James Bama
1926-2022
James Bama, the Western icon known for his evocative portraits of stoic Western figures, died on April 24 in Cody, Wyoming. He was 95 years old. Although many art collectors are familiar with his Western work, Bama had a long career that took him through many genres. Born in New York City, Bama showed an early aptitude in the arts, though his art training was interrupted at the beginning of World War II. As soon as he was old enough he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, but the war would end before he could be deployed. After returning home, Bama found he qualified for the G.I. Bill, which allowed him to go the Art Students League and study under illustrator Frank J. Reilly.
His illustration career would prove to be quite lucrative as he found work for the Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest, Bantam and Dell paperback books, boxes for model kits and an early period in men’s adventure magazines. He was also instrumental in creating the look of Doc Savage for the hit series of books.
In 1966, Bama and his wife Lynn, one of his early models, visited Wyoming for the first time. Not long after they moved there permanently and never left. It was in Wyoming that the illustrator began transitioning to become a fine artist. “Bama is Western art that any self-respecting art critic is automatically required to sneer at. But it’s hard to sneer,” wrote Gerrit Henry. “In a supernaturalistic style that makes New York Photo Realism look like Action Painting, Bama paints heroes of the contemporary West. He takes the true stuff of American myth, Olympian figures of a dying past, and reinstates them in our cultural consciousness…for all its desert-like stretches, Wyoming has proved a fertile ground for painting of a very unfashionable, very powerful sort.”
Today many of Bama’s works are in prominent collections all around the country, including in a number of museum collections.