SCRIVER, JACKSON AND DYCK
Three vivid and intense artists of the Western America trope are associated with the Buffalo Bill Center. Harry Jackson depicted white cowboy culture, Bob Scriver portrayed both cowboys and Blackfeet because he grew up with both, and Paul Dyck painted the indigenous people of the high plains in abstract, using traditional European egg tempera glazes in the classic manner which he learned in the Old Country. Jackson and Scriver were much alike and bonded at once. Harry used classic casting like Scriver’s in his Italian foundry. Scriver and Dyck had a far more wary relationship, partly because Dyck had a collection of Native American artifacts that he said far exceeded that of the Scriver family. He was probably right.
Scriver Studio was a kind of trading post where people came to leave messages and touch base for a moment of hospitality. It was like a scent tree where grizzlies leave their spoor by rubbing against bark and scientists can gather bits of their fur for genetic analysis. It was not at all like the giant mausoleums that institutions build in major cities in order to make a religion of the West.
Paul Dyck traveled in a “jimmy”, a preferred vehicle in the ranching SW, with his wife Star, a remarkable woman who always made me think of Melina Mercouri. He came to us for help in taking the ashes of Lone Wolf to the grave of his father, James Willard Schultz, on a bluff near the Holy Family Mission. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Willard_Schultz Among other things, Schultz wrote 39 books about Blackfeet in the early days, and in Scriver’s childhood for a while had an office a few doors down from the Browning Mercantile.
Bob knew him as one among several his parents told him to stay away from, including Charlie Russell. Schultz’s stories were wild, sometimes invented, and very popular. For decades he suffered with a bad back which he treated by smoking marijuana. The Dycks and the Scrivers, plus a few elders, went in a little convoy out to the grave and did the best we could to duplicate a proper Blackfeet ceremony.
Dyck took care of Lone Wolf in the way that several younger artists protected older ones, for instance Charlie Beil in Banff looking out for Carl Rungius or Bob Scriver trying to protect Ace Powell in spite of the Rocky Mountains being between them. Dyck lived many places but he and his family did spend time in Alberta with the Blackfoot tribes there. He was not an outsider.
I’ve tied these three artists to the Buffalo Bill Center because they really had very little relationship between any two of them. I don’t know whether Dyck ever met Jackson or that Jackson would have been impressed by Dyck. All three simply made their livings and reputations by the idea of the “Western” culture and its celebration in the Buff Bill Center among others.
Nor did they have any similarity among their art works. Jackson did a stylized version of realism and built his reputation as a Western artist on a lethal stampede, a range funeral, and a portrait of John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn. Scriver did carefully realistic portraits of actual people and animals. Dyck’s work was imaginative, fantastic, unreal. But all were drawn from the mythology of the West.
None of the three could have made a living without the machinery of institutions built on the mythic power of the idea that somehow “Western” meant a complex as familiar and honorable as King Arthur’s Court or the Bible. Yet these museums, galleries, historical societies and so on were as much a problem for them as a way of existing. They controlled income and reputation: they were political, that is, dependent on the conviction of the “polity” that not only was the myth real, but it was virtuous.
Yet, in reality, the bureaucratic management of the institutions hungered for the reflected importance of having access to the artists who embodied the myth, even by collecting artifacts which created an equal and opposite set of politics among indigenous people. They gloried in the notion that they were more important than the artists who actually made things, because they controlled the artists.
Many of the curators and head bureaucrats were — like Van Kirke Nelson and Harold McCracken — “wheeler-dealers” who cut corners and made secret deals. Curators were sometimes excellent and sometimes just irrelevant, like the curators of the Montana Historical Society who got their degrees by studying French Cubists like Picasso. Museums became ego trips, power trips, ways to get books and lectures, reputation laundering for resource exploiters. When Bob Scriver began to fight against the wheeling and dealing, he was simply cut out of the picture.
This linked essay is an excellent reminder of what a museum can be so long as it stops trying to be a power-monger and gold mine.
https://imagejournal.org/article/how-to-visit-a-museum-disciplines-of-availability/
These days the Western trope has turned away from the phenomenon of eliminating the bison from the prairie so as to herd cattle north to profit from the “free” grass the government pretended it owned. The cowboy life was in part built on starving and stunted young men who needed jobs of any kind, some of them running from the Confederate war or even slavery itself. Their sad songs were far more real than the heroic gunslingers who later used WWII assumptions about big strong men willing to kill. But that notion has prevailed even recently and the counter-challenges. It’s just too useful.
The deeper Western idea has turned to the plains, the land itself and its value as a place of sun and wind, grass and mineral deposits left from an ancient inland sea, and we know that spaces of this kind exist around the world. We also know that horse-based culture on the northern Russian steppes began a disparity of power that has plagued us ever since, even after the Industrial Revolution which finally failed to save us. Though Scriver, Dyck, and Jackson did not picture ecosystems, all three were subject to sociological versions and responses to the Prairie. These now include the re-valuing of the old cultures of the autochthonous peoples and their deepest assumptions before politics. And also can return to the pre-political visions of Scriver, Dyck and Jackson.
