[Music] Hi everybody.

My name is Kristin Poole, and I have had the great privilege and pleasure of working with the Hagerman Historical Museum to sort through their rather extensive collection of Archie Teater paintings.

And this is the first of what will be, we think, many exhibitions of Archie Teater’s work, primarily based on the collections, the holdings of this institution.

What we wanted to do with this show is really sort of give people an overview of Archie's life, who he was, how he painted, and the styles he painted in.

He was born in 1901 in Boise, Idaho.

And he grew up in a family that was not well off.

In fact, they suffered from poverty from time to time.

And in eighth grade, Archie made either the very courageous decision or the very foolish decision to drop out of eighth grade and become an artist.

And he was determined to do that, and he did that for the rest of his life.

But as was, is true for most artists, he had a very difficult time making a living at it for quite some time.

His life was truly nomadic.

He was an itinerant for a really long time and did a lot of odd jobs.

In south central Idaho he was a bushwhacker and a mule skinner, and he fished in the Snake River, and he ate those fish, and he took those fish up to the mining camps and sold it to the miners.

So he made his way.

But he painted and he painted and he painted and he painted all the way through his lifetime.

This painting here, this is the Waddington House on River Road in Hagerman, and it is the oldest painting in the collection, or at least the oldest painting we know of.

For whatever reasons, Archie never dated most of his paintings.

But this was done in 1922, when he was 21 years old.

He spent a lot of time at this age in his life between Boise and Hagerman.

And Hagerman really became, I don't know that it would be fair to say the word “home” for him, but it was a base for him throughout his lifetime.

So these five paintings here are of Hagerman and, this is the Pope House, for those of you who know where you are.

And there is a very funny story about Archie deciding that - plopping himself down on the land and deciding to paint the house.

And Mr. Pope came out and said, “What are you doing, young man?” And he said, “Well, I'm painting a picture and you're bothering me, so you should leave.” And he kicked him off his land.

So that shows you a little bit about Archie's determination and his arrogance.

I love this painting here, which is a really sweet painting of the river and the landscape in this part of the world, and really shows that Archie studied the land.

He really understood the formations of these hills.

He understood how to paint water.

And it took me a while to find this fisher person here.

But this fisher person is just a suggestion of a person with this little tiny fishing line.

Really wonderful sense of rushing water.

Very bucolic and very typical of Teater.

He did not - he was a romantic.

He very rarely painted anything of distress, on either people in distress or landscapes in distress.

It was always the happy, skippy outlook.

In about 1928, he really kind of got grounded for the first time in his life.

And that grounding happened when he went to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and in Jackson Hole he fell in love with the Tetons.

And the Tetons really became his foundation for painting for the next five decades.

Every summer he would go back to the Tetons.

And there's two Teton paintings in the exhibition, this painting here and this painting that I close the exhibition with.

And you see the Tetons, you recognize the Tetons, but they're quite different in their painting styles.

This is more, for those of you who know your art history, more pointillist.

Where, if you look at how he made the red and blue flowers, he just did this with his paintbrush.

Whereas this is much more painterly.

He took his time.

It's much more articulated.

The light and the landscape and the water are much, much more refined.

But this is how he earned his living, is painting the Tetons.

And he became known as “Teton Teater.” Sometimes he even signed his paintings “Teton Teater.” It lasted throughout his lifetime.

He was a naive.

So he really painted out of instinct.

He had very little training, and he painted what was in front of him.

He was what we call a plein air painter.

Meaning, he painted out of doors almost all of the time.

And he painted what he saw.

I think for Teater, painting was a way for him to digest the world, to sort of figure out what he had seen and how he felt about it.

But in Jackson Hole he married, met and married a woman named Patricia, who became his wife.

And she kind of changed his life.

She was from Chicago.

She was a socialite, and well-educated and well-traveled.

And she was ambitious.

And she wanted Archie Teater to be successful.

So she and a patron of his in Jackson Hole said, “You need some training.

Let's get you to New York City.” And he enrolled him in the Art Students League, where he went to school on and off for about 25 years.

The league is probably one of the most important schools in the country.

And still is, but particularly when America was asserting itself as an artistic alternative to Paris.

Their student league taught some of the most important painters in this country between the 20s and the 70s.

Many, many, many, many of the artists that you know went to the league.

When you look at his work and the work that he did before he went to the league and the work that he did after the league, it didn't seem to have a whole lot of impression on him.

He didn't change his style.

But I think what he did, is he worked with a man named Reginald Marsh.

