Western Art Collector – August 2019

W

illiam Acheff remembers being in Beverly Hills,

California, in the early 1970s when a gallery owner

told him about a new trend that was starting to

percolate within the art scene. The painter’s ears

perked up. “The dealer I was going to at the time

told me, ‘There’s something new happening in art.’ What he was referring

to was what was then called Americana, though it was basically Western

art,” Acheff says. “I just remember thinking there was nothing like it, and

it was something I had to look into.”

Within the next year, Acheff was in Taos, New Mexico, taking it all

in, one painting, Pueblo pot, Navajo blanket, beaded moccasin and

cottonwood carving at a time.

And he never left.

Since his arrival to Taos in 1973, Acheff has become a formidable

force in Western art, particularly in the area of Western still life, a

subgenre that he essentially standardized across the market. Certainly

others have tinkered with Western still lifes—Joseph Henry Sharp, for

instance, did some wonderful still life paintings from his Taos studio—

but Acheff was an early innovator when it came to painting Native

American artifacts alongside classic Western painting and photography,

and today his work sells for six figures at auction, is in the collections

of major museums and is treasured by collectors. Even as Acheff’s star

brightened in Western art over the last five decades, his goals have

remained the same since he started painting: to push the envelope

SILENT

Stillness

William Acheff celebrates his 50th year of painting with a new Western

still life show at Nedra Matteucci Gallery in Santa Fe.

BY MICHAEL CLAWSON

Above: Potter and Pots, oil on panel, 7 x 9”; Opposite page: Golden Memories, oil on panel, 9 x 6”