Cowboy Artists

THE COWBOY ARTISTS OF AMERICA: Out of the Mystic Past BY E. J. MONTINI

To me, it's just another show in October," says William Moyers, underscoring his statement with a long, deliberate, frowning silence. Moyers is a senior member of the Cowboy Artists of America, a group of painters and sculptors who may be the most successful and enduring art collective of any period in time.

Each October more than 2000 invited guests, at 150 dollars each, crowd into the Phoenix Art Museum to witness the CAA'S annual exhibition and sale. Press from around the world cover the event, where more than one million dollars in art has been sold on opening night at each of the CAA's last five shows.

Afterwards, more than 30,000 visit the museum during the exhibition's monthlong stay, purchasing twenty-five-dollar posters and sixteen-dollar museum catalogs with the same kind of diehard determination with which their wealthier counterparts purchase art.

So enamored with the CAA are some friends and patrons that two years ago they constructed a 14,366-square-foot museum for the group in Kerrville, Texas. It is the only known institution dedicated exclusively to collecting and exhibiting the works of a specific group of living artists and sculptors.

This year the CAA marks its twentieth anniversary. It delineates the distance separating its first exhibition, where 100 persons attended and $49,000 was raised, and its current one.

"Maybe everyone else will make something of this being the twentieth anniversary, but not us members," Moyers says. "To the group, I don't believe it's any difference is, we do the best we can for every CA show, every October. We're dependable that way. And we're competitive enough amongst ourselves to be at our best. And we care about each other. Maybe that's how you get to lasting for twenty years in the first place."

He pauses again. "But then I suppose that's too long and wordy and not what you'd be looking for for an article," he says. "Maybe one of the others can say it more economically."

One of the others, founding member Joe Beeler, is asked about the differences between the CAA he helped found over beer and jukebox music in a Sedona bar more than two decades ago, and the group that will gather for a champagne brunch at its twentieth exhibition.

"Maturity," he says. "That really makes all the difference."

The Cowboy Artists of America have grown wealthy together in twenty years. Yet they are the same. Their notion of creating art to honor and to celebrate America's historic Western past, as well as the contemporary cowboy, remains the same. Yet, over one generation, the size of the group has grown, as has the range of its talents and interests, the acceptance of its work, and the influence of its members. The CAA has twenty-five active members and five emeritus members. Among them are those whose only connection to the West is philosophical, and others who like to say they were born on horseback. CAA member Frank Polk, both cowboy and artist all his life, once was asked if he researched his subject matter. "Hell," he replied, "I am research."

Two years ago, at the CAA's annual exhibition, the Best of Show award was presented to Fritz White's sculpture Out of the Mystic Past. It depicts an Indian sorcerer thrusting a magic wand of stick and animal skull, a device he believes to be sufficient for warding off evil spirits.

But it was not strong enough. The powers of American civilization-the greatest evil his magic wand came up against-overwhelmed him. It was a foregone conclusion, White's sculpture seems to say, but the sorcerer's effort was nonetheless honorable and worthwhile.

For members of the CAA, paint brushes and sculpting knives are magic wands waved in defense of a prized and mystic past. Their work celebrates a time and place and life-style that the artists see as a wonder and an adventure, and which they allow to shine clear and silvery before us with none of the worldly corrosion that has eaten away so much of it.

There are those who read of the CAA'S annual exhibition, of the one million dollar sales figure, and cast it off as the simple commercialization of the Old West and the new. They are wrong. Western American Realism (as CAA members call it) is more than just a business to the artists and to their collectors. It fulfills in them a psychological or even moral need. It is not the prestige or the money or their own museum that sustains the CAA, or has caused them to last for twenty years.

It is the myth. It is the conviction that, under the pressures of our age, we have become too remote from our past. It is the belief that through the cowboys and Indians created by the CAA, through the renegades and mountain men, the scouts and trappers, the settlers, the sorcerers, we might return for a few moments to a more primitive state of grace.

E. J. Montini is a columnist for the Arizona Republic, where, among other things, he has covered the visual arts for the last five years.