And Reginald Marsh was a kind of a, a revolutionary at the time because he said, “Don't paint those history paintings.

Don't paint those religious paintings.

Don't paint those traditional still lifes.

Paint what you see in front of you.

Paint daily life, paint your average Joe.” And that's what Marsh did, and that's what Teater did.

And Teater said, “Okay, I'm good.

I'm on the right track.

I’m doing what I'm supposed to be doing.” So he continued on and he did some still lifes.

There are some somewhat atypical, but those of you who know your art, this is a very typical still life.

It's a bottle, it's glasses, it's fruit.

Or in this case, we think there's lot of clams on a table.

That's a very typical still life set up.

This sack of potatoes, spilling out with a potato bush and perhaps a suggestion of mountains in the background is not.

But it's very Archie Teater.

And it's a wonderful, wonderful painting where the potato skins and the sack texture kind of merge, very loosely painted.

He painted fast and painted with quick marks.

This sort of brushy background that Teater used in his portraits was something that he did learn from his time at the Art Students League.

Portraits would be a way for him to make money, right?

And while he was painting the Tetons rather furiously and stacking them up around him on Jenny Lake and selling them that way, he finally did have a studio in Jackson, and he hung out a portrait shingle.

And I suspect it was a way for him to make money.

These are three seascapes, done at very, very different times in his life.

We know this was dated in 1943.

We believe this was done at the end of his life when he was living in Carmel, California with Patricia.

And we're not sure where this was or when it was painted.

But you see, they're really, really different in how he applies the paint.

This is really “googie.” I mean, he's got, you know, he's using the paint and he's kind of sticking it on.

Whereas this is very, very, very softly painted.

And then here he's doing a combination of both of those things.

This is very nicely painted.

And then there's the drama of the water.

Water is one of the things that I believe Teater did best.

Because he really captures the feeling and the movement of water.

You can sort of taste what this feels like.

1952, he and Patricia are rollin’.

He’s actually becoming very well known.

He's in shows in New York City.

He's in Better Homes and Gardens.

He's in Look magazine.

And Patricia being Patricia and being very ambitious, decides to write the most famous architect in the country and say, “Will, you build us a studio on the Snake River?” And at the time, Frank Lloyd Wright has got his biggest commission of his life.

He's building the Guggenheim in New York City.

And surprisingly Wright writes back and says, “Yes.” And so this building, Teater's Knoll, which is down the street here, is the only Frank Lloyd Wright building in the state of Idaho, and served as their studio, not really their home, but their studio for many, many years.

And has been lovingly restored and cared for by Henry Whiting for many, many decades now.

I want to draw your attention to sort of, again, how Teater painted and what was important to him.

Here's two paintings of New York City, Saint Patrick's Cathedral and the Guggenheim Museum.

The detail with which he puts into the painting of this cathedral and church, and the building is really, really different than the way he articulates a people, which is just a little tiny mark.

This was important to him.

Architecture was important to him.

You know, and delineating that architecture was important to him.

But he just suggests the people and suggest the foliage on these trees.

And does the same thing in these Western landscapes where, you know, there's no real cow head there.

You're not seeing any eyes.

But, you know, those are cows on the landscape.

And this is the landscape Teater knew in his gut.

It was very comfortable for him.

This is a wonderful painting of Make Water Mine, beautifully painted.

But again, fast, fast, fast brushstrokes, and, and a palette that was resonant with the colors of the mine and the material in front of him.

He didn't ever make up colors.

He was not into that modernist use of new color and new approaches.

There's one other painting in the building that I want you to look at, and that is a large, large painting, a really important painting that these guys have of Greasy Grass where Teater spent time researching that battle and did it with such clarity.

But there's violence there, and that's the only time that I've seen a painting by him that really is violent.

The last two decades of his life he and Patricia spent summers in Jackson Hole and winter's traveling.

He spent a lot of time traveling around the United States and a lot of time traveling internationally.

But he didn't just go to Paris.

He didn't just go to Italy.

He went to Yugoslavia.

They went to Slovenia.

They went to very, very difficult and challenging places.

Which, to their credit, he diaried it through the collection of international paintings that the museum hold.

This is a painting that was done, in 1971 at the end, towards the end of his life.

I love this little picture of South Carolina.

You really get a sense of the rain on the street and the beauty and the feeling of that landscape.

Again, very articulated architecture, very suggested street life.

And we end with Jackson Hole.

And I suspect that, this is the kind and quality of many of the Jackson Hole paintings that Teater sold.

Thank you!

[Laughs]