Sunlight slips through the windows, past walls full of Western paintings, deer and antelope heads, and bear and cougar skins. Today, Harvey is himself a corporation. Frankly, says Michael Duty, the director of Indianapolis Eiteljorg Museum of American Indian and Western art, I thought his paintings looked like one of those CinemaScope movies shown on a regular television screen, in which all the figures got elongatedand for me, it all seemed a little too pat., Harvey, however, thought there was an audience for what he likes to call nostalgic, wholesome themes. He wanted to create a dreamy, serene West that was about to vanish forever, one heroic age yielding to another. Its a nice big old fine piece. Tour Texas Travel Tip: Want to visit the Museum of Western Art right now? And thats why, on a March evening in 1976, four hundred of them dressed up in black ties and evening gowns and went to the ballroom of the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas to watch something called the Western Heritage Sale. These Boots - Neutral Glitter II / Beige Art Print, These Boots - Neutral II / Beige Art Print, Cholla, Orange Flowering Cactus Art Print, Relics of West Texas x Marfa Photography Art Print, Purple travel trailer in Marfa, West Texas Art Print, Texas Longhorns in Big Bend National Park Art Print, Happy Smiley Face Says Howdy - Western Aesthetic Art Print, Prickly pear cactus in Marfa, West Texas Art Print, Nowhere But Here in Marfa, Texas Art Print, Relics of West Texas II X Marfa Texas Photography Art Print, thunderbird motel - hillsboro, texas Art Print, Wild West sunset - Cowboy Men horse riding at sunset Vintage west vintage illustration Art Print, Texas Star - West Texas Marfa Photography Art Print, Art prints are available in up to five different sizes, Each art print is custom trimmed and includes a border for easy framing, All prints feature a crisp white, matte background. Art dealer Burford staged a series of shows for Harvey through the late seventies, and the invitation list was like a whos who of Texas power: Amarillo oilman Boone Pickens, Dallas mayor Robert Folsom, Kerrville flooring and pizza tycoon Lloyd Brinkman, and Dallas developers John Eulich and Mack Pogue. 
Whatever you paint, Best said, Ill write a check for it on the spot. It was an astounding proposal. I didnt know what to say, Harvey recalls. Read more. Its history did not create myths for him so much as his own myths created the West. Theyre just nice to look at, plain and simple. In Bests hands, a Harvey painting is like a rare commodity, hoarded and manipulated to drive up the price. I dont find a painting very intriguing unless I can put a horse in it., To learn how to paint a horse, in 1967 Harvey bought an old mare named Buttons, kept her on a piece of land he owned near Austin, and went out daily to sketch her. 
For example, in 1889 Remington painted Cow-boys Coming to Town for Christmas. And although Best has now sold his interests in Southwest Art and in the Dallas and Houston galleriesHarvey paintings have bypassed Texas altogether and are now sold only at Trailsidehe has used his numerous contacts to get Harvey the Smithsonian deal (a chance for enormous national exposure, says Best) and the Russian tour, for which Harvey will paint scenes of Russia at the turn of the century. 
Harvey, in white New Balance tennis shoes, khakis, and a white button-down shirt, slouches on a couch, a man utterly at ease compared with the way he looked at the gallery opening. Harvey is a devout Christian with little stomach for violence, and he is a devoted family man who says proudly that he has consulted his wife, Pat, on every decision he has made, even artistic ones. You remember that one?, Harvey smiles as politely as he can. It was a lesson he passed on to Harvey, whom he befriended in the early seventies. Best wont comment on the amount of the contract except to say that it was worth many millions of dollars. He explains, But the feeling was that Harvey was such a hot property that if you had some kind of deal with him that was even remotely reasonable, you would come out in the long run very well., Best was already experienced in this game. Change their uniforms and they could be cowboys. 
