Midcentury Modern Art in Texas 9780292756649

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MIDCENTURY MODERN ART IN TEXAS

MIDCENTURY MODERN ART

IN TEXAS K AT I E R O B I N S O N E D WA R D S

UNIVERSIT Y OF TEXAS AUSTIN

This book was supported in part by a gift from The Eugene McDermott Foundation.

Copyright © 2014 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in China First edition, 2014 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-form The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). Design by Lindsay Starr library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Edwards, Katie Robinson, 1964– Midcentury modern art in Texas / by Katie Robinson Edwards. — First edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-292-75659-5 (cl. : alk. paper) 1. Art, Abstract—Texas. 2. Modernism (Art)—Texas. 3. Art, American—Texas—20th century. I. Title. n6530.t4e35 2014 709.764'0904—dc23 2013032395

doi:10.7560/756595

For Alberto, Riley, and Lee and in memory of JVG2

CONTENTS

ac k n ow l e d g me n t s | ix

a p pe n d ix | 263 Selected Artists’ Biographies Sarah Beth Wilson n ote s |297 bibl iog ra phy | 339 il lu s trat i o n c r e d it s | 357 in d e x | 365

1

The Modernist Impulse and Texas Art 1

2

The 1930s and the Texas Centennial 29

3

Houston and the Foundations of Early Texas Modernism 61

4

Early Practitioners of Abstraction and Nonobjectivity 79

5

The Fort Worth Circle 115

6

The University of Texas at Austin in the 1940s and 1950s 137

7

The 1950s and Houston 169

8

Sculpture in and around the Studio of Charles Williams 207

9

Are Texans American? MoMA’s Americans Exhibitions 239 Postscript: What Happened to Earnest Modernism? 257

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book owes everything to the artists. I have

had the pleasure to know a few of them, but many passed on long before I came to this project. Thank you to the artists and their families, along with the curators, museums, historians, critics, collectors, and viewers who give continuing life to Texas art. Tremendous support came from the Center for the Advancement and Study of Early Texas Art (caseta), its learned cofounder Bill Reaves, dedicated board, and core members. With appreciation to former caseta director Robert Summers, who first introduced me to Texas modern art. The Institute for Oral History at Baylor University, especially Lois Myers, was a key early supporter. I am grateful for the unerring guidance of Allison Faust. Also at the University of Texas Press, thank you to Robert Devens, Leslie Tingle, Nancy Lavender Bryan, and Lindsay Starr. All errors herein are my own, but the writing was vastly improved by the astute, professional editing of Kip Keller. For sharing their taste and insights, special gratitude goes to James and Kimel Baker, Scott Barker,

Rick Bebermeyer, Lawrence Boettigheimer, Michael Grauer, Lisa Harvell, Mark Kever, Tam Kiehnhoff, Carl McQueary, Gene Owens, George Palmer, Charles Peveto, David Spradling, Richard Stout, Randy Tibbits, and Karl B. Williams. I was further assisted through the generosity of Claude C. Albritton III, Susan H. Albritton, Judy and Stephen Alton, Seth Alverson, Mary Arno, Pam Arnoult, Charles Attal, Linda Baird, Wendy Hurlock Baker, Melissa Barry, Cynthia Bell, Margaret Blagg, Terrell Blodgett, Devin Borden, Kim Williams Boyd, Sharon and (the late) Jack Boynton, Margery Brinkley, Pat and Dave Bronstein, Amy Cappellazzo, David and (the late) Patricia Cargill, Tammy Carter, Bill and Mark Cheek, Amy Corbin, Elizabeth Culwell-Collins, Jack and Gail Davis, Judy Deaton, David and Beth Dike, Greg Dow, Krishna Dronamraju, Melisa Durkee, Jim Edwards, Genevieve Ellerbee, Clare Elliott, the late Mary Margaret Farabee, the late Kelly Fearing, Sarah G. Forgey, Henri Gadbois, Karin Gilliam, George Grammer, Tom Haggerty, Kiowa

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Hammons, Rick Hardin, Paul Hatgil, Sara Hignite, Jana Hill, Dodi Holland, Katie Hooker, Kirk Hopper, Mark  O. Howald, Holly Hutzell, Jim D’Imperio, Roula and Vincent Jarrard, Anne Kelly, Patrick Kelly, Raymond B. Kelly III, Geralyn Kever, Veronica Keyes, Tom Kiehnhoff, Liz Kurtulik, David Lackey, Gayle Laurel, Paul Lester, Tara Lewis, Jim Lincoln, Judy Lopez, Darcy Marlow, Kathryn and Morris Matson, John D. McClanahan, Leila McConnell, Norma McManaway, Ava Jean Mears, Elizabeth C. Moody, Diane Nelson, Beverly Palmer, Nelie Plourde, Karen Rechnitzer Pope, Eric Preusser, Russell Prince, Sam Ratcliffe, Jean Goebel Rather, Linda Reaves, Rick and Nancy Rome, Jason Schoen, Anne W. Shea, Susan Sklar, Charles Smith, Mark  L. Smith, James  E. Sowell, Sam and Juliana Stevens, Ruth Storms, Warren Stricker, Stella Sullivan, Meredith Sutton, John Swords, Russell Tether, Leslie Thompson, Janet Tyson, Karl Umlauf, Kevin and Cheryl Vogel, Paula Webb, Earl Weed, Gwen Weiner, Otis T. Welch, Ronald Wenner, Ruby White, Erica Wickett, the late Dick Wray, Robert Wray, and Jeff Zilm. Many thanks to the institutional lenders and their courteous staff, including the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Andrews Kurth llp, Archives of American Art, Art Resource, Artists Rights Society, Baltimore Museum of Art, Barry Whistler Gallery, Blanton Museum of Art, Bobbie and John L. Nau Collection, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Cartin Collection, Cynthia Brants Trust, Dallas Museum

of Art, Grace Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Jerry Bywaters Special Collection at the Hamon Arts Library of Southern Methodist University, Henry Moore Foundation, Meadows Museum, Menil Collection, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Modern Art, Nasher Sculpture Center, Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Old Jail Art Center, Palm Springs Art Museum, Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philbrook Museum of Art, Princeton University Library, Ridglea Country Club, Sheldon Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Southern Methodist University, Talley Dunn Gallery, Texas a&m University Press, Texas Woman’s University, Umlauf Sculpture Garden Museum, vaga, Washburn Gallery, and Whitney Museum of American Art. To any person or institution I may have inadvertently left out, please accept my apologies. This book owes much to the invaluable input of Alison de Lima Greene and Francine Carraro, who should know that all shortcomings are solely mine. I was heartened by the unflagging support of Alexandra Phillips during the onerous permissions process. Another outstanding Baylor alumna, Sarah Beth Wilson, researched and wrote the artists’ biographies. Finally, I could not have written this book without the steadfast support of Scott J. Robinson, Johnna S. Robinson, Riley Mott, Alberto, and Lee.

MIDCENTURY MODERN ART IN TEXAS

1 To understand and appreciate modern art one must seek more than literal facts and imitations of nature. The visual experience that is intended by the artist is different from the telling of a story with words or looking at the surface appearance of nature. Modern art must be considered a visual language and not confused with the language of spoken or written words. This is the first step toward understanding. ROBERT PREUSSER “What Is Modern Art?,” c. 1938

Facing | Figure 1.01 | Photograph of Robert O. Preusser by F. Wilbur Seiders, c. 1952. Preusser, a member of Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery stable, is pictured in front of Subaqueous Impression (Fig. 7.06).

The Modernist Impulse and Texas Art

At the age of nineteen, the Houston artist Robert Preusser sat down at his typewriter and earnestly tapped out his theory of modern art. He then honed his argument with handwritten corrections in block letters.1 Preusser’s declaration both revealed the precocious development of a single artist and succinctly encapsulated the fundamental challenge many artists would face over the next twoplus decades. How was one to present modern art to a public accustomed to pictures that resembled the “surface appearance of nature”? And for Texas artists, how was that to be accomplished in a state dominated by conservative tastes and geographically isolated from the aesthetically urbane areas of the country? By embracing modern art in Texas in the late 1930s, Preusser was a chronological outlier, ahead of many of his contemporaries. He benefited, however, from growing up in a city with competent and formidable art teachers, a rapidly developing patronage system, and the state’s first art museum.2 It is unsurprising that one of Texas’s first fully abstract artists emerged from Houston.

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Within twenty-five years, artists all over the state discovered modernism, and by 1960 it had become the norm rather than the exception. Recalling the situation in Texas of the early 1960s, the art historian Susie Kalil lamented, “Pervasive throughout those years were flaccid, palette-knife renditions and methodical abstractions mostly emanating out of university art departments. Many artists . . . rigidly adhered to teaching modernist principles.”3

Figure 1.02 | Robert O. Preusser, Receding Transit, 1940, oil on board, 32" × 20". Receding Transit represents a remarkably early example of nonobjective abstract painting in Texas.

Kalil’s keen reflection suggests how thoroughly a formerly radical style had lost its efficacy. Modernism in the arts first emerged in mid to late nineteenth-century Paris, although historians have since uncovered indications of an incipient modernist attitude in art forms across Europe and the United States during that period. In many ways, modernism was a response to or symptom of changes in society brought on by the Industrial Revolution. As Pam Meecham and Julie Sheldon wrote in 2000, “No art form was unchanged by modernism but the degree and depth of change seems, in the visual arts, to have been especially extreme, involving the abandoning, in some of its forms, of centuries of craft, technical skill and even knowledge.”4 Abstract Expressionism, whose roots lie in European modernism, is distinctly American, having originated in New York City in the years around World War II. Generally, in the guise of either gently modulated color fields or gestural action painting, Abstract Expressionism once symbolized existential rebellion against conformity and indifference. But its expressive individualism, institutionalized and sanitized, soon lost much of its initial impact. New York eventually became the postwar center of the art world, and the Abstract Expressionist gesture spread like a blight across the United States. Although it was to last at least until 1960, one of the first critics to note this loss of effectiveness was Harold Rosenberg, who warned in 1952 that Abstract Expressionist painting risked becoming what he memorably labeled “apocalyptic wallpaper.”5 As the 1960s dawned in New York, Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein countered the then-embedded

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notion that the spontaneous gesture implied an elevated content. Johns teased the machismo implied by the gestural drip, most comically in Painting with Two Balls (1960), in which faux-gestural brushwork covers a canvas that is pushed apart by two actual round balls. The Pop artist Lichtenstein famously parodied the Abstract Expressionist gesture in a series of enlarged brushstrokes and paint drips that emulated the depersonalized style of commercial art. Midcentury Modern Art in Texas concentrates on the period when, to paraphrase Preusser’s heartfelt declaration, the “modern artist’s intuitive approach” held “validity.” It covers the years in Texas when abstract forms, marks, and lyrical color fields still felt novel and provocative, before Abstract Expressionism became an orthodox style.6 My intent with this book is not only to reconstruct that initial enthusiasm, but also to argue for the continued vibrancy and effectiveness of midcentury painting and sculpture in Texas. The best Texas midcentury art is fully capable of profound visual communication, even fifty years after its creation and beyond the diffuse focus of an information-saturated global society. Harold Rosenberg, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein worked in Manhattan, where they experienced and shaped cutting-edge art and criticism. Each had firsthand access to American and European aesthetic pioneers and movements. Rosenberg’s “wallpaper” admonition appeared at a time when many Texas artists had barely discovered abstraction, much less the liberating potential of spontaneous expression. Such a temporal handicap would seem to have made Texas a latecomer to

modern art—a party guest who arrived well after the champagne had gone stale. Yet it is apparent that the state’s delayed introduction to modern art, and the mediation of that art through distinctly Texan channels, preserved and perhaps enhanced its expressive power. From the perspective of Texas, developments in Europe, Mexico, and the eastern and western United States could be taken at face value, reconciled with the local visual dialect, or ignored completely. The state’s geographic insularity carried both a positive and a negative charge. Before World War II, modernism in the United States encompassed a wide variety of styles. Around 1945, the aesthetic and critical values emerging from Lower Manhattan began to supplant the country’s diversified modernist approaches, and New York’s Abstract Expressionism came to represent, synecdochically, all American modernism.7 This concept has a precursor in the art historian Angela Miller’s persuasive argument about nineteenth-century American art in which scenes created by the Hudson River school in one part of the country—the northeastern United States— came to represent the whole of the country.8 Similarly, and for decades after World War II, the historiography of American art turned on the pivotal role of Abstract Expressionism. It is thus important to note that much of the art in this book was created before the canonization of New York Abstract Expressionism as American modernism. Modernist expressions in Texas were like a thriving bacterial culture in a petri dish just before it is subsumed by a virulent and foreign strain. (The double meaning of “culture” is invoked as a reminder that the United States at midcentury was filled with localized

4  |  MIDCENTURY MODERN ART IN TEXAS

expressions of modernism.) The best Texas art in the middle decades of the twentieth century was at once conspecific with and blissfully separated from the northeastern strain, and its unique qualities relate to this duality of ideological and geographic positioning.9 This issue segues into a pertinent question regarding how individual artists or schools practiced modernism across the United States. How does one construct the history of a particular area in a way that emphasizes its connections to national and international modernity while preserving its distinctive local characteristics? In New York, the question

was largely obviated by grandly ambitious artists who rejected telltale local references in their paintings and sculptures.10 Undoubtedly, the apparently nonspecific, universalizing qualities of Abstract Expressionism in New York made it easier to argue that it synecdochically represented all American art.11 The irony is that Abstract Expressionism developed in one tiny district in the melting-pot bustle of postwar New York. One could argue that Lower Manhattan evinced its own regional style by virtue of its adamant rejection of the local. But in those days “regionalism” was a pejorative, and has been periodically since then, connoting the provincialism of rural artists who shunned city life.

✳ Texas stood apart from the rest of the country in countless ways. Beaumont, Texas, greeted the twentieth century in 1901 with an explosion of greenishblack liquid, rocketing skyward. The repercussions were monumental. The well, soon dubbed Spindletop, produced millions of barrels of crude oil, and from that day onward Texas surged ahead of the rest of the nation in oil production. Spindletop’s oil fields heralded the dawn of the modern oil industry, changing the course of both Texas and U.S. history. The harnessing of oil—a feat laden with Texassized perils—at the dawn of the twentieth century confirmed that the state’s bountiful resources extended beyond the endless land to the subterranean domain beneath it. Spindletop serves as a metaphor for the oil-related extravagance that helped define the world’s collective vision of Texas. The fortunes of iconic fictional figures, whether in the guise of Jett Rink Figure 1.03 | Richard Stout, Twin Derricks, oil on canvas, 15½" × 11½". The precocious creation of a sixteen-year-old Beaumont native augured an exceptional sixty-plus-year career of painting, drawing, and sculpting that continues today.

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(from the film Giant) or J. R. Ewing (from the television show Dallas), rose and fell on the availability of oil. Before the oil boom, ranchers and cattlemen stood as the state’s emblems of hardiness, strength, and boldness. From someplace between oil, ranching, and the Alamo, the image of Texas conjures up a horde of historical figures and hackneyed images: Davey Crockett, Sam Houston, cowboys, boots, oil derricks, longhorn cattle, rattlesnakes,

and bluebonnets. Artists living in or simply passing through Texas have made countless depictions of these subjects and more. Its action-packed history and fierce reputation for independence provide the twenty-eighth state with numerous factual and tall tales to elicit the interest of people from all countries; its near-mythic status encourages the perpetuation of such stories. For a state so proud of its size, self-reliant individualism, and sovereignty, the paradox is that its popular visual imagery tends toward the utterly conventional. Yet from the same Texas soil, modernist forms of painting and sculpture emerged. Not nearly as ostentatious as the oil boom and its attendant grandiosity, modernist art in Texas nonetheless retained an essential connection to the land, and thrived. Greeted neither by elated crowds nor by throngs of reporters, it was scarcely noticed by the average Texan. By highlighting this less conspicuous but equally indigenous Texas product, the following chapters trace the development of modernist and abstract tendencies from the early explorations of a handful of artists in the 1930s through

Figure 1.04 | Robert Rogan, Untitled, c. 1950s, oil on canvas, 14" × 9". Born in Topeka, Kansas, Rogan began teaching at Beaumont’s Lamar University in 1961, putting his Texas period later than other artists in this book. Rogan’s high caliber and consistent engagement with abstraction, plus the clear influence of Southeast Texas, make his work a valuable addition.

Figure 1.05 | Stephen Rascoe, Oil Field Lights, n.d., oil on Masonite, 43¼" × 61½". Rascoe, a draftsman for the Shell Oil Company, spent much of his career in Corpus Christi before taking a teaching position in Arlington. This emblematic color-field interpretation of the state’s most productive industry won a D. D. Feldman purchase prize.

6  |  MIDCENTURY MODERN ART IN TEXAS

the biomorphic and geometric forms that peppered art in the state in the 1950s and early 1960s. Lone Star modernists absorbed and interpreted the latest, most extreme formal lessons of the twentieth century. They rarely cohered into a single group; that is, we cannot look back and recognize a “School of Texas Modernism.” With few exceptions, modernism in the Lone Star State emerged quietly and independently. A standout early practitioner was Georgia O’Keeffe, who—during her few years in Texas—painted and drew radical abstract work in the Panhandle as early as 1914. More commonly, those who picked up modernism began their work in the 1930s or the 1940s. A number of skilled teachers, students, and independent artists viewed abstraction as an invigorating and enlightening pictorial language. The origins of twentieth-century modern art were antithetical to the independent spirit of Texas, which had struggled against and rejected foreign intervention.12 Popular taste in art paralleled that of the majority of Americans, who favored traditional modes of art. Texas might have been one of the last states of the Union where a person could expect to find a vital current of modernist painting and sculpture in the mid-twentieth century. Ultimately, however, the same Texas that encouraged political independence and free-spirited citizens turned out to be fertile ground for an autonomous spirit in sculpture and painting. The state’s vast geography and secessionary zeal allowed artists to work in whatever style of art they pleased. Many drew literal and metaphoric inspiration from the land; still others abandoned any semblance of mimetic representation.

Beginning in the 1930s, certain Texas artists started to engage in abstraction to varying degrees; some hardened the edges of recognizable landscapes that yet departed from nature, while others embraced nonobjective, geometric imagery. Between these poles lay a wide range of styles.

Figure 1.06 | Dorothy Antoinette “Toni” LaSelle, Theme 1, B, 1952, oil on canvas, 44" × 25". LaSelle was among many inspiring teacher-artists who shaped the art and legacy of the Denton, Texas, area.

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Significant for pushing the limits of abstraction were Preusser of Houston, Forrest Bess of Baytown and Chinquapin, Seymour Fogel in Austin, Dorothy Antoinette “Toni” LaSelle in Denton, former Denton resident Myron Stout, and Ben L. Culwell in Dallas and Temple, among many others. Although modern sculptors were rarer than painters, the Fort Worth, Dallas, and Houston areas nurtured several stellar three-dimensional artists, including Charles T. Williams and Jim Love. Welcoming and internalizing abstract modes of art, these were among the state’s modernist aesthetic pioneers. As New York City attained art world primacy, in part because of prewar immigration by Europeans and postwar devastation, many Texas artists exhibited there, holding their own against other soonto-be-famous artists. “American art” was defined by the leading modernist institution, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and Texas artists visiting the city were not unaffected. Occasionally, and for short spells, small artistic gatherings coalesced into quasi movements, as in the case of the so-called Fort Worth Circle. The circle’s artists deliberately flouted the prevailing trends of relatively conservative art in Texas by engaging in what they considered a more avant-garde approach, strongly influenced by Surrealism, Paul Klee, and Amedeo Modigliani. Some members of the circle ventured briefly into full abstraction, but for the most part their imagery was grounded in recognizable figures and scenes with a distinctively modernist touch. As Texas colleges and universities developed art departments, some artists found teaching positions that permitted them to innovate in their own art, and their teaching reflected, naturally, the concepts

they embraced in their work. Other artists held primary jobs in other vocations but made abstract art on the side. Modernist pockets existed from Austin to Houston, Denton to San Angelo, and up north, into the Panhandle. The history of modernist art in Texas has been overshadowed by both an abiding preference for realistic or Impressionist-style art and the state’s selfperpetuating lore. There is, nevertheless, a treasure trove of Texas modernism, much of it having been secreted away in the basements of museums or held within a limited number of private collections and

Figure 1.07 | Cynthia Brants, Still Life (in Light from Window), 1947, oil on canvas, 35" × 26". Writer, printmaker, and painter Brants breaks up the light and objects into skillfully colored facets.

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artists’ inventories. Only in recent years have national exhibitions and publications begun to “rediscover” midcentury modernist artists and movements that seemed to be invisible to the broader American art world.13 Well-rehearsed explanations for what happened historically always revolved around the dominance of the New York School and its subsequent stranglehold on modern American art.14 But starting perhaps twenty-five years ago, East Coast–centered overviews of the American terrain have begun to yield their once canonical authority.15

✳ Two overarching themes—“heroism” and “landscape”—recur throughout the study of Texas modernism. Where there are heroes, there are often antiheroes. Similarly, landscape requires space. Although Texas artists gleaned much from European and New York avant-gardes, and shared much with them, these leitmotifs, which interrelate and overlap, have a peculiarly Texan tenor. Texas Heroism Consider what the Manhattan editor of a financial magazine intoned before the Advertising Clubs of Texas in 1923: “Your State’s greatest assets,” he reminded his audience, are its “history and heroism.”16 This adman’s perspicacity was wholly accurate; nothing fascinates Americans and Europeans like the lore of Texas, some of which reads like a classic revenge fantasy.17 What first comes to mind is the Battle of the Alamo, with its overwhelming rout of the Texians (what the early Texas colonists

called themselves), followed by the Texas army’s victory at the Battle of San Jacinto, the determining event in Texas’s fight for independence. With its scant two hundred defenders, including William Travis and James Bowie, the Alamo is synonymous with zealous independence, although “Remember the Alamo!” may be heard more frequently today in parody than in earnest. During this turning point in Texas history, Moses Austin, Stephen F. Austin, Samuel Houston, Travis, and Bowie all earned reputations as stalwart, irrepressible heroes. Sifting fact from fiction is challenging, but Texas will always be associated with grand acts of bravery, real or imagined. Early examples of fine art recorded and embellished these courageous events, and the act of portraying red-blooded history could impart a degree of heroism to the artist himself. Two books by female authors, Frances Battaile Fisk’s A History of Texas Artists and Sculptors (1928) and Esse ForresterO’Brien’s Art and Artists of Texas (1935), are among the first comprehensive attempts to document the state’s historical and practicing artists. In each one the author equates the act of painting heroic subjects with an artist’s own mettle. In her opening chapter, Fisk describes the historical painter Henry Arthur (Harry) McArdle (1836–1908) as follows: “Born near Belfast, Ireland, July 9, 1836, the very year in which were enacted the stirring scenes in the drama of Texas Independence which he was destined so vividly to portray in his splendid historical paintings.” Once in Texas, she continues, “the artist consecrated his life to his dreams.”18 ForresterO’Brien likewise makes note of McArdle’s birth as occurring in “the very year of the stirring day

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of Texas drama,” adding, “Fate most certainly decreed that his brush should portray these historic happenings.”19 Once the Irishman arrived in Texas, Forrester-O’Brien explains, he “became so imbued with its past that he decided to remain to tell its dramatic story on canvas”; McArdle’s Battle of San Jacinto becomes “a thrilling picturization of the culminating triumph in the closing chapter of the fight for Texas independence.” Forrester-O’Brien eulogizes McArdle as “a soldier, a patriot, a crusader in the cause of patriotism, a scholar, an historian and an artist of genius.” Forrester-O’Brien’s account of William Henry Huddle (1847–1892) pushes the concept of the artist’s heroism further still; after all, this is about Texas, by definition larger than life. The biography of this “self-sacrificing” artist “should be written indelibly in the minds and hearts of present and future generations.” Why? “He dipped his brush not in mere paints, but in those ingredients which make character, personality, history, wars, and painted as though inspired, the story of the State of Texas.” Indeed, “it would be safe to say that no other artist painted individually and collectively so much manpower, for in those pioneer days in Texas it took men not only of mental and moral strength but of physical strength.” Such hagiographic rhetoric, in part accounted for by the 1935 date of Art and Artists of Texas, one year before the Texas Centennial celebration, seamlessly merges physical virility with painterly heroism. Both chronicles predate most modernist activity in the state, as well as the Texas Centennial, making 1935 a valuable terminus ante quem (“limit before which,” that is, the latest time) for early Texas art

and thus a year at which we can also set the beginning of Texas modernism.20 Several artists in Forrester-O’Brien’s compendium—such as Dickson Reeder and William Lester—had not yet employed abstraction. Forrester-O’Brien does, however, dedicate two paragraphs to Georgia O’Keeffe. With no reference to the modernist content of the Wisconsin native’s art, she attributes O’Keeffe’s success to her fawning husband: “As the wife of Alfred Stieglitz, the New York photographer, Georgia O’Keefe [sic] has found fame and fortune, and an appreciative and understanding companion. In the gallery, ‘An American Place,’ in New York, owned by her husband, O’Keefe’s [sic] latest paintings are always on exhibition.”21 O’Keeffe’s Texas period receives further attention in the latter half of this chapter. The Antihero The paradigm of the artist-as-hero is in no way applicable to Bess. | JOHN YAU , “On the Life and Art of Forrest Bess”

The ingrained concept of heroism in Texas history— and as Fisk and Forrester-O’Brien explicate it, within the artists themselves—is unavoidable. Some Texas modernists were indeed independent minded and free-spirited, embodying a new incarnation of the Texas myth. But if some brought great machismo to their process, others engaged in decidedly antiheroic activity.22 Neither their personae nor their aesthetic styles appear to carry the robust vigor and tough-mindedness associated with the pantheon of Texas heroes.23

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Advanced by Rosenberg’s “American Action Painters” essay of 1952 and reified in Irving Sandler’s The Triumph of American Painting (1970),24 the twentieth-century concept of artist as hero became synonymous with New York Abstract Expressionism. New York artists, heavily championed by a bevy of critics and curators, were given plenty of room to remake themselves and thereby reconstitute the conventional understanding of heroism. Barnett Newman’s iconic Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–1951) signaled his lofty and straight-faced certainty of the spiritually heroic potential in abstract art. Back in Texas, the challenge lay in shaking off the yoke of the state’s ingrained heroism. Texas painters and sculptors occupied the crossroads between the existential New York action painter and Texas’s mythologized nineteenth-century heroes. One of Texas’s finest modernist painters, Forrest Bess, thwarted the traditional hero category so effectively as to make it seem risible (for more on Bess, see chapter four). At least, that is, if one construes heroism as equivalent to robust masculinity. Yet as I will argue, Bess’s paintings and persona perhaps manifest a new locus of heroism, taking metaphysical determination and physical willpower to unprecedented heights. Since its inception in the mid-nineteenth century, modernist painting has inverted standard tropes and expectations, tending to elevate the antihero and the renegade. For example, in lieu of the smooth, near-invisible brushwork of successful academic painters, the French Realist Édouard Manet eschewed chiaroscuro and painted with tangible, tactile brushstrokes. And rather than portraying Napoleonic battles or mythological scenes, Manet elevated courtesans and dandies.

Compared to New York Abstract Expressionists, artists such as Bess may, paradoxically, have more thoroughly inhabited the essence of modernism— and even offered a new spirit of “Texan independence”—in the mid-twentieth century. Landscape and Space For centuries, Texas has been shaped by the geologic characteristics of its land as well as by the rugged determination of those who choose to inhabit it.25 This thematic underpinning of the ensuing

Figure 1.08 | Forrest Bess, Untitled, 1947, oil on canvas, 4½" × 2¾". Made by one of the leading abstract painters in the state, these twin images may allude to Bess’s theories about the unification of male and female within one body.

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chapters concerns the physical and metaphorical landscape and space of Texas. That is, abstraction has an integral relationship to the state and its geography. To many artists, horizon and sky imply infinity, a quality that can only be hinted at in painting, sculpture, printmaking, or photography. Any literal depiction of the land constitutes an approximation, just one mode of re-creating the feeling of vastness. For some artists, a literal or figurative representation of the landscape is insufficient, driving them toward an existential freedom in their recognition that the horizon stands in for an unknowable, inexpressible terrain. Abstraction, too, has a greater capacity than representational art to evoke a wide phenomenological field and may be a more potent equivalent of the vast and sublime land and sky of Texas. The term “space” is multivalent. It can refer, externally, to the endless Texas landscape or, internally, to the space developed within a painting or sculpture. In abstract art, space can be psychological or metaphysical. These connotations can be embodied in a single object when the artist internalizes and then represents the vast expanse of the land. American art history, too, constitutes another type of space: this book periodically addresses how Texans fit within that established historical terrain.

✳ In a catalogue essay written in 1992, “Texas Vision: Through the Looking Glass of History,” Michael Ennis highlights episodes in Texas art history from 1836 through the present, focusing on objects collected by Richard and Nona Barrett. The Barretts’ somewhat heterogeneous collection includes

a concentration of Texas painting and sculpture from its origins to the late twentieth century.26 Ennis points out that the relationship between Texas art and its history relates to the frequently raised question of whether American art is distinctively “American.” He articulates what he characterizes as his renegade position in the late 1980s and early 1990s: I intend to argue—quite unfashionably— that the answer to the question “Is there such a thing as Texas art?” is an emphatic “yes.” What is Texan about it is not as simple as an affinity for bold strokes, whether emotional or literal. It is a pervading sense of place, a fundamental Texan-ness most directly evidenced in a strong tradition of narrative and landscape art, but that also emerges through a more subtle appropriation of the same language in which so much of Texas’s history has been written: the language of myth.27

Note how Ennis’s self-described “unfashionable” opinion is the art historical equivalent of the antihero stance, of going against the tide. On the whole, he identifies many of the same themes that motivate a majority of observers and scholars of Texas art—including numerous collectors who discuss what moves them about particular objects as well as gallery directors, curators, and historians who attempt to situate the work thematically or historically. Other writers who have broached the matter from different points of view—including Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, Francine Carraro, William Goetzmann, Michael Grauer, Alison de Lima Greene, Patricia Covo Johnson, Susie Kalil, William Reaves, Becky

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Duval Reese, Barbara Rose, and Rick Stewart— discern a manifestation of Texas identity in much of the art.28 What Ennis identified as “unfashionable” in 1992 has been borne out by looking. Yet the case for the integration of identifiably Texan qualities into abstract art presents itself less tangibly. It would be simplistic to reiterate Ennis’s emphatic yes or to argue against it. There are playfully and deliberately iconic Texas modernist paintings, such as Kathleen Blackshear’s Texas Synthesis or Jack Boynton’s midcareer cowboy boots and maplike renderings of the state. In the syncopated rhythms of familiar Texas scenes, such as Bill Condon’s Houston Ship Channel or any number of oil derricks as interpreted by modernist painters, one finds a Texas-specific modernism. But in nonobjective or purely expressionist art, what periodically surfaces is an abstract sensation of the Texas landscape, myth, heroism, and its antonym. These works transmute an aura of place or circumstance into pictorial means.

artist’s chief contributions were modern but not principally abstract, or because scant information was available to me. Of the large number of Texas modern artists who are discussed, lengthier consideration is given to those who took modernism beyond vacuous formal conceits or whose work relates to a historical circumstance that warrants greater attention. Occasionally, this means distinguishing between art that was merely derivative and that which was truly innovative.

✳ The first task of Midcentury Modern Art in Texas is to highlight key manifestations of the work and to consider the causes that spurred its creation. Readers familiar with early Texas art will find recognizable names here as well as some heretofore unknown. For them, I hope the book offers a refreshing review as well as deeper insights. And I hope that those unfamiliar with this art discover much that will be valuable and compelling. I do not attempt to delineate a complete history of Texas modern art or its artists. The names of some practitioners do not appear; in general this is either because an Figure 1.09 | Kathleen Blackshear, Texas Synthesis, 1938, oil on canvas, 30" × 26". Iconic Texas images interpreted by one of the state’s leading art historian–artists; Blackshear spent much of her career at the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Top | Figure 1.10 | Bill Condon, Houston Ship Channel, 1958, oil on panel, 24" × 80". Both his training in architecture at the Rice Institute and his career at Broesche and Condon Architects are evident in this Houston native’s structure of the ship channel. Condon won awards for his paintings and prints in the 1950s and 1960s. Bottom | Figure 1.11 | William Lester, Landscape and Interior, 1970–1971, oil on canvas, 48" × 38". One of the chronologically latest works here, this image represents Lester’s continued evolution as he merges interior with exterior in a brightly hued palette characteristic of his 1960s and 1970s work.

I draw comparisons to better-known American and European modernist art and movements in order to demonstrate how the finest Texas artists fit within a larger aesthetic scheme. Although I implicitly and explicitly consider the aforementioned perennial question “What is ‘Texan’ in this art?”, its creators should be treated as artists first. My intent is to avoid Texas jingoism and instead to situate the artists properly within the larger, ever-unfolding framework of American art. At the same time, their work and inspiration often conveys a quality of Texan-ness that subtly undergirds much of their production. It is true, just as the artists Alexandre Hogue and Myron Stout knew, that the local offered a path that could be followed to the universal. The second half of this introductory chapter introduces early Texas art, offers a synopsis of American modernism, and defines key terms. The chapters that follow demonstrate, through several lenses and framings, the disparate ways that diverse artists across Texas incorporated and exhibited the modernist impulse in their work. The chapters are structured chronologically around energized areas or events. Sometimes a modernist verve took hold

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of a city; other times it was most prominent in individual artists who practiced alone. For example, the 1936 Texas Centennial in Dallas offered Texans a chance to take stock of who they were and where they stood within the national artistic setting. Thus, to revivify the striking local form of modernism created by Texas regionalists, chapter two dedicates considerable discussion to the Centennial. Although some modern artists, in later years, would dismiss the work of the Dallas Nine in the 1930s as overly “regionalist,” the members of that group displayed a magnified sense of realism, a heightened attunement to local motifs, and a peculiar compression of space, all indicative of a modernist impulse.

Figure 1.12 | Alexandre Hogue, Neighbors, 1932, oil on canvas, 14" × 30". Hogue’s “neighbors” are tiny aproned figures waving to each other in this bird’s-eye landscape.

The artists have been treated admirably by historians such as Rick Stewart and Francine Carraro, but my goal is to situate them within the specific context of abstraction as progenitors and even shepherds of later forms of modernism.29 Focusing on early work in Houston, to circa 1940, chapter three explores how the Bayou City came to be the state’s leader in arts. Chapter four centers on individual artists who embraced and expressed the modernist fervor relatively early and made their work outside the state’s main metropolises. These include some truly radical abstractionists, such as Ben L. Culwell, Toni LaSelle, Myron Stout, and Forrest Bess. Concentrating on the Fort

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Worth Circle, chapter five describes the only cohesive group of Texas modernists that existed in Fort Worth in the 1940s and early 1950s. A single city is once again in focus in chapter six, which surveys the modernist zeal that reverberated throughout the Art Department at the University of Texas in Austin. In the chapter that follows, Houston’s vibrant contemporary art community at midcentury is explored through three crowning achievements of the late 1950s. The core of energy covered in chapter eight is Charles Truett Williams’s sculpture studio in Fort Worth, a site to which artists traveled from Dallas and Houston. And chapter nine is a case study of Texas modernist artists who exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, tracing its midcentury Americans exhibitions in order to contextualize Texans within the broader art world. Early Texas Artists The earliest visual representations made in the state portray the relationship between the people and the land.30 Texas is home to hundreds of prehistoric and historic petroglyphs and pictographs, most notably in the Pecos River area near the Rio Grande. Starting in the late seventeenth century, the Spanish influence in art emerges prominently in architecture, as can be seen in the grand, locally modified baroque missions of San Antonio. Still later, responding to indeterminate expanses of land and sky, the best-known fine artists, such as Karl Friedrich Hermann Lungkwitz, Frank Reaugh, Robert Onderdonk and his son Julian, Jose Arpa, and Porfirio Salinas, inclined naturally toward landscapes. The preponderance of landscape painting in the

twentieth century fostered the affectionate but occasionally scornful nickname, the “Bluebonnet School.” Although Texas may have been slow to foster the growth of fine art, the entire United States lagged considerably behind Europe. In the seventeenth century, art academies, confraternities, and training were firmly established in Europe, while settlers in the New World kept busy simply trying to stay alive. The scant number of Americans who considered fine art as a profession trained abroad, sometimes remaining there. America’s greatest colonial period export, John Singleton Copley, lamented that his fellow Bostonians regarded painting as they would any “other usefull trade, as they sometimes term it, like that of a carpenter, tailor, or shew maker, not as one of the most noble Arts in the World. Which is not a little Mortifying to me.”31 The first Texas artists were mapmakers. From the cartographic documents of Spanish expeditions in the sixteenth century through the map of Texas territory made by General Stephen F. Austin in 1839, itinerant mapmakers translated the land into a picture.32 Like the sixteenth-century watercolors of John White’s Virginia and Jacques Le Moyne’s surviving gouache of St. Augustine, Florida, early Texas images were made by those who traveled with exploration parties. Thus, the earliest portable recorded images of the state tend to be documentary: French, Spanish, or Mexican drawings or engravings of maps, plants, people, and the land.33 In a sense, Texas’s early surveyor-artists helped contain the vastness of the land. By contrast, twentieth-century artists found in abstraction a potent analogy for the state’s boundlessness.

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The earliest known painting of a historical event in Texas was created in Mexico City around 1765, perhaps by José de Páez, who worked in the studio of one of Mexico’s most significant eighteenthcentury painters, Miguel Cabrera. The grand scale of the San Sabá Mission Painting depicts Caddo, Comanche, and Wichita warrior attacks on the Spanish mission. Questionable factual accuracy notwithstanding, the San Sabá canvas is the first known professional painting of a historical event in Texas.34 German immigrant painters made the first landscape paintings.35 The surge of German immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century brought a scattering of academically trained painters. Karl Friedrich Hermann Lungkwitz and his brother-inlaw Richard Petri both trained in Dresden in the Romantic style, of which the greatest practitioner was Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). Among many Germans who settled in Texas at the time, Petri and Lungkwitz were in search of a fresh start after the European revolutions of 1848.36 Two other noteworthy immigrants were the Prussian Carl Gustav von Iwonski (1830–1912), who operated a photography studio in San Antonio with Lungkwitz in the 1860s and 1870s, and the Swiss naturalist Conrad Caspar Rordorf (1800–1847). Documentation of the fall of the Alamo, in 1836, soon to become the state’s most mythologized event, initially existed solely in the form of written accounts and newspaper illustrations. But over the next fifty years, the Alamo and the decisive response at San Jacinto began to accrue greater artistic cachet. In 1848–1849, the West Point–trained artist Seth Eastman (1808–1875) created some of the finest watercolor and gouache depictions of the

ruined Alamo and other Texas scenes. Eastman, who began as a mapmaker and later gained fame for his portrayal of Native American life, displayed magisterial draftsmanship. Henry Arthur (Harry) McArdle (1836–1908), the Irishman lauded by both Frances Battaile Fisk and Esse Forrester-O’Brien, was a Confederate veteran whose birth year indeed may have given him a special affinity for the Texas army when he painted the monumental companion paintings Dawn at the Alamo (1875; 1905) and The Battle of San Jacinto (1898).37 McArdle’s attention to detail is both commendable and biased; for example, in his Alamo painting, James Bowie is attacking a Mexican soldier with his namesake knife.38 McArdle’s paintings hang in Austin at the Capitol along with another early history painting, The Surrender of Santa Anna (1886), by William Henry Huddle (1847–1892). Théodore Gentilz (1819–1906), a French painter and surveyor active in San Antonio, also painted a Fall of the Alamo (1844, no longer extant), along with many carefully observed scenes of southwestern Mexican and Texan culture.39 Lithographs of the Alamo dating to c. 1850, allegedly made by Lungkwitz, show a sensitively trained hand. Elisabet Ney (1833–1907) was exceptional for her neoclassical sculptures and her determination as a woman sculptor. A trailblazer in her native Germany, she was the first female student at the Munich Academy of Art. At her Berlin studio in the 1850s, Ney sculpted the busts of prominent sitters, among them the Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the German composer Richard Wagner, and the Prussian leader Otto von Bismarck. Immigrating to the

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United States during the Franco-Prussian War, she moved her family into a rundown Greek Revival plantation house near Hempstead, Texas, in 1873. Ney won a substantial commission to provide statues of Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and in that year she built a limestone home in the newly named Hyde Park area of Austin. Her persistent campaign for increased academic attention to the arts ultimately led to the founding of the Texas Fine Arts Association in 1911, although Ney did not

Figure 1.13 | Karl Friedrich Hermann Lungkwitz, Above the Falls on the Pedernales River, 1885, oil on canvas, 19" × 27". A spectacularly rendered scene by one of Texas’s great German immigrant painters. Lungkwitz’s virtuoso building up of the oil layers makes the water and sky seem to glow.

survive to see it. She likewise lobbied for a formal art department at the University of Texas in Austin; the department was finally founded in 1938, thirty years after Ney’s death. Because she sought commissions in lieu of teaching, Ney’s legacy consists of her sculptures and promotion of the arts. By contrast, Charles Franklin “Frank” Reaugh (1860–1945) taught and mentored students and colleagues for most of his life. One of the finest draftsmen, painters, and teachers ever to explore the state, the Illinois-born Reaugh moved to Texas in

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1866. After a first sketching trip in 1883, he trained in St. Louis and in Paris at the Académie Julian. Nicknamed the “Painter of the Longhorn” for his hundreds of pastels and paintings of the subject, he reportedly documented Texas longhorns before they were crossbred later in the nineteenth century.40 From 1889 until 1940, Reaugh took annual sketching journeys throughout West Texas, bringing numerous students on his plein air pilgrimages. With his European training, mentoring skills, and determination to record the inhospitable areas of the state, he became one of Texas’s most distinguished artists. The Onderdonk family was equally vital to the development of true fine art in Texas. Born in Maryland, Robert Jenkins Onderdonk (1852–1917) studied at the National Academy of Design in New York, joining the splinter group of students who left it in 1875 to open the Art Students League of New York (hereafter, the Art Students League; in 1893 he re-created that kind of training school by cofounding the Art Students League of Dallas). Onderdonk moved to San Antonio in 1879, and he, too, weighed in on Texas’s cherished historical event with his The Fall of the Alamo (1903). Most of his career was dedicated to commissioned portraits. Two of Robert’s children established fundamental positions in Texas art: Robert Julian Onderdonk (called Julian, 1882–1922) became the state’s preeminent bluebonnet painter. He followed his father’s footsteps at age seventeen, studying at the Art Students League, where he worked with William Merritt Chase (including spending a pivotal term at a summer school in Shinnecock, Long Island) and took a night course with Robert Henri.41 The curator William Rudolph has argued persuasively

that Onderdonk’s repeated use of the bluebonnet motif is the equivalent of Claude Monet’s water lilies theme.42 Onderdonk’s paintings helped establish the aforementioned Bluebonnet School in the state. A prime example, Dawn in the Hills (1922, Witte Museum, San Antonio), is especially poignant for being one of the last canvases he completed before his untimely death at age forty. Onderdonk employed modern paint handling, passed on to him through William Merritt Chase and the French Impressionism he encountered abroad.43 His Impressionistic canvases were in Edgar B. Davis’s mind’s eye when he launched his awards for wildflower paintings, although the younger Onderdonk never lived to compete for one of them. Julian’s younger sister Eleanor also trained at the Art Students League. Her most significant contribution to Texas art came not through her paintings but from the thirty years she dedicated to curating at San Antonio’s Witte Museum (1927–1958). Eleanor Onderdonk was a powerful, forward-thinking artist-educator who presented a broad array of exhibitions in virtually all media. She supplemented exhibitions of artists such as Diego Rivera, Carlos Mérida, and Pablo Picasso with a lecture series that brought to San Antonio the avant-garde Russian artist Alexander Archipenko, the American regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, and Walter Pach, the writer-artist who was instrumental in organizing the Armory Show of 1913.44 Even this briefest summary indicates the breadth and range of training of many artists who settled in or came through Texas. Yet by the 1920s, it was apparent to the rest of the country that Texas was not known for its fine artists. Time magazine summed up the state’s

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reputation cruelly in 1928: “The state of Texas has never been closely associated with the production of good, or even mediocre, paintings.”45 Time had been drawn to the tale of the Texas oilman Edgar B. Davis and his national competition, which encouraged paintings of Texas wildflowers and ranching scenes. Through the San Antonio Art League (which today houses the Purchase Prize paintings), Davis promised what was then the highest monetary award ever offered in a painting competition: the first-place winner earned $5,000 cash. In three years, he awarded more than $53,000 directly to artists and more than $350,000 for traveling exhibitions and publicity.46 The Texas Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions, short-lived and long ago, encouraged countless artists to create Impressionistic landscapes or genre scenes of ranching, cotton fields, and cattlemen. Although many Wildflower Competitive Exhibition paintings are skillfully rendered and in no way “mediocre,” as Time’s critic noted, very few of them engage modernist techniques or subjects. In their painterly origins, most of the Wildflower Competitive Exhibition paintings could be traced stylistically to French Impressionism, a movement that, half a century earlier, had truly represented the vanguard of modernism. In their day, Impressionist paintings were dismissed by critics for their sketchy, unfinished appearance and their rejection of the highly polished, morally edifying production of the French Academy (Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture). By the first quarter of the twentieth century, as the output of European artists traversed the most radical visual forms ever developed up to that time, countless Texas painters embraced the misty, soft-brushed version of 1880s

Impressionism. In some ways it was appropriate. Impressionism’s once-revolutionary pictorial language captured the effects of light outdoors, making it an efficacious choice for artists working in the vast and varied landscape of Texas. Some local painters had been introduced to the style firsthand, through travels across the Atlantic; others picked it up at the National Academy of Design in New York; and still others learned it from colleagues and teachers in Texas. Despite key exceptional painters such as Julian Onderdonk or Dawson DawsonWatson, a Davis award–winning Englishman who had studied at Giverny near Monet’s home, many local artists engaged a hollow style whose potential for disruptive observation or even true invention had long been evacuated.47 In Texas Art and a Wildcatter’s Dream: Edgar B. Davis and the San Antonio Art League, the historian William Reaves proposes that Davis’s wildflower competitions provoked an artistic response that focused and colored Texas regionalism of the 1930s. Although some of the younger artists who entered the competitions were influenced by modernist trends, the Davis judges consistently showed “conspicuous preference” in awarding prizes for more conservative works. The competitions and their jaw-dropping cash awards became a lightning rod for burgeoning Texas regionalists. As Reaves perceptively notes, the heavy praise for conventional painting bolstered the regionalists’ resolve to reject Texas Impressionism.48 One group of regionalists, Jerry Bywaters and Alexandre Hogue among them, forged a path for modernism in Dallas over the next decade. The group acquired a nickname, the Dallas Nine, and although its numbers and influence extended

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beyond the “Nine,” the moniker acknowledges the group’s against-the-tide determination, a marker of heroism. Contrary to Time’s dismissive estimation, in 1927 the national art magazine Art Digest had sensed an incipient reaction: “Not all the artists of Texas go in for wild flowers, in spite of San Antonio’s famous contest. In fact there is just a suggestion of revolt against themes of this sort, and its center is Dallas, where there is an art colony whose members are winning national recognition.”49 If Davis’s wildflower competitions set a negative example for progressive painters, that was not unusual. Modernism, in Texas as elsewhere, developed through a series of reformist stances. Modernist artists share one important quality: they tend to reject older styles of art as they respond directly or indirectly to modernization in the world. Depending on one’s point of view, the wildflower competitions might have been the grit in the oyster’s maw that created the pearl of the Dallas Nine. Alternatively, one might see the Dallas Nine’s aesthetic as gritty compared with the loosely painted bluebonnets that dominated Davis’s competitions. A National Context for Modernism By the 1920s, Texas Impressionism had gained national attention, but its atmospheric brushstrokes were already out of fashion. As a country, the United States witnessed abstraction in its most famous public incarnation at the New York Armory Show in 1913, yet at that early date, Texas harbored virtually no known abstractionists or modernists. Installed in New York’s 69th Regiment Armory and officially titled The International Exhibition of Modern

Art, the Armory Show boldly introduced the United States to modern “American and Foreign Art,” showcasing more than twelve hundred works by three hundred artists.50 In a single month nearly a hundred thousand viewers filed through the vast former armaments building on Lexington Avenue, flocking to the European galleries to see outrages of modern European art in its evolution from Realism to the contagious new trend of Cubism, which famously abrogated established rules of composition and perspective. The emphatic nature of this work was buttressed by pioneering shows at New York’s Macbeth Gallery and Alfred Stieglitz’s galleries, and the U.S. art scene was profoundly affected. Modern European art effectively mounted a siege on American shores in that massive 1913 exhibition.51 The show was chiefly organized by three members of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, who spent more than a year preparing for it. By the time the exhibition closed in Chicago and Boston, more than 250,000 people had passed through the galleries.52 The Armory Show remained the touchstone of modernist activity for American artists; its monumental impact on artists and the public was felt for decades. The Armory Show presented an opportunity for comparisons between European and American avant-garde activity, although its pedagogical impact was diminished by press reports sensationalizing Cubism as well as enfant terrible Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912). American galleries showcased the latest modern efforts, including the work of the so-called Ashcan school of artists. They had been promulgating a

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small but thriving form of avant-garde art for the previos five years. In 1908, Arthur B. Davies, one of the Armory Show’s organizers, cofounded a group called the Eight.53 His circle included Robert Henri, George Luks, Everett Shinn, John Sloan, and George Bellows. Their gritty urban realism quickly acquired the appellation Ashcan school. Another critical and vigorous promoter of modernism was active long before the Armory Show: the New Yorker Alfred Stieglitz, the son of Jewish German immigrants. Since the mid-nineteenth century in Europe, artists had formed groups or organized exhibitions in protest against the restrictive atmosphere of official art schools and academies. For example, the Vienna Secession, founded in 1897, was created in reaction to the conservative teaching environment at the Vienna Künstlerhaus.54 Stieglitz took both a cue and nomenclature from such artistic outcries, particularly the Austrian group, founding the Photo-Secession in New York in 1902. The Photo-Secession was dedicated to raising the status of photography as a fine art by promoting its expressive and pictorial aspects. The following year, Stieglitz began publishing the quarterly magazine Camera Work. In 1905 he opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue. The Little Galleries morphed into the first major modernist American art gallery, called 291.55 The gallery’s roll call of exhibitions remains astonishing today: it was the first American venue to exhibit work by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. At 291, Stieglitz exhibited Japanese prints as well, along with—in advance of their widely viewed appearance at the Armory Show—works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Manet,

Henri Rousseau, and August Rodin. Yet throughout his life, Stieglitz maintained a deep commitment to American artists. His stable included devoted modernists: Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Max Weber. Although Stieglitz was forced to close 291 in June 1917, he reopened galleries in other incarnations after World War I and held an unwavering commitment to modernism until his death, in 1946. The young Georgia O’Keeffe’s first solo exhibition was held at 291 in 1917. As mentioned above, she is credited with developing the first wholly abstract paintings in Texas, and her modernist production in the state stands alone. O’Keeffe, who lived in the Panhandle for only a few years, will forever be among the outliers in Texas art. There is scant evidence of her pedagogical impact, and her career matured across the border in New Mexico. Historians, curators, and critics are split on whether O’Keeffe’s work fits the label “Texas art,” but such academic bickering is beside the point; her Texas work was profoundly affected by the light and sky of Palo Duro Canyon. Originally from Wisconsin, she attended the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York. During a summer drawing course at the University of Virginia in 1912, O’Keeffe was introduced to the writings of Arthur Wesley Dow.56 Dow encouraged abstraction by promoting harmonious arrangements of line, color, and notan, the Japanese term for balancing light and dark values. His shadow loomed large over American abstract artists, since his theories favored pure design over literal, mimetic naturalism. It is vital to emphasize that Georgia O’Keeffe spent two distinct periods in

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Figure 1.14 | Georgia O’Keeffe, Red Landscape, c. 1917, oil on board, 24½" × 19". One of the first abstract paintings to be made in Texas, today it resides in the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, near where O’Keeffe taught.

Texas: the first from 1912 to 1914, and the second from 1917 to 1918. In August 1912, she accepted a position as supervisor of drawing and penmanship in the Amarillo public school system. She remained there until 1914, when she enrolled at Teachers College, Columbia University. While in New York, she attended exhibitions at Stieglitz’s 291 gallery, where

she saw paintings, drawings, and photographs by the Americans Marin, Hartley, Stanton MacDonald-Wright, and Paul Strand, as well as the Europeans Georges Braque, Francis Picabia, and Picasso. Seeking to return to Texas, she accepted a position at West Texas State Normal College in Canyon from late 1916 to early 1918.57 While O’Keeffe was in Texas, Stieglitz held a solo exhibition of her work in April 1917. Her great modern abstract landscapes, a result of her exposure to avant-garde art at 291, were made during her second stint in Texas. Among the best known of these are the “Light Coming on the Plains” series, the “Evening Star” series, and Painting No. 21 (Palo Duro Canyon). Red Landscape (c. 1917), a spectacularly bright oil on board, represents one of four surviving oil paintings from the second Texas period. Fittingly, the painting belongs to the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, a gift from the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation in 1994. As the art historian and curator Barbara Haskell wrote, “For O’Keeffe, the Panhandle landscape was what oceans and mountains were to other artists: expansive, metaphoric and elemental.” O’Keeffe said, in a letter to Stieglitz in 1916, “The plains— the wonderful, great big sky—makes me want to breathe so deep that I’ll break”; she commented around the same time to her friend Anita Pollitzer, “I belonged. . . . That was my country—terrible winds and a wonderful emptiness.”58 O’Keeffe put words and images to what many Texas artists feel about the influence of the landscape on their work. Like O’Keeffe, many of them internalized the landscape and the sensation of Texas’s expanse to develop lyrical and compelling abstract art.

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Modernism, Abstraction, Avant-Garde, and Nonobjectivity Objective: related as directly as possible to the sense of order of the known outside world. Nonobjective: the sense of order of desire and aspiration resting, of course, on the kind of knowledge of the outside world, but because it is a personal vision it can have an absolute quality, and it is this which people call abstract. | MYRON STOUT , journal entry, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1953

For more than a century critics have poked fun at what they perceive as an obfuscating tendency in modernist art and the language used to define it. In general, the modern period describes the historical phase that began in the nineteenth century as Europe and the United States became more industrialized. Relatively quickly, the Western world advanced in breathtaking leaps in science, medicine, communication, transportation, architecture, and other technology-based fields. Steam trains transported people quickly between cities, electricity surged into homes and businesses, and merchants and trade centers bustled with shoppers. As cities and urban centers expanded, human lives became altered by modern conveniences. People who lived in the modern era were affected by the changing pace of the times. Alongside technological advancements came developments in social sciences such as psychology and sociology. The general quality of life improved, but at a cost: crowding and a faster pace of life often led to anomie. As the objective world changed dramatically, so did people’s interior lives.

Chronologically, “modern” can refer to virtually any person or event after the mid-nineteenth century. This does not mean that all artists living in the modern period created art that reflected or took account of modern life. Artistic modernism refers to expressions that are contemporary with the artist’s time and in which the stylistic manifestation or formal characteristics of the object (the artwork; generally, a painting or a sculpture) reflect modern life. Early rumblings of modern art occurred in Paris, whose medieval identity was revamped as the city was forcibly modernized in the mid-nineteenth century.59 The Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire reveled in the changing Paris and offered nowclassic early definitions of modernity. For him, the modern embodied an entire mode of being. Baudelaire flitted through the city streets with a poet’s eye, dressed in an elegant black suit, cravat, and top hat. In 1864, he defined modernity in a way that retains its relevance today: “By modernity I mean the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”60 Modernity tends to reject tradition in its embrace of the new. Such carefree abandonment of tradition is problematic for many who confront modern art. Like a young upstart, modern art seems to cast aside all it should have learned, forsaking traditional beauty even as it rejects or parodies timeworn forms. Yet the modern era demands new approaches to the changing world. A hundred years after Baudelaire and an ocean away, a leading American abstract artist expressed this point of view: “It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old

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forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique.”61 That artist, Jackson Pollock, created paintings that stymied many Americans, whose responses ranged from tickled dismissal to outright irritation. American Scene painting of the 1920s to 1930s gave way to a subjective, internalized art in the World War II era. A group of New York artists notable for their proximity to one another, similar political inclinations, meetings at artists’ and drinking clubs, and exposure to a steady stream of European artists and theories forged a distinctive style in the 1940s. The postwar period in American art has long been dominated by Abstract Expressionism, sometimes termed the New York School.62 Every aspect of their lives felt vibrantly important, urging them to a level of unprecedented productivity. These artists—Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Barnett Newman are only the best known of those who benefited from the cultural crucible they helped create—were absolutely American painters. At the same time, their success hinged on an inversion: it necessitated the abandonment of anything that mimetically resembled earlier American art.63 Replete with ironies and counterintuitive aesthetic phenomena, the situation in midcentury New York was in many ways appropriate only to that particular artistic climate. And that climate permitted the artist’s mark—the physical manifestation of a painted or dripped mark on the canvas—to reign. If removed from that historically specific context, the same mark would take on a different meaning. Both the expressionistic mark making and the subtly modulated color fields of the New York School reached Texas in the 1950s.

Modernity is associated with a time period; modernism suggests a condition, system, or philosophy.64 The parade of modernist movements, the isms of art—Realism, Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Constructivism, Dada (the most rebellious form of modernist art was purposefully not an ism), Surrealism, and so forth—demonstrate an engagement with modernity in new and frequently shocking ways.65 Modernism takes an active stance against traditional modes of art, something beyond merely making art and being an artist in the modern era. Modernism indicates a school of thought, propagated through critical writings, discussions, curating, and collecting practices. In the mid-twentiethcentury United States, a relatively small number of artists and an even smaller number of art critics had a disproportionately powerful impact on the period’s history.66 The most vocal of these critics was the American Clement Greenberg (1909– 1994), who developed and espoused an influential lineage for modernism that reverberates today. From his first major art essay in 1939, Greenberg identified characteristics common to modernist art. He noted that in the nineteenth century, modern art began to be characterized by the self-referentiality of its medium. Each branch of the arts started to exhibit telltale signs of self-consciousness about its own boundaries. Modern painters increasingly attended to the qualities of paint itself and to the flat surface of the canvas. For millennia, artists (painters, here) strove to develop a pictorial space that extended past the two-dimensional limitations of their surfaces toward three-dimensional illusionism, masquerading as a window

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on the world.67 The Renaissance invention of linear, one-point perspective and the development of modeling served to magnify the illusion of three dimensions. Greenberg focused on the qualities related to the form of art: composition, medium, color, line, and so forth. Qualities extrinsic to form (for example, the artist’s biography, the narrative story of the artwork, the pasted bits of physical material in a collage) were irrelevant to his formalist criticism. His theories evolved over the decades, culminating in the major essay “Modernist Painting” (1960), in which he recapitulates his theory: “The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.”68 Painting’s “area of competence” relates to the application of pigment to a two-dimensional canvas. In the modern era, three-dimensional, pictorial sleight of hand is no longer an appropriate form. Modern painting had been progressing historically, ineluctably toward the adamant assertion of its own flatness—its “area of competence.” For Greenberg, nineteenth-century Realist paintings by Édouard Manet were “the first Modernist pictures by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted.”69 Such a notion seems deflating, particularly because viewers since ancient times have delighted in painting’s illusory appeal.70 But, as has been mentioned, the sweeping industrial effects of the modern period brought about aesthetic changes as well. Here Greenberg borrows loosely from Immanuel

Kant’s Enlightenment philosophy: each discipline becomes self-critical, questioning its own limitations.71 Greenberg’s theories have been digested, pilloried, and reconstituted since the 1960s, yet his influence was formidable for many decades, affecting countless artists, students, professors, and historians and shaping the very history of art.72 Indeed, it is Greenberg’s modernism that has most profoundly determined what is published in survey texts and histories of American and European twentieth-century modern art. One of many restrictions corseting Greenberg’s modernism is that it severely reduces the possibilities for painting and sculpture. For Greenberg, the best paintings of the 1960s were thinly painted on unprimed canvas, because “staining” the canvas allowed the weave to show, thus emphasizing its structure and flatness. (His favorite practitioners were the color-field painters Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and Jules Olitski.) In the area of sculpture, if the medium of steel moves increasingly toward emphasizing its own materiality, bringing steel to the fore, and painting toward emphasizing paint (or the fibers of the two-dimensional canvas), where could those forms go next? The history of art solved that conundrum: it was no coincidence that just as Greenberg was defining the limits of modernism in the early 1960s, the postmodern era was already underway.73 Observers today are divided over whether postmodernism is modernism’s true antithesis or its historical extension. However one chooses to bracket art of the later twentieth century, after about 1960 much of the art begins to question modernism itself.74 In a massive return of the repressed, postmodernism reveled in crossing

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categories by incorporating such things as mixed media, performance, gender issues, biography, and autobiography. Since the 1960s, Greenberg’s modernism has steadily been complemented by a substantially more heterogeneous modernism. Twenty-first-century historians tend to use a definition of “modernism” that embodies a variety of styles.75 For example, the current Twentieth-Century American Art (in the Oxford History of Art series), written by the American art historian Erika Doss, includes many modernist styles that Greenberg would have tossed out. The retrospective view of American modernism today incorporates figurative forms (such as those used by the Ashcan school), social forms (such as those used by the Social Realist Ben Shahn), and abstract forms (such as those used by the Abstract Expressionists). With historical distance, we reevaluate the earlier eras with fresh—or at least alternate—eyes. As artists sought to create new modes of art, abstraction was a logical path. In 1937, the art historian Meyer Schapiro underscored the profundity of abstraction in painting: “Just as the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry gave a powerful impetus to the view that mathematics was independent of experience, so abstract painting cut at the roots of the classic ideas of artistic imitation.”76 Schapiro’s insight into abstraction proved to be less influential than the linear teleology and obiter dicta of Greenberg. The origins of “abstract” come from its Latin root, “abstrahere,” “to draw out from” or “to exclude.” But abstraction in the context of picture making is a challenge to define, because all art is necessarily

an abstraction from an actual object. Any line in a picture that represents something in the visible world is abstracted from, or a reduced form of, the original object.77 For example, an extremely realistic painting of a wooden house is nonetheless an abstracted representation of the real house. An artist must make decisions about how to paint lines that will stand in for the lines of the eaves and windows, how to represent the color of the wood with pigment, and so forth. Recognizing this first fact about abstraction is crucial for understanding the more bewildering forms used in abstract art and for edifying those who shy away from severe abstraction, such as a painting composed entirely of unrecognizable subjects. Although abstraction is a complicated concept, its more familiar connotation in the twentieth century is relatively straightforward. Twentieth-century abstraction tends to refer to paintings and sculptures that take liberties with the visible world or deliberately avoid any recognizable representation. In the twentieth century, the style was often denigrated by those who asserted that abstract artists have no talent. Yet along with the idea that the art was unskillfully made was the (perhaps ironic) concomitant belief that abstraction was elitist, speaking to a select few. In his introduction to the monumentally ambitious Cubism and Abstract Art Exhibition catalogue (1936), Alfred H. Barr, Jr., notes, “It is customary to apologize for the word ‘abstract,’ but words to describe art movements or works of art are often inexact.”78 He continues, in his avuncular manner, “This is not to deny that the adjective ‘abstract’ is confusing and even paradoxical. For an ‘abstract’ painting is really a most positively

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concrete painting since it confines the attention to its immediate, sensuous, physical surface far more than does the canvas of a sunset or a portrait.”79 Barr’s observation is at once utterly simple and counterintuitive. That sense of making a “most positively concrete painting” is how the best Texas abstract artists busied themselves over the next few decades. Abstraction can include figurative abstraction, which takes liberties with visible form while retaining identifiable subject matter. For example, Pablo Picasso’s iconic brothel painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) includes five figures easily recognizable as women whose bodies are composed of angular and geometric planes. Picasso never engaged strict nonobjectivity, even when he drastically abandoned traditional modes, as in his coinvention of Cubism with Georges Braque. By contrast, nonobjective artists deliberately avoid depicting the visual, “real” world.80 Because it originated at the turn

of the twentieth century—a time of intensive technological, political, and social change—artists have prized nonobjectivity for its utopian promise.81 In mid-twentieth-century American lingo, “modern art” was practically synonymous with “avant-garde,” a term with military origins. “Avantgarde” refers to art that is “advanced” or “on the front lines.” Avant-garde art was characterized, as it is today, by its rejection of the traditional past and by its experimental, revolutionary quality. The art of Texans at midcentury fits any conception of modernism. It has, like much of American art, been left out of the canon, partly because of the dominance of New York School painting and sculpture. Throughout this book, I refer to how Texas modernism fits both the narrower and the broader view of modernism in the period that coincides with the rise and establishment of the United States as an international modernist artistic force.

