INSIDE Art of the Cowboy • Bill Nebeker • Jim Morgan • Western Art East of the Mississippi DECEMBER 2018
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Preserving a
TRADITION Bill Nebeker is the longest serving full member of the Cowboy Artists of America, and he has stories to prove it. By Michael Clawson
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Bill Nebeker during the 2015 CAA trail ride.
n 1965, four cowboy artists found themselves huddled around a table at the Oak Creek Tavern in Sedona, Arizona. The men, quick to laugh and in good spirits, threw back some beers and reflected back on a trip from a year earlier in Mexico, where they worked on a cattle ranch and bonded over the shared experience. And that’s how the Cowboy Artists of America was born. Throw a rock in a still pond and the ripples radiate outward across the whole pond, but the ripples are largest near the center. A 90-minute drive to the southwest from Oak Creek Tavern, in Prescott, Arizona, Bill Nebeker had a front row view of Western art history, a history he would soon be contributing to. “It was an exciting time back then,” he says. “You could sense that big things were about to happen, which was certainly reflected in my own life, first as a saddlemaker, then working at a foundry and finally as an artist. I just knew I was going to be
Bill Nebeker works on a revised version of If Horses Could Talk in his Prescott, Arizona, studio. The work will eventually become a life-and-a-half monument.
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The Cowboy Artists of America pose for a photograph in 1983. Bill Nebeker can be seen seated in center wearing a black hat.
involved in some way in the Western way of life, because that’s how I was raised.” Bill Nebeker was a bit too young to be part of the birth of the CAA, but he was right there at its epicenter taking it all in, just one or two levels removed from the action. He was born in southern Idaho, but due to a bad case of asthma his family moved south— first in 1948 and then permanently in 1953—looking for cleaner air and slightly warmer weather. Around that time, Prescott was the home of John Hampton, and George Phippen was a short drive out of town in Skull Valley. Charlie Dye and Joe Beeler were in Sedona, but their presence was felt far and wide in Arizona. Prescott, it seemed, was an ideal place for a young, talented artist looking for guidance on his career. “You talk about a cow town, this was a real cowboy town in 1948,” Nebeker says, adding that he drifted away from the Western way of life during his asthma years. “After I graduated from school, I really had a desire to go back to my original roots so I started wearing Western clothes again, bought me a horse, learned how to calf rope—I just started down the road from there. I had friends who had ranches, so whenever they had a brandin’ I would go drag calves and then I was always making
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A photograph of Bill Nebeker meeting John Wayne is framed behind a bronze of Wayne created in 1974.
Chasin’ Mavericks, 2017, bronze, 23 x 7 x 9”
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Hare-Raisin’ Ride, 2018, bronze, 23 x 12 x 9”
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things. At one point I was going to become a saddlemaker. I had built a saddle on my own one time without a lot of formal instruction, and it came out fairly well.” Around the time he started dating Merry— his future wife and the behind-the-scenes mechanism that keeps his studio running so efficiently—Phippen had a show at a bank in Prescott. “When I got there I was mesmerized. I got to see bronze sculpture firsthand, oil paintings, watercolors firsthand. I was totally fascinated,” he recalls. “Everything I had seen was a print or picture in a magazine, so seeing art firsthand was unbelievable. I was really driven, and really wanted to do it, but never thinking I would get anywhere with it. I was just driven to do it. I went to a local art store and bought the wrong kind of clay. I was trying to build stuff with pottery clay and it didn’t work very well.” But Nebeker kept at it, eventually assembling some early work that he could bring to Phippen’s Bear Paw Bronze Works in Skull Valley. George Phippen had since passed, but Nebeker was friendly with his sons and approached George’s wife, Louise, with some of his clay creations. “They were kind to me and never told me how bad they were but they offered me a job to learn the bronze casting business. Boy I jumped at that,” the artist says. “So I left a $2-an-hour job in town for the forest service to go work for them for a buck-and-a-half an hour. I learned the bronzecasting business day by day, and eventually we were making pretty fine castings and eventually we had other artists show up. I got to meet Joe Beeler and Bill Owen and T.D. Kelsey came down. We did some of T.D.’s very first castings.” Decades later, as the president of the CAA, a role he would hold several times, Nebeker would often refer back to this period of Western art, particularly how fragile it was. Modern art and abstract expressionism were the driving forces behind art elsewhere in the country, and representational art wasn’t so much riding in the backseat as it was stuffed in the trunk, which left Western art’s future even more in doubt. But it survived because the artists were passionate about it and they refused to let it die. “Everything was angles and circles and cubism and modern art,” Nebeker says, adding that, “Western art survived because the West survived, particularly the Western way of life.” And art was an important element of the Western way of life. Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington had laid a foundation that would hold, but in the heyday of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Helen Frankenthaler it was artists like Beeler, Dye and Hampton who played prominent roles in keeping Western art
Double Trouble, 2016, bronze, 29 x 27 x 16”