Designed by distinguished Texas architect O'Neil Ford, the building is reminiscent of a hacienda, with a handcrafted boveda ceiling, mesquite wood and Saltillo tile floors, and life-sized bronzes dotting the grounds. Though the crew-cut, bespectacled Harvey didnt even pretend to be a cowboyhe rarely rode a horse and had tried raising a few head of cattlehe knew the bluebonnet genre was dying. Brinkman taught Harvey that an art career is built like a good business: One finds his niche in the market, creates a product that fills that niche, and never strays from it. It was of a horse in front of another horse. Through careful marketing, Best has made it feel like an accomplishment just to get hold of a fairly cheap Harvey print. Some painters became known for their Indians, others for their cavalry scenes, others for their great trail ridesand Harvey for his shadowy cowboys. But, oh, does it sell. Back then, you know, this state had bluebonnet painters coming out its ass.. Head All the Way North on I-35 for Texas-Style Barbecue in Minnesota, East Texass Most Exciting New Store Is Hidden in a Small-town Mansion, Welcome to Party Island on Lady Bird Lake. Get a preview of what your experience here will be like on this virtual tour. They all have the bearing of people who are obviously important, wherever they are from. Yet he refused to do the same old Remingtonesque picture of the cowboy hurtling through the brush with gun in hand. To maintain Harveys image of exclusivity, Best offers limited editions of a Harvey painting, sometimes as few as 1,250 prints. It seemed like there was this little club of men, all gunning for the next G. Harvey painting just so they could say they had beaten the others at getting it.. In Western art, the painters are as beloved for their masculine cowboy lifestyles as for their work: Arizona cowboy painter Bill Owen lost an eye last year in a calf-roping accident, but the demand for his art remained steady even though he was painting one-eyed. He skips right past a thin man in a plain gray suit with a red rose in the lapel. 
My dear, says the Trailside Galleries president, Christine Mollring, an austere British woman with clipped black hair like a Chanel model, everyone is going to want that one. Mollring looks like the last person to run a Western art galleryin fact, she didnt know that cowboy art existed when she bought Trailside in the early sixtiesbut she definitely knows how to sell. Russell got $10,000 for his large works in the early 1900s, which was the auction price of a Monet at the time. 
. To add even more glamour, Connally suggested throwing in a few cowboy-and-Indian paintings to be auctioned off in between each cattle sale. Long the butt of jokes by connoisseurs of modern and European art, always relegated to a provincial, second-class status in art centers like New York, the head-em-off-at-the-pass school of paintingwith its fat buffalo, windswept prairies, Indians riding furiously, and explorers shooting riflesgets hardly more than a mention in American art history textbooks. Leave them blank to get signed up. Johnson promptly commissioned Harvey to paint Johnsons birthplace, boyhood home, and ranch house. There was even a Harvey auction at Burt Reynolds home in Los Angeles. What made Harvey so much more appealing than the other Western artists who were actually better painters and also painting a greater variety of subjects? Hes had so much pressure on him to paint, to fulfill all those obligations, that hes got to be like a machine. At lunch, I ask Harvey if he ever gets bored doing all those cowboy-on-the-road paintings. Harvey sold paintings to galleries for as little as $25 apiece. At the Trailside Galleries in Scottsdale, Arizona, the last great bastion of traditional Western art in a world gone abstract, sleekly dressed couples mill about, holding slim, elegant drinks that look like urine specimens, looking other couples up and down as if they were paintings. Welcome to Alphaland, the Disney World for Bodybuilders, How B.J. It was like one of those contracts that free-agent baseball players received. Gilcrease and Carter eventually opened their own museumsand for the next thirty years, that is where Western art stood. He sort of is uncomfortable about publicity, a gallery representative whispers. I thought I needed to juice up the paintings, says Harvey. I dont know., Lunch is over, and we head back to the studio. Best essentially became to Harvey what the fifteenth-century Medicis were to the Renaissance paintershis patron, his sole supporter, and his mentor. People begin to wonder what Harvey is doing behind those walls of his home. Museum of Western Art Hours and Admission Prices. In a