2 Texas is big—bigger than any European nation except Russia—and, whether New York knows it or not, that commonwealth and the other states of the Southwest and the Far West, are contributing a vital element to the nation’s art. ART DIGEST, June 1936

Facing | Detail of Figure 2.07

The 1930s and the Texas Centennial

The Texas Centennial of 1936 was arguably the most significant cultural event in the history of the Lone Star State. It was certainly the grandest and widest-reaching party, celebrated yearlong in cities all over the state’s 268,000 square miles.1 Commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Texas’s victory over Mexico, the fiesta-cum-exposition showcased the Lone Star State’s heritage, history, and cultural treasures. A lavish, centralized $25 million celebration was held in Dallas. Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, and St. Louis had all hosted world’s fairs, but the Texas Centennial in Dallas was promoted as the first world’s fair south of the Mason-Dixon line.2 At the fair, a Texas Centennial Rangerette with a physique the sculptor likened to the Venus de Milo’s posed for Lawrence Tenney Stevens’s allegorical statue of the Republic of Texas. Troupes of chaps-sporting Rangerettes in five-gallon hats pranced around the country promoting the upcoming Texas party. The singing cowboy Gene Autry (born near Tioga, Texas) filmed much of The Big

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Show in Fair Park; the movie is filled with recognizable glimpses of the attractions and buildings.3 Equally popular was the “Cavalcade of Texas,” an enormous live pageant depicting the state’s history. The story unfolded over two hours as a Texan named “Smokey” enumerated Texas’s historical merits to the lovely “Betty,” complete with live-action scenes of Indians, conquistadors, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle (called La Salle in history books), and notable characters of all stripes. Less grand but equally showy was the “100 Year Pageant,” a competition in which swimsuited beauties attempted to squeeze their curvilinear physiques into wooden cutout shapes of the ideal figure. The event caught the attention of President Roosevelt, who addressed the Centennial on June 12 (1936 was an election year). fdr naturally flattered his audience, opining, “You down here live in the biggest state of the Union, but it is not mere acres that count in this world; it is, rather, the character of the people who dwell upon them.”4 Later that day, the president unveiled a statue of General Robert E. Lee at Oak Lawn (now Lee) Park. Six and a half million visitors roamed through the fairgrounds over a period of five months. As Stanley Marcus stated unequivocally, modern Texas history began in 1936, the year “the rest of America discovered Texas.”5 Although Lone Star beauties manipulating their appendages into wooden silhouettes offered stiff competition, a different brand of “fine” art was equally bountiful at the fair.6 The “100 Year Pageant” was vintage Texas, but much of the artistic decoration at the fair—murals, sculptures, reliefs— was the handiwork of European-born artists for

whom painting and sculpture was a secondary skill. As the artist, teacher, and former director of the Dallas Museum of Art Jerry Bywaters recalled fifty years later, the artists selected “really were not known in the art world at all,” adding that they were “known in the exposition world as designers for exposition buildings.”7 For local artists, including the group nicknamed the Dallas Nine, of whom Bywaters was a member, there remained one golden opportunity at the Centennial: securing the commission to paint the vast mural in the Great Hall in the Hall of State (hereafter, the Great Hall).8 The building’s exterior was constructed of local fossilized limestone; massive simplified columns create a modern, planar portico. The floors inside were made of different types of marble, all contributing to the building’s enormous cost; the Hall of State was rumored to be one of the most expensive buildings per square foot ever built in Dallas. The building anchored the Centennial’s master architectural plan, whose chief architect was the Dallasite George Dahl, who received consulting assistance from the Beaux-Arts–trained Paul Cret and a consortium of designers. Cret’s influence is most palpable in the Hall of State. The overall plan of the Centennial was strikingly modern for its day, in contradistinction to much of the decorative program. Playing on the eclecticism of the Centennial’s architectural style, Dahl defined it as a gustatory experience: “modern, flavored with the condiments of Egypt and Archaic Greece, and finally seasoned with the warmth and sunshine of the Southwest.”9 The Great Hall mural would be both expansive and expensive, depicting one hundred years of

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Texas history. Thirty thousand dollars was allocated for the winner of the commission. Bywaters in particular understood the potential of socially conscious large-scale art, having spent several months of 1928 in Mexico with Diego Rivera, one of a triumvirate of Mexican muralists that included José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros.10 Bywaters and his peers—Harry Carnohan, John Douglass, Otis Dozier, Alexandre Hogue, William Lester, Perry Nichols, Everett Spruce, and Thomas Stell—developed a proposal by dividing the century into decades, performing extensive research on each era, and working up sketches to make their official pitch.

Figure 2.01 | Thomas M. Stell, Self-Portrait, c. 1930, oil on board, 25" × 19". A movingly direct encounter, this selfportrait by an original Dallas Nine member was presumed lost for nearly seventy years. Expressive blue-gray eyes anchor the composition, offering a contrast to the architectonic rigidity of his lapels. Note Stell’s attention to the multicolored texture of his woolen cap.

Thus in 1936, unsolicited, the young Dallasites made an appointment to meet with the selection board. Their case was never even considered, however, despite their repeated attempts to gain an audience with the board. Instead, the contract went to the established muralist Eugene Savage of New York. Savage possessed a national reputation, but he had little knowledge of Texas history. Although every single local artist was disappointed, Alexandre Hogue was livid. In a letter to his Taos friend the artist Emil Bisttram, Hogue lamented: “Each [Texas] man had his material in order. On the other hand an outsider with a few weeks to prepare will get his material from textbooks rather [than] from contact with the land and its people. At best he will only do a superficial thing.”11 Later, when the director of the Hall of State examined Savage’s finished mural of the Texas annexation scene, he pointed out that the muralist had neglected to include Anson Jones, the last president of the Republic of Texas. The New Yorker’s response was simple: he had never heard of Anson Jones.12 Though many of the Dallas Nine had been exhibiting regularly since the 1920s, Bywaters and the rest of the group were still relatively unknown in 1936. As early as 1928, they had earned national attention when one of the country’s leading art magazines, the Art Digest, published an essay titled “All Texans Do Not Paint ‘Wild Flowers,’” which included a reproduction of Hogue’s Studio Corner, Taos.13 (Hogue first started painting in Taos in 1926; the Taos-Texas connection is explored in chapter six.) The Art Digest article was prompted by a piece Hogue wrote in his capacity as art critic for the Dallas Times-Herald. The group gained further national

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recognition in 1932, when their exhibition at the Dallas Public Art Gallery in Fair Park was reviewed in the Art Digest, which dubbed them the “Nine.”14 The artists in that show were Jerry Bywaters, John Douglass, Otis Dozier, Lloyd Goff, William Lester, Charles McCann, Perry Nichols, Everett Spruce, and James Buchanan (Buck) Winn, Jr.15 As noted above, while “Dallas Nine” remains a convenient

moniker, the number of members was far higher.16 The circle of the Nine included like-minded painters and printmakers such as Don Brown, Charles Bowling, Merritt Mauzey, Florence McClung, Russell Vernon Hunter, H. O. Robertson, and Donald Vogel, as well as the sculptors Dorothy Austin, Octavio Medellín, Michael G. Owen, and Allie Tennant.

Figure 2.02 | Florence McClung, Lancaster Valley, 1936, oil on canvas, 24" × 30". McClung displays a Precisionist sensitivity and appreciation of the landscape’s geometry near Waxahachie, Texas. This painting appeared in the first room of the

Texas Painting galleries at the Centennial Exposition and then at the New York World’s Fair. In 1939, it was the first work by a Texas artist (female or male) to be purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was later deaccessioned.

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Educated and curious, the Dallas Nine kept up with American culture. Several taught or studied at the Dallas Art Institute, founded in 1926 at 1215½ Main Street by Olin Travis (1885–1975), a Texas native who earned his degree at the Art Institute of Chicago; his artist wife, Kathryne Bess Hail Travis (1894–1972); and the commercial artist James A. Waddell, whom Olin Travis knew from Chicago. In the 1920s, Southern Methodist University launched a major literary magazine, the interdisciplinary Southwest Review, edited by John H. McGinniss and incorporating noteworthy contributions by Henry Nash Smith. (Both men belonged to the Dallas Art League.) Bywaters, Hogue, and the architect David R. Williams contributed to the Southwest Review, as did one of the state’s best-known authors, J. Frank Dobie.17 (Hogue painted a powerfully evocative portrait of Dobie in 1931.) The Dallas artists saved issues of the Dial from the 1910s and 1920s, known during its heyday as the chief literary magazine of Europe and the United States. A widely disseminated and still frequently quoted Dial article was Van Wyck Brooks’s “On Creating a Usable Past” (1918), in which he called for Americans to plumb their own literary past. They were to do so without neglecting the contemporary era: “Discover, invent a usable past we certainly can, and that is what a vital criticism always does.”18 The theme was deeply transcendental, drawing on the country’s greatest writers: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Thomas Hart Benton and Thomas Craven contributed visual-arts essays to the Dial, and the critic Henry McBride provided the regular “Modern Art” column. Throughout the 1920s, the magazine was a

source for images of artists’ work, ranging from that of the Europeans Vincent van Gogh, Oskar Kokoschka, and Pablo Picasso to that of the Americans Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Stuart Davis.19 Bywaters later fondly recalled his initial “chance discovery of bound copies of the risqué Dial magazine, published by Americans in France and about the only magazine available to me with ‘modern art’ reproduced.”20 Anything but insular, the Dallas group kept up with contemporary and modernist trends and exhibited in the state and beyond. Austin, Carnohan, Dozier, Hogue, Edward Eisenlohr, and Travis appeared in the Museum of Modern Art’s Painting and Sculpture from Sixteen American Cities exhibition in 1933. John Sites Ankeney, the director of the Dallas Art Association from 1929 to 1934, selected them for that show.21 Ankeney was appointed regional director of the Public Works of Art Project (pwap), the federally funded New Deal program founded in late 1933, and both Oklahoma and Texas were within his purview. Several of the artists painted pwap murals, including a large-scale commission by Hogue and Bywaters at Dallas’s Old City Hall and projects by Dozier, Brown, Carnohan, Nichols, and Xavier Gonzalez. The City Hall panels were publicly praised by Thomas Hart Benton during a visit to Dallas in January 1935.22 Still, despite their steadfast dedication to expanding the Dallas arts community and to increasing the recognition of Dallas artists, Bywaters and other locals were passed over for the Great Hall mural commission.23 In his book on the Texas Centennial, Kenneth Ragsdale observes that Bywaters’s rejection experience was true to the then-basic American

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assumption: foreign art in all its forms was superior to any domestic product.24 (One could justifiably expand the definition of “foreign” in 1930s Texas to include American artists with “foreign” training and all non-Texans.) Being shut out from consideration for the mural demonstrated the power of political connections, highlighting the disenfranchised status of the have-nots.25 The Centennial directors’ choice to import “foreign-born” artists bolstered local artists’ resolve, perhaps in the same manner as the Davis wildflower competitions had in the previous decade. In both competitions, non-Texas or old-fashioned artists took the prize, as it were, working in styles that were traditional, imported, or both. Fortunately, the adroit Dallas artists did not reject the whole of the European modernist canon in a fit of pique. One remaining venue promised national exposure for locals during the Centennial. The $500,000 Art Deco Dallas Museum of Fine Arts building on the Fair Park exposition grounds was completed just in time for the Centennial.26 The museum’s inaugural exhibition was a broad survey of art, from its beginnings to the present day. To gear up for the enormous show, termed the Centennial Exposition, the museum had hired a new director, Richard Foster Howard, one year earlier. Reflecting Howard’s fondness for Texas art and the expertise of Robert B. Harshe and Daniel Catton Rich (director and associate director of the Art Institute of Chicago) in the broader history of painting and sculpture, the museum’s galleries were crammed with more than six hundred works, borrowed from nearly one hundred collections. Visitors could navigate the history of Western art, from the “Primitives” (Medieval

and Renaissance Flemish), Italian Renaissance, French eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting, and the twentieth-century International movement, to southwestern and contemporary American art. Two American artists had entire galleries to themselves: the western artist Frederic Remington and the Ashcan artist George Bellows, represented by a room of lithographs. The jury for the Texas art selections included James Chillman (director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) and Hogue.27 Originally, a single gallery was planned for the Texans, but the selections soon expanded to fill five rooms. In the end, nearly 180 objects were chosen to demonstrate the previous fifty years of Texas art, with an emphasis on Dallas artists.28 There was also, as Light Cummins (former Texas state historian) points out, a strong showing by women. Between the Texas and “southwestern” artists, ninetyone women were represented, making up almost 56 percent of the regional artists whose work was exhibited.29 If the exhibition leaned toward gender equality, most likely it was because women “held down the fort” as teachers and instructors. A female presence at art schools and among mentors affected the entire state; in the coming years, many of them promoted modernist techniques. In celebration of the massive exhibition, the nationally circulated Art Digest dedicated nearly the entirety of its June 1 issue to the Texas Centennial. The editor, Peyton Boswell, noted that the magazine printed more copies of the Texas issue than any other in its ten-year history.30 On a single page one could find Hogue’s Drouth Stricken Area and Bywaters’s In the Chair Car, both of which hung on the walls in the Centennial galleries.31 Hogue, Howard,

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and Bywaters contributed essays to the dense, illustrated volume. As Bywaters, who was also an art reviewer and regular columnist for the Dallas Morning News, wrote: “The Texas Centennial opening June 6 at Dallas will celebrate a century of Texas history, but the Centennial Art Exhibition, assembled for the occasion, and to initiate a new museum building, will celebrate no more than fifty years of Texas art activity. For, up to fifty years ago, Texans were clearing virgin land and fighting Indians, and obviously the development of art was slow as long as scalping was in style.”32 The allusion to scalping was at once shocking and darkly comic. Esse Forrester O’Brien had made the analogy in her pioneering compilation Art and Artists of Texas of 1935. The identical caustic explanation for a delay in artistic production appears frequently in the literature and discussions of early Texas art. The state’s colorful history helped forge a reputation that Bywaters was quick to take advantage of for his essay in the Art Digest, knowing it would be read by a national audience. Indeed, Texas art did develop more slowly than art in the northern and midwestern metropolises. As Bywaters explains it, once art took root, the work of some great early Texas artists—“Frank Reaugh, longhorn cattle painter, E. G. Eisenlohr and Olin Travis, landscape painters”—established a regional flavor. That flavor, Bywaters continues, has been “intensely elaborated in the works of some seventy-five younger Texan artists.”33 The same issue saw Richard Foster Howard rallying for the budding group: “Among the younger men, however, there has been a strong, conscious and alert rebellion against the academic.”34 In addition, Howard wrote “Texas Painting” for the

official Centennial catalogue, highlighting characteristics of the “younger men” that linked them to modernist techniques: “With the development and spread of the knowledge of science, there has been a better understanding of the laws of physics, chemistry, physiology and psychology which determine our seeing of a picture. Not that these painters have deliberately studied all these things, but the social and educational inheritance of our time is such that they have assimilated them. The scientific attitude, moreover, has provided the impetus for a swing away from romanticism.”35 Howard was no Texan. He had been imported—he held a Harvard University BA with a specialty in museum management and most recently had worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art—for the colossal project of overseeing the construction of the new museum and organizing its inaugural exhibitions.36 His pedigree may have contributed to his insight, but Howard seemed innately perspicacious about modernism and its local manifestations. He noted that these artists, particular to Texas, show “clear, sharp lines . . . [that] reflect the brilliant clarity of the Texas atmosphere. The warm color shows the influence of the semi-arid land.”37 The pristine Texas galleries must have been striking to visitors. Standout paintings were reproduced in the Art Digest, no doubt in a calculated gesture. In coordinating the Dallas group’s publicity, Bywaters contributed a much-expanded essay to the Southwest Review (“The New Texas Painters,” April 1936) that traced the history of Texas art to the present. His essay was illustrated by four Centennial Exhibition paintings (Dozier’s The Annual Move, Hogue’s Drouth Stricken Area, Lester’s Oklahoma Rocks,

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and Spruce’s Suburban Landscape) that also appeared in the pages of the Art Digest of June 1936.38 Hogue’s Drouth Stricken Area, still in the Dallas Museum of Art collection, has become an icon of Depression-era Dust Bowl images. Made four years before Dorothea Lange photographed the devastation around Childress County, Texas, the painting, like Lange’s photographs, conveys the all but uninhabitable conditions of the land. Drouth Stricken Area is grim and extraordinarily depressing; a skeletal cow pitifully seeks water at its formerly full tub. Now overrun with sandy earth, the windmill that once supplied the water is dilapidated. A vulture patiently waits for the cow to succumb to starvation. The disturbing quality was enhanced by Hogue’s meticulous brushwork and flawless tones. The following year, Life magazine profiled Hogue as a “Texan portraying ‘Man’s Mistakes,’” calling him “the artist of the U.S. Dust Bowl.”39 Many have noted Hogue’s condemnation of mankind’s reckless destruction of the land. In 1984, Lea Rosson DeLong, in the first full-length monograph on Hogue, observed that he was so distraught “about the unconscionable misuse of the land that he chose to portray the devastation realistically”: “If there is any reference to traditional agrarian values it is to their perfidy.”40 Twenty years later, perhaps reflecting on the earth’s increasingly threatened natural resources, DeLong argued that Hogue was among the first truly ecological painters in the United States. In his painting, humans act, she explained, but the landscape appears.41 For Mark White, Hogue shows “an ecological sympathy for the land as a sacred body and an attack on the aggressive practices of agribusiness.”42 Susie

Kalil, perhaps the most articulate of Hogue’s interpreters, notes that Drouth Stricken Area is at once immediate and metaphysical. Hogue’s entire “Erosion” series, to which Drouth Stricken Area belongs, “aims to rediscover a relationship to nature as alive and full of feeling; one in which the mythic and the spiritual aspects of life are restored.”43 Kalil argues for Hogue’s ultimately positive, redemptive view of nature. The crispness of Hogue’s canvas challenges one’s ability to view it from a remove, as one might with a mistier rendition of the land. This series reveals no hint of Impressionistic brushwork, no soft focus to dilute the harrowing scene. Hogue wanted the viewer to feel as if the scene had occurred. Early on he invented a term for his technique of logically arranging symbols in his paintings: psychoreality. Distinct from Surrealism, psychorealism plays on the conscious mind. As DeLong, who, like Kalil, spent many hours with the artist, explains it: “Psychoreality seems to have meant for Hogue the capacity for the image to affect the viewer in the same way the artist was affected. The viewer should share his horror at the devastation and death in the Dust Bowl.”44 Hogue was careful to differentiate his method from that of Surrealism, the concurrent European movement that evidenced a visual kinship to his paintings. In fact, Hogue’s draftsmanship and psychoreality lie somewhere between the brilliantly rendered Surrealist dreamscapes of Salvador Dalí and the more stoically realized classicizing landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico in the early 1920s. That Hogue would eschew such comparisons is irrelevant: all three artists engaged realistic means to create startlingly familiar psychological

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scenes. Hogue’s psychoreality shares another parallel with Surrealism by invoking the uncanny feeling within the viewer of having been in his landscape before. Another Hogue icon that appears in numerous books on American art is Erosion No. 2—Mother Earth Laid Bare (1936).45 The primally distressing Erosion No. 2, with its voyeuristic point of view and earthraping plow in the foreground, practically forces the viewer’s complicity. Again, in stark contrast to looser, Impressionistic strokes, Hogue’s methodical marks block any potential feelings of nostalgia or distanced disinterest.46 Those latter emotions better characterize paintings of old—such as loosely

Figure 2.03 | Alexandre Hogue, Erosion No. 2—Mother Earth Laid Bare, 1936, oil on canvas, 44" × 56". A justifiably widely disseminated work by one of the greatest artists and teachers ever to work in the state.

painted, delicately covered landscapes of flowers— through which aesthetic pleasure was enhanced by the viewer’s prerogative to gaze unencumbered. Modernism, in its most confrontational mode, prevents such a relaxed view. The subject of Jerry Bywaters’s In the Chair Car (1934)—a close-cropped scene of an older and younger nun riding in coach class on the train— could not be further from Hogue’s desolate landscape. Yet they share a crucial similarity: neither artist shrinks from his subject. In Bywaters’s painting, two stages of life are connected by the vast negative space of the nuns’ black habits, allowing the viewer to focus on the two faces. The black habits

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at once connect and divide the women. The older nun has paused in her reading of scripture and stares straight ahead, in a moment of reflection. The younger woman’s lids are lowered, her gaze slightly downcast, her lips turned ever so slightly upward at the corners. To underscore their individual life journeys (the train is the metaphor), the window shade behind the older woman is pulled lower than that of her youthful protégée. Bywaters’s scene is at

Figure 2.04 | Jerry Bywaters, In the Chair Car, 1934, oil on Masonite, 27½" × 33¼". With its themes of youth, old age, piety, and modern transportation in a spare setting, In the Chair Car might be thought of as a pictorial novella. Bywaters spent decades documenting, promoting, and creating the state’s art.

once specific and universal, his portrayal direct and clear, in much the same style as the Italian masters he so admired.47 Many gems shone in the Texas galleries, including works by artists who no longer receive much attention. For example, Frank Fisher rendered The Fence with touches of brilliant greens and subdued auburns. “Regional” in its specificity of location, The Fence contains intriguing abstracted passages

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(see the rocks at left foreground and the patchwork grass and earth). Also on display were Charles Bowling’s Church at the Crossroads (1936), Harry Carnohan’s barren and Surrealistic West Texas Landscape (1934), Coreen Spellman’s carefully observed, Precisionist-Regionalist Railroad Signal (1936), Thomas Stell’s exceedingly popular Portrait of Miss Dale Heard (1935), and sculptures by Dorothy Austin, Marjorie Baltzel, Octavio Medellín, and Allie Victoria Tennant, who also sculpted the gilded bronze, mohawked Tejas Warrior above the Hall of State portal, still visible today.

Top | Figure 2.05 | Frank Fisher, The Fence, oil on canvas, 24" × 30". This painting by a less familiar artist was shown at the Centennial; Fisher’s neatly structured scene and accomplished brushwork hint at the training he received from Sallie Gillespie, Wade Jolly, and Samuel Ziegler. Bottom | Figure 2.06 | Dorothy Austin, Noggin, c. 1933, white pine, 13" × 8" × 10¾". A beautifully carved sculptural portrait in white pine (note how the wood grain enhances the features) by a Texas native who trained at New York’s Art Students League in 1928.

Figure 2.07 | Coreen Spellman, Railroad Signal, 1936, oil on beaver board, 20" × 16". Spellman’s iconic painting has much in common with the works of American Precisionist painters, like Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, who celebrated industrial America. Spellman’s railroad signal also can be read anthropomorphically as the solitary inhabitant of the desolate landscape.

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Otis Dozier’s Annual Move (1936), with its poignant but deadpan evocation of a family packing up to leave their dusty plot; Edmund Kinzinger’s oddly stiff Italian Shepherd; William Lester’s Oklahoma Rocks (1936); and Everett Spruce’s Suburban Landscape (c. 1936) could be found in the galleries as well as on the pages of the Art Digest special issue.48 Several of these artists showed great breadth, varying their styles, approaches, and even media. Dozier’s Still

Figure 2.08 | William Lester, Oklahoma Rocks, 1936, oil on board, 12" × 16". A hauntingly spare depiction from the period when Lester was stationed as a staff artist with the Civilian Conservation Corps in Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

Life with Striped Gourd (1935), for example, possesses the careening perspective of Paul Cézanne’s tables or Vincent van Gogh’s plank floors, combined with a pragmatic durability in the gourds and checkerboard tile floor. The physicality of objects in his still life seems to bespeak a specific Texan quality; Dozier engages the modernist or “European” tilted perspective but maintains a firm reality in his objects.

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Edmund Daniel Kinzinger was from Germany, a world away and a generation beyond most of the Dallas Nine. He trained at the Munich Art Academy and the Stuttgart Academy of Arts before spending four years as a German artillery officer during World War I. He cofounded a visually radical artist’s group, the Üechte-Gruppe, with Willi Baumeister and Oskar Schlemmer, two significant avant-garde artists later included in the Nazis’ notorious Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) exhibition of 1937.49 By the time of that fateful and derisive Third Reich display, Kinzinger had immigrated to Texas, later becoming chair of Baylor University’s Art Department in Waco, Texas.50 Kinzinger assimilated the southwestern feel into his art with quick efficiency, making one wonder whether he was reticent to return to his avant-garde works and their association with vitriolic political and ad hominem attacks in his native Germany. Kinzinger’s Italian Shepherd and the Mexican or New Mexican figurative subjects he produced throughout the 1930s and 1940s bear little relationship to his works of the 1910s, such as the Die Brücke–style Expressionism one finds in Badende Am Strand (1911) or Cubist Figure with Green (1918). Although his personal style changed, Kinzinger imparted in his Baylor classes the same formal lessons he had taught at Hans Hofmann’s Munich School of Art (1931–1932) before Hofmann was forced to shut it down.51 Eventually, North Texas became a pipeline for professors wanting to study during the summer in Provincetown at Hofmann’s school or at others in that vital art colony, but Kinzinger was the only artist who had worked for the German master in his native country.52

Regionalism Replication of a Western European culture might win recognition in the East, but [southwestern] regional authors, musicians, actors, architects, singers, artists and dancers eventually decided not only to re-create but also to innovate. The new environment unleashed creative powers, and the fusion of elements in a new locale created a regional culture. . . . Though the result was initially more imitative than innovative, the increasing urbanization, growing economy, and continuing aspirations stimulated the creative forces. | KEITH L. BRYANT, JR. , Culture in the American Southwest

Many works by Dallas-area Regionalists, including Hogue’s Drouth Stricken Area and Bywaters’s In the Chair Car, possess a notable clarity and resolve. The group firmly believed that art demanded strong local conviction and expression. Importantly, however, they were not chauvinistic nationalists. Thomas Hart Benton’s visit to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts in 1935 and his unswerving support were crucial, but Bywaters and Hogue took issue with his isolationist and antimodernist rants. Benton’s main champion was Thomas Craven (1888–1969), the influential and vituperative American art critic who promoted the Regionalism of Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood. Craven’s essays appeared in the Dial, the Nation, the New Republic, Harpers, Scribner’s, and Hearst publications, as well as in several major books he published in the era.53 Benton himself was pugilistic in person and ideological in print and art.54 His early work revealed the impact of his time in Paris, including Synchronist

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and Orphic works made alongside Stanton MacDonald-Wright. Once back on American soil, Benton famously rejected his younger styles, exclaiming, “I wallowed in every cock-eyed ‘ism’ that came along before I got all that dirt out of my system.”55 He engaged in a legendary public feud in art journals with the modernist painter Stuart Davis. (Erika Doss rightly calls it “out and out combat.”)56 The argument is generally couched as Davis’s abstract modernism versus Benton’s Regionalist antimodernism. Or as the New York Times phrased it in the language of the day, as a debate between “Leading Exponents of ‘Abstract’ and ‘Nationalist’ Tendencies.”57 This was the period of the Popular Front (1935–1939), when John Reed society members, liberals, socialists, and radicals of many stripes forged a union against fascism. It was incumbent upon the inheritors of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to determine exactly how art should function. The role of art (all art—literature, poetry, drama, and the visual arts) was central to the future of the United States, especially as bread lines grew and Europe heated up for another war. Progressive artists’ views appeared in newspapers and in the little magazines that sprang up in the first decades of the century.58 Yet by the later 1930s, the American Left was profoundly shaken by the course of world events, particularly the Moscow show trials—Joseph Stalin’s staged performances set up to eliminate any old Bolsheviks associated with his ousted rival Leon Trotsky—and the politically revelatory Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939.59 How could a communist country join forces with Third Reich fascism? It took time for news of Stalin’s

abhorrent campaigns against his own people to reach U.S. intellectuals, leaving some clinging to a pro-Soviet stance longer than others. Eventually, the totalitarian underpinnings of the ideology powering both the Soviet Union and Germany were revealed. Whereas even mild-mannered New York artists were frequently pulled into the debates by virtue of geographic proximity, the Dallas group was less vocal on international politics. Their physical distance from the U.S. coasts buffered them from the heated political debates, the artists’ unions, and the presumption that one had to commit one’s art and writing to an ideological cause. Yet the Texans watched from afar, worrying like the rest of the country about whether the United States would join the war. Their distance did not leave them better or worse off; it simply affected their engagement. In fact, they were deeply dedicated to a cause— promoting Regionalism—but it reverberated only mildly outside the state, understandably, given the country’s larger preoccupation. The Dallas Nine traced the Benton-Davis altercation through the pages of Art Front and the Art Digest. Significantly, their sympathies on that topic lay not with their own champion Benton, but with Stuart Davis, who wrote, “Regional jingoism and racial chauvinism will not have a place in this great art of the future which Benton foresees.”60 In contrast to Benton’s nativist rigidity, Jerry Bywaters insisted, “Contemporary artists of Texas are united in their enthusiasm for the development of a regional art which shall coördinate the best efforts of previous European, American, and Texas artists in

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a living art of today.”61 These qualities are evident in many works of the Dallas Nine, a reminder that Texas regionalism had its own dialect. Unfortunately, the vociferous variety of regionalism that dominated the U.S. press gave the term a bad name.62 From a modernist perspective, the Texas artists in the Centennial Exposition steered clear of geometric or nonobjective abstraction. As Richard Foster Howard aptly noted in the catalogue, they “almost

Figure 2.09 | Jerry Bywaters, Oil Field Girls, 1940, oil on board, 29⅝" × 24½". Bywaters’s celebrated painting is a modern allegory on the industry’s ills and the symbiotic profession that thrives on it. (Note the black smoke and “666” sign in the background.) At the same time, it is humorous and eternal.

entirely skipped that phase of twentieth century thought in art which was concerned with abstraction and extreme distortion.”63 According to Bywaters, it was because their art had developed beyond such youthful expressions. The more “studious” Texas artists, Bywaters wrote, had certainly learned from experimentation with modern techniques. But it was either their “maturing minds, or perhaps merely the great distance from the source of supply, Paris, that rescued the Texas artists from what in French modernism has become no more than perpetual experimentation for its own sake.”64 Bywaters’s own determination and his faith in his peers might have biased his opinion of French modernism. Nevertheless, he was well acquainted with art from distant shores, having seen modernist art in France and Spain in the summer of 1927. He made reasoned, respectful arguments. All along, Bywaters merged theory and practice silently in his paintings and prints. Paintings like his portrait of David R. Williams (1933; called David or Portrait of an Architect), Share Cropper (1937), Century Plant, Big Bend (1939), Oil Field Girls (1940), On the Ranch (1941), and On Beach in Galveston (1941) merge his theory with practice. Bywaters soon became the director of the Dallas Museum of Art, a position he held for twenty years, promoting and championing a broad range of art, attending even to styles that may have run counter to his own ideals and tastes. With far greater aplomb, Alexandre Hogue vocally eschewed the European influences on his fellow artists. In the early 1930s, Hogue registered his frustration while displaying his understanding of the modernist movements in France:

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Listening to some artists talk in America you hear a dozen names like Van Gogh and Cézanne mentioned so frequently you would fancy that painters got some sort of pleasure out of tripping them off their tongues. But our problems today, certainly in the Southwest, are not the problems of the French artists. And curiously enough, the painters who speak most frequently of them seem to lose sight of the most striking fact in the career of all of them— that they are, first of all, absolutely colloquial in their approach to art. It is because their work transcends the colloquial and becomes universal in its appeal that they have won their place; not because they set out first to become universal.65

Hogue’s percipience was to recognize that much great art begins with a regional or local focus. Rather than critiquing the Europeans, the statement vents his irritation at local name-droppers who failed to see the colloquial-to-universal connection.66 Largely because of Benton, Wood, Curry, and the critical apparatus surrounding their work, Regionalism today still summons mixed responses. Later scholarship on these artists has complicated the picture.67 By the twenty-first century, the eminent curator and scholar Robert Storr had grown weary of the topic’s repeated resurgence. Regionalism should be buried once and for all, he averred, for having been “a figment of the United States in the 1930s at one of its most chauvinistic periods.”68 Storr accurately summed up the challenge of handling the timeworn term, but he nonetheless referred to a specific definition of Regionalism,

namely, the sort espoused by the famed American midwestern triumvirate. Regionalism in Texas was of a different sort. Though it sprang from the local soil, it shared fewer of the invidious attributes held by the chauvinistic brand. As practiced in Texas, regionalism often had a positive, even progressive outcome. Through the direct observation of their surroundings and their refusal to be provincial, many Dallas artists achieved a nuanced and cultured vision of the United States. Some of them “transcended the colloquial” (Hogue’s phrase) to achieve a universal form. The Centennial afforded the opportunity for artists to unite in a quasi Popular Texas Front, as it were, to show the rest of the United States that vision. Olin Travis (1888–1975) The regal elder statesman of the Dallas group was Olin Herman Travis, at whose Dallas Art Institute many of the artists studied, taught, or became secondary recipients of lessons communicated there. Categorizing Travis as a Texas regionalist suffices only partially. He was indeed a prominent member of the original Nine, but his artistic heritage and painterly application—sometimes he dappled color on in patches, not unlike Robert Henri but with considerably greater humor—align him with a broader group of American social realists and American Scene painters. At Bert Willoughby’s Sportatorium (1935) undoubtedly owes its subject to the boxing paintings and lithographs by the Ashcan master George Bellows. Travis’s wrestling match, seen from the front row at eye level, captures the

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dance-like choreography of the immensely popular matches at men’s clubs. The composition becomes dynamic as the colossal fighter in red holds his opponent diagonally in a headlock, both of their backs to the viewer. The ruffled referee (a fighter himself: note the smashed nose and torn white clothes) shifts adroitly to view the full action.

Figure 2.10 | Olin Herman Travis, At Bert Willoughby’s Sportatorium, 1935, oil on canvas, 25" × 35".

Travis took an alternate but equally compelling modern approach in the Mayor of Hoover City (Texas), which was finished in Dallas a few years after the Great Crash of 1929. Mayor is a satiric retort to Herbert Hoover’s oft-quoted statement (published in Time magazine) that the country’s economic downturn represented a temporary halt to the great

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nation’s overall prosperity. Even Mayor’s beacons of hope—his startling bright blue eyes—are downcast within his haggard, sunburned complexion.69 The incongruously cheerful squares of reds and greens on the shack heighten the scene’s irony. The next year, Travis addressed destitution in the Ozarks, this time in A Workman (1929), an unforgettable portrait of Simon Staten, an Ozark mountaineer, World War I veteran, and laid-off steelworker. The Arkansan sits for his portrait (Travis thought he posed like Abraham Lincoln), his wellworn shirt buttoned properly at the neck under tattered overalls, hat in hand in his lap (it was, after all, a formal sitting), against a background of shacks, water towers, and chimney stacks in mottled greens and grays. Travis, who finished a manuscript titled “Portrait Painting as an Art,” built the face up of ruddy crimsons (on the cheekbones) and creams, including a bold highlight on the sitter’s forehead, which rarely saw the sun. Skin tones specked with

black create the shadow of stubble. Olin Travis’s granddaughter Susan, who wrote her dissertation on his work, finds The Workman to be emblematic of Marx’s concept of alienated labor, by which the proletarian worker is denied any personal fulfillment in his industrialized job. For Susan Travis, this view is in keeping with her grandfather’s appreciation of Marx’s tenets. The sardonically titled painting captures the dignified, unemployed mountaineer, who took his task of portrait modeling so seriously that he was immune to the jibes of countless visitors who teased him and Travis for rendering an image of “the ugliest man in the county.”70 Although the label social realist is seldom applied to Travis, The Workman belongs in the canon of stately presentations of down-on-their-luck Depressionera Americans. Travis’s The Workman was published as the frontispiece to Survey Graphic: A Magazine of Social Interpretation (May 1934). Survey Graphic focused on national and international political and sociological topics such as anti-Semitism, poverty, and social welfare. The copy beneath the reproduction of Travis’s painting reads: “This painting, awarded first medal in 1930 on the Southern States Art League circuit, hangs temporarily in the Red Cross waiting room at Dallas. Ada Miller, secretary of the chapter, writes: ‘An unemployed steel worker and ex-soldier sat for the artist, and somehow both the great wars are in his eyes.’”71 Given the 1930 date, “both the great wars” refers to World War I and the Great Depression. An uncanny painting by an artist who studied briefly with Olin Travis is Cinderland Cedar (1943) by Lucille Harris Locke (1904–1989). Although

Figure 2.11 | Olin Herman Travis, Mayor of Hoover City (Texas), c. 1932, 25" × 30". The art historian Scott Grant Barker observes that this painting “pointedly incorporates a modern skyline as the backdrop for Travis’s visualization of the human cost of widespread economic collapse.”

Facing | Figure 2.12 | Olin Herman Travis, A Workman, 1929, oil on canvas, 35" × 30". The unemployed steelworker so poignantly depicted by Travis was laid-off mountaineer Simon Staten; Travis suspected the movements of Staten’s facial muscles were a sign of his missing teeth.

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Locke did not exhibit at the Centennial, her work belongs to the legacy of Travis’s and Xavier Gonzalez’s students. Born in Georgia, Locke attended Newcomb College at Tulane University in New Orleans, where she took classes with Xavier Gonzalez and others before moving to El Paso, Sonora, San Antonio, and Central Texas. She eventually settled in Corpus Christi, where she wrote for the newspaper and became a founding member of the city’s arts foundation.72 While at the San Antonio Art Institute, she studied under Charles Rosen and Travis, who was a guest instructor from 1944 to 1945. Locke’s cedar tree, centrally placed in the

foreground like a human subject, twists and rises toward the cerulean sky. The interpretation is hauntingly human; the cedar tree is half-dead, its trunk splayed open. The wood visible inside is painted with a thick yellowish impasto: she impressed the paint with her brush to create quasi rings. On the branches, she incised sharp lines to reveal an orange underlayer. Cinderland Cedar’s eeriness and unusual paint handling cohere into a “portrait” of the Texas landscape. Everett Spruce Olin Herman Travis was the single degree of separation between Everett Spruce and Simon Staten. Travis and his wife, the artist Kathryne Bess Hail Travis, taught during the summer in the Ozarks in Cass, Arkansas.73 While they were there on a sketching trip, Kathryne’s cousin introduced the Travises to seventeen-year-old Everett Spruce, who shyly showed them his self-taught drawings, prompting Olin Travis to offer him a year’s scholarship at his newly formed Dallas Art Institute. Spruce saved up $25 and made the life-altering journey a few months later, in 1925, as soon as he finished high school. He credits his mentor for impressing upon him “the importance of being a real artist” and introducing him “to the work of modern artists, making us understand them.”74 At the institute, he learned much from Thomas M. Stell, Jr., and befriended Otis Dozier and William Lester, who became a lifelong colleague. Spruce gained early and impressive national attention: a solo exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts in 1932 was followed in 1936 by group exhibitions at the

Figure 2.13 | Lucille Locke, Cinderland Cedar, 1943, oil on board, 24" × 18". Locke’s painting is but one interpretation of the many single trees that Regionalist artists painted; she renders her half-barren tree with a profound humanity, incising lines in the bark and using impasto to build up the trunk’s canker.

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Kansas City Art Institute and the First National Exhibition of American Art at Rockefeller Center in New York. In 1937, his work was featured at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and at a solo exhibition at the Delphic Studios on East 57th Street, whose curator, Alma Reed, had given José Clemente Orozco his first New York show. In 1940, Spruce left Dallas to join the art faculty of the University of Texas (see chapter six). Painted the same year as the Texas Centennial and included in the Delphic Studios exhibition, Spruce’s Mending the Rock Fence (1936, oil on Masonite) stands at the peculiar intersection of Depression-era Texas and Quattrocento Italy. Two generations of men work side by side (reminiscent of the nuns in Bywaters’s In the Chair Car), laying stones for a wall that could stand in for an Italian

Figure 2.14 | Everett Spruce, Mending the Rock Fence, 1936, oil on Masonite, 20" × 24".

parapet. Like the parapet, Spruce’s rock fence links the viewer to a fictive landscape. Spruce’s signature is on the wall, just as Renaissance artists often signed the parapets they depicted. The lessons of the father are being passed on as the older man assesses the stone’s mass with his hands, communing with it like a talisman. The stone ledge and tree in the distant background rise symbolically between the men, nature’s macrocosm. The men, working slowly with individual rocks, echo it in microcosm. The parapet metaphor provides yet another indication of the thoughtfulness and range of some Dallas Nine members. Alexandre Hogue, for example, employs the parapet device regularly, such as in Irrigation—Taos (1931), Grim Reaper (1932, charcoal), and Howdy Neighbor (1936, pencil). In the aforementioned Erosion No. 2—Mother Earth Laid Bare (1936), the gray eroded hill in the foreground acts as the parapet, linking the viewer to the ravaged mother earth, further enhancing Hogue’s characteristic psychorealism. Spruce and Hogue, though distinctly different artists, both put a modern twist on a classic narrative device. Spruce’s Night (1938) is at once recognizable and abstracted from nature, still figurative but with an abstract quality of line. The easily identifiable tree (or what is left of it) is composed of distinct brushstrokes. He applied off-white to gray pigments in the clouds, which have unrealistically sharpened edges.75 Later on, Spruce veered more into abstraction but also retained vestiges of recognizable imagery. An interesting comparison can be made between Spruce’s Hollow Tree (1940) and Locke’s Cinderland Cedar. Both paintings anthropomorphize the rotting tree, a fundamental feature of a bonedry Texas landscape.

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middle ground of the composition, dwarfing the human figure. The humorous aspect of the subject of Rattlesnake Hunter pervades the work. Lester’s works of the 1930s reify nature, hardening it into planes, angles, and palpable, occasionally luminous striations. Lone Star Printmakers and the Printmakers Guild

Figure 2.15 | Everett Spruce, Hollow Tree, 1940, oil on board, 15" × 19". A contribution to the “lone tree” theme so many Texans explored. Note how Spruce set his curving tree within diagonal landscape lines (rock wall, line of trees, horizon, and cloud), animating the entire painting.

Although the Dallas Nine was not a formal school or group, many of its members banded together officially as the Lone Star Printmakers, loosely modeled after Reeves Lewenthal’s Associated American Artists (aaa). In 1933, Lewenthal announced that the aaa sought “a forceful contract with the public” and believed “that the possession of a good work of art will more effectively stimulate an art interest.”76

William Lester Spruce’s close friend William Lester moved to Austin in 1942, at Spruce’s insistence, to teach. He had studied at the Dallas Art Institute under Alexandre Hogue, whose fondness for materiality is echoed in Lester’s Dallas-era works. Lester expressed the solidity of the natural world through angular and geometric forms. Oklahoma Rocks (1936; Centennial Exposition), In Oklahoma (1936), and Rattlesnake Hunter (1939; also reproduced as a 1939 lithograph) indicate the artist’s sense of humor and his architectonic transformation of the landscape. Lester also engaged in that peculiar close observation common to these Texas Regionalists. The style of painting— the precise, linear, almost caricatural style—makes it modern. The Texas land dominates the fore- and Figure 2.16 | William Lester, In Oklahoma, 1936, oil on Masonite, 24" × 30". Lester rhymes the open and closed form of the rocks and contrasts living with dying trees and hard forms with soft in this brilliant take on the landscape.

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Since their widespread dissemination beginning in the fifteenth century, prints have been a democratic medium, making original artwork accessible to those who could not afford higher-priced paintings and sculptures. The United States experienced a nationwide printmaking revival in the 1920s and 1930s, coincident with the downturn in the economy and the return to roots to which Regionalism belonged. The Lone Star Printmakers’ graphic production was organized and prodigious during their four-year run (1938–1942). They issued affordable portfolios that widened the reach of Texas art. Prints are made in

Figure 2.17 | Otis Dozier, Cotton Pickers, 1940, lithograph, 12" × 14", ed. 16. The sparse cotton plants and faceless figures accentuate the dismal subject; the woman seems to be in the process of becoming wooden and aged, a human echo of the posts behind her.

multiple copies, although each remains an original, meaning that the first folio could be seen simultaneously in locations throughout Colorado, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas. The inaugural exhibition, at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, featured the charter members, who shared a familiar nucleus: Reveau Bassett, Jerry Bywaters, Charles T. Bowling, Harry Carnohan, John Douglass, Otis Dozier, E. G. Eisenlohr, Alexandre Hogue, William Lester, Merritt Mauzey, Perry Nichols, Michael Owen (listed as “Mike”), H. O. Robertson, Thomas Stell, Jr., and Olin Herman Travis.77

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A standout member of the group was the painter and exceptionally skilled lithographer Charles T. Bowling (1891–1985). Bowling pinpointed the sublime desolation of his scenes, whether peopled or not, in paintings such as Texas Landscape (1936) and lithographs such as Sunflowers (1938, featured in the Printmakers’ debut exhibition), Low Land (1940,

Figure 2.18 | Charles T. Bowling, Texas Landscape, 1936, oil on board, 25" × 29". Made in the year of the Centennial, this was not the painting that represented Bowling there. Texas Landscape’s subtle tonal range highlights the scene’s starkness. The artist, who never finished high school, worked for nearly fifty years as a civil engineer and draftsman for Texas Power and Light Company.

with its haunting tree), Down Stream (1940), and Trailerville (1940). Bowling’s work possesses a sly supernatural quality conveyed by distinctive spatial rendering and a deceptively smooth process. The grays, ochres, and crisp taupes of Bowling’s painted oeuvre find a parallel in the rich tonal range of his graphic productions.

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Figure 2.19 | Charles T. Bowling, Trailerville, 1940, lithograph, 9⅝" × 11½". Every lonesome detail of this composition—the woman’s back, the front-and-center trashcans, the barren trees, the trailer itself—is enhanced by Bowling’s unrivalled draftsmanship and his modulated lithographic tones.

Merritt Mauzey’s paintings likewise inflected his printmaking, and vice versa. An early work, the nearly monochromatic painting Vanquished (1930), uses a limited tonal range to depict a sharp-faced migrant. The single figure carries his worldly possessions over his shoulder like a cross. Two cottonthemed paintings were exhibited at the Centennial Exposition. A later painting, My Brother’s Keeper (c. 1940), was reproduced as a World War II lithograph while Mauzey was a member of the Lone Star Printmakers.78 It traveled overseas in 1944 with the Office of War Information’s exhibit Contemporary American Prints, a show of American regional art. Mauzey’s My Brother’s Keeper, as painting and lithograph, and works such as Charles Bowling’s foreboding Texas Windstorm (1935) are prime examples of a hauntingly Surrealistic genre.

Figure 2.20 | Merritt Mauzey, My Brother’s Keeper, c. 1940, oil on Masonite, 34⅜" × 40⅜".

Figure 2.21 | Merritt Mauzey, My Brother’s Keeper, 1940, lithograph, 12½" × 13⅞". The lithograph, likely made after the painting, was used to raise money for the British war relief effort. The young couple, framed by the razed brick building, face the distant church, making youth and hope a theme of this desolate subject.

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Women were conspicuously absent from the Lone Star Printmakers, a fact that casts a regressive shadow across the group, particularly given the female presence in the Centennial and the talents of Dallas-area women.79 They did not wait around like wallflowers, however, or bluebonnets. In response to being shut out, eight female artists, led by Bertha Landers, launched the Printmakers Guild in 1939. Moreover, whereas the men’s group dissolved in 1942, the Printmakers Guild continued for another two decades (changing its name to Texas Printmakers) and ultimately reached a broad swath

of the United States. The other founding members were Stella LaMond, Lucile Land Lacy, Mary Lightfoot, Verda Ligon, Blanche McVeigh, Coreen Mary Spellman, and Lura Ann Taylor.80 The Printmakers Guild provides but one example of the commanding role that women took in Texas art, whether or not they were cordoned off by their sex. The fact that they were women rebelling against a gender-based bias in 1940 should be regarded as a modernist gesture. Some of their oil-on-canvas modernist contributions will be revisited in other chapters. Tom Lea Among Texas’s better-known artists and authors, a major artist whose work bears mention is the El Paso native Tom Lea (1907–2001).81 Though not a member of the Dallas group, Lea was an established muralist who painted several murals at the Hall of State (1935–1936) for the Texas Centennial. He spent three years at the Art Institute of Chicago, followed by stints in Italy and Santa Fe, before returning to El Paso. Using skills gained from intensive study in Chicago and an apprenticeship with the noted muralist John Warner Norton, Lea earned numerous mural commissions from the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts (in operation 1934–1943). He painted murals for wpa programs, as well as independently, from Washington, D.C., to New Mexico. In 1939, Lea illustrated a series of essays published by J. Frank Dobie (originally a friend of Lea’s father, the colorful mayor of El Paso) in the Southwest Review. By 1941, Lea had caught the eye of the publishing magnate Henry

Figure 2.22 | Coreen Spellman, Rhythmic Plowing/Rhythmic Fields, n.d., lithograph, 11¼" × 7⅞". Spellman captures the geometry of the plowed fields with a high, vertical, careening perspective.

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Luce, who hired him as a Life magazine war correspondent. All told, Lea made more war images than the other eight Life artist-correspondents combined.82 The El Pasoan drew inspiration from the people and places around him in a style that fits most closely with American Regionalism. Lea’s sublime Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (later retitled Sarah, for Sarah Dighton Beane) took the $50 second-place prize in the Texas General Exhibit of 1940. (The $100 first-place prize that year went to the San Antonio artist Lonnie Rees’s portrait The Pink Gloves.) For one series of paintings for Life, the Texan correspondent spent sixty-six days aboard the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, disembarking only four days before Japanese dive-bombers and torpedo planes sank the ship on October 26, 1942, during

Figure 2.23 | Tom Lea, Explosion, 1943, oil on canvas, dimensions unavailable. Published in Life magazine shortly after Roosevelt changed the censorship guidelines to permit Americans to see more of the true brutality of the war.

the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. One hundred forty sailors were killed. As Life reported, all the photographic files were aboard the sunken ship, making Lea’s drawings of the officers the only pictorial record of its final days.83 As Brendan  M. Greeley observes in his book on Lea’s military art, Lea became an eyewitness to “one of the most significant innovations in the history of naval warfare: carrier-based airpower.”84 Explosion belongs to Lea’s continued exploration of the tragedy in the “Death of the Hornet ” series, produced from memory. Reproduced in Life on August 2, 1943, these were the only war illustrations that Lea did not base on direct, firsthand observation.85 According to Sarah G. Forgey, curator of the Army Art Collection: “This series was the most

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graphic war art that the public saw to that point, as the paintings were among the first to be released after new censorship guidelines became effective in late summer 1943. Prior to that, military censors had not released images of dead Americans, believing them to be bad for morale. President Roosevelt reversed that decision in summer 1943, believing that the public was ready to see the worst.”86 It is easy to see why another of the Life paintings has been so frequently reproduced.87 It portrays a frozen moment during the Battle of Peleliu, a coral island in the western Pacific. The Peleliu invasion was expected to be a brief engagement, yet it lasted two months and inflicted the highest casualty rate of any amphibious assault in the Pacific theater.88 The bewildered shock on the face of Lea’s soldier in That 2,000-Yard Stare (1943) epitomizes the war’s toll at the individual level. As Lea wrote in notes that were published as Life’s caption, “How much can a human being endure?”89 The soldier’s helmet is askew, his expression at once numb and fully present: the whites of his eyes completely surround his irises and dilated pupils. The clarity of the background (“Bloody Nose Ridge,” a heavily protected Japanese redoubt) lends a painful truth to the figure’s subjective stare. Such an intense focus on one human being’s interior state is a hallmark of modernism. Like those of many Texas Regionalists and their circle, Lea’s murals, paintings, and drawings are imbued with a sense of immediacy. Either through the technical means of a crisply painted canvas or through the use of a contemporary topic as their subjects, these artists addressed the here and now. Nor did they blindly follow the better-known

Figure 2.24 | Tom Lea, That 2,000-Yard Stare, 1943, oil on canvas, 36" × 28". Stationed with U.S. troops during the drawn-out, costly Battle of Peleliu, Lea allows a single figure to express the war’s toll.

regionalists such as Benton, Wood, and Curry. They incorporated a Mexican influence, which was geographically more available than elsewhere in the United States. These Texas artists, working somewhat outside the shadow soon to be cast by the midcentury modernists, developed their own novel methods of confronting the world around them. Mobilized by the Centennial to demonstrate their locally sourced regionalism, they left an influence that reverberated in future artists.

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Later Figures Artists such as Ed Bearden, Barney Delabano, DeForrest Judd, and Dan Wingren eventually became associated with the Nine. The oeuvre, education, and manner of the Ohio native DeForrest Hale Judd (1916 –1992) bind him to the Dallas Nine. A 1939 graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art, Judd was awarded a scholarship at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, where he studied with its director, Boardman Robinson, and Otis Dozier. After moving to Dallas in 1946, Judd taught at the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist

Figure 2.25 | DeForrest Judd, Ghost Town, 1954, oil on board, 24" × 36". It is as if the brushed-on paint and bold colors are all that keep the ghost town structures standing.

University and also at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. He earned many major prizes throughout his career for nature-inspired paintings featuring bold colors and abstracted, often hardened lines. One senses the Texas regionalists’ attunement to nature, but Judd displays a more modern disposition, partly because he belonged to a later generation.

✳ As noted above, Jerry Bywaters raised his Dallas profile significantly by becoming director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts a decade after the Texas Centennial. During this period, around 1943,

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Bywaters sketched out the Tree of Texas Painting.90 By that time, he had dedicated twenty years to teaching, writing, curating, painting, and printmaking. A multitalented investigator of Texas art, he had as much authority as anyone to chart the Lone Star State’s artistic origins and its future. In the drawing, a massive tree trunk is centered between the Trans-Pecos natives to the west (complete with tiny sketched teepees and a buffalo hide) and San Antonio’s Mission Concepción to the south. The tree’s roots bear the names of European immigrants such as Théodore Gentilz, Hermann Lungkwitz, and Carl G. von Iwonski. The trunk features Americans with “Academic Foreign Training”; “Historical and

Figure 2.26 | Dan Wingren, Late Wilderness, 1957, oil on canvas, 16" × 20". Wingren centers the composition within horizontal striations and vertical trees, enlivening the surface with crisscrossing flourishes of white and bright orange dancing lines.

Pioneer Subjects” and “Cattle Painters” branch to the left from there. Higher up in the central trunk are the “Moderns (1900–1943).”91 Forking off from the moderns are Impressionists, regionalists, internationalists, and graphic media. The internationalists are further divided into a Y-shaped branch, distinguishing the “Abstractionists” from the “School of Paris, Rhome [sic], Vienna.”92 The Tree of Texas Painting—a marvelous inprogress document—does not seem to have been intended for publication.93 Yet it shows Bywaters taking his directorial role to heart, privately deliberating over a taxonomy for the entire state, back to its origins in 1830. It also suggests that the new museum director unequivocally placed the regionalists within the modern grouping. The form of the tree is modeled after genealogical family trees, although a direct model was very likely the Mexican artist and cartoonist Miguel Covarrubias’s Tree of Modern Art—Planted 60 Years Ago, which was published in Vanity Fair in 1933. Bywaters could have easily come across Covarrubias’s Tree, which would certainly have piqued his interest.94 Bywaters was undoubtedly well acquainted with a later, more famous precedent: Alfred H. Barr’s diagram for MoMA’s groundbreaking exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art in 1936.95 Barr’s genealogical chart, more sober than Covarrubias’s and lacking an arboreal outline, neatly connects successive stages of modern art from 1890 to 1935. Intended to educate the public by making sense of the potentially dizzying parade of modernist isms, it was published as the catalogue jacket cover and as a press release, and was posted on the museum wall. It has become an icon of modernist historiography.

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Figure 2.27 | Jerry Bywaters, Tree of Texas Painting, c. 1943, pencil on paper, 21" × 16". From the artist who tirelessly promoted Texas—and all American and international—art, a work in progress that determines a taxonomy for his state.

Although castigated and critiqued in the ensuing decades for its reductive and determinist evolution, it remains a highly useful and influential document (“the Gospel of modern art,” the art historian Robert Rosenblum quipped).96 Bywaters may have felt an affinity for Barr in other ways as well. When MoMA mounted its exhibition in 1936, Texans were immersed in the statewide Centennial celebrations, and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts opened in Fair Park with the inaugural Centennial Exposition; it was a moment when Texas artists stood a chance of making a larger impact in American art. Years later, Bywaters found himself, like Barr, a museum director. On Bywaters’s Tree of Texas Painting, the sparse “Abstractionists” branch bears two leaves and a jotted-in name. All three of those artists were working outside the Dallas area. Don Brown was a Texas native of cosmopolitan background who studied first at the Art Institute of Chicago, then with the Cubist André Lhote in Paris, and finally at the Art Students League. He moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1934 to teach. Although he still exhibited in Texas, his absence may explain why no leaf circled his name circa 1943. The other leaves on the nearly barren branch bear the names (Robert) “Preusser (?)” and (Bror) “Utter.” Because Robert Preusser’s prolific early education and his long career are inextricable from the cultural paths paved for him by Houstonians, his contributions will be considered in chapter three and revisited in chapter seven. Bror Utter’s association with the Fort Worth Circle is discussed in chapter five.

3 During the planning for the Texas Centennial,

Houston and the Foundations of Early Texas Modernism

Houston was among the cities vying to host the grand festivities. Although Dallas ultimately won the honor, Houston—like other cities across the state—celebrated with anniversary events throughout 1936.1 In June, the same month the huge Centennial Exposition opened at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (mfah) opened its own Texas Centennial Exhibition. The exhibition was one of twenty shows held at the mfah that year, an indirect indication of Houston’s advanced involvement with the arts at the time. Twenty years later, Houston arts reached a multitiered pinnacle, affirmed by three signal events symbolizing the city’s national and international arts status. The first was initiated in the early 1950s when the arts patron Nina J. Cullinan insisted that the mfah seek a prominent international architect to design its expansion. She followed through by helping the museum procure an ambitious architectural master plan from Mies van der Rohe, former director of the German Bauhaus. The first phase of the

revamped mfah was completed in 1958.2 The opening of what became Mies’s Cullinan Hall brackets the two other signal events: the American Federation of the Arts (afa) convention in March 1957 and the Contemporary Arts Association (caa) exhibition Totems Not Taboo: An Exhibition of Primitive Art in February 1959. Organized by the curator Jermayne MacAgy, Totems Not Taboo was brilliantly displayed within Mies’s pristine glass and marble galleries. These advances in art and architecture demanded considerable local and statewide cooperation, involved international elements, and made national headlines. They signified a level of achievement far beyond that of the rest of the state and much of the country. (Further discussion of Houston in the 1950s is reserved for chapter seven.) To better understand how the city reached the top tier of the art world in the 1950s, it is necessary to look back at Houston’s burgeoning modernist institutions, patronage, and artists of earlier decades. No city in Texas has been as artistically productive as Houston, which began casting away its conservative

Facing | Figure 3.01 | Ward Lockwood, Houston Docks, 1941, oil on Masonite, 18" × 24". Houston Docks demonstrates how Lockwood “readily adapted to his new Texas environment” after moving from Taos to Austin in 1938. The art historian

Charles Eldredge pointed out how “the landscape offered new pictorial possibilities” for Lockwood (Eldredge, Ward Lockwood, 1894–1963). The vibrant painting also demonstrates the centrality of Houston for so many Texas artists.

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beginnings in 1900 with the formation of the Public School Art League. Founded by five dedicated women, including the artist-teacher Emma Richardson Cherry (1859–1954), the league strove to enlighten students and the community through classes, lectures, and exhibitions.3 By 1913 (the year of the Armory Show), in a nod to the metropolitan breadth of their mission, the group had renamed itself the Houston Art League. Three years later, the oil industrialist and philanthropist Joseph S. Cullinan (father of Nina J. Cullinan) anonymously donated money allowing the league to purchase land near the Rice Institute for a future museum site.4 And in 1924, the league inaugurated a new building; five years later it officially became the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston. William Ward Watkin, who taught at Rice along with the museum’s founding director, James Chillman, laid out the original structure in a symmetrical neoclassical plan, which was fashionable at the time.5 The mfah was the state’s first fine arts museum and became, under Chillman’s thirty years of leadership, its foremost arts institution, recognized for its architecture, curation, outreach, and teaching.6 To foster the rise of the local arts scene through competition, the mfah established the juried Annual Exhibition of Houston Artists in 1925, acquiring the winning entry each year for its permanent collection. The museum organized solo exhibitions of Texas artists, including Emma Richardson Cherry (1925), Olin Travis (1926), Julian Onderdonk (posthumously in 1927, 1928, and 1932), Mary Bonner (1927, 1929), Alexandre Hogue (1929), Edward M. Schiwetz (1932), Coreen Mary Spellman (1933), Edmund Kinzinger (1939), and Forrest Bess (1941). In

addition to Southwest circuit exhibitions and those of regional artists, its varied schedule included shows of local, national, and international photography; modern and traditional Mexican art; African American artists; modern and classical French art; the modernist painter Raymond Jonson; the figurative painter Byron Boyd; ancient and modern ceramics; and Chinese and Japanese art, among many others.7 In keeping with the populism and eclecticism of the era, in the 1920s and 1930s the mfah served as a venue for the competitive soapsculpture shows sponsored by Procter & Gamble.8 It began cohosting the annual Texas General Exhibits in 1940. In its early decades, the museum averaged more than thirty shows a year; that frequency was especially astonishing because Chillman served part-time during his entire tenure. Those who left significant modernist legacies to the city include the much-loved Ima Hogg, the daughter of Texas governor Jim Hogg who became a noted collector and philanthropist. The majority of her collection, which emphasized American decorative arts and paintings, formed the basis for the Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens.9 Hogg traveled extensively in Europe and Mexico, and she was receptive to interwar modernism. She lent Mexican avant-garde art and works on paper by artists such as Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso for mfah exhibitions, and in 1939 she donated one hundred objects and her appreciable collection of Russian avant-garde and German Expressionist prints and drawings to the museum’s permanent collection.10 Following an enlightening trip to Paris in 1909, Sarah Campbell Blaffer (1885–1975) became a

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connoisseur and collector of both breadth and insight.11 Her collection formed the backbone of the museum’s European art department. Blaffer hoped to kindle an appreciation of visual arts in all Texans—“poor, rich, townfolk, and country”—so that they could gain inspiration from “beautiful” works.12 Other important patrons added substantially to the city’s art holdings later in the century. Emma Richardson Cherry, Ruth Pershing Uhler, and Ola McNeill Davidson As in the realm of museums, a worldly and dedicated league of women took the helm of art education in Houston. “Many are educated, few are cultured,” averred Emma Richardson Cherry as part of her address to the Houston Teachers’ Association on the opening day of the mfah in 1924.13 Like many other American artists, Cherry (1859–1954) had traveled to Paris to study at the Académie Julian (in her case, in 1888). She tirelessly promoted modernism for more than fifty years.14 At age seventy-one, looking back at her career, Cherry told a Houston newspaper, “I learned to do academic, pretty things when I was young. As I became more mature, I wanted to make my work different. I wanted to inject modernism into it. I studied hard to acquire that modernism.”15 The inimitable Cherry studied at the famous artists’ colony in Giverny, the Normandy home of Claude Monet in 1888–1889, perhaps becoming the first American woman to do so. (Her painting partner and friend, the Englishman Dawson Dawson-Watson, married Cherry’s friend Mary Hoyt Sellar and moved to Texas thirty years later, where

he won first prize in the inaugural Davis wildflower competition.)16 Wherever she resided, Cherry became deeply involved with arts clubs and teaching. After living in Kansas City, Denver, and Nebraska, she settled in Houston in 1896, where she continued her extended travels and kept apace of current trends. Her own work often followed the styles of the schools where she studied, extending from Postimpressionism to Cubism to early American modernism. She took classes with William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League during her time there, 1879–1885; she also studied at Hugh Henry Breckenridge’s art school in East Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she became acquainted with Stuart Davis and Marsden Hartley. Cherry traveled extensively, to the periodic dismay of the husband she left at home: “I am uneasy all the time,” Dillin Brook Cherry wrote to his wife in Paris in 1888. “Try little one to look at the evils of that great City. . . . It is unfortunate for me that I am so well acquainted with the average man’s morals.”17 Despite her husband’s misgivings, for the next forty years Emma Cherry took many voyages, avidly absorbing as much modern art as possible. Although she did not make it to the Armory Show in New York, she visited the Salon d’Automne exhibition of 1912 in Paris at least twice.18 The exhibition featured Cubism, including paintings by Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, František Kupka, Fernand Léger, André Lhote, Jean Metzinger, and Francis Picabia, with sculptures by Alexander Archipenko and Amedeo Modigliani. Many Salon d’Automne artists—and some of the objects exhibited there—were selected for the Armory Show. Cherry later studied under Lhote in 1925–1926 in

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Paris, where she learned his system of dynamic symmetry, in which the figure is divided into geometric portions that, ideally, correspond to the golden section.19 Cherry returned to the United States with her Study in Compositional Spaces (1925), signed by her French alter ego, “Cerise,” in block letters. During that same European trip, she renewed an acquaintance with Sonia Delaunay and took in dozens of exhibitions. In 1923, Cherry saw Dr. Albert C. Barnes’s astounding and growing European modernist collection at its first public showing at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The peripatetic Cherry also visited major world’s fairs, including the nowlegendary Exposition Universelle (Paris, 1889 and 1900), the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893), the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (St. Louis, 1904), the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (Paris, 1925;

later called the “Art Deco” fair), and the Century of Progress International Exposition (Chicago, 1933).20 In 1920, Cherry enhanced her modernist credentials with yet another pioneering act. She became an original member of—and the sole Texan in—the Société Anonyme, Inc., the avant-garde arts group formed by the artist and collector Katherine Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray.21 Cherry’s early membership in this organization was nothing short of radical. The Société Anonyme, Inc. organized more than eighty exhibitions, produced thirty publications, and presented at least eighty public lectures in its twenty-year history.22 Never a bricksand-mortar institution, the Société Anonyme, Inc. operated out of borrowed spaces and was the first U.S. collection to be called a “Museum of Modern Art.” (New York’s Museum of Modern Art was not founded until 1929, and opened the doors to its

Figure 3.02 | Photograph of the Salon d’Automne Cubist room, Grand Palais des Champs Elysées, Paris, 1912. Emma Richardson Cherry visited the Salon d’Automne in Paris twice that year. This photograph of the Cubist hall shows paintings

by František Kupka, Francis Picabia, Jean Metzinger, and Henri Le Fauconnier. Four of Amedeo Modigliani’s sculptural heads are seen on the pedestals, as is a lost sculptural group by Joseph Csaky.

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Figure 3.03 | Emma Richardson Cherry, Study in Compositional Spaces, 1925, 12¼" × 9". A pioneer in Houston arts and a participant in avant-garde movements, the incomparable Cherry traveled worldwide, studying “hard to acquire that modernism” (quoted in “A Houston Modernist Writes Home: Two Letters from Emma Richardson Cherry to Her Daughter in the 1920’s,” Randolph K. Tibbits). As part of her selfeducation, she studied in Paris with André Lhote.

permanent building on 53rd Street in 1939.) Emma Richardson Cherry remained a Société Anonyme, Inc. member through at least 1925 and kept up a long-standing correspondence with Dreier, a kindred, independent-minded leader in modernist art of the early twentieth century.23 Many years later, Marcel Duchamp would strengthen the Société’s tie to Houston by delivering his short, seminal lecture “The Creative Act” at the afa convention there in 1957; Cherry had, unfortunately, died three years earlier. During one of her visits home between 1934 and 1936, Cherry and Ruth Pershing Uhler painted Public Works of Art Project murals at Houston’s public library (the present-day Julia Ideson Building). The Spanish Revival central library was designed by Ralph Cram, with collaboration from William Ward Watkin.24 Uhler was close to the artist Grace Spaulding John (1890–1972), and they helped paint the ceiling mural at the new city hall in 1939. In 1937, Uhler became an instructor at the mfah and later a curator of education. Her Decoration: Red Haw Trees, November (1932) is one of only a handful of extant paintings; she burned hundreds of her works in her backyard in 1940.25 Red Haw Trees and her Earth Rhythms, No. 3 (1936, awarded the Purchase Prize at the Twelfth Annual Exhibition of Houston Artists) reveal an artist in full possession of an idiosyncratic style that flattened the landscape’s planes like a Japanese screen in a tripartite construction. Uhler was intrigued with nonWestern art and Native American cultures. She spent considerable time in Santa Fe—often with Grace Spaulding John—while recuperating from tuberculosis in 1935–1936.26 It is likely that Uhler

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Figure 3.04 | Ruth Pershing Uhler, Earth Rhythms, No. 3, oil on canvas, 25¼" × 30⅜". Uhler absorbed the influence of Native American art and culture in Santa Fe. The simplicity of her line and bold colors invoke the power of nature.