valid in a changing art landscape. And Nebeker, a self-taught artist, was part of an important second wave of CA artists who were tasked with keeping Western art relevant. Recalling back to his acceptance into the cowboy group, Nebeker says it was Owen, the colorful one-eyed painter who maintains an endearing legacy with the group’s members, who initially reached out to him and told him to apply. In 1978, Nebeker gave it a go and brought five works down to Phoenix to show the group. “My wife and I are sitting out in the lobby because they were having a business meeting. We waited and waited and sweated bullets, and all of the sudden the door swung open and big ol’ Jim Reynolds comes striding across the room and he grabs my wife and says, ‘I want a kiss from the new Cowboy Artist
of America,’” Nebeker remembers. “What an honor for me because the man who inspired me, George Phippen, was the first president of the organization and I, a self-taught artist, ended up becoming a member of the Cowboy Artists in 1978 and now have since been president four times.” Nebeker is also the longest serving full member. Only Fred Fellows, who was brought into the group in 1969, has been a member longer, though today Fellows is an emeritus member. Celebrating four decades in the group this year, Nebeker has a lot to look back and reflect on, from his award-winning bronzes, both cowboy and Native American subject matter, to the vast array of artists he’s worked with and had the pleasure to know. “When I got in the group, geez, you had Jim
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Headin' for the Brush, 1981, bronze, 19 x 34 x 12”
Reynolds, who was a powerful, big, boisterous and loud guy. When he was in the room, you knew Jim Reynolds was in the room. John Clymer was this nice, quiet little guy and he and his wife were always together, and then you have Frank Polk who was as diehard as anyone in the group,” Nebeker says, adding that Polk would often stutter, something Polk himself poked fun at in his autobiography,
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F-F-F-Frank Polk: An Uncommonly Frank Autobiography. “You talk about a personality, I mean he was a character’s character. He lived the life. The poor guy stuttered and stammered so bad, but he had stories to tell that were just amazing of living that life.” He mentioned many other artists: Howard Terpning, Frank McCarthy, Tom Lovell, Fritz White, Tom Ryan, Melvin Warren…on and on,
each name an important figure in the world of Western art. It was these artists that Nebeker would work with, show with and frequently camp with on the annual CA trail rides, which often allowed the artists to show their prowess on a horse or with a rope—after all, for many of these artists, the West wasn’t just their business, it was their culture. Another cowboy name Nebeker worked
with: the Duke himself, John Wayne. “He was a man’s man. He stood up for what he believed,” he says. “I had seen every movie he ever made, and appreciated [all of them] especially during the Vietnam War. It became a very anti-war era and John Wayne stood his ground. He stood up for all the soldiers that went to Vietnam, and I thought, ‘Boy, that is really something, a person in his line of business to stand up for what he believes rather than something popular.’”
In 1974, Nebeker started work on a tribute to Wayne in the form of a sculpture based on The Searchers, what many people believe, even today, to be Wayne’s finest film. Without YouTube or even video rental stores around, Nebeker had to send away for some Time Life books on Hollywood to find an image of Wayne in the most iconic sequence of the film, when his character stands in an empty doorway in the final scene of the film. After completing the
work, in which Wayne is holding his arm at the elbow and looking weary and wounded from the emotional journey, word had gotten to the actor about the bronze. Out of the blue, Wayne’s secretary called the artist and coordinated a meet-up south of Phoenix, where Wayne was filming a gun safety video for Arizona Game & Fish. “The man was enormous. I’m a young guy, kinda skinny at the time, and I was shaking hands with him and staring up at him and you can’t even see my hand because there was this big mitt shaking my hand,” Nebeker recalls. “He was so gracious and kind. We were sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck, drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups and he’s looking at my artwork sitting on the tailgate of the truck.” Not only did Wayne buy three pieces, including the one of himself, but he also had Nebeker customize one to include Wayne’s 26 Bar brand. “We left kind of floating on cloud nine,” he adds. With or without Wayne, Nebeker has solidified his presence in the Western world with his cowboy kindness, his long history in the CAA and his persistent presence at museum and gallery events all around the West. But it’s also his work that has cemented his legacy. Nebeker’s bronzes speak to the iconography of the West, as his cowboy figures dash toward fleeing cattle or as horses rear up, ejecting their riders from their saddles. Consider works such as Chasin’ Mavericks or Hare-Raisin’ Ride, both of which present variations on the explosive movement of cowboys and their horses. And yet, as iconic as these images are, the artist also has a solemn streak in his depiction of cowboys. Like Wayne in the finale of The Searchers, Nebeker’s cowboys are worn and weary, a testament to their resiliency and their hard work. In Cold Mornin’ Cow Camp, a cowboy is bundled from the cold and waiting, possibly with some hesitancy, for his day to commence. In Double Trouble, you don’t see a victorious cowboy, but one who is outnumbered and resigned to his work. His works can also be quite funny, as in If Horses Could Talk, one of his most famous works. The cowboy in the sculpture stares intently through binoculars, unaware that his prey is making a getaway underneath him. Only his horse seems to understand what is happening and, alas, he’s ill equipped to inform on the fleeing deer. Nebeker, who’s currently developing this piece as a life-and-a-half monument, comes to these scenes with affection for the West, its subjects and locales, and a personal familiarity with the culture they represent. “An artist can only do the best he can,” Nebeker says from his Prescott studio. “…I’m just driven to do it.”
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