One measure of an artist’s success is numbers — how many attend an art exhibition or how many paintings sell, how many buy the book or attend productions of the play. Over the years, here’s where I’ve landed: How many people find an artist’s work doesn’t matter nearly as much as who encounters it — and then, the path it lays for them.

Take Clayton Sumner Price, one of Oregon’s most influential Modernist painters who emerged during the first half of the 20th century and whose work is the subject of a retrospective show this summer at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem. In the case of C.S. Price, it matters that more than 60 years ago, a Michigan dad took his adolescent son to the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Diego Rivera’s famous Detroit Industry murals loom large in that building, but those aren’t what piqued 12-year-old Roger Saydack’s interest during his visit. As a youth, he was enchanted by one of Price’s late paintings, The Fisherman.

“It wasn’t trying to show me something, or tell me something,” Saydack told me. “I had the impression that it was asking me a question. I never had that reaction to a painting before. I remembered Price because of that encounter, and I took it for granted that one day I would find more of his paintings.”

Today, Saydack is a retired attorney living in Eugene, and over the decades he tracked down many more of Price’s paintings, engaging with them deeply and digging into the artist’s life. As a result, Hallie Ford Executive Director John Olbrantz told the audience at the opening reception for the Price show in June, Saydack “is the world’s leading authority on C.S. Price.”

“I think he probably knows more about C.S. Price than C.S. Price himself,” Olbrantz said.

Saydack approached Olbrantz in 2017 about doing a retrospective show. Eight years on, we have the happy result: C.S. Price: A Portrait, which runs through Aug. 30. Saydack’s long quest to bring greater recognition to Price, who slipped into relative obscurity not long after he died in 1950, also resulted in a 312-page exhibition book, which retails for $60 in the museum’s lobby. A separate article on the book appears here.

The exhibition is a major and, historically speaking, significant event. It showcases work by an artist who, despite doing very little to promote his work and keeping a low profile, posthumously earned what the exhibition notes call a reputation as “Oregon’s foremost Modernist painter” who developed “a national reputation as an artist who would help shape America’s view of the West.” 

Price’s paintings are difficult to come by, given that so few survive. It’s possible that the final count topped 1,000, but when a painting didn’t sell or he was unsatisfied or simply “done” with it, the artist scraped and painted over it. Saydack estimates he finished 300 or so; dozens of those were lost and dozens more are in private collections.

The Hallie Ford show is the first single-person exhibition of Price’s work in more than a quarter century and the first to be held in Salem. Shortly after his passing, a few Portland exhibitions were held in the early 1950s, and it would be the mid-1970s before a collection of his paintings were on public display, in a show at the Portland Art Museum. The most recent was a 1998 show that made it out of Portland to Eugene before heading to Monterey, Calif., where Price painted during the early 1920s.

As a journalistic subject, Price left few footprints. By all accounts — both those reported by his contemporaries such as Oregon artist Charles Heaney and those Saydack was able to speak to personally — he was a quiet, simple man who didn’t talk much about himself. He didn’t keep a journal, and there are no boxes of personal correspondence to dig through.

As he worked on his book, Saydack had a dream where he walked downstairs and found Price in his living room, which has a few of his paintings on the walls. In his telling, the artist turned to his most devoted admirer and stated: “Everything you need to know about me is in those paintings. It’s all on these walls. Everything.”

More than 40 of Price’s paintings are mounted in the Hallie Ford’s largest space, the Melvin Henderson-Rubio Gallery. One thing to keep in mind, particularly regarding the later ones that illustrate the full development of his sensuous aesthetic, is a point Saydack makes in the book: Many of these paintings were considered weird when he did them.

“Our senses today are so blunted by rapidly changing art sensations that we rarely experience the cultural shock that so-called Modernist art produced in those enthusiastically naive days of the twenties,” he writes.

He’s referencing, of course, the explosion of innovation in painting in the early 20th century, when artists began exploring modes of representation that went beyond and even eviscerated the notion that renderings of landscapes, people, and animals should be “realistic.” Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Fauvism, and Expressionism were all the rage, and many people who enjoyed looking at art found these “experiments” confusing.

Price was born in Iowa in 1874 into a homesteader family, the third of 12 children. He grew up on farms and ranches that were dozens or even hundreds of miles from a town, a neighbor, a railroad. Like a lot of children, he drew, and his mother encouraged it, making sure that he had art supplies.

The exhibition arranges Price’s work in chronological order. First are some of the early drawings and paintings, which feature scenes Price would have had plenty of time to contemplate growing up: horses and cattle, mostly.

Nothing in this section was made after 1925, and the earliest painting is a 1905 watercolor of coyotes chasing buffalo. Next to that is the smallest watercolor, not much bigger than a playing card and yet packing an emotional wallop. Coyotes depicts several of the animals, but only one is alive: a mother wailing next to her pups, who have been shot and killed by a rancher.

Virtually all the pieces feature another hallmark of Price’s work: animals in groups, clumped so closely that they appear to be touching or flowing into each other. This type of imagery, Saydack says, is indicative of Price’s views about the interconnectivity of all things.

The exhibition features plenty of items and ephemera from Price’s life, and the glass case for this period contains samples of the artist’s earliest work for pay — his magazine illustrations. One from Price’s early days in Portland, the August 1910 cover of The Pacific Monthly (which merged with Sunset magazine two years later), features two cowboys busting a steer, an image in which Saydack notes that “Price pulls no punches.” The animal looks terrified, which conveys interiority, Saydack says.