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Top | Figure 3.05 | Grace Spaulding John, The Bell, c. 1950. Bottom | Figure 3.06 | Ola McNeill Davidson, Dead Live Oak, 1931, oil on canvas, 30" × 24½". Another evocative entry in the stark pantheon of lone Texas trees, this time by Emma Richardson Cherry’s friend and a founder of Houston’s 1938 Our Little Gallery of abstract art.

was exposed to Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings and drawings firsthand, because O’Keeffe regularly spent summers in Taos, seventy miles away, beginning in 1929.27 Among Emma Richardson Cherry’s protégées was Ola McNeill Davidson (1884–1976). Cherry wrote to Davidson, entreating her to come to Lhote’s studio in Paris to study. Raised in the Panhandle, Davidson moved to Dallas before settling in Houston in 1920, where she, too, taught at the museum school of the mfah. The title of her painting Dead Live Oak (1931) conveys a droll sense of humor about the arboreal Texas native that so many of the state’s artists portrayed. But Davidson’s manner shares more with French Postimpressionism than with the harder edges of Dallas regionalism. The gnarled branches and rotted hollows of the Dead Live Oak contrast with the pastel vivacity of the clouds, hills, and house. Davidson’s influence can be measured in the quality of the students she fostered. At age fifty-four, she opened Our Little Gallery in 1938 in a two-story converted garage; her students there included Forrest Bess, Robert Preusser, Frank Dolejska, Gene Charlton, and Carden Bailey. As the local newspaper reported, “Numerous volumes on current art and translations of European criticisms are available to all. And discussions stretch far into the night as a deeper understanding of art is approached. Here a young group of abstract and non-objective painters who are attracting national attention by their work, gather daily for study.”28 The reporter used language appropriate to a church study group, an indication of the piousness with which these abstract artists approached their endeavors.

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Above | Figure 3.07 | Gene Charlton, Glowing Through, 1953, ink and wash on paper, 9" × 12". A young founder of Houston’s Our Little Gallery of abstract art (1938), Charlton had been exhibiting at the Contemporary Arts Gallery in New York by 1953 and had had a one-man show at the MFAH (Randolph K. Tibbits, unpublished Charlton chronology). Right | Figure 3.08 | Gene Charlton, Untitled, 1956, oil on board, 9" × 6½". This exceptional little painting suggests Charlton’s own interpretation of French Tachisme with his unique recurring motif of vaguely figurative forms that recede subtly into space. Compare this to Michael Frary, Secret Totem, Fig. 6.31.

Frank Dolejska Back in Dallas, Alexandre Hogue mentioned three of these gallery members by name in the Art Digest Texas Centennial issue: “The most progressive artists in Houston today, and the least appreciated, are two youngsters in their early twenties. Carden Bailey and Gene Charlton since they were small children have had the sympathetic and broad-minded guidance of McNeil [sic] Davidson, herself an artist.”29 In fact the entire art scene in Houston bore little relation to the one in Dallas. Internationally

cosmopolitan, the Bayou City possessed less of the southwestern flavor that permeated Dallas. Our Little Gallery may not have lasted through the year. As the Houston historian Randy Tibbits notes, members of its stable exhibited in a gallery that Forrest Bess operated in early 1939. Yet the existence of these galleries, in addition to Grace Spaulding John’s cooperative Houston Artists Gallery, reveals a developing contemporary art community, however diminutive, that fostered young Houstonians’ growth.30

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Figure 3.09 | Frank Dolejska, As Never, 1938, oil on Masonite, 15½" × 16½". An early Cubist-inspired American trompe l’oeil painting made the year Dolejska co-organized Houston’s abstract-focused Our Little Gallery. Figure 3.10 | Frank Dolejska, Music in Brasses, 1937, oil on Masonite, 28" × 32". The artist created a tiered, round frame, vaguely reminiscent of Picasso’s pioneering use of collage in high art in 1912. A decade later, Dolejska helped found Houston’s Contemporary Arts Association.

One painting that may have been exhibited at Our Little Gallery was As Never (1938) by the seventeen-year-old Houston native Frank Dolejska (1921–1989). Dolejska exhibited for the first time in the Houston Annual in 1938, earning an honorable mention for one of his four accepted paintings. In As Never, he tests out a trompe l’oeil technique by rendering what looks like a wood-paneled wall in natural colors. The central form is flayed, like a side of meat hanging on a wall, its recesses meticulously shaded to convey depth. To this, Dolejska applied thin lines suggesting depth or a curvature away from the picture plane. The limited earth-tone palette and the tiny profile of a corner of furniture at lower left suggest the young artist was studying analytical Cubism when he painted As Never, perhaps at the instigation of Davidson. His signature appears prominently in white block letters running down the Masonite’s right side. An interesting comparison can be made to his teacher McNeill Davidson’s Dead Live Oak, with its hollowed-out tree cavities. Dolejska, too, uses natural wood as a starting point, carving out dark hollows that recede back into the painting, but renders the wood nonrepresentationally. Dolejska served in the army during World War II, traveling to Africa and Europe. He became a founding member of the Contemporary Arts Association and codirector of the Contemporary Arts Museum, where he designed catalogues and curated and installed numerous shows. Like Ruth Pershing Uhler, Dolejska grew disillusioned and destroyed much of his early output, adding the allure of rarity to both artists’ scant midcentury oeuvres.

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Robert Preusser As noted above, one of Davidson’s protégés was the unparalleled Robert Preusser (1919–1992), who created nonmimetic paintings and drawings in the 1930s.31 As discussed at the end of the previous chapter, when Jerry Bywaters sketched out his Tree of Texas Painting in the 1940s, he situated Preusser on the “Abstractionists” leaf, penciling in a tiny, pale question mark by the young artist’s name.32 By any standards, Preusser’s work would have looked questionable, and even more so from a Regionalist perspective. Preusser conveyed none of Van Wyck Brooks’s “usable past,” much less a Texan “indigenous subject.”33 The young artist was worlds away from most of the Dallas group. The cosmopolitan inspiration of Houston and the encouragement of his mentor Ola McNeill Davidson undoubtedly were conducive to Preusser’s creation of abstract paintings so early in his career. The painting that likely planted Preusser on Bywaters’s Tree was Tonality (1939). It was with Tonality that Preusser, barely twenty-two, claimed the $50 prize at the Texas-Oklahoma General Exhibition in 1941.34 That year’s Texas Annual (officially called the Texas-Oklahoma General Exhibition) traveled to Tulsa in addition to Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Despite subtle spots of Surrealist biomorphism, Preusser’s painting is almost entirely nonobjective. Against a taupe-gray ground, he created a network of attenuated vertical ellipses that are crossed by carefully placed horizontal lines. Tiny circular and oblong forms recur throughout the painting. Preusser selectively filled in some of these geometric shapes with color. The small sharp red

triangles, turquoise trapezoids, and maroon, cream, and orange oblongs create a jewel-box look, reminiscent of cloisonné enamel. The slight curvature of the central horizontal band (along with echoing curves above and below it) makes the surface seem to bow out, hinting at three dimensions. Further depth comes from the peeping colors interspersed throughout, enhancing the suggestion that more lies behind the two-dimensional Masonite surface. Preusser possessed an astounding sense for composition, a result of his solid education and personal discipline. By the time of his success at the

Figure 3.11 | Robert O. Preusser, Tonality, 1939, oil on Masonite, 22" × 16". This sublime painting by the nineteen-yearold Preusser appeared in the 1941 Texas-Oklahoma General Exhibition and the 1941 Carnegie Institute’s Directions in American Painting.

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Texas-Oklahoma General Exhibition, he had already been accepted, at the age of sixteen, into a juried exhibition at the Kansas City Art Institute (1936). In 1938, the eighteen-year-old was among twenty Texas artists selected for the third National Exhibition of American Art in New York at Rockefeller Center. That honor made Preusser one of Texas’s first abstract artists to achieve national recognition.35 Likewise his Composition No. 1 (c. 1940) was the first nonobjective painting to win a purchase prize in the Annual Exhibition of Houston Artists. The following year, Tonality could be seen again at the Carnegie Institute of Technology exhibition Directions in American Painting in Pittsburgh. Although Preusser was indeed younger than other exhibiting Texas artists, his remove extended beyond any generational difference. In 1938, when James Chillman, the director of the mfah, brought the first public exhibition of abstract art to Houston, the teenaged Preusser was primed for it. He penned Chillman a letter of gratitude: The present show of abstract painting and sculpture has arisen in me such a tremendous stimulation that I am prompted to voice my thanks to you for bringing this most vital exhibition to Houston. The stimulation of which I speak is one of painting and delving deeper into the meaning of today’s art. . . . I by no means stand alone in this opinion, for I have sat up late hours discussing the show with other active artists of Houston, and we agree upon its value to us as younger painters.36

The exhibition must have been invigorating to a young, analytically minded artist eager to avoid the confines of regional painting or latter-day Impressionism. The traveling survey that Chillman hosted, the International Exhibition of Abstract Painting and Sculpture, was a showcase for Constructive art. Organized by the English painter Eileen Holding, it featured selections from the Constructivist Circle group, which had recently published a major manifesto-cum-catalogue, Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art.37 Its editors were the English painter Ben Nicholson, the Russian-born sculptor Naum Gabo, and the English architect J. L. Martin. Barbara Hepworth and Sadie Martin designed the book. Gabo and his brother, Antoine Pevsner, were leading proponents of Russian Constructivism, a 1920s movement that stemmed from Cubism. Gabo identified Cubism as a revolution “only comparable to that which happened at approximately the same time in the world of physics.”38 But, as he wryly claimed, Constructivism’s relationship to that revolutionary art movement “has almost the character of a repulsion rather than an attraction.”39 Although Cubists took the external world as a point of departure, they did not “see and did not want to see” a difference between the objects represented (violin, tree, human body, and so forth). That is, the Cubists subjugated discrete differences within objects to the overall composition. “Our own generation,” Gabo continued after his insightful but partisan summation of Cubism’s impact, “found in the world of Art after the work of the Cubists only a conglomeration of ruins.”40 Constructivists had no choice, he asserted, but to

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start from the beginning. The basis of the Constructivist movement was to rebuild art according to its fundamental elements—“content” and “form”—since the Constructivist “sees and values Art only as a creative act,” in opposition to Cubism’s “destruction.”41 It is likely that Preusser saw a copy of the Circle manifesto in which Gabo’s essay appears at the mfah’s exhibition.42 It is a call to arms, with dozens of contributors and illustrations, subdivided into sections on painting, sculpture, and architecture. The final unifying section, “Art and Life,” includes essays by the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy. The show emblematized the Constructivist mission of art that “perform[s] positive works which lead us towards the best,” as Gabo stated it.43 The galleries were filled with Piet Mondrian’s grids of pure plastic utopia, Nicholson’s collaged circles and squares, Alexander Calder’s elegantly balanced mobiles, Jean Hélion’s smoothly modulated Purist geometries, Moholy-Nagy’s planar intersections of angles offering illusory threedimensionality, carved wooden and stone abstractions by Hepworth and Henry Moore, and Gabo’s own complex three-dimensional plastic, wood, and metal constructions. Rather than emphasizing the destruction or explosion of form, which the artists felt characterized so much post-Cubist art, the mfah exhibition focused on remaking the world through the affirming structure of content and form. It was, of course, all supremely abstract, yet realized within concrete, tangible objects. Whether Preusser read the Circle catalogue or was stimulated by the art alone, it kept him up “late hours,” as he affirmed in his letter to James Chillman.

It is worth recalling for a moment the complaints levied by Jerry Bywaters and Alexandre Hogue against the too-facile incorporation of the School of Paris style among Texas painters. (According to Gabo, too, the Cubist revolution truly sent many artists “on the way of destruction.”)44 By relying on the foreign, post-Cubist School of Paris without grounding their work in the local landscape, some Texas artists missed the point of the once-radical invention. Applying a late-Cubist rubric injudiciously to art was akin to creating form devoid of content. The Dallas Nine in the 1930s in no way embraced abstraction per se, much less nonobjective art. But with their embrace of

Figure 3.12 | Robert O. Preusser, Untitled, 1937, ink on paper, 12" × 14". The eighteen-year-old artist’s self-assured line and conjuring of space indicates the superb training he received in Houston from Ola McNeill Davidson and others.

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geography, local culture, and a certain Texan fearlessness, they developed their own, often distinctive form of modernism.45 Preusser’s works made before his visits to the mfah’s International Exhibition of Abstract Painting and Sculpture suggest how the teenage artist handled spatial problems nonrepresentationally, even before that vision-altering show. For example, in an untitled pen-and-ink drawing from 1937 in Preusser’s notebooks, a central twisting band winds vertically up the paper. Preusser depicts the front and back of the twisting banderole, like fabric or a curved piece of paper. If interpreted loosely as geography, the drawing contains vague indications of mountainlike forms, pathways, and dual horizon lines. Little flowerlike squiggles appear at the top of the vertical band, with repeated pen flourishes in the background. Preusser deliberately smeared passages of the wet ink, presumably to create greater depth and vibrancy. The drawing is signed and dated, indicating he considered it a finished work. Although Preusser had at the time yet to discover Bauhaus or Constructivism firsthand, the two banderole shapes (a smaller rendition flies out from the central banderole) are modified spirals. Moholy-Nagy’s posthumously published Vision in Motion (1947) contains texts and concepts the Hungarian-born artist had explored for decades. He identifies the spiral as a “visual symbol value” for space-time experience. Because a spiral revolves “from the outside to the inside with constant ascent,” Moholy-Nagy explained, inside and outside can be seen simultaneously.46 Preusser’s banderole is also like a Möbius strip, a good example of a spiral in which the inside and outside are displayed simultaneously. Preusser,

from training and temperament, was well primed for the discoveries he would soon make. Organization (1937), with its Impressionistic brushwork, reads like Preusser’s nonobjective interior landscape. Yet Organization does not refer to a particular location. A creamy tone settles over his bizarre landscape, separated into areas defined by black curved and sharp triangular outlines. His touch is loose, mixing colors (greens, azure, and brick red) with beige tones to bring some areas forward as others recede. It is a still-searching work, showing an artist unwilling to abandon his painterly touch for rigid composition. Organization is another compelling early painting that forecasts Preusser’s future formal and haptic aesthetic inquiries.47 Preusser’s Elsewhere (1938) shares the same enigmatic space as Organization. The blues and green hint at a mysterious landscape. He sometimes scratches through the layers, a technique many children use when they obliterate a brightly colored surface with black crayon and then incise lines into it. (Again, Preusser made the painting while still a teenager.) The title, Elsewhere, alludes to a place, but one not visible in the Houston environs or anywhere in this world. Instead Preusser creates the space that Elsewhere makes concrete. Another work he made before the Circle exhibition is Untitled (Stars and Circles) of 1937–1938. The artist and art historian Mark L. Smith described the painting insightfully in the 2007 Texas Modern exhibition catalogue: Using a dark, crepuscular palette, Preusser created an ambiguous pictorial space that has its referent in the internal world of his mind. The

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dominant hue is a marine, blue-green enriched with the black of the artist’s meticulous fingerpaint texture—but the stars seem to imply an aerial space. Perhaps it is both spaces and neither, a surreal place that exists only in the precocious young painter’s mind. . . . In the lowerleft quadrant, he even borrows a Cubist device, shading the angular line so that it toggles between a three-dimensional shape and a twodimensional line.48

Stars and Circles represents the place that Preusser occupied artistically at that moment, based on his lessons, the art he saw in exhibitions and magazines, and his own searching but still-adolescent imagination. Again he invokes elementary education: the stars are constructed the way many children are taught to make this iconic American symbol, by keeping the pencil on the paper and drawing unbroken lines of crisscrossing angles. The addition of the fingerprints—a more organized manifestation of the finger paintings he surely made as a child a few years earlier—is ingenious: his fingertips provide a texturizing matrix that adds overall dimension throughout the background. At the same time, the fingerprints let Preusser indexically mark Stars and Circles as his own, turning it into a kind of self-portrait. By contrast, Tonality (1939), the painting he exhibited in Dallas and Pittsburgh, was made after the mfah hosted the Circle group exhibition. In Tonality, Preusser abandons the literal symbols of stars and circles, limiting and modulating the circle forms. There are definite intimations of nonconstructivist artists, such as the Swiss-German Paul

Klee, as well as the biomorphic Surrealism of Joan Miró or even Yves Tanguy, with a background palette and horn-like forms that recall Wifredo Lam. Preusser obviously drew inspiration from others, but the final interpretation is unique. The entire painting is anchored through the powerful structure of verticals and horizontals. Since 1937, Preusser had tightened up his sense of space considerably. Tonality, subtler than some of his earlier work, displays key Preusser practices for developing retreating and advancing space. Ola McNeill Davidson sent Preusser to Chicago in 1939 to study directly with László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) at the School of Design. It was no bluebonnet apprenticeship. In 1937 the Chicago Association of Arts and Industries, determined to add modernist design to the heavily industrial but architecturally advanced city, had urged Moholy-Nagy to move to the United States to direct what they intended to be the New Bauhaus in Chicago. (Their first choice, Walter Gropius, declined in favor of a teaching appointment at Harvard; he remained a consultant and recommended his former colleague as director.) With only three months to develop the curriculum for an entire program, Moholy-Nagy boarded a transatlantic ship and launched the New Bauhaus– American School of Design in the fall of 1937. Regrettably, failed stock speculations and an economic downturn depleted funding for the school in its first year. Moholy-Nagy, with the backing of the Chicago businessman Walter Paepcke, the chairman of the Container Corporation of America, reopened the New Bauhaus as another short-lived institution, the School of Design, in 1939.49 The School

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of Design changed its title to the Institute of Design in 1944, officially obtaining college status. A few years after Moholy-Nagy’s death, the Institute of Design was incorporated into the more financially stable Illinois Institute of Technology (iit) in 1949.50 Thus, Preusser attended the second incarnation of the short-lived but seminally influential New Bauhaus. A man of striking pedigree and pedagogical and artistic skills, Moholy-Nagy brought Constructivism to Germany in the early 1920s after having explored its tenets in his native Hungary. He was a crucial and influential teacher at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, from 1923 until 1928, teaching

Figure 3.13 | Robert O. Preusser, Untitled (Stars and Circles), 1937–1938, oil on Masonite, 20" × 30". The teenaged Preusser applied his black-painted fingerprints throughout to enhance the surface.

the rigorous Vorkurs, or preliminary course. Founded in Weimar in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius, the groundbreaking German school of art, design, and architecture remains unrivalled for its all-encompassing mission and influence. In Germany, Moholy-Nagy sported red worker’s coveralls in a display of solidarity with proletariat laborers, an everyman approach he tried to recreate in Chicago. His teaching integrated the role of intuition and the kinetic nature of all phenomena. The study of art, he believed, hinged on all available skills: conscious methodical analysis should be balanced by awareness of unconscious processes. After editing all fourteen volumes of the Bauhaus

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journal with Gropius, Moholy-Nagy resigned from the Bauhaus in 1928 when Gropius himself departed.51 The Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau and then to Berlin, ultimately becoming a victim of the National Socialist tide. The school closed permanently in 1932, leaving its legacy in printed books, typography, design, and incomparable impact through its many teachers and students. Throughout his life, Moholy-Nagy moved among the leading circles of modernism. In addition to his Bauhaus connections—he remained close with Gyorgy Kepes as well as Gropius—his friends or colleagues included Piet Mondrian, Jean Hélion, Naum Gabo, the architect Alvar Aalto, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, and the historiancritics Roger Fry and Herbert Read. In Chicago, Moholy-Nagy enhanced Gropius’s Dessau Bauhaus vision, expanding the visual arts to include photography, film, and kinetic sculpture and, notably, by adding science.52 Another, better-known Bauhaus luminary immigrated to Chicago, too. In 1938, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe began directing the Armour Institute, the forerunner to the Institute of Design at iit.53 Thus, Bauhaus methodology, as promulgated by many of its practitioners, dominated Chicago’s art and architectural pedagogy.54 Mies was the master architect for a campus boasting twenty of his buildings. (iit has maintained its avantgarde vision with expanded grounds featuring engaging contemporary buildings by Rem Koolhaas and Helmut Jahn.) Much later, Mies designed the master plan for Houston’s mfah (1953) and its two major expansions (1958, 1974).

Bauhaus tenets embraced by Moholy-Nagy undergird Preusser’s Composition No. 1 (c. 1940), mentioned above, another exceptional early work that gained him wide recognition. Made in Chicago at the School of Design, the painting (on paper with casein and tempera) won the purchase prize at the Sixteenth Annual Exhibition of Houston Artists and thereby joined the permanent collection of the mfah.55 As Alison de Lima Greene points out in her masterly collection catalogue Texas: 150 Works from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the painting is indebted to works such as Moholy-Nagy’s Space Modulator (1923–1930) and its related film (1930).56 By that reading, the circular shapes in Preusser’s painting can be metaphorically interpreted as holes through which colored light shines.

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Preusser’s profound debt to Constructivism and the Bauhaus raises the question of derivation. As a New Bauhaus student, the young artist operated under pedagogic strictures that caused his geometric nonobjective work to recall that of his teachers, especially Kepes and Moholy-Nagy. Yet even in these early paintings, Preusser melds geometricism with Surrealist biomorphism. There are echoes of the influential Bauhaus instructor Paul Klee’s Expressionism, but Preusser combines the forms uniquely. Composition No. 1 presents different worlds—the black-and-white linear shadowy background, the open cubes (like hypercubes, invoking the fourth dimension), and the organic circular forms (the circles at lower right have contrails)— on a single plane of flat paper. The youthful artist is still finding his own visual voice, establishing the direction of his future work. The war put an end to Preusser’s Chicago studies. He spent three years (1942–1945) with the army’s 84th Engineer Battalion (Camouflage) in North Africa, France, Italy, and Germany.57 His specialty was enemy aerial reconnaissance deception: he replicated towns, bridges, and other landmarks in geographically off-course positions.58 In a Facing | Figure 3.14 | Robert O. Preusser, Warlike Theme, 1938, oil and aluminum powder on Masonite, 30" × 40". Preusser considered this his most important painting: “I was listening to the radio [. . .] report of Hitler’s march into Czechoslovakia, which was a year before war was declared, and this subject matter revealed itself to me only after I’d finished it which I thought had a warlike quality. There are tanks, dirigibles, ships [. . . It] revealed its subject to me subconsciously.” His description is reminiscent of Forrest Bess’s attitude toward the revelatory potency of the subconscious.

sign of the times, Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion reproduces a startling photograph taken in 1942 by the navy pilot John H. Stickell of a bomber on a searchlight hunt over Germany. The text notes how small dots of light are made by “anti-aircraft batteries firing at the plane.”59 Given Moholy-Nagy’s attunement to wartime photography in his book, one wonders how Preusser’s Chicago training affected his own aesthetic vision while in the service. It is clear that the young Preusser was vitally affected by his association with Moholy-Nagy, Kepes, and Gabo. Their theories, quite varied in execution, intersected in a fundamental way: each believed the fracturing experience of modern existence could be repaired through integration of all the arts. After the war, Preusser spent a year in Los Angeles at the Art Center School. Returning to Houston in 1947, he joined the faculty of the mfah School of Art (the present-day Glassell School of Art), the same institution where Davidson had once taught him. Preusser’s reputation grew over the next decade as he was added to Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery stable in New York and cofounded the Contemporary Arts Association in Houston, the forerunner of the Contemporary Arts Museum.

4 Although many Texas artists served in World War

II, no one registered its impact with the visual intensity of San Antonio–born Ben L. Culwell (1918– 1992). Perhaps this is because Culwell was among the only artists known to have made a full-length art series in the midst of the war. His mixed-media works caught the attention of MoMA’s Dorothy C. Miller, who, with the guidance of Alfred Barr, included them in the Fourteen Americans exhibition of 1946. The museum’s ongoing Americans exhibitions aimed to bring contemporary art to the broader public. Culwell’s inclusion rocketed him to national attention, through both the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue. (See chapter nine for further discussion of the MoMA exhibitions.) In Culwell’s youth, his family moved to San Antonio, then to Houston and Memphis and back, finally settling in Dallas in the summer of 1934, in time for Culwell’s senior year of high school.1 His art teacher at the Woodrow Wilson School was Eleanor Benners, to whose class the former student William Lester once returned, befriending the young Culwell.2 Benners introduced Culwell to Facing | Figure 4.01 | Ben L. Culwell, Young Man as Artist in U.S.A., 1946–1947, mixed media and oil on board, 14" × 10". Culwell’s German Expressionist–inspired early work forecasts his later method of dividing the canvas; note the profiled figure whose head is at upper right.

Early Practitioners of Abstraction and Nonobjectivity

other Works Progress Administration artists working in north-central Texas. Even though wpa artists were technically on the government payroll, their dedication demonstrated to Culwell the possibility of art as a profession. His father, too, was a federal worker, having brought the family to Dallas after receiving a position as division director for flour milling with the National Recovery Administration. Despite Culwell’s winning a scholarship to Olin Travis’s Dallas Art Institute (the jurors at the Joseph Sorder Gallery competition were Lloyd LaPage Rollins, Allie Tennant, and Otis Dozier), he was forced to decline it.3 To that same exhibition, Culwell submitted a drawing of magnolia blossoms that was purchased for five dollars by Alexandre Hogue.4 In the end, Culwell enrolled instead at Southern Methodist University at the urging of his father, who sought financial security for his three sons after losing his personal fortune in wheat commodities in the 1929 crash. Culwell took art courses at smu, improving his skills considerably as he painted throughout 1935– 1936. He was in Dallas during the energizing period

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of Centennial preparations, exposing him to national and “foreign” artists as well as to the Dallas Regionalist group. Culwell left Dallas in mid-1936 when his father took a job in New York City. He enrolled in Columbia University, where his painting teacher was the artist and art historian Walter Pach. Pach had organized many exhibitions in New York, including the landmark Armory Show, with Arthur B. Davies and Walt Kuhn. Culwell remembered Pach’s tobacco-stained “walrus moustache” as well as that European smell of never bathing, but from the time he opened his mouth, he was just fascinating, and he contributed absolutely nothing

Figure 4.02 | Ben L. Culwell, Untitled, c. 1947, mixed media on board: oil, resin, sand, glass, and car paint, 35" × 60". A Culwell tour-de-force, employing a wide variety of media arrayed into an otherworldly topography.

to my knowledge of painting as a matter of technique, no materialistic contribution—but understanding of it, and the osmosis with the painting and with the environment he could create. For example, he would take the class on field trips to see, off to some plush Fifth Avenue townhouse, to see someone’s famous collection, and only he really had entry.5

Beyond seeing swank private collections, Culwell took in two crucially important exhibitions. The first, one of the most groundbreaking exhibitions in the United States since the Armory Show, was Alfred Barr’s Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art (December 2, 1936–January 17,

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1937). MoMA’s show featured exclusively European artists. It belonged to MoMA’s ambitious, instructional series of exhibitions and publications that traced the lineage of a particular style. It followed Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), from whence Barr’s chart of modern art originates. The other invigorating show that Culwell beheld offered an American view: the first exhibition of the American Abstract Artists at the Squibb Galleries in the Art Deco Squibb Building at 745 Fifth Avenue in April 1937. The show has received far less attention than its institutional parallels, but with nearly forty artists, it was the most extensive group of American abstract painting and sculpture ever shown outside a museum.6 Vaclav Vytlacil (1892–1984) was a founding member of the artist group. Culwell also knew Werner Drewes (1899– 1985), who had studied at both the original Weimar Bauhaus and at the Dessau incarnation under Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Johannes Itten, and Lyonel Feininger. Sometime in 1937, the Culwell family left New York to return to Dallas, again for a milling-related position his father accepted. Ben L. Culwell moved back to Texas, too, and enrolled in business classes at the Metropolitan Business College. Fortuitously, his teacher there happened to be the regional Realist artist H. O. Robertson. Culwell remembered himself as a renegade artist in Dallas in those years: Top | Figure 4.03 | Ben L. Culwell, Now II, 1960–1963, 30" × 36", oil and glass fragments on board. In the mid-1940s Culwell retained the German-inspired Expressionism of his wartime mixed-media works that were exhibited at MoMA in New York, later shifting into an equally expressive but wholly unique, multifaceted style, apparent in the higher key in his 1960s work. Now II sets meticulously gridded geometrical areas in play with free-flowing pours. Bottom | Figure 4.04 | Ben L. Culwell, Dance in Dallas, c. 1940, mixed media. An early Culwell in Dallas, channeling the European modernism he may have seen in the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts into a Texas dance hall scene.

Returning from New York, I was on fire with the things I had seen and the realization that I had gotten in New York. I was still trying to assimilate them, I was painting every chance I got at night. .  .  . I drew incessantly nearly

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[impressionist] and impressionist renderings of the subjects of Dallas regionalism to expressionistic renderings of the same regional subjects to abstracted renderings of the same subjects, that is, the North Texas rural landscape, and the Dallas urban landscape and the people in my own life. . . . This experimental, radically experimental manifestation in me was not accepted by the elders of the Texas regional movement.7

“I took delight in Turking myself sometimes,” he recalled, “I have to admit in hindsight.” By “Turking” himself, Culwell meant that he intentionally went against the prevailing style.8 Nevertheless, Robertson, an elder within the regional movement, remained unperturbed. He befriended his young student-artist, encouraging Culwell to enter his work in local and area competitive exhibitions. Robertson helped Culwell select his best work for at least two or three years in a row. In 1940, Culwell won a monetary award in the Eleventh Annual Dallas Allied Arts Exhibition (April 7–May 4, 1940) for a drawing called Man with Soul Indigestion (wax crayon with watercolor wash).9 As the artist later remembered it, after receiving notice of the award, he attended the museum preview to collect his honors. Sadly, Richard Foster Howard, director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, skipped over Culwell when he passed out the award checks. As Culwell waited, a broom-wielding Everett Spruce motioned to him to come to the director’s office, where Spruce explained, “I can’t understand [the director’s] attitude, but here’s your

check.”10 (Spruce was the museum’s registrar-cumjanitor during this period.)11 Culwell and Spruce remained friends from then on. Culwell felt, understandably, “unduly punished by the ‘In’ group.”12 A year later, about to be drafted into the U.S. Army, Culwell instead enlisted in the navy, hoping he would get an exemption. (His boss at the time, an insurance specialist and former Marine, had been granted just such an exemption in World War I and felt Culwell would as well.) Quite the opposite occurred. He had been at navy boot camp in San Diego just over a month when early in the morning on Sunday, December 7, 1941, 360 Japanese warplanes attacked the Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor, rendering much of it useless. Culwell and one thousand “raw recruits” left San Diego on a transport ship, arriving in Hawaii that Saturday.13 The ship to which he had been assigned, Culwell said shortly after, “had been sunk during the Jap bombing, so my first active duty as a trained sailor was to help bury the bodies which were being recovered from the sunken hulks of American war ships in the harbor.”14 Burial duty lasted for several weeks in December 1941 and January 1942: bodies were recovered daily. Divers would bring them up from underwater wrecks and the burial detail would load them onto trucks and head to the cemetery. Later, Culwell wrote the caption for his painting The Burial Detail with bleakest humor, “Thus I learned the many nuances of the odor.”15 It was, as he said, a “pretty rugged indoctrination.”16 In late January 1942 he went aboard the heavy cruiser USS Pensacola.17 The Pensacola engaged in several battles at Guadalcanal, including the Battle

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of Tassafaronga in November 1942, during which it was struck by a torpedo and then ferried back to port by a U.S. destroyer. According to Culwell, over half the thirteen hundred men aboard were killed, including a handful of close friends.18 In a lengthy oral history interview conducted by the Menil Collection’s Kathryn Davidson in 1984, Culwell was asked when on earth he found time to paint. “At night, only at night,” he replied.19 Back at Pearl Harbor, astonishingly, he frequented a paint store and received packages from his mother containing art materials not available on the islands.

Figure 4.05 | Ben L. Culwell, page from the Museum of Modern Art’s Fourteen Americans catalogue, depicting the black-and-white reproduction of Me and the Battle of Tassafaronga (c. 1942) and text from the young artist’s statement. The Museum of Modern Art, Fourteen Americans, 1946.

Being that the legal paper we used for court martials was very high grade rag paper, it made good drawing paper. I had finally got a hot plate [to melt the wax]. . . . And by the third year, I was a chief petty officer, which meant I got to live in the chief ’s quarters. . . . Well it meant I could get occasionally, later on, I could get an egg or two and mix some egg yolk in with my mixed media. Do a little, mix a little tempera in. .  .  . Rather than being overwhelmed by the experience, I had adjusted to it and was in command of it.20

Figure 4.06 | Ben L. Culwell, Death by Burning, c. 1942, tempera with egg white, 12⅛" × 9⅝". Curator Dorothy Miller purchased this work for MoMA’s permanent collection out of the Fourteen Americans exhibition.

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Whether he was “in command of ” the experience or whether it commanded him is debatable. All told, Culwell made more than 130 works aboard the Pensacola, ranging in size from 9" × 11" to 11" × 17". On leave from the navy, Culwell returned to Dallas and showed his works to Jerry Bywaters, the new director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Bywaters surely knew of Spruce’s—who had left Dallas to teach in Austin in 1940—and Robertson’s positive opinion of Culwell. He may even have known about his predecessor’s snub of the young artist. Whatever Bywaters thought personally of Culwell’s extravagantly Expressionist drawings, he organized a one-person exhibition in 1945 and provided a remarkably thoughtful article for the occasion.21 When Dorothy C. Miller at MoMA heard about the Dallas exhibition, she grew interested, selecting Culwell for the upcoming Fourteen Americans exhibition. It was a tremendous honor, one that brought unparalleled national attention to Culwell. Nineteen of Culwell’s mixed-media works were in the 53rd Street galleries, side by side with works by David Aronson, Arshile Gorky, David Hare, Loren MacIver, Robert Motherwell, Isamu Noguchi, Irene Rice Pereira, Alton Pickens, C. S. Price, Theodore Roszak, Honoré Sharrer, Saul Steinberg, and Mark Tobey. It was an art-world stamp of approval that turned out to be difficult to follow up on. MoMA was generous with space in the Fourteen Americans catalogue, reproducing six of Culwell’s works, including Me and the Battle of Tassafaronga, Guadalcanal, November 30, 1942. In that work, Culwell mixed watercolor, ink, and crayon that he had heated over a hot plate to achieve a quasi encaustic.

Tassafaronga, a Japanese victory, was the final battle of the Guadalcanal campaign. During the battle, Culwell saw the USS New Orleans get her bow cut off by torpedo fire. Then, as Culwell remembered it, every man on the Pensacola was “knocked flat by a tremendous concussion. . . . And we lost all power immediately. . . . The ship listed thirty degrees and fires broke out everywhere.”22 It took thirteen hours to put out the fires. The Pensacola was incapacitated for months. In his statement for the MoMA catalogue, Culwell explained that after his draft induction in 1941, “without pause for breath or adjustment I was swept into total war, and my luck unchanging, I landed in the darkest spot, the hardest hour for the service of which I was a new, stunned, untrained part.”23 Culwell’s Fourteen Americans showing generated substantial critical response in the national press. The New Yorker’s Robert Coates, the critic who had “named” Abstract Expressionism earlier that year,24 was among those who singled out the Texan for praise: I was especially impressed, for example, with the work of Ben L. Culwell, a young Texan just out of the Navy after nearly five years of active service in the Pacific, whose “Death by Burning,” “Death by Drowning,” “Fragment of Concussion Time,” and “Morning at Attu,” among others—all combining Abstraction and Expressionism in a way that produces a maximum of emotional intensity—are among the few really integrated interpretations of wartime experience that I have yet come across.25

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Far from being metaphorical imaginings, the harrowing titles of Culwell’s works were painfully real. Another response to Culwell’s war images came from Aline Louchheim, writing for Art News: A personal inner world of tormented fantasy motivates the painting of yet another of the show’s debutants, Ben L. Culwell. . . . Yet these paintings for the most part on shipboard, are no naïve primitives. Done in a mixed technique—as necessity playing mother of invention—of watercolor, ink, egg tempera, and encaustic, they betray a sophisticated eye which must surely have known the metamorphic double images of [Pavel] Tchelitchew, perhaps the expressionist fervor of [Karl] Zerbe. Color is searing: forms in flux: the mood at white-heat intensity. Even without the pretentious and self-conscious explanatory captions the paintings expose the raw emotions for which the war was stimulus.26

Although patently affected by the works, Louchheim raises the question of Culwell’s too-apparent influences. Assessing the degree of influence on Culwell may or may not be fruitful. He may have seen paintings by Tchelitchew and Zerbe, in addition to a heavy dose of German Expressionism, in New York. Those artists all share a temperament. Culwell’s series maintains its almost manically expressive mood through dozens of works. Consider one of the wartime works that Dorothy Miller saw but did not include in the exhibition. Critical Moment of Torpedo Plane Attack on Naval Task Force, Tarawa 11/4₃ (1943/1944) re-creates dizzying

psychological and physical effects. The force of the scene—made all the more disturbing by the cartoonlike graphic approach—is reminiscent of both German Expressionism and Dada. Miller may have seen in Culwell a compelling, contemporary American interpreter of the horrors of war. Here was an American whose expressive powers rivaled those of the Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”) artist Otto Dix, who made aggressively Expressionist paintings and graphic work in Weimar Germany. Like Culwell, Dix produced an enormous body of paintings and drawings while serving in active combat (in Dix’s case, during World War I). In 1931, Alfred Barr named Dix’s The Trench (c. 1920–1923, oil on canvas) “perhaps the most famous painting in postwar Europe.”27 In 1934, according to a Time magazine reporter, visitors to the Dix exhibition at MoMA “turned away from some of his clinical dissections of haphazard horrors, unaware that in an upstairs office Museum Director Alfred H. Barr Jr. had concealed other Dix drawings considered too strong for public exhibition.”28 In Culwell’s gestural expression, Barr and Miller must have found an American, advance-guard response to war that they felt was on a par with Otto Dix’s. Whatever artists’ images Culwell retained in his mind’s eye while aboard ship, they were filtered through the unwavering intensity of the colors, erratic shapes, and incised lines. There is another example in which Culwell’s potential source imagery suggests how the Texan internalized a specific European influence. Culwell’s Figment of Erotic Torture (1942/1944) is, undeniably, a striking image made by the young recruit who referred to himself as “fresh from American

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boyhood” after having gone “six months without seeing a woman.”29 It is likely that Culwell had seen René Magritte’s Surrealist emblem Le Viol (1934).30 For good reason, the painting was among Magritte’s most shocking images. André Breton, the founder of the Surrealist movement, in collaboration with the Belgian artist, reproduced a drawing of Le Viol on the cover of his pamphlet Qu’est-ce que le Surréalisme? (1934). Breton’s pamphlet, published fifteen years after the dawn of Surrealism, was probably displayed among the texts in the MoMA galleries at the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition, which Culwell attended. (A copy of the pamphlet was among MoMA’s many André Breton documents at the time of the exhibition.)31 Even had Culwell not seen it in the Surrealism show, the unforgettable Magritte image and Breton’s Qu’est-ce que le Surréalisme? were reproduced in several art magazines before the young naval recruit left for war. The Magritte drawing and painting are similar to Culwell’s in spirit, meaning, and use of superimposition. In their particulars, they are quite different. Magritte’s image depicts only a woman’s head atop her long, phallic neck. Her facial features are supplanted by her breasts (eyes), umbilicus (nose), and pubic triangle (mouth). Culwell’s Figment of Erotic Torture illustrates a face, presumably his own, superimposed onto the curvaceous torso of a woman. Culwell’s woman is headless; Magritte’s is bodiless. Whereas Magritte’s Le Viol fits within a larger context of Freudian psychology and the polemics of European Surrealism, Culwell’s stands as he titled it: a personal symbol of “erotic torture” inflicted upon the twenty-something, testosterone-ridden sailor.32

Culwell’s epigraph for the mixed-media drawing Adrenalin Hour was published in the Fourteen Americans catalogue: “Perhaps there are worse ways of dying than in that super-conscious stratum of seeing-red rage; half-crying, half-god soar of strength, endurance and selflessness. Herein are the only (and too few legitimate) medals earned.”33 In works such as Adrenalin Hour and Death by Drowning (1942/1944), Culwell’s Expressionism and lack of fixed perspective function as metaphors for the movement of the ship. Even though he had drawn and sketched throughout his time in the service, the bulk of those works were finished aboard ship during 1944. He explained that by that year, “the third consecutive year of my combat duty, I had reached the positive balance requisite to creative statement.” Culwell continues, “I set down relationships of the life which I was in, in the full perspective afforded by the simultaneous viewpoints of assimilated familiarity and fresh impression.”34 By 1944, Culwell had seemed to develop a pictorial sea perspective of simultaneous viewpoints. One senses the vertiginous forces of the ship under attack in Me and the Battle of Tassafaronga or the merciless downward spiral as the sea claimed another life in Critical Moment of Torpedo Plane Attack on Naval Task Force, Tarawa 11/43. The exhibition caught the eye and pen of the Nation’s critic Clement Greenberg, who judged that at least “half the artists” had to be taken seriously: Arshile Gorky, David Hare, Theodore Roszak, Mark Tobey, Loren MacIver, Robert Motherwell. Greenberg also approved of Irene Rice Pereira and Isamu Noguchi. But he found that the presence of other artists—including Ben L. Culwell— “blunt[ed]” the show because they “adulterate the

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Top | Figure 4.07 | Photograph of Ben L. Culwell in front of RedBuds and the Smell of Fresh Asphalt, c. 1980s. Bottom | Figure 4.08 | Ben L. Culwell, “Four In Love Aspects” No. 50-2, 1950–1974, oil and resin on board, 11" × 14". Culwell sometimes held on to paintings, adding to the surface decades later. He would also sign all four corners, believing that any orientation was equally valid.

good tendency by faking it.” The “good tendency” was the unambiguous and definite modernist direction along the path laid out by Mondrian, Matisse, and Picasso. For Greenberg, such pejorative terms—“adulterate,” “faking it”—are loaded with the associations with kitsch, the “ersatz culture” of faked art that Greenberg delineated in a famous essay of 1939. His review of Fourteen Americans concludes: “The net result of 14 Americans is a kind of shabbiness, half-bakedness, a lack-of-seriousness and independence and energy, the fault of which lies more with the person who selected and arranged the show than with the artists shown. Whoever he was, he seems altogether devoid of personal taste—more reliant on tips than on his own judgment.”35 Dorothy Miller, of course, was not a man. Regardless of Greenberg’s oversight, he disliked the work. Did Greenberg’s put-down negatively affect Culwell’s career? It would be hard to say, since the Nation had a far more limited readership than other journals and newspapers that supported Culwell. Still, Greenberg’s opinion counted more and more as the decade drew to a close. Four decades later, in 1987, the legendary Menil Collection curator Walter Hopps curated an exhibition titled Adrenalin Hour: The South Pacific, World War II: Ben L. Culwell. Hopps wrote about how he, like so many others, was startled by Culwell’s “emotional intensity and authority” after chancing upon reproductions of his work in the MoMA catalogue. Hopps had never heard of Culwell, a Texas artist. And when he made casual inquiries over the next decades, no one else seemed to know of Culwell

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either. Hopps thought that Culwell had “retreated from what he sensed was the ‘escapism’ of bohemian life, choosing to pursue a business career in his native Texas.” Hopps likened Culwell’s trajectory to that of another American painter, Gerald Murphy (1888–1964).36 Murphy created a number of masterly Precisionism-meets–Stuart Davis paintings from 1921 to 1929 and then abandoned art altogether to take over the family business—as Culwell seems to have done. (During Murphy’s lifetime, his only U.S. museum appearance was in Douglas McAgy’s American Genius in Review at the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts in 1960.) In fact, Culwell held a business job during the day and continued to paint over the course of his entire life. It was not until Hopps arrived at the Menil Collection that he finally located Culwell, who was living in the Central Texas town of Temple. It is noteworthy that for much Culwell’s mature production, he insisted on signing his paintings on all four sides. One might say he constantly resisted the traditional hierarchical orientation. Thus, his art repeatedly undermines the established reference points (verticality, anthropocentric visual apprehension). Culwell thwarted authority through his absolute artistic freedom. The strictures of his job in the business world were cast off, continually, through his art. In 1989, Culwell had a retrospective exhibition in Temple at the Cultural Activities Center, a far cry from MoMA.37 As the art historian and critic Donald Kuspit wrote in the accompanying exhibition essay, “There are many important artists whom the system misses; Ben Culwell is one of them.”38 Kuspit was right: Culwell’s reputation remained

strong in pockets of Texas, but the larger art “system” simply missed him. The work he developed after the “Adrenalin Hour” war series was a striking departure. His postwar, “mature” work should have cemented his reputation outside the state, but for a variety of reasons and with few exceptions, his oeuvre remains an untapped reserve. Although Kuspit and Hopps considered Culwell an Abstract Expressionist, they knew that the slight attention paid to him after 1946 was partly due to his living in Texas.39 The art “system,” which compiled the canon of twentieth-century American art, missed many other Texas artists who created abstract or semiabstract works. Denton, Texas, and Dorothy Antoinette “Toni” LaSelle Denton, Texas, is forty miles south of the Oklahoma border. The city sits at the top of the “fork” where southbound Interstate 35 splits off toward Fort Worth (to the west) and Dallas (to the east). In the nineteenth century, predominantly agricultural Denton was the county seat. Denton became known as a college town when the Texas Normal College and Teacher’s Training Institute (later North Texas Normal College, North Texas State Teachers College, North Texas State College, North Texas State University, and since 1988, the University of North Texas, one of the largest U.S. public universities) was founded in 1890. In 1901, the Texas Legislature established the Girls’ Industrial College. The school grew into the College of Industrial Arts (1905), Texas State College for Women (1934), and Texas Woman’s University (since 1957).

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Denton became home to countless innovative, forward-thinking educators and administrators. An archival photograph captures a group of women who shaped art education in North Texas. Many of them were extraordinary artists as well. Gathered around a table at Texas State College for Women in 1938–1939 are Dorothy A. LaSelle, Mattie Lee Lacy, Marie Delleney, Betty Mitchell, Mary Marshall, Carlotta Corpron, Lura B. Kendrick, Edith Brisac, Coreen Spellman, and Marjorie Baltzel.

Figure 4.09 | Little Chapel-in-the-Woods sponsors, Texas State College for Women (now Texas Woman’s University), Denton. Seated from left to right: Dorothy A. LaSelle, Mattie Lee Lacy, Marie Delleney, Betty Mitchell, Mary Marshall, Carlotta Corpron. Standing: Lura B. Kendrick, Edith Brisac, Coreen Spellman, Marjorie Baltzel.

Each institution has made history in several ways. Pertinent to the discussion of segregation in this book (see chapter eight), it is valuable to mention actions taken at the city’s larger university in the 1950s: “In response to United States federal court actions, Matthews supervised a smooth transition from racial segregation to integration on campus. By the summer of 1956 the school newspaper reported that fifty to seventy-five African Americans were attending North Texas State. It

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Figure 4.10 | Edith Brisac, Still Life, 1940, oil on canvas, 22" × 26". One of Denton’s talented artist-educators, Brisac paints with a tight precision she then calls into question with the slightly tilted perspective.

also became one of the first southern institutions of higher education to integrate its sports program.”40 (J. C. Matthews was president of North Texas State at the time.) Earlier in the century, the women’s school had managed to survive and even improve itself during the Depression, despite plummeting enrollment: “President Louis H. Hubbard took advantage of federal funds available through the Work Projects Administration and the Public Works Administration to launch an extensive building program that doubled instructional space and increased the value of the physical plant by onehalf. A campus landmark, the Little Chapel-in-theWoods, was also a project of the depression.”41 An educator who played an integral role in constructing the Little Chapel-in-the-Woods was

Dorothy Antoinette “Toni” LaSelle (1901–2002). LaSelle was born in the farming town of Beatrice, Nebraska, and as a youth was profoundly affected by the Chicago sculptor Lorado Taft’s visit to her high school.42 She earned her BA in English at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, where she designed the cover of the alumni magazine in 1922.43 During her senior year in college, LaSelle had a second artistic awakening with the arrival of an art teacher who had been to the Armory Show. That teacher triggered her interest in modernism, leading her to the University of Chicago for her MA in 1926 and 1927. Her first solo exhibition was at the Renaissance Society Gallery at the University of Chicago in 1926. “From that time on,” she said, “I began to realize that to do representational work really stood for a time and thinking that really wasn’t in accord with the time in which I was living.”44 After graduation, she studied art in England, France, and Italy for six months. In 1928, LaSelle embarked on what would become a decades-long career of teaching art at the College of Industrial Arts (present-day Texas Woman’s University). From 1938 to 1941, LaSelle was the faculty adviser to more than three hundred students who helped build the college’s Little Chapel-in-the-Woods, which was designed by O’Neil Ford with help from Arch B. Swank of Dallas and Preston M. Geren of Fort Worth.45 Construction was carried out by master artisans who supervised young men from Denton County. The unfinished chapel was inaugurated by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1939. LaSelle oversaw the building of the hand-carved wooden pews, the designing of brass lighting fixtures, and the creation and installation of ten stained-glass windows

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portraying the theme of “women ministering to human needs.”46 The multifaceted skills and cooperation involved in constructing the Little Chapel is reminiscent of Wiener Werkstatte and Bauhaus projects in Vienna and Germany, except the Little Chapel interiors were almost entirely made by women. Although LaSelle was friendly with Dallas Nine artists (even attending their parties) and taught side by side with Alexandre Hogue, she never officially joined their ranks.47 It would be easy to speculate that LaSelle had two strikes against her: sex and nonobjectivity. She soon became one of the first women in Texas to paint in a completely

nonrepresentational mode and one of a number of women who were instrumental in introducing nonrepresentational art to their students. She might have been temperamentally indisposed toward the regional aesthetic. On sabbatical from Denton in 1931–1932, LaSelle studied with Ralph Stockpole and Maurice Sterne at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. By 1935, she was delivering local radio addresses in Denton on modern art and community.48 LaSelle exhibited in the Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition in Dallas in 1937, and at least two of the annual Texas Print Exhibitions.49 She was in France when war was declared, having

Figure 4.11 | Students standing in front of the Little Chapelin-the-Woods, designed by O’Neil Ford and Arch Swank, Texas State College for Women (today’s Texas Woman’s University), Denton, Texas, 1940–1941, black-and-white photograph.

Figure 4.12 | Little Chapel-in-the-Woods, finished interior, at today’s Texas Woman’s University, Denton, Texas, 1940–1941, black-and-white photograph.

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traveled there on the Queen Mary to study Gothic stained glass; LaSelle returned home on the Atlantic’s “sub-infested waters.”50 After reading a book by László Moholy-Nagy, who had moved to Chicago in 1937, she arranged for him to visit Texas State College for Women on three occasions in the early 1940s. (Although they shared a Chicago connection, LaSelle completed her MA a decade before Moholy-Nagy’s arrival in the United States.) She followed Moholy-Nagy back to Chicago for two summers at the Institute of Design, making her and Robert Preusser the only two Texans to study directly with the Hungarian founder of the “New Bauhaus.”51 Beginning in the summer of 1944, she began taking classes at Hans Hofmann’s Provincetown school, eventually splitting her time between Texas and Massachusetts (she lived in Provincetown fulltime in the 1980s after retiring from teaching).52 She was responsible for the first exhibition of Hofmann’s paintings in Texas, at the Texas State College for Women.53 LaSelle was soon painting smallscale abstractions featuring colors and shapes that almost dance in a charged equilibrium. Her first and only one-person exhibition in New York was at the Rose Fried Gallery (known as the Pinacotheca) in 1950, an important venue. The show, which featured only abstract work (1947–1950), followed that of Robert Delaunay, the French practitioner of an abstract, musically inspired style of art that Guillaume Apollinaire called Orphism, which developed around 1912. Significantly, then, Delaunay can be credited as one of the first nonobjective artists practicing anywhere. Art Digest recognized that LaSelle, a Texan “non-tyro,” was no neophyte.

The magazine’s reviewer pointed out that “a basic honesty coupled with a probing and experimental attitude keep her from limiting herself to tricky design and slick technique.” Funeral in July in Bright Sunlight and Departure were singled out as among the artist’s most effective “pictures.”54 The Art News reviewer also praised Funeral in July in Bright Sunlight as “exceptional and promising,” a work “in which she uses rising blue circles with authoritative precision against bands of pink and orange.”55 Whereas Art News (the reviewer was the observant associate editor, Dorothy Seckler) felt that LaSelle lacked “imaginative command” of her style, Stuart Preston of the New York Times seemed delighted by what he found at the Pinacotheca: New Yorkers are often accused of self-sufficiency. That stricture applies in matters of art as well as in anything else. So it is a pleasure to welcome, at the Pinacotheca, paintings and drawings by Toni La Selle, art teacher at the Texas State College for Women. In her work Miss La Selle does, with some success, the difficult thing of turning purely geometrical means to discreetly poetical ends. She is, root and branch, an abstract artist; but though losing all contact with reality, she is still able to convey by the careful spacing of lines and circles and by the persuasiveness of color, the quality of a mood. This is particularly true of Nos. 1 and 3 here. In the drawings she shows a nice response to the possibilities of charcoal.56

Among other solo exhibitions of the period, LaSelle was featured at the Dallas Museum of Fine

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Arts (1948, Jerry Bywaters directing) and the Fort Worth Art Museum (1959), for which Hans Hofmann provided the preface to the catalogue.57 The influence of Moholy-Nagy and Hofmann, as well as an overall modernist aesthetic, are palpable in LaSelle’s work of the period. Her remarks about her Dallas solo exhibition of drawings in 1948, however, are fully indebted to the Hungarian polymath. As LaSelle explained in an interview with a local news reporter, “My drawings are Space and Movement Compositions. They can also be called Space-Time drawings. The plane of the paper, the planes in the drawings, and the space in the drawings are all one thing. They cannot be separated.”58 LaSelle’s “space-time” directly invokes the concept to which Moholy-Nagy dedicated his life, teaching, and art. Space-time was the modern paradigm. In Vision in Motion, Moholy-Nagy asserts that “vision in motion” is a synonym for simultaneity and space-time.59 Space-time is an added dimension, a twentieth-century refinement of tools for “manipulating, measuring and experiencing our physical and psychological environment.”60 It is at once a physical measure (just like length and breadth) and a method for picturing feelings and psychological events. Much of the book explores space-time in various disciplines: architecture, painting, photography, sculpture, motion pictures, and literature. Two concrete examples of artists’ rendering spacetime are Cubist depictions of multiple moments at once within a single pictorial space, and the double exposure of a photograph.61 Moholy-Nagy strove always to incorporate the human, emotional element into art, for art was nothing without a human imprint on the interplay between perception and

technology. Like pioneering educators such as John Dewey (with whom he maintained a correspondence), Moholy-Nagy was a fervent advocate of the interrelatedness of all the arts. When Toni LaSelle, a twenty-year veteran of art education, was interviewed by the local paper in 1948, she knew her art works required some explication: “They look abstract if one tries to find a still life or a figure. They are concrete, however, expressions of form and space unified to make new dimensions out of the plane of the charcoal paper.”62 The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston possesses a sublime LaSelle painting, Puritan (1947–1950). The frequent comparisons to the work of her friend and compatriot Myron Stout are justified, since both artists’ mature styles employ a limited number of geometric forms within a restricted palette.63 But LaSelle bypasses the iconic singularity that Stout perfected. In colors limited mostly to black, green, and gray on a white ground, Puritan’s circle, triangles, and rectilinear forms are at once precariously balanced and solidly anchored. The small yellow rectangle at lower right intrudes almost humorously on the sanctified color scheme of green, black, and gray. Puritan looks as fresh today as it must have fifty years ago. The study for Puritan (1947) indicates the labored premeditation LaSelle undertook. The study, with its slightly less complicated design and more horizontal format, is harder edged. The final Puritan remains geometric but painterly, with forms fluctuating between floating and receding planes. Although looking nothing like Hofmann’s work, it achieves the German painter’s famed “push-pull,” which generates dynamism.

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Puritan’s title may allude loosely to pilgrims (it was, after all, painted during summers in the land of Plymouth Rock). The title is playfully apposite for LaSelle’s utter lack of excess. A more direct source for LaSelle’s title may be Moholy-Nagy’s writings. He died at age fifty-one of leukemia late in 1946, but not before completing the bulk of his masterwork, Vision in Motion. A compendium of his entire aesthetic and life philosophy, Vision in Motion is densely and democratically illustrated with images of now-iconic Cubist, Constructivist, and Bauhaus works side by side with Institute of Design student and instructor works. In the subsection titled “In Defense of Abstract Art,” Moholy-Nagy (who had a laudable grasp of English) writes: Like the semanticist, who strives for logical cleanliness, a clearing away of loosely trailing connotative associations in the verbal sphere, the abstract artist seeks to disengage the visual fundamentals from the welter of traditional symbolism and inherited illusionistic expectations. We should exult in this puritanic task and not merely be frightened or stumble into a possible richness which the old connotations may yet yield. We must leave the arts with a clean surface that only permanent and vital meaning, native to the age yet to come, may adhere.64

The description of the abstract artist’s task (leaving “a clean surface” where “permanent and vital meaning . . . may adhere”) certainly applies to LaSelle’s Puritan. One wonders whether, when apprised of her friend’s declining health and demise, the Denton artist paid homage to him in both the Puritan study and the final painting.65

Top | Figure 4.13 | Dorothy Antoinette (Toni) LaSelle, Puritan, 1949–1950, oil on canvas: 25" × 30" (63.5 × 76.2 cm) Frame: 259∕16" × 309∕16" × 1⅜" (64.9 × 77.6 × 3.5 cm). Bottom | Figure 4.14 | Dorothy Antoinette (Toni) LaSelle, Study for Puritan, 1947, oil on canvas, 12" × 14".

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Denton, Texas, and Myron Stout The great difficulty for people who cannot understand abstract painting is that they cannot get beyond the naming and objectifying of forms to come to some establishment of order through the relational ordering of forms for an expression of truth— or as expression which moves toward the truth. | MYRON STOUT , journal entry, August 27, 1953

Day and night, year in and year out, in Texas and beyond, Myron Stout’s life was dictated by art.66 Over the course of decades, he slowly and deliberately rendered both naturalistic drawings and unabashedly abstract formal icons. Stout (1908–1987) was born in Denton to a father who studied Greek and Latin in preparation for a life in the ministry (but became a bank president instead) and a mother who taught herself German and taught her son how to read English from a book of Greek myths. His father died when Myron was two, forcing the family (including two older sisters) to support themselves by operating a dairy farm. Stout ran a milkbottling business in high school, continuing into college at North Texas State University, where he earned a degree in English and history. After coming late to painting in college, he taught art in San Antonio. The promise of a viable aesthetic direction came in 1933, when Stout made a crucial trip to Mexico, working at the Academia de San Carlos with Carlos Mérida. Mérida, a Guatemalan, cofounded the Union of Mexican Workers, Technicians, Painters and Sculptors with Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco. After working in the representational clarity that Mexican

muralism demanded, Mérida later turned to abstraction. He steeped himself in the Popol Vuh, the ancient mytho-historical origin story of the Quiché people of Guatemala. The Popol Vuh narrative, passed along via oral tradition for centuries, was finally committed to text in the sixteenth century. The document famously survived the Spanish conquest of the land and concomitant destruction of many Mayan codices. Mérida’s guidance must have been revelatory for Stout: he interpreted indigenous images through contemporary means, becoming one of the first nonobjective painters in Mexico.67 There is a corollary between Mérida’s absorption of indigenous Guatemalan culture and Texas regionalism: both looked to their native roots for inspiration. (Mérida later taught at North Texas State University from 1941 to 1943 while Stout was in Hawaii.) Although Stout was never a regionalist in the Dallas Nine sense, he adapted and internalized the qualities of his local environment—Texas—in even his most nonobjective paintings and drawings. Following his older sister’s path, Stout moved to New York to earn a master’s degree at Columbia Teacher’s College, which he completed in 1937. At Columbia, he encountered the work of John Dewey, which intensified Stout’s awareness of the interplay among all forms of art. Later Stout added historian Erwin Panofsky, Susanne Langer, and Ernst Cassirer to his bountiful source material. He then taught for eleven years in Honolulu, spending summers back in New York and Provincetown. From high on an igneous mountainside, Myron Stout watched Japanese bombers attack Pearl Harbor in December 1941. He was drafted in the spring of 1943. After training in New York and serving in Hawaii and Guam, he returned to New York in

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1945 to study on the GI Bill. His outlook was bleak. He seriously considered abandoning the pursuit of painting in favor of something more tangible. He devised a program for a doctoral degree at either Columbia or New York University on the interrelationship of the arts. Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934) became an especially powerful influence on him at this time, as did Susanne Langer’s manuscript in progress for Feeling and Form (1953). Stout planned to earn a PhD and embark on a sensible teaching career. (His mother, who passed away while he was in Hawaii, was a teacher before her husband died.) His plans changed irrevocably when an old Denton friend then in New York, Toni LaSelle, insisted he attend Hans Hofmann’s drawing classes downtown. At LaSelle’s recommendation, Stout began taking classes at Hans Hofmann’s summer school in Provincetown in 1946 and then in the New York studio as well, which began his lifelong admiration for and bond with Hofmann.68 The Hans Hofmann School of Fine Art was not a venue for novices. Without promoting a particular style, the German master encouraged serious artists to hone their technical skills and increase the dynamism in their work. In the 1950s, Stout settled permanently in the seaside community of Provincetown. Sanford Schwarz, who organized Stout’s Whitney Museum retrospective in 1980, described him as “increasingly known as a distinguished littleknown.”69 Jackson Pollock’s biographer B. H. Friedman befriended Stout and wrote the catalogue essay for the same exhibition. Friedman observed that the term “purist abstraction” is “both inaccurate and pretentious” for Stout’s work. Instead, he belongs in the

modern European tradition from which grows the mature work of such artists as Cézanne, Brancusi, and Mondrian—visual sages who, though they produced more work than Stout, agonized like him, often reclusively, over the primal shape and structure of things—and in every sense, the illumination of things. . . . These artists . . . all transcend national boundaries. In the same way, Stout transcends geographical and critical location.70

The curator and scholar Robert Storr also makes the pertinent comparison of Stout to Mondrian; it was a kinship Stout himself sought.71 Both artists (Mondrian of Dutch Protestant background; Stout of Unitarianism in mostly Baptist Denton) sought a spiritual purity in their work that was to be achieved through strict, hand-painted, formally rigorous arrangements. Indeed, Stout might have been speaking of himself when he wrote of Mondrian in 1955, “He is obsessed by oneness. . . . In spite of the rarefaction of the realm which he thus inhabited . . . the tangible and sensational world was still the raw material. . . . Aesthetics was to him a higher morality—an ethics—an absolutely basic and guiding principle through which all aspects of life could come together.”72 Works from Myron Stout’s midcareer, Quartet (1948) and the series of untitled paintings of 1950– 1951 are small-scale linear meditations that allude to a space beyond the picture plane. Among other things, it is useful to consider them according to the precepts of gestalt psychology, which was based on the notion that the eye perceives an organized whole beyond the sum of an object’s parts.73 The crux of gestalt theory draws on the brain’s self-organizing

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tendency to recognize a pattern from smaller pieces. The complexity of a whole, however, is not merely the accumulated accretion of smaller parts. Many artists of the 1960s—especially minimalists such as Sol LeWitt—were concerned with the gestalt. Robert Morris’s influential article “Notes on Sculpture” (1966) focuses on gestalt relationships in three dimensions, the importance of the viewer’s intuitive grasp, and the experience of sculpture over time. Stout seems to have explored these ideas a decade earlier, likely coming to them through his own methodical investigations into perception, his reading of Susanne Langer (and brief period studying with her), and conversations with Hans Hofmann. A Stout series from 1950 and 1951 resembles wooden floorboards placed vertically. Untitled (1951) depicts segments of vertically oriented rectangles in black, maroon, and red.74 The rectangles become narrower and shrink toward the top of the canvas; they appear at a slight angle to the picture plane, as if climbing upward toward the sky. The predominantly orange Untitled (c. 1950, Dallas Museum of Art), with evenly spaced blue rectangles, performs a similar act of trompe l’oeil illusionism. The Dallas painting is proportionally taller than its counterpart from 1951, showing how Stout experimented with the canvas shape itself to echo the rectilinear forms within. With these subtle alterations—which Stout perfected in paintings and drawings of the 1950s— the artist exchanged the horizontal “floor” for a vertical climb, confounding the way we normally perceive a picture plane. The series shifts the viewer’s orientation to the wall: the rectangles seem to move infinitely upward when viewed on a vertical plane, or outward when considered as a “floor” or

horizontal plane. Jackson Pollock and Myron Stout carried abstraction in different directions, yet both sought that paramount shift in visual awareness. Pollock’s classic drip paintings of 1947–1950 make a ninety-degree shift from the floor, where they were painted, to the wall, where they were hung. Ultimately, by disrupting the basis of perception and permitting the viewer to see two perspectives at once, Stout’s work trafficks in the nature of being— ontology—and knowing—epistemology. Stout did not use such philosophical terms, but the concepts permeated his thinking. He expressed himself in graspable and gifted language throughout his journals, which fluctuate between perfect concision and investigative meandering. He fluidly but privately sought a space where life and art truly intersect. For example, in 1953, at age fifty-six, he attempted to precisely describe the effects of marijuana. This was not untypical for the era, yet Stout’s attempts are charmingly eggheaded: he names the condition “Potedness”: “Pot breaks up Time. It makes a ‘break’ in the continuity of time.” “In this way,” he continues in his journal, “the awareness is, so to speak, so intense that time exists longer for each apprehension and its following-ups.”75 Stout may well have entered the dimension of Moholy-Nagy’s space-time. His writings complement his art, plotting out the full range of his aesthetic process. At times, he wrote pithy aphorisms that are analogous to his symbol paintings. The journals include maxims such as “You ‘find’ out of uncertainty,” “What you put on the paper or the canvas must take possession!,” and “So a painting is also an epiphany, you know.”76

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In Hofmann’s Provincetown classes, Stout was known for sitting in front of the model for long hours, facing a blank sketchbook. Then, as his fellow Texan Haynes Ownby recalled, “When the model rested, he’d read his New York Times. And when the model resumed her pose, he’d put that down and he’d look some more. His paper would remain blank until at one point he’d pick the charcoal and start drawing a thin line and you’d wonder, what’s it going to be?”77 What it was, one guesses, was what William Wordsworth defined as poetry itself: “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”78 Stout read Wordsworth as a young adult in Texas. He frequently recalled his Texas upbringing, as in this journal entry from 1957, written in Massachusetts decades later: In the Southwest—in Texas, there is so little in one’s surroundings to repeat and give substance to what the culture we inhabit— and study so assiduously—tells us are the real things, the valuable things in the surroundings where that culture grew. In Texas you have to make those things up. Texas is not only provincial—it’s a province with little or nothing you can tie into that everything you learn (which always comes from somewhere else) tells you you should be tying into.79

Despite the awkward phrasing, Stout compellingly evokes his home state. He then confesses how he secretly and “shamefacedly” wondered how he could ever arrive at the lyrical meaning of Wordsworth’s

lines “When all at once I saw a crowd, / A host of golden daffodils,” since the young Texan could not “wander” and come upon daffodils unexpectedly. Of this conjured Wordsworthian location, he mused: There one could wander in such a fine, romantic way only in the imagination, and all my reading and studying in English or French or Greek literature produced such imaginary images that I believe I must secretly have been convinced that literature had really very little connection with life at all—that Wordsworth must, when you got right down to it, have really ‘made the whole thing up out of whole cloth.’80

Was Stout compelled to leave Texas and its provincialism in search of a place where “culture grew”? Perhaps yes, geographically speaking. His first decades in Texas, however, forever inflected his outlook.81 It would be overly facile to surmise that Stout’s abstraction came from having been forced to turn inward in those youthful years. His art belongs to a larger process of thinking, looking, and practicing. Abstraction seemed innate with him.82 Texas, where Stout made lithographs and beautifully realized landscapes and served as president of the Denton Art League, was significant for his early training and for permanently molding his memory. In his journals, he repeatedly recalls the colors, sounds, flowers, hills, and light of his native state. The flatness of Texas affected him phenomenologically. In 1965, while reading John Wilson’s Burden of Egypt: An Interpretation of Ancient Egyptian Culture,

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Stout paused to consider Wilson’s argument that the Egyptians were affected by their geographic environment. It led Stout to formulate his own “cogitations on same”: “I think it was only when I came fully alive, so to speak as a painter—when I had worked with Hans [Hofmann]—that the effect on me of the flatness of my native environment had affected my imagination so powerfully. The flatness—or rather the successively endless—low-rolling character of North Texas and of all the areas of Texas that I went to in my young years had the effect of giving promise in every direction.”83 In the 1950s, after having become “fully alive” as a painter, he also became more visible publicly. He exhibited at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery, known for showing avant-garde artists of the era. Later he moved to the Hansa Gallery, the artists’ cooperative named for Hans Hofmann that lasted from 1952 to 1959. The work for which Stout became best known occupied the better part of the 1950s and 1960s. Many are black-and-white paintings and drawings featuring one or more rounded forms set iconically against a background. As the poet and critic John Yau expressed it, “Stout does not depict a shape, he elicits one.”84 MoMA has in its collection one of the finest examples of the period. Untitled (Number 3, 1954), is a slightly off-kilter, rounded white U on a black ground. The drawing Untitled (1957– 1962, charcoal on paper, mfah) inverts the figureground color scheme of the MoMA painting. The Houston charcoal shows two nearly circular black forms, the smaller one over the large one, dramatically placed on a white ground. For some artists, finding their abstract motif is a process of evolution from earlier representational forms. Such an

evolution often takes the course of purifying motifs into essential forms. The mature Stouts are indeed a visual reduction of landscapes that he never abandoned. Again, the parallel case is that of Piet Mondrian, who shifted from his early Dutch landscapes and trees (Stout’s early works also included brushy Texas landscape drawings and lithographs) toward increasingly abstracted landscapes and still lifes, and finally into complete nonobjectivity. Returning to the concept of the gestalt, Stout’s symbol paintings present a distillation that stands in for an entire experience. The MoMA painting is almost symmetrical, like medieval heraldry. Yet Stout curves the top of the form just enough to invoke a

Figure 4.15 | Myron Stout, Untitled (Number 3, 1954), oil on canvas, 20⅛" × 16" (50.9 × 40.6 cm). Among the most minimal paintings in this book, Stout dedicated lengthy painting sessions to getting his icons exactly right.

