By now, Jim Boren, the Cowboy Hall of Fame's art director and a fine watercolorist in his own right, had quit his job and joined the Cowboy Artists. An attempt by the museum to gain control of the group failed, and after several successful years the Cowboy Artists broke away from Oklahoma City. The eighth annual exhibition premiered at the Phoenix Art Museum, back in Arizona, where it had all started, just up the road in Sedona. The move proved propitious, providing a long-term arrangement that gave the group an even greater support structure and patron base, as well as a wider audience of potential collectors. Annual show sales blew past the million-dollar mark by the late 1970s and reached 2.8 million by 2000.
The success was due to more than a cultural fad or passing fancy. The Cowboy Artists of America had become a permanent and prominent presence in the context of American art. Today, after almost forty years, many of the original members are gone, and artists who once were protégés have become mentors themselves to a second generation of Cowboy Artists. The group has garnered attention on an international scale, and even the most skeptical critics finally have been able to work past their early pronouncements of provincialism.
The artists and their paintings and sculptures have achieved an aspect of seasoned maturity over the close to forty years of the organization's existence. Most of the Cowboy Artists remain realists in regard to artistic technique, but the heartfelt hues of romanticism are still evident, just as they were in the works of Remington and Russell. It has always been difficult to be dispassionate about the American West. To even try seems to rob it of its resonance, to diminish the inspirational power of prairies and proud horsemen passing by.
Charles Goodnight, the consummate Texas cowman, once wrote: Most of the time we were solitary adventurers in a great land as fresh and new as a spring morning, and we were free and full of the zest of darers. The zest of the Western darers remains implicit in, and fundamental to, the paintings and sculpture of the Cowboy Artists and in their lives as well. They have created a collective celebration of life in a land like no other. And each spring or early summer, the group still gathers somewhere in the West on a real ranch at roundup time just for fellowship and fun.
In 2002, they gathered on a Montana ranch not far from Judith Basin where Charlie Russell once wrangled horses and dreamed of painting the West, hardly different at all from that cold Mexico morning in 1964, when three gringo cowboys rode out with the roundup down south in Sonora.
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