class and started ridiculing it. I said, 'If you like to ride my tail so much, why don't you come outside and fight me?' I was kicked out of school. A recalcitrant, they said."

One of Swanson's horses was a stud named Amigo S, who had some speed on him, and in 1947 Swanson began racing on the quarter-horse circuit. Riding without boots, to cut weight, he twice tied the world record for the furlong (12.3 seconds). Then Amigo S came up lame, and Swanson found an art school at Carmel, Calif. near the ocean, so he could exercise him in salt water. Mornings, he broke horses to make a living--"I'd have half a dozen of them lined up in the corral, already saddled, and I'd ride them one after another"--and in the afternoons he would paint. In the evenings he would work at building his house on a ranch he was buying near Carmel. It was 20 years of this routine before art paid the bills.

Now, on sale day at the Phoenix Art Museum, members of the Men's Arts Council are stationed by the paintings with cake boxes at the ready. This is not an auction but a sale at prices fixed by each artist. The 1,500 collectors crowded into the gallery (fire laws won't permit more) pay $75 each for the privilege of stuffing intent-to-purchase chips into the cake boxes. Then names of lucky purchasers are drawn out of the boxes, sometimes from among several hundred chips. The expensive works tend to attract the most chips. Tonight John Clymer, an old Saturday Evening Post cover artist, has a painting priced at $80,000. So does his colleague, Tom Lovell, another successful illustrator in the old days.

A stroll around the exhibition turns up nothing that is not representational, nothing whose style or execution departs any considerable distance from the work of Frederic Remington or Charles M. Russell, the great turn-of-the-century cowboy artist. Bill Nebeker's small bronze, Givin' the Boys a Show, is a rousing halloo for Remington and the past, a bucking horse with all four legs stiff and off the ground, and a rider waving his hat high. Lovell's Cooling the Big 50 is a powerful charcoal drawing showing a plainsman pouring water on the barrel of his rifle, which he has been firing for some time at an unseen target (buffaloes? attacking Indians?).

Sentiment and nostalgia undoubtedly count for much of the popularity of such works, especially with collectors for whom a purchase is, among other things, a blow struck for God's country (the title of a fine James Boren watercolor) against the effete and fashionable East. A very high level of skill, and a feeling of bedrock belief, save these paintings from triteness, sometimes against high odds. Gary Niblett's big oil Typhoid would seem to be intolerably melodramatic. It shows a couple of covered wagons in the background, and in the foreground a mother and two young daughters huddling before a fresh grave. But the artist's handling of an enormous sweep of empty grassland and gray sky keeps it honest. Never mind melodrama, Niblett seems to be saying, the pioneers did face that kind of immensity, and a lot of them died doing it.

All details are exact. Gear is correct for the historical period and the region. If there is war paint on an Indian, an expert can tell whether the warrior is a Sioux or a Crow. To Clymer, who spends his summers traveling about the Northwest doing research, this is simply a matter of "honoring the past." Bill Owen's paintings record the working lives of contemporary cowboys in central Arizona. "People think that this is all dead and gone, that it's a fantasy scene," he says. "It's not; roping and branding and range life haven't changed much from the 19th century on the big ranches. What I paint will be history in 100 years, and I want people to know it was done right."

The collectors stride in. They will buy $1,292,050 worth of sagebrush work before the evening is over, and gallerygoers over the next few days will buy out the show with another $200,000 in purchases. Beeler will make $246,500. An observer stands beside a burly rent-a-car millionaire in shirtsleeves who has bid on one of Bill Owen's canvases, just as someone else's name is drawn out of the cake box. "Tough luck," says the observer. "I'll get it," says the millionaire. The observer asks what he means, and is told that an offer of 20% over the purchase price invariably persuades the buyer to resell. But what if the buyer is fond of the painting and already has all the money he needs?

"There isn't any such person," says the millionaire with great confidence as he walks off to make his deal. --By John Skow

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