The Art Dealer: Earl Biss & Paul Zeuger

By the time Earl Biss met Denver art dealer Paul Zueger, he had already lived several lifetimes. He had been the official artist for Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign, sold out shows across the West, and seen both adoration and exile from the art world. But when Suzanne Todd—a former art rep, art historian, and lover—introduced him to Zueger, it wasn’t a sure thing.

“Earl, I love your art,” Zueger told him, “but I also know your reputation with all the drugs and alcohol, and I don’t want to be around that. My kids work in the family business too, and I don’t want them to be around that.”

Despite his initial hesitation, Zueger eventually took Earl on. Zueger owned multiple galleries and had national reach—an ideal platform for an artist of Earl’s ambition. But representing Earl wasn’t like representing anyone else. Their collaboration was volatile, creative, and commercially explosive. “After a while, he became a star,” said Gene Licht, a friend and screen printer. “You could be the greatest artist in the world, but if you don’t promote yourself, you’re not going to make it. So, Earl had to promote himself as a Native American. He dressed the part, he drank the part, he did the part—and it ate away at him like you wouldn’t believe.”

Earl understood the importance of image. He might arrive at an opening in a top hat and tails, or a Hawaiian shirt, or a massive bearskin coat with a pistol tucked in his belt. “He put on the sunglasses, he put on the bearskin coat, he put on the glitter… But it was all an act. Because he really was a tremendously nice man,” Licht said.

At Zueger’s galleries, Earl’s shows were electric. “It got so intense at his openings,” said gallery manager Mike Olson, “we had to give the big collectors sheets of stick-on red dots so they could mark the pieces they wanted.” But Earl couldn’t resist disruption. At one opening, he brought three “erotica” paintings, carried them to a hidden alcove, and stood by them all night, ignoring his acclaimed piece Early Snow on the Beartooth Range hanging in the main gallery. “That’s when I started calling Earl the shock jock of art,” Olson said.

His brilliance came from a raw, lived place. Zueger remembered one painting of a Crow woman in traditional clothing, perched on a rock—except she was wearing fishnet stockings and holding a can of beer. “I said, ‘Earl, what did you do here?’ And he said, ‘That’s my mom.’ Then he added, ‘If she lived a hundred years earlier, she would have been that beautiful Indian princess. But that can of beer… the alcohol… changed her whole life.’” Zueger recalled that Earl was nearly in tears when he said it.

As Earl’s style evolved, so did his symbolism. He painted chiefs in chains, Crow women with inverted Christian crosses, and medicine men shapeshifting to escape. He called this phase moving paint—raw, spiritual, and emotional work driven by urgency and vision.

But his inner life remained turbulent. He dealt with grief, addiction, and trauma. He once held a dying friend in his arms after a racially motivated shooting—and watched as no jury convicted the white man who pulled the trigger. Earl mourned that injustice his entire life. “There’s a voice here that wants to cry out,” he once said. “Someone has been holding a hand over my mouth.”

Even when the commercial art world embraced him, Earl resisted the boundaries it imposed. “Some control is good,” he said. “But not too much control, or it loses its freedom.”

Zueger and his gallery team supported Earl through some of his darkest times: legal issues, addiction, emotional breakdowns. In turn, Earl gave them some of his most powerful work—paintings that were vivid, visionary, and utterly his own. He became a father figure to his adopted son Dante, passed on his techniques, and tapped deeper into spiritual visions of the American West: herds of buffalo in the sky, women with hourglasses running out of time.

Toward the end of his life, Earl began to make amends, reconnecting with people he cared about. His final paintings showed a new awareness of mortality: a self-portrait without a paintbrush, a burial scene he said he could never finish because it would “take his spirit.” When asked to explain why the piece kept being destroyed, he told gallery director Shelly Zueger simply, “I’m not allowed to paint it.”

After a massive stroke felled him in the middle of preparing for a Santa Fe show, Earl was buried on the Crow reservation in Montana, in the land that made him. Zueger, Olson, and others flew over his grave in a private jet, popped a bottle of champagne, and toasted him from the sky.

“It was fitting,” said Presley LaFountain. “Because it was still his medicine that was carrying us on.”

— Moving Paint: The Life and Art of Earl Biss, John Goekler (American Design Ltd., 2018)