Tenderfoots and City Slickers
It really can’t be overstated enough: Western art is everywhere. Sometimes you have to look for it, and maybe lift up a rock or two, but it’s there. In May, publishers Wendie Martin and Adolfo Castillo and I were in New York City for the American Art Fair and several of the spring sales at the big auction houses. Of course,
New York City is a great art destination, and we saw lots of beautiful work. I saw Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Andrew Wyeth’s Christina World at the
Museum of Modern Art. I stood in front of Emanuel Leutze’s great Washington Crossing the Delaware and marveled at the gallery with the Hudson River School artists at the Met. And then there were countless galleries at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams— Warhol, Lichtenstein, Basquiat, Sargent, Cassatt… great works at every turn.
And at almost every venue there was Western art of some form. Sometimes it was subtle—landscapes of Yosemite or Yellowstone, or explorers venturing into the wild frontier past the Missouri River—and other times it practically bonked you on the head, like Frederic Remington’s unbelievable On the Southern Plains on display in the American wing at the Met. Or even Charles Schreyvogel’s My Bunkie, which was displayed just a few paintings away. Over at Christie’s, which had the Knobloch Collection on view, it was on hit after another: Moran, Remington, Russell, Sharp, Farny, Couse and others. When the collection sold, it went for more than $21 million. Meanwhile the regular American sale brought in $9 million. The West was riding high!
Something else really amusing happened to me one night as I walked back to my hotel. I was walking toward Midtown on Fifth Avenue alongside Central Park. It was dark so I could see into the first-floor windows that were elevated above the sidewalk. One of the windows caught my eye with a painting of a cowboy, and then one window over there was a Western bronze. Glancing up and seeing recognizable images, there of all places, was wonderful.
It can be easy to think Western art lives in the West, but it’s everywhere. It’s in New York City, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Miami and then all of the places that you already know about—santa Fe, Scottsdale, Denver, Jackson Hole, Great Falls and many others. Western art is timeless, and it speaks to this country and where it came from. So whether you live in the city or a ranch deep in the heart of the West, we thank you for participating in this exciting aspect of American art.