A.P. Hays Collection | Session II | Saturday, April 12th, 2025 10:00AM
A. P. Hays
(9/8/1930 – 1/22/2025)
First arriving in Arizona as a child by way of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, A.P. Hays immediately fell in love with the American West. By his teen years in the 1940s, he was already collecting Western art and objects. In 1976, after a successful career in public relations, Hays moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, where he started Arizona West Galleries. The collector and art dealer, known by many as Abe, became a fixture at shows, auctions and events around the West, and quickly developed a reputation for a great eye when it came to Old West artifacts and paintings. When Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West opened its doors in 2015, visitors were greeted by the Abe Hays Family Spirit of the West Collection, the museum’s first permanent exhibition, which consists of 1,400 objects that includes historic Western saddles, rifles and revolvers, badges, gauntlets and horse gear.
Over the course of 60 years collecting art, Hays owned hundreds of Dixon pieces, including masterpieces such as Cloud World. Additionally, he published several books on Dixon and been involved in numerous exhibitions on the artist. He was also known for his encyclopedic knowledge of Western art, from Dixon and Lon Magargee to Frederic Remington and Charlie Russell. He shared this knowledge, and passion, with everyone he encountered. “I’m still a little boy, collecting little-boy things,” Hays told a reporter in 2015. “It’s just been a passion of mine that’s stayed my whole life.” A.P. “Abe” Hays died on January 22, 2025, in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Maynard Dixon
(1875-1946)
Few artists have been as consequential to present-day Western art as Maynard Dixon, whose influence has seemingly touched every artist working the last 50 years in a variety of ways. Born in California in 1875, at time when there was still some “wild” in the Wild West, Dixon turned to art almost immediately. Early works were illustrations for magazines and newspapers, including the Sunset Magazine, which ran now-iconic images by the artist on its covers. His assignment required travel around the West, including to Colorado, Utah, Nevada and Arizona. In every location he visited, he sought out Native Americans and other Western subjects who would appear in everything from hand-drawn cartoons to dazzling field studies to his large and magnificent studio paintings.
Dixon was in San Francisco for two major events: the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which destroyed his studio, and the building of the Golden Gate Bridge, which received its distinct orange color—officially called International Orange—from the artist. Dixon loved California and would have easily stayed there, but poor health forced him to find warmer and dryer climates in the deserts of Utah and Arizona. It was his paintings in the desert Southwest that defined Western art while he was alive, and long after. Although modernism had worked its way into Western art before Dixon, it was Dixon who persistently redefined what the genre could be, even today as modern artists continue to cite the painter as an influence on their interpretations of the land and its forms. Dixon died in Tucson, Arizona, in 1946.
Many works in The A.P. Hays Collection have been recently exhibited:
Sagebrush and Solitude: Maynard Dixon in Nevada, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV, 2024
The Abe Hays Family Maynard Dixon Collection, Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West, Scottsdale, AZ, 2020-2021
Additionally, over the years, The A.P. Hays Collection has been featured in more than 18 museums in 11 different states.
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