HARRY JACKSON (AMERICAN 1924-2011)
Steer Roper (Hard and Fast) , 1959
bronze with medium brown patina atop granite base
overall height: 34 cm (13 3/8 in.)
signed, dated, and inscribed Bustin' One on base

PROVENANCE
Estate of the artist

LITERATURE
Larry Pointer, Donald Goddard, Harry Jackson (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1981), pp. 160-161, nos. 214-215 (illustrated)

LOT NOTES
In his unparalleled creative trajectory from realism to abstraction to realism again, Harry Jackson - as perhaps no other American artist of the period - embodies the spirit of relentless inquiry that came to define the art of the 20th century. One of the most prolific and significant Western artists of his generation, Jackson also produced an immensely diverse body of work, represented in lots 119-122, including two important canvases from his Abstract Expressionist period.

Prior to settling in Wyoming to make his best-known work, Chicago-born Jackson had served in World War II as a combat Marine artist, awarded a Purple Heart, and, in 1944, stationed in Los Angeles. Soon after, he saw Jackson Pollock's The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle and The She-Wolf, which impressed him profoundly. Determined to meet Pollock, Jackson moved to New York, where he became a close friend of the artist and gained notoriety for his own Abstract Expressionist works, capturing the attention of Clement Greenberg and Meyer Shapiro (who featured him in their Talent 1950 show at the Kootz Gallery) and later exhibiting at Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

Eventually, Jackson's childhood fascination with cowboys (he, aged 14, had run away from home to a Wyoming farm), his academic training at the Art Institute of Chicago, and a 1954 tour through Italy reinvigorated Jackson's interest in Realism. Perspective and modeling, infused with the ethos of abstraction, made their way into his works. During a second trip to Italy in 1956, Jackson began studying sculpture at the Vignali-Tommasi Foundry, producing the first of his Western bronzes in the tradition of Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. He made trips to both the American West and Europe throughout the 1950s and 60s, setting up his own foundry and finally relocating his studio to Wyoming in 1970.

In 1958, an inspired conversation with Robert Coe (United States Ambassador to Denmark and trustee of the Whitney Gallery of Western Art in Cody) about Gustave Courbet's Burial at Ornans at the Louvre led Jackson to secure a monumental commission, now part of the Range Burial cycle. In preparation for the piece, Jackson began experimenting with bronze, and produced Steer Roper (Hard and Fast) soon after, in the summer of 1959. Reflecting on the work, Jackson notes that while the process was initially difficult, he conquered the vagaries of metal armatures, and learned how to control and detail the wax surface. He explains: The surface of this bronze was worked very broadly and roughly in order to stress the extraordinary action in this everyday task.