Deeper into the exhibition, the viewer sees how Price’s aesthetic evolved toward Expressionism. It’s remarkable that he got there at all, given how removed he was for the first three decades of his life from opportunities to see contemporary painting. His only formal training in art came in 1905 at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts, thanks to financial backing from a rancher, but he left after one year. He never visited the great museums of Europe, and as Saydack notes in the book, until the artist was in his 40s, his exposure to the innovative painting of the day was largely confined to black-and-white reproductions in magazines.

But in another sense, Expressionism was a natural place for Price to land, given his intention, and apparently deep need, to give visual form to his inner experiences of what he spent so many years seeing and feeling outdoors, watching animals.

The source of Price’s art, Saydack explains, was the “transition from observation to imagination,” and his painting represented an attempt to chase and somehow convey what he called “the One Big Thing” that manifested for those who took the time to look, to let the world in.

A key experience for Price, after he tired of drawing and painting for hire, was visiting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, a year after his father died and family members started selling their homesteads. It was there that he saw modern art for the first time and in particular, a painting by Paul Cézanne.

Realizing that painting could do so much more than “realistically” depict a horse or a mountain, he moved to Monterey in 1921, when he was in his mid-40s. There, he joined an artist colony and shared a studio with one member of the so-called Modernists of the Society of Six, August Gay.

The long hallway of the Melvin Henderson-Rubio Gallery features 10 paintings, most from the mid-1920s into the early 1930s, that capture his artistic evolution during and immediately after this period. 

Two of these paintings, both from 1933, have an interesting backstory that the book unpacks. They were conceived as proposals for stained glass windows for a planned Jesuit chapel. Ultimately, the windows were not commissioned, but the oil paintings, Tossing Boats and Frightened Horses, are “fine examples of adventuresome Modernism” that anticipated Abstract Expressionism according to Saydack. “Imagine how they must have looked to Price’s contemporaries in Portland in 1933,” Saydack writes, “when no one was painting like this.”

At the far end of the hall, one of the larger paintings in the show is mounted, a 1935 oil titled Old Public Market, Portland, Oregon. This is one of the first pieces Price painted for the New Deal Art Project and one that he asked to be included in the first one-person show the Portland Art Museum organized for him in 1942.

Other New Deal projects such as Pack Train and Huckleberry Pickers, do not, unfortunately, appear in the show, but Saydack’s telling nicely illustrates how people struggled to wrap their heads around Modernist painting.

Pack Train and Huckleberry Pickers were murals created for two specific locations, which Price carefully measured, at Timberline Lodge. The paintings were trucked up there, then rejected. The head forester, according to an interview Saydack cites, “did not understand contemporary painting, and he didn’t understand the C.S. Price murals at all, so he ordered them taken out….” The murals eventually found their way to Timberline in 1975, although they still do not appear in the space Price intended.

When viewers at C.S. Price: A Portrait explore the rear room and the atrium at Hallie Ford, they will see the paintings in which the artist fully realized his Modernist aesthetic, including a couple where Price embraced pure abstraction.

To this viewer’s eyes, the One Big Thing in Price’s late paintings is a mysterious, ephemeral thing. The woman in a 1950 painting titled Head does not have a “realistic” face, but there’s an undeniable power there. In some of the animal paintings, it can be hard to immediately identify the animals — dark bodies and heads that ebb into a dark background. Interestingly, Saydack notes in the book that Price rarely used black pigment; if he needed black, he’d mix it from alizarin crimson, viridian, and ultramarine blue.

Those who don’t buy the book nevertheless get some great anecdotes that Saydack includes in the wall labels, such as the one that accompanies the 1944 oil The Wolves. Although Price was sometimes described by contemporaries in beatific terms, Saydack writes that “… he knew that he was not that man. He struggled all his life with good and evil, ambiguity and certainty, faith and doubt, fear and acceptance….”

He then quotes Heaney, the Portland painter who was friends with Price and described the artist sometimes achieving a sort of Dionysian ecstasy when he worked. “He went at it like he was killing snakes,” Heaney said. “He would throw his whole self into it.”

For another, a beautiful 1949 oil titled Sea of Galilee, which must have been one of Price’s final paintings, Saydack describes its sale to someone who visited the aging, tired artist in his studio. After perusing a dozen or so paintings, the person asked if he could purchase Sea of Galilee. Here’s what happened next:

Price seemed uncertain. He pulled the painting out of the stack, propped it up on his easel, and began to look at it, intently and quietly. Not just for a minute or two, or even for five minutes. Price looked at Sea of Galilee for at least ten minutes without saying a word. Finally, he turned to the purchaser and said, “I guess I’m done with it. You can have it now.”

Given the tiny digs Price lived and worked in a few blocks from the Portland Art Museum, the worktable he used in completing Sea of Galilee is likely the one displayed  a few feet away in the center of the atrium, the thick globs of paint long hardened. It was donated by the son of the late Oregon artist Amanda Snyder.

Among other objects in the show are a rocking horse Price carved for a friend’s child (positioned next to the table), several small wood carvings of horses, catalogs for some of his one-person shows, and his harmonica.

When the Hallie Ford opened in 1998, it had no work by Price; today, the museum has around a dozen pieces, some donated by Price’s niece, Frances Price Cook. The rest of the paintings in C.S. Price: A Portrait are on loan from a variety of public and private collections around the U.S., including the Seattle Art Museum, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery.

“Every time there has been a major Price exhibition, interest in his art is renewed,” said Saydack, who will give a free talk at the museum at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 12.  “My hope is that the Hallie Ford exhibition and book will make Price’s art readily available and a part of the national scene once again.”

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Read David Bates’s complete Q&A interview with Roger Saydack, curator of the Hallie Ford’s C.S. Price exhibit and author of its accompanying book, on Bates’s Artlandia Substack page here.