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dynamism that, when combined with the bold contrast of black and white, keeps the painting active. In fact, Number 3, 1954 resembles the twentieth letter of the Greek alphabet, upsilon, or υ, also represented as an imperfect u. It is reminiscent of the Greek invention that Italians named contrapposto—the “weight shift” principle according to which a human statue rests its weight on one leg, allowing the entire body to be poised and ready to spring into athletic action. The Greeks applied contrapposto even to their architecture, giving their columns a slight swell in the middle (entasis) to indicate vitality.85 Such sculptural relationships are critical to Stout’s drawings and paintings, in which he sought an equivalent for three-dimensional depth on a potentially static two-dimensional surface. Stout’s musings on Texas’s infinite flatness and his reverence for Hans Hofmann bring to mind Clement Greenberg’s most contentious critical legacy. In the 1950s, Greenberg solidified a framework for modernism in which each art form emphasized what was unique to its own medium. Thus, a modernist painting defined itself according to its two-dimensional flatness. Flatness on a painting’s surface reveals a modernist self-consciousness about the primacy of the form’s medium. Hans Hofmann’s lectures had initially spurred Greenberg to write about art, first in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) and “Towards a Newer Laocoon” (1940). Greenberg learned much from Hofmann, but ultimately arrived at different conclusions. In “Modernist Painting” (1960) Greenberg writes, “Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else.”86

But “flat” was not a tenet that Hofmann or Stout could justify. For Hofmann, depth in painting had to be created via the forces of “push and pull,” a formal back-and-forth in the composition. Surface flatness—what Greenberg celebrated in the all-over drip paintings of Pollock or, later, in the stained canvases of Helen Frankenthaler—was not their holy grail. Stout’s response to Greenberg was understandably Hofmannesque: “Well, if it’s perfectly flat . . . it doesn’t have any vitality. The fact is that the vitality comes from the tensions of the various dynamic elements of placement and dark and light and all of these things, overlappings or whatnot.”87 In 1965, Stout approached the topic from his characteristic ontological perspective: “I believe that flatness (as of the canvas, for instance) is something we never see, but only know. The eyes are not constructed to see flatness, and we come nearer knowing it through the sense of touch.”88 In 1980, B. H. Friedman told of how he used to tease Stout for not changing his name to something more manly when he became an artist. Why not use only your middle name, Friedman would joke, and call yourself “Stedman Stout”? After all, Paul Jackson Pollock dropped his first name.89 Yet as Friedman recalled telling Stout, “Myron, with its Greek connotations of ‘delight’ rather than power, is just right.”90 Carlotta Corpron Carlotta Corpron was influenced by László MoholyNagy and studied his books, and one of her photograms from 1944 is reproduced in Vision in Motion.

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Photograms are made by placing an object or objects directly onto light-sensitive paper; they are photographs created without a camera. Corpron, originally from Minnesota, grew up in India (1905– 1920) before returning to Minnesota for college and then earning her master’s degree at Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1926. After teaching in Montgomery, Alabama, and then in Cincinnati, she became a colleague of Toni LaSelle’s by accepting a job at Texas State College for Women in 1935.91 Corpron taught there for three decades. As mentioned previously, Moholy-Nagy taught in Denton, at LaSelle’s invitation in 1941, and then during two more summers (1942 and 1944). Corpron’s photogram of “pattern of light in a glass brick” is given an entire page in the “Teaching Photography” section in Vision in Motion. “In order to learn about the properties of the light sensitive emulsion, which is the basic element of photography,” Moholy-Nagy writes, “it is best to start with the making of cameraless photographs.”92 The earliest, most direct photogram was made by Fox Talbot when he placed lace atop paper covered with photosensitive emulsion. (For the historical record, Moholy-Nagy inserts a footnote at the bottom of his page: “Around 1920 Man Ray and I, independent of each other, re-invented the photogram.”) Corpron’s photogram, made twentyfive years after the “reinvention” of the form, was achieved by projecting light through a glass brick onto sensitized paper. (In a portrait of Corpron made in 1977 by Margaretta K. Mitchell, the seventy-six-year-old Denton photographer hugs a glass brick.) Photograms can “record with delicate fidelity

a great range of tonal values,” observed MoholyNagy in Vision in Motion. Corpron’s image exemplifies the pedagogical value of the technique, since it ranges from the bright white of the paper through gradations of gray to dark black. This presumably was a demonstration to encourage like tonal gradations from her students. Yet Corpron’s photogram is a striking image in its own right, coming alive through vertically stacked diamonds of modulated tonal values that dance across the paper. (One would be hard-pressed to identify a glass brick as the source of the distortion.) Because photograms freeze the motion of light into a single image, they are a step toward increased comprehension of spatial relationships and rendering. The projected light registers on the photogram as “tracks” that articulate Moholy-Nagy’s space-time itself.93 Corpron worked as Moholy-Nagy’s assistant in Denton in 1942, conducting her own light workshop for students under his tutelage.94 Gyorgy Kepes accompanied Moholy-Nagy to Denton in 1942 and 1944. Kepes had been invited to teach at the Chicago Bauhaus by his Hungarian compatriot in 1937. One of Kepes’s photograms is illustrated in the same section as Corpron’s in Vision in Motion. Corpron was aesthetically primed for their visit, having experimented with light and in the darkroom in the early 1940s; see, for example, Light Circles (c. 1940), Church in Havana (1942), and the overlapping negatives used in Design with Oil Tank (c. 1942).95 Kepes provided the foreword to the catalogue for Corpron’s Amon Carter Museum retrospective in 1980, when he was professor emeritus at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at mit.

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Top | Figure 4.16 | Carlotta M. Corpron, Glass Cubes and Patterned Bricks, gelatin silver print, 137/16" × 10½". Bottom | Figure 4.17 | Carlotta M. Corpron, Oil Tanks with Bridge, gelatin silver print, 10¼" × 13¼".

“Her fundamental aspiration,” he surmised, “is to bring order into disorder and unity to the manifold, endless variety of visual phenomena.”96 In that catalogue, Martha Sandweiss links Corpron’s “Oil Tanks near Jefferson, Texas” and “Oil Tanks with Bridge” series with the industrial photographs of Edward Weston, Charles Sheeler, and Russell Lee, but notes that Corpron used the photographs as “preparatory sketches” for doubled images.97 The photographs speak to a Precisionist sensibility of the sort evidenced in the paintings of Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler. Sheeler’s Suspended Power (1939, oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art) was among the paintings commissioned in 1940 by Fortune magazine for a portfolio that extolled American industry. (Sheeler’s paintings were exhibited at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery late that year.) Corpron’s decision to print her negatives “straight,” as it were, as finished photographs, resulted in dramatic gray-scale compositions. Corpron was no pioneer in this area, but her “Oil Tanks” series at once anthropomorphize the Texas manufacturing landscape while invoking the impersonal quality of these industrial behemoths. Her photographs are Precisionist in spirit, making them kin to paintings by Coreen Spellman, Florence McClung, and Frieda Kay Fall. Kepes was invited to teach at another Denton institution, North Texas State Teachers College, in 1943. The following year he published his own defining book, Language of Vision (1944). Corpron’s photography is illustrated in the book by a cutpaper–light-box photograph titled Light Volumes.98 Kepes became Corpron’s primary influence; when

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he introduced her to the light box, it significantly altered her course. “As far I’m concerned,” Corpron stated in 1980, “the only influence on my work is Kepes.”99 Although she later downplayed Moholy-Nagy’s effect on her work, photograms were indispensable to her teaching and experimentation. Interestingly enough, even the physical light box that Corpron hammered together—a two-footby-three-foot box with holes through which she shined flashlights—bears a primitive correspondence to Moholy-Nagy’s light space modulator, the ever-evolving metal and glass contraption he carried with him throughout Europe and to the United States. With the light box, Corpron made series dedicated more fully to light’s effects, using objects and cut paper. In what Sandweiss calls Corpron’s leitmotif, she later filtered light through venetian blinds, unwittingly adopting a formal device of Alfred Stieglitz’s from the late nineteenth century.100 In the mid-1940s, after returning from New York, where she showed her work to the eighty-year-old Stieglitz, she stepped up her investigations of space and light. This period includes compositions based on nautilus shells (echoing the subject used by Edward Weston in the late 1920s), glass paperweights, eggs, and a curved ferrotype (a photograph made directly onto a sensitized metal surface). Although interesting, few of these have the strength of earlier explorers’ work in the same realm and with the same subject matter.101 Corpron’s oeuvre is uneven. Some of her finished photographs originated as teaching examples, a constraint that in all likelihood limited her

development. In the Bauhaus manner, she illustrated articles on teaching with student compositions, as in “Designing with Light,” in which she detailed the classroom process of working with variations made from photograms and enlargers. In another article, “Light as a Creative Medium,” she lyrically celebrates the virtues of her most cherished medium: “An awakening to the possibilities of light as a creative medium is an exciting experience. As one develops new powers of observation and sensitivity the search for subjects transformed by the magic of light becomes a rare treasure hunt. . . . Students . . . come to realize that Light is a plastic medium capable of creating abstract designs of extraordinary beauty and interest.”102 Corpron sought to imbue a lifelong admiration of photography in her students: “When a study of photography is approached creatively, the art can become as dramatic and vital as any other. The exploration of possibilities is limitless.”103 A colleague at Texas Woman’s University, Mabel Maxcy, profiled Corpron in a lengthy, wellillustrated article of 1960, reproducing the photographer’s Light in Space and Eggs Multiplied along with student photographs and photograms.104 Corpron’s own favorite series are the so-called egg compositions and the “Fluid Light Designs,” of which Fluid Light Design (1941) is a close-cropped view that makes a purely abstract, curved landscape.105 Flowing Light (c. 1947) contrasts a diagonally moving highway of light with the wooden texture of planks. Corpron, like so many of her colleagues in Denton and at colleges across Texas, split her time between teaching and making, training thousands of students.

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Forrest Bess Schools of trout with schools of birds above them diving for bits of shrimp left by the fish. Porpoise playing—tarpon silver blue leaping straight up into the air. Sea horses—Japanese crabs—tropical fish— trawling for fish—a good catch of trout—

Hell—I wouldn’t trade it for all the art colonies in

the world. | FORREST BESS to Rosalie and Sidney Berkowitz, September 13, 1948

Carlotta Corpron, Myron Stout, and Toni LaSelle had strong Denton connections. Ben  L. Culwell spent most of his career in Temple. A third city that stands outside the major Texas metropolises is Bay City, the home of Forrest Bess. While working as a shrimper, Bess gained sustained attention from New York City’s art luminaries. Small paintings, like those of Myron Stout or Forrest Bess, tend to be relegated to the wings of art history, Roberta Smith noted in a recent New York Times review, since they are “considered eccentric or overly precious.” Small-scale paintings avoid two chronological and hallowed traditions: the older, Realist concept of painting as a window on the world, and the late-modernist dictum that painting should demonstrate its own flatness. Smith cannily observes that “smallness” tends to be aligned with “less vaunted, and even less masculine, conventions: the printed page, illuminated manuscripts, icons and plaques.”106 In the case of “small” Texas artists, Smith’s remarks ring true. Forrest Bess’s paintings are in inverse proportion to the size of his posthumous reputation and storied life. In an earlier essay, the

astute Smith made the point that Bess was among the artists working against the grain of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s.107 These characteristics— modest or miniature size, a deliberate economy of paint application—underscore Bess’s antiheroism. Forrest Bess’s paintings are brilliant, at times sublime. They are among the most profoundly moving paintings that have been made in the Lone Star state or beyond. Bess was thoroughly Texan, but unlike the iconic Texans of the plains or oil fields, he lived most of his life on the Gulf Coast. He grew up under the same big Texas sky, but his was a life of saltwater and fishing. He had an atypical youth and upbringing, even for an artist. He first drew as a young boy, copying images from an encyclopedia. He later said that he experienced his first vision on Easter morning at age four, which he assiduously described when he grew older.108 His father, a barely educated itinerant oil-field worker, encouraged him to study architecture, and in 1929 he enrolled at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (now Texas a&m University). While at a&m, he developed interests in descriptive geometry, literature, religion, mythology, evolution, and psychoanalytic theory. He continued to draw and paint, transferring in 1931 to the University of Texas at Austin, where he further pursued architecture and deepened his interest in philosophy and religion. Two years later he left school to work in the Texas oil fields. Like so many other Texas artists taking part in the “Mexican vogue” of the era, he used his earnings to fund periodic travels to Mexico, where he made prints and paintings. He witnessed Siqueiros and Rivera at work, an experience that must have been profoundly moving for him.

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Back in Bay City in 1934, he immersed himself in making art, mounting his own first solo exhibition in a local hotel lobby. San Antonio’s Witte Memorial Museum gave him a solo show in 1938, the same year he was included in a group show at the mfah. He spent time in Houston, joining and exhibiting with the young artists associated with Ola McNeill Davidson. In February 1941, the mfah gave him a one-person exhibition. Later that year he enlisted in the Army Corps of Engineers, eventually earning a formal commendation for camouflage design. Bess suffered a nervous breakdown that landed him in the VA hospital in San Antonio for psychiatric treatment. Even there he kept a painting studio; his envelopes from the time bear the return address “Studio of Forrest Bess.” Once recovered enough to go home, he returned to the coast and managed the family shrimp bait business

Figure 4.18 | Forrest Clemenger Bess, Untitled, 1935, oil on canvas in wooden frame made by the artist, 13⅝" × 1113/16". A wonderfully composed, colored, and rarely seen early Bess from the period when he was under the influence of Vincent van Gogh.

at Chinquapin, an area on the intracoastal canal on an unpaved road in Matagorda County, twenty miles from Bay City. For the next twenty years, Bess made an overturned barge (its hull covered with barnacles) his home, on a spit of land in the Gulf of Mexico accessible only by boat. (Chinquapin was destroyed by Hurricane Carla in 1967, forcing Bess to return to Bay City.) He drank much and was always broke. Yet Forrest Bess was the only Texan to exhibit in New York at the paragon of venues, the Betty Parsons Gallery. Between 1949 and 1967, Bess had six one-person shows at Betty Parsons at 15 East 57th Street.109 Parsons, who represented a collection of artists that reads like a who’s who of the American avant-garde, eventually became the dealer with the strongest links to the international emergence of Abstract Expressionism. Joseph Cornell, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Lee Krasner, Barnett Newman, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Bradley Walker Tomlin were all in her stable at various times. Her biggest coup was to take over Jackson Pollock’s contract when Peggy Guggenheim closed her Art of This Century gallery and moved to Europe in 1947.110 As it happened, Pollock’s debut exhibition in January 1948 at Parsons largely consisted of his new drip-style paintings, which he had embarked on the year before. Bess joined her at precisely the right historical moment. (Interestingly, Parsons was not Bess’s first choice, for he did “not care for Parsons’s painters.”)111 But following his last exhibition with Betty Parsons, in 1967, his reputation went into virtual eclipse. Despite her encouragement and the occasionally enthusiastic support of Meyer

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Schapiro, his work received little notice during his lifetime except from fellow artists. His reputation saw a posthumous surge beginning in the 1980s. The published literature on Bess is abundant, an indication of his international stature.112 He holds tremendous allure for curators, critics, collectors, and historians. Virtually every writer addresses, obliquely or explicitly, Bess’s dedication to the hermetic sciences and his guiding principle that immortality could be achieved through androgyny.

Figure 4.19 | Forrest Clemenger Bess, Untitled (No. 5), 1949, oil on canvas, framed, 10" × 12⅞". A perfectly colored and balanced Bess from his finest abstract period.

Other motifs that pepper the literature include Bess the visionary (a term he himself used), Bess’s recording of dreams in notebooks, Bess’s belief that the hermaphrodite is the universal symbol of union, Bess the painter of what he saw inside his eyelids, Bess’s symbol system and its schematic key (reproduced several times in catalogues), Bess’s repeated readings of Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex, Bess the reader of Carl Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy and his contact with Jung, Bess’s championing

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by Meyer Schapiro, Bess’s correspondence with Dr. John Money (the high-profile Johns Hopkins psychologist on intersexuality), Bess’s six exhibitions at the legendary Betty Parsons Gallery and his correspondence with her, Bess’s immersion in L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics (after already having employed similar imagery), shrimp bait, alcohol, and Bess’s scrotum.113 That last, a doozy, has confounded Bess interpreters and interlocutors for the better part of a century. After decades of self-directed study, consultation, and mental preparation, the artist performed a series of surgical operations on himself, beginning in 1960, to eventually create a fistula at the base of his penis.114 Bess’s private parts have become a cipher for his paintings, the decoding of which putatively yields insight into his universe. Critics and historians, accustomed to writing

Figure 4.20 | Forrest Clemenger Bess, View of Maya, 1951, oil on canvas, 8⅛" × 8".

about artistic matters, are challenged when confronted with the bald but pertinent fact of Bess’s self-mutilation.115 To back up a little bit from the touchy topic, consider that abstract painting is at its core a nonliteral form of representation. Greenbergian formalism dictates that a critic should attend to the painting alone: surface qualities, structure, color, paint handling, medium, and so forth. Biographical data surrounding the painting’s maker are irrelevant and even intrusive. By contrast, a more expansive view of modernism (the opposite of what Greenberg delineated) attends to biographical details and personal convictions that can offer up crucial clues to an artist’s production. From that broader point of view, to shut out the narrative surrounding the painting is to miss the complete story and to prejudice vision above all other senses.116 At the same time, abstract art is attractive to many observers because it presents a screen onto which subjective interpretation is projected. A classic example is the Rorschach test, employed in psychiatric testing and diagnosis precisely because the abstract quality of the mostly black-on-white inkblot images allows the viewer to exercise his or her own subjective perception in attributing meaning, narrative, and imagery. Some artists are drawn toward abstraction because they feel that representational or figurative work denies them the ability to seek higher “truths” or meanings. (Myron Stout is one such artist; not coincidentally, he is regularly exhibited or invoked alongside Bess.) Many abstract artists dream of a transcendent space, a utopia delivered through pure plastic means. The Russian Suprematists and Dutch de Stijl artists were

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exemplars of this kind of modernist quest. It impelled them, in short, to make art. Enter Forrest Bess and a bevy of art historical commentators.117 Even critics accustomed to incorporating biographical facts in their discussions of artworks must contend with the exceedingly literal and visceral fact of Bess’s self-surgery.118 Bess, a direct descendant of the “abstraction as transcendence” genealogy, crossed over from idealized striving to actual, bodily transformation. It was a shocking thing to do. His transgression created a critical stumbling block in the literature.119 That literature is written by self-aware authors who are intellectually and culturally well equipped to incorporate discussion of aberrant behavior. Nevertheless, historians remained challenged to account for the real, undeniable facts of life that empowered Bess’s art. When Bess wrote, “My painting is tomorrow’s painting. Watch and see,” he was more right than he could have imagined. For not only was his art worlds ahead of its time, the means through which to interpret it is still in the making. The art critic Peter Schjeldahl put a darkly humorous spin on the situation in a review of Bess’s Hirschl & Adler Modern exhibition in 1988. In the midst of a highly laudatory review, Schjeldahl avers that Bess might have easily won fame as a “sophisticated, lovable eccentric . . . except for one little thing”: “He underwent a series of operations that I’d rather not think about. Other writers, referring delicately to Bess’s subsequent ‘disappointments,’ seem to find the subject similarly distracting.”120 Three other examples illustrate how writers, when not shying away from or ignoring the topic, have dealt with Bess’s hermaphroditic obsession

and surgical acts. In 1981, Barbara Haskell, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, noted, “Bess’ theory of androgeny [sic] and its attendant symbology arose from his own sexuality and what he saw as dichotomous aspects of his personality—a polarization manifested in the sensitive gentle painter on the one hand; the rugged, liquor-drinking fisherman on the other.”121 Haskell then summed up an efficacious approach to Bess’s art: “Yet despite the specificity of his iconography, the impact of Bess’ paintings does not depend on deciphering his pictorial vocabulary; rather, it rests on the power of his visual images to evoke universal responses quite apart from the paintings’ obscurely personal origins.”122 Haskell is right, of course: one need not decipher the pictures to sense they are a conduit to universal concepts. Nevertheless, she offers an escape route—via pure abstraction—for those not wishing to contend with the undeniable physical outcome of Bess’s aesthetic philosophy. The eminent art historian James Elkins touched on the Bess issue in Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis (1989), in a chapter appositely titled “Membranes.” He put his visions to work on himself, by undergoing an operation that punctured the base of his penis into the urethra, creating a “vagina” large enough to insert a tapered candle (which he used to masturbate). The whole operation, Bess’s theory, and the result are documented in an essay in the Journal of Sex Research—making Bess possibly the only artist whose genitals have been published in a medical journal. His small paintings, and the small

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photographs of his penis that he took himself, are equally strange—part of a project that was always nearly hermetic, but also drew on universal ideas of maleness, femaleness, and the way one folds into the other.123

Elkins penned, however inadvertently, a startlingly accurate description of the double entendre, selfabuse. The focus of his wide-ranging book is representations of pain, not necessarily the painted images themselves. To that end, his discussion of Bess’s paintings is circumscribed by his focus on the Polaroid photographs reproduced in John Money’s essay. A dozen years later, Robert Storr’s essay for Christie’s Private Sales again illustrated the challenge faced by an outstanding writer confronted with the Bess barricade. In discussing two untitled, undated canvases that feature gray grounds atop which lie triangle forms, Storr eloquently writes: Bess’s graphic lexicon tells us that this triangle means “to cut shallow,” and that identification sets off speculation regarding his self-surgery, but the triangles themselves are so poised within the cool radiance of the ambient grisaille that thoughts of genital mutilation are soon replaced by serenity. Precisely, one would like to believe, the serenity that Bess’s anxious imagination sought to achieve through physiologically unifying the conflicted and conflicting halves of his at once masculine/feminine personality—and whose isn’t?—and did manifestly succeed in reaching through the act of painting.124

For an instant, it seems that Storr will allow the soothing lavender and yellow triangles to eradicate uneasy visceral images in his mind’s eye and to replace them with “serenity.” Another interpreter of Bess, using a purely formal approach, might stop there. But Storr pushes past his own discomfort, returning back to the physical Bess, hoping that the artist himself found relief in the unity he achieved on canvas. The salutary response to the Bess barricade is to return to the works themselves, as both Haskell and Storr successfully did. One of the finest Bess paintings, Untitled 11A (1958), contains elements of traditional landscape in its tripartite construction: sky (red), sea (black curving waves), earth (blue and white bars).125 Bess’s interior, subjective space is externalized as an ostensible landscape. As the Texas cultural historian Michael Ennis described it, “The rows of blue and white stripes in his untitled 1958 abstraction weren’t exercises in the kind of serial, minimalist painting they seem to anticipate—they were symbols of a primordial inner landscape where he struggled to find the secrets of immortality.”126 It is unclear whether Ennis had consulted Bess’s hand-drawn graphic lexicon that the artist had sent in the mail to Betty Parsons. In that list of symbols, the black waves represent “craters,” vertical lines are for “marking of time (periods of time).” Two parallel horizontal lines stand for “back and forth (masturbation/coitus).” The blue and white lines in Untitled 11A are vertical, forming three horizontal bands of alternating stripes that are indeed visually stimulating, so to speak. The horizontal blue-andwhite-striped bands appear to “climb,” the result

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Figure 4.21 | Forrest Clemenger Bess, Untitled 11A, 1958, oil on canvas, 17¾" × 24" (45.1 × 61 cm); framed, 1811∕16" × 24¾" (47.5 × 62.9 cm).

of an optical illusion created by Bess’s close, neat placement of the colors. The perception of climbing may indicate an ascent toward an ideal future. (Kandinsky had a similar notion about the triangle as indicating an ascent toward higher spirituality.) The black wavelike forms are on the painting’s horizon line but do not fully extend across it. One needs greater knowledge of Bess’s philosophy and sources to fully decode the painting, but even then one could only speculate. Yet this basic reading suggests a terrain in which sexual merging, via coitus, meets geologic time.127 Bess explicated many of his works and theories in his voluminous letters. In her discussion of this painting, Alison de Lima Greene, a Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, curator, reproduces an excerpt from a Bess self-interview that he sent to Betty Parsons in 1962. Bess inquired about Untitled 11A, asking himself what he felt the canvas represented.

Bess responded to himself, “I felt it had something to do with a lonely beach. The sharp pointed black shapes brought to mind driftwood—the silhouette of driftwood on a beach.” He then asked himself whether this imagery is how the painting ultimately “integrated.” Bess’s notion of “integration” is related to Carl Jung’s theory of integrating opposites, like the conscious and the unconscious, as part of a larger process of individuation. Through this process a person seeks psychological wholeness. For Bess, integration meant unifying his symbolic paintings with his own experience. Thus, the interviewee in his self-questionnaire explains that Untitled 11A did not ultimately integrate as a lonely beach scene. Instead, after a prolonged hypnotic meditation induced by staring at the painting, he experienced a shift in the wind, then traveled back in memory to a childhood recollection, then further still to an ancient pre-memory “so very, very old that the light was very dim”: “I looked out over a desolate landscape of craters. Almost as if newly cooled white granite had become pockmarked with many many craters with sharp edges—just as if bubbles had bursted in the granite.” The integration frightened him, for previously he had “had no idea of what Jung meant by the integration of the ideogram but here I had experienced one—the happening.” Greene observes that with this painting Bess successfully captured “the sense of primal creation [he] sought in his work; his hallucinatory description—the temporal and subjective shifts— mirrors his transcendental aspirations.”128 Indeed, Greene compares the liberation Bess discovered in the Texas landscape to that experienced by Georgia O’Keeffe in the Panhandle decades earlier.

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Bess’s painting has had a powerful effect on a number of viewers; its strong formal structure, planar activation of the dancing blue and white lines that contrast with the red plane, and tidy, palpably hand-painted strokes secure its popularity.129 Untitled 11A lacks the literalness of some Bess paintings, like those that suggest coitus or urethral holes. The lack of specificity gives the viewer room for subjectivity, perhaps even an integration. Bess’s red, white, and blue Untitled 11A recalls in an important way the work of another American artist who was hot in the New York scene at precisely the same time. Jasper Johns’s “Flag” series of paintings, first shown at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958, are stalwarts of American postwar and postmodern art. Some of Johns’s Flags are red, white, and blue; others are green, black, and orange (complementary colors whose retinal afterimage leaves a spectral red, white, and blue); others are shades

Figure 4.22 | Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954–1955, encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood, three panels, 42¼" × 60⅝" (107.3 × 153.8 cm). With the notorious act of re-creating the American flag, Johns made one of the best known paintings of postwar American art. Forrest Bess would have known his Untitled 11A echoed Johns’s Flag, which he would have seen in New York or in magazines.

of gray. Johns chose a symbol that distanced his persona from the work, a tactic that opposed the existential action painting of Abstract Expressionists of the preceding generation. Johns’s reliance on common, familiar objects and his belabored touch in paintings of flags, targets, maps, numbers, and alphabets has itself been interpreted as a strategy of silence regarding the dominant, machismo-filled aesthetic of the time. Bess’s Untitled 11A is highly reminiscent of an American flag, a fact he surely must have known. Both Bess and Johns, unmarried and interested in men as sexual partners, lived lives outside the dominant heterosexual society of the 1950s. Both men found, nearly contemporaneously, a vocabulary of painting with a symbolic or hermetic language that helped them to transmute their personal experiences into art. Other extraordinary Bess paintings with a related structural theme are Dedication to van Gogh (1946), View of Maya (1951), and Untitled (1966, a cream-colored painting with vertical lines and sun). A glorious Untitled (1946) has earned the unfortunate but visually apt sobriquet “The Dicks.” In it, two rows of oblong orange and yellow Popsicle-like forms confront each other amid a black background. The painting bears intriguing parallels to Louise Bourgeois’s classic sculpture The Destruction of the Father (1974). Bourgeois’s diorama-like work displays fearsome toothlike extrusions from a surface. Looking at it is like being inside a mouth. Bess, as a Jungian, favored archetypal imagery, as opposed to the sexualized Freudian connotations of Bourgeois’s sculpture. But in both cases, the objects seem to perform a purifying function, a cathartic ridding of the past for, hopefully, the promise of a better future.

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If one could ignore the nickname of Untitled (1946), the forms could appear as fingers, landforms, or glowing beacons. The black negative space surrounding them comes alive, creating shapes that can be seen as rising or descending. At his artistic peak here, Bess’s sense for color and composition are intuitive and inspired. He crops the paintings (many are delimited by their hand-hewn wooden frames) as if to indicate the expansive universe outside the frame. As discussed earlier in relation to Myron Stout, many artists explored gestalt psychology’s idea that patterns and concepts stand in for a whole. Bess undoubtedly was familiar with these ideas, but he likewise achieved them intuitively via his impassioned search for an alternate existence. For Bess, the gestalt may have alluded to something in the beyond, outside the picture plane—to a pattern only hinted at but not readily accessible. He may have thought his paintings were teleological, evolving in the direction in which he sought to travel. By the late 1950s, he was ready to take what to him was the next logical step: physical self-transformation into the unified whole to which he aspired. Whatever else Bess did or however he lived, he was above all an artist steeped in spirituality and the belief that shamanistic and curative properties are inherent in art and can be accessed through art making. The question that Bess’s paintings raise is whether they “work” for a viewer. Do they require that one steep oneself in arcane texts as well as the gory actualities of self-mutilation? Or can a viewer access a higher plane through sheer vision and reflection? Bess offers indications of his goal for the viewer. He wondered whether, after extensive contemplation of his painting, one would go to sleep

Figure 4.23 | Forrest Clemenger Bess, Untitled (The Dicks), 1946, oil on canvas, 15½" × 17½" × 2"; unframed, 14" × 16". Both View of Maya and this Untitled painting share Bess’s interest in the repeating pattern (like that of the gestalt) that symbolized infinity.

and dream of a higher, archetypal image. A letter from Bess in 1963 to a collector couple who had recently purchased some of his paintings is edifying. Bess refers to his letters to Carl Jung, with which he is parting because “Dr. Adler wants them for publishing,” and directs the collectors to read select pages from Jung’s Practice of Psychotherapy and from Francis Wickes’s Inner World of Man. According to Bess, Jung observes that “the talented portraitist begins painting from this source literally as if she never held a brush in her hands. He called it virgin territory.” Bess continues:

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I would like for you to do an experiment. Jung states that this type of work [art like the collectors’ Bess paintings] has the ability to talk back to the unconscious. That it is the language of the unconscious. Some evening right before retiring both of you take one of the paintings, place a light on it—look at it for a period of say twenty minutes or so—do not try to read into it but without interference concentrate on it then go on and go to bed. Many times you will dream concerning the painting. The next morning compare notes with each other and let me know what the dream was about. I rather feel that people who buy my work are rather guided to do so unconsciously. Now it may take more than one sitting because they integrate of their own accord.130

The parallels with Bess’s lifelong preoccupation with a union of opposites are evident: can different people arrive at the same idea from the same stimulus?

Bess’s relationship to abstract art may seem counterintuitive, given his interest in very precise imagery and hermetic symbols. The alchemical texts upon which he frequently drew featured complex engraved images representing facets and scenes of transformative processes. They were, of course, deeply symbolic emblems despite their figurative appearance. Bess was attracted to the literalness of the concept that undergirded alchemical imagery: the reality of psychic and physical metamorphosis. By reducing hermetic symbolism to its essential forms, Bess’s abstractions constituted an up-to-date, contemporary incarnation of the ageold symbols. In 1988, the New York Times art critic Michael Brenson offered a terse verbal equivalent for the late Texan’s pictorial oeuvre: “For Bess, abstraction was a life-and-death matter.”131

5 You boys, you girls over here have so much fun. We’re so stodgy in Dallas. We don’t do anything like this. KELLY FEARING , recalling a remark made by Otis Dozier in the mid-1940s

Facing | Figure 5.01 | Bror Utter, Untitled, July 1952, oil on canvas, 30" × 18". Seemingly abstract with Utter’s characteristic linear outlines, this belongs to his series of “cocktail” paintings.

The Fort Worth Circle

In midcentury Texas, the nearest approximation to a unified group of artists who shared similar aesthetic philosophies and who sang, drank, danced, recited poetry, and made paintings, prints, music, and, in some cases, love together emerged in Fort Worth in the 1940s.1 But they were more a coterie than a school, and the art of each member is highly distinctive and quite different from that of any others. This group looked directly and pointedly to European modernism for inspiration. At one point in the mid-1940s, its members dubbed themselves the “Texas Eight” or just the “Eight,” presumably in playful homage to the unidealized American realists led by Robert Henri in the early twentieth century.2 Such a reference hints at the jocular spirit of the Fort Worthians. In 1946, the Texas Eight exhibited their work in the upstairs lounge of Dallas’s Telenews Theatre, which had opened in 1941 a month before the United States formally declared war against the Axis powers. Their paintings and watercolors, in contrast with the all-newsreel theater in which they were shown, betrayed

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Figure 5.02 | George Grammer, Offshore, 1953, oil on canvas, 22" × 19". Grammer, a younger member of the Fort Worth circle, offers his interpretation of the state’s dominant industry.

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no knowledge of world or national events. Instead, the work—by the artists Bill Bomar, Kelly Fearing, Veronica Helfensteller, Bertha Landers, Dickson Reeder, Flora Blanc Reeder (working professionally as Flora Blanc), Bror Utter, and Donald Vogel— reflected an interior, subjective world. The modernist forms that some members engaged in may have represented an escape from the traumatic events that had dominated headlines for the past few years. The Dallas reviewer who covered the exhibition found “nothing particularly revolutionary about the Texas Eight’s work”: “It is, for the most part, good imaginative, often experimental painting.”3 Although it may not have seemed revolutionary in the grand sense, their art was definitely subversive from a local perspective. Nor did the reviewer seem to realize that the name, the Eight, was a joke in response to the reigning Dallas Nine. These Fort Worth artists were exhibiting in Dallas, so physically close that the two cities were practically back-fence neighbors, but light-years apart artistically. Mercifully—given the high probability for art-world confusion—the name the “Eight” never stuck. But a rebellious instinct and a rejection of Regionalism was a hallmark of the artists who are today known as the Fort Worth Circle.4 The too-little-known group was adventuresome, creative, and, in Otis Dozier’s estimation, fun. They shunned the realistic imagery that anchored Texas regionalism, along with such practices as the Bluebonnet School version of late Impressionism. For inspiration, they turned to European modernism; for subject matter, they turned inward. Surrealism suited their tastes, with the strong flavors of Joan Miró, Amedeo Modigliani, and Paul Klee.

It was not until 1986 and the Texas Sesquicentennial that the historical record finally and formally documented these artists as a group. The artist and teacher Sallie Gillespie co-organized the first broad survey in Beyond Regionalism: The Fort Worth School (1945–1955), held at the Old Jail Art Center in the tiny north-central Texas town of Albany. Beyond Regionalism included representative paintings and sculpture from first- and second-generation group members; the Old Jail Art Center, founded by Bill Bomar and Reilly Nail, owns a sizable collection of Fort Worth artists’ works. Six years later, an exhibition occasioned by the donation of a print collection from a former member of the group, Kelly Fearing, contributed further to the Fort Worthians “rediscovery.” Fearing had retired in 1987 after four decades at the University of Texas at Austin. The exhibition featuring his collection, Prints of the Fort Worth Circle, 1940–1960, was organized by the Archer M. Huntington Gallery (now the Blanton Museum of Art). It affixed a more suitable name to the group and examined its members’ often ingenious and technically supreme etchings and engravings.5 The Fort Worth Circle morphed over time, but its backbone included Bill Bomar, Cynthia Brants, Lia Cuilty, Kelly Fearing, Veronica Helfensteller, Dickson Reeder, Flora Blanc Reeder, and Bror Utter. Other participants, with varying levels of involvement, were David Brownlow, George Grammer, Bertha Landers, Marjorie Johnson (later Lee), and Blanche McVeigh. McVeigh, Gillespie, and Evaline Sellors were instrumental in introducing the styles of Picasso, Georges Braque, André Derain, and Henri Matisse to many of the group at the Fort Worth School of Fine Art (founded by

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McVeigh, Sellors, and Wade Jolly in 1931). The inauguration of the annual juried Texas General exhibitions in 1940 gave them a statewide platform, along with patronage from figures such as Samuel B. Cantey III (president of the Fort Worth Art Association, banker, and art collector); his wife, Betsy; and Anne Burnett Windfohr. The Betty McLean Gallery and its astute manager, the artist Donald Vogel, provided exposure and contacts.6

Both the Prints of the Fort Worth Circle and Beyond Regionalism exhibitions were mounted at institutions geographically distant from Fort Worth, bringing the circle’s work to the attention of a wider Texas public. And in 2008 an eye-opening exhibition of their work was shown in the artists’ hometown. Scott Grant Barker and Jane Myers organized Intimate Modernism: Fort Worth Circle Artists in the 1940s for the Amon Carter Museum. The catalogue and exhibition gave the artists their full-color due, sixty years after their creative zenith. Some of the most alluring images to come out of the Fort Worth crucible are in black-and-white, however. According to Myers, who holds particular expertise in graphic media: “Considering the time and

Figure 5.03 | Marjorie Johnson, The Old House, 1944, oil on canvas, 30" × 20".

Figure 5.04 | Marjorie Johnson, Still Life with Grapes, 1951, oil on canvas, 24" × 20". Note the shift in palette and brushwork in just a matter of years from Johnson’s Old House to Still Life with Grapes.

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place, the Circle’s printmaking was nothing short of revolutionary.”7 (Incidentally, the Dallas reviewer who found “nothing revolutionary” in the Telenews Theatre lounge in 1946 was not looking at the group’s graphic production.) By their nature, prints tend to be an intimate medium, because of their smaller scale and the artist’s handmade marks on the surface of the plate. Closer to drawings, prints call to mind the Renaissance dichotomy between disegno (drawing) and colorito (color). And drawing, the basis of all twodimensional forms, is traditionally associated with intellect, whereas color is said to evoke emotion. Many in the Fort Worth Circle worked in both modes, effectively toying with that classic dichotomy. Although many of their prints were in blackand-white, by applying texture (such as patterned fabric embedded into the soft ground) and by varying the depth of the acid bite, they could bring out a full range of tones.

Figure 5.05 | David Brownlow, Untitled, 1956, oil on Masonite, 15½"  × 23½".

Many members of the circle tended to work in intaglio, bypassing a trend toward lithography at the time, a medium strongly associated with American Regionalism, the Dallas Nine, and the Lone Star Printmakers. Dickson Reeder and Flora Blanc Reeder transported insights gained at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 studio, in Paris, to latenight stints in Fort Worth at the studio of Veronica Helfensteller, sharing their unorthodox techniques. Bror Utter, whose father was a professional printer, was able to acquire the hard-to-find zinc sheets for the artists to use as matrices. The circle created small editions from the metal plates, using aquatint, ingenuity, and occasionally even chiffon fabric for texture. They worked with linoleum or wood blocks, as in Kelly Fearing’s Children Carrying Driftwood—Fisher Watching (1949), with its scratched-out primitive stick figures and fish. Several members of the Fort Worth Circle internalized lessons from French and Spanish Surrealism, giving it a different interpretation. Helfensteller shone in graphic media, creating fanciful animal scenes and enigmatic geologic- and organicinspired lithographs and etchings. The artists made their New York debut, appropriately, as a collective. Six Texas Painters opened in 1944 at the Weyhe Gallery on Lexington Avenue, a show made possible in part by the connections of Martha Elliott Blanc (Flora Blanc Reeder’s mother) and Sam Cantey III. Founded in 1919 by Erhard Weyhe, the Weyhe Gallery was among the earliest New York venues to specialize in prints, the medium in which Fort Worth Circle members excelled and innovated.8 Remarks on the exhibition in the Art Digest underscore the artists’ metaphorical

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distance from a stereotypical view of Texas: “Patricia Peck of the Dallas Morning News calls them ‘nonspecific regionalists who have been busily painting away from the earth.’ It is apparent in the exhibition that these Texans are studio painters and are in no way concerned with Texas country as a tie that binds, nor with outdoors light. I do not gather that the slogan is ‘away from the earth’ necessarily, but that their earnestness about picture making renders subject matter de trop.”9 Each member— Helfensteller, Vogel, Utter, Bomar, Dickson Reeder,

and Flora Blanc—was assessed individually. Overall, Art Digest’s critic found it “an interesting show.” Edward Alden Jewell of the New York Times reported, “I understand that the Fort Worth painters are, so to speak, inseparable.” He determined that they still had a long way to go creatively, but that “the joyousness of the ensemble effort proves infectious.”10 Dickson Reeder The Fort Worth native Dickson Reeder (1912–1970) became the circle’s unofficial leader. A portraitist who worked on commission, he began training in New York with Wayman Adams in 1931 and studied with him in Taxco, Mexico, in 1933. Adams, whose oil painting Blind was selected for the “Southwest” section of the Centennial Exposition, may have encouraged his student to submit a painting.11 Reeder’s small portrait of his Fort Worth teacher, Sallie Gillespie, was featured in the “Texas” galleries. During the mid-1930s, Reeder traveled and painted in Europe, learning theater design in Paris from Aleksandra Ekster (1882–1949), a Russian-UkrainianFrench painter and designer who had been welcomed into Gertrude Stein’s circle through her friendships with Picasso and Braque. In Paris he also met New York–born Flora Blanc, then working with Fernand Léger, and studied with her at Hayter’s Atelier 17. Married in 1937 in New York, the Reeders lived in the Chelsea area before relocating to Fort Worth in 1940. There they “provided the social glue that bonded the group together,” according to Scott Grant Barker.12 They offered their house for

Figure 5.06 | Kelly Fearing, Children Carrying Driftwood— Fisher Watching, 1949, woodblock print, 3½" × 4¾" (image), 8½" × 11" (sheet).

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recurring Saturday-night soirées, Fort Worth salonstyle celebrations fueled by sherry and recordings of the Russian composers Dmitri Shostakovich and Igor Stravinsky, and punctuated by the latter’s Petrushka. (Fearing, Utter, and Flora Reeder gave enthusiastic ballet improvisations. One Christmas, the sole Dallas member, Donald Vogel, handed out properly sized ballet slippers to his friends.) In 1945, Flora and Dickson Reeder opened their School of Theater and Design for Children, training even very young students to perform in elaborately designed Shakespeare-derived productions to which many circle members contributed. A quick comparison of sketches made in 1937 by Dickson Reeder and Robert Preusser (Fig. 3.12; see chapter three for a discussion of Preusser’s early production) sheds light on the distinction between the Houstonian’s anchor in nonobjectivity and Reeder’s anchor in figuration. Whereas Preusser abandons all semblance of figures in favor of purely abstract marks, Reeder’s drawing is indebted to Surrealism and School of Paris influences.13 Two faces, one in Picassoesque profile, hover above a coast reminiscent of Salvador Dalí’s Catalan landscape. Bill Bomar Bill Bomar (1919–1991), a leading member of the group, was born into a prominent family in Fort Worth and learned to paint seriously in his teens. His family was close to Anne Burnett Windfohr (later Tandy), who was from one of Texas’s toniest families. At twenty-one, Bomar had studied at Cranbrook Art Academy, followed by stints in New

York with John Sloan, Amédée Ozenfant (for a full year), and Hans Hofmann. He split his time between Taos and New York, with frequent visits back to his hometown. He followed up his participation in the Weyhe Gallery group show with numerous one-person and group exhibitions. After his move to Taos, Bomar exhibited widely in New Mexico and Texas while continuing to show in New York. A solo exhibition by Bomar at the Weyhe Gallery in 1949 earned a highly favorable notice from the New York Times critic Stuart Preston. It is worth quoting in full for its detail and approbation: At the Weyhe Gallery Bill Bomar’s impeccably painted canvases—semi-cubist still lifes and fantastic variations on Spanish themes—are well worth a visit. Designs are either built with streamlined geometrical forms or with infinitely complex shapes that open out of one another like the chambers of a seashell. In both cases these designs are strongly balanced, especial strength being concentrated in the razorsharp contours that bend and buckle with the tension of coiled springs. To Bomar each canvas is not so much a reproduction of the world of appearances as it is the solution of a problem in form and color. A beautiful mathematical clarity, as well as some of mathematics’ coldness, marks Bomar’s solutions.14

The newspaper featured a reproduction of Bomar’s painting Avocado, in which the angles of the table, walls, and avocado form a perfectly composed still life that defies the laws of physics. Bomar patently

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held his own as an artist: in the same column Preston reviewed gallery exhibitions of Edgar Degas, Georges Rouault, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Louise Bourgeois, and El Lissitzky. Avocado also appeared in the Art Digest (October 15, 1949), whose reviewer found “no loose ends anywhere” in the solo show.15 A third reviewer, for Art Times, found “a flowing serenity and an almost cold elegance” in the “young Texan’s” return to New York.16 Of the art writers, two sensed something “cold” in Bomar’s abstractions, a not-unfounded observation. Such an indictment, if it can be called so, may have to do with Bomar’s restricted forms and controlled palette. His abstract work is tightly organized, and Expressionistic outbursts are rare. This same quality of reserve imbues some of his modernist portraits. His three-quarter portraits,

Figure 5.07 | Bill Bomar, Medea’s Bath, c. 1955, oil on canvas on Masonite, 9½" × 17". Bomar and the Fort Worth Circle were a theatrical, literary group; he probably based this on Euripedes’s play about Medea’s shocking revenge on her husband, Jason. Possibly Bomar references a scene late in the play when Medea appeared in sun god Helios’s chariot.

such as Flora (1944), Sara (1946), and Jewel’s Feathered Hat (1947), depict women looking away from the viewer, their bodies properly decorous, with flat expressions. Sitter and space are so well anchored in their backgrounds through color and line that they become one. A more emotional portrait is one made in 1953 of his peer Lia Cuilty. Seen almost in profile, the artist bends her right arm behind her head as if in repose or retreat; her left hand holds a fan. Yet her motivations are inaccessible to us; her downcast eyes do not permit the clichéd view into the window of her soul. Of Bomar’s abstract paintings, Day Observation for a Harlequin (1947) is truly extraterrestrial.17 A spaceship form floats in Bomar’s expertly modulated yellow sky. Geometric orbs connect that background to the aqua-green of the terrain, which has been

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claimed by staves and a flag-like form. It is easy to read Day Observation for a Harlequin as the metaphorical colonization of the subconscious mind, an outer space conquered by both male (staves) and female (flag) shapes. Medea’s Bath (1955) likewise summons an otherworldly scene. It is surely based on Euripides’s fifthcentury BC retelling of the myth in which the barbarian sorceress Medea exacts horrific revenge on her husband, Jason, for having taken up with another woman. Like Day Observation for a Harlequin, this small painting may be indebted to the Reeders’ theatrical influence or to Bomar’s own Broadway forays. Robinson Jeffers’s adaptation of Euripides’s Medea became a hit on Broadway in the late 1940s, and Ben Bagley’s Shoestring Revue performed the well-received off-Broadway parody, Medea in Disneyland, in 1955.18 Although Bomar’s meaning is elusive, Medea’s Bath seems to emblematize the harrowing tale’s aftermath. Possibly the painter conflated Aeschylus’s Oresteia with the Medea tale: in the Oresteia, Clytemnestra murders her husband, Agamemnon, in the bath upon his return from Troy. Or Bomar may be interpreting the end of Euripides’s play, when Medea appears in an airborne chariot drawn by dragons, a gift from the sun god Helios. Bomar’s scalloped vessel is filled with water, held in place by fiery poles that could allude to Helios, as could the sun’s flame. A dark plum orb encircling the sun may signal a traumatic end. Whatever impetus lay behind it, Medea’s Bath captures the circle’s cryptic surreality and fascination with drama and myth. Bomar’s artistic ambitions were aided by his family wealth, which helped him acquire a modest art

collection—including works by Lyonel Feininger, John Marin, Paul Klee, and Ben Shahn—and establish part-time residency at New York’s Hotel Chelsea. He took over the lease of his teacher, John Sloan, who had been having trouble making the rent. (“There was a time when you could get out of the elevator on the fifth or sixth floor and take a deep breath and never have to smoke your own grass,” Bomar half-joked years later.)19 Modigliani’s Girl with Braids (1918) hung on his Hotel Chelsea wall; he used it as direct inspiration for a painting of his mother, Jewel Bomar. Kelly Fearing Born in Fordyce, Arkansas, Kelly Fearing (1918– 2011) was raised in Louisiana and earned a master’s degree at Columbia University. He moved to Fort Worth in 1943 for a position at Consolidated Vultee Aircraft (Convair), where he drew three-dimensional illustrations from blueprints to demonstrate how U.S. aircraft bomber parts—every single rivet—fit into one another. Dickson Reeder, already working at Convair, befriended Fearing and introduced him to the others, including Bomar, who became a close friend. Fearing worked in a variety of media and styles: pure abstraction—see the scratched-out minimalism of some of his pure engravings—biomorphic organicism, and veristic, classic Surrealism. The last mode was Fearing’s masterly, reigning style of work from the later 1950s through the 1990s. Enigmatic narratives are set into mystical landscapes of intricately worked boulders, azure skies, and reflective water.

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Figure 5.08 | Kelly Fearing, Air Raid, 1942–1943, oil on canvas, 24" × 20". Generally Fort Worth Circle artists avoided overt depictions of the war; Fearing’s painting represents a poignant exception, conveyed as a still life.

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In the midst of a visit to Bomar in New York, Fearing received a telegram from Loren Mozley of the UT Austin Department of Art, offering him a position that he accepted and went on to hold for four decades. (Flora’s mother, Martha Elliott Blanc, who lived in an Upper East Side apartment, insisted that Fearing take the position and postpone his plans to study French in New York.)20

Fearing’s work ranged widely in this period. He revisited his hermetic portraits, such as The Collector (1945) and The Aquarist (1947), in etchings, oil, and even screen prints. Thematic reinterpretations occur also in prints such as Annunciation (1946, etching and aquatint) and Fishermen (1947, etching and soft-ground etching). He strengthened and refined his motifs in the late 1940s and 1950s, after the move to Austin.

Figure 5.09 | Kelly Fearing, Catcher of the Yellow Bird, 1948, oil on Masonite, 23" × 15". The influence of one of Fearing’s favorite artists, Swiss-German Paul Klee, is felt here.

Figure 5.10 | Kelly Fearing, Tobias (and the Guardian Angel), 1955, oil on canvas, 40" × 24". From Fearing’s classic, Surrealistic period, painted during his long tenure at UT Austin.

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Bror Utter A thoroughly different take on Surrealism was practiced by one of the Fort Worth Circle’s earliest members, Bror Utter (1913–1993), who had been a high school classmate of Dickson Reeder. Although he studied lithographic techniques with Adolf Dehn and Boardman Robinson in Colorado Springs in 1940, he held fast to the intaglio process prized by the Fort Worthians. Utter, who was among those in the circle taken with Surrealism, pithily stated, “We thought regionalism was old hat.”21 He produced elegant gouaches of forms that appeared to be the offspring of geometric creatures

Figure 5.11 | Bror Utter, Untitled, 1946, oil on Masonite, 12" × 18". Like other Fort Worth artists, Utter was well familiar with the Surrealists’ fascination with insects. Here he pairs the beetles with what are presumably their human counterparts.

and modernist furniture. He called them “embellished forms”; they took on organic shapes with quasi-human characteristics. Utter innovated in the creation of textured backgrounds, against which he set his embellished forms. Confronting Racism and Homophobia As is explored further in chapter eight, abstraction in midcentury Texas was a largely Caucasian enterprise, with relatively few exceptions.22 Of course, the most abstract manifestations of avant-garde painting and sculpture operate without discernible references to the culture from whence they emerge.

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The irony is that modernism is generally associated with progressive aesthetic and social politics, but at midcentury it was the territory of the dominant culture, which across the United States was white and middle class. Dickson Reeder’s racially charged painting Conversation Piece (1945) might be defined as a protest painting in true modernist fashion or a sensitive snapshot of real life—or both.23 It is worth discussing here because it elicits social issues that help to construct a sense of the era. Conversation Piece is a double portrait of a young white boy, Reeder’s son Michael, and a young black girl, Ruth Ann, the daughter of the Reeders’ African American maid, kneeling at a table where a cat toys with a strip of paper. Hardly remarkable today, the painting must be situated within the hate-filled climate of Dallas and Fort Worth in that era.24 The last known public lynching in Fort Worth had occurred only twentyfour years earlier, in 1921, with the killing of Fred Rouse, an African American packinghouse employee who crossed a picket line in the stockyards and allegedly shot two striking white workers following an altercation. North Texas bigotry ran deep and was legitimized by nationwide segregation. The art writer Tyler Green, in his blog entry on the Amon Carter Museum’s Intimate Modernism exhibition, observed: “In the 1920s Dallas had the largest Ku Klux Klan chapter in the U.S., with Fort Worth’s chapter close behind. The Klan was so widely accepted in Fort Worth that the big annual livestock show featured a ‘Klan Day.’” Reeder’s painting might operate progressively, according to Green:

So how was it that Reeder was able to paint Conversation Piece, a painting of innocence and friendship complete with children-holdinghands paper-cutout, nine years before Brown [v. Board of Education] and 18 years before the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham? . . . Not only did Reeder paint his son playing with a girl believed to be the daughter of the family’s maid, he focuses the viewer on the little girl. She is more richly painted, and the comics pages on the wall behind her serve to push her toward the viewer. The painting revolves around her.25

Green suggests that Reeder’s painting is “Manet’s Olympia Texas-style,” replete with the little girl’s headscarf and the cat. Given that little else about the painting supports such a connection, the comparison may be too facile, but the potential for Conversation Piece to be seen as an act of social protest should not be dismissed. Manet’s invocation of the intertwined racial and economic relations in France’s Second Empire—Olympia was officially submitted to the French Salon—was truly radical. Reeder made a private observation, based on the reality of life in his home. Whatever Reeder’s view, his painting alludes directly to one of the greatest moral outrages in American history. Reeder’s potential role as a true social progressive is troubled by his appearing as the man painted in blackface in Emily Guthrie Smith’s Halloween Party (1943), a painting based on the real lives of the artists. There is a temptation to “expect more” of Reeder, to wish retroactively that he recognized the racist stereotype for the demeaning act that it was

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and that he had never donned the blackface makeup—but real life and real history, again, intrude. The social implications of Smith’s Halloween Party and Reeder’s Conversation Piece lead to another crucial detail of Fort Worth Circle modernism. Intimate Modernism, the title of both the exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum and the accompanying catalogue, refers to the close camaraderie and personalized subject matter that emerged from the fertile imaginations of members of the Fort Worth Circle. The authors and curators shy away from this issue, but it also provides an oblique allusion to the homosexuality of some circle members. Engaging in a tactful elision of off-canvas dalliances, the catalogue offers ample evidence of circle members’ heterosexual marriages and children, but makes little reference to less conventional relationships. Individual paintings, however, suggest the sub rosa content. One example of this is Dickson Reeder’s triple portrait of three half-length male harlequins, The Dispute (1944). Two of the faces (beautifully rendered in stage makeup and clearly modeled after the circus performers and clowns of Walt Kuhn) exhibit vaguely quizzical expressions; the third figure, his back to the viewer, occupies nearly half the painting. The figures’ costumes and makeup—in the manner of commedia dell’arte players—provide a metaphorical cover for what may be a love triangle. At the least, the composition’s intimate structure amplifies the bond of the two pale-faced actors. A richer consideration of the contributions of the Fort Worth Circle to modern art might justifiably argue that some of the homosexual members felt more at ease in private domestic gatherings than in being publicly identified as gay. Not

only was homosexuality explicitly forbidden by the Christian dogma with which some of them had been inculcated in childhood, but Texas culture in the 1940s was bigoted and discriminatory, both racially and sexually. In 1860, during an era that predates the term “homosexual,” Texas adopted its first sodomy law.26 The law was revised in 1943, passed by unanimous votes in the Texas House and Senate. That law made it a felony to engage in “carnal copulation with a beast, or in an opening of the body, except sexual parts, with another human being.” Additionally, the 1943 revision, put into effect during World War II, made oral sex a crime for the first time in Texas. Yet it is worth noting that in 1973 the Texas Legislature made a third change to the sodomy law, banning “deviate sexual intercourse,” specifically

Figure 5.12 | Dickson Reeder, The Dispute, 1944, oil on canvas, 24¾" × 30" (62.865 × 76.2 cm). A year after this theatrically inspired painting in 1945, Dickson and Flora Reeder established the Reeder School of Theater and Design for Children. Both dedicated extensive time developing and producing plays at the school.

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Figure 5.13 | Cynthia Brants, Still Life with Bones, 1946, oil on canvas, 18⅞" × 31¾". An outstanding early painting by Brants that is atypically dark in palette and subject matter.

what it labeled “homosexual conduct.”27 The law against homosexual conduct remained in the Texas Penal Code until it was overturned in 2003 by the landmark Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas.28 For some of these artists, looking toward Europe for inspiration may have had as much to do with its apparently socially liberated sexual attitudes as it did with the formal innovations of the School of Paris. Although the intricacies of artistic reception are hard to pin down, the “intimate” characteristics of their art may have affected their national reception. With that in mind, comments by reviewers who invoked hearsay—such as Edward Alden Jewell, who remarked that the Texas group was “so to speak, inseparable”—take on a new tone. Viewers may have balked at paintings of men in leggings, their bare bottoms exposed—Sara Shannon’s Ballet

on the Stairs (1943) is a telling example—and major museums likewise may have blanched at the idea of displaying such patently provocative scenes. Modernism might have appealed to some of them precisely because it operated outside the mainstream and far afield of their Texas hometown. By looking solely at their technical and imagistic borrowings from the European avant-garde, we may miss part of the story.29 Most of the Fort Worth Circle members retained figurative elements in their work. Entirely nonrepresentational modes were expressed in works by Utter and Bomar, as well as in aspects of Fearing’s oeuvre. By the late 1940s, members of the group had begun to disperse. Fearing left for UT Austin in 1947; Helfensteller relocated to New Mexico in 1948, as did Bill Bomar, who had been spending much of his time in New York City; Flora and Dickson Reeder spent an increasing amount of time abroad. Brants and Grammer joined the group relatively late during that same period, but they were welcomed as full-fledged members. Lirl Treuter and Josephine Mahaffey Many other artists came in contact with the Fort Worth Circle through varied channels; their contributions either are all but lost or were barely ever known. Yet highlighting the work of at least a few of these artists is crucial for conveying an understanding of the legacy the circle left behind. It also is compatible with a secondary purpose of this book: to periodically introduce the reader to unfamiliar artists whose work was spurred on by the vitality of modernism of Texas. One of the most

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proficient painters and printmakers in Fort Worth, and at the same time virtually unknown, was Lirl Treuter (1923–2001). A student of Fearing’s at Texas Wesleyan College, Treuter absorbed his ethos, expanding and enhancing it. Her adeptly etched and printed Shorebound (1947) presents a moody nighttime seascape. What might be familiar beach detritus in the daytime is transformed into arcane, bonelike forms at night. Darkness also pervades her Bats

Figure 5.14 | Lirl Treuter, Shorebound, 1947, drypoint etching with embossing, 3¾" × 515∕16". A beautifully drawn, masterfully printed etching by a relatively unknown Fort Worth artist who learned much from the teachers around her, including Kelly Fearing (and made the year he left for UT Austin).

in a Cave, a miniature oil painting so dark it is difficult to apprehend. The young artist portrayed the interior of a Texas grotto as if it were not intended to be seen by human eyes. Treuter’s works are clearly kin to those of her teacher-friend, but another figure tangential to the circle, the prolific painter Josephine Mahaffey (1903–1982), made paintings that are strikingly individual. After studying with Sallie Blyth Mummert,

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Mahaffey was soon painting daily, compulsively recording the Fort Worth that surrounded her. According to the art historian Scott Grant Barker, in 1957 Coronet magazine nicknamed her “Mama Mahaffey, the Texas Dynamo” for having produced thousands of artworks.30 She knew the city well: as the proprietor of a small chain of grocery stores, Mahaffey became familiar with the poor neighborhoods in which they were situated. Her quick,

energetic strokes might be seen as a metaphor for her frenetic life (she had seven children). One Way Bridge, for example, departs significantly from the Surrealist or biomorphic influences on the Fort Worth Circle. Mahaffey engages jagged lines and Expressionistic colors. She became a teacher herself, with a generosity toward her students that matched her prodigious artistic output; she offered art lessons even to those unable to pay tuition.31

Figure 5.15 | Lirl Treuter, Bats in a Cave, oil on linen, c. 1947, 8¼" × 10¼". Another stunning contribution by Treuter, combining the mood of some Fort Worth Circle members with the Fearing style.

Figure 5.16 | Josephine Mahaffey, One Way Bridge, watercolor, 1940, 24" × 18". Mahaffey painted daily, capturing the city around her with spontaneous gestures quite apart from other Fort Worth artists of the time.

