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	The
	Last
	BLANKETS
	by Joshua Baer

"Respect" is a word you hear a lot in American popular culture. Athletes, gangs and musicians use the word like a mantra: "It's all about respect," they say. In the art world, respect means that works of art produced by a specific artist or culture have appeared in museum exhibitions, magazines and coffee table books, and have realized five-, six-, or seven-figure prices at auction. Dealers, speculators, celebrities and the newly rich flock to respectable art because it confers legitimacy on their money, makes them look tasteful, and is supposed to be easy to resell.

2. A double saddle blanket shown on horseback under a contemporary saddle. Note how only the decorative border is revealed.

Works of American Indian art occasionally realize strong prices at auction, and scores of books extol the aesthetic and spiritual virtues of art created by "the first Americans." But, with the notable exception of the Museum of the American Indian in New York, major American museums seem reluctant to stage either permanent or temporary exhibitions of American Indian art. Their reluctance to display American Indian material may be rooted in the 19th century, when Anglo-Americans killed nine million American Indians. Or it may have something to do with the fact that American Indian Art is a diverse, complicated field that does not lend itself to academic theories. Whatever the reasons, this reluctance has created an unfortunate stalemate: if there is little or no American Indian art in American museums, then the American public has no place to cultivate an interest in it, and if the public has no interest, the museums have no incentive to stage exhibitions. Meanwhile, the respect flows into simpler, trendier areas like Turkish kilims or Kuba textiles.

3. Saddle Blanket

The lack of respect received by American Indian art used to irritate me. I had a passion for the material, so I thought everyone else should be passionate too. It was only during the last couple of years that I realized how fortunate I was to be working and collecting in a field that gets scant institutional respect. Collecting art that everyone wants is, at best, an exercise in conformity. You may think that you're thinking for yourself, but your thoughts are really being produced by the crowd you're following. Prices are high, selection is low and a sense of discovery is long gone. Collecting art that nobody wants is just the opposite. Prices are low, selection is good and a sense of discovery is always with you. The story of the Navajo double saddle blanket is one I am still learning how to tell, but for me it began seven years ago, in the middle of the art boom, with an art form that nobody wanted.

4. Saddle Blanket

In the spring of 1989, I was working as the managing partner of a gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that specialized in antique American Indian art, with an emphasis on nineteenth-century Navajo blankets. Business was very good. Sometimes we sold two or three five-figure blankets a day. Navajo blanket dealers and collectors from all over the country were sending us their material, hoping to cash in on the run we were having. Whenever I was offered a classic serape I really liked, I bought it, rolled it up and stashed it in a cedar chest. Like other 1980s art dealers who confused wisdom with positive cash flow, I thought I knew everything about buying and selling art, and I intended to keep buying, selling and stashing it until they carried me out in a box. It wasn't work. It was creative commerce. Each time I sold another classic blanket, I told myself I was dancing to sweet music, and that the music would never stop.

One afternoon, a trader named Lane Coulter came in and offered me a Navajo weaving, circa 1900, that made me laugh because it was so simple (see fig. 4). It lacked any semblance of decoration or color. To call the piece "minimal" was an understatement. It was beyond basic. It seemed so innocuous that I decided not to buy it, and I was about to say so when Lane told me the price. At that time, you could spend more for lunch at one of Santa Fe's better restaurants than Lane wanted for his weaving. After I wrote the check, I asked him what I had just bought.

5. Saddle Blanket

"That's a double saddle blanket," he said. He picked up the blanket, folded in half widthwise and draped the folded blanket over his outstretched arm. "This is how it would lie on a horse's back," he explained. "The saddle would go on top of it. All you'd see of the blanket would be the border around the edge. The saddle would cover the rest. That's why double saddle blankets have empty centers. They really weren't meant to be seen." I told Lane to find some more. Over the next year he brought five. I bought them, but it wasn't until I laid them out side by side on the floor one evening that it struck me: I was building a collection of Navajo double saddle blankets, and I was doing it because of their "empty" centers.

