Bonanza for Art of the West

PASO ROBLES, Calif. — The county cattlemen's association's annual sale is about to begin. As dusk falls on the Mid-State Fairgrounds, two men stand practicing lariat tosses, a barbecue drum belches tri-tip smoke, and a crowd collects in the exhibition hall, thick with Stetsons and Wranglers and leather fringe. The scene is everything a city slicker would imagine, except that the cattlemen aren't here to sell cattle.

They're here for the art.

"Amazing," says one browser, admiring a stylized steer.

"The color!" says another, standing before a desert landscape.

In the unlikely event that you could haul an art critic or curator into this room, the 100-plus paintings and sculptures might well inspire scorn or giggles. But these artworks sell. Within minutes of the sale's 7 p.m. opening, red dots are turning up next to oil paintings priced at $6,000 and $7,000.

Americans are buying Western art--pictures and sculptures of cowboys, Indians, ranch animals and the landscapes that sustain them--at a startling rate, paying prices that stretch into six and seven figures. In Los Angeles, the take of the Autry Museum of Western Heritage's annual Western art sale has grown since 1998 from $350,000 to $1.4 million. In Reno, the annual Coeur D'Alene Art Auction jumped from $8 million in sales in 2000 to $14 million in 2001. In Oklahoma City, where the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum's annual Prix de West sale has doubled its revenue in the last seven years, a June sale of about 275 paintings and sculptures fetched $2.5 million.

This doesn't mean the Western art wagon train is about to roll over Monet, Van Gogh or Picasso. But a New West subculture has collected around this Old West imagery. Its mostly male ranks are populated at one extreme by genuine ranchers who want their interiors to match their outdoor lives, and at the other by wealthy indoorsmen looking to illustrate their dreams of escape.

"It's no-nonsense art," says Margaret L. Brown, editor of Houston-based Southwest Art magazine. "You don't have to explain it or figure it out. It is what it is."

In this world, cell phones may be sheathed in leather holsters, mustaches are often waxed, and belt buckles make fashion statements. Cowboys and Indians do business side by side. And though nobody can fully explain an art boom, insiders and outsiders naturally have their theories.

"It represents a clearer, simpler kind of life," says David Pereira, a San Luis Obispo rancher on the art show committee.