Chronicles & Confessions of a Young Collector
Let me briefly introduce myself—and this new column, AA style: My name is Jonathan Vaughters, and I am an obsessive Western art collector. I am, by the standards of the Western art world, quite young too. This new column is a place for me to scribble about my conquests, foibles, errors and true love for Western art and the addiction that is known as, collecting. For many of you, the Western art world is something you’ve learned about over many decades. The Western art world probably seems natural to you. However, for us newbies, this world it is an intimidating and hard to understand world (do they really burn paintings that don’t sell at auction?). These are the chronicles of my learning this strange new place and all the (wonderful) people I’ve encountered along the way.
My background is probably a bit different than most of folks I’ve met in the Western American art world. I am not an oil tycoon, nor do I own a ranch. I don’t curate for a museum, I don’t have a PHD in Native American culture and I have only recently purchased cowboy boots. Nope, none of those. Instead, I come from a rather distant community to Western art. I’ve spent my entire life trying to win the Tour de France. Yes, the bicycle race. Two thousand miles in three weeks wearing spandex. Now, I don’t race myself anymore, but I did do that, now I manage the top ranked American cycling team in the world. So, even though I don’t pedal as much, I’m still trying to win the Tour de France.
So then, how did I get here? A columnist in Western Art Collector magazine? I suppose I’ve spent many years focused on observing aesthetics and beauty. Maybe all those thousands of lonely miles of training on bike in the countryside makes you think about landscape a bit more? Perhaps also studying beauty, and learning about aesthetics. Trying to create it myself too. A bit. And then, later, obsessively trying to collect it. It’s all in my blood,
I suppose, as I come from a family who has had a fair few members educated at the Art Institute of Chicago and whose works have been displayed across the globe. I grew up with the work of my great-great-aunt Sara Mae Hess hanging on the wall, in the same way her work once hung next to Higgins and Hennings in Chicago. I never knew who any of them were. They were just old paintings and pictures in my parents’ home.
For the greater part of my 46 years in this world, I never really looked at my home, my home state or the western United States as a place of beauty, as a place of aesthetics to be admired. It was just home. Colorado. A nice place to live. Beauty and aesthetic perfection was elsewhere in this world, but not so much at home.
I have no idea why I thought that, but I did. Familiarity breeds contempt, they say. Or maybe just apathy?
I spent most of my life traveling. From very young on, I was always in a new part of the world. Europe, South America, Australia, wherever…these were the places beauty was to be found. I observed and mimicked European fashion, design and architecture. I admired the mountainous landscape of the Andes and the beaches of Bermuda. I found beauty all around the world. And when it came to art, I learned about the great masters, the Flemish renaissance, French impressionism, Toulouselautrec and Catalan modernism. As I came of age, I began to decorate homes I lived in with Victorian style, then later I moved to Beaux Arts and Art Nouveau. I developed my own worldly and unique taste in antiques and art along the way. I thought of myself as quite stylistically superior to my native cow town of, meh, Denver, Colorado.
I never once noticed any of the beauty, the art, the architecture or the culture of right where I was born. It was beneath me. I was better than the place that had formed
me and raised me as child. The western United States was not for style. It was for being outdoors, eating Mexican food and skiing. Not art. Not design. Not Aesthetics.
I moved into an Arts and Crafts Bungalow built in 1914 about 15 years ago. I studiously started to look at how an arts and crafts home should be decorated. Stickley furniture, Willian Morris patterns and textiles, hammered copper wood boxes. And those became my new collecting fantasies and obsessions. Then, one day, I noticed an old picture of a Navajo rug in a home just like mine. It was next to a Gustav Stickley table with another Navajo blanket draped over it. How did that happen, I thought? Navajo rugs were something I grew up with, but never saw much value in. They were on the floors of hippies in Colorado who were somehow trying to be Native Americans. Not in the homes with high style of William Morris and Co.
But in the picture it looked good. It looked real. And it looked like the way my house should be. So, I poked my head into the world of Native American and Western art.
I had read in one of Gustav Stickley’s writings that the paintings in a Craftsman home should be that of the landscape near the home. So, wanting to be true to that, I looked for landscapes painted around eh time by house was built.
An old antiques dealer near me seemed to always have Arts and Crafts furniture I was looking for, so I figured I’d ask him about this new found thought of mine to bring a little West into my home. The owner lit up. He immediately told me how beautiful it was to combine the wood and natural design of Stickley furniture with the textures of Native American rugs and the colors in a fine old western painting. He pulled me back into his cluttered and wonderful smelling place only an antique store that’s been in business for 50 years can have. On the wall in the back, he pointed out a painting of Sierra Blanca, a mountain in southern Colorado, by a Colorado artist named Charles Partridge Adams.
He explained to me that Adams had been the first artist to truly paint the mountains of Colorado. And that he was a relative of our second president, John Adams.
It was everything I loved about collecting. History, a sense of place, a fun story behind it, a purpose…and it suddenly seemed stylish. Hard to believe there were painters in Colorado at the same time as Monet, but there were. And they were painting the beauty of the American West that I had never noticed for the previous 35 years.
I impulsively bought the painting. For far too much money. Having no idea what it was really worth. And I hung it over the fireplace mantle in my house.
I had taken my first step in becoming a collector of Western art. How little did I understand at that moment how damned addictive, crazy, and rewarding this Western world can be.
So, now to start a regular column that will chronicle all the wins, losses, mistakes and luck that I’ve had in my last decade as a young Western art collector. I hope to shed some light on how the art, the art market and the people surrounding Western art will be viewed as our country, and indeed world, undergoes a massive cultural and generational turnover. Maybe I’ll even help an even younger collector take his or her first step into this quirky and complex world. Maybe inspire someone who comes from the West, like I do, to not think of their place of birth as somewhere to escape, but instead somewhere to embrace.