6. Saddle Blanket

In the spring of 1991, the music stopped. My clients decided to remodel their kitchens, buy log cabins in Montana, go on treks in Nepal, or do just about anything with their money besides buy Navajo blankets. The ecstatic art dealer who knew everything about buying and selling expensive works of art in 1989 turned out to be a moron. I had theories about my clients' sudden indifference to my inventory, but all my theories made me angry so I decided to stop theorizing. For the first time in ten years, I questioned my method of making a living. All the wealthy people I knew advised me to go into another business, preferably a business where financial assets were the product line and "things" - as they now referred to works of art - were what you used to decorate your second home. "What you did was interesting," a media tycoon told me, "but it's over. You have to face that."

7. A double saddle blanket with a white field and a red and brown border. Navajo, circa 1900

Having no money brings out the stubbornness in people. I spent the better part of 1991, 1992, and 1993 learning how to survive as an art dealer. In time, the art of survival became almost as entertaining as knowing everything had been in 1989. The classic serapes I had stashed during the good times were still marketable and they came out of the cedar chest and sold, one by one. While I hated saying good bye to them, I really had no choice. The money those serapes turned into was spent long before I made the inevitable decision to let each one go. The only weavings I kept were the double saddle blankets, and the only reason I kept them was because no one wanted to buy them.

It was during this educational phase in my career that I learned how satisfying the life of a die-hard collector can be, especially the die-hard collector who is broke most of the time. I hadn't told any one I was collecting double saddle blankets, but Lane and a few other dealers could smell what I was doing, so I continued to be offered two or three examples each month. Most of them were uninspired, but a handful had the look I wanted: a combination of intensity and composure, a floating quality that seemed both mysterious and obvious. Even though I was broke, the financial part of buying double saddle blankets posed no obstacle. The dealers were so happy to sell me something no one else wanted that they didn't care when they got paid, and the amounts of money involved seemed trivial compared with the stack of overdue bills on my desk.

8. A double saddle blanket with a gray and white field and a border of diagonal white dashes. Navajo, circa 1895-1900

By the middle of 1992, I owned twelve double saddle blankets. One of the interesting things about not having any capital is that it is a lot more labor intensive than being prosperous. The better part of my working day was spent talking on the telephone to people to whom I owed money, or to their attorneys. Paying bills with funds I didn't have had replaced creative commerce, and it was work in every sense of the word. In the evenings and on Sundays, I looked for ways to restore my enthusiasm, much the same way that diamond cutters stare at emeralds to rest their eyes. My emeralds were my double saddle blankets.

By 1993, the collection had grown to sixteen blankets. Just for fun, I started showing the collection to friends, and some of them started saying things like, "If you ever sell that one, call me." That summer, I heard that a rug dealer in Taos was writing a book about saddle blankets, and I panicked. The idea of another dealer poaching on what I had come to regard as my personal fiefdom was intolerable. On impulse, I ran a series of magazine advertisements with color pictures of double saddle blankets, stating that I was writing a book about them. The ads also said my company wanted to buy unusual examples.

9. Navajo, circa 1900-1910

What happened next should have come as no surprise, though I certainly didn't see it coming. Prices for double saddle blankets tripled, but so did the volume of material that I was offered. A week after the ads came out, my company started receiving letters full of Polaroids and snapshots. The letters came from all over the United States and Canada. The majority of the pictures were of damaged Navajo rugs, but there were enough double saddle blankets among them to increase my collection to twenty blankets, and start new collections for several clients. Most of the double saddle blankets illustrated in this article surfaced during this period. Had I known how much material those ads would attract, I would have run them in 1989.