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McKie Massenburg Trotter III I believe neither in the real nor the abstract—but in universalities. To me there must be time for contemplation, and an approach in which humility plays a strong part. My painting, therefore, is both real and abstract, with neither side permanently retaining the upper hand. | M c KIE TROTTER , c. 1955

Another member later affiliated with the Fort Worth Circle was McKie Trotter (1918–1999), who arrived in Fort Worth in 1948 to teach at Texas Wesleyan College.32 Trotter has garnered less retrospective attention than some of the other members of the circle, but he was a vital transitional figure.33 Steering his own painting away from the circle’s potential insularity, he embraced pure and partial abstraction in the 1950s. He was also among the better colorists of the period. A Georgia native, Trotter continually shifted between what he called “the real” and “the abstract.” Working in a metaphysical gap between those poles, he developed a concrete abstraction in elegantly colored and deftly painted works. For him abstraction and realism were not mutually exclusive; rather, they were inflections of each other. Trotter’s oeuvre remains underattended, likely because of his scant production in later years as well as limited patronage.34 At midcentury, he exhibited in numerous prestigious shows, receiving favorable national reviews. He began exhibiting widely in 1946, first in the Annual Exhibition of the Southern States Art League and its exhibition Oils and Watercolor in Atlanta, and then in the Pepsi-Cola Annual at the National Academy of Design in New York. Trotter was the only Fort Worth Circle affiliate to have been

a prisoner of war, an experience that understandably marked him for life. For all those reasons and for the sustained high quality of his work during a decade from the 1940s to 1950s, he features prominently here. Trotter became part of the Fort Worth Circle despite not having arrived in Texas until 1947, at age twenty-nine. Trotter’s parents came from affluence, something he had in common with several other members. His father, an executive at a textile mill in La Grange, was a member of the Georgia House of Representatives in the mid-1940s. Trotter’s mother was a traveling art teacher who passed away when McKie was fourteen. Trotter graduated in 1940 with a bachelor’s degree in art and French from the College of William and Mary in Virginia. His mfa studies at the University of Georgia were interrupted by the war. Trotter, who served as a bugler for the Georgia National Guard from 1940 to 1941, was called to active duty in 1942. His education and background helped gain him acceptance to Officer Candidate School. After graduating in the fall of 1943, Trotter was sent to Europe as a replacement infantry officer. A month after he shipped out, his family received word that he was missing in action, followed by news of his captivity by the Nazis. After spending nine months as a prisoner, Trotter was freed at the end of the war by Soviet troops. He returned to the United States in May 1945, grateful for his life but indelibly marked by the experience.35 During his internment, Trotter kept a journal on scrap paper and wrote poignantly of his wish to draw.36 The earliest remaining prewar paintings (1939–1942) are highly skilled portraits and still lifes that display a masterly handling of figures and

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perspective (it seems possible that his late mother’s natural talent was passed on to her son). Tellingly, in 1939 Trotter made a completely abstract geometric work, composed of circles and a cylinder, on artist’s board. After the war, his brush loosened considerably. Some postwar works are quite dark: Refugees (1946), in deep grays and blues, is a haunting social-realist depiction of two war refugees. In 1947, Refugees won the fellowship award in the popular, nationally traveling Pepsi-Cola Annual, a high honor for the young artist.

Bottom | Figure 5.17 | McKie Trotter, Untitled [Entrance to the Fair], 1954, oil on board, 30½" × 45½". Trotter, who carefully documented his media, noted that he used Sherwin-Williams Flat-Rite Enamel Undercoater as well as oil in this painting. The annual exhibitions at the Texas State Fair were critically important to the history of Texas art; Trotter regularly partook in these competitions and shared the excitement.

Top | Figure 5.18 | McKie Trotter, Entrance to the Fair, 1954, crayon and pencil on paper, 8½" × 5¾".

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Returning to the University of Georgia in 1947– 1948, in pursuit of his mfa under Lamar Dodd, Trotter was an artistic magpie. Two other works of that period were featured in the Pepsi-Cola Annual. Three Windows (1947), a late-Cubism-inspired work that shows Trotter internalizing a School of Paris influence, presents three flattened interior spaces in a triptych of windows, reminiscent of Max Beckmann’s large-scale paintings. The other painting was strikingly different, a charming postwar Americana scene titled Intersection (1947). In its simplified forms and quasi-Surrealistic overtones, Intersection is Trotter’s version of Regionalism. His sure hand is particularly evident in the dark rainy sky and the woman holding an umbrella. In 1948, Trotter accepted a teaching position at Texas Wesleyan College in Fort Worth as the replacement for Kelly Fearing, who had moved to Austin. Compared to the tight, literal quality of his earlier output, his Fort Worth work has a freer, more modern feel. Flood (1949) depicts a real event: a devastating Fort Worth flood on May 17, 1949, that took eleven lives. (This notorious natural disaster in Fort Worth history also took out many trees, some of which were salvaged for sculptures by Trotter’s friend Charles Truett Williams; see chapter eight.) Trotter recorded the scene with a reduction of forms and late-Cubist elements. The water itself, surging in gray and green, occupies three-quarters of the picture. A telephone pole floats like a mast; a bisected moon presides over the entire eerie scene. It is tempting to surmise that the flood was so dramatic that he felt it was best handled with a distanced abstraction, but whatever the motivation, Flood portrays the tragedy with eloquence.

The 1950s were Trotter’s most fruitful and successful years, a time when he found his own pictorial vocabulary. He finished his thesis in 1950, married Sandra Canning (whom he met in Texas), and, in 1953, joined the faculty at Texas Christian University, where he remained for thirty-five years. Trotter was stimulated by the lively and experimental mood of the Fort Worth art community as well as by the security of a full-time teaching position. Paintings from the era illustrate why his work was so well received. He broke the landscape down in a variety of ways, veering back and forth between abstract passages and recognizable space. For example, Exits (1950) and its preparatory drawing show a division of space and linear forms similar to that seen in prints and paintings by his friend Bror Utter.37 Sea Things (1952) analyzes the seascape through its component parts on a surface of unprimed, ungessoed canvas. Rib-like shapes delineate the boat, building, and sky. A vertical rib runs through the sun, turning it into two semicircular wedges. With Beach Castles and High Shoals (seascapes from 1953), Trotter carries the formal investigations of Sea Things to further extremes. Beach Castles exemplifies Trotter’s mastery of color and composition. Repeated catenary brushstrokes nestle together, unifying the painting as an inseparable whole. Its large size and careful composition suggest that the artist conceived of it as a showpiece and may have considered it one of his own exemplary works.38 In 1950, Jerry Bywaters included Trotter in the Annual Texas Painting and Sculpture Exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art. Bywaters would have known Trotter’s work since 1948, shortly after

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the younger artist’s arrival at Texas Wesleyan College. Bywaters published a major essay on Trotter in Art in America, observing the “intriguing psychological element” contained in Trotter’s paintings. The article included a large reproduction of Bright Peninsula, an ethereal 1953 work in casein applied with brush and rollers.39 Bywaters perspicaciously praised Trotter’s achievement of a placeless setting, invoking J. M. W. Turner’s “strangely lit sea-spaces” and the evocative spaces of the French Symbolist Odilon Redon. The artist’s statement by Trotter that opens this section was the epigraph for Bywaters’s article. Bywaters’s essay appeared in color in one of the preeminent national art magazines—

Figure 5.19 | McKie Trotter, Beach Castles, 1953, oil on board, 38" × 62". In all his paintings, Trotter had an intuitive sense for color. The catenary lines and colored planes of Beach Castles are wholly abstract, yet anchored in the real world by the horizon line and descriptive title.

a major coup for artist, author, and Texas painting. The mid-1950s were a high-water mark for Trotter. In 1954, Two Cities (1953) was selected for the Younger American Painters exhibition at New York’s Guggenheim Museum and was illustrated in the exhibition catalogue. That same year, he participated in eight other exhibitions. In 1955, he showed in ten local and national exhibitions. In 1956, yet another momentous year, Trotter had a one-person exhibition at Grand Central Moderns, in New York, the “modern art” branch of Grand Central Art Galleries, with a high-status address at 55 East 57th Street. Grand Central Moderns advertised “the finest progressive paintings and sculptures by

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young artists.”40 One reviewer singled out Trotter for praise, saying he “appears at ease in both the more literal style . . . and in the abstract manner of Earthscape and Sky Lift.”41 Remarks by the critic for ARTnews are highly germane to Trotter’s method: “Within his restriction of his palette to reds, oranges, yellows, greys, blacks and browns, he makes statements of the widest significance. The carefully built up surfaces are the work of a professional who understands painting space and color, and the care is not of a plodding kind. In the simplification and geometric reduction of form he realizes his stated objective of finding realism through the forms at hand in a world in which ‘all things are abstract,’ and graphically demonstrates this idea.”42 In the mid-1950s, Trotter developed a style of nearly complete abstraction, often employing the “restricted” palette mentioned above. Skyscraperscape (c. 1954–1955) is a vertical painting in which narrow passages of orange and white rise up out of a gray background. The only hints of actual architecture (the “skyscrapers”) are horizontal lines

and rectangular passages that allude to windows. Southwestern Landscape #2 (1955) employs a similar palette to render the barest suggestion of a natural landscape, with hints of a leaf, building, and grass inside an otherwise nonrepresentational scene. In Harbor (1956), Trotter uses paint rollers to layer the orange, gray, and black paint into frenetic rectangular shapes. Trotter made a series of hallmark horizontal landscapes around the same time. Southwestern Landscape #3 (1956–1957, 42" × 108") is one of Trotter’s largest paintings. Exhibited in the Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture of Tarrant County in 1957, Southwestern Landscape #3 brings Trotter’s exquisite skills as colorist together with his geometric approach to dividing up the landscape. He uses his distinctive horizontal rectangles to move the eye along the canvas, the center of which recedes into a deep blue swirling space. The painting is anchored at right and left by large sun shapes; here he uses strongly contrasting colors to divide the sun into geometric abstract parts.43

6 One year after the Texas Centennial festivities and

two hundred miles down the highway, the University of Texas at Austin founded its College of Fine Arts.1 The college’s first dean, Ezra William Doty, sought to forge an art department that would live up to the standards of the overall institution, one Doty deemed a “University of the First Class.”2 The new hire, barely thirty-one, arrived at his job bearing three onerous titles: dean of the College of Fine Arts, chairman of the Music Department, and professor of music. As Robert Summers and Chelsea Weathers point out in their unpublished essay on the University of Texas Art Department, Doty’s independence as an administrator was the result of a fortunate coincidence, whereby the College enjoyed the security of being a part of a state funded university, and yet was unimpeded by rigid precedents or specific expectations of what exactly a College of Fine Arts should be. With so few examples to follow, Doty had the freedom to develop a distinct

The University of Texas at Austin in the 1940s and 1950s

identity for the College of Fine Arts, one that would adhere to the traditions and ideals of the University and of Texas, and also compete nationally as a progressive Fine Arts institution.3

In less capable hands, the results might have been anywhere from mediocre to disastrous. But Doty laid the foundation for what would become an enlightened and innovative department. His mission firmly in mind, Doty sought the best possible talent to lead the fledgling department. Tellingly, his quest led him out of state, to the land he felt would yield the richest aesthetic promise in the Southwest, New Mexico. In Taos, Doty found the Kansas-born John Ward Lockwood (1894–1963), a painter of notable pedigree, résumé, and contacts. Lockwood’s early training occurred at the University of Kansas, in Lawrence, in the mid-1910s, a fact that Doty found attractive when deciding to hire him at another state-funded school. Lockwood’s later studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

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exposed him to cutting-edge modernist movements and placed him closer to the impact of the Armory Show. In April 1917, while still a student, he enlisted in Officer’s Training Camp. He served with the American Expeditionary Forces in France in the Argonne and at Saint-Mihiel (September 1918).4 Lockwood earned the Croix de Guerre, an honor awarded to foreign military men serving in France. A few years after the armistice, he returned to Paris, living in the bohemian area of Montmartre and gaining firsthand knowledge from the likes of Maurice Denis, a Symbolist and founding member of the Nabis (“Prophets”), and the Cézanne-inspired landscape painter Jules-Émile Zingg. Denis penned a prophetic statement in 1890 that still serves as a modernist motto: “Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude, an anecdote or whatnot, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.”5 (Denis developed his synthétiste paintings past the initial flat surface; later modernists ended there.)6 Lockwood returned stateside, eventually taking up permanent residence in the artists’ colony in Taos in 1928. There, his close friendships with Kenneth Adams and Andrew Dasburg and a summer spent in the company of John Marin placed him at the center of a thriving art colony. Both Dasburg and Marin had exhibited in the Armory Show. For years, Lockwood, Dasburg, Marin, and Loren Mozley were regular camping and sketching companions. For two summers in the early 1930s, Lockwood taught in Colorado at the Broadmoor Art Academy (today the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center) with Boardman Robinson, whose methods encouraged the simplification of planes and forms.

Figure 6.01 | John Ward Lockwood, The Joke, c. 1945, 24" × 20", oil on canvas. Lockwood’s expressionistic figural painting was shown in the Eighth Annual Texas General Art Exhibition, 1946–1947.

Lockwood recognized the promise in William Doty’s offer and began his tenure as Chairman of Department of Art in Austin in 1938. There he could handcraft an entire department virtually from scratch, molding it in the avant-garde mode he felt represented the future of art. Lockwood’s biographer Charles Eldredge noted how Texas offered new vistas for the artist, in natural and urban scenes alike. Lockwood’s Houston Docks (1941, illustrated in chapter seven) conveys the channel’s frenetic energy with a rectilinear

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montage of convening seacraft. Dasburg’s influence is conveyed through Lockwood’s geometric framework. Lockwood painted expressionistically in style and color in the 1940s, as in the illustrated painting The Joke (c. 1945). In the 1950s, he shifted to another expressionistic mode, activating the canvas with what amounts to a disassembled geometry. The architectural underpinnings remain, but he organized the planes into a nonfigural dynamism, as in Untitled (1958). At UT, among Lockwood’s first

Figure 6.02 | John Ward Lockwood, Untitled, 1958, polymer on canvas, dimensions unavailable.

administrative initiatives was to bring in his New Mexican friend Loren Mozley as the department’s first painting instructor. Both were instrumental in bringing a contemporary aesthetic to Texas. As an infant, the Illinois-born Loren Mozley moved to New Mexico with his family. At age eleven, Mozley learned to paint with oils from one of his physician father’s Laguna Pueblo patients. Mozley then spent three years at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where, instead

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of completing his degree, he painted in Taos and served as secretary (in 1926 and 1927) to the modernist maven Mabel Dodge Luhan there. He and Lockwood were tightly involved with the thriving art colony in Taos, which included Kenneth Adams, John Marin, and Andrew Dasburg. Indeed, both Mozley’s and Lockwood’s compositions owe something to Dasburg’s interpretation of Cézanne’s geometric volumes. Mozley embarked on a European tour from 1929 to 1931, with an extended stay in France. Upon his return to the United States in 1931, he spent five years in New York, reconnecting with Marin and meeting Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. Mozley befriended Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Georgia O’Keeffe, driving with O’Keeffe from Lake George, New York, to Taos in 1936.7 Mozley wrote an entertaining and discerning essay, “Yankee Artist,” about John Marin for MoMA’s 1936 retrospective. Mozley’s Marin stands self-confidently outside trends, enamored equally of fishing and painting, managing to sell through Stieglitz’s 291 without a contract. Marin’s “tic,” Mozley observes, is his “instinctive personal gesture” and “intricate, bewildering, short-hand method.” He describes what Marin was like in the pre– World War I days in New York: “Those were the days of the Armory show, the days of Right and Wrong in art, of taking sides. A whole generation of excited fellows gathered around 291. . . . Marin did his abstractions with the rest but he could not afford to spend much time in hullabaloo. The movement mainly gave him courage to do as he pleased. That is about the extent of Marin as a ‘Modern’ artist. He stuck to Nature.”8 As an artist, Mozley

never seriously engaged Marin’s “short-hand method,” but here he might as well be discussing his own aesthetic philosophy, especially about not spending time in “hullabaloo” and sticking to “Nature.” Mozley described himself as “a child of the Cubist order,” but emphasized that he did “not distort for fun.”9 He built his compositions up densely and assuredly, employing what the curator Judy Tedford Deaton refers to as “structural integrity.” According to Deaton, Mozley shared Marin’s “insistence on direct references to nature while emphasizing the sensation nature evoked.”10 The artist Roger Winter, who enrolled in numerous UT Austin courses led by Mozley, finds his former teacher’s compositions to be “as specifically planned as an

Figure 6.03 | Loren Mozley, Ranchos Church, 1937, block print, 6" × 5". Mozley made this high contrast, dramatic block print of the back of Ranchos de Taos Church for a calendar featuring original prints by artists of the Taos area shortly after returning to New Mexico from New York; a year later Mozley moved to Texas.

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architect’s building before construction begins.”11 Mozley’s devout Catholicism proved to be another mooring, contributing to his romantic, at times nostalgic content. These factors set Mozley apart from contemporaries who might have experimented formally without the iconographic anchor. Mozley’s sensibility comes to the fore in Winter Fields (1948), a painting he considered among his

Figure 6.04 | Loren Mozley, Winter Fields, 1948, oil on canvas, 24" × 30".

finest. Two dead magpies fill half the horizontal painting, balanced by twigs of milkweed pods.12 The birds’ white feathers echo the wintry ground (even the brushstroke feels frosty), distant sky, and mountains, just as the mountain’s parallel ridges echo delineations in the magpies’ feathers. Iconic like an altarpiece, Mozley’s assiduously developed tripartite structure centers the mountain at the top.

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Perhaps sheer coincidence accounts for the painting’s similarity to a work by one of the most popular American painters. The title of Andrew Wyeth’s Winter Fields (1942) is identical to Mozley’s, and the subjects closely align. Wyeth’s tempera depicts a crow’s lifeless body, which is placed horizontally across the foreground. His Winter Fields was exhibited at least twice in New York before 1948 (the date of Mozley’s oil) and was reproduced in MoMA’s American Realist and Magic Realists catalogue (1945). Whether or not Mozley knew of the Wyeth tempera, a comparison between the two works is telling. Both take liberties with linear perspective to accentuate the deceased foreground creatures. In defiance of traditional perspectival laws, Mozley’s birds appear stacked one on top of the other;

Figure 6.05 | Andrew Wyeth, Winter Fields, 1942, tempera, oil, ink, and gesso on composition board, 175∕16" × 41".

Wyeth depicts his crow as if seen from the ground, a view that should obscure the house and barn clearly seen in the distance. Wyeth’s manipulated perspective lends a surreal tenor. In lieu of Wyeth’s painstaking detail, Mozley blocks his forms out into discretely modeled sections. Wyeth’s descriptive exactitude was excoriated by the critic Clement Greenberg during this period. In a Nation review of a landscape survey at the Brooklyn Museum in 1945, Greenberg lamented how, after journeying pictorially from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries, he arrived at “an anti-climactic stop with a dead bird in the grass executed with meretricious and astounding precision by the young American Andrew Wyeth.”13 “Meretricious” was Greenberg’s way of condemning the

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painting’s superficial and vulgar attractiveness. It fit Greenberg’s definition of kitsch, the term he legendarily defined in 1939 in the essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Kitsch art stood for false or “ersatz culture” like that evinced by Tin Pan Alley productions and Norman Rockwell–type paintings. During this era, Greenberg was delimiting an American modernism whose future lay in nonrepresentation and abstraction. His dismissal of Wyeth was intertwined with the young artist’s immense national popularity; the twenty-year-old painter had sold out his first exhibition at New York’s Macbeth Gallery in 1937, and national magazines such as Life, Time, and Newsweek praised his realism. What Greenberg called “meretricious” in Wyeth’s Winter Fields is in fact a keen manifestation of the sublimity in the American landscape. Wyeth inherited the traditions of the Hudson River school and the Realism of Thomas Eakins, situating them within a disrupted, wartime United States.14 In the same decade that the soon-to-be-foremost American formalist critic shunned Wyeth’s literalness, Loren Mozley intuitively opted for a deliberately worked, highly symbolic rendering. Mozley’s Winter Fields originated in Cubism, the movement that Greenberg saw as the parent of twentieth-century modernism. This is not to argue that Mozley paid homage to Wyeth or that he intentionally eschewed closely observed realism (although Mozley’s painting does align with magical realism). Yet Mozley’s rigorous, purposefully composed work succeeds through its symbolic, abstracted patterns that unify sky, earth, and life. He presents a Cubistderived American modernism inflected by the western landscape.

Other Mozley paintings display comparable rigor. The same year he painted Winter Fields, he developed an enigmatic rocky scene in The Grotto (1948). The palpably rocklike forms are vertically arranged, nearly merging with the background sky. The linearity of the dead tree that extends from the bottom to the top of the canvas sets off the distinctively modeled stone shapes. Depicting a classic Texas subject, Big Pecans (1952), with its grand trees, feels straightforward. Yet he constructed the entire surface of inflected planes of shadows and trees, lending a rigorous solidity to the whole. Mozley’s labyrinthine, autumn-colored ground complements the intertwined branches and shadows of the pecans.

Figure 6.06 | Loren Mozley, The Grotto, 1948, oil on gessoed panel, 30" × 24".

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Figure 6.07 | Loren Mozley, Big Pecans, 1952, 30" × 24".

From 1938 to 1948, the University of Texas’s College of Fine Arts curated or hosted over eighty exhibitions, including traveling exhibitions from MoMA and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Alongside the higher-profile shows, university students were given semiannual exhibitions on campus, a rarity in those days. Meanwhile, all the new professors exhibited in juried regional, circuit, and national exhibitions.15 Lockwood and William Doty hired Boyer Gonzalez, a Galveston native who was teaching in San Antonio, in 1939, as well as the Houston sculptor William McVey. Eugene Trentham, a painter,

arrived in 1940, as did the sculptor Charles Umlauf, the painter Everett Spruce, and the printmaker Constance Forsyth. Julius Woeltz of San Antonio joined the faculty in 1941. Lockwood lured William Lester from Dallas in 1942. Lockwood returned to military duty that year as an army captain, and Mozley filled in as acting chairman of the department. Lockwood’s artistic output was severely curtailed during the war. He lamented: “The loss of my production of paintings during the latter war years had resulted in an insufficient amount of recent work to adequately participate in current exhibitions or to supply dealers.”16 After a year’s leave of absence from the university, in 1947 he was offered a position at the University of California, Berkeley. That same year, Kelly Fearing relocated to Austin from Fort Worth. Seymour Fogel and Ralph White, Jr., expanded the painting faculty in 1946. White had studied at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and the University of Minnesota. Upon graduation in 1942, he became an Army Air Corps test pilot, flying B-24 bombers and training other young pilots. During the war, he grew close to Ward Lockwood, who was stationed at the same base. After the war, he studied at the Pratt Institute in New York and then, at Lockwood’s urging, joined the UT faculty. Paul Hatgil, a ceramist, and the painter John Guerin both joined in 1953, the painter Michael Frary in 1952; in 1954, Donald Weismann came on board as department chairman. Never before in the state had a large group of artists with modernist tendencies worked together on a single campus in a relatively small city. (Austin’s population was about 100,000 in the 1950s.)

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Figure 6.10 | Ralph White, Industrial Landscape, The Austin Concrete Co., 1956, oil on Masonite, 30" × 48".

Still, the university teachers never cohered as a school of like-minded aesthetic explorers. Perhaps in part because of individual egos and the demands of their day jobs, a number of UT Austin artists worked side by side but more or less alone, making distinctive, independent contributions to Texas modernism. In all cases, the steadiness of a teaching position allowed them to take risks in their own work. Everett Spruce

Top | Figure 6.08 | John Guerin, Mysterious Coastline, 1958, oil on Masonite, 21½" × 17". Bottom | Figure 6.09 | Ralph White, The Road to San Antonio from Austin, c. 1950s, oil on Masonite, 32" × 48".

Despite the university group’s solitary styles, one can trace themes and affinities that bind some of them as kindred artists. The two most frequently paired painters, Everett Spruce and William Lester, for example, nearly always rooted their works in landscape. Although Lester eventually strayed entirely from the subject, Spruce’s paintings always retained overt manifestations or vestiges of horizon. Spruce’s work underwent vast changes from his Dallas Nine days. The year he arrived at the

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University of Texas, he created the small Hollow Tree (1940; see Fig. 2.15), rich with soft greens and creams, in which some of the foliage begins to merge with atmosphere and sky. A later example, Canyon at Night (1945), clearly depicts a landscape with high rocks, boulders, and a stream running horizontally across the picture plane. In the five years between the two paintings, Spruce’s brushwork loosened up,

Figure 6.11 | Everett Spruce, Brushy Hillside, 1957, oil on composition board, 24" × 30" (61 × 76.2 cm).

allowing him to render the distant cliff and clouds softly and to connect the various planes together with shades of taupe. Night Landscape I (1943) is subdivided into triangular planes. In paintings such as these, Spruce symbolically transformed the landscape (as in Broken Tree, 1950) or applied a Postimpressionist touch (as in Cathedral Mountain, 1948–1950). In works of the later 1950s

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such as The Cliff (1957), his colors are higher keyed and the brushstrokes become discrete, merging together into a dappled landscape. Low Tide in the Gulf (1957–1958, Barrett Collection) features Spruce’s idiosyncratic flattened, truncated tree at the center. The surfaces shimmer, the result of small strokes of oranges, reds, yellows, and pale blues. The historian Francine Carraro astutely pointed out that natural elements in Spruce’s work such as trees, plants, and rocks “lose their distinctions and are sacrificed for the total expression.”17 Works of the 1950s and 1960s demonstrate how Spruce’s interest in activating the entire surface dominates, akin to the “all-over” painting practiced by Abstract Expressionists, but uniquely manifest in his

Figure 6.12 | Everett Spruce, Billboard, 1960, oil on board, 20" × 24".

canvases. Pecos River (1958) depicts a specific riverbank in Texas with a universalizing mark of short, curved, or jagged brushwork. Later, Spruce virtually obliterated the scene, as in a series from the late 1950s and 1960s. Spruce’s Brushy Hillside (1957) caught the attention of John I. H. Baur, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art (and later its director), who recommended purchasing it out of one of the museum’s annual exhibitions. In Billboard (1960), the ostensible subject serves only as point of departure. Spruce retains the horizon line (a hallmark of his work) and even the sense of receding planes, yet flecks the canvas with myriad jewel-like colored spots of light. Likewise in Rider (1961), which features a horse and helmeted rider barreling toward the viewer, the drama is intensified by scratchy staccato lines. Through sheer observation of human movement and his restricted application of high-key colors, Spruce invented an Expressionist-Futurist mark in these late 1950s and 1960s painting. Instead of freezing his motion into static planes, he gave it continual life. They connote Texas through their adherence to atmospheric changes. As Time magazine noted in 1957, Everett Spruce was “the other kind of painter.” The forty-eightyear-old did not “spend his youth in the ateliers of Montparnasse and the arms of his models. Nor did he return wearing beard and beret.”18 Spruce’s statement in Time describes not only his own work but also that of many of his peers: “Some artists who live in the East get themselves into a kind of prison of form and expression. In Texas I have been free to do the work I like. I’m not bound.”19

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William Lester William Lester, the painter and close friend from Dallas with whom Spruce is regularly paired, likewise underwent an artistic evolution in Austin. As Lester said, “My color needed strength, more visual force, more drama. I wanted to be sure also that the shapes gained maximum strength.”20 Lester’s paintings from the 1940s are southwestern hued, in colors of clay, sun, and stone. His architectural structures—as in House Near Terlingua (1954, Barrett

Figure 6.13 | William Lester, Possessed by the Trees, 1952, oil on board, 24" × 34".

Collection) or Old Fort Davis (1949)—are at once solid and transparent, showing the effects of years in the harsh Texas climate. Lester adopted the tectonic theme so prevalent at UT, painting haunted ruins in works such as Possessed by the Trees (1952). In his landscapes, layers of rock are architectonically configured. Even Lester’s later, wholly nonobjective pink-and-orange-toned abstractions tend to be divided into block-like forms. Lester’s people, depicted in a heavy manner that makes them as solid as rocks, forecast the work of later artists such as

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Top | Figure 6.14 | William Lester, Untitled [The Beetle], c. 1945, oil on Masonite, 15" × 12". Bottom | Figure 6.15 | Richard D. Hardin, San Angelo Dust Storm, 1954–1955, oil on board, 24" × 30".

David Bates (born in Dallas, 1952). Lester’s hardened forms are most evident in works such as Carnival Flags (1947) and Carnival (c. 1950s). His frequent return to the theme of animals and insects is oddly charming, often consisting of a thickly outlined single creature that occupies the full frame. In a Surrealist’s hands, insects are ominous harbingers of death and decay; consider the ants in Salvador Dalí’s iconic Persistence of Memory (1931) or the splayed insect by Alberto Giacometti mentioned in chapter eight. Dallas Regionalists took a more humorous approach, as in a lost painting by Otis Dozier in which a gigantic grasshopper places its legs victoriously across the back of a collapsed (evidently dead) farmer (Grasshopper and Farmer, 1937). Dozier made a variant of the theme in the lithograph Grasshopper and Farmer (also 1937). The series was darkly comic, given the Dust Bowl– era truth behind the despoiling insects. Understandably, bugs in Texas are commonly viewed as pests. Lester maintains the Regionalist playfulness, elevating his animals and bugs to full-size portraits, transforming them into symbolic stand-ins for the state itself, as in Figure 6.14. Lester shifted toward nonobjective painting in the 1950s and returned again to the natural landscape in later decades. Unlike Spruce, Lester later discarded any pretense of figurative imagery. Elements of Lester’s sensibility were conveyed to and internalized by his students. One of them, Richard D. Hardin (born in 1924 in Stephenville, Texas), studied with Spruce and Umlauf as well and spent two months apprenticing with Seymour Fogel, working on The Creation, the University Baptist Church mural just off campus. To transfer the

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design for the painting onto the wall, Hardin dusted powdered charcoal through holes pricked in the paper, in the traditional manner of Renaissance frescoes. After graduating from the university in 1952, Hardin traveled to New Zealand to study the cultures of Oceania, in emulation of Paul Gauguin. After painting and drawing motifs from his travels, Hardin revisited local scenes while teaching at San Angelo State University, in west-central Texas, from 1952 to 1954. San Angelo Dust Storm (1954–1955) recreates a meteorological phenomenon common in Texas. The painting evokes the storm’s aftermath, the dust-filled sky bathing the entire scene in an uncanny golden-orange hue. Like Texas regionalist works, Hardin’s painting underscores human insignificance in the face of nature. The scraping of the palette knife, for example, effectively undermines the buildings’ sheltering capacity within the larger natural framework.

Among Umlauf ’s earliest sculptures, Caryatid (1937, marble, 10") suggests a direct response to André Derain’s Crouching Man (1907, stone) and Modigliani’s own Caryatid (1914). Umlauf arrived in Austin in 1941 and taught there for four decades. He is not generally considered a modernist because of the figurative quality of most of his oeuvre as well as its overt Christianity. Even his technique

Charles Umlauf Although Charles Umlauf (1911–1994) was born in Michigan, his sculptural style was born in Chicago, the city that invented the modern skyscraper and was home to vast holdings of classical and modern works at the Art Institute. Unlike other artists whose work become looser and increasingly more abstract over time, Umlauf began under the European influence of modern sculpture and revisited it throughout his career. The works for which he is best known, however, are single figures or groups of elongated, sinewy subjects whose faces frequently turn upward. The trope of the upturned face often has religious connotations; many of his works are Christian themed.

Figure 6.16 | Charles Umlauf, Holy Family/Flight into Egypt, 1940, stoneware with slip.

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was thousands of years old: he used the lost-wax (or cire perdue) method to cast bronze, a process used in ancient Greece. He was comfortable working in any sculptural medium, including terra-cotta and stone. Yet one need only look at the exaggerated countenances and Mannerist bodies featured in his figurative work to find a departure from the past. Importantly, Umlauf treats matters of faith with

Figure 6.17 | Charles Umlauf, Refugees, 1939, plaster, 41" high.

a spontaneous touch, melding a venerable tradition with a contemporary spirit. As for his abstract sculptures, the primordial semiformation of Eve and Adam (both 1943, lignum vitae, 16" and 20") results in severely abstracted forms. Umlauf ’s experimentation with abstraction is vividly apparent in two versions of his Mother and Child (1947 and 1950) and his fully nonrepresentational Supplication (1949). (Umlauf had created a figurative image of Supplication in 1947.)21 The 1949 version demonstrates Umlauf ’s skill at shifting from a mimetic to an abstract incarnation of a single motif.22 Umlauf ’s Holy Family (also known as Flight into Egypt), an atypical rendition of a classic theme, includes five figures in lieu of the traditional three (Virgin, Joseph, and infant Christ). Francine Carraro has offered several plausible explanations for Umlauf ’s curious additions and how the figures in the sculptural group relate to one another. Whatever the sculptor had in mind, his novel departure from tradition was in itself a modernist gesture, perhaps an attempt to reach a deeper aspect of the biblical story. Today the eight-acre site of Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum in Austin is dotted with his sculptures; a planned expansion will incorporate his adjacent former home and studio. Charles and Angeline (Allen) Umlauf ’s six children inherited their artistic genes. One of them, Karl Umlauf (born in Chicago, 1939), studied at UT Austin with Guerin, Lester, Mozley, and Spruce. Painted when he was twenty, Slag Pullers (1959) touches on his lifelong interests—industry, mechanization, geology— that still shape Karl Umlauf ’s art today.

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Figure 6.18 | Karl Umlauf, Slag Pullers, 1959, oil on linen, 36" × 48".

Constance Forsyth

1930). After Broadmoor, she assisted Thomas Hart Benton on his murals for Chicago’s Century of Progress International Exposition in 1933. She then taught in Indianapolis, first privately and then for four years as an instructor at the John Herron Art Institute. Forsyth arrived in Texas—at age thirtysix—well equipped for the role she went on to hold for more than three decades. Lockwood’s decision to hire a female printmaker appears enlightened in retrospect. Indeed, according to the standards of the day, it was. Yet a letter from him to her mitigates the impact of his equal-opportunity gesture: “The job will consist of various duties: the teaching of a class or two, acting as an exhibition secretary, keeping track of models for several classes, answering some letters that come to me, acting as a buffer between me and the angry mob, and performing other miscellaneous duties. The person employed will probably not have as much time for his own creative endeavors as do the other members of the faculty.”23 As Lockwood

Ward Lockwood met Constance Forsyth (1903– 1987) in 1932, when she participated in the first lithography class at the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado Springs. He wasted little time in bringing her to Austin in 1940 to found the printmaking department at UT. She was born in Indianapolis; her father, William Forsyth, a leading Indiana painter and member of the Hoosier Group, trained his daughter from a young age. Her degree in chemistry (Butler University, Indianapolis) proved useful in a career spent working with solvents and solutions. She trained during two separate stays at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1927–1928, Figure 6.19 | Constance Forsyth, The Hefties, 1948, line drypoint on paper, 5⅞" × 7½".

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foresaw, Forsyth was frequently preoccupied with administrative duties and teaching undergraduates, and eventually graduate students as well. But the five-foot-tall, one-hundred-pound, bobbed-haired Hoosier was a powerhouse, running her print department and even making time for watercolor forays, as in West Texas Mesa, which is dominated by the roiling clouds of the Texas sky. She produced strikingly Expressionist etchings and lithographs, such as The Hefties (1948, line drypoint on paper),

Deep Valley Rocks (c. 1950s, etching with aquatint), Evening Sky (1955), Evening Clouds (1950s, aquatint), and A High Place (1963, etching with aquatint, or spit bite aquatint). The Hefties is composed of a handful of etched, velvety black lines that cohere into a pair of elegant mountains. Forsyth’s ability to restrict her mark in The Hefties is laudable. Her experimental, darker works bespeak a willingness to go against the representational grain, locating the underlying energetic structure in the landscape.24 Seymour Fogel Among the many first-rate artists transplanted to Texas, Seymour Fogel (1911–1984) stood out for a wide range of distinctive styles that cohere through adroit draftsmanship, judicious use of color, and, during his most celebrated period, swirling inventive geometries.25 Fogel’s artistic formation began in the 1930s in his home state of New York. He trained at the Art Students League in 1929 and won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design. Although never a member of the New York School, like many of those artists he joined the Federal Art Project’s mural program.26 Fogel won numerous mural commissions between 1934 and 1941, including a major project for the Social Security Building in Washington, D.C. He painted murals side by side with Philip Guston and Ben Shahn. As an apprentice to Diego Rivera, Fogel was on the scene of one of the most controversial debacles of the 1930s, when Rivera was famously “called down from the scaffold” of his Rockefeller Center mural. The Mexican muralist was paid and then summarily dismissed for

Figure 6.20 | Constance Forsyth, West Texas Mesa, c. 1950s, watercolor on paper, 13½" × 12½".

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including a clearly legible portrait of Vladimir Lenin in the work.27 At least one of Fogel’s murals likewise sparked extensive controversy, though not the lasting notoriety of Rivera’s Rockefeller Center commission. Fogel’s winning design for the post office in Safford, Arizona, aroused the public’s ire for its sympathetic depiction of Apache tribe members. The protestors, write Jared A. Fogel and Robert L. Stevens, “reflected the prevailing prejudice that viewed American Indians in Arizona as worthless degenerates. . . . A widespread view asserted that ‘God knew what he was about in making the white man victorious on this continent.’”28 Fogel overhauled the designs for the cycle, called the History of the Gila Valley, but one Indian-themed panel that the artist reworked repeatedly was nevertheless eliminated. All of Fogel’s mural work from the 1930s and 1940s maintains the socially conscious style of Rivera and American Depression-era work. His enormous mural (covering nearly 750 square feet) for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, The Rehabilitation of the People (no longer extant), placed two women in compositionally prominent positions. Although not included in Dorothy C. Miller’s Americans series of exhibitions at MoMA (1946– 1968; see chapter nine for a discussion of the series), Fogel had been honored for his mural work at MoMA years earlier. In 1936, Holger Cahill, then director of the Federal Art Project, and Miller selected Fogel for New Horizons in American Art.29 The massive exhibition, featuring hundreds of objects, saluted artists working on the Federal Art Project. In addition to mural studies, there were easel paintings, graphic arts, sculpture, “allied arts” (their Facing | Figure 6.21 | Seymour Fogel at work on his New York World’s Fair Mural, 1939.

label for works made as part of the wpa-era project the Index of American Design), and “children’s work,” part of a Depression-era educational initiative.30 Cahill wanted to expressly demonstrate how “for the first time in American art history a direct and sound relationship has been established between the American public and the artist.”31 The two Fogel works in New Horizons in American Art related to his mural for Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn. Among the significant individual artists in the gargantuan exhibition were James Brooks (identified as the New Yorker he had become since leaving Texas in his youth), Philip Evergood, Arshile Gorky, Ilya Bolotowsky, Byron Browne, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Willem de Kooning, Paul Kelpe, Louis Guglielmi, Karl Knaths, Jack Levine, Loren MacIver, Joseph Stella, Rufino Tamayo, Anton Refregier, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi.32 The Constructivist painter Paul Kelpe (1902 [Minden, Germany]–1985 [Austin, Texas]) was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, serving as secretary of the organization from 1936 to 1941. Years later, Kelpe taught for six years at East Texas Teachers College (now Texas a&m–Commerce) and moved to Austin in 1969. On the eve of World War II, MoMA optimistically posited that these artists bridged the gap between themselves and their public. The irony of how far apart those two elements—artist and public—would grow over the next two decades was not yet palpable. Fogel developed a purely nonobjective style that, although it stood in radical relief to his wpa mural work, found its cornerstone in his early experience and training.

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After the war, Fogel joined the relatively young and visually nuanced Department of Art at UT, remaining there for eight years. His art underwent rapid formal changes in Texas, suggesting that he felt at ease, free to explore avant-garde modes. He invented Cubist-inspired compositions with primary colors, which were familiar from Piet Mondrian’s reduced palette. In Fogel’s female figures and in works such as Kachinas (c. 1947) and Musicians (c. 1946), he shows an affinity for Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921), the emblem of synthetic Cubism. He may have modeled one painting, The Ladies (c. 1946, oil on canvas, 40" × 30"), after the Spanish artist’s Girl before Mirror (1932). Both Picasso paintings, housed at MoMA, served as touchstones for countless modernist artists.33 Fogel himself visited MoMA regularly as a student. His homages to modernist European masters are characteristic of how he methodically worked through formal problems before coming into his own style. In the 1950s, the artist and historian Ralph Pearson described Fogel’s paintings as embodiments of the times: “They are related to what one imagines nuclear fission must be; the atoms of emotion are split before our eyes and chase each other in endless circlings of check-reined turmoil of color, space, and line.”34 The impetus for one exceptional series came directly from the local geology: Texas limestone. Ubiquitous in outcroppings and streams throughout the central part of the state, cream-colored limestone filled with fossilized shells from the Cretaceous period covers numerous buildings on the UT campus. When limestone is cut into blocks or polished into veneer, striated and coiled shellshaped indentations pit the smooth surface. The Art Deco Texas Memorial Museum on campus,

initially funded in 1935 through the Texas Centennial Celebration Bill, extravagantly displays the material. The works in Fogel’s “Limestone” series (c. 1948–1950) integrally relate to his lifelong dedication to architecture. The dominant off-white color in Limestone No. 10 (1950) approximates the stone’s surface, while the blacks echo the surface hollows. Into this, Fogel scratches networks of lines that intimate a metaphoric allusion to geologic time. At the same time, the technique used in the Limestone paintings recalls the automatic drawings of Surrealists such as Joan Miró and André Masson. In Red and Black, a stylistic variant within the “Limestone” series, Fogel pares down the motif with a looser, freer line. By restricting his palette

Figure 6.22 | Seymour Fogel, Limestone No. 10, 1950, oil on Masonite, 30" × 40".

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Figure 6.23 | Seymour Fogel, Red and Black, c. 1951, oil on Masonite, 20" × 24".

Figure 6.24 | Seymour Fogel, Conclave, 1950, oil on board, 48" × 84". Conclave belongs to Fogel’s “Flagellants” period; a gathering of figures can be detected in the network of lines.

almost exclusively to red and black, the artist achieves depth through subtle textures and variations in hue. He frequently used a palette knife, manipulating the paint into smooth flattened areas and denser regions. The palette knife summons the image of a stonemason’s trowel, a coincidence that nevertheless expands the architectural metaphor. Echoes of the “Limestone” series can be felt in the paint application used in an entirely different, ambitious series of paintings loosely grouped together as “The Flagellants.” As in some of Umlauf ’s sculpture, the series revolves around theological concerns. With Conclave (1950), the flagellant reference expands to suggest a group of cardinals or bishops at a cloistered meeting; their human forms are visible within the painting’s vast network

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of skeins, triangles, polygons, and palette-knife incisions. With its prominent reference to the medieval religious practice of self-mortification, Fogel’s “Flagellants” series demonstrates that fully abstracted linear geometries are capable of profound, thematic communication. That is to say, Fogel consistently returns to the human condition within the modern world. Fogel took on many mural commissions in Austin, Houston, and Waco, using a new technical process involving ethyl silicate that he developed to increase the murals’ lives. In 1950, Art Digest published “Modern Art in a Texas Church,” an essay on Seymour Fogel and Charles Umlauf. Both artists were prominent nationally, but the essay expanded their reach. Their modernist contribution to the UT Baptist Student Union (still in place at today’s University Baptist Church) recalls Toni LaSelle’s work on the Little Chapel-in-the-Woods in Denton. Ralph Pearson began the essay enthusiastically: “An event has transpired in the heart of Texas, at the capital and university city of Austin. . . . A church has used distinguished artists of its own home area to decorate one of its buildings. Both Umlauf and Fogel have achieved distinction in the vision and execution of these outstanding religious works. Both have demonstrated that ‘religious art,’ in the words of Fogel, ‘can be more contemporary and meaningful than is a display of saints.’”35 Fogel merged his figurative skills with a symmetrically patterned geometry— suitable for the subject of Genesis—but radical, as the Art Digest recognized, for church decoration. Fogel’s mural for the newly constructed Austin American National Bank in 1954 was also made with ethyl silicate. It could be applied freely like

fresco, but was impervious to atmospheric damages. The downtown building, at Sixth and Colorado Streets, holistically united modernist architecture by the prominent architect Howard Barr (for his firm Kuehne, Brooks and Barr), interior by Florence Knoll, and art by Seymour Fogel. Fogel grounded the mural with horizontal and vertical lines, across which run dynamic diagonals. He filled some of the resultant rectangles, diamonds, triangles, and trapezoids with solid colors, enhancing the threedimensional effect. The overall design, especially when seen in situ, high on the wall, resembles an anamorphic perspectival study. The predominantly sky-blue color lends atmospheric depth, suggesting

Figure 6.25 | Seymour Fogel with a model of his American National Bank mural, Austin, 1954. Fogel’s painting The Flagellants, 1950, is in the background. The restored mural, 28' × 10' 8", can be visited today in the McGarrah Jessee building at Sixth and Colorado.

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that the mural abstractly interprets the urban landscape of Austin in the 1950s. Although one of Fogel’s avant-garde Houston murals was destroyed, the American National Bank mural survives thanks to the efforts of a few dedicated citizens and the Texas Historical Commission. Art in America’s longtime critic, Dorothy Gees Seckler, selected Fogel as a “New Talent” artist in 1956 on the eve of his exhibition at the DuveenGraham Modern Art gallery, listing among his accolades the American National Bank mural, which was featured in the magazines Fortune and Interiors and in the Gold Medal Exhibition at the Architectural League of New York in 1950. Seckler added that Fogel had recently won the $1,000 purchase prize for The City in the Annual Texas Painting and Sculpture Exhibition of 1955; as a result, the Dallas

Figure 6.26 | Dallas Morning News photograph of D. D. Feldman, Jack Boynton, and Seymour Fogel, May 27, 1958, at the D. D. Feldman awards. Donald L. Weismann’s c. 1958 painting Electronic Icon (today in the Blanton Museum of Art) is partially visible in the background.

Museum of Art purchased the painting.36 The City (1955, oil on composition board, dma), a vast network of sharp lines in dominant gray tones, indicates that he and Donald Weismann were artistic comrades in their fevered interpretation of urban motifs. In the article “Architecture and Modern Art,” cowritten in 1952 by Seymour Fogel and the architectural historian and professor Winston Weisman, the authors bemoan the lack of integration between painting, sculpture, and architecture. These three arts should come together, they argue, “into a modern symphony of creative form.” (Fogel and Weisman seemed unaware that just such a “modern symphony” existed in Denton at the Little Chapelin-the-Woods.) One of the major obstacles in the path of integration, they point out, is the architects themselves, who seem aggressively hostile to the idea.37 The authors continue in a section that clearly is Fogel’s voice: “To enumerate just a few ways in which murals could contribute to architectural form. Since color exercises such a direct and powerful influence upon space, murals can enhance the architect’s design; or help solve some of his more difficult spatial problems. They can be used as space modulators to subdivide large areas into more pleasing volumes. Static areas can be activated by the use of color tensions. In cases where the opposite effect is wanted, for example in hospitals, color compositions can produce an atmosphere of serenity and quiet.”38 Much later in his career, Fogel created a freestanding sculptural mural for the famed Bellevue Hospital in New York, an indication of how he hoped architectural murals would encourage “serenity and quiet.”39

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Donald Weismann Donald Weismann (1914–2007), another William Doty hire, came from the University of Kentucky in 1954 as the department’s first art-historian chairman. An avid reader and prolific writer, Weismann’s architectural training is evident throughout much of his painted oeuvre. The Blanton Museum at UT Austin gained two significant Weismann paintings, the deep matte blue Night Works (c. 1958, oil on duck canvas) and the golden-tinted Electronic Icon (c. 1958, oil on duck canvas), as gifts of D. D. Feldman. The D.  D. Feldman Invitational Exhibitions selected

Figure 6.27 | Donald L. Weismann, Sic Transit, 1956, oil on canvas, 40" × 60".

artists from across the state; the celebrated invitees in 1958 included David Adickes, Ethel Broadnax, Cecil Casebier, Dan Wingren, Luis Eades, Chapman Kelley, Perry Nichols, George Pinca, Dickson Reeder, McKie Trotter, and Hiram Williams. In a photograph in the Dallas Morning News, Jack Boynton of Houston and Seymour Fogel of Austin stand in front of Weismann’s Electronic Icon at the Dallas Public Library. By the late 1950s, the Feldman competitions were “assuming the stature” of the Texas Annuals, with a key difference. Feldman’s “chief scout” culled the invitation-only entries before an outside judge determined the award winners.40

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Many of Weismann’s publications addressed the function of art education and criticism. In one essay written at the University of Kentucky, he detailed how his department revised what it considered a failed method of teaching introductory art history. Forsaking the tradition of using a single instructor to impart facts and doctrine, the new course involved six professors who spent extensive time fostering and encouraging broad-based discussions with students, as well as walking together around the campus and interrogating architectural function. In one meeting, the faculty members made presentations on disparate objects, including a copy of Fra Angelico’s Madonna and Child, a Chinese teacup, and a stalk of corn. The professors elaborated on the organic themes previously discerned by the students: “Emphasis was given the logic of form and the pervasiveness of this in life in general. On this basis the corn stalk could be considered in many of the same ways that the Fra Angelico or the teacup could be. . . . Without spelling out what we were doing, we allowed for some kind of resonance of biological processes with the fine arts. Left for them to make— if they were ready—was the easy transition from specifically sexual emotions to the transmuted aesthetic ones.”41 Weismann felt he and his colleagues were successful with the more engaged pedagogy, one that he brought to the University of Texas. His recognition of the interconnectivity of the natural and art worlds underlies his aesthetic philosophy. About the time when he cotaught an introductory art course, Weismann painted Sic Transit (1956), a dark-lavender-themed canvas characteristic of his abstracted architectonic paintings. The phrase “sic transit” is an abbreviated form of Sic

transit gloria mundi, “Thus passes the glory of the world.” Weismann’s Sic Transit is a modernist memento mori. On either side of the canvas, rectilinear scaffolding rises to flank the horizon-level cream and white structures. A vast central area is seemingly empty, filled with the purple tones of a night sky. The presence of man-made buildings is countered by their absence in the area of the purple void, a reminder of the fleeting nature of existence. Weismann’s writings and paintings functioned in tandem, with contemporary depictions that hark back to age-old themes. Michael Frary Michael Frary (1918–2005) was memorable for his movie-star good looks and a talent to match. He held positions as art director at Goldwyn Studios (part of Paramount Pictures) and later at Universal Studios, teaching painting at night. He graduated with a BA in architecture from the University of Southern California, followed by an mfa in painting in 1941. His architectural background and interest registered itself throughout his career, in paintings of buildings as well as landscapes and still lifes. His architectonic approach to composition is sometimes evident in the physical buildup of his paint, at other times in the actual blocks of wood Frary affixed to paintings. Startlingly prolific, he worked with quick efficiency in watercolor while creating a vast and varied body of assiduously developed oil and encaustic paintings. Frary toyed with mimetic representation and pure abstraction, to stunning effect in Abstraction (1940), made during his graduate school period.

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Working in an atypical, fully nonobjective mode, Frary punctuated the picture plane with acute angles. In the choice between stressing the picture plane’s flatness or its three-dimensional potential, Frary opted for the latter. The painting makes for an intriguing comparison with Seymour Fogel’s American National Bank mural of 1954. Both artists, indebted to and reliant on architectural principles, used foundational geometric lines to form an illusionistic space independent of representation. Frary eventually accepted a studio art position at the University of California, Los Angeles. Marion Koogler McNay coaxed him to San Antonio in

Top | Figure 6.28 | Michael Frary, Abstraction, 1940, oil on board, 20" × 23½". Bottom | Figure 6.29 | Michael Frary, Still Life with White Platter, 1952, oil and collage on board, 29½" × 48".

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1949 to become the artist in residence and faculty chairman at the art institute bearing her name.42 While working in San Antonio, his Red Apartment House won the $100 “Foley’s of Houston” award at the Fourteenth Texas Annual in 1952. That year he moved to Austin as an assistant professor at the University of Texas. In California, Frary had developed a “Totems” motif that he continued in Texas. These paintings feature multiple stalagmite-like poles placed iconically within a background. Sometimes they bear rich ornamentation, as in the jeweled, red-toned Forgotten Totem (1948). In others, such as the magnificent Secret Totem (1954), the vertical forms become ancient, weathered monoliths. Like a meeting of elders, the structures in Secret Totems gather around the moon’s reflection in a tide pool. Frary used the Surrealist technique of decalcomania, pressing and peeling wet paint into networks of cellulose. Secret Totems engages a modernist method to render a primeval scene, an effect seen also in Kelly Fearing’s arcane, craggy landscapes and Charles Williams’s primitivistic totems. They retain a highly abstracted anthropomorphism. San Antonio By midcentury, UT Austin had eclipsed San Antonio as a leader in modernist education, but the latter town had deeper artistic roots. The city’s history with Mexico had long attracted artists. The San Antonio Art League recently celebrated its centennial; the league emerged in 1894, and was reorganized in 1912 (with Robert Onderdonk among those at the helm).43 Collaboration among San Antonio Top | Figure 6.30 | Michael Frary, Red Apartment House, 1952, oil on panel, 47½" × 36¼". Bottom | Figure 6.31 | Michael Frary, Secret Totem, 1958, oil on Masonite, 30" × 40".

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museums resulted in the founding of the Witte Memorial Museum (today the Witte Museum) in 1926. Forrest Bess, Ben L. Culwell, Michael Frary, Ola McNeill Davidson, Octavio Medellín, and Olin Travis, among many others, had strong ties to San Antonio through birth, education, teaching, or competitions there, as in the pre-Depression wildflower competitions. Marion Koogler McNay’s home was constructed in 1927 and given to the city in 1950. Bill Reily (see chapter seven and Fig. 7.05), a startlingly dynamic painter, worked also in three dimensions, as seen in his longhorn totem. Chester Toney

Figure 6.32 | Bill Reily, Untitled [Thin Longhorn], n.d., wood, 18" × 4" × 4".

Chester Toney (1925–1960) was born in Littlefield, Texas.44 After studying in New Mexico and at the San Antonio Art Institute, he settled in San Antonio and helped found the Men of Art Guild, a cooperative gallery of artists working in disparate styles but all dedicated to bringing contemporary art to San Antonio and to exhibiting as a group outside the city. They held exhibitions at the Art Center on Broadway and at the Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute.45 Largely composed of veterans, the Men of Art Guild was cofounded in 1952 by Cecil Casebier, Bill Reily, and Chester Toney. Other members were J. R. Fletcher, J. Medellin, George Pinca, Robert Reed Alex Sosa, and Jack Tinkle. Toney showed extensively in Texas, receiving numerous awards, including third place at the D. D. Feldman Invitational Exhibition in 1956, a cash award at the Texas Fine Arts Association exhibition, and the San Antonio Art League’s Artist of the Year award.

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Top | Figure 6.33 | Chester Toney, Submerged Memory of a Melody, 1951, oil and thread on Masonite, 9¼" × 21". Bottom | Figure 6.34 | Chester Toney, Reflections, 1956, oil on Masonite, 30" × 58".

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Toney’s paintings were highly structured. The common denominator, whether he engaged a postCubist planar geometry or a looser Expressionism, is a centrally anchored composition. One of Toney’s most abstract paintings is a small horizontal work on board painted in 1951. This unusual nonobjective painting features a winding ribbon traveling in, out, and across holes painted on the surface. While its planetary shapes suggest an outof-this-world space, the small painting is solidly anchored in a black ground under a cream sky. Toney teasingly exploited the play between opposed dynamics, “in” versus “out” and “foreground” versus “background.” Before his untimely death in his midthirties, he had fully embraced nonobjective painting. Hiram Williams The Pennsylvania native Hiram Williams (1917– 2003) joined the UT Austin faculty in 1954, driving through the Southwest after a yearlong teaching appointment at the University of Southern California. His new subject matter was inspired by the deserts he traversed on his way to Austin during an inhospitable late summer. Williams’s biographer, Robert Larson, observed, “Several canvasses emerged in which attempts were made to pin down the environment; to try to capture the sense of blasting heat that is so impressive to a newcomer.”46 Around this time, Williams contended with the influences of Picasso, Arshile Gorky, and the British painters Graham Sutherland and Francis Bacon. Williams felt that his paintings conveyed a “general note of Abstract Expressionism” and “were

Figure 6.35 | Hiram Williams, Meat Plate, 1956, oil on canvas, 30" × 24".

becoming almost academic,” according to the biography by Larson.47 Williams’s self-criticism, expressed years later, should be read cautiously, for his highly original, free-flowing works of the late 1950s are absolute gems. This is a painter who tackles all aspects of the surface. Rather than just sitting atop the canvas as a gesture, Williams’s Expressionism seems to pervade the canvas’s substrate. Yet the Abstract Expressionist style was rampant across the United States in the late 1950s, especially in universities. To counter his own dissatisfaction,

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Williams returned to the figure. He won a university grant, a benefit of his teaching position, which provided him with several months’ uninterrupted painting time in 1958 and 1959. As Donald Weismann wrote in a lengthy essay on the resultant series, “Here is surcease from all contemporary art

which refers only to itself. . . . Williams set himself, not unawares, counter to the mode of abstract expressionism, the most engrossing international style of today.”48 The twenty-eight completed canvases range from four feet by six feet to eight feet by twelve feet. Thus, they matched the grand scale of some Abstract Expressionist works, but nearly all of Williams’s were figurative. A dark-suited man, his body distorted by motion, recurs throughout what Williams calls his “Guilty Men” series. The motif offered an indictment of postwar white-collar culture and its concomitant alienation. In lieu of Cubist fragmentation, Williams’s unsettling figures are

Figure 6.36 | Hiram Williams, Untitled, 1959, oil on canvas, 40" × 29⅛".

Figure 6.37 | Hiram Williams, The Guilty II, 1959, oil on canvas, 96¼" × 723/16".

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uncannily integrated. The painter traced his “problem” back to 1947, when he desired to make “whole figurative images without fracturing that image (as in cubism).”49 Williams noted further: “Fracturing has become a device. Break the picture into little squares and you have painted ‘Modern.’ Undisciplined students, ignorant of what painting is about, learn to break up their pictures, and immediately expect to bask in fame as painters.” Such disdainful remarks recall Alexandre Hogue’s objection in 1936 to American artists’ facile overreliance on French artists like van Gogh and Cézanne.50 Williams’s “Guilty Men” bring to mind Sloan Wilson’s best-selling novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), with its stark look at materialism and corporate ladder climbing. Dorothy Miller at MoMA maintained that Williams’s painted series reflects modern man’s memory, which is “more visual than ever before because of our exposure to movies and especially television.”51 MoMA

purchased Challenging Man (1959), a major work in the series. The huge paintings captivated John Canaday, an art critic for the New York Times, and Anthony Bower, the editor of Art in America, the magazine that selected Williams for its “New Talent in the U.S.A.” article in 1959. Dalton Trumbo, the author of Johnny Got His Gun (1939), one of the most damning antiwar novels ever written, bought the six-foot-by-six-foot Guilty Men I (1958) and displayed it centrally at his home. Trumbo may have appreciated Williams’s stark portrayal of conforming Americans; he was one of the Hollywood Ten, the blacklisted directors, screenwriters, and producers who refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. In addition to illustrating postwar anomie, Hiram Williams may have intended a disapproving reference to infighting at UT, which contributed to his departure in 1960 for the University of Florida.

7 Houston is the largest city in Texas, the fourth

largest in the United States, and one of the ten busiest ports in the country.1 Houston’s prosperity is derived from multiple sources: land and cotton, oil and petrochemicals, shipping, railways, and aeronautics. With wide-ranging individual and corporate philanthropists, artists, curators, gallery dealers, museums, and universities, the city was engaged with local, national, and international art for most of the twentieth century. During the 1950s, a decade in which its population doubled, Houston strove for world-class recognition in the arts.2 An abbreviated list of the modernist artists who emanated from Houston at midcentury includes David Adickes, John Biggers, Jack Boynton, Lowell Collins, Bill Condon, Don Edelman, Henri Gadbois, Dorothy Hood, Jim Love, Leila McConnell, Herb Mears, Charles Pebworth, Charles Schorre, Mildred Dixon Sherwood, Carroll Harris Simms, Chester Snowden, Richard Stout, Stella Sullivan, Ruth Pershing Uhler, and Dick Wray.3

The 1950s and Houston

As referred to in chapter three, Houston attained a zenith late in the 1950s that was affirmed by three signal events: the American Federation of Arts (afa) convention in 1957, Mies van der Rohe’s sublime addition to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Totems Not Taboo exhibition in 1959. The first, the afa’s 48th Annual Convention in April 1957, grandly situated Houston within the prevailing modernist tenor of the art world. The second, the new mfah wing, indicated Houston’s sensitivity to and leadership in creating International Style, modernist architecture. The third event, the Contemporary Arts Museum’s Totems Not Taboo: An Exhibition of Primitive Art, proved to be a subtler and more prophetic phenomenon that firmly ensconced Houston in the upper echelon of modernist curatorial practices. All three events represented broadbased cooperation among leaders and artists in the Houston art world. Taken together, they highlight Houston’s modernist engagement in the 1950s.

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Figure 7.01 | Herb Mears, Cat Cracker/Refinery, 1956, oil on board, 24" × 30". Mears, who spent years working in the petroleum industry, puns on the meaning of “cat” in this depiction of a Houston catalytic cracking behemoth.

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The American Federation of Arts Convention: Houston 1957 Houston’s eminence in the art world grew in 1957 when the city hosted the afa’s national three-day convention. The French émigré arts patron John de Menil and Lee Malone of the mfah organized the convention, with crucial assistance from other prominent Houstonians, including Dominique de Menil and Nina Cullinan, and the Dallas businessman Stanley Marcus. Highlights of the convention’s intellectual offerings were Meyer Schapiro’s keynote address, “The Place of Painting in Contemporary Culture,” and Marcel Duchamp’s brief but widely cited talk “The Creative Act.”4 The mfah organized Three Brothers: Jacques Villon,

Figure 7.02 | Paul Maxwell, Red Field, 1956, oil on board, 32" × 60".

Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp, which was on view during the convention. Jermayne MacAgy organized the Pacemakers exhibition for cam (see the reference in chapter eight) to coincide with the convention.5 Other art-world tastemakers in attendance were Rudolf Arnheim, Gregory Bateson, Stuart Davis, Jimmy Ernst, Sidney Janis, Randall Jarrell, Philip Johnson, James Johnson Sweeney, William Seitz, and James Thrall Soby.6 The actor and avid art collector Vincent Price served as the banquet’s toastmaster. Dominique and John de Menil commissioned Henri Cartier-Bresson to document the event and photograph the city itself after the convention goers departed. Although Houston staged the vast convention, San Antonio, Dallas, and Fort Worth organized

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Figures 7.03 | Lowell Collins, Marcel Duchamp, and Paul Maxwell at the American Federation of Arts 48th Annual Convention, Houston, 1957, April 3–6.

exhibitions and private tours to celebrate the event. Thus, two decades after the Texas Centennial, the afa convention stimulated Texas to again showcase its finest art. Whereas in 1936 in Dallas the leading contemporary style was Regionalism, modernism and abstraction reigned in 1957. In a show of both Texas hospitality and a degree of shrewdness, John de Menil chartered a jet for members of the nation’s leading New York art and cultural publications to fly to Houston for the convention.7 From Houston, guests then were flown to Dallas, Fort Worth, and San Antonio. A Survey of Texas Painting (1957) at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, with catalogue essays by the director, Jerry

Bywaters, and the curator Jerry Harwell, is one example of the intrastate coordination the convention encouraged. After displaying Texas talents to convention goers, the afa circulated the exhibition (renamed Contemporary Texas Painting) to Sacramento, Topeka, Louisville, Atlanta, and Jacksonville, among other cities. Interestingly, at one point during their negotiations for the show, the afa’s secretary for exhibitions, Virginia Field, asked Bywaters to clarify whether the exhibition would include, as she had heard, “reference to the earliest painters of the State of Texas” or any “historical material.” Bywaters telegraphed his reply via Western Union: “Concerning Texas Painting No Historical Painting in Circuit Exhibit.”8 The urgency implied in his telegram suggests a potent desire to distinguish the current artists from the state’s “historical painters,” whereas twenty years earlier his goal had been to show continuity between older and newer paintings. His unequivocal response testifies to just how pervasive modernism had become by 1957. In the foreword to the catalogue for A Survey of Texas Painting, Bywaters reflects on the changes that had occurred since the afa’s previous circuit exhibition of Texas art, during the war. His words were clearly aimed at non-Texans who would see the work over the next two years: “In 1944 a similar survey exhibition, titled ‘Texas Panorama’ . . . was sprinkled with a few harbingers of abstraction and expressionism, but most of the paintings had the look of Texas, however well-composed and competent they were. . . . By now, all vestiges of subjective insularity have been overcome by a catholicity of approach worthy of the times.”9

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The change was indeed dramatic, in both style and subject matter. By 1957, virtually all the selected artists engaged some manifestation of abstraction.10 Although the afa’s guests did not fly to Austin, Michael Frary, a University of Texas professor, was represented at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts by Sea Wall (1956), a seascape featuring a water tower, boat, and boathouse. In the foreground, a jagged wall fills a quarter of the composition, its sharply outlined triangular facets zigzagging ominously. His

Figure 7.04 | Michael Frary, Sea Wall, 1956, oil on canvas, 30" × 36".

modulated angles take the multiple vantage points celebrated by the Cubist revolution and reinsert them back into a recognizable seascape. The San Antonio painter Bill Reily’s Ship Yard (1955), also on display in Dallas for afa visitors, explored the outer reaches of the abstract landscape.11 Intimations of his education at the University of Texas at Austin are evident in the brushwork and in elements of Everett Spruce’s and William Lester’s palette. Other Reily landscapes of the era—Chisos

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Mountains (c. 1958), Texas Beach, and Breakers (n.d.)— likewise owe a considerable debt to Everett Spruce; others take after Joan Miró or Picasso. But Reily, who by the late 1950s possessed a distinguished record of honors and exhibitions, stands alone among Texas artists for his peculiar melding of atmospheric landscape with hardened industrial forms. In paintings such as Ship Yard, Marblehead (n.d.), Masts (c. 1954), and Billy the Kid (1955), Reily retained vestiges of landscape (sky and clouds in Marblehead, the sun’s rays in Ship Yard ) while reducing individual elements to concretized fragments. “Turnout for Art in Texas,” a generously illustrated essay in Life, documented guests crossing the tarmac for chartered flights from Houston to private collections and museums in San Antonio, Dallas, and Fort Worth.12 Within Life’s color pages, American readers could view contemporary art by Otis Dozier, Michael Frary, McKie Trotter, Luis Eades, Ethel Broadnax, and Donald Weismann. Sculpture was also published in the national magazine; Charles Williams’s brass-coated steel Battleground appears amid work by Virginia Oechsner, Bess Hubbard, Heri Bartscht, Charles Umlauf, Peggy Goldstein, David Parsons, Evaline Sellors, Octavio Medellín, and David Cargill.13 On other pages one found Marcel Duchamp explaining his imprisoned marble sugar cubes, Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy? (1921), to mfah visitors, and Vincent Price standing amid primitive masks in Stanley Marcus’s Dallas home. The second signal art event of the 1950s in Houston occurred the next year, in 1958. As mentioned in chapter three, Nina Cullinan maintained that the mfah needed an international architect, so

she donated funds for the Mies van der Rohe expansion. In keeping with Mies’s master plan and original intentions, the Brown Pavilion (completed in 1974) wraps around the curved Cullinan Hall (1958), transforming the latter into the interior space it is today. The third signal event of the decade brought together the curatorial prowess of Jermayne MacAgy, primitive objects, cam, and the mfah. The occasion was MacAgy’s much-revered exhibition Totems Not Taboo: An Exhibition of Primitive Art (1959), featuring work from Australia, French Guinea, French Equatorial Africa, and Melanesia.14 Even though nearly every object was made outside Texas, the exhibition emblematized Houston’s contemporary art scene, diversity, and modern architectural grace. Totems Not Taboo has since become an iconic, widely celebrated exhibition that secured MacAgy’s position

Figure 7.05 | Bill Reily, Ship Yard, 1955, oil on board, 36" × 48". San Antonio artist Bill Reily’s Ship Yard was selected by the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts for the Survey of Texas Painting on view during the American Federation for the Arts convention in 1957. It toured nationally afterward as part of the AFA circuit exhibition organized primarily by Jerry Bywaters.

