From the July/August 2026 issue of Apollo.
Despite the hundreds of events taking place in the United States this month to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a somewhat downbeat mood pervades much of the press coverage. ‘Commemoration has been a complicated undertaking in this country from the start,’ noted the New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb – recalling that the 100th anniversary took place in the wake of a civil war that left 700,000 people dead, while the 200th came two years after President Nixon’s downfall in 1974.
Elsewhere, however, traditional US cultural icons – particularly of the West – have never been more fashionable. ‘Tradwife’ Hannah Neeleman, better known by her Instagram handle ‘Ballerina Farm’, has millions of followers for her images of Mormon life with her husband and eight children on their 328-acre cattle farm in Utah. In the fashion world, musician Pharrell Williams has reimagined a multicultural version of Wild West clothing – dark denim, pearl-and-sequins floral embroidery, fringed chaps and Stetsons – for the luxury brand Louis Vuitton.
The West is in vogue in the art market, too. Most attention recently has been paid to the record-breaking prices made for a small number of exceptional paintings by modern artists in New York in May: $181.2m for a Jackson Pollock drip painting, $107.6m for a Constantin Brâncuși head and $98.4m for a Mark Rothko owned by Agnes Gund. But the market for what auction houses call the ‘art of the American West’ has also been quietly setting records for names who resonate in the United States but are much less well known in Europe.
Earlier this year Christie’s New York made top prices at auction for works from the collection of Bill Koch by Frederic Remington (Coming to the Call, c. 1905, $13.3m), Alfred Jacob Miller (The Buffalo Hunt, 1850, $4.7m) and Charles Marion Russell (Dust, 1925, $5.8m). Mike Overby, director of specialist Western art auction house Coeur d’Alene, says the market ‘has grown in leaps and bounds’. Founded in 1986 in the picturesque northern Idaho resort of the same name, the auction house has since moved its main operation to Reno, Nevada. ‘When we started we turned over about $200,000 a year. Last July we took $22m in a single sale,’ Overby says. ‘We stayed in Coeur d’Alene for about a decade, but the auctions grew too big – the town didn’t have enough hotel rooms and the little airport couldn’t handle the number of private jets flying in.’
Last year Coeur d’Alene sold Maynard Dixon’s Open Range (1942) for $2m. Dixon, who was born in California in 1875, was slightly younger than the artists Overby calls ‘the kings of Western art’. These are led by Remington (1861–1909) and Russell (1864–1926) – both famous for their pictures of cowboys, Native Americans, cavalry officers and frontier life. ‘The important thing is that both of them went west as young men in the 1880s and they saw it when it was still wild, before the cattle were fenced in and when the railroads were just coming,’ Overby says. ‘They were two of the last artists – and the most technically brilliant – to see it as it really was.’
What and when counts as the Wild or Old West is debatable. It generally describes the period from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the early 1900s and covers some 16 modern-day states including Texas, Montana, Utah, California and Nevada. The government encouraged settlers to head west after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 secured much of the central United States from France, a move accelerated after the Mexican-American War of 1846–48 and the Homestead Act of 1862.
Landscape painters such as Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) and Thomas Moran (1837–1926) made it out west first. They are associated with the Hudson River School, which is now famous for its romanticisation of the US landscape and is generally considered the first uniquely American art movement.
Bierstadt accompanied a government survey in 1859 to Nebraska. Once there, he turned what he saw into idealised landscapes – a source of national pride but also magnets for exploration, settlement and exploitation. The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak (1863) is a typical example. An apparently divine light catches a waterfall. In the background there are spectacular icy peaks, in the foreground a peaceful Shoshone encampment. ‘[They represent] the old ways, which Bierstadt knew would not last,’ writes Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick. ‘The bison were being decimated and with them the traditional lifeways of the Indians.’
Bierstadt and Moran ‘were the celebrities of the era’, says Tylee Abbott, head of American art at Christie’s (and a descendant of the frontier painter William Tylee Ranney). ‘They would have ticketed unveilings of their paintings back in New York and crowds would pay to see them.’ Remington, Russell and Charles Schreyvogel (1861–1912) were not far behind. ‘People went crazy for their illustrations and paintings,’ Abbott adds.
Remington in particular tapped into the vogue for cowboys, initially as an illustrator for Harper’s Weekly. The American public was gripped by ‘dime novels’, much like Victorian ‘penny dreadfuls’, filled with tales of heroic cowboys, dead-eyed gunslingers and fearsome Native Americans. An Argument with the Town Marshall (c. 1905) is a classic of the genre. A lone cowboy rides into town at night, his horse with one foreleg in the air, about to turn, his pistol firing. It sold at Christie’s in January for $11.8m (estimate $4m–$6m).
Remington, Abbott says, used to say he painted ‘men with the bark on – figures with purpose, resolve and necessity’. Russell, too, fully bought in to the myth of the West but his work is more romantic, moody and impressionistic. While Remington travelled from New York, Russell lived in Montana: commentators today emphasise the friendships he made there with members of the Blackfeet, Kainai and Crow nations.