10. Navajo, circa 1900-1910

The more double saddle blankets I saw, the more they taught me. I learned that the Navajos started weaving double saddle blankets during the early 19th century, and that almost all 19th-century examples are twill woven and unbordered (see figs. 1 and 5). I learned that the heyday of the double saddle blanket began around 1890 and lasted until 1910. I learned that the arrival of the bordered double saddle blanket with the empty center happened right before the turn of the century, concurrent with the phasing out of the Navajo wearing blanket and the phasing in of its replacement, the Navajo floor rug. I learned that Navajo weavers, all of whom were women, wove double saddle blankets as trade items for sale or barter to traders, cowboys and ranchers, but they also wove them for the men in their own families. Each double saddle blanket woven for a Navajo man was considered a journey: the blanket was intended to leave on horseback, blessed with a prayer that it would always return. To ensure their return, Navajo women wove feathers, strands of their own hair, and threads from the clothing of their sons or husbands into the empty centers of the blankets. You have to look carefully to see this, but almost every double saddle blanket I've examined has at least one of those items woven into its center.

11. Navajo, circa 1900-1910

I learned that old-time Indian traders referred to double saddle blankets as "windows," "ghost rugs" or "blanks." I learned that double saddle blankets were the last blankets woven by the Navajo. After 1910, ninety-nine percent of the weavings produced by the Navajo were floor rugs. I learned that many people from New York think that Navajo double saddle blankets look like paintings by Mark Rothko, and that the contemporary painter Susan Rothenberg (who used to paint horses) recently completed a painting with a non-decorative center surrounded by a rectangular border, which she titled "Ghost Rug."

On a day when I was re-hanging the gallery, I learned that you can display a good double saddle blanket in a room with a classic chief's blanket or a classic serape, and the double saddle blanket will hold its own and look like it belongs on the same wall with blankets that sell for twenty times its price. I learned that the American public is fascinated by anything related to horses, saddles, the Old West, and the romantic notion of returning to where you started. I learned that the American public's taste is shifting away from decorative, ornamental, brightly colored works of art in favor of pieces that might be described as contemplative. I learned that there is a Tantric quality at work in double saddle blankets. A group of double saddle blankets has a soothing influence on the eye. I learned that when a collector buys a double saddle blanket from you, and you call the collector a year or two later and offer her three times what she paid for the blanket, the collector laughs and says, "I'll think about it," but she never calls back. Finally, I learned that the Navajo double saddle blanket is a link to a world that no longer exists, a world where Navajo weavers produced blankets that were secrets, a world where the horse, the landscape, the eye and the imagination came together in a kind of jagged harmony, a truce between space and design.

12. A double saddle blanket with opposing gray and beige windows Navajo, circa 1900-1910

The double saddle blankets illustrated in this article are an incomplete chronology of the genre, but they do narrate the transition from the unbordered examples of the 19th century to the early bordered style of the 1900s, which in turn gave way to the livelier, more optical borders of the 1910s. What you cannot feel from the illustrations is the textural density of these blankets. They are simultaneously coarse and fine. They are not so much tapestries as mosaics of yarn. The compression of the yarn by the weight of the saddle and the motion of the horse's back acted as a final step in the weaving process. Navajo weavers started these blankets, but the horse culture of the Old West finished them. After being squeezed between generations of horses and saddles, it seems fitting that these blankets should look as well as they do on a wall. They are probably relieved to be there.

Jackson Pollock used to say that his paintings weren't finished until they were hanging in someone else's living room. The same might be said for double saddle blankets. They have made extraordinary journeys and, while they may not be back where they started, they have the power to return us to a sense of unlimited time and endless space that existed when they were woven.

13. with horse pictorials

Do Navajo double saddle blankets have respect? They have mine, and there are a few collectors out there who share my opinion that the Navajo double saddle blanket is an emerging American art form. But, as far as the general public is concerned, double saddle blankets are still in the esoteric and poorly understood part of their art world cycle. For every New Yorker who comments on how "modern" double saddle blankets look, there must be at least twenty other people who can't understand why an art dealer would hang old blankets with empty centers on the walls of his gallery. I take this as a sign that respect for these pieces is a long way off, and that there is still plenty of time to learn how to appreciate a work of art that was meant to be folded in half and put in a place where no one could see it.