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in the annals of curatorial achievement. Cullinan, a founding member of the Contemporary Arts Association (caa) as well as a patron of the mfah, had stipulated that the new Mies van der Rohe galleries should periodically be made available to the thenitinerant contemporary arts group. Taking full advantage of the opportunity, MacAgy installed the show sensitively within the new glass, steel, and stone galleries of Cullinan Hall, far outshining the inaugural exhibition that had been installed there by the mfah director, Lee Malone. Totems Not Taboo had an equally ambitious catalogue, with an essay commissioned from Ralph C. Altman of the University of California, Los Angeles. In the 1960s, Altman became the founding director of ucla’s Museum and Laboratories of Ethnic Arts and Technologies and cofounded the magazine African Arts. MacAgy also acknowledged the assistance of Robert Goldwater, whose classic Primitivism in Modern Painting (1938) was then the field’s paragon text. Goldwater had recently opened the Museum of Primitive Art in New York, founded in 1954 with Nelson Rockefeller’s donated tribal art collection. Totems Not Taboo was one of the most indepth exhibitions of primitive art in the country up to that point. The objects were ingeniously placed on ramps and amid plants so that they could augment and interact with Mies’s architecture. The “Relations to Primitive Art” section of the exhibition and catalogue featured sculptural examples from Constantin Brancusi, Henri Laurens, Jacques Lipchitz, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso.15 Thus, even as MacAgy acknowledged the debt that modern European artists owed to the “primitive,” those pieces were secondary to the nearly two hundred totemic and ceremonial

originals. In 1959, MacAgy bucked the widespread tendency to subordinate primitive art to European modernism. Totems Not Taboo epitomized a curatorial style in which MacAgy permitted the objects to speak for themselves, as she later did with the Menils’ collection in exhibitions at the University of St. Thomas. The exhibition was critically acclaimed in Houston and beyond, with praise coming in from René d’Harnoncourt, director of MoMA, and the polymath inventor Buckminster Fuller. In an essay positing that Cullinan Hall reflected the social construction of Houston in that era, the architectural historian Stephen Fox pointed to Dominique and John de Menil’s ambiguous position within the city’s arts establishment: “They were not part of the Museum of Fine Arts’ old guard and, although they were among the founders of the caa [Contemporary Arts Association], they were impatient with the volunteer enthusiasm and local orientation of a significant percentage of the caa membership. Through collecting and vanguard patronage, they began to construct an alternative to caa’s modernism as well as museum conservatism, commencing their assertion of cultural leadership in 1949–1950 by building a modern house.”16 The couple’s Philip Johnson–designed River Oaks house (1949) represents one of the earliest International Style private residences in Texas.17 (The same year in Fort Worth, the arts patrons Ted and Lucille Weiner moved into their Edward Larrabee Barnes–designed modernist house.) Fox succinctly identified the fissures in Houston’s cultural geology. Ultimately, the Menils initiated an entirely new project, transferring their revered curator from the caa to the Art Department at the University of St. Thomas.

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Robert Preusser Robert Preusser, whose early career is discussed extensively in chapter three, continued on a prolific trajectory in the 1940s. Subaqueous Impression (1948) reveals Preusser’s hermeticism made manifest within a seascape. In a contemporary photograph that may have been taken to publicize his debut at New York’s Downtown Gallery, Preusser poses in front of Subaqueous Impression (see chapter one). Perhaps buoyed by his New York success in 1948, and seeking to increase the visibility of avant-garde and contemporary art in Houston, Preusser and several artists, architects, and collectors joined together to form the Contemporary Arts Association. In addition to the founders, the list of artists who volunteered long hours in the pre-MacAgy days to support the city’s contemporary art museum includes Ava and Herbert Mears, Frank Dolejska, Frank Freed, Henri Gadbois, and Leila McConnell. Philip Johnson, Alexander Calder, and Max Ernst traveled to Houston in conjunction with shows at the caa. The caa’s first two exhibitions were tellingly modern. This Is Contemporary Art, a wide-ranging group exhibition featuring painting, sculpture, architectural drawings, and photography, was organized by Preusser. It was followed by an afa-organized memorial exhibition for Preusser’s Chicago mentor, László Moholy-Nagy. Although tensions between the caa and the mfah grew, the latter provided galleries for both exhibitions, an indication of their early cooperation. Nina Cullinan intended for the mfah galleries to be made available periodically to the younger group, yet the caa board chose to maintain its independence.

The caa became an official institution in its own right, the Contemporary Arts Museum, in 1949 with a stunning, movable triangular building designed by Karl Kamrath, a founding member, and his partner Fred MacKie. Thanks to the Menils’ patronage, cam displayed prints and drawings by Vincent van Gogh in 1951. Today, van Gogh may seem like an antiquated avant-gardist, but the show made Houston the first U.S. venue outside New York or Chicago to dedicate an entire exhibition to his work. Furthermore, the cam show featured four van Goghs never before seen in the United States. In 1948, the same year that the caa formed, Ralph Pearson published an essay in the Art Digest

Figure 7.06 | Robert O. Preusser, Subaqueous Impression, 1948, oil on canvas, 34" × 40".

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titled “All Texas Annual Revolts against Regionalism.”18 Pearson had juried the 10th Annual Texas General Exhibition with Eleanor Onderdonk, Jerry Bywaters, James Chillman, and Joseph Taylor of the University of Oklahoma. Robert Preusser’s Hydroscopic Realm won the show’s Witte Museum $200 Purchase Prize. Of the six hundred paintings, prints, drawings, and ceramics submitted, five hundred were quickly eliminated from consideration, leaving a group that Pearson felt held “its own adequately with any section of the country, including the effete East.” As for his personal preference, Pearson noted with pleasure that certain bluebonnet submissions were “better” than color photographs. The article’s provocative title aside, Pearson perceptively assessed the commonality in subject matter among works that made the cut: Many of the lesser works dealt with Texas subjects, mostly as obvious eternal reports. The upper bracket creations, however, were predominently [sic] remote from the heart of Texas—in subject, symbolism and their authentically modern idiom. . . . To me it seems a result of several forces—an isolationism forced partially by lack of community support and partly by an urge for the more profound meanings that demand abstract or semi-abstract treatment, an ever-growing satisfaction with the pure music of visual harmonics, an over-dependence on the ego and its private symbolism and, with lesser talents, an eclecticism which peters into mere imitation of modern externals.19

In the end, Pearson claimed that the jury lamented the unfortunate trend, agreeing that “art is healthier if its roots sink deeply into the life of its own place and time.” If all five jurors considered the current direction “unfortunate,” it suggests they applied criteria beyond sheer “quality,” as indicated by Pearson’s assessment of the bluebonnet paintings. By 1948, modernism had begun to have a firm grip on the Texas General Exhibitions. Pearson did not mention the postwar disillusionment and anomie that sent artists searching for more “profound meanings” in the United States. The aesthetic turn toward “private symbolism” was effectively a rejection of former standards of beauty in an era when their relevance felt diminished. Among Texas artists, one could find both a turn toward fashionable modernism as well as a genuine search for a meaningful subjectivity. Other paintings of the period by Preusser deserve mention here. His Tonal Oval (1950, private collection, Austin) is a sophisticated externalization of principles of space. Preusser said his “constant aim in painting is that of making evident an emotional expression and bringing it into a revealed and tangible form through a combined intellectual and intuitive approach.”20 One of the most precocious and prodigious artists to come out of Texas, Preusser used abstraction to engage the whole human being in a performative way. The early works are strongly marked by sheer opticality, appealing mostly to the eye. Later, Preusser encouraged bodily responses to his work. Another sublime painting, Interior Movement (1950), alludes to an unspecified place, as does

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Elsewhere (1938, mentioned in chapter three). Yet Interior Movement summons an interior space, making a reference to music (“movement”) that suggests a nonvisual dimension. The Cubists, especially in the works of Picasso and Braque in 1909–1912, invoked music as candidate for the fourth, nonvisible dimension. In the 1950s, Preusser’s work made increasingly frequent analogies to music. Based on its title, and considered in relation to other Preusser paintings, Calligraphic Forms (1954) can be seen as Preusser’s investigation into hermetic written language (itself an abstraction) and nonvisual realms (music, for example, the most abstract of all art forms). It

Figure 7.07 | Robert O. Preusser, Calligraphic Forms, 1954, oil on Masonite, 24" × 18".

also represents a too-rare moment when a Texas midcentury modernist was featured in a major, American-focused (rather than Texas-based) publication, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s: An Illustrated Survey (2003).21 John Biggers In the same way that Preusser was furthering his inquiry into all art forms, the caa’s own avantgarde activities suggested a deeper engagement with contemporary life. Its exhibitions extended beyond plastic and formal innovations. Before the civil rights era, the caa displayed work by artists and faculty members of Texas Southern University, a historically African American institution, including the Art Department’s founder and chairman, John Biggers (1924–2001), and Carroll Simms (1924–2010), a professor. These men’s upbringings and experiences were in stark contrast to those of most modern artists in Houston.22 During the era of American abstraction, Biggers was among the African American artists committed to “launching a figurative tradition that could accept black physiognomy and celebrate its features,” according to the curator and museum director Edmund Gaither.23 For many years, American art historical modernism aspired to a formalist universalism, that is, a presumption that modernism required stripping away narrative structure and figurative representation in order to strive for universal significance. Instead, Biggers and Simms found meaning through an intensive exploration of African and African American experiences. In that sense, they are crucial figures for modernism in Texas; one could even

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argue their art aspires toward a more enlightened version of modernism than that of some contemporaneous artists across the country. Raised in the segregated industrial town of Gastonia, North Carolina, John Biggers attended college at the Hampton Institute, Virginia, whose most renowned graduate was Booker  T. Washington (Class of 1875).24 Biggers’s intellectual pursuits, artistic skills, and social consciousness developed exponentially at Hampton, where he was mentored from 1941 to 1943 by the artist and teacher Viktor Lowenfeld. Campus guests included the muralist Hale Woodruff and Dr. Alain Locke, author of The New Negro (1925). In addition to preparing its students for a range of careers, Hampton encouraged learning about African arts, a problematic focus in that era. Furthermore, as the curator and historian Alvia Wardlaw observed, “In the outside world, the African diaspora was rarely discussed without derision.”25 Lowenfeld had headed the African art museum in Vienna before escaping to the United States in 1939. As a Jewish émigré, he possessed an acute awareness of ethnic prejudice. In 1943, he organized Young Negro Art, an exhibition of Hampton student work for MoMA. Although Biggers’s painting Dying Soldier (1942) was singled out for adverse criticism, the exposure was invaluable. The war wreaked havoc on the college and its students’ lives. Biggers spent two years in the navy, where, ironically, after excellent scores on his coxswain’s exam earned him a posting back at Hampton, he was forced to abide the navy’s segregated drills, housing, and mess lines. After a brief postwar return to Hampton, Biggers followed Lowenfeld to

Pennsylvania State University, where he completed his degree and then earned a master’s in art education (1948), creating a series of murals for the school while there. During this time, he regularly traveled to New York, visiting his former Hampton teacher Charles White and his artist wife, Elizabeth Catlett. Active in communist and progressive politics, they developed strong connections to Mexico (Catlett later became a Mexican citizen) and its circle of artist-intellectuals. Biggers returned to Penn State to earn his PhD in 1954. He arrived at Texas State University for Negroes in 1949, two years before it was renamed Texas Southern University. Part of Biggers’s attraction to Texas and tsu was the proximity to Mexico and its revolutionary muralists. Yet the young instructor found himself struggling to develop a proper art department. At tsu, Biggers had one full-time art instructor, Joseph L. Mack, and led a department that could barely be described as fledgling. The following year, Biggers broke the color barrier when his work was included in the mfah’s 25th Annual Exhibition of Works by Houston Artists. Biggers’s work may have broken the color line, but he himself was not allowed to: “In 1950 John [Biggers] won a contest at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, for his drawing, The Cradle. The museum, which permitted blacks only on Thursdays, did not allow Biggers to be present at a reception in his honor.”26 Biggers recalled how the mfah’s director, James Chillman, dealt with the outrageous situation. Chillman asked him to come to the museum on a “Blacks Only” Thursday evening for a celebratory champagne party. “If you will do this thing,” said Chillman, “I guarantee there will be

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no segregation in this museum next year.” Chillman kept his promise, and the mfah was finally desegregated.27 A similar incident in Dallas in early 1952 precipitated no parallel administrative redress: Biggers’s drawing Sleeping Boy won the $100 Neiman-Marcus company prize at the 5th Southwestern Exhibition of Prints and Drawings. (The jurors were Constance Forsyth of UT Austin and J. Jay McVicker of Oklahoma a&m College, in Stillwater.) The artist and his wife, Hazel, drove from Houston to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts to accept the award.

Figure 7.08 | Catalogue cover for 1952 Prints and Drawings exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. John Biggers’s award-winning Sleeping Boy drawing is featured on the cover.

Once the museum’s representative realized that Biggers was African American, the reception was canceled. Biggers was handed his award at the back door. Ironically, Sleeping Boy was published on the cover of the exhibition catalogue. It is important to recall that Jim Crow laws were ubiquitous in the era, and Dallas and Houston were no exceptions. Back in Houston, cam featured Biggers in late 1952 in a group show called Texas Contemporary Artists. In 1953, Herbert and Ava Mears organized Painting, Sculpture, Ceramics by the Students and Faculty of the Texas Southern University at cam. That exhibition immediately followed one titled Modern Painting: Way and Means, which featured work by William Baziotes, Jacob Lawrence, and Yves Tanguy. (The last show was organized by Robert Preusser, who resigned from his codirectorship of cam in 1950, and his wife, Mary Ellen.) Biggers’s best-known work of this period includes the mural The Contribution of Negro Women to American Life and Education (1953) at the Blue Triangle branch of the ywca. The extensive research he conducted for the project became the subject for his Penn State PhD. In his murals, Biggers developed a social-realist style with a narrative structure; his individual works are often singular snapshots of poverty and despair. Prints by the German Expressionist Käthe Kollwitz provided a potent influence. Especially in her numerous self-portraits, Kollwitz tightly cropped her compositions to force the viewer into a direct encounter with the subject. The Cradle (1950), Despair and Two Heads (1952, lithographs), and Cotton Pickers (c. 1952, etching), all at the mfah, show Biggers’s similar arrangement of his subjects. Although Thomas Hart Benton’s mannered style is

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evident in his early murals, Benton’s occasional caricatures of blacks are noticeably absent. In virtually all his work, Biggers strove for a unification of his own American upbringing and his African heritage with a socially conscious intent to encourage others through his art. African American artists, like their white counterparts, often traveled to Europe for inspiration. Some, feeling more comfortable abroad, remained there. Biggers, who had studied European modernism as an undergraduate and graduate student, sought out Africa as a more pertinent destination. Thus, his unesco-sponsored trip to Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, and Togo in 1957 changed his work forever. He kept a visual diary of that experience, published in part as Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa (1962). Biggers intensified his focus on African themes, even adopting an abstract patterning that may have been inspired by textiles. His American

Figure 7.09 | John Biggers, Jubilee: Ghana Harvest Festival, tempera and acrylic on canvas, 38⅜" × 98" (97.5 × 248.9 cm); framed, 39⅛" × 98⅝ × 1¼".

scenes contained symbolic African American motifs, such as the ubiquitous southern shotgun houses like the family home his father had built in Gastonia.28 Edmund Gaither characterized Biggers’s early-1960s period as one when African images “were slowly retreating from the forefront of his consciousness, replaced by a more metaphorical emphasis on mystery, veiled meaning, and parabolic teaching.”29 Indeed, though always rooted in figuration, Biggers’s art grew increasingly abstract and symbolic in the ensuing decades. Although historians recognize that Biggers made a decisive shift toward geometry in the late 1960s, the mathematician Ron Eglash argues that his work had engaged mathematical designs far earlier, citing as one example the fractal patterning in the Web of Life mural (1958).30 The connection between Biggers and fractals, which are based on a repeating pattern of self-similarity, is

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relevant not only for expanding our awareness of avant-garde activity, but also because substantial research has been dedicated to the fractal analysis of Jackson Pollock’s drip-style paintings from around 1950; the findings indicate that the Abstract Expressionist painter was ahead of the times.31 Carroll Simms John Biggers hired his fellow Hampton student Carroll Simms in 1950 to teach sculpture and ceramics at tsu. Simms and Biggers both eventually developed symbolic representations informed by their study of and experiences in Africa. Simms was the first black graduate of the Cranbrook Art Academy, the preeminent cradle of American modernism, whose first director was the architect Eliel Saarinen, a Finnish immigrant. A Fulbright scholarship in the mid-1950s allowed him to study at London’s Slade School of Art and then at the Royal College of Art. In 1957, Simms created a crucifix for St. Oswald’s Church at Tile Hill, Coventry. St. Oswald’s was one of three churches that the architect Sir Basil Spence designed in the 1950s for the bishop of Coventry, the Right Reverend Neville Gorton; these parish churches were low-cost modern structures made of lightweight concrete. Simms adamantly expressed the intention of not wanting to make a traditional scene of Christ crucified between two thieves. Instead, he intended to imbue the sculpture with meaning “as a Negro crucifix,” in which the hammered-bronze figure symbolizes Christ and the cross at the same time.32 Christ’s emaciated body becomes an abstract representation of suffering, his geometric, linear ribs echoing

the skeins of his long hair and beard. Simms’s break with tradition is modernist in itself, but the symbolic merging of Christ’s body with the cross is a powerful conceit that enhances the image’s iconography. Rather than portraying Jesus as a crucified victim, Simms’s Christ literally and figuratively embodies his own destiny. It is tempting to read parallels to Simms’s own experience as an African American oppressed by a dominant white society. Back in Houston, his stained-glass commissions for the Third Ward’s Boynton Methodist Church (1958) depict biblical scenes with equally direct symbolic power. For example, the Miracle of Changing Water into Wine features a Christ figure concentrating intensively on his task. His body is constructed of linear planes and a halo. In another window, one of Eve’s breasts is a ripe apple.33 Simms’s conflation recurs brilliantly in his bronze fountain Jonah and the Whale (1959), an unusual vertical depiction of the Old Testament story in which the arced whale’s body is attached to the boat like a letter P. Only the eyes, mouth, and title hint at the subject. Biggers and Simms undertook Herculean feats at tsu. They created a department from virtually nothing and brought their students to a respectable and at times excellent level of training. Although Simms was hired primarily to teach ceramics, when he arrived the department had no clay. Worse still, many students, despite being enrolled in college, lacked the ability to read and write at a level sufficient to comprehend the advanced concepts they encountered while studying art.34 The earliest students required extensive shepherding, with the professors serving as both artistic and societal role models.

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The matter of making purely abstract art at midcentury accrued deeper layers of meaning for African Americans. There were practicing African American abstract-inclined painters such as the stellar Norman Lewis and the expatriate Beauford Delaney. But African American artists who too eagerly embraced Abstract Expressionism “were often misconstrued as imitative,” according to the scholar and museum director Sharon Patton.35 Lowery Stokes Sims, likewise elucidated the double bind of African American artists. While those “working in abstract styles had to struggle for recognition in the art establishment, they also faced resistance from certain camps of black self-imagemaking, which perceived abstraction as being

Figure 7.10 | Carroll Simms, Christ and the Lambs, photograph of clay model for St. Oswald’s Church, Tile Hill, Coventry, England.

Figure 7.11 | Carroll Simms’s Christ, in situ, 1957–1958, St. Oswald’s Church, Tile Hill, Coventry, England, architect: Sir Basil Spence.

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outside an integral black identity.”36 Whether abstraction at midcentury stood “outside an integral black identity” remains a fundamental concern. For an African American, embracing abstract, avantgarde art amounted, consciously or not, to inserting him- or herself unproblematically within the white European tradition, what Partha Mitter calls “the unmarked case.”37 (This concept is investigated further in the following chapter.) An artist’s geographic and institutional location likely affected his or her response. For example, when Biggers studied under Lowenfeld within the encouraging educational climate at historically black Hampton, the exposure to European modernism kindled his enthusiasm. Indeed, Lowenfeld presented both European and African art as equally valid. In the early days in Houston at tsu, however, the situation was entirely different. Thus the double consciousness of W. E. B. Du Bois assumes yet another nuance as regards abstract art and African Americans. Nonobjective abstraction may simply have seemed less pertinent to artists like Biggers and Simms, for it bore little apparent relation to societal challenges. If Texas lagged behind the East in discovering modernism, the state’s dilatory stance on integration may have contributed to the delay of nonfigurative abstraction winning adherents in minority circles. Here it is important to beware the teleological concept of artistic development: nonobjective abstraction is not necessarily a more “advanced” form of art, despite the assertions of early twentieth-century manifestos. Biggers and Simms developed abstract symbolic means to represent contemporary life in a positive and progressive light.

By 1955, as the tsu Art Department was expanding, cam changed course by hiring the innovative Jermayne MacAgy as its director.38 Gone was the use of volunteers and the cooperative spirit in selecting and designing shows, but with its replacement came greater recognition and professionalism. When MacAgy had first visited with the Menils in 1952, even the mfah lacked a full-time director. During her four-year tenure at cam and with a relatively modest budget, she organized twenty-nine exhibitions, including a regular Art Rental exhibition.39 MacAgy had an innate capacity for categorical reversals: she could render the familiar unfamiliar as effectively as she could intimately present unusual objects. David Adickes and Herb Mears By the 1950s, Houston was a large enough town to keep many galleries afloat, even if only barely at times. One of the first commercial fine art galleries to handle contemporary art was set up inside the James Bute paint store. It was managed by the art dealer Ben DuBose, whose gallery would later inhabit a separate structure.40 Beginning around 1950, DuBose’s modest space featured many of Houston’s contemporary artists. Kathryn Swenson ran the New Arts gallery from 1956 to 1974. As the artist Richard Stout recalled in lingo appropriate for the era, New Arts was “the swellest gallery in Texas by far.”41 Meredith Long opened his longrunning gallery in 1959.42 Houston’s modernist artists largely reflected the city’s heterogeneity. Some, like David Adickes (b. 1927) and Herb Mears (1923–1999), were School of

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Paris inheritors. Born in Huntsville, Adickes was part of an Army Air Corps transport crew flying to and from Paris during World War II. After the war, he earned his degree at Sam Houston State Teachers College before returning to Paris in 1948–1950 to study at the atelier of one of the original members of the Puteaux Cubist group, Fernand Léger, a destination for many American artists studying abroad on the GI Bill. John de Menil purchased a work out of Adickes’s first show in 1950 at Houston’s brand-new Shamrock Hotel, which was sponsored

Figure 7.12 | David Adickes, Still Life with Lime, Melon Slices, 1957, oil on board, 18" x 24".

by the Art League of Houston.43 Adickes experimented ceaselessly with variations on still lifes, architecture, and figures. Around 1950, those figures became elongated and mysterious—“Adickes men” became a recognizable trademark within his paintings.44 His fellow Atelier Léger alumnus Herb Mears moved to Houston to open a short-lived school, the Studio of Contemporary Art, with Adickes. Mears remained in the city, teaching at cam, the mfah, the University of Houston, and Rice University. His wife, Ava

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Jean, became the secretary of cam and took dozens of photographs that document its early years. Herb Mears, whose Parisian-style figuration is related to that of Adickes, possesses a striking range and darkness in his work. For example, Still Life with Mask (1956) employs the synthetic Cubist flattening of collage-like elements that tilt up defiantly against the picture plane. But the open-mouthed harlequin head seems to be shouting into the opaque grey abyss. Even though one may have seen these basic elements in other artists’ still lifes, the resultant mood is disruptive rather than reassuring. In that same year, Mears departed significantly from the moody subjectivity of Still Life with Mask to represent the frenetic energy of a Houston industrial monolith in Cat Cracker/Refinery (Fig. 7.01). Mears’s depiction of the refinery constitutes a city unto itself. The vibrant rainbow palette is arranged into a rectilinear labyrinth rising up toward a central apex. Mears worked for Humble Oil Company from 1951 to 1964, giving him a firsthand familiarity with the process of “cat cracking,” the technology for converting crude petroleum into gasoline. Mears’s painting traveled in the 1958 exhibition Texas Oil ’58: A Salute to the Oil Industry of the State by Texas Painters (1958).45 The group exhibition featured dozens of artists statewide, including Wayne Amerine, Jack Boynton, Ethel Broadnax, David Brownlow, Lowell Collins, Ben  L. Culwell, Otis Dozier, Michael Frary, Henri Gadbois, Leila McConnell, Stephen Rascoe, Buck Schiwetz, Richard Stout, Ruth Tears, McKie Trotter, and Clara Williamson. The artworks in the exhibition demonstrated the affinity between modern methods of refining petroleum and contemporary modes of illustrating it.

Henri Gadbois and Leila McConnell The Houston native Henri Gadbois (1930–) sometimes worked in a soft-edged figural style that aligns him with Adickes and Mears. But Gadbois’s oeuvre is noteworthy for displaying versatility and skill in a variety of styles. His Lamar High School art teacher, Norma Henderson, taught Jack Boynton and Dick Wray also. Gadbois then studied at the mfah’s Museum School with Ruth Uhler, and earned two degrees at the University of Houston, where Robert Preusser and Lowell Collins both were teaching. Some of Gadbois’s midcentury works reflect Fauvist and School of Paris influences, such as Matisse’s windows series at Collioure. Whether depicting still lifes, landscapes, or structures, Gadbois’s work is anchored by architectural solidity and color balance. Two-Tiered Formation (1950) applies an arid southwestern palette to swooping, interacting flame-like masses. Gadbois ably shifted from minimally representational works to highly abstracted landscapes to quotidian objects, as in Watermelon and Pomegranate (1953). Gadbois married his fellow student Leila McConnell (1927–) in 1956. Both dedicated themselves full-time to teaching, painting, and raising a family. McConnell began studying architecture at the Rice Institute at age sixteen under James Chillman, whom she credits for profoundly influencing her work. She took a class at the Museum School (Rice did not then have an art department) with the successful portraitist Robert Joy while still in her teens. After graduation, she studied there under an array of talented teachers: Lowell Collins, Robert Preusser, Francis Skinner, and Ruth Uhler, who doubled as education curator. McConnell returned to

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California (where she was born) in 1949 to study at the San Francisco School of Fine Arts, where she met Mark Rothko. The director then was Douglas MacAgy, and artists such as Clyfford Still, Elmer Bischoff, and Clay Spohn were on the faculty. The San Francisco stint encouraged McConnell to enhance the atmospheric effects within her paintings. A trip to Italy followed her time in San Francisco,

resulting in her series of “sky paintings” in the 1960s.46 McConnell’s incremental tonal adjustments helped her attain considerable depth within a narrow range of colors. In fact, an edifying comparison can be made between one of her figurative paintings, such as Ruth Laird’s Pots (1958), and her abstract firmaments, such as The Time Between (late 1950s, presumed lost), Blue Painting (1961), or The First Bar of Peace (1961). McConnell collected Laird’s sensuously minimal ceramics; the two women’s shared aesthetic temperament is tangible. Yet the presence or absence of objects in McConnell’s paintings is secondary to the ethereal space she develops with slight shifts in hue and value.

Top | Figure 7.13 | Henri Gadbois, Watermelon and Pomegranate, 1953, oil on canvas, 16" × 28".

Figure 7.15 | Ruth Laird, Untitled, c. 1950s, fired clay vessel, 9" × 7" × 5".

Bottom | Figure 7.14 | Leila McConnell, Ruth Laird’s Pots, 1958, oil on canvas, 24" × 36".

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Stella Sullivan

Dorothy Hood

Another painter in the circle of Gadbois and McConnell was Stella Sullivan (1924–). She earned a degree in architecture from the Rice Institute under James Chillman’s direction. At the Museum School, she was taught by Ola McNeill Davidson, and then moved to Michigan to study at the School of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts and then the Cranbrook Academy of Art.47 (She arrived too late to encounter Cranbrook’s first black graduate, Carroll Simms.) Sullivan returned to Texas on holidays and in the summer, and then taught in Houston art schools until opening her own in 1971. Actively involved in the early incarnation of cam, Sullivan stressed the importance of its volunteer ethic, saying, “Everyone knew everybody and got to be friends, you know, for life.”48

Dorothy Hood (1919–2000) jokingly asserted that Houston had only three serious artists in the 1960s: Dick Wray, Jim Love, and Richard Stout.49 Her half-teasing assessment was undoubtedly affected by having lived in Mexico for most of the previous two decades, where she belonged to an inspiring circle that included Luis Buñuel, Leonora Carrington, Miguel Covarrubias, Carlos Mérida, Pablo Neruda, José Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo, and Remedios Varos. Hood’s defining work of the 1960s and later is often described as “abstract surrealism” or “lyrical abstraction,” technically accurate phrases that convey little of Hood’s meticulous attention to line, composition, and color.50 Reared in Houston, Hood studied at the Rhode Island School of Design on scholarship and then at the Art Students League in New York. In 1941, she embarked on an extended road trip to Mexico with friends. Mexico served as a cultural epiphany to the twenty-two-year-old. With its entrenched traditions of machismo and the mujer abnegada, or the archetype of a virtuous, self-sacrificing woman, she found the country to express a paradox. Rather than experiencing chauvinism in Mexico, Hood considered the extreme reverence for the Madonna to be a positive force. Additionally, she noticed that Mexicans had a tremendous respect for artists, whether male or female. “In nineteen years, I never felt any reservation toward me as a woman,” she later said.51 Her first one-person exhibition at Mexico City’s Gama Gallery in 1943 was noteworthy for the prose poem by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in the catalogue. The two became lifelong friends. In the 1940s, Hood married the Bolivian

Figure 7.16 | Stella Sullivan, Symbols: The Eucharist, 1953, oil on canvas, 24" × 28".

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conductor, composer, and filmmaker José María Velasco Maidana. His career carried them throughout the Americas, with frequent returns to Mexico. She spent much of 1945 studying in New York, where her drawings caught the eye of the MoMA curator James Thrall Soby. On account of Soby, in 1944 MoMA acquired Hood’s drawing The Seeming Beginning (1943, ink and pencil on paper), a large depiction of a female nude (possibly a self-portrait) whose round face echoes the background sun. Hood had a well-received solo show at the Willard Gallery in New York in 1950, causing the Art Digest reviewer to compare her paintings and drawings to those by the Symbolist artists William Blake, James Ensor, and Odilon Redon.52 Stuart Preston of the New York Times, however, saw a too-clear debt to the Russian-born figurative Surrealist Pavel Tchelitchew, and criticized Hood’s work for lacking coherence.53 In 1954 Hood’s drawing appeared in MoMA’s Figures and Faces exhibition alongside works by Tchelitchew; she was also featured in shows at MoMA in 1958 and 1959. Around the time of Hood’s MoMA successes, the Brooklyn Museum of Art acquired two of her drawings from the 1950s.54 One of these, An Austere Charade (1955), depicts vegetal creations in Hood’s distinctive hand. Tightly compressed parallel lines and contour hatching lend an entirely other dimension to the limp, surrealistic plant. Hood’s thin, linear motif recurs in mysterious hairy biological shapes in drawings of the 1950s and 1960s such as Fear (1964), Butterflies of the Future (1967), and Furred Flower (1967). Hood’s propensity for hair and filaments recalls Meret Oppenheim’s iconic fur-covered teacup, saucer, and spoon: Object (1936, MoMA), a sculpture she was no doubt familiar with from studies in New

York. Object was the first work by a female artist to be purchased by MoMA. Hood’s hirsute curiosity is reminiscent of Dorothy Tanning’s drawings of the 1940s and her furry sculptures of 1969 and 1970, such as the Menil Collection’s unsettling syntheticfur coupling, Les Cousins (1970). John and Dominique de Menil also owned René Magritte’s symbol of Surrealist desire and anxiety Le Viol (1934), in which the Belgian painter supplanted a woman’s face with breasts, umbilicus, and pubic hair.

Figure 7.17 | Dorothy Hood, An Austere Charade, 1955, pen and black ink on gray wove paper, 25⅝" × 19¾" (65.1 × 50.2 cm).

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Hood’s frequent depiction of tightly interspersed filaments may relate to the fact that hair is a loaded female secondary sexual characteristic, one that she portrayed positively. As Hood explained once in an interview, “Being a woman has been an enormous help where sensitivity, perception, intuition— all of the things that are said to come ‘naturally’ to us—are concerned.” In that same interview, Hood indicated that women have what she calls “a biomorphic consciousness.”55 Importantly, hair or fur displaced from a body (as Hood so often construes it) is a classically discomfiting Surrealist element, as proven by the unsettling incongruity within Oppenheim’s Object. André Breton, who in 1938 traveled in the same Mexican intellectual circles that Hood would soon join, was delighted when Oppenheim created the Object, or Déjeuner en Fourrure, for his exhibition of Surrealist objects in 1936.56 The trope of dislocated underarm hair recurred disturbingly in Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s silent film Un Chien Andalou (1929): at one point, the male character watches as the female character’s underarm hair migrates to the space where his mouth used to be. Hood’s husband, Velasco Maidana, developed his own film production company in Bolivia. Hood, who knew Buñuel in Mexico (he lived there from 1946 to 1965), was surely familiar with all these images and their evocative capacity. Walking Away from the Sun (c. 1950s, pen and ink) exemplifies Hood’s authoritative skills as draftswoman. Like other early drawings (including MoMA’s The Seeming Beginning), Walking Away from the Sun may allude autobiographically to Hood’s vexing relationship with her mother. A head in profile on birdlike long legs walks away from a stippled sky

whose negative space creates the sun shape. The dominant form at the bottom is Hood’s hallmark motif of an organic form meticulously rendered in precise lines that recall strands of hair or filaments. Ultimately, Hood found that Houston in the 1960s offered far more than the three “serious” artists she once quipped about: she held regular solo exhibitions at Meredith Long’s gallery, taught for a dozen years at the mfah’s Museum School, and exhibited all over the state and country. In 1973, Hood won the Childe Hassam Award, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Figure 7.18 | Dorothy Hood, Walking Away from the Sun, c. 1950s, pen and black ink on gray wove paper, 25⅝" × 19¾" (65.1 × 50.2 cm).

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She developed her best-known, mature style in the 1960s: grand colored canvases that suggest geologic metaphors. Often staining the canvas in thick and thin layers and sometimes using the Surrealist technique of decalcomania, Hood’s paintings suggest palimpsestic layers, as if collaged and then torn asunder. Hood always maintained that form was pointless as an end in itself; much of her work is like an archaeological excavation of layers that summon psychosexuality, memory, or history.

traumatic period, Bird Trap’s title suggests that the aggressive central form, oddly tempered by cheerful bright blue and green hues, is female.57 The surrounding gray background seems to close in claustrophobically on the bright central blue area.

Jack Boynton Lee Malone (mfah director, 1953–1959) organized a two-person exhibition of John Biggers’s and Jack Boynton’s work in 1954. Boynton (1928–2010) had studied at tcu in Fort Worth and was a tertiary member of the Fort Worth Circle. Among his provocative early paintings is Bird Trap (1952). The painting’s exoskeletal creature derives from the science fiction novels in which Boynton was steeped. Formally, the single figure recalls paintings of the 1940s made by the Cuban Wifredo Lam, with spikes invoking grand Surrealist landscapes by the Chilean Matta (Roberto Matta Echaurren). Closer to Boynton’s educational roots, however, the painting’s fantastical shape may show deference to Bror Utter’s Surrealist-inspired forms and his occasional use of a patchy, moody background. Boynton painted Bird Trap when he was twentyfour, an emotionally turbulent point in his life. According to the artist, on his wedding night in 1950, his wife, Ann, suffered a stroke. In the coming years, she spent extensive time in hospitals, receiving a diagnosis of bipolar disease. Viewed against that Figure 7.19 | James W. (Jack) Boynton, Bird Trap, 1952, oil on canvas, 36" × 20".

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Bird Trap belongs to the sharply delineated, fantastical creatures and architectural forms inspired by Boynton’s love of science fiction. In other works from this period, such as Guyed Form (1952) and Arch (1954), a carefully delineated single form rests within a relatively plain background. The creature or shape takes on a bony, phantasmagorical animal form. Some figures have thorns, others are ominously sinewy. One of Boynton’s great strengths is to fuse these quasi-surrealistic elements into a modulated color-field background so that the paintings feel at once natural and unnatural. In addition to personal trauma, one senses Boynton’s response to postwar anxiety in many of these 1950s works. The structure of these paintings and his commanding draftsmanship were influenced by the technical sketches he drew for the Convair aircraft plant in Fort Worth. As mentioned earlier, Kelly Fearing likewise made technical illustrations for Convair, where the work demanded linear and technical perfection. Boynton illustrated objects against a bland ground, a formal conceit he later adapted to his art. Similarly, Alexandre Hogue made technical drawings during World War II for North American Aviation, translating blueprints into three-dimensional drawings in order to show how pieces fit together.58 Boynton’s Downtown and Suburban (c. 1954) won the $1,500 first prize in the D. D. Feldman Invitational Exhibition of 1955. The judges were brought in from the Brooklyn Museum (Edgar Schenck), the Art Institute of Chicago (Katherine Kuh), and ucla’s galleries (Frederick Wight). Only the title suggests that Downtown and Suburban is a cityscape; Boynton broke the architectural elements into his

distinctive attenuated rectangles, like archaeological fragments in a landscape. One finds a similar line used by Boynton’s Fort Worth friend McKie Trotter and Houston’s Lowell Collins. Another important Boynton painting from the 1950s, Ambiance (1957), consists of totem-like forms set into a spatially ambiguous background. The vertically oriented painting resembles a banner or a sheet of paper. The subtle gradations of greens and browns make it seem to move, almost imperceptibly, in a breeze. The partially split circle (an

Figure 7.20 | James W. (Jack) Boynton, Ambiance, 1957, oil on canvas, 48" × 34".

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early appearance of a Boynton motif ) and slightly bowed horizontal lines drift into calligraphic shapes at the bottom. If one reads Ambiance from top to bottom, it is as if the upper shapes were converted as they traveled downward through the central region, turning into faux hieroglyphic script at the

Figure 7.21 | James W. (Jack) Boynton, Aftermath, 1956– 1957, oil and sand on canvas, 60" × 34" (152.4 × 86.36 cm).

bottom.59 Like other partially representational features in his paintings, the calligraphy feels vaguely familiar yet remains unreadable. A similar phenomenon occurs in the ethereal blue landscape Inland Lights (1956), which evokes distant buildings without permitting the viewer to identify specifics. The “lights” allude to shore lights and their watery reflections, which emerge from rectangular reaches of blue that are deeply stained with wax and pigment into the canvas. Inland Lights shows a change in Boynton’s style from the earlier science-fiction- and technical-drawing-inspired pieces. In the later 1950s, Boynton symbolically dissected objects, repositioning their lines into the new terrain of a desolate landscape. The color scheme of Inland Lights feels moody but optimistic, as if its blue rectangular structure is beginning to reconstruct a new space, with flickering distant beacons of white and red. The late-1950s paintings are suffused with incandescence. The Whitney Museum acquired Boynton’s Aftermath out of one of its Young Americans exhibitions in 1957 (Boynton exhibited in at least two of these exhibitions). Aftermath strips away color into a sooty, postatomic, grisaille landscape. Boynton’s chief concerns paralleled those of so many artists in the late 1950s: repercussions of the atom bomb, the Cold War, existentialism, the Beat generation, agnosticism versus atheism, and, in his particular case, “wife problems.”60 Boynton imbued his tripartite landscape with texture, mixing the oil paint with sand and applying it thickly in order to achieve sculptural relief.61 A calligraphic star shape near the lower left calls to mind the explosive origins of this scene.

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Boynton had known of Mark Rothko’s paintings since his tcu classes as well as via word of mouth and magazines. In September 1957, Jerry MacAgy asked him to help Jim Love hang cam’s Rothko exhibition, which she curated. The huge canvases arrived rolled up in a box. Love and Boynton built the stretchers and stapled the paintings to them; Boynton recalled later that “we only wrecked one.” Boynton’s first viewing of a Rothko close up proved surprisingly disappointing; he felt that glossy magazine paper must have added a luminosity not present in the actual pieces.62 Still, Rothko’s influence on Boynton grew pronounced in the 1960s when Boynton embarked on his series of “event horizons.” Outpost (1957, oil on Masonite, Blanton Museum of Art) was made the same year that he was

Figure 7.22 | James W. (Jack) Boynton, Outpost, 1957, oil on Masonite, 49" × 84½".

honored by inclusion at the Whitney’s Young Americans exhibition. The southwestern-hued painting won the D. D. Feldman award, joining the oil baron’s private collection. The mysterious Outpost invokes an outer-space terrain, or the psychological outpost of the mind. Boynton created a purely imaginary world with enough tangible cues—red sun, the dark opening of doorway—to conflate reality with fantasy. As for so many of Houston’s contemporary artists, Jerry MacAgy’s presence on the scene elevated Boynton’s conceptions of what constituted art, as well as his ambitions. During an intense period when Boynton was exhibiting regularly at the Guggenheim and Whitney, MacAgy prodded him to find New York gallery representation, suggesting

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contacts for him to visit and writing letters on his behalf. After Boynton’s trip to New York in late 1957, he created a painting for her titled Jerry’s Nail (1957).63 The artist hammered a real nail directly into what he called “the face” of the small painting. In a sculpture of the same period, David and Goliath, Boynton represented David as a hammered nail. Thus, Boynton’s nails seem to symbolize martyrdom. Boynton fluctuated between two and three dimensions within a single work, literally or through purely visual means. His friendship with Jim Love and his own curiosity led him to create a series of small sculptures in the late 1950s. Most of these works were seldom exhibited or sold, but they show Boynton privately developing Dadaistic puns in a restrained and coded format. In addition to the aforementioned David and Goliath, another biblical

piece was the coffin-shaped Samson and Delilah. He also carved a miniature Homage to Constantin Brancusi: an absurdly tiny rendition of the Romanian sculptor’s Endless Column. Boynton nestled the mini Brancusi in yellow satin within a sewing box like a medieval reliquary. The twelve-inch-long Identity Being Consumed by Its Own Offspring (1957–1958) features eight small nails driven into a smooth board through a larger, prostrate nail. Boynton shares Jim Love’s affinity for descriptive titles; he also may have been smarting from the Jerry’s Nail episode, using the subject to stand in for his art-world experiences as well as his social awkwardness. Whatever spurred the sculpture, the result is a carefully constructed talismanic object imbued with universal human significance. At first appearance, Appian Way (1958/1959) seems to be the most “traditional” of Boynton’s works from the 1950s. A muted landscape in subtle tones, its classical title and soft copse of trees were inspired by reading Robert Graves’s accounts of the Roman emperors in I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1935)—especially the author’s portrayal of the human condition. While Appian Way resembles

Figure 7.23 | James W. (Jack) Boynton, Jerry’s Nail, 1957, oil and sand on canvas with nail, 9" × 12" × 1⅜".

Figure 7.24 | James W. (Jack) Boynton, Identity Being Consumed by Its Own Offspring, 1957–1958, wood and nails, 2¾" × 5½" × 9½".

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a road and a landscape, the swelling, dark, central form can be read as a foreboding interference on the horizon. Boynton soon developed these interferences into what he called “events” on a horizon, a motif central to his works of the 1960s. In cosmology, “event horizon” is the term for the boundary of a black hole. Nothing, not even light, can escape an event horizon. Boynton’s event—which may be emotional, psychic, atmospheric—is articulated as a formal exploration of how the black region might make its impact on the blue-grays, like a fog moving through a landscape. In 1960, Boynton spent almost two full years at San Francisco’s California School of Fine Arts, internalizing the atmospheric style that was favored there and reconsidering the work of Mark Rothko.64 Boynton later concretized “the event” as a horizontally moving line set into a defined landscape. He created variations on the theme in a series of prints made during a Tamarind Lithography Workshop residency in Los Angeles (1967–1969) and in a series of paintings. For Boynton, the event presents a way to impose a random form onto something structured. Metaphorically, the horizontal band is an anchoring motif signaling a dramatic incident. The movement of the line across the horizon can represent an emotional or psychological mood.65 Boynton’s works demonstrate his lifelong interest in color, emotion, landscape, and humans as creators of graphic systems. Boynton is an artistcartographer, whether traversing the subjective human mind or the ostensibly objective outside world. The artist’s aesthetic explorations from the 1970s onward seem disparate to some viewers, particularly after his early decades of profound abstract

investigation. A gallery owner once asked him whether his wide-ranging styles might have hurt his career. “Probably,” Boynton answered. “But the alternative was boredom.”66 Yet when one considers Boynton’s fascination with the artist as shamanistic voyager, his later forays adhere to a single creative logic. Richard Stout Whereas Jack Boynton’s paintings tend to evince a quiet reserve, Richard Stout (b. 1934) revels in the expressive potential of paint itself. But even Stout’s boisterous gestures are kept in check by countervailing forces elsewhere in the composition. Nearly all his paintings are performances in tension. As such, they carry tremendous symbolic capacity for equivocating emotional states. Like Robert Preusser, Stout had an unusually mature sense of structure and color as a young artist. He began painting in Beaumont in middle school. The art programs of the Beaumont City School System were overseen by Lorene David, who had exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Artists for Victory exhibition in 1942.67 At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he first studied with Laura van Pappelendam and Isabel McKinnon. McKinnon, a former student of Hans Hofmann, was a knowledgeable conduit for the German artist’s theories on creating space in abstract painting through advancing and receding colors and forms—what Hofmann famously called “push-pull.” Two other strong Art Institute influences were the Bauhaus-trained Paul Wiegart and the artist-historian Kathleen Blackshear. With his

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background in art and longstanding interest in literature and music, Stout likely felt that the instruction he received in Chicago was more reaffirming than revelatory. Stout’s education and experience, like Boynton’s, were anything but provincial. One of Stout’s strongest early works, Sunset Landscape (1956), anticipates themes that occupied the artist throughout his career. The painting is dark, moody, with a marked architectonic structure. The centers of Stout’s paintings are often highly charged spaces, holding their own against impending forces. Horizontal light-gray bands form the center’s focal point. It remains calm in the face of looming perils: from the left and upper right, dense black threatens to obliterate the center; from the lower right, three rectangular forms slice toward it. Rectangular forms that move in from the edge became far more pronounced in paintings such as Remember the Race (1961), where they march toward the horizon as if in lockstep.

Bottom | Figure 7.25 | Richard Stout, Black Wave, 1959, oil on canvas, 26" × 69". Top | Figure 7.26 | Kathleen Blackshear, Kitchen Table, c. 1930, oil on canvas, 24" × 20".

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Another painting from 1956, Seiche I, is dominated by an olive-green rectangular region. A reddish form that travels diagonally and horizontally toward the center activates the entire painting. The reddish form (in fact, several layered brushstrokes, including green, yellow, and black) is punctuated at the top by a single, black, head-like stroke. Seiche I is wholly abstract, yet hauntingly evokes a bent-over figure traveling across a boggy surface. Within this painting we see Stout’s incipient sense that abstraction is empty without the human presence—even if that presence exists only as a spectral form. Or, as many of his paintings attest, even if the human presence is felt exclusively within the stroke of the brush or the structuring of the canvas. A seiche (pronounced “saysh”) is a back-andforth movement of water, like a standing wave. When seiches occur in large bodies of water, they are often imperceptible to boaters riding on the surface. Stout investigates the limits of human tolerance and the limitations of human perception. In 1957, Stout dramatically expanded the interior action and subjective emotional state of his work. That expansion amplified his pictorial syntax. Three important paintings from 1957—Cave, Passion, and Flowers—form an unofficial triptych that demonstrates the change. The central and largest of these, Passion (72" × 72"), is divided into three vertical bands. This “triptych within a triptych” is Stout’s pictorial equivalent of a play-within-a-play. In the middle band is Passion’s explosive heart: vibrant, dense strokes that anchor and disrupt the painting’s core. Echoes of its impact are visible on the left side of the canvas, where pink and orange staccato lines rain down.

The internal response to Passion’s externalized drama occurs in Cave, smaller in scale (50" × 50") but still large. Whereas Passion offers restrained lightning, Cave undulates and throbs. It is the darkest hued of the three works; cool and warm colors intensify its reserved tension. Oblong-circling gestures recur, as if trying to contain what is within (note the “head” shapes at top, the thin curved white line at lower left, and the oblong red circle at lower right). It is unnerving to feel the heightened drama of Passion turned inward in Cave’s private, impastoed procession. Passion’s vertical orientation and scale allow the viewer to stand back as an eyewitness; Cave’s ritualized forms force the viewer to partake. Flowers, the last part of the triptych, conveys the aftermath of the scene. If one envisions this canvas as the right-hand work in the triptych, Flowers performs an exit. (Cave and Flowers are both 50" × 50" squares, with a dynamic composition that moves from lower left to upper right.) Flowers begins to regroup, with lighter yellows, whites, and pinks. If Cave is all interiority, Flowers begins the process of reorganizing into an exterior façade. Stout himself would rank Pall (1958) as one of his best works of the era. Its surface covered with gestural swipes, Pall is anchored in the landscape. A pall can be a dark cloud or a covering of dust in nature, but it also carries the sense of moodiness or gloom that envelops a situation. Stout calls on both senses, allegorically invoking the physical and emotional as he does in so many of his midcentury works. Stout made sculpture also, although it was not until the 1990s that he finally began to cast bronze,

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at the encouragement of his friend Michael Tracy. Tracy, who had a studio near Guanajuato, recommended his Mexican foundry to Stout. In Opus I (Tempest) (1999, cast bronze), Stout re-created from memory a sculpture he had made for Kathleen Blackshear’s composition class in Chicago in 1956. The twenty-two-year-old Stout had recently returned from New York, where he had been impressed by an Isamu Noguchi table sculpture at the

Stable Gallery on West 58th Street. At the Art Institute, Stout had long admired an Alberto Giacometti plaza sculpture with figures.68 Stout’s resulting, untitled response, in lead and painted plaster, paid homage to both those sculptors’ formative influences on his art. Unfortunately the original from Blackshear’s class is long lost.69 Stout’s re-creation was in direct response to the Noguchi work he had seen decades earlier, but with enigmatic forms disposed across the surface in the manner of Giacometti’s plazas. The parenthetical “tempest” of the title alludes to Giorgione’s Renaissance painting at the Venice Accademia. Giorgione’s cryptic La Tempesta (c. 1506–1508) features a flowing stream that separates the male and female figures. Echoes of that stream appear in both Stout pieces (1956 and 1999), suggestive of a floating world. All these disparate artists share the invention of a fictitious, enigmatic space transformed into tangible reality. Richard Stout once described several fulcrums for his work: “rejection/subjugation, independence/ loneliness, and desire/accommodation, among others.” At the base of all emotions, he wrote, are death, fear, life, and love.70 Such mythic language might seem overblown in the hands of a less skilled artist. But Stout probes those infinite human depths with acuity, avoiding histrionics, reenacting them as emblematic universal scenes. Landscape has always grounded Stout’s work. As he describes it: I love to work from life in the landscape. . . . I do it as often as I can, but no one really quite understands this except those other people who really love working from the landscape directly because it is everything and it’s moving

Figure 7.27 | Richard Stout, Pall, 1958, oil on canvas, 40" × 33".

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all the time. The lights shifting all the time, and you’re changing, and the temperature’s changing, and the wind’s blowing, or it’s not blowing, or you get still, or you start sweating, or you get bored, and all of these kinds of things. So you swim through this sea of activity, which is all focused on working from the landscape, and it’s delightful.71

times literally. So, too, does light. Both artists’ superb manipulation of color enhances their ability to manufacture light. Not external light, but an internal light achieved through degrees of opacity, hue, and value. Texas is also felt in their artistic personalities. Absorbing influences but unswayed by trends or fashion, Boynton and Stout retained their individuality.

In Stout’s list, states such as the “wind blowing, not blowing” are opposites. They represent various moments relating to being itself. Stout’s paintings and sculpture stand in for the entire range of experience, for the “sea of activity” channeled through his living, existing being. Stout and Boynton shared a Houston studio for a few years; their friendship lasted for decades even as they traveled nearly opposite artistic paths. Yet they share many similarities in the use and goals of abstraction. The strength of their midcentury work is in keeping with Edmund Burke’s eighteenthcentury delineation of the concepts the beautiful and the sublime. For Burke, the sublime was the more affective mode because it invoked awe, terror, and fear. Beautiful though many of Stout and Boynton’s paintings are, their power derives from summoning aspects of the sublime. Stout and Boynton, who read widely, traveled, and operated from a cosmopolitan base, were open to broad, heterogeneous influences. Nevertheless, both artists were immensely affected by the Texas landscape and light. Their landscapes rarely allude to a specifically Texas locale. But the sense of wide horizon and grand sky anchors much of their work, sometimes metaphorically and other Top | Figure 7.28 | Richard Stout, Opus I (Tempest), 1999, bronze, 12" × 12" × 6". Bottom | Figure 7.29 | Richard Stout, Untitled (no longer extant), sculpture made for Kathleen Blackshear’s class at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1956.

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Dick Wray Of all the Houston artists, no one resented being labeled more than Dick Wray (1933–2011). He despised being called a “Texas artist.” Wray considered himself a loner, despite engendering intense respect among other artists and developing a close camaraderie with some. After studying architecture at the University of Houston from 1955 to 1958, Wray traveled to Düsseldorf, Germany, where he studied at the Kunstakademie in 1958. The Kunstakademie environment was stimulating, to say the least. Paul Klee had taught there in the 1930s; the controversial Joseph Beuys studied there and became a professor there in 1961. Wray just missed having Blinky Palermo, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter as classmates. They all share Wray’s playful fluctuation between abstraction and representation and his interest in the contemporary world. The supercharged atmosphere of the late-1950s Kunstakademie haunted Wray’s work for decades. In Paris on the same trip, he was further excited by the work of the Art Informel artists Jean Dubuffet, Antoni Tàpies, the cobra group, and Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze), among others. Wray responded to their works’ tactility and blend of wild aggression and sensual materiality. Back in Houston, Wray exhibited every year. His fervently Expressionistic style differed from that of his Houston peers of milder dispositions. Yet Wray did not blindly adhere to gestural abstraction; throughout his career he made figurative work, not sensing a distinction. In that regard, his philosophy is like that of Gerhard Richter, who makes abstract and representational paintings at the same time,

unencumbered by perceived polarities between the two modes. When pressed, Dick Wray acknowledged that “my mother was abstraction.”72 When James Johnson Sweeney arrived to lead the mfah in 1961, one of his first mandates was to cancel the Annual Exhibitions of Houston Artists. Those exhibitions had provided an important venue for local artists for years. Most of them resented the change, considering it a New Yorker’s snub of the community. But Wray made the cut for the first nationally juried, more competitive show that replaced the Annuals; he became close with Sweeney. In 1943, Sweeney had authored the poetic essay for Jackson Pollock’s first exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century. The essay is a fiery metaphor for Pollock’s paintings, a parallel

Figure 7.30 | Dick Wray, Green Grass Man, 1961, mixed media on canvas, 51½" × 58½".

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language. Sweeney saw much of Pollock’s wildly expressionistic spirit in Dick. For Wray as for Pollock, tactility was paramount, whether it was manifest in the texture of his early-1960s works, the physicality of his forms, or his way of bringing color alive in the later works. Wray channeled Pollock’s seething energy, managing to sustain his exuberance for six decades. One of Five Is a Tree was exhibited in the Texas Annual of 1961.73 The title originated in an E. E. Cummings poem.74 Wray said he painted it because the poem itself was rather abstract. But at the exhibition, visitors told Wray that they figured out which line in the painting was “the tree.” Such literalness was anathema to Wray’s worldview, to the point that he ceased titling his works for a long time. Wray sought a place, a painted or drawn space, that offered refuge from the literal response. Even though Wray bristled at the “Texas” moniker and the potential whiff of provincialism it carried, Texas clearly inspired his work, whether through its bright skies, rural rugged stretches, or Houston’s bustling urban scene. Postscript: Robert Ormerod Preusser after Leaving Texas In 1954, Robert Preusser left Houston for Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a position at the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology. For the rest of his career there, Preusser taught, wrote articles, and developed new art series, including strikingly forward-looking all-encompassing light-and-space environments.

Figure 7.31 | Dick Wray, One of Five Is a Tree, 1960, oil on canvas, 46¾" × 59".

After leaving Houston, Preusser became a fluent spokesman for the interrelationship between the arts and sciences, publishing a prescient and imagerich essay in the international journal Leonardo (for which he later served as U.S. editor) in 1973.75 The essay, “Relating Art to Science and Technology: An Educational Experiment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.),” concerns a lifelong theme for the Houston artist: integrating visual education into science and education curricula. The article refines and elaborates upon Preusser’s essay “Visual Education for Science and Engineering

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Students,” which was published in Gyorgy Kepes’s Education of Vision.76 Kepes, his former Chicago professor, was responsible for bringing Preusser to mit. Excerpts from “Relating Art to Science and Technology” should be standard reading for all liberal arts and hard science programs, thus it is worth examining his arguments closely. The article sheds light on both Preusser’s sensitivity to the paradigmatic changes in science and art during the preceding years and his highly structured thought process. That thought process also undergirded Preusser’s maturing oeuvre during his decades in Texas. The impetus behind Preusser’s essay was a fifteen-year-old interdisciplinary program at mit that he had cofounded in 1957 and molded since then. He argues for the need to join artistic and scientific methodologies: “Visual stimulation and curiosity lead to understanding and discovery in both disciplines. Furthermore, reliance upon intuitiveanalytical procedures and quantitative measure, without exercising subjective powers and responding to qualitative values, reduces creative ability in either field.”77 He lays out the quandary: dramatic advances in art and science since the late nineteenth century had led to extreme specialization within the disciplines, particularly in the sciences: “The segregation of artistic sensibilities from scientific and technical competence has produced a generation of specialists with little sensitivity to aesthetic values.”78 (Other authors, he notes, had discussed the relationship between art, science, and technology, but his concern is the problems as they relate to the educating of scientists and engineers, such as those

at his home institution.) Preusser alludes to the scientific underpinnings that led to artistic movements like Neo-Impressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. He is struck by the “paradox of our time: that [science and art] have not been synthesized in the process of education.”79 The reasons for this are widespread. The “concepts, media, idioms, form and content [that] evolved during a century of the now waning machine age are no longer relevant to changing physical, social and psychological environments.” He identifies a distinct lack of established criteria and a need for “redefinition and reorientation of the visual arts with reference to these changes.” That lack of criteria, he continues, led to the current situation, in which “novelty rather than credibility predominates in the market place and museums.” Here Preusser gives no quarter to fashionable but vacuous art forms: “Time will undoubtedly deal severely with the many dead ends promoted and merchandized as commodities to be consumed by a novelty-seeking clientele.” (One wonders what he would think if he had lived to see the twenty-first century? Most likely, an inquisitive mind such as his would have embraced the digital age.) The overarching theme, however, is the separation of art from its “customary [that is, scientific and technological] backgrounds and interrelationships,” resulting in the recent tendency toward visual concreteness. As examples, he cites the shaped canvases and primary structures of minimal art and op art. (He is thinking of artists such as Frank Stella, Robert Morris, and Donald Judd.) Shaped

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canvases mix sculptural forms with painted forms, but are still highly concrete and literal, and entirely devoid of scientific contextualization.80 Preusser, who never uses the term, identifies the dawning of the postmodern era. The modernist-formalist Clement Greenberg ignored minimalism; Michael Fried famously critiqued it in “Art and Objecthood” (1967).81 Preusser stood outside such debates; he was not a conscientious objector, but the ideological altercations of art criticism were not his concern. “The division between painting and sculpture has been ignored,” he continues, “as each is assigned characteristics of the other”: “Such explorations have shattered fixed ideas about art, making it doubtful that conventionally categorized idioms will remain autonomous or that the visual elements will ever fit together again in a manner conforming to the traditional vocabulary and structure of art.”82 The promise held by advancing technology will not be realized “until there is sustained, in-depth inquiry among artists, scientists and engineers. A soul-searching reappraisal of their crucial roles is imperative.” These are fighting words, concluding with a baldly earnest plea: “Only then can we hope for the interdisciplinary understanding and collaborative action that is necessary to thwart the dehumanization of man’s visual and physical worlds.”83 Preusser then outlined the specifics of the mit program, beginning with the discrepancy between the “average freshman’s ability to think and see.” “Preoccupation with identifying and measuring,” he continues later, “explicit in scientific learning, tends to anesthetize the capacity to see directly.”84 Preusser and his colleagues recognized that the mit

students would be uncomfortable with their artistic skills (or lack thereof), so their introductory exercises include directed “doodling”—a habit shared by all people—which encourages conscious use of “this subconscious process [making] possible the shifting from subjectivity to objectivity.”85 Eventually, students are motivated to initiate their own projects, often exploring aesthetic possibilities within their own fields of study. A stunning example of artistic merit found through “the application of highly developed scientific techniques” is seen in the fractured interiors of Lucite blocks. Students and professors penetrated the plastic Lucite with electron beams from a Van de Graaff high-voltage generator. The further step involved was to prick the block’s surface with a metal punch, causing the electrons to escape, “making visible the breakdown pattern.”86 The “dielectric breakdown” results in a plantlike fractal pattern encased within the plastic.

Figure 7.32 | Robert Preusser, “Relief planes illuminated from the rear and distorted in a semicircular Mylar wall,” c. 1973, photograph of an installation, Department of Architecture, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.

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Other students used plasma technology: transparent polyvinyl fluoride tubing was evacuated to form a partial vacuum. High-voltage current causes it to glow by charging the gas particles; altering the composition of the gas can change the color of light.87 There are experiments with crystal growth, magnetized metal filings encased in polyester resin, and computer programs that convert the “parameters of dimension, color, luminosity etc. into different domains for display on a high resolution oscilloscope.”88 One, the “Plexiglas and Nylon cord construction,” resembles nothing so much as a Naum Gabo Constructivist filament sculpture. Most of the fifteen images in the essay are visual-design experiments made by mit students, a testament to Preusser and mit for engaging in a Bauhaus-style, student-dominant program. One reproduced work, however, is by Robert Preusser. He titles it descriptively: “Relief planes illuminated from the rear and distorted in a semicircular Mylar wall.” The work is an environment like a mirrored funhouse, although Preusser is somewhat more analytical, describing it as a “more complex display of optical phenomenon.” “Rear lighting,” he explains,

“reflects color from the back sides of planes in relief that are mirrored (with varying degrees of shaped deformations) in a semi-circular wall unevenly surfaced with Mylar.” Preusser’s relief planes resemble an optical, stacked collection of Josef Albers’s squares. He retains an inkling of the minimalist grid and repetition, yet the dizzying Mylar and light effects energize the entire environment. Importantly, Preusser’s room depends on the viewer’s activation of the space: “Various transformations appear when the spectator’s position changes relative to the wall.”89 Relief planes indicate a radical shift in Preusser’s use of space: very much in sync with performance art and optical art of the 1970s, this installation (from 1972) changes depending on the viewer’s position. It is at once interactive, scientific, and spatially disorienting.90 Visually, it forecasts distorted projections by video artists such as the multimedia artist Tony Oursler (American, born 1957) in the 1990s. Robert Preusser was sixty-two when he published the Leonardo article, a testament to his unwavering exploration of innovative techniques and results.

8 Its ranks slowly reduced, the Fort Worth Circle

Sculpture in and around the Studio of Charles Williams

disbanded in 1958. If late-1940s Fort Worth modernism was marked by sophisticated, occasionally cross-dressing soirées at Flora and Dickson Reeder’s house, the mid-1950s and 1960s revolved around the martini-drinking, macho “salon” at the sculptor Charles Williams’s home and studio.1 This group had more in common with the denizens of New York’s Cedar Tavern, where the erstwhile Texan James Brooks rubbed elbows with other members of the New York School, including Jackson Pollock, one of the Tavern’s more notorious visitors. While the later Fort Worth generation never acquired a nickname the way the circle retroactively did, countless friends and artists collected regularly at the studio and handmade bar built by Charles Williams. Williams was a catalyst within the artistic community; his studio was a “social center,” according to the artist Roger Winter, for many younger artists in the 1950s and 1960s, including Jack Boynton, Roy Fridge, Jim Love, David McManaway, Gene

Owens, and Ed Storms.2 The significance of the studio extended beyond this core group: Octavio and Consuelo Medellín, a decade older than Charles and Anita Williams, were close friends and regular guests at the Williams studio-bar. Members of the first generation of Fort Worth modernists, such as Bror Utter, Dickson Reeder, and Cynthia Brants, all visited Charlie’s shop. Bill Bomar and Kelly Fearing stopped by when in town. The Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi and the inventorpolymath Buckminster Fuller made requisite stops at Charlie’s shop while in Texas.3 Daniel Defenbacher, the Fort Worth Art Association’s first professional director (1951–1955), frequented the Williams studio, as did the collector Sam Cantey III; the Dallas landscape architect Joe Lambert; the businessman Stanley Marcus; the banker John Murchison and his arts-patron wife, Lucille (“Lupe”); the real estate developer and collector Raymond Nasher and his wife, Patsy; and the oilman Ted Weiner and his wife, Lucille. Until the spring of 1966, the studio served as an informal locus for avant-garde activity

Facing | Figure 8.01 | Revelers at Charles T. Williams’s studio-bar, Fort Worth, circa 1955. Williams himself probably took this photograph. Left to right: Dickson Reeder (seated, partially in frame), Charles T. Williams’s model for the

Ridglea fountain, Jack Boynton, General Dynamics illustratorartist Bob Cunningham, D’Aun Cunningham, unidentified figures at bar, Bror Utter (seated, wearing glasses), Ann Williams Boynton (seated), McKie Trotter (standing at far right).

