Today, the New York Times has a short item: Thomas Moran’s landscape “Green River of Wyoming” sold on Wednesday for $17.73 million at a Christie’s sale of American art in New York. This doubled the previous auction record for an American 19th century painting (previously held by John Singer Sargent’s “Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife,” $8.8 million, Sotheby’s, 2004). This would have been a matter of almost no consequence to me, even though I would have described Moran’s landscapes generally as “yummy” or “pretty cool” or even “sweet” if pressed. I look at some Morans (not this one, exactly) and I’m immediately transported back to the woods of Natty Bumpo and J.F. Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, which occupied me for a summer when I was a kid. (But that’s another story.)

Back to the auction. As I said, no consequence to me, except that I had just read another, much longer magazine story, by Ann E. Berman in Art+Auction on artinfo.com, about the difficulty collectors and museums were having locating and purchasing paintings by the iconic American painters. What’s the problem? There were few American painters (compared to Europeans), most of the best work was absorbed by museums in the 1990s, and wealthy American collectors are hungry for American art. Berman makes this case pretty convincingly and “predicted” the record-breaking sale of the Moran painting.

I would even have shrugged past this, though, except for one line in Berman’s story from collector James Dicke: “A few decades ago we would have walked right by artists like the Japanese-influenced Arts & Crafts–era painter Arthur Wesley Dow and snowscape specialist Walter Launt Palmer. But now people are taking another look,” Dicke says. “There is also new interest in regional artists.”

Now, we’re getting closer to home. And a series of questions popped up: what regional artists? what region? employing what styles? from what time period? And finally: what about the Northwest? I’ve always thought the Bay Area painters of the 1950s, working out ways to combine figurative and abstract styles, were “undervalued,” not necessarily at auction (though they probably have been), but by the “culture,” as represented by museums and curators and book publishers — David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, etc. (There is a good book on this era, Bay Area Figurative Art 1950-1965 by Caroline A. Jones.) And, of course, the Northwest School, which is really the Seattle School — Tobey, Callahan, Graves. A collector could do far worse than turn her attention to these artists. And if she did, that might have larger importance than paintings and cash simply changing hands, namely, scholarship, books, exhibitions, television shows, feature films. Well, maybe not the last two.

Regional artists. The Third Tier. Or is it the Fourth Tier? Ridiculous really, to think in these terms. It’s hard to think of our mythical New York collector making her way to Portland to be shown the work of CS Price, the Runquist brothers, Amanda Snyder. And she’d be hard-pressed to come by a major Price painting, I think (maybe I’m wrong). The Morrises, Russo and Haley, Bunce, Wilson. In the past couple of months there have been shows of older work by Oregon artists at two Portland galleries. There weren’t a lot of red dots. There’s almost no scholarship. Very few exhibitions, let alone publications. And that’s why that line caught my imagination: Because I can imagine a world in which the name Hilda Morris instantly evokes images of her sculpture (and Sumi paintings), poetic descriptions, argument about sources and relative merits — and the need to see them. We need to see them — and dream them, place them, learn from them. We just do.