financial and marketing scheme that experts say is unheard of in contemporary art, Harvey has signed a multimillion-dollar contract to sell his art exclusively to a wily and widely respected Houston entrepreneur named Randy Best. The other half, of course, is money. We didnt know if the art was good or bad, we didnt know the artists, but we were so caught up in the hoopla, trying to out-bid everyone there, that we would have bought any old cow painting.. Even the titles are imitated. In the late seventies, as the price of oil headed past $30 a barrel, Texas entered one of its most wondrous periods of wretched excess. In 1979 ARTnews magazine claimed that Western art had become one of the highest-priced sectors in all American art, and soon dozens of Eastern artists headed West, donning cowboy boots and hats, painting Dustin Hoffmanlooking Indians and stereotypical cowboys riding oddly shaped Thoroughbreds. The crowd, with nothing but time and money on its hands, went absolutely gaga. Then, in the 1880s, two commercial illustrators, working for publications such as Harpers Weekly and Leslies Illustrated Weekly (the nineteenth-century equivalents of People magazine), hit upon the formula that helped transform the West into the stuff of myth. As the Harvey lovers drift away, they never realize that they have been part of a carefully orchestrated plan to turn the shy artist into a highly desirable yet elusive commodity worth millions of dollars on the art market. The artist is already at work again, a wistful chronicler of a disappearing, twilit world. Texas Has Always Been a Great Setting for the Apocalypse. You see this one, Boomtown Drifters. He turns the brutal world of the Old West into a kind of romantic Eden, a land where no one is hurting and opportunity can be found at the end of every journey. If we had told Connally that wed sell more art by shooting the artist out of the cannon and landing him in a net across the ballroom, hed do it, says Don Hedgepeth, a Western art consultant from Kerrville who helped recruit the artists for the early shows. 
But no one took greater interest in Harvey than Randy Best. Frederic Remington and Charles Russell revolutionized the Western art business by making a folk hero out of the great white man on horseback. . I knew he had a great future, Connally recalls, but the reason I liked him was that I could afford him. Connally also showed Harveys work to his buddy Lyndon Johnson, then the president of the United States. Hell, says the burly, balding Burford, we were just muddling along, looking for someone who could paint a good Texas scene. There was a time when you couldnt go into a dentists office without seeing a Windberg print on the wall, says one famous art critic. He once advertised that he would give away a Windberg print to anyone who would buy an American car or home by a certain date. window.mc4wp.listeners.push( Use your wall art to complement your shower curtain, bathroom decor and more. Another guest, comedian David Steinberg, called the auction the greatest collection of gentile wealth ever assembled in one room. In 1980 another Harvey auction at the Fairmont Hotel in Dallas, attended by eight hundred people, brought in just under $1 million in sales for 27 paintings and 10 bronze sculptures, which was said to be one of the largest sums ever collected by a single contemporary American artist in one show. Something about the nostalgia, about all those people back then, about the way families worked, about how the light coming out of those windows felt so warm, so kind. Gossip abounds that even Europeans are in the crowd. Women glide by in suede skirts held up by belts with silver buckles, their neck muscles tight from the exercise that comes from wearing enormous turquoise earrings. I would like for all of my paintings to be completely believable by the viewer, but have the look of knowing it would be impossible to get this shot from acamera. The centerpiece work on the front wall, on sale for $75,000, is Cowboys Payday, a three-by-five-foot painting of a group of cowboys at dusk herding Longhorn cattle to market down a rain-drenched street. One of his large works will easily fetch $70,000. Harvey recalls his past for me one morning in the two-story studio that sits fifty yards behind his 137-year-old Fredericksburg home. Ill tell you this much. Scattered throughout the West are numerous schools of artwildlife artists, Santa Fe landscape artists, Taos impressionists, Native American artists, California plein air artists, Arizona desert artists, Jackson Hole mountain artists, and of course, the cowboy artists. It makes me happy. I dont enjoy going to these shows, he says in his soft, flat voice.