Today the many grim realities of the frontier are well known. Life for cowboys was grinding. Men – in the era before railroads and refrigeration – slowly drove cattle hundreds of miles in miserable conditions. Few had guns, pay was miserly, the threats of disease and wild animal attacks were all too real. While most were poor white immigrants and Americans, a large minority were Native Americans, Mexicans or emancipated Black slaves who took the work because they had no other options.
Yet somehow the mystique endures. For Abbott: ‘The West is so uniquely American, people trying to make something out of nothing, being gritty, hardy and entrepreneurial. It personifies a lot of American culture.’
It is also a narrative that appeals particularly to what have become increasingly wealthy western states. The economies of Texas, Nevada, Utah and Idaho have been among the fastest growing, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. This is partly because of oil and renewable energy, and partly because of an influx of tech companies and entrepreneurs seeking lower tax environments. Texas now has an annual economy worth $2.9trn, second only to California, and a population of 88 billionaires according to Forbes, many based in cities such as Dallas, Houston and Austin.
A mixture of fashion and financial speculation has also led to a surge of interest in luxury ranches among the ultra-wealthy, particularly near fashionable resorts such as Aspen, Colorado; Bozeman, Montana; and Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
This probably explains why the Western art market remains strongest in its heartlands. Auction data from analytical firm ArtTactic, based on a group of around 75 artists, shows that annual sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York have hovered between the $5m and $10m mark for a decade. The exceptions are years when high-value, single-owner collections have been consigned there. But Arizona auction house Scottsdale sold $16.5m of art in a single sale in April this year. It is co-owned by Michael Frost, the nephew of the late Jack Bartfield, founder of JN Bartfield gallery in New York in 1937, which remains the most important specialist Western gallery in the city.
‘There’s been a proliferation of smaller auction companies and galleries opening over the past two decades [in the West],’ Abbott says. ‘That has really driven a healthy market – people are buying either because they have second homes in the West or they are making money there. That’s how we have arrived at this great acceleration over the past 10 to 15 years.’
Even less well known is that Western art remains a living art form that can still command high prices. One of the most successful artists is Logan Maxwell Hagege, a 46-year-old Los Angeleno, who paints images of the Native American people and landscapes of Arizona. ‘The Western region seems to hold the strongest representation of mythicism for me: the native people, the cowboy, the desert, all represent a uniquely American voice,’ Hagege says. His current auction record was set in 2019 at Scottsdale for Breaking Through the Storm (2014), at $234,000 (estimate $50,000 to $70,000).
‘Few people know how strong the Western art market is – what’s happening in the contemporary market, say, in Basel and New York, is so much more visible and the numbers are so much bigger,’ says Beau Alexander, co-founder of contemporary Western gallery Maxwell Alexander in Pasadena. But ‘once you get into it, you find there’s quite a big world here. It’s such an American subject, it permeates everything.’ He says the gallery is succeeding in appealing to a new generation of Californians.
The fact that the imagery of the West is highly constructed has been acknowledged for decades. ‘This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,’ declares newspaper editor Maxwell Scott in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), set in the fictional western town of Shinbone in the 1880s. Unsurprisingly the art history of the West is also under scrutiny. ‘America has always celebrated its land. [Artists] built upon the idea through the lens of the frontiersman and cowboy as exemplars of American strength and resilience and the native people of the continent as a worthy but vanquished foe,’ says Jonathan Frembling, lead curator and archivist at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, which houses one of the most important collections of 19th– and 20th-century American art.
‘The ugly reality of the past could be obscured behind the facade of heroes engaged in adventures. It served as a myth upon which American identity could be built – independent, vigorous, free as the open range.’ Now, says Frembling, museums contextualise the story ‘responsibly and respectfully. Because the West continues to resonate so powerfully for Americans, it is important to discuss the difficult history of land ownership and the often rocky relations between the people of this continent.’ At the museum this has included scholarly reappraisals of artists such as Russell, and ‘Cowboy’, an exhibition last year in which Black, Asian and Native American contemporary artists reclaimed this most iconic figure as multicultural and queer.
In one work in the show, Filipino-American artist Stephanie Syjuco photographed perhaps the most famous of all examples of Western works of art, Remington’s The Broncho Buster sculpture, against a black background. Modelled in 1895, the sculpture shows a cowboy with whip in hand on a rearing horse. (There are several versions and editions: the record for the rarest, with woolly chaps, stands at $2.6m.)
The Broncho Buster, with its dynamic, individually brave but arguably cruel message, became a staple decoration of the Oval Office from the presidency of Gerald Ford onwards. Until 2021, that is, when incoming Democrat president Joe Biden replaced it with Swift Messenger (1990), a sculpture of an Apache on a charging horse by Native American artist Allan Houser. As soon as Donald Trump returned to office in 2025, he swapped it back. A symbol, if one were needed, of the power of the iconography of the American West and the conflicting stories that can be taken from it.
From the July/August 2026 issue of Apollo.