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in Northeast Texas, attracting artists, critics, and collectors from around the state and the country. The bar’s namesake and cynosure, the sculptor Charles Truett Williams (1918–1966), took part in the Normandy invasion and the liberation of Paris. Stationed in Paris with the Army Corps of Engineers (1944–1946), Williams experienced European modernism firsthand.4 Back in the states, the GI Bill helped him earn a bfa at Texas Christian University (1952), followed in 1955 by what may have been the first mfa issued by tcu. In Fort Worth over the next decade, he and his Dallas friend Octavio Medellín collaborated on private and public mosaic-mural commissions for Temple Emanu-El in Dallas and for the Texas Turnpike Authority in Arlington. Evincing consummate skill in casting, carving, hammering, chasing, and welding, Williams was well served by his engineering expertise in both grand and small-scale sculptures. An early Williams sculpture conjures his European sojourn. Continuum (1951, limestone) pays homage to the Texan’s cherished influence, the English sculptor Henry Moore, as well as the FrenchGerman Surrealism of Jean Arp.5 It differs significantly from the work of both artists, however, in the highly compressed space it inhabits. It is as if Williams began with Moore’s recumbent-female motif, then constricted her proportions into cubic form, expertly working the tantalizingly sensual marble. The hole in Continuum is as structurally decisive as the rounded marble contours, connecting interior seamlessly to exterior. The shape encourages an unbroken transition between the figurative essence of the form and its abstract iteration in, as its title indicates, a continuum.

Moore’s horizontal female forms were inspired around 1925 by a magazine photograph of a Toltec or Mayan Chac-Mool figure. These colossal stone figures, which are found near temple entrances or over doorways, hold positions of authority.6 The reclining pose soon became a primary motif of the Englishman’s production. Moore encountered a Chac-Mool figure in full three-dimensional form shortly thereafter, as a plaster cast at Paris’s Musée de l’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (later the Musée de l’Homme). And twenty-some years later, during the war, Williams, who revered Moore, may have followed in his tracks.

Figure 8.02 | Charles Truett Williams, Continuum, 1951, limestone, 15" × 6" × 12".

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Human anatomy frequently undergirds Williams’s sculptures, regardless of the medium or the liberties he takes with form. Compare, for example, two wooden torsos from 1949 and 1956. In 1949, after returning to the United States, Williams constructed a Noguchi-esque female form of smoothly finished, interlocked pieces. A female with dualdirectional breasts and protruding left hip, she also invokes the African and Oceanic sculptures he might have seen at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris and the European interpretations of those tribal and non-Western objects. His Torso (1956) also found its foundation in the figure—a bent leg or an arm is carved in relief in the lower half—and possesses the vertical orientation of a human being. This torso remains

Figure 8.03 | Henry Moore, Reclining Figure, 1956, bronze, 96".

decidedly more abstract, more like a letter from an ancient alphabet than a human being. Williams revisited figural motifs regularly, making sculptures that frequently teeter between settling into a human shape and thwarting the full apprehension of a figural form. Similarly, the columnar Ancient Symbol (1957), carved from a single piece of wood, is mysteriously anthropomorphic. Smooth stone-shaped discs visually trisect the tapering walnut cylinder. Ancient Symbol relates to the numerous stone cairns that Williams constructed on his Fort Worth land. The walnut sculpture’s vertical format merges human verticality with the cairn’s original function as an ancient siting marker. Williams plugged a knothole in Ancient Symbol with ebony, a gesture that became

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a trademark of the “Ancient Symbol” series. It is also pertinent to note that Williams literally situated Ancient Symbol within the local: the wood came from an uprooted walnut tree he salvaged from the great Fort Worth flood of 1949. Many sculptures of the period were hewn from flood-ravaged trees, a working method by which Williams physically embedded Fort Worth history into his objects. Williams’s source material was vital: whether constructed from salvaged and carved walnut, retrieved objects from junkyards, or local cedar, his sculptures

contain a previous life.7 Such reuse, crucial to his development, became more pronounced as his career developed. Williams’s work possesses an additional layer of depth through his technique and unique construction. He demonstrated a special ability in shaping the perimeters of his sculpture, developing a rounded, knoblike form that sometimes represents a formalized elbow, knee, or head. Perhaps originally a fantasy-inspired shape reminiscent of Arp’s Dada sculpture, the rounded extremity is unique to

Figure 8.04 | Charles Truett Williams, Torso, 1956, black walnut, 21" × 9".

Figure 8.05 | Charles Truett Williams, Torso #2, 1949, walnut, 30" × 9½" × 9½".

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Williams, whose bodily knobs are distinctively globular.8 The knobs mark the sculpture’s outer reaches while also inviting a circularity that directs the eye or hand back into the sculptured form. Continuum is exemplary in this regard: each extremity is bulbously curved to return the emphasis back to the interior or to other boundaries of the sculpture, like intertwined solid Möbius strips. Williams’s walnut medium and his sculptural motifs transcend the formal exercises they might have been in a lesser artist’s hands. By connecting dualistic tropes such as

Figure 8.06 | Charles Truett Williams, Totem (Ancient Symbol), 1957, black walnut, 42".

archaic-contemporary, negative-positive, or interior-exterior, Williams’s objects enact a dialogic relationship with the past that is firmly rooted in the present. A Fort Worth native, the oil wildcatter and collector Ted Weiner grew up in West Texas, where he first struck oil. Weiner and his wife, Lucille, became two of Williams’s most dedicated patrons. Moved by an interest in simplified archaic forms, the Weiners began to collect a notable group of nonWestern and ethnographic objects in the early 1940s. In 1949 they began to develop the first significant private collection of modernist sculpture in the Southwest, predating the better-known Ray and Patsy Nasher collection. They amassed works by Jean Arp, Harry Bertoia, Alexander Calder, Edgar Degas, Jacques Lipchitz, Jim Love, Marino Marini, Amedeo Modigliani, Picasso, Charles Umlauf, and Jack Zajac.9 They collected Henry Moore sculptures dating from the 1930s through the 1960s, including the bronze Reclining Figure (1956) that directly influenced Charles Williams.10 In 1949, Ted and Lucille Weiner hired the thirty-three-year-old New York architect Edward Larrabee Barnes to design, on an expansive lot, their Fort Worth house and garden. The Barnes commission, with its horizontal emphasis and open floor plan, was the first International Style modernist home in North Texas.11 Pleased with the sculptures that Charles Williams had installed for his terraced garden, Ted Weiner proposed that the exclusive Ridglea Country Club in Fort Worth commission art from the local artist, including the copper Odalisque (1954). A clear homage to Moore, Odalisque’s hammered

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undulations embody abstract sensuality much as the Englishman’s reclining females do. The prostrate Odalisque’s upper hip juts skyward provocatively as her neck and head curve seductively. Williams would have been familiar with Henri Matisse’s Blue Nude (Memory of Biskra) (1907), with its exaggerated hips, as well as his clay sculptural model for Reclining Nude 1 (Aurora) (1906–1907), whose collapse inspired the painting. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Matisse had radically innovated the traditional odalisque, severely disrupting a long-hallowed approach that could be traced back to works like Giorgione and Titian’s sixteenth-century Venuses, through Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (1647–1651) and Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’s Grande Odalisque (1814). Williams’s copper Odalisque remains in situ over the bar at the Ridglea Country Club, cannily installed to gaze teasingly down on the imbibers. In 2012, Ted and Lucille’s daughter, Gwendolyn Weiner, gave two of Charles Williams’s works from her parents’ collection to the Estate of Charles Williams, closing the circle on a critical avenue of patronage.12 One of these, Three Posts (1961), from the “Heritage of the Great Southwest” series, is assembled from local cedar and found iron (a horse shoe, chain, a piece of a jack, a lever, a clevis rod) mounted on a limestone base. Three Posts stands like three figures pausing in the fields to gossip or simply converse, their tools dangling from their sides. Plowshares stand in for their “hats.” The sculpture’s distinctive southwestern motif and straightforward presentation offer deadpan humor. Williams’s studio was a social center for guests, patrons, and artists alike. His influence on artists, Top | Figure 8.07 | Charles Truett Williams, Odalisque, 1954, hammered bronze, in situ at Ridglea Country Club, Fort Worth. Bottom | Figure 8.08 | Charles Truett Williams, Fountain, hammered bronze, in situ at Ridglea Country Club, Fort Worth.

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many of whom were in their early careers, was profound. Two lifelong friends were Houston’s Jim Love and Jack Boynton, a transplanted Fort Worth native. Their regular presence at Charlie’s shop strengthened intrastate artistic allegiances. Boynton introduced Williams to Love during a trip to Houston to see Jermayne MacAgy’s Pacemakers group show at cam in 1957. Williams, Boynton, and Forrest Bess were all selected as “Pacemakers.” Although Love’s work was not featured, he was MacAgy’s preparator. By all accounts, Williams, who was Love’s senior by nine years, welcomed the younger artist as an equal. Boynton later recalled, “Charlie turned Jim on to casting; in turn Jim turned Charlie on to found objects.”13 A friendship and a passion for sculpture was formed: Williams taught Love how to cast metal and how to use the lost-wax technique. The two sculptors foraged at salvage yards in tandem, a habit that had been ingrained in Love since visiting a Waco scrap yard a few years earlier with another Texas sculptor, Roy Fridge. Gashman’s scrap yard became their most celebrated Fort Worth haunt, which they habitually followed with barbeque sandwiches and beer at Angelo’s restaurant.14 Although Love made his career in Houston, his passion for the arts first developed in Waco. After studying business administration at Baylor University, he underwent a transformation in a drama course taught by the university’s legendary theater professor Paul Baker.15 Following Love’s unofficial postgraduate year in Baylor’s theater department, Baker recommended him for a lighting technician job in Houston in 1953 at the then-maverick Alley Theatre. For a period, Love designed theatrical sets, Figure 8.09 | Charles Truett Williams, Three Posts, 1961, cedar and iron, 85" × 18½" × 22".

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expediting his construction process by learning how to weld. In 1956, Jermayne MacAgy hired him as a museum technician for cam, thus initiating his long association with her and, by extension, John and Dominique de Menil, whose namesake museum holds a significant trove of Love’s sculptures. Love shared an aesthetic sensibility with his sculptor colleagues. Williams, Love, Fridge, David McManaway, and Gene Owens were all susceptible to visual puns and toilet humor, in Texas-goodold-boy fashion, as evidenced in Williams’s portrait of Love, The Exhibitionist (1962).16 The Love effigy, sporting a bowler hat and a telltale male spigot,

playfully alludes to a charge of indecent exposure levied against the younger artist on the University of St. Thomas campus, at that time the location for much of the Menils’ and Jerry MacAgy’s artistic activities. Williams’s Ancient Warrior (1962, cast-iron found object) likewise exhibits a jocular theme. In 1962, it won the top Purchase Prize at Texas’s 24th Annual exhibition, traveling from San Antonio (whose Art League purchased it) to Corpus Christi, Beaumont, and Dallas.17 Williams’s Ancient Warrior and his Jim Love portrait belong to the vast trove of work created from objects found during their frequent junkyard outings.

Figure 8.10 | Photograph of Charles Truett Williams and Jim Love, c. 1950s, in Williams’s Fort Worth studio.

Figure 8.11 | Charles Truett Williams, Ancient Warrior, 1962.

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Figure 8.12 | Drawing after the photograph of a wooden Zuni “War God” (now repatriated, formerly Brooklyn Museum of Art) that appeared in the Contemporary Arts Museum’s Totems Not Taboo catalogue, 1959.

Ancient Warrior, with its Dadaistic absurdity and Freudian emphasis, was likely inspired by MacAgy’s Totems Not Taboo exhibition in Houston. As he had with the Pacemakers exhibitions, Love helped install that iconic show for cam at the mfah. In the wake of that much-lauded exhibition, Love and Williams made objects that were indebted to MacAgy’s curatorial influence. Compare, for example, Ancient Warrior with the Zuni “War God” that MacAgy borrowed from the Brooklyn Museum of Art for her exhibition.18 Witty and occasionally puerile anthropomorphisms became a defining subtheme of sculptural objects that radiated out of the Williams studio. As in the Dada vein, these punning pieces undercut high-art pretensions. At the same time, their inside jokes anchored the artists within a spirited local scene. As Charles Williams’s “Ancient” series intimates, many works by him, Love, McManaway, and Fridge bear a likeness to totemic or primitive objects, a reminder of how Henry Moore’s encounter with the pre-Columbian Chac-Mool image opened a sculptural avenue that reverberated decades later in Williams’s work. Around 1960, Roy Fridge gave Williams a small, elegant sculpture made of carved pieces of wood nailed and fitted together on a four-legged pedestal. A Beeville native, Fridge attended Baylor with Love, studying theater under Baker, in addition to film. He embarked on a commercial filmmaking career before turning to sculpture. In 1961, he left Dallas for the beach at Port Aransas, living in a shack and enjoying frequent visits from Love and McManaway.19 Fridge’s gift to Williams possesses the meticulous layering and mysterious construction of some of his later artifact-like assemblages.

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About the same time, McManaway presented Williams with a gift of a found bronze putto supporting a brick carved with Williams’s birth date, like Atlas holding up the earth. McManaway playfully contrasts Renaissance-style refinement (the cupid figure) with the brick’s heaviness (associated with Williams). The Texas sculptors shared a penchant for creating “Jomos” such as this and giving them to one another. An invention of McManaway’s, a Jomo was a seemingly meaningless, nondescript object facetiously imbued with great talismanic power. It

Figure 8.13 | Roy Fridge, Untitled (Gift Object), early 1960s, wood, 12½" × 11" × 4”.

originated from McManaway’s memory of a black character in the film Juke Girl (1942) who peddles worthless “Jomos.” (“Jomo” reverses the syllables in “mojo,” an early twentieth-century term of African derivation for a charm, talisman, or spell.)20 McManaway’s Jomos are not primitive per se, although the concept originated with a dark-skinned huckster selling quasi-primitive bogus charms. The multifaceted relationship between depictions of African Americans in U.S. popular culture, ethnicity, and primitivism affects the formal interpretation of some of the Texas sculptors’ work.

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It is crucial to note that the phenomenon of primitivism is paramount in the evolution of modern European art. As an area of study in the twentieth century, primitivism referred to the interest that so-called primitive objects held for European and American artists. Picasso’s African-mask-wearing women in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907, MoMA) remain the highest-profile example but represent only a single case of the pervasive visual pillaging of tribal or totemic art.21 Les Demoiselles is arguably indebted to Iberian sculpture and African tribal masks; Picasso himself paid a pivotal visit to the Trocadéro in the spring of 1907.

In 1908, at the age of twelve, André Breton, the founder of the Surrealist movement, acquired an Easter Island figurine. The acquisition was an auspicious beginning to Breton’s collection of hundreds of ceremonial Oceanic and pre-Columbian objects, whose formal expression he found to be more powerful than that of African objects. Breton, who in 1924 famously defined Surrealism as “pure, psychic automatism,” published, exhibited, and collected tribal objects alongside Dada and Surrealist objects. Thus, the leader of Surrealism pioneered the practice of juxtaposing the primitive to the modern.22 Primitive objects held a special Figure 8.14 | David McManaway, Untitled (Gift Object), c. early 1960s, brick and found objects.

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attraction for European modernists, who responded viscerally to what they perceived to be their primeval power. Artists and collectors appreciated tribal art’s propensity to bypass the rigid hierarchical rules of the Academies: to appropriate the look of totemic objects offered an effective way to épater le bourgeois (“shock the middle classes”). In 1938, Robert Goldwater published a groundbreaking study of the phenomenon, Primitivism in Modern Art. Notably, art historical primitivism refers to the Western response to tribal art, not to the primary or original functions of the objects themselves. Thus, by midcentury a practice had developed in which European modernism could serve as a point of entry for viewers of non-Western or tribal art. Texas art institutions and artists engaged in dialogues with arts once deemed primitive (but that are more accurately referred to by their countries of origins). In Houston, Dominique and John de Menil, patrons and friends of many Surrealist artists, acquired tribal arts in great breadth and depth; their friend Jerry MacAgy also collected primitive objects. And as noted above, Ted Weiner had been collecting objects from Oceania, Asia, and the Americas since the 1940s. Related to the artistic, curatorial, and semantic questions surrounding primitivism was the problem of racial segregation, which endured throughout Texas. Art historical primitivism refers to objects removed from their African or other non-Western cultures and capitalized upon by Western culture. Texas artists of the 1950s lived in a deeply segregated society and country that explicitly and implicitly denigrated African Americans, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the state adopted Jim Crow laws, a series

of statutes and penal codes, common throughout the South, that were designed to prevent African Americans from achieving political or social equality. Texas enacted twenty-seven Jim Crow laws between 1866 and 1958. Statutory segregation encouraged a cultural environment of racist practices and attitudes. To better understand how modern sculptural Texas objects fit within the nexus of primitivism and racial codes, it is worth retracing a defining moment in Texas’s turbulent history of segregation. The state was the center of the Supreme Court ruling in Sweatt v. Painter (1950), which declared that the University of Texas, by setting up a onestudent, African American law school for the plaintiff, Heman Sweatt, had denied him equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment; the UT Law School was ordered to admit African American students. That ruling challenged the legal doctrine of “separate but equal,” which had been in place in the United States since the 1890s.23 The landmark Supreme Court decision to desegregate all U.S. public schools, Brown v. Board of Education, followed six years later, in 1954.24 Even with that historic federal mandate in place, Texas governor Allan Shivers, a staunch advocate for states’ rights, famously resisted desegregation. For example, when the Mansfield school district, south of Fort Worth, was to undergo desegregation in 1956, Shivers defied a federal court order by sending in the Texas Rangers to keep black students from entering. His resistance was supported by a large percentage of the state’s populace. Bolstered by its own defiance, Texas passed another key segregation law in 1958. The Mansfield school district

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was not desegregated until 1965; it was years before the school system of a major city such as Dallas was finally desegregated. Segregation legislation applied to Mexican Americans as well as African Americans.25 In the 1950s and 1960s, both groups were still subjected to de jure (required by law) and de facto (actual, whether based in law or not) segregation. In a study of a typical Texas town, two sociologists demonstrated that movie theatres remained segregated for Mexican Americans until the 1940s; the town’s restaurants remained segregated until 1958. Harry Pachon and Joan Moore offer this disturbing summation of the general U.S. situation for Mexican Americans at midcentury: After the 1930s, Mexican migration to the United States was influenced by attempts by both the states and the national government to regulate Mexican immigration to labor and public policy needs. Mexicans were deported in the 1930s at the time of the Great Depression, imported in the 1940s as agricultural braceros due to the labor shortage caused by World War II, and deported in large numbers again in the 1950s (Operation Wetback).26

In a territory whose default color was white, a member of an outsider or nonwhite group essentially became an Other, the philosophical and social science designation for someone whom a society excludes from the dominant group.27 In Texas, the designation implied both “less than” and “to be excluded from” the white mainstream. The situation for Mexican Americans was further complicated by their dual nationality. Texas’s proximity

to Mexico was double-edged: Texans were afforded increased exposure and opportunity to understand their southern neighbors, yet the formation and maintenance of the state originated with a violent separation from Mexico that ossified into an overt ethnic distinction. A story about Charles Williams and Octavio Medellín conveys nuances of this quandary for Texas artists. Medellín’s family fled central Mexico for San Antonio during the Mexican Revolution. He was a close friend of Carlos Mérida, with whom he traveled and taught at North Texas State Teachers College in Denton in 1941–1942. With Allie Tennant and Dorothy Austin, Medellín cofounded the Texas Sculptors Group in 1943. In the 1950s, Medellín and his wife, Consuelo, undertook an extended journey into Mexico with Charles and Anita Williams.28 According to Medellín, once they reached the Yucatán, Williams was stunned by the Chac-Mool sculpture at Chichen Itza.29 He exclaimed, “Oh, that’s Henry Moore!” Medellín teasingly responded, “No, Henry Moore copied him, ha, ha, ha.”30 Both artists possessed a sophisticated understanding of modernist sculpture and enthusiastically embraced the preColumbian works in situ. Moore’s three-dimensional language was ingrained in Williams, who had followed Moore’s sculpture and influences in France and then Fort Worth, and had now confronted the English sculptor’s source material in Mexico. The experience would have resonated deeply. Williams long knew of the primordial power inherent in the sculptural, emphasizing it through his own recombinatory methods. As Stephanie Lewthwaite notes in her outstanding essay on Medellín’s ambiguous cultural status

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and his relationship to modernism, the geographic position of Texas artists gave them a ready opportunity to interact with their neighbors across the border: “Just as modernist sculptors assumed ownership of ‘primitive’ art forms, Texas artists took special ownership of these sources. They viewed them not simply as identifiably American sources, but as specific to the region and central to the state’s unique contribution to a ‘Good Neighbor’ policy based on cultural diplomacy and transnational art

Figure 8.15 | Octavio Medellín, The Dancer, n.d., terra cotta, 20¼".

flows.”31 Given the realities of their lengthy Mexican trip, this description may be more applicable to Williams than Medellín. During the course of the journey, Medellín received an ambivalent welcome in his ancestral land. Williams’s son Karl recalls his parents’ stories of “uncomfortable moments” related to Octavio and Consuelo’s Yucatán reception.32 During the culturally biased and racially segregated midcentury era, the Medellíns remained Others in both worlds. Such a role put Octavio Medellín in a precarious and uncharted position. According to Lewthwaite, Medellín was increasingly distanced from what he perceived as his own past, existing “on the margins of both homeland and host society.”33 She avers that Medellín successfully synthesized elements from both influences, producing an alternate form of modernism, one reflective of his bicultural status.34 Thus Medellín’s teasing response to Williams’s Chac-Mool excitement was complex. By the intensity of its real-life encounters, the Medellín-Williams family trip complicates the hydra-headed subject of primitivism in modern art. (It is important to note the difference between collecting primitive objects, as Breton did, and actually visiting the source of their creation, as Paul Gauguin did in Martinique and Tahiti.) Both Medellín and Williams reacted to the potency of the Mesoamerican site: for Williams, the formal power dominated; for Medellín, the ancestral connections prevailed. Before the Totems Not Taboo exhibition in 1959, the mfah had exhibited African art from a private collection as early as 1933, and the Dallas Museum of Art showed African, Oceanic, and Pacific Primitive Artifacts in 1954. By the late 1950s, acquiring

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original Oceanic, Native American, and African objects had gained currency among Texas collectors, complementing the statewide expanding interest in modernism.35 The idea of a segregated society seeped into the Texas art scene in a way that is integral to its history and therefore its interpretation. How we view modernism and primitivism in Texas depends in part on how we read history. If we regard them in hindsight from a twenty-first-century perspective, it is incumbent upon us to question hegemonic assumptions that may have been invisible to the midcentury artist.36 These often subtle cultural assumptions can be deconstructed and better understood through an examination of the sociological constructions that served to perpetuate the mindset of the dominant class. In the social sciences, the term “unmarked case” refers to the common occurrence of employing the universal (dominant, accepted, “unmarked”) to describe the specific. The “unmarked case” is the mindset that goes unquestioned or the rule that a group assumes to be true. In 2008, the art historian Partha Mitter enlisted the “unmarked case” to refer to the Western modernist artistic canon. Mitter argued that by the late twentieth century, the selfevident universality of the Western canon became the unmarked case, making any reference to modernism implicitly stand for Western modernism.37 To apply Mitter’s idea to Texas, the dominant culture of white males stood in for the culture of all Texans. But from a perspective contemporaneous with the Texas postwar artists, racially divisive policies such as segregation were the prevailing condition, whereas modernism was novel terrain. In a

sense, white male artists in Texas unwittingly participated in the creation of the “unmarked” canon of Western modernism. Strangely, they had not been admitted into the canon because their endeavors at the time barely registered on the national, not to mention international, scene. Works by Jim Love call attention to this dissonance in the concept of Texas primitivism. A subtle example that implicitly invokes the theme is Love’s sculpture Figure (1959). The work earned MoMA’s imprimatur when William Seitz selected it for his monumental The Art of Assemblage exhibition.38 At a mere sixteen inches high, the unassuming Figure shared a gallery wall with a series of paintings and sculptures, including Jean Tinguely’s kinetic Monstranz.39 Although Love was duly appreciative for the MoMA exposure, he was likewise “disgruntled,” feeling that Figure was not very representative of his work.40 Forty years later, in the catalogue for a Jim Love retrospective, Don Quaintance constructed a narrative that followed the trajectory of Love’s career via the metaphor of Figure. The sculpture eventually became a “junior member” of MoMA’s permanent collection.41 (Today, Figure belongs to a latent cortege of Texas art in New York museum collections, along with works by John Biggers, Jack Boynton, Ben L. Culwell, Everett Spruce, and others.)42 Despite Love’s ambivalent response to the MoMA honor, the sculpture itself possesses elegance and quiet fortitude. The straightforward, minimal adornment of its animal form, sitting on its curved iron legs in a gesture that evokes a sense of patience, aligns it visually with many totemic objects. Figure was echoed decades later in Love’s

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welded-steel works of the 1980s.43 The metalpolishing brush functions dually as leonine mane and flower petals. The utter simplicity of the assembled sculpture (a “put-together,” to use Love’s knowing and ironic nomenclature) lends it power, quite opposed to the raucous implications of Tinguely’s Monstranz. Rather, the upward turn of Figure’s “face” delicately implies movement. That subtle tropism enhances the anthropomorphic quality and links it to Witch Doctor (1959), another Love put-together that more overtly refers to the duality of primitivism within a distinctly Texan cultural experience. Love’s Witch Doctor belongs to the same genus of quasi-animalistic, modest-sized welded found objects as Figure. Even the materials are kindred: a polishing brush like that in Figure manifests as Witch Doctor’s necklace. Although the MoMA sculpture is contemporaneous with Witch Doctor, the latter is categorically more complicated—a welded steel rabbit whose outstretched arms hold found-object charms. The sculpture merges pop culture, primitivism, put-togethers, and Jomos. Love’s Witch Doctor playfully emblematizes the Bugs Bunny cartoon Which Is Witch (1949).44 That episode, among the least politically correct of Warner Bros. cartoons, finds Bugs Bunny traveling in Africa, where he encounters a spear-wielding, jet-black pygmy witch doctor with enormous white lips and teeth.45 In need of a rabbit for the prescription he is formulating, the witch doctor marches Bugs to his hut with the intent of boiling him in a giant cauldron. By the time Bugs realizes it is not a bathtub, the lid is clamped down, and he escapes only when the heat forces him into the glass pressure gauge, which Figure 8.16 | Jim Love, Figure, 1959, welded steel and cast iron with brush, 16⅛" × 6" × 6⅝" (40.9 × 15.3 × 16.8 cm).

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breaks open. Bugs slips away and into an empty hut, from which he peers out into the village, gaining the inspiration for his escape. He pulls a large brass spring over his head and onto his neck to fashion a set of Ndebele-style neck rings and inserts dinner plates in his mouth to extend his lips.46 After binding his ears, and sporting a sarong, Bugs falls in

step with two local women, mimicking their distinctive posture and style of walking, until his costume malfunctions: the spring bounces off and the plates pop out. In the end, after wrestling with an alligator and saving the “little guy” witch doctor from the gator, Bugs is free. The body parts of Love’s Witch Doctor can be variously interpreted, but the bunny ears—close together atop the head with a slight forward arc—and the wide jaw and big eyes are compellingly Bugs Bunny–esque. In fact, Love’s Witch Doctor appears to have been closely modeled on the promotional title frames of the cartoon. In them, Bugs wears a tribal mask, his legs bowed and his arms outstretched. Both Love’s sculpture and the Warner Bros. title frames are symbolic amalgamations of Bugs and the witch doctor that are never pictured in the animated sequences of the story.47 Witch Doctor must also be seen as a direct response to Totems Not Taboo. As he did so many times on other occasions, Love helped MacAgy with the installation, putting in ramps and pedestals to display nearly two

Figure 8.17 | Jim Love, Witch Doctor, 1959, iron, 12¼" × 9½" × 3¾".

Figure 8.18 | Still image from opening credits, featuring Bugs Bunny in the Warner Bros. cartoon Which Is Witch, 1949.

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hundred primitive objects.48 MacAgy borrowed a Benin bronze head for the show from the Baltimore Museum of Art, from the Wurtzburger Collection. The seventeenth-century head represented that of a deceased king, his neck obscured by numerous neck rings. It is highly plausible that Love teasingly reinterpreted the “primitive” work after experiencing Totems Not Taboo, inventing a primitive-meets-popculture emblem appropriate for his artistic temperament and cultural era. Witch Doctor cannily thwarts the embedded, even if unintentional, racism of the Warner Bros. cartoon by replacing the pygmy with a primitivized bunny. An apparent complement to this work is a welded sculpture by Love’s junkyard comrade Charles Williams. The found-object skirted figure Ubangi Woman (1961) has round eyes, gauged ear lobes, and a wide, opened circular mouth. The plate-mouthed or duckbilled reference in both Ubangi Woman and the Bugs Bunny cartoon is based on the body modification practice of lip plate insertion by certain African tribes. Ubangi Woman also seems indebted to Totems Not Taboo or, at the very least, to the interest in primitive arts that underpinned the exhibition. Through its use of just a few salvaged objects, Ubangi Woman can also be read as a respectful emulation of primitivism. But another potential influence on Williams—and perhaps on Love as well—is less seemly. As part of their Africa-themed entertainment in the first decades of the twentieth century, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus exhibited living African people in their U.S. shows. The circus promoted the exhibitions through posters and

advertising that touted a “Tribe of Genuine Ubangi Savages” from “Africa’s Deepest Depths.”49 A Ringling Bros. press agent later admitted the natives were not actually Ubangi members: he chose “Ubangi” for its sound.50 Some publicity posters claim that the Ubangi have “mouths and lips as large as those of full-grown crocodiles!” Whether Williams or Love had heard about the African traveling circus is unclear, nor can it be confirmed whether any of Charlie’s studio group knew of the “Ubangi Warrior Pop-A-Part,” a spear-bearing doll manufactured in 1957 whose necklaced head sprang off when it was shot with suction darts.51 Midcentury American primitivism would have been affected by such popular manifestations of “African”-type culture.

Figure 8.19 | Commemorative head of an Oba (King), Edo peoples (Nigeria), 1816–1888, copper alloy, 20¼" × 11" × 11" (51.4 × 28 × 28 cm).

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For many decades, African people were displayed at world’s fairs as ethnographic wonders. Loren Kruger delineates the cultural phenomenon: “Although the United States had no formal empire from which to recruit human subjects as ‘objects of ethnography,’ American world’s fairs from Philadelphia in 1876 to New York in 1939 participated wholeheartedly in the display of both their modern wealth and their primitivist curiosity in the face of ethnographic subjects, whether Native American or exotic African.”52 For Kruger, “primitivist” denotes “the attribution of naïveté or, worse, backwardness, to colonial others deemed primitive by those experts or spectators who consider themselves advanced.”53 The relentless showcasing of “exotic” Africans in world’s fairs right up through 1939 in New York City is disconcerting. A fusion between public acceptance of sideshows featuring African natives and the public perception of modern art reached all the way to the U.S. presidency in 1947. Dismayed at seeing a modern art painting that the State Department

Figure 8.20 | Charles Truett Williams, Ubangi Woman, 1961, cast-iron found object assemblage, 22¾" × 8½" × 8½".

Figure 8.21 | Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, Tribe of Genuine Ubangi Savages, c. 1930, offset lithography poster.

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had purchased for a traveling exhibition, Harry Truman famously quipped, “If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot!”54—thus managing to simultaneously insult both modernism and African “primitive” culture. The word “Hottentot” no longer circulates as freely in American parlance as it once did. Widespread fascination with “Hottentots” predates the embrace and employment of primitive arts by the European avant-garde: the “Hottentot Venus” originated in the Napoleonic era when the Khoikhoi clan member Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman became a freak-show celebrity. The word “Hottentot” was a European invention, possibly a compound of the Dutch words for “stammering” and “stuttering,” a reference to the Khoikhoian linguistic “clicks.”55 Even the English term “Khoikhoi,” then, preserves a condescending stereotype. In the United States, it was once easy to find “Hottentot” in popular culture. Dave Harman and his orchestra recorded the instrumental jazz piece Hot-Hot-Hottentot in early 1925. And in 1939, eight years before Harry Truman’s famous comment, the film version of The Wizard of Oz was released. The Cowardly Lion sings, “What makes the Hottentot so hot? / What puts the ‘ape’ in apricot? / Whadda they got that I ain’t got?” Colloquially, “Hottentot” developed into an American racial slur levied against someone perceived to be dim-witted, such as the ostensibly racially inferior Africans. It would be a challenge to recover Love’s and Williams’s source material, not to mention their “intentions.” But on the basis of formal similarities, exhibitions, and the popular and circus cultures

of the period, their sculptures touch on a troubling, pervasive midcentury attitude about race and African cultures. As artists in the true modernist fashion, Love and Williams pillaged popular culture, invoking primitivism via its American materialization. The distinction is crucial, for their works may be enacting a meta-primitivism, parodying the U.S. preoccupation with, and sensationalized treatment of, these so-called African practices.56 With their humorous or patently absurd objects, the Texas sculptors channeled the Dada aesthetic as well. They invoked the nonsensical nihilism germane to French, Swiss, and American Dada, but also the German manifestation of Dada, in which objects retained a political charge. As mentioned, Love’s Witch Doctor cleverly supplants the African figure with a masquerading rabbit, toying with the inherent racism of Which Is Witch. One wonders, too, whether Love was also stealthily lambasting Joseph McCarthy’s congressional witch hunts of the early 1950s. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Love regularly visited Charles Williams in Fort Worth; in nearby Dallas, he dropped in on his close friend Roy Fridge, whom he had known since 1952. Love attended every exhibition he could, treating the airport (he expressed an understandable affection for Love Field) as his “office.”57 Interrelationships among Texas artists and institutions strengthened considerably from the mid-1950s onward. Charlie’s studio gathering place functioned as a microcosm of the larger scene, incubating the community that developed around art in the following decades. Aside from Williams’s magnetic personality (Love called him “the perfect host”), his studio benefited from

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the camaraderie encouraged by their endeavors. In contrast with the generally solitary creative activity inherent in painting, casting metal demands collaboration. Their trips to the salvage yards for weldable objects also were joint ventures, and when they worked independently, the group dynamic shone through. Ed Storms (1924–1987) was another close friend of Williams. Storms flew over Germany in World War II as a P-47 fighter pilot. Like the other members of the 368th Fighter Squadron, he earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. Six years younger than Williams, Storms trained as a painter and portrait photographer before learning to cast bronze in Charlie’s studio in 1961. Storms created T-shaped

bronzes in the mid-1960s called the “Churinga” series, named after the elongated fetish objects used by tribes of central Australia. In the 1970s, however, Storms abruptly abandoned sculpture. The historian Scott Barker has pointed out how Storms, who sought a high polish similar to that of the Italian Arnaldo Pomodoro, was dissatisfied by the results on his own surfaces.58 (In fact, Pomodoro, who trained in goldsmithing, often used a gold patina in his “Spheres” series that would have been expensive and arduous to replicate.) Storms told a newspaper reporter that around the same period, he chanced upon an image of a Lithops specimen, from a genus of the succulent family of plants. Suddenly he realized he had been “sculpting look-alikes in cast bronze, polished and nickel-plated.”59 A comparison of Storms’s cast-bronze sculpture Slithy Tove (1964) with his own photograph of Ruschianthus falcatus (a genus in the same family as Lithops, native to Namibia) reveals an astonishing similarity between his art and Lithops plants, a connection that may not at the time have been altogether conscious.60 Love’s

Figure 8.22 | Ed Storms, Slithy Tove, 1964, cast bronze on shellstone base, 16" × 21" × 6".

Figure 8.23 | Ed Storms, Ruschianthus falcatus, photograph from The New Growing the Mesembs, 1986.

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Slithy Tove, through its formal reference to a natural form, and the “Churinga” series both incorporate a primitive aesthetic that is characteristic of works by Williams, Love, Fridge, and McManaway. The Dallas curator and museum director Douglas MacAgy (1913–1973) well understood the dynamic of the Williams studio. He left a vital legacy in Texas, although his tenure in the state was later, briefer, and less storied than that of his Houston-based ex-wife, Jermayne. Douglas MacAgy became the North Texas sculpture group’s champion and chronicler, exhibiting the artists’ work regularly,

Figure 8.24 | Ed Storms, Libido, 1960, bronze, 16" × 18" × 16".

along with far-reaching thematic shows of national and international art. A Canadian citizen seasoned at three institutions with strong avant-garde activity (the San Francisco Museum of Art, the California School of Fine Arts, and MoMA), he arrived in 1959 as the first professional curator of the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts.61 The indefatigable MacAgy staged provocative exhibitions, juried national shows, delivered the lecture “Action Painting and the Beatniks” in Norman, Oklahoma, and personally took guests on car and bus tours of Texas and New York to visit galleries, museums, and artists’ studios.62 He encouraged patrons to purchase works for the museum’s permanent collection, even accompanying them on a three-week European tour. Among the first shows MacAgy hung in Dallas was a drawing exhibition by Jack Boynton, the former Fort Worth artist recently relocated to Houston. (MacAgy curated and wrote the catalogue essay for Boynton’s exhibition in 1959 at New York’s Barone Gallery.) In 1960, he curated the first U.S. exhibition of the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte.64 MacAgy organized 1961 (in 1962), an exhibition of proto-Pop art, at which he invited Claes Oldenburg to perform Injun, which he asserted was the first museum-commissioned Happening.63 He brought MoMA’s The Art of Assemblage exhibition to Dallas in 1962. The New York exhibition included one Texan, Jim Love, at MacAgy’s suggestion; the dmca incarnation included both Love and David McManaway. One wildly ambitious MacAgy exhibition, The Art That Broke the Looking-Glass (November–December 1961), charted a change in depictions of art over nearly five hundred years. The title alludes to Lewis

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Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871).65 Carroll’s make-believe world must have appealed to the curator, not least for its blending of mathematical reality and fantastical occurrences. In MacAgy’s star-studded array were artists from Germany (Albrecht Dürer), Flanders (Jan Gossaert), Italy (Paolo Veronese), France (JeanFrançois Rigaud), Spain (Pablo Picasso), and the United States (Joseph Cornell). For the catalogue cover, Roy Fridge created a Joseph Cornell–type Surrealist-inspired funhouse, complete with dangling objects, mirrors, a doll’s head, and disembodied eyes. The interior of the Fridge-designed catalogue, featuring, among its recurring marginalia, juxtapositions such as Veronica’s Veil by Zurbarán and a photograph of a blonde pinup girl, was indispensible to MacAgy’s gambit, illustrating a history of patronage and technologically inspired developments. MacAgy traced such changes through to the present time: “The object has been returned to the world, where it is a stranger to all but those versed in its pictorial tradition. Meanwhile, for the first time in a long time, the canvas had been cleared of its representational responsibilities.”66 A historically and scientfically based justification for seeing with new eyes, the show laid the groundwork for his later exhibitions of challenging contemporary art. As an example of the interconnected Dallas–Fort Worth–Houston zeitgeist, Jim Love’s 1961 sculpture featuring a spigot and flower within an iron-pipe frame is called The Looking Glass (1961), and the title of Ed Storms’s Slithy Tove derives from the first stanza of “Jabberwocky,” published in Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.67 Storms also made a “Jabberwock” series of bronze sculptures.

Response to The Art That Broke the Looking-Glass was mixed. Alan R. Bromberg told MacAgy that the show “was easily the most brilliant and imaginative ever mounted in this part of the world.” Others, including the artist Chapman Kelley, were vexed by MacAgy’s grand pretensions.68 Although no local artists and very few Americans were featured in the show, MacAgy hoped to lead his Dallas audiences toward an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the history of art, which in turn might elevate viewers’ engagement, expanding their receptivity to all art, including the contemporary and local.

Figure 8.25 | Roy Fridge, cover design for The Art That Broke the Looking-Glass catalogue, curated by Douglas MacAgy, Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, 1961.

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After discussions about combining the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts started up, Douglas MacAgy left, in late 1962. Of MacAgy’s departure, Rual Askew of the Dallas Morning News wrote, “It has been no secret that even before the troubled merger rumpus last spring and all the double talk that inspired, MacAgy had quietly investigated posts elsewhere.”69 The dmca and its permanent collection were melded into the larger museum in 1963. Another important factor figured into MacAgy’s departure. As he later recalled: “By luck we happened to live just across Turtle Creek from Paul Baker’s Theater. [The Frank Lloyd Wright– designed Kalita Humphreys Theater.] When I was away he’d send members of his company to patrol our yard at night. Why? Because minatory letters and cards were frequent. 1:00A.M. threats of murder occasional, and my wife would be followed home by strangers right into the driveway gloom. Why? Because I was showing modern art—a communist conspiracy.”70 Around 1960, the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts received an anticommunist pamphlet in the mail with a black-and-white line drawing of a city street on the cover. The dmca artists proceeded to fill all the objects in the drawing (the mailboxes, flags, fire hydrants) with red ink and wrote on it, “You can never tell where red may turn up.” They proudly mailed it back to the organization that had sent it.71 Jerry Bywaters faced even greater challenges at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, as detailed in Francine Carraro’s biography of him.72 Both the director and the board of trustees were accused of exhibiting communist works at the museum.

Ironically, MacAgy’s grandest effort to exhibit Texas artists occurred following his departure and five years after Williams’s untimely death at fortyeight in 1966. The exhibition one i at a time (1971, at Southern Methodist University), memorialized a group that had dispersed: Charles Williams, Hal Pauley, Herb Rogalla, Roy Fridge, Jim Love, David McManaway, Bill Komodore, and Roger Winter. The collaborative catalogue was designed by Fridge and produced by Rogalla, with a cover photomontage by Winter.73 Inside, MacAgy links the artists through a shared work ethic (“all being craftsman”), sense of humor (“Like dada to Dadaists, insiders can recognize jomo anywhere”), and their ambivalent attitude toward non-Texas locales (“Curse or blessing, New York is most often the chosen alternative”). He characterized their Texanness as follows: “Whether Texans by birth, adoption or transitory residence, these artists are far from Claghorn types. Neither are they Easy Riders on California choppers, nor truckers with gunracks aft. Like all Texans, they meet most at parties and, like many, drink happily. . . . Art interest in Dallas society tends to allow artists to foregather on their own. Locals are rarely lionized. The artists prize their social anonymity.”74 MacAgy wrote the essay for one i at a time from his new position at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C., in a role that may have renewed his appreciation for the “social anonymity” that Texas could offer. With the late Williams having been the oldest of the one i at a time artists, MacAgy’s retrospective exhibition signified a shift toward the younger generation of sculptors and painters who branched out in the later 1970s.

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The presence of the two MacAgys—Douglas and his former wife Jermayne—in Texas in the same period heralded a new era of statewide attention on contemporary art.75 Both MacAgys constructed elaborate and expertly installed exhibitions illustrating continuous links to past art. The impetus for their dual presence in the state originated with Dominique and John de Menil, who invited Douglas to develop a strategy for Houston’s Contemporary Arts Association in 1952. At the time, MacAgy was working for unesco, out of an office at MoMA.76 Douglas MacAgy wrote a proposal, but was too ill with tuberculosis to travel, and thus sent Jermayne to Houston from San Francisco. (Married in 1941, they divorced in 1954.) The Menils were so taken with Jermayne that that they hired her as the first professional director of cam, in 1955.

at Texas Wesleyan until 1960. He was teaching at Texas Wesleyan when he met Isamu Noguchi for the first time, while Noguchi was in town working on a commission for Fort Worth’s First National Bank Building. Owens quit teaching in 1960 to devote himself full-time to making sculpture, and in the mid-1960s he began working for Noguchi at his Long Island City studio and at other sites on six separate, months-long occasions. That exposure ratcheted up his technical abilities and placed him squarely within the New York art scene. Owens met and conversed with Mark Rothko shortly before his death, had long discussions with Ad Reinhardt, and knew both Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, among other artists and critics. Owens worked on major Noguchi projects, including the sunken courtyard sculptures at Yale University’s Beinecke

Gene Owens A significant and often overlooked sculptor, Gene Owens (1931–) was close to Charles Williams but was not an integral part of the dmca group.77 He spent his youth in a small North Texas town that no longer exists.78 That minor fact is an appropriate augur for a full-time artist who spent his career working in the liminal space between presence and absence. Owens earned his BA at Texas Wesleyan College in Fort Worth, where McKie Trotter headed the art department. Owens met Williams in 1955. Texas Wesleyan prohibited nude models, so the students and professors would go to Williams’s studio for alcohol-fueled life drawing classes. Owens continued his studies at the University of Georgia (mfa, 1958) before returning to head the art department Figure 8.26 | Charles Truett Williams and Gene Owens in bronze foundry, c. early 1960s.

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Rare Book and Manuscript Library. (The building, which was completed in 1963, was designed by Gordon Bunshaft, working for the famed national firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.) Noguchi’s elemental forms—a white marble pyramid for the earth, a circle for the sun, a cube representing chance—profoundly affected Owens. He later wrote an exposition on the role of chance in his own work. In addition to being struck by Noguchi’s painstaking attention to detail (“nothing was too small to escape his notice and concern”), he felt that Noguchi’s attitude was best symbolized in his concern for the bases of his sculptures. Owens explained what moved him: They are not just something on which the pieces sit, they are part of the sculpture itself, the floor, room, building, street and the city. . . . It is a way of denying that art is something to be set apart from the everyday world. Sometimes there were no bases in the traditional sense. The pieces may have used either the floor or wall as a base which was attached to the building, which was attached to the street, which was attached to the city and the world. It is an attitude and a lesson I never shall forget.79

Although Owens is circumspect about his own creative impact on Noguchi, the sculptor’s work of the “Owens era” suggests that influence traveled both ways. Noguchi implored Owens to become a yearround assistant, but the Texan was reluctant to give up his own sculptural career to become permanently subordinated to the more famous artist.

Furthermore, as the Old Jail Art Center’s curator Patrick Kelly observed in 2012, Owens was disillusioned by “the business aspect of the art world and the way it operated,” since he regarded art’s creation as “more of a ‘spiritual enterprise’ than a business venture.”80 The artist himself offered another reason: “I cannot imagine being without my Westerness [sic], more precisely my South-Westerness: even more precisely my Texaness; specifically my Fort Worth/Dallasness.”81 Like the Gulf Coast artist Forrest Bess, Owens was fascinated by alchemical transformation. Despite their dramatically different attitudes and results, both artists grounded their highly modernist works in the ancient hermetic discipline of alchemy. Whereas alchemical transformation relates symbolically to Owens’s bronze and porcelain sculpture, Bess believed that true physical androgyny was a necessary step toward attaining the philosopher’s stone.82 Owens created a series of sculptures by dipping shaped pieces of wax into a vat of hot wax just long enough to reform them. That process involved subtraction, because wax was melted away from the original form. “I didn’t really make them,” Owens explained. “Heat made them; nature made them. I made the original thing, but what was beautiful about them was that I didn’t touch them after that. I just dipped them in the hot wax and they were created like alchemy.”83 (By redipping it into cooler wax to add layers, Owens used an additive process that was similarly “untouched” by his hand.) From his wax model, Owens could then make a removable-piece mold of rubber or latex. Through the investment, or lost-wax, method, which demanded several more stages, the wax shape would

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eventually be translated into bronze.84 One way in which Owens innovated on the traditional lost-wax technique was to take a block of the investment material and carve a model from it. He dipped the carved model in wax, building it up to the desired thickness, and the built-up model then became the core for the bronze sculpture. Among Owens’s sculptures of the late 1950s are Fu Dog (Barking at the Moon) (1955, bronze), which was owned by Flora Blanc Reeder for many years; Girl Crying (c. 1955, bronze); and The Sentinel (1963, cast and polished chromium bronze). The 1960s were phenomenally productive years for Owens.

His ideas gestated in Long Island, priming him to return to Texas to further his own art. Some of his finest sculptures are Snake (1960, polished bronze), Abstract Bronze (1964, chromium bronze), Shiva (1965, polished bronze), Space Symbol (1966, polished bronze), and The Hand (1967, polished bronze).85 The Sentinel, Shiva, and Abstract Bronze offer variations on the theme of anthropomorphized arboreal sculpture. The Sentinel rises like a truncated golden tree— perhaps a ludic reference to James Frazer’s classic study of mythology, The Golden Bough—with liplike shapes protruding from near the top of the trunk. That shape may allude to the yoni (Sanskrit for

Figure 8.27 | Gene Owens, Abstract Bronze, 1964, chromium bronze, 14" × 8" × 6".

Figure 8.28 | Gene Owens, The Sentinel, 1963, chromium bronze, 14" × 8" × 6".

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vagina), the representation of the female force of Shakti, symbolized in the Kama Sutra as the vulva. The Sentinel, then, appends a visual equivalent of labia onto a male phallic trunk, becoming a verifiably hermaphroditic abstraction. Although Bess and Owens never crossed paths, the philosophical similarity between the two is impressive, as are the dichotomous ways in which they embodied it. Owens’s Abstract Bronze, with its curvaceous Jean Arp–like bulbous appendages, features a tiny round indentation at the top, like a mouth. That indentation, a miniature crater, creates an alternative negative space relative to the sculpture as a whole. Such small-scale explorations of positive and negative, and of presence and absence, are elusively subtle. In Shiva, an overt homage to the Hindu god of creation and destruction, eight flailing arm forms emerge out of the central torso. In temples, Shiva is often worshiped in the pillar or phallic form of the lingam, the counterpart to the yoni. Owens read widely—on religious symbolism, physics, fractals, and geometry—even before his years with Noguchi, which undoubtedly reinforced the power of aniconic symbols to the Texan. Many of Owens’s late-1950s and 1960s sculptures are erudite abstractions imbued with potent allusions. For Owens, the process of bronze casting was connected to the resulting space created in the sculptures themselves: “The process is almost metaphysical. It never fails to excite me in a primordial way. It is related to the world of alchemy: Transmuting thought, dreams and desires into some tangible form that others can actually see.”86 There is a particular moment in the casting process that persistently affected Owens; he published his ideas

Figure 8.29 | Gene Owens, Shiva, 1965, polished bronze, 17½" × 14" × 5".

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formally in 1991 and spoke of it in interviews and conversation. He noted how the technique of printmaking closely aligns with that of casting. As Owens observes: At one point, the print doesn’t exist. It’s on the stone, you know, and when he [the printmaker] rubs the paper onto the stone, the print comes into being. And bronze casting, you start off with—if you’re doing the cire perdue (which is French for lost wax) you have a wax model, which is identical to what will eventually be the bronze piece, and you invest this in a material that you can pour the bronze into. And then you melt the wax out and you have a cavity. The piece no longer exists at that point: it just doesn’t exist, it’s a negative space. And when you pour it in, it’s a metamorphosis that takes place. The piece becomes. Exists. And it was always such a thrill to go there and cast—casting day was really fun.87

He spoke of the sculpture not being present, of a divine moment of absence. That sheds light on why, beyond pure visual glossiness, Owens burnished some of his bronze works to a flawless high sheen: “I wanted to polish the pieces of bronze not because it was pretty, but it removed me—the surface of me from that piece.”88 With his wide-ranging mind, Owens drew a parallel to Jackson Pollock’s method for applying his paint onto canvases laid flat on the floor. “When Pollock drips the paint onto the canvas,” Owens commented, “he is removed from it—he doesn’t touch the canvas. He is removed from it. . . . There’s a space there of time

and distance where you’re removed from it. And that distance between him and the painting, the physical distance, when he drips that paint on it, he doesn’t touch it—gravity does.”89 The concept of “removal” for Owens is equated with nature taking over.90 It also has the quality of Zen emptiness, of nothingness. That negative space speaks volumes. Even though the result is a solid, tangible object, the sculpture bears its own history within it, harboring the phase when nothing was there. As opposed to the vertical works discussed above, the polished bronze Parturient Machine (1967) lies prostrate on its base. Considerably more complex in execution than some of the iconically shaped earlier works, Parturient Machine relates to the artist’s midcentury interests in universal and mythic femininity. “Parturient” refers to a birth or the creative process; Owens reinterprets this rite of passage via a cylindrical body with six machine-like appendages attached by cast joints. The joints are movable: “her” legs can be bent to lie across the machine’s body or can be flexed to touch the body/base. (As in industrial manufacturing, the intricacy and perfect fit of Owens’s joints is superb.) Parturient Machine bears an uncanny resemblance to Alberto Giacometti’s Woman with Her Throat Cut.91 Although Giacometti made the model in 1932— at the height of Surrealist influences on his sculpture—it was not cast until 1949. The violence of Giacometti’s sculpture remains shocking, its visceral impact undiminished by its octogenarian status. The “woman” of the title is barely there: she exists as spindly, spread bronze legs, arched torso, and flattened, shield-like breasts. The rest of Giacometti’s hybrid creature consists of a flayed, leaflike,

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fused pair of elytra (forewings) beneath the torso; asymmetrical arms, one crossed over the body; and asymmetrical hands: one large and pendantlike, reflecting in a way the shape of the torso, and the other large, flattened, and cupped, also leaflike; her neck is long, bearing external vertebral rings, leading to the obviously slit throat and small, schematized head, its mouth open and beaklike. The sculptor intended for the piece to lie on the floor, a hideous crime scene without the chalk outlines. The sculpture is nasty, quite unlike Giacometti’s ethereal

Figure 8.30 | Gene Owens, Parturient Machine, 1967, bronze, dimensions unavailable.

painted portraits or his later, more familiar attenuated figural sculptures. Rather than “woman” as symbolic earth mother or navel of the universe, Giacometti’s sculpture lies still, raped and murdered. Owens’s Parturient Machine carries the connotations of woman as machine that charmed European artists such as Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, especially after they reached U.S. shores; he also channels the Surrealist fascination with and fear of mechanization taking over human existence. Yet one would be hard pressed to find the

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overt misogyny and sadism that characterizes Giacometti’s floor piece.92 The sexuality of Owens’s bronze is procreative, not destructive. Evaline Clarke Sellors A work by Evaline Sellors (1903–1995), who belonged to an earlier generation, is worth illustrating here for its relation to Giacometti and the Surrealist insect motif. Sellors is best known for her Praying Mantis, made in 1947 in Fort Worth. Praying Mantis brilliantly reinterprets the Surrealist female and her insect doppelgänger. Sellors was seventeen years old and had been making art for years by the time women were given the right to vote. Born to Irish immigrant parents, she attended preparatory school in Fort Worth—Samuel Ziegler was her art teacher—before attending Washington University in St. Louis (1921–1923) and then the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1925–1929). Through scholarships, she financed two major trips to study

Figure 8.31 | Alberto Giacometti, Woman with Her Throat Cut, 1932 (cast 1949), bronze, 8" × 34½" × 25" (20.3 × 87.6 × 63.5 cm).

abroad. Within a few years after returning to Texas, she cofounded the Texas School of Fine Arts (later the Fort Worth School of Fine Arts), in 1932. By 1936, Sellors was chairperson of the seven-member committee of artistic advisers for the Texas Centennial.93 Nearly three decades older than Gene Owens, she was friendly with her fellow Fort Worth– area artist, even mentoring him at times.

Figure 8.32 | Evaline Sellors, Praying Mantis, 1947, cast bronze, dimensions unavailable.

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Praying Mantis (1947; cast again in 1954) automatically calls to mind the Surrealist fascination with and repulsion at six-legged creatures. The praying mantis held a special place of honor in Surrealist imagery because the female mantis decapitates and devours her mate.94 (Scientists have confirmed that the act hastens spasmodic ejaculation by the unwitting partner.) Unlike Giacometti’s ravished bugwoman or Owens’s horizontal Parturient Machine, Sellors’s praying mantis sits proudly upright, six legs folded symmetrically under its body. She shrewdly co-opted this fear-inducing Surrealist mascot.

9 One of the goals of this book has been to high-

light the extraordinarily varied modernist activity in Texas at midcentury. Many of these artists were simply missed by the larger art “system,” as the art critic and professor Donald Kuspit wrote of the painter Ben L. Culwell in 1989. Components of that system did locate some Texan artists fleetingly before letting them go again. Ben L. Culwell’s momentous presence in MoMA’s Fourteen Americans exhibition in 1946 was but one example. This chapter revisits material from some of the previous ones by looking at how the most prominent American museum at midcentury—MoMA—determined what constituted “American” art. It also revisits one of Texas’s finest abstractionists, Robert Preusser, to consider the context of his success in New York City. By the 1940s, many Texan modernists and protomodernists had gained national status. William Lester, Everett Spruce, Myron Stout, and Joseph Glasco all had early and established success outside Texas, exhibiting in New York in major exhibitions

Are Texans American? M o M A’ S A M E R I C A N S EXHIBITIONS

and solo shows in the 1930s or early 1940s. Dozens of other Texas painters and sculptors routinely appeared in group and solo exhibitions across the country. Myriad internal and external forces shaped modernism in Texas. It was practiced within communities or in individual studios across the state. Texas modernism periodically coalesced into a vibrant group effort; at other times it was privately realized slowly over a number of years. The lack of attention to avant-garde rumblings inside the state had much to do with preexisting notions of how both “Texas” and “art” were defined. Meanwhile on the East Coast, as the familiar story goes, the center of the art world shifted from Nazi-occupied Paris to plucky New York City. The arrival of countless Europeans on U.S. shores during Hitler’s rise and after the war was met by powerful institutional and gallery support and an educated crop of American art critics and historians. These facts belong to a complicated artistic-socio-political web that ultimately ensured New York’s art world

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dominance.1 The Triumph of American Painting (1970) was the title of the critic Irving Sandler’s book lionizing New York’s painters and sculptors.2 Never mind that Sandler’s “America” extended about as far west as the East River—his memoir-history documented the rise and crowning achievements of New York artists, who, like Sandler himself, belonged to a relatively small circle of critics, artists, historians, and onlookers. Defining “American art,” even within the confines of New York City, was no slapdash process. Judging from the popular and critical literature, and from museum and gallery exhibitions in the late 1930s through the 1950s, Abstract Expressionist painters were not predestined for their ultimate triumph. Commercial galleries and museums were looking for a truly American form of modernism— preferably something that seemed indigenous, as if it had sprung from American soil—and they hoped it would sell.3 It is important to recall that several Lone Star modernists were already working in an abstract mode before they were exposed to New York. These artists had absorbed the modernist European influence by the 1930s. They looked progressively attractive to the New York art world. As the Houston artist Jack Boynton remembered it, in the 1950s it was “fashionable for dealers to drive across the country,” mining Texas and the Southwest for the artistic equivalent of black gold.4 A reconsideration of the presence of Texans in New York demonstrates how they were at turns seen as “Texans” and “Americans.” It is edifying to take a closer look at the series of exhibitions nicknamed the Americans shows organized by MoMA, and then to turn to other venues that were exhibiting Lone Star art.

Artists from Texas or with a strong tie to the state were included in five of the six Americans exhibitions, suggesting that at the very least the Lone Star state was turning out productive modernists capable of holding their own in the country’s most prestigious institutions. Lone Star modernists’ careers might have been helped by exhibiting in New York, except that during this period of profound uncertainty and rapid change, there was disagreement about what constituted truly “American” art. When the curator Dorothy Miller died in 2003, the New York Times’s Michael Kimmelman eulogized her as “a clairvoyant curator with unusually wide-ranging tastes.”5 Those perspicacious curatorial skills underlay a series of exhibitions that brought many American artists to MoMA. In 1934, Miller became the first professionally trained curator hired by MoMA, though she had worked there on earlier exhibitions.6 The museum, cofounded by Alfred Barr in 1929, embraced a mission that encompassed acquisitions, exhibitions, and publications on modern art. The founding director sought to help people “understand and enjoy the visual arts of their own time.”7 Whereas Barr focused on international modern art with a weighty tilt toward Europe, his protégée Miller crafted six exhibitions exclusively of American artists between 1942 and 1963. Her shows were largely modeled on criteria established by her mentor when he coordinated the first American-related art survey in late 1929, Paintings by Nineteen Living Americans. That show was MoMA’s second exhibition, underscoring the museum’s long-standing attempts to exhibit Americans. Barr wrote in the press release, “It is believed that these Nineteen

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painters represent a fair cross section of the most mature artists of both conservative and radical tendencies.”8 Miller’s exhibitions likewise featured artists who manifested a variety of styles and subject matter, yet she departed from Barr in seeking out less “mature artists,” pulling from a wider swath of the country and adding established artists whom she felt warranted greater attention. She devised an original format that she revisited in different guises for fifteen years. Sidestepping the inadvertent superficiality that tended to characterize broad survey exhibitions, Miller selected a greater number of objects by a smaller group of artists. Frequently, one artist was generously granted a full gallery. Her Americans exhibitions posited a pluralistic sense of the modern: she sought figurative and nonfigurative art alike, local and national expressions. The taste-making MoMA Americans exhibitions are intriguing in retrospect for not espousing an exclusively abstract or nonobjective modernist vision. It is edifying to examine the exhibitions to see with whom the featured Texans were aligned by virtue of contiguity on the gallery walls. As Lynn Zelevansky notes in her exhaustive essay, when the Americans series began, in the early 1940s, “New York was culturally provincial, but by [the exhibitions’] conclusion two decades later, the city had become a capital of the international art world. Chronologically, the series paralleled the development of Abstract Expressionism in the United States.”9 Those dates also correspond to the time of richest activity by Texas abstract artists, whether in or out of the state. At a critical juncture in the history of art, as Europe began the long process of postwar recovery and the United States morphed into a full-fledged

superpower, MoMA’s Americans project wrestled with the very concept of what constituted American art. Miller’s first exhibition, Americans 1942, paid tribute to the Works Progress Administration, headed by her husband at the time, Holger Cahill.10 The show was dedicated to artists outside New York. The galleries were dominated by figuration, Surrealist-inspired magic realism, and social realism. Nine states were represented; twelve of the eighteen artists had worked on wpa projects. The Art Digest, which tended to favor traditional styles, loved Americans 1942. Even the communist newspaper the Daily Worker ran a headline stating, “The Modern Museum show proves great democratic possibilities of art!”11 But Americans 1942 was greeted with animosity by Manhattan artists who were rankled at being excluded from the talent pool. Exacerbating the problem, MoMA’s press release originally called the exhibition New American Leaders, causing Gerome Kamrowski, a New York Surrealist painter and member of the American Abstract Artists, to publicly retort, “‘New Leaders’ in American Art without including the younger New York painters? Perhaps if the Museum of Modern Art is unaware of the ‘new leaders’ in American art, I would be glad to suggest the names myself . . . or could New York not be American?”12 The irony of that wartime statement runs deep: within a decade, “American art” became virtually synonymous with New York art. For just two examples, consider the titles of classic histories—Dore Ashton’s American Art since 1945 and the previously mentioned Sandler book, The Triumph of American Painting. Both are ostensibly

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about “America” but focus predominantly or wholly on New York painting and sculpture.13 Miller, for her part, had clarified the museum’s intent regarding selections for the exhibition in the catalogue’s foreword: “Artists closely identified with the New York art world have not been included in this year’s exhibition, but succeeding shows in the series will not be limited in this way.”14 Indeed, future shows tended to favor artists active in New York. Americans 1942 opened in January 1942. It showcased fifteen paintings by the Arkansas-born Texan Everett Spruce and seven figurative sculptures by the Mexico-born Texan Octavio Medellín.15 (See chapter two for another illustration of the sculptor’s work.) Medellín was a naturalized American citizen, brought to San Antonio by his mother as a teen, where within two years he was learning from José Arpa and Xavier Gonzalez. He took courses at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1928 and embarked on a series of return visits to his native Mexico. After teaching in San Antonio, he moved to Dallas and Denton and was featured in solo and group exhibitions, including the 1936 Texas Centennial. Medellín was a proponent of direct carving, a technique that broke from classical methods of using a caliper or pointing device to translate a model by increments into a block of stone or wood. (Constantin Brancusi was the most renowned early-modernist proponent of direct carving.) Such a method, of course, had been the norm for sculpture predating the European academies, which used maquettes and perfected the pointing technique. Medellín’s biography in the Americans 1942 catalogue mentions the sculptor’s native

genes—“Otomí Indian stock”—and his “intensive study” of Mayan ruins in 1938, which gave “new impetus” to his stone carving. In other words, Medellín’s engagement of the modern direct-carving technique signaled a return to “primitive,” preWesternized methods, as well as an engagement with the artist’s own heritage. Four of the seven exhibited sculptures were reproduced in MoMA’s catalogue, including the direct-carved half-length Primitive Woman (1935), which has a sturdy simplified body that pays homage to the heaviness of the limestone. A pair of cast-stone crouching figures are fused together in Penitentes (1940), whose vertical, linear plaited hair echoes the horizontal lines of the male figure’s ribs and the ropes tied around his waist. Medellín’s sculptures convey potent emotion: in the open mouth ululating toward heaven in Holy Roller (1941), in the gaunt-faced anguished martyr of At the Stake (1941, wood), and simply through the dense materiality of the medium itself. Medellín’s sculpture merges the regional influence of indigenous Mexican Olmec and Mayan sources with untrammeled passion. In his statement for the MoMA catalogue, Medellín emphasizes the integral link between his preferred medium and his adopted homeland, scrupulously detailing each type of stone and its source terrain: “All the stone used in my work comes from Texas quarries. Some pieces are carved in limestone from quarries located near Austin, Texas. A very compact, semi-hard stone, it gives a beautiful texture when carved. I also use a rose-colored sandstone from west Texas. In color and grain it is similar to petrified wood and has a very special quality. I have also used a gray sandstone from southwest

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Texas, a hard stone that must be treated in a rough, coarse way.”16 Medellín’s medium—rock—bound him to the Texas land. Artists who work in twodimensional media, such as painting or printmaking, can convey the aura of Texas through color or shading, manipulating shapes or developing a mood. But Medellín’s three-dimensional sculptures accomplish what the planar media never can: his

Figure 9.01 | Octavio Medellín, Penitentes, 1940, cast limestone, dimensions unavailable.

work literally is Texas, quarried from the earth and remade into figurative modern forms. No wonder he took such pains to specify each region and the stone it yielded. As he wrote in the same artist statement, “I believe that sincere art must be elemental and close to the earth.”17 Medellín and Everett Spruce had been running in the same circles for years by the time of the exhibition, often showing at the same venues. After years in Dallas, Spruce moved to Austin in 1940 to teach at the University of Texas. (On the East Coast, such a move would mean relocating to a completely different state. In Texas, Austin was relatively close to Dallas.) In 1942, Spruce, along with the Austin sculptor Charles Umlauf and the Beaumont painter Lorene David, participated in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s gigantic Artists for Victory exhibition, which displayed fifteen hundred objects.18 That fall, Spruce was given most of a gallery at Americans 1942. The fifteen paintings, ranging in date from 1936 to 1941, represented the epitome of his Regionalist style. Spruce’s idiosyncratic blend of quasi-surrealistic elements (often best seen in his clouds or hard-edged rocks and trees) and localized intensity resulted in an overall timeless effect. Among the works included were Mending the Rock Fence (1937), which had premiered in New York at Delphic Studios, and The Hawk (1939), already in MoMA’s collection.19 The Hawk was shown at the 1939 New York World’s Fair as part of the Contemporary American Art Exhibition. The critic Elizabeth McCausland singled it out among the twelve hundred American objects in her laudatory essay on the world’s fair. She makes an astute observation: “Everett Spruce’s The Hawk

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exemplifies a more drastic breaking down on [sic] boundaries; it draws on cubism for form, but turns to romanticism for its energies. Marsden Hartley’s Ghost of the Forest, an oil treating of the devastation wrought by careless and greedy lumbering operations, shows the same tendency.”20 The SpruceHartley comparison is apt, since both artists used nature as a springboard, solidifying and hardening its forms. Hartley, too, was an American original, a peripatetic northeasterner who had painted in Santa Fe, spent considerable years as an expatriate in France and Germany, and took inspiration from a pivotal trip to Mexico. Sixty years later, the curator and author Jim Edwards sensed that same affinity: “The Dallas regionalists William Lester and Everett Spruce, in their days as regional painters, depicted the drought-starved southwest of the 1930s with a raw, brooding vigor—at its best equaling the emotional tenor of Hartley’s series ‘New Mexico Recollections.’ The hard scrabble depiction of the arid landscapes these artists painted often verged upon the surreal, suggesting the metaphysical starkness of landscapes by the twentieth century Italian masters Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carra.”21 Spruce’s work changed in the 1940s after he became an art professor in Austin. The man who brought him to Austin was Ward Lockwood, chairman of the UT Art Department since its inauguration, in 1938. Lockwood enticed Spruce’s friend William Lester to teach at the university as well. Back in New York, MoMA followed up Americans 1942 with the major exhibition American Realists and Magic Realists (1943), an enormous show highlighting forty-two artists, none of them Texan. This particular show was cocurated by the charismatic

impresario-curator Lincoln Kirstein, who provided the catalogue introduction. The galleries included a historical retrospective section of fourteen artists that preceded work by twenty-eight contemporary artists. Because the show zeroed in on a particular theme and included older (not contemporary) works of art, it was atypical for the series. In all future Americans catalogues, Miller counted American Realists and Magic Realists as among the series. Years later, though, Miller retroactively determined it did not properly belong to the Americans exhibitions because it lacked the series’ expanded ambitions.22 Nevertheless, American Realists and Magic Realists visually expounded on a “widespread but not yet generally recognized trend in contemporary American art.”23 Kirstein argued persuasively that the artists—including Ivan Albright, Peter Blume, Paul Cadmus, Ben Shahn, and Andrew Wyeth— were simultaneously “anti-impressionist” and “anti-expressionist.”24 (Of course, shortly thereafter U.S. art was equated with extreme expressionism.) But American Realists and Magic Realists depicted a modern sensibility that was pictorial, literary, and mysterious. The next true Americans show brought Ben L. Culwell’s USS Pensacola paintings to the public eye in Fourteen Americans (1946). Miller favored neither figuration nor abstraction in her selections. As she wrote in the catalogue’s foreword, Fourteen Americans brought together “painting and sculpture by artists of widely different aims and inspirations.”25 She was highly specific about the universal tenor of the exhibition. It was, after all, MoMA’s first sustained consideration of American artists since the United States had dropped two nuclear bombs on

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Japan. The full extent of Europe’s destruction and Nazi atrocities were slowly being revealed in the press and in firsthand accounts as soldiers returned from overseas: “The mood is serious, even religious, but it has nothing to do with preaching. The idiom is American but there is no hint of regionalism or chauvinistic tendency. On the contrary, there is a profound consciousness that the world of art is one world and that it contains the Orient no less than Europe and the Americas.”26 Gallery by gallery, year by year, MoMA sought to illuminate and pinpoint that American idiom. It was six years before Miller mounted the third incarnation of the series, Fifteen Americans (1952). The show must have been mind-boggling to behold: the walls and floors were filled with objects that have since become icons of American art. Although no artist living in Texas made the cut, one major painter who grew up in the Lone Star state (and who returned there permanently in 1972) was the Oklahoma native Joseph Glasco. Glasco, both a painter and sculptor (and younger than many of his peers), is considered part of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists. He was born in 1925, and his family moved to Tyler, Texas, in 1931. He took his first art lessons there at age eight, attended boarding school in St. Louis, and entered the University of Texas at Austin in 1942—when Lockwood, Spruce, Lester, Umlauf, Constance Forsyth, and Loren Mozley were all there—for a mere six months before being drafted. An early assignment was as a muralist in Amarillo for the Army Air Corps. Glasco was living in New York at the time of the exhibition, but moved to Taos for three years in 1954. In 1949, he was given a one-person exhibition

at age twenty-four at New York’s Jed Perls Gallery, prompting MoMA to purchase a work in 1950, making Glasco the youngest artist in the museum’s permanent collection at the time. He followed that debut with regular solo shows at the Catherine Viviano Gallery and in group exhibitions at other museums and galleries. The next year, the Whitney Museum of American Art purchased his Portrait of a Poet (1951).

Figure 9.02 | Joseph M. Glasco, Portrait of a Poet, 1951, oil on canvas, 68" × 46" (172.7 × 116.8 cm).

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Glasco was startlingly successful. Fifteen Americans, arguably the most exceptional Americans show, quickly developed historic status. Today, many of Glasco’s peers from the exhibition are firmly secured within the canon of American, and indeed international, art. The complete list is compelling: William Baziotes, Edward Corbett, Edwin Dickinson, Herbert Ferber, Joseph Glasco, Herbert Katzman, Frederick Kiesler, Irving Kriesberg, Richard Lippold, Jackson Pollock, Herman Rose,

Figure 9.03 | Photograph of Joseph M. Glasco at his easel, 1952.

Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Thomas Wilfred. Only a few of those artists worked in the dominant trend in American painting, “the category usually called abstract,” as Miller noted in her foreword. She divided the artists into two categories: those for whom “experience and expression” are paramount, and those who “evoke vivid associations with the objective world.”27 Interestingly, Glasco landed between those two groups. His nine paintings included Sleepers (1949), a horizontal composition with two figures laid out in a bed rich with repeating patterns of quilt and sheets, making a dense bejeweled surface that is a hallmark of Glasco’s style. The painting playfully tilts the horizontality of the bed ninety degrees, so the viewer confronts the slumberers hanging upright on the wall. In a temporal and geographic coincidence, another Texas-reared artist, born in the same year as Joseph Glasco, constructed his own paint-bloody sculptural Bed five years later.28 Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955) resides in the pantheon of infamous art gestures, joining pieces like Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917). Just as Duchamp rendered the porcelain urinal useless by turning it sideways, Rauschenberg’s Bed was hung vertically on the wall like a painting, thwarting any hope of crawling into it. (Not, of course, that anyone would want to enter Bed’s Technicolor crime scene.) Bed was among Rauschenberg’s earliest “Combines,” objects that mixed painting, collage, and sculpture. Beyond being the upstart creation of an enfant terrible, the Port Arthur native’s Bed satirized and domesticated the reigning mood of Abstract Expressionist angst. Rauschenberg simultaneously glanced back and forward, parodying the existential Expressionist

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Figure 9.04 | Joseph M. Glasco, Sleepers, 1949, oil on canvas, 293∕10" × 54½".

paint splash while anticipating the Pop movement, which confounded the hierarchical boundaries of modernist sobriety. Glasco’s Sleepers and Rauschenberg’s Bed seem to share little beyond the main subject, but the similarities are salient. Both emphasize the texture of the quilt, summoning memories of home and childhood. (Like mothers across the country during the Depression era, Dora Rauschenberg salvaged every scrap of old clothing she could get her hands on.) Rauschenberg’s real-life quilt in Bed was a gift from artist Dorothea Rockburne, which the artist allegedly used when he ran out of materials.29 Although heavily overlaid with paint, the materiality of the fabric squares comes to the fore. Likewise, Glasco’s painting celebrates texture, seemingly flattening the three-dimensional bed into painted wood-grained whorls and lines. Like Rauschenberg in his amalgamated Bed, Glasco merged figure with abstraction, two dimensions with three.30 Additionally, each artist was private about his homosexuality, making the bed an overdetermined metaphor for both of them. Glasco’s artist’s statement reveals self-awareness about his own hybrid, nonstandard aesthetic practice: “There is no modern painting. There is no abstract painting. The very nature of art is abstract and has always been. The answer does not lie in arriving at intricately conceived ideas on what painting should be today as opposed to yesterday. It lies in ourselves, those among us who have the energy and the desire to exteriorize their experiences through the medium of painting.”31 Glasco “exteriorized” his own experience through expressive geometric patterns that doubled as linear figures. It is a paltry understatement to point out that Glasco’s

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work never achieved the notoriety of Rauschenberg’s “Combine” series. Instead, Glasco’s painting is quietly introverted, the figures sheltered within their hand-made ornamental setting. Neither shape nor pattern dominated. Attentive to the dominant abstract mode, Glasco determinedly created an expressive object without “theory,” as he put it.32 Dorothy Miller was behind the curve in regard to the artist Jackson Pollock. She did not feature him in an Americans show until Fifteen Americans, five full years after his classic drip paintings were launched. Miller wisely selected crucial works from that period, including the supreme Number 30: 1950 (Autumn Rhythm), which stretched seventeen feet across the wall. Also present in Fifteen Americans were examples of the brand-new series of black-and-white figurative paintings on which Pollock had embarked in 1952. Glasco and Pollock had been friendly ever since the former’s arrival in New York in 1949; the younger artist even experimented with the drip technique, as did so many artists who were dumbfounded by Pollock’s lyrical audacity.33 In 1952, Glasco’s and Pollock’s modes were similar in that both structured the canvas around the figure, despite whatever nonfigurative remarks stained or encrusted the surface. Glasco cut his own course, disavowing neither figuration nor abstraction in his sensible recognition that “the very nature of art is abstract and always has been.” His retention of figurative forms, however, might have damaged his long-term reputation. Such imagery quickly became passé. It was the full-fledged abstract artists in Fifteen Americans who generated the most attention. A four-year hiatus intervened before Miller organized the next in the series, Twelve Americans

(1956). That year, the Texas-trained James Brooks was among the chosen dozen. Brooks belonged to the first generation of Abstract Expressionists and was one of fifteen artists in the notorious “Irascibles” photograph of 1950. In that classic shot, Brooks, seated, occupies a prominent central position between Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman (on his right) and Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko (on his left). The famous photograph marks the only time the majority of the New York School members were ever photographed together. Photographed by Nina Leen for Life in November 1950, it was published in the magazine (January 15, 1951) with the title “Irascible Group of Advanced Artists Led Fight against Show.” The title referred to the group’s protest against the jury’s selections for the Metropolitan Museum exhibition American Painting Today 1950.34 Their open letter, which grabbed front-page attention in the New York Times (May 22, 1950), to the museum’s president argued that no examples of Abstract Expressionist painting had been admitted; the group believed that the curators were “hostile to advanced art” in their promotion of only the most conservative strain of American painting. The article in Life, like so much of the magazine’s reporting on abstract art for its generally conservative readership, took a wink-and-nod approach. The solemn people above [in the photograph], along with three others, made up the group of “irascible” artists who raised the biggest fuss about the Metropolitan’s competition. . . . All representatives of advanced art, they paint in styles which vary from the dribblings of Pollock . . . to the Cyclopean phantoms of Baziotes, and

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all have distrusted the [Metropolitan] museum since its director likened them to “flat-chested” pelicans “strutting upon the intellectual wastelands.” . . . Their revolt and subsequent boycott of the show was in keeping with an age-old tradition among avant-garde artists.35

The “Irascibles” photograph has long since become the single most celebrated image of these radical artists. Although Brooks never attained the astral stature of Pollock or Rothko (nor perhaps did he desire to pay the price of such fame), he had a rich career. Brooks, a friend of both Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, moved out to what in those days was the “country” near them; today it is East Hampton.36 In the 1940s, he developed the formal innovation of thinning his oil paints to stain unprimed canvas, a full decade before Helen Frankenthaler’s classic Mountains and Sea (1954). (Many of Pollock’s paintings also show staining, the result of his medium and the thinning of the paint.) Like many artists, Brooks and Frankenthaler were seeking a way to advance abstract painting beyond the gestural skeins of Jackson Pollock. Two crucial members of the next generation, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, altered their painting styles after a famous visit with Clement Greenberg to Frankenthaler’s studio in 1953. (Although Brooks had been staining his unprimed canvases for years, he had no such high-profile visitors at the time.) Brooks was born in 1906 in St. Louis. The family moved to Dallas in 1916, where he graduated from Oak Cliff High School. He was the first student at the Dallas Art Institute, studying with a commercial artist from Chicago, James Waddell, and Olin

Travis. Brooks also took private lessons from Martha Simkins (1869–1969), a well-established portrait painter with broad experience. She had learned much from William Merritt Chase (with whom she studied in two phases) and Kenyon Cox at the Art Students League. Later she traveled to Europe, studying with Cecilia Beaux and John Singer Sargent and befriending Mary Cassatt. When Waddell relocated from Dallas to New York in his old Moon motorcar, Brooks rode in the passenger seat.37 As Brooks recalled in an interview for the Archives of American Art in 1965: “[I was] raised on magazine illustration mostly, I think. My family weren’t museum-goers and weren’t educated

Figure 9.05 | Jackson Pollock and James Brooks, 1950. Photograph by Hans Namuth. The two artists are in Brooks’s studio, Montauk, Long Island, New York.

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in art so I just picked up from comic strips and magazines. Finally, a little before I came to New York, I started studying in Dallas. I started to study drawing at the Dallas Art Institute. At the time I made no separation between illustration and fine arts. They all seemed the same. I liked Rembrandt and Pruett Carter and Raleigh, all illustrators. When I came to New York I realized there was a difference.”38

Figure 9.06 | James Brooks, Oil Well at Sunset, c. 1935, oil on canvas, 203∕16" × 26⅛".

Brooks’s teachers at the Art Students League were Kimon Nicolaides and Boardman Robinson; the young artist supported himself by moonlighting as a display artist and commercial letterer. Brooks also was an accomplished muralist. From 1942 to 1945, he served as an art correspondent for the army in the Middle East, traveling through North Africa, Egypt, and Palestine.

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In 1949, the Peridot Gallery hosted his first oneperson exhibition in New York. Stuart Preston raved in the New York Times about one of Brooks’s later (1952) Peridot exhibitions: “James Brooks, whose new paintings are at the Peridot Gallery, is one of the outstanding abstractionists of the day. He is fully at home in this idiom and the fact that he is a colorist of unusual sensitivity adds to the attractiveness of his canvases. Shapes and colors whirl about in a sort of Walpurgis night excitement, though their vehemence is not employed to express anything but their own existence. His designs have spontaneity and a sort of lilting lyricism that should give much pleasure.”39 His Twelve Americans selections were from this period. At MoMA he showed huge canvases (some were seven feet across) of stained and dripped, bright and muted olive-greens, salmon-oranges, cherry-reds, and grayed blues. Brooks activated the entire canvas with rounded gestural forms that resemble geologic formations—like lakes or landmasses—viewed from above. Though by the 1950s Brooks had unquestionably aligned himself with fine artists, his training and former ignorance of the culturally enforced separation between commercial and fine art prepared him well. He seems to have retained an absence of aesthetic snobbery, and a remarkable sense of design and placement (qualities common to good graphic designers). Brooks exhibited regularly in solo and group exhibitions; in 1963, the Whitney Museum of Art organized a large Brooks retrospective of sixty-four oil paintings, gouaches, and watercolors. The penultimate exhibition in MoMA’s series was Sixteen Americans (1959–1960). Continually striving for balance among the intermittent shows,

Miller explained, Fifteen Americans (1952) and Twelve Americans (1956) showed “a number of distinguished artists already well known to New York gallery visitors, although far from well known to the Museum’s larger public.” Therefore, she continued, “It seemed desirable to include a large proportion of newcomers to the New York scene. .  .  . Perhaps it is not too much to claim for Sixteen Americans an usually fresh, richly varied, vigorous and youthful character. .  .  . Geographical distribution, not

Figure 9.07 | James Brooks, U-1951, 1951, oil on canvas, 37" × 25".

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consciously sought after, is nonetheless remarkable: though ten now live in New York City, only one was born here.”40 Among the transplants to New York was Rauschenberg, a member of the dealer Leo Castelli’s stable of artists.41 Seven of his Combine paintings were included. With their accumulations of fabric, collaged photographs, street detritus, and broad swaths of brushed or dripped paint, the Combines jutted out from the walls. Satellite (1955) even boasted a taxidermied pheasant strutting across the top. When Milton Rauschenberg was boarding a bus in Kansas City bound for New York, he shed his given name and attempted to shed his Texas accent.42 Yet there is a large kernel of truth in the stereotypes that metaphorically connect Rauschenberg’s grand-manner art to the grand state of his youth. The independence, freedom, and brashness of his art match the stubbornness, drunken antics, openness, and genuine friendliness of his personality. In 1963, Dorothy Miller and MoMA mounted what was the final entry in the sporadic series, Americans 1963. For the first time, an Americans show appeared with no artists from Texas. Miller worked at the museum in various supervisory and advisory capacities until she retired, in 1969. Her ability to sustain a largely unbiased vision for the Americans exhibitions across a span of twenty-one years is unique and laudable. She was a tastemaker unafraid to exercise unpopular judgments. MoMA’s Americans exhibitions constituted a long-running and sustained attempt by the country’s preeminent modern museum to identify talent from across the country. Museums, galleries, and critics elsewhere in New York, in an alignment of financial gambits and postwar patriotism, were

Figure 9.08 | James Brooks, Dolamen, 1958, oil with sand on canvas, 66" × 28⅛" (167.6 × 71.4 cm).

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scanning the country for authentic American talent. Recalling the Houston artist Jack Boynton’s take on the situation, such talent-search peregrinations were “fashionable.”43 To New Yorkers, Texas was far enough from the Big Apple to possess a foreign allure. The Russian-born Jewish émigré Edith Halpert (1900–1970) ran the Downtown Gallery. The term “shrewd” repeatedly arises in reference to Halpert; she was pioneering, dedicated, and tenacious. Her specialty was Americans; she exhibited Jacob Lawrence early in his career and was a good friend of Charles Sheeler.44 On her gallery walls at various moments were Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jack Levine, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe (very briefly), Ben Shahn, and Max Weber.45 Halpert spent weeks driving through America and scouting in Texas, where she “discovered” a number of artists, most notably Houston’s Robert Preusser. The Downtown Gallery emphasized socially conscious and figurative artists, styles denigrated by Clement Greenberg’s modernism. Halpert was instrumental in promoting American folk artists, a style most critics completely ignored. The Downtown Gallery arrived in the living rooms of millions of Americans in March 1952 when Life ran a three-page article, “New Crop of Painting Protégés,” on Edith Halpert’s artists. The subtitle of the essay about Halpert’s painters announced: “Dealer with an Eye for Talent Tries to Pick Tomorrow’s Stars.”46 Thus it was that thirtytwo-year-old Robert Preusser gained the largest audience of his lifetime. The short text mentions Halpert’s success over the previous twenty-five years, ever since an “enterprising young lady” first opened her downtown Manhattan gallery. A photograph

of the Gallery’s “Oldtimers”—Jack Levine, Stuart Davis, William Zorach, Bernard Karfiol, Jacob Lawrence, David Friedenthal, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Charles Sheeler, and Ben Shahn—is inset on the opening page. Some of the “Oldtimers’” work that once sold for as little as $75, Life told its readers, was going for as much as $6,500. The top half of the essay is anchored by an imposing photograph of Halpert seated in front of her “Newcomers.” Unfortunately, Preusser, who was unable to attend the New York photo shoot, does not appear in the group portrait. The pictured artists—Charles Oscar, Robert Knipschild, Johan Kinigstein, Wallace Reiss, Carroll Cloar, and Herbert Katzman—each strike self-conscious poses near one of their paintings.47 None of them smiles. (Halpert’s artists might be teasingly called the less than “Irascibles.”) A modern ceiling light fixture, perhaps an aluminum model by the Danish designer Kurt Versen, illuminates the gallery. The article sums up Halpert’s gamble: “Gratified by the success of her discoveries of yesterday, Mrs. Halpert recently set out to discover some artists of tomorrow. She took off on a cross-country tour, looked at thousands of paintings, finally came up with nine young artists, most of them under 30 and most of them abstract and even extreme in style. Gambling on their ‘future importance,’ Mrs. Halpert bought outright from each of the artists a minimum of $1,000 worth of paintings and installed them in a special room where they will be continuously on display.”48 Inside the essay are Robert Preusser’s Cavernous Impression and a headshot of the Houston artist, both in black-and-white.49 (The latter is the first image in chapter one.) The text stoically explains that the painting was created “to suggest

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strange forms in caves.” The square-formatted Cavernous Impression was a recent work, dating to 1950 or 1951. In style, however, it recalls Preusser’s architecturally inspired paintings of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Linear architectural remnants move in and out of atmospheric, loosely rendered regions. While the public-relations potential of the Life article was unrivaled, it seems to have made little impact on Preusser’s long- or short-term commercial career. He did, however, flourish academically. Within two years, the Houstonian was offered a teaching position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Undoubtedly, the hiring faculty members were presented with copies of the Life essay. Yet today the “New Crop of Painting Protégés” essay and photographs are unknown to many, lost among reams of articles Life rolled off the printing press week in and week out. One wonders too whether Halpert’s reputation for promoting figurative, social realist, and folk art may have mitigated the impact of her abstract representatives. She is, after all, best known for her stalwart backing of Lawrence, Sheeler, and Davis. In all, Preusser exhibited in three group exhibitions at the Downtown Gallery: Newcomers (1951), Recent Arrivals (1952), and Painters under Forty (1953). Halpert’s confidence in Preusser’s aptitude was yet another example of big-city gallerists and curators placing their faith in Texas painters and sculptors. The same year that the Life essay appeared, New York’s blue chip M. Knoedler and Company exhibited fifty-two works in Texas Contemporary Artists. The moody and tenebristic Preusser painting Ecclesia (1952) debuted at Knoedler. Ecclesia rises cathedral-like; quasi-Gothic arches and spires are

compressed into a dense, overlapping network. The painting is unusual within Preusser’s body of work for its overt Christian title and the appearance of crosses that crown many of the arches. Preusser’s previous works and his sources (particularly the Bauhaus and Constructivist influences) were, at the least, irreligious. Yet Ecclesia’s sacred references become less anomalous when put in the context of Barnett Newman’s master painting Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–1951), which was first shown at Betty Parsons’s gallery in New York the previous year. Newman’s breathtaking eighteen-foot-long expanse of crimson canvas is divided by five irregularly placed vertical “zips” that run the full eight-foot height of the enormous canvas. The Latin title, often translated as “Man, Heroic and Sublime,” carries a gravitas to match the lofty intentions of Newman’s philosophy. The painting and title come from one of Newman’s better-known essays, “The Sublime Is Now.” In that essay, Newman asserts that Michelangelo, whose brilliance lay in making a cathedral out of man himself (in contrast to the Greek idea of making man like a god, or the medieval mindset of making cathedrals to glorify God), set a standard for sublimity that few could follow. Further along in the essay, Newman declares, “The question that now arises is how, if we are living in a time without a legend or mythos that can be called sublime, if we refuse to admit any exaltation in pure relations, if we refuse to live in the abstract, how can we be creating a sublime art?” Newman’s answer is unequivocal: “Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life,’ we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.”50

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Preusser’s Ecclesia seems to address Barnett Newman’s declaration directly, even literally, overlaying a cathedral motif onto the darkened subjectivity of the artist.51 Such a response befits the young Texan’s ideals for art and its potentialities as a humanistically unifying medium. In the larger arena, a paradox in the Lone Star modernists’ reception in New York affected their ultimate position within the developing art “system.” The paradox turns on how one defines “American.” Being “American” cut two ways. To the New York art world, some Texas modernists were appealing for representing a strong, native, all-American quality. The expansive landscape and the self-sustaining quality of Texas were unique. But back home, in Texas, abstract art came to be viewed as un-American by the broader public. By the 1950s, a communist scare pervaded the country. Major traveling exhibitions were canceled; there were protests and letter-writing campaigns. For many people, the fact that modern art originated in Europe—the birthplace of Karl Marx and permanent home of the communist Pablo Picasso— was sufficient to damn it. The other irony of these Texans representing America is that although it might have helped them get into shows in New York, it engendered a degree of jealousy among New York natives and transplants who were seeking greater exposure. The presence of Lone Star modernists in New York was in some ways inconvenient. In New York, abstract painters were already protesting juried exhibitions that favored representational painters. The last thing they needed was some unfamiliar Texas abstract artist—and a good one to boot—to increase the competition.

Figure 9.09 | Robert O. Preusser, Ecclesia, 1952, oil on board, 40" × 17".

Postscript W H AT H A P P E N E D T O EAR N EST M ODE R N ISM ?

We created this monster called “Texas Art” and it nearly devoured the whole scene. We had begun by trying to convince people there was something special in the visual arts down here, and reaching for the metaphor at hand, we invoked the mythos of Texas. DAVE HICKEY , 1981

Facing | Detail of Figure 7.07.

Since the dawn of the twentieth century, American artists have busily devoted themselves to proving their worth on local, national, and international scales. This book isolates roughly twenty-five years at the center of the twentieth century when abstract modernism captured the attention of the American art world. The 1940s and 1950s saw artists wielding brushes like weapons, making heroic marks in the war against complacency and stasis. In those days, one could do so with a straight face, fully engaged in the cause. When the art critic Harold Rosenberg searched for a commonality in the best American postwar painting, he penned the now-canonical essay “The American Action Painters” (1952). The pre– World War I epigraph that opens the essay, “J’ai fait des gestes blanc parmi les solitudes,” by Guillaume Apollinaire, served as a call to arms in the uncertainty of the postnuclear age.1 (Apollinaire’s line, insufficiently translated, extols the poet’s ability to “make blank gestures amidst the solitudes.”)2 Blank and unrecognized perhaps, but the poet and artist persist nevertheless. Rosenberg’s second epigraph

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borrows from the American poet Wallace Stevens: “The American will is easily satisfied in its efforts to realize itself in knowing itself.” (How readily one could substitute “Texan” for “American.”) Stevens’s observation stood as a warning against superficial self-awareness. In Rosenberg’s hands, the epigraphs foreshadowed the distinction between authentic action painting, in which the canvas became an arena, and the emptiness of what he deemed “apocalyptic wallpaper.” By the late 1960s, the existential engagement that Rosenberg valued was fading into the past. As it did across the country, modernism in Texas hinged on a kind of earnestness. It represented a subjective, often existential response to the historic changes and devastation that swept the world at midcentury. Late-1960s art began to pillory such earnestness. Not that everyone joined in or declared the demise of modernism, but the reevaluations came soon enough. Many of the artists about whom I have written in the previous chapters continued making modern art into the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The trouble is that by the 1970s, the Texas art landscape had been transformed. For some, the “blank” gestures became hollow, echoing a previous commitment that no longer held the same relevance. For many others, however, the new topography triggered new forms of modernism. The historical epoch that came next may well have eclipsed the somber “high modernists” for decades. Modernist art essentially fell out of favor, overshadowed by funnier, louder, and more popularly appealing forms.

A Clean Well-Lighted Place In 1967, Dave Hickey opened a gallery called A Clean Well-Lighted Place in Austin. The gallery’s name hailed from a Hemingway short story involving alcohol, suicide, and talk—exemplary highmodernist literature.3 The gallery’s art told another story. Hickey’s exhibitions straddled a chronological and aesthetic divide. During its four-year existence, A Clean Well-Lighted Place showed everything from sober modernism to incipient Texas funk.4 In the late 1960s and 1970s, artists began to tweak the nose of dour midcentury modernism, opening a door of perception, as it were, for art’s next phase. Hickey’s selection of the young artist Jim Franklin to inaugurate his West Campus gallery exemplified the changing climate. The debut of A Clean Well-Lighted Place in 1967 featured Franklin’s abstract paintings.5 Although Hickey was thoroughly steeped in the psychedelic haze of late-1960s Austin, he favored serious art with high ideals. The exhibition succeeded well enough, especially for an experimental gallery run by a twenty-eight-year-old writer and his wife, Mary Jane, with no prior gallery experience. The following year, Franklin developed his trademark symbol: the illustrated armadillo. It was only a matter of time before his nine-banded cartoon critters secured their place in Texas cultural history, adopted as the symbol of Austin’s Armadillo World Headquarters music hall, a bastion of hipsters and hippie counterculture. Franklin decorated the venue with armadillo-themed murals. His armadillo armies swarm the cracked earth and

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fill the sky on the 1970 album cover by the psychedelic band Shiva’s Headband. Franklin’s new take on the iconic Texas mammal filled broadsides and home-style magazine rags. Sometimes his armadillo floated hallucinogenically in space, stood in a mysterious all-seeing-eye landscape, or sported a surrealistic double body. (Franklin’s plated mammal even starred in sui generis armadillo-porn underground comics.) The armadillo represented an antiestablishment Texan antihero, an ironic take on Davy Crockett and his coonskin cap.6 As Hickey pointed out a decade later, “At that time, abstract painting was Jim’s vocation. Shiva’s Headband album covers were his day job.”7 Not all the artists straddled the boundaries of high art the way Franklin did. Many in Hickey’s cobbledtogether stable toed the line of “serious” painters, sculptors, and graphic artists. A further subset consisted of out-and-out modernists. The disparate group included Terry Allen, Barry Buxkamper, Mel Casas, Harry Geffert, Luis Jiménez, Stephen Mueller, Peter Plagens, David Reed, June Robinson, Jim Roche, Earl Staley, Juergen Strunck, Bob Wade, and Glenn Whitehead. Ultimately, the gallery’s reputation fused with the “Texas funk” aesthetic, the splashy style emanating from the likes of Bob “Daddy-O” Wade of Dallas’s Oak Cliff neighborhood. Hickey himself shunned both the “Texas” and “funk” labels as he witnessed the explosion of the fiery new Lone Star aesthetic after he moved out of state. Hickey sought to showcase young artists lacking the requisite attention, and he happened to set up in Austin, never intending to tout Texas art per se. “The entire time . . . I had worked to keep my artists discrete from one another and from any

kind of ‘buzz-word’ movement. That kind of thing is the kiss of death,” he recalled in 1981.8 From Modernism to Postmodernism What happened next was postmodernism, the buzzword characterizing the dissonant scene that was the 1960s. Modernism offered a way to stitch together the fragments of a dissolute, distracting world into a whole fabric; postmodernism disallows wholeness by destabilizing our futile attempts at meaning, keeping us off-kilter. Just as modernist artists grew restless with traditional and academic art, postmodernists grew weary of modernism’s own solemnity. Postmodernism may well be only an extension of modernism, as many cultural critics aver, but it is an extension that expands, critiques, and satirizes modernism’s high-mindedness. To recapitulate only a few instances of twentieth-century modernism, there were artists who mimicked the Industrial Age’s mechanical forms, in the manner of the Europeans Marcel Duchamp or Frances Picabia, American Precisionism, or Fort Worth’s Bror Utter.9 Others exaggerated or enhanced the visible world, as in European Surrealism, American magic realism, Kelly Fearing’s mystical locales, Everett Spruce’s abstracted landscapes, or Jack Boynton’s creatures. Still others— many others—turned inward via full-scale abstraction. By the 1940s, modernist formulations represented the artist’s untrammeled subjective expression. Standout Lone Star practitioners of geometricized abstraction were Myron Stout, Toni LaSelle, and Robert Preusser. Hardcore purveyors of the moody expressionist branch were Jack Boynton,

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James Brooks, Ben Culwell, Dorothy Hood, and McKie Trotter. One common denominator in modernist art is the individual creator. The artist frequently rode on an existential path, a sign of individualistic bravery. Tellingly, the New York Abstract Expressionists, the paragons of midcentury American modernism, were composed of distinct individuals engaging in strikingly varied styles. To refer to a New York “school” is to refer to a concatenation of independent forms of expression. The same held true in Texas, even when groups of artists worked closely together, as in the case of the Fort Worth Circle. By contrast, postmodern art alludes not to the individual’s feelings, but to her or his social conditions, laying open the constructs of those conditions. It thus undercuts independent heroic expression by attending to the circumstances imposed by the outside world and society. Postmodern art frequently addressed politics, gender, race, power, money—themes that modernism tends to deemphasize or elide.10 At least, modernism ostensibly avoids those subjects. As I have tried to demonstrate, in cases as disparate as Octavio Medellín’s “primitivism” and Forrest Bess’s hermeticism, modernism is far more complicated once we move beyond a strictly formalist interpretation. Whatever type of modernism is seen as the precursor, postmodernism is distinguished by its pluralism and its pluralistic view of objects themselves. Images, concepts, and words become radically polyvalent, as in the word paintings of the California painter Ed Ruscha (a favorite of Dave Hickey’s). When Ruscha painted the Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas (1963), he reinterpreted the Texas landscape in the vernacular

as a gleaming, Hollywood-style monument to oil.11 Ruscha presents a deadpan, Salon-sized Academic history painting with a Pop sensibility. Postmodernist art pulls the outside world in, often literally, as in Ruscha’s Standard Station. A more familiar example is Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can motif. For good reason, Warhol’s turn toward repetitive silkscreen painting of common objects and famous people in the early 1960s marked a sea change in the art world. The silver-haired cypher methodically deconstructed every hallowed trait of modernism. High art merged into low. His paintings collapsed commodity production into aesthetic production until the two activities became indistinguishable. Whereas modernist artists possessed depth and meaningfulness, Warhol celebrated shallowness and meaninglessness. By repeating his imagery seemingly infinitely—tomato soup, Brillo boxes, Marilyn Monroe—his paintings belittled the notion of the singular, inspired genius. He insisted on working collaboratively, to the point of disavowing his role as the creator of his own objects. Collaboration and group effort characterized postmodernism in ways seldom seen in modernism. (The perpetually atypical modernist example is Dada, although even Dadaist movements brought together a group of individuals expressing anti-art sentiments.) The Fluxus international movement, performance art, and Allan Kaprow’s Happenings regularly hinged on collective effort. Even solo performances by protofeminist artists such as Carolee Schneemann and Yoko Ono depended on the audience to complete the story. Soon, even the artist’s painted or sculpted gesture became suspect: see, for example, the industrial fabrication behind

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minimalist sculpture and the negation of the artist’s personal mark in Sol Lewitt’s drawings. Finally, the concept of irony encompasses and pulls together the heterogeneous qualities of postmodernism. Postmodern art adopts a sardonic stance toward the past and present. Irony itself had become tiresome by the late 1980s, but for a solid two decades it was the tactic of choice for upstart artists. The rise of a Texas-themed irony-laden aesthetic quite possibly served to sequester the state’s existing, vital modernist culture. Much of Texas’s modern art remained semiobscure until the state entered another historical phase: that of digging into its soil to unearth its own indigenous modernists. From Amarillo Ramp to Cadillac Ranch: The Hyperbole of Late Twentieth-Century Texas Art As a sculptural example of the change in Texas art, consider the case of Robert Smithson’s Amarillo Ramp (1973) and the Ant Farm–Stanley Marsh collaboration Cadillac Ranch (1974). The former is a sculpture of weighty late modernism; the latter, a postmodern pun. In 1973, the American artist Robert Smithson was killed in an airplane crash while aerially surveying a site in the Texas Panhandle for his next earthwork. (The photographer and the pilot were also killed.) Smithson had already constructed Spiral Jetty, the massive earthwork that became synonymous with his name, on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The piece planned for Texas, Amarillo Ramp, would be an elevated, open,

circular ramp slowly rising from ground level to twelve feet high. After Smithson’s death, the red shale earthwork was completed by his widow, the artist Nancy Holt; the sculptor Richard Serra; and others. Somewhat similar to the aqueous setting of Spiral Jetty, Amarillo Ramp once rose from an artificial lake. The sad circumstances of its creation notwithstanding, Amarillo Ramp was determined by serious late modernism.12 Smithson had longstanding interests in premodern cultures, geology, geography, symbols, mapping, and the forces of entropy. His art paid homage to ancient beliefs; Amarillo Ramp itself was shaped like the ouroboros, the self-devouring snake that represents the cycles of nature. With a fifty-yard diameter and rising to twice the height of any human, Smithson’s Amarillo earthwork was also Texas-sized. The person who paid for it, providing the land, the dump trucks, and the airplane, was Stanley Marsh 3, the eccentric prankster-businessman and scion of Panhandle oil and gas affluence. In 1974, while construction of Amarillo Ramp was still underway, Marsh commissioned the hyperbolic Cadillac Ranch. He collaborated with Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez, and Doug Michels of the San Francisco art collective Ant Farm to implant ten Cadillacs in a straight line, nose first, into the earth. (Allegedly, the angle of the cars corresponds to the angle of the Great Pyramids, a comical connection to the siting of Smithson’s sacred earthworks.) The roadside attraction achieved worldwide fame, something few Texas artworks have ever accomplished. Cadillac Ranch, the site of pilgrimages, vandals, and graffiti artists, fast became a Texas-sized

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one-liner, raucously memorialized by Bruce Springsteen in a song on the album The River (1980). But it was a car joke with a sobering underpinning. The Cadillac models ranged from 1949 to 1963, tracing the emergence and zenith of the tail fin era and the concomitant heyday of oversized American automobiles. Cadillac Ranch was a polyvalent

postmodern symbol of rise, excess, and decline. The fifteen-year span memorialized by the Cadillacs also happens to correspond to the richest fifteen years of American abstract modernism. In the twenty-first century, virtually anyone on the street has heard of Cadillac Ranch; far fewer could name a Texas midcentury modernist.

Appendix

Selected Artists’ Biographies SARAH BETH WILSON

note: This appendix intends to update Texan artists’ biographies and, in some cases, add new biographies. European artists (e.g., Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti), artists whose biographies are readily available on the web (e.g., James Brooks, Joseph Glasco), and those lightly mentioned in the text may not be included. kre Forrest Clemenger Bess b. Bay City, Texas, 1911–d. Bay City, 1977

Forrest Bess is known for his visionary, personal art reflecting his fascination with psychology and the unconscious mind. Bess studied architecture at Texas a&m College (1929–1930) and art at the University of Texas at Austin (1931–1932). In 1934, Bess traveled and studied in Mexico briefly and then opened a studio in Houston (1938), which operated also as a cooperative art gallery (with Carden Bailey, Gene Charlton, Russell F. Davis, and Jan Olmstead). In 1941, Bess enlisted in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and moved to Virginia. After suffering a nervous breakdown, Bess spent time in therapy at the Veterans Administration Hospital in San Antonio and then was released from his military duties. He opened a frame shop, gallery, and studio in

San Antonio and entered numerous art exhibitions. In 1947, he returned to his native Bay City area, concentrating solely on his art. During a trip to New York in 1948, Bess joined forces with the Betty Parsons Gallery (solo exhibitions in 1950, 1957, 1959, 1962, 1967); the 1962 show was a retrospective (with the catalogue essay by Meyer Schapiro). Bess received a grant from the Mark Rothko Foundation in 1973, which aided him in continuing to create a large body of powerful work throughout the remainder of his career. Selected Exhibitions

Corcoran Gallery, 1938, 1940 Witte Museum, 1938, 1940, 1967 (solo) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1941 (solo), 1951 (solo) Dallas Museum of Art, 1946, 1951 (solo) The University of Texas at Austin, 1951 Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 1962 (solo) Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, 1974 (solo) Whitney Museum of American Art, 1981 (solo) Hirschl and Adler Modern Gallery, New York, 1988 (solo) Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1988 (solo) Menil Collection, 2013 (solo)

264  |  MIDCENTURY MODERN ART IN TEXAS Selected Public Collections

Selected Exhibitions

Menil Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Witte Museum

Art Students League of Chicago Annual Exhibition, 1927 (prize), 1928 (prize) Annual Houston Artists Exhibition, 1930 (purchase prize), 1934–1937 Art Institute of Chicago, 1933–1935, 1941–1944, 1990 (retrospective) Texas Centennial Exposition, Dallas, 1936 Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition, Dallas, 1937 Witte Museum, 1941 (solo) Texas General Exhibition, 1948 Texas Painting and Sculpture Annual Exhibition, 1949 (purchase prize), 1953 HemisFair Exhibition, San Antonio, 1968

Kathleen Blackshear b. Navasota, Texas, 1897–d. Navasota, 1988

Blackshear graduated from Baylor University in 1917, later enrolling in the Art Students League, New York. From 1918 to 1924, Blackshear lived and worked in College Station, Texas, spent time in Los Angeles, traveled to Europe, taught in Stephenville, Texas, and returned to Navasota, eventually moving to Chicago to enroll in the Art Institute (1924, graduated 1927). Blackshear received instruction from noted Art Institute artists and historians, including Helen Gardner. She served as Gardner’s assistant, illustrating her textbooks Art through the Ages (1926) and Understanding the Arts (1932). Blackshear remained in Chicago, where she received her mfa (1940) and instructed at the Art Institute until her retirement in 1961 (the Houston artist Richard Stout was among the students strongly affected by her). During this time, Blackshear taught for one term at the Museum School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, spent summers at her Navasota residence, embarked on sketching trips throughout Mexico and the Southwest, illustrated Katherine Kuh’s Art Has Many Faces (1951), and conducted research at the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago. After her retirement from teaching, she returned to Texas, residing in Navasota and serving as guest lecturer at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 1968, the Art Institute acknowledged Blackshear’s devotion to education by awarding her the title of professor emeritus.

Selected Public Collections

Art Institute of Chicago Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas William Wells “Bill” Bomar b. Fort Worth, Texas, 1919–d. Clovis, New Mexico, 1990

The prominent Fort Worth school artist Bill Bomar is known for his abstract, semigeometric compositions that incorporate natural elements in dramatic landscapes and surrealistic worlds. Bomar’s interest in art was sparked early after sitting for a portrait painted by the Fort Worth artist Murray Bewley. While young, Bomar received instruction in oils from Sallie Blythe Mummert (a student of Vivian Aunspaugh and a private instructor at Texas Christian University) and in watercolors from Joseph G. Bakos in Santa Fe (founder of Santa Fe’s first art association, Los Cincos Pintores).

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Bomar enrolled at the Cranbrook Academy of Art (1940–1941), studied with John Sloan (1942), and received criticism and instruction from Amédée Ozenfant and Hans Hofmann. Throughout his career, Bomar visited New Mexico, eventually moving to Ranchos de Taos (1972). Selected Exhibitions

Annual Fort Worth Local Artists Show, 1940s (frequent prizes) Texas General Exhibition, 1940s, 1947 (purchase prize) Texas-Oklahoma General Exhibition, 1941 Weyhe Gallery, New York, 1944 (Six Texas Painters); 1946, 1949 (solo); 1958 (solo); 1962, 1964 Dallas Museum of Art, 1948 (solo) Texas Painting and Sculpture Annual Exhibition, 1949–1956, 1958 M. Knoedler & Co., New York, 1952 (Texas Contemporary Artists) Betty McLean Galleries, Dallas, 1952 (solo) Laguna Gloria, Austin, 1952 (solo) D. D. Feldman Collection of Contemporary Texas Art, Dallas, 1956 Whitney Museum of American Art, 1958 Old Jail Art Center, Albany, Texas, 1999 (solo) Selected Public Collections

Dallas Museum of Art Guggenheim Museum Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The University of Texas at Austin

James Wesley “Jack” Boynton b. Fort Worth, Texas, 1928–d. Houston, Texas, 2010

Boynton, a Texas artist in every sense of the term, possessed a style that he transformed from abstraction to vibrant expressionism during his career. Signs of Texas landscapes and iconic imagery are often present in his work. Boynton received his bfa in commercial art from Texas Christian University (1949), followed by his mfa in painting (1955, Texas Christian University). His career in art education included stints at the University of Houston (1955–1957), the San Francisco Art Institute (1960–1962), and the University of St. Thomas in Houston (1969–1985). He was awarded a fellowship at the Tamarind Institute in Los Angeles (1967–1969). Selected Exhibitions

M. Knoedler & Co., New York, 1952 (Texas Contemporary Artists) Guggenheim Museum, 1954 (Younger American Painters) Whitney Museum of American Art, 1957 (Young America) World’s Fair, Brussels, 1958 (one of seventeen U.S. artists) Barone Gallery, New York, 1958 (solo), 1959 (solo) Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, 1959 (solo) Staempfli Gallery, New York, 1961 (solo) Museum of Modern Art, 1962 (Recent Painting: The Figure) Louisiana Gallery, Houston, 1964 (solo) University of St. Thomas, Houston, 1971 (solo) DuBose Gallery, Houston, 1974 (solo) Moody Gallery, Houston, 1976–1986 (solo) Amarillo Art Center, 1980 (Jack Boynton: Retro/ Spectrum, traveling exhibition) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1985 (Fresh Paint: The Houston School)

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Texas Christian University, 1989 (Homecoming: A Thumbnail Retrospective, featured artist) Martin Museum, Waco, Texas, 2007 (Texas Modern) Selected Public Collections

Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth Dallas Museum of Art Guggenheim Museum Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum of Modern Art Whitney Museum of American Art Cynthia Humble Brants b. Fort Worth, Texas, 1924–d. Fort Worth, 2006

Brants grew up in a prominent family, which gave her access at a young age to the arts and culture of the period. After expressing an interest in drawing and painting as a child, she was enrolled in Saturday classes at the Fort Worth School of Fine Art (instructors included Blanche McVeigh, Evaline Sellors, and Sallie Blythe Mummert). Other students included Bill Bomar, Bror Utter, and Veronica Helfensteller; those artists, along with Brants and others, made up the Fort Worth school, whose main purpose was to support the growth of modernism in Texas. Brants’s paintings and prints are Cubist in style, which aligned with the Fort Worth school’s efforts to branch out from the representational, Regionalist tendencies that dominated the contemporary Texas art scene. Brants pursued an education in art at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, where she studied under the artist (and later lifelong mentor) Kurt Roesch. After graduating in 1945, she studied the arts in Europe, later returning to Fort Worth, where she established a studio that she kept until 1979, when she moved to Granbury). During the early 1950s, Brants taught classes at the Fort Worth Children’s Museum

and the Fort Worth Museum Art Center (now the Modern Art Museum). Brants taught painting and drawing at Sarah Lawrence College for Roesch during a leave of absence (1958–1962) and at Texas Woman’s University, Denton (1972–1973). Brants made art daily, creating new paintings and drawings and furthering her studies and experimentation in printmaking. Selected Exhibitions

Bodley Gallery, New York Dallas Museum of Art (frequent participant in the Southwestern Exhibition of Prints and Drawings) Fort Worth Art Museum Numerous other institutions throughout Texas Selected Public Collections

Dallas Museum of Art Old Jail Art Center, Albany, Texas Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey Williamson Gerald “Jerry” Bywaters b. Paris, Texas, 1906–d. Dallas, Texas, 1989

Artist, critic, teacher, curator, and director of the Dallas Museum of Art, Bywaters is known as a champion of Lone Star regionalism and a member of the Dallas Nine (a group of artists devoted to the interpretation of the land and people of the Southwest). Upon completion of his degree in comparative literature from Southern Methodist University (1926), Bywaters enrolled in the Dallas Art Institute (where he studied under Olin Travis and Thomas M. Stell) and then toured Europe. In Mexico in 1928, he wrote about that country’s muralists, including Diego Rivera. That same year, Bywaters studied at numerous artist colonies, including the Old Lyme Art Colony in Connecticut, under Bruce Crane. He continued his studies at the Art Students League later that fall with Ivan Olinsky and John Sloan,

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returning to Dallas in early 1929. He was later awarded commissions for post office murals throughout Texas (1937–1942). An avid art critic, he wrote for the Dallas Morning News and the Southwest Review. Before and during his tenure as director of the Dallas Museum of Art (1943–1964), he taught at Southern Methodist University (1937–1980s). The school awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1987, and his research documents form the Jerry Bywaters Collection on Art of the Southwest there. After leaving the museum, he directed the Pollock Gallery at Southern Methodist University (1965–1970). He served as regional director of the Texas Project with the Archives of American Art for the Smithsonian Institution until his death in 1989. Selected Exhibitions

Annual Allied Arts Exhibition, Dallas, 1928–1933, 1935, 1937–1947, 1950 (numerous awards) Dallas Museum of Art, 1932 (Nine Young Dallas Artists), 1937 (solo), 1940 (solo), 1985 (Lone Star Regionalism: The Dallas Nine and Their Circle, traveling exhibition) Rockefeller Center, New York, 1936 (National Exhibition of American Art) Texas Centennial Exposition, Dallas, 1936 World’s Fair, New York, 1939 (American Art Today) Texas General Exhibition, 1940–1947 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1950 (American Painting 1950) Southern Methodist University, 1976 (Jerry Bywaters: A Retrospective Exhibition, traveling exhibition) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1986 (The Texas Landscape, 1900–1986), 1995 (Texas Myths and Realities) Selected Public Collections

Blanton Museum of Art, Austin Dallas Museum of Art Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Southern Methodist University

Emma Richardson Cherry b. Aurora, Illinois, 1859–d. Houston, Texas, 1954

Cherry was a pioneering artist of Houston, recognized for her role in founding the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and her support of art education. She boasted an extensive exhibition history worldwide that won her numerous accolades. Before moving to Houston (early 1890s), Cherry taught art at the university in Lincoln, Nebraska (1879–1881); enrolled in the Art Students League to study with William Merritt Chase (1882–1885); traveled to Paris (1888), where she enrolled at the Académie Julian (1889–1891); and moved to Denver in 1891, where she assisted in the organization of the Artists Club of Denver (now the Denver Art Museum). Cherry embarked on an equally ambitious path in Houston, opening the Art Study Club in her studio and founding the Public School Art League in 1900 (renamed the Houston Art League in 1912 and later evolving into the mfah, founded 1924). Cherry devoted her life to art. She attended the Breckenridge School of Painting in East Gloucester, Massachusetts (1920), where her pursuit of modern aesthetics received encouragement from Marsden Hartley; taught summer sessions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1923); studied in Paris with André L’Hote; and traveled in Italy and Africa (1926). In 1934, she was one of five Texas artists hired by the Public Works Art Project to create murals for the Houston Public Library. Although known for impressionistic landscapes and still lifes, she explored new subjects and modern styles discovered on her travels. Selected Exhibitions

Houston Art League, 1923 (with Percy Holt) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1925 (solo), 1925–1938 and 1942–1947 (annual exhibition of work by Houston artists)

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Denver Art Museum, 1925 (solo) Witte Museum, 1926–1927 (solo) and 1938 (solo) Selected Public Collections

Elisabet Ney Museum, Austin Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Witte Museum

Selected Exhibitions

Dallas Museum of Art, 1949 (solo) Art Institute, 1953 (solo) Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, 1980 (solo, exhibition catalogue foreword by Gyorgy Kepes) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1996 Selected Public Collections

Carlotta Mae Corpron b. Blue Earth, Minnesota, 1901–d. Denton, Texas, 1988

Before enrolling at Michigan State Normal College in 1920, Corpron lived most of her early years in India (her father was a missionary and surgeon). She returned to the States to attend college, graduating with a BA in art education (1925). She immediately enrolled in Columbia University, receiving her MA in art education and fabric design (1926). That same year, she taught classes at the Alabama College for Women, Montevallo; in 1928, she moved to Ohio, joining the faculty at the School of Applied Arts, University of Cincinnati. Corpron moved to Denton in 1935, teaching art history, advertising design, and photography at the Texas State College for Women, where she became a colleague of Toni LaSelle. Photography became her main focus, and she enrolled in a summer session at the Art Center School, Los Angeles (1936). During the early 1940s, LaSelle invited László Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes from the Institute of Design in Chicago to teach in Denton (Corpron credited both artists as great influences on her art). She worked as Moholy-Nagy’s assistant (1942). In the 1950s, failing health forced Corpron to focus on her career as an educator. She retired from Texas Woman’s University (successor to Texas State College for Women) as a professor emeritus in 1968.

Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth Art Institute International Center of Photography, New York Museum of Modern Art Ben L. Culwell b. San Antonio, Texas, 1918–d. Marlin, Texas, 1992

Often credited as one of the first nonobjective artists in Texas, Culwell is known for his highly original, personal works featuring Regionalist and Abstract Expressionist styles reflecting his time spent in the South and in New York. The artist and his family moved to Dallas in 1934, where he enrolled at the Dallas Art Institute and then attended Southern Methodist University for two years. In 1936, he moved to New York briefly, pursuing studies at Columbia University (his instructors included Walter Pach). Culwell returned to Dallas the next year, working for an insurance company, exhibiting his works, and teaching at Texas State College for Women, Denton (1940–1941). In 1941, the artist enlisted in the U.S. Navy, serving in the Pacific on the USS Pensacola (1942–1944). He recorded his war experiences in a diary with drawings. He showed his work to Jerry Bywaters (director, Dallas Museum of Art) resulting in a solo exhibition at the dma (1945) and his inclusion in Fourteen Americans at MoMA (1946, with Robert Motherwell, Arshile Gorky, Isamu Noguchi, and others). Culwell returned to Dallas after the war, creating art and selling insurance. In 1961,

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he moved to Temple, where he worked as the president of a desk-manufacturing company; he retired in 1974 to focus on his art. Selected Exhibitions

Dallas Museum of Art, 1945 (solo), 1957 (Survey of Texas Painting) Museum of Modern Art, 1946 (Fourteen Americans) Texas Painting and Sculpture Annual Exhibition, 1950, 1952–1954, 1956, 1959 D. D. Feldman Collection of Contemporary Texas Art, Dallas, 1957 Texas Fine Arts Association Exhibition, 1957–1958, 1959 (purchase prize) Annual Texas Artists Circuit Exhibition, 1958 Artisan Gallery, Houston, 1959 (solo) Southern Methodist University, 1971 (Texas Painting and Sculpture: The 20th Century, traveling exhibition) McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, 1977 (solo) Meredith Long and Co., Houston, 1977 (solo) Menil Collection, 1987 (Adrenalin Hour) Selected Public Collections

Dallas Museum of Art Menil Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum of Modern Art

Art in Sherman, Texas. She moved to Houston in 1920 to pursue a career in art. She studied with the renowned Houston artist Emma Richardson Cherry and accepted a position as an art teacher at the Museum School at the mfah. Through her teaching, Davidson influenced a generation of Houston artists (including Frank Dolejska and Robert Preusser) and, along with Cherry, was a crucial figure in Houston’s modern art scene. Selected Exhibitions

Annual Texas Artists Exhibition, Fort Worth, 1924–1932 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1925–1928 and 1930–1939 (Annual Exhibition of Work by Houston Artists) Southern States Art League Annual Exhibition, 1926–1929, 1930 (prize), 1932–1934 Edgar B. Davis Competition, San Antonio, 1928–1929 Rockefeller Center, New York, 1936–1937 (National Exhibition of American Art) Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition, Dallas, 1937 Public Collections

Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas Frank Dolejska b. Houston, Texas, 1921–d. Houston, 1989

Ola McNeill Davidson (McNeill Davidson) b. Brazoria County, Texas, 1884–d. Houston, Texas, 1976

Davidson was known for her commitment to art education, having spent most of her career as an art teacher in Houston. When she was young, her family moved to a ranch in the Texas Panhandle, where she grew up. At North Texas Female College, she pursued her artistic studies under Evangeline Fowler, later continuing her education at the Kidd-Key Conservatory of Music and

Dolejska, like his fellow Houstonian Robert Preusser, is best known for his nonobjective artistic style, creating paintings, sculpture, and objects that pushed the boundaries of representational art. After graduating from high school in 1939, Dolejska studied under the early Houston modernist Ola McNeill Davidson (1939– 1940), receiving a firm foundation in the modernist aesthetic. During World War II, he served in Africa and Europe as a member of the U.S. Army. After returning

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to Houston, he became a founding member of the Contemporary Arts Association and worked as codirector of the Contemporary Arts Museum (1948–1954). In 1957, he founded Handmakers, which supported the creation of works in various media by local artists. Selected Exhibitions

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1938–1939, 1947, and 1949–1955 (Annual Exhibition of Work by Houston Artists); 1951 (solo) Texas General Exhibition, 1940, 1948 Corpus Christi Art Museum, Texas, 1949 (solo) Texas Painting and Sculpture Annual Exhibition, 1950–1952 Dallas Museum of Art, 1951 (solo) Otis Marion Dozier b. Forney, Texas, 1904–d. Dallas, Texas, 1987

An original member of the Dallas Nine, Dozier moved to Dallas in the early 1920s, studying at the Aunspaugh Art School (1920–1922), at the Dallas Art Institute, and with the artist Frank Reaugh. He later worked as a draftsman at the Dallas Power and Light Company under the artist Charles Bowling (1929–1932, 1935). In 1936, Dozier accepted a teaching position at the Dallas School of Creative Arts, and two years later moved to Colorado, where he was awarded a study scholarship at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, followed by a teaching position there (1939–1945). In 1945, Dozier and his wife (the artist Velma Davis, married 1940) returned to Dallas, where he taught life drawing at Southern Methodist University (until 1948) and painting at the dma school (1945–mid-1960s). Like other Dallas Nine artists, he focused his creative energies on the southwestern landscape, embarking on numerous sketching trips to New Mexico, the Texas coast, and West Texas, particularly the Big Bend area. In 1958–1959, Dozier

painted in India and other parts of Asia, and in Mexico in the early 1960s. In 1960, the University of Texas Press published a portfolio of his paintings. Selected Exhibitions

Dallas Museum of Art, 1932 (Nine Young Dallas Artists); 1956 (solo); 1974–1975 (A Salute to the Doziers of Dallas, traveling exhibition); 1985 (Lone Star Regionalism: The Dallas Nine and Their Circle, traveling exhibition) Museum of Modern Art, 1933 (Painting and Sculpture from 16 American Cities) Texas Centennial Exposition, Dallas, 1936 Rockefeller Center, New York, 1936 and 1938 (National Exhibition of American Art) World’s Fair, New York, 1939 (American Art Today) Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1950 (American Painting 1950) San Francisco Museum of Art, 1952 (Texas Wildcat) Selected Public Collections

Blanton Museum of Art, Austin Dallas Museum of Art McNay Art Museum, San Antonio Metropolitan Museum of Art Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Southern Methodist University Whitney Museum of American Art William Kelly Fearing b. Fordyce, Arkansas, 1918—d. Austin, Texas, 2011

Fearing is known for both his art and his pioneering work in art education, serving as the Ashbel Smith Professor of Art at the University of Texas at Austin from 1947 to 1987, retiring as professor emeritus. In 2007 he was presented with the College of Fine Arts’s E. William Doty Award for distinguished service to the university.

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He grew up in Louisiana and studied art at Louisiana Tech University (1941), later earning his MA from Columbia University (1950). During World War II, Fearing trained in Fort Worth as a draftsman with a company making bombers. He became a key figure in the Fort Worth school. Selected Exhibitions

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1947 (55 Works of Modern Art Owned in Houston); 1955 (Two Texas Artists: Kelly Fearing and Mildred Wood Dixon); 1956 (GulfCaribbean Art Exhibition); 1963 (University of Texas Art Faculty: Past and Present) San Francisco Museum of Art, 1952 (Texas Wildcat) Laguna Gloria, Austin, 1955 (solo) Henry Clay Frick Memorial Gallery, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1955 (solo) D. D. Feldman Collection of Contemporary Texas Art, Dallas, 1956 Valley House Gallery, Dallas, 1958, 1961, 1992, 1996 (all solo) Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, 1963 (University of Texas Art Faculty: Past and Present, traveling exhibition) World’s Fair, New York, 1964 (Texas Pavilion) The University of Texas at Austin, 1967 (solo); 1974 (solo); 2002–2003 (The Mystical World of Kelly Fearing: A Sixty-Year Retrospective, traveling exhibition); numerous group shows DuBose Gallery, Houston, 1977 (solo) Selected Public Collections

Amon Carter Museum of Art, Fort Worth Blanton Museum of Art, Austin Dallas Museum of Art The Grace Museum, Abilene, Texas Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth Old Jail Art Center, Albany, Texas

Seymour Fogel b. New York City, 1911–d. Weston, Connecticut, 1984

Recognized for his contribution to the growth of Abstract Expressionism, Fogel is credited as an early practitioner and advocate of nonobjective work in Texas. Fogel attended the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design, New York (graduated in 1932). He painted numerous murals throughout his career, assisting Diego Rivera on the now-destroyed mural at Rockefeller Center (other murals were created under wpa auspices, including ones for the wpa Building at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 and murals in Washington, D.C., New York, and Texas). He moved to Texas in 1946 to take a teaching position in the Art Department at the University of Texas at Austin, where he educated students in modernist trends of the period. He returned to his native New York in 1959, maintaining a studio in the city and living in Connecticut with his family. Fogel dynamically expanded his oeuvre throughout his career, creating numerous works that pushed the boundaries of abstraction and definitions of nonobjective art in media and form. Along with the Texas modernist giants Ben Culwell and Robert Preusser, Fogel is considered a founding father of Texas modernism. Selected Exhibitions

Whitney Museum of American Art, 1938 Museum of Modern Art, 1942 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1951 (Designs for Murals, Petroleum Club, by Seymour Fogel); 1956 (GulfCaribbean Art Exhibition); 1963 (University of Texas Art Faculty: Past and Present, traveling exhibition) Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 1952 D. D. Feldman Collection of Contemporary Texas Art, Dallas, 1956 Dallas Museum of Art, 1957 (Survey of Texas Painting) M. Knoedler & Co., New York, 1958 (solo)

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Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, 1963 (University of Texas Art Faculty: Past and Present) Martin Museum, Waco, 2007 (Texas Modern) Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum, Austin, 2008 (Modernist: The University of Texas Legacy) Selected Public Collections

Dallas Museum of Art Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Museum of Art The University of Texas at Austin Whitney Museum of American Art Constance “Connie” Forsyth b. Indianapolis, Indiana, 1903–d. Austin, Texas, 1987

Forsyth’s career as an artist began with early studies with her father, William Forsyth. She received her BA in chemistry from Butler University in Indianapolis (1925), later studying at the John Herron Art Institute (also in Indianapolis) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1925–1930). The 1930s were a productive period for the artist—she accepted an instructorship at the John Herron Art Institute (1931–1935) and enrolled in summer art classes at the Broadmoor Art Academy, Colorado Springs (1932 and 1934), where she studied lithography, her later focus. Ward Lockwood, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, was among her instructors at Broadmoor. In 1933, Forsyth assisted Thomas Hart Benton with his murals for the Century of Progress International Exposition, Chicago. Forsyth accepted a position in the Art Department at the University of Texas at Austin in 1940 (the first female professor in the department). She was a devoted educator whose interest in printmaking played a pivotal role in the founding of the printmaking program

at UT. Forsyth retired as professor emeritus in 1973. An endowed scholarship in printmaking at UT was established in her name in 1990. Selected Exhibitions

John Herron Art Institute, Indianapolis, 1936 (prize), 1938, 1961 New York World’s Fair, 1939 (American Art Today) Dallas Museum of Art, 1942–1946 (Texas General Exhibition) Texas Printmakers Circuit Exhibition, 1942–1961 National Academy of Design, New York, 1942 (annual exhibition) Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1948 and 1959 (Annual Exhibition of Watercolors, Prints and Drawings) M. Knoedler & Co., New York, 1952 (Texas Contemporary Artists) D. D. Feldman Collection of Contemporary Texas Art, Dallas, 1957 Kunst Museum, Bern, Switzerland, 1957 (traveling exhibition) Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, 1959, 1963 (University of Texas Art Faculty: Past and Present, traveling exhibition) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1963 (University of Texas Art Faculty: Past and Present) The University of Texas at Austin, 1974 (retrospective with William Lester) Selected Public Collections

Blanton Museum of Art, Austin Dallas Museum of Art Indianapolis Museum of Art John Herron Art Institute, Indianapolis Witte Museum, San Antonio

S E L E C T E D A R T I S T S ’ B I O G R A P H I E S  |   2 7 3 Michael Frary b. Santa Monica, California, 1918–d. Austin, Texas, 2005

Frary earned two degrees from the University of Southern California, a BA in architecture (1940) and an mfa in painting (1941). After spending time in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he worked as an assistant art director for Goldwyn Studios, Paramount, and Universal Studios in Southern California. He later accepted a full-time teaching post as a painting instructor at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1949 he moved to San Antonio to work as artist in residence and faculty chairman at Marion Koogler McNay’s art school. In the early 1950s, he became an assistant professor of art at the University of Texas at Austin, eventually retiring from the university in 1986 as professor emeritus. His watercolors were published in three books focusing on the Texas landscape: Impressions of the Big Thicket (1973), Impressions of the Panhandle (1977), and Watercolors of the Rio Grande (1984). Selected Exhibitions

Annual Texas Watercolor Society Exhibition, 1950s Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1956 (D. D. Feldman Collection of Contemporary Texas Art and Gulf-Caribbean Art Exhibition); 1962 (The Southwest: Painting and Sculpture, Dallas and Houston); 1963 (University of Texas Art Faculty: Past and Present, traveling exhibition) Dallas Museum of Art, 1950s–1960s (Annual Texas Painting and Sculpture Exhibition); 1957 (Survey of Painting in Texas); 1957–1959 (Southwestern Exhibition of Prints and Drawing) Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, 1963 (University of Texas Art Faculty: Past and Present) Selected Public Collections

Dallas Museum of Art McNay Art Museum, San Antonio

National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California The University of Texas at Austin Roy Fridge b. Beeville, Texas, 1927–d. Port Aransas, Texas, 2007

Fridge is known for his work as a filmmaker and his sculptures that incorporate objects into mystical assemblages, making reference to the roots and landscape of his native state. Fridge attended the University of Texas at Austin (1944–1946) before entering the U.S. Navy (served 1946–1948). In 1948, he enrolled at Baylor, where he received his BA (1950). After graduation, he moved to Dallas, where he founded his first film studio (1951). During the 1950s, Fridge designed the production sets for plays by the Dallas Little Theater. Although he turned to sculpture in 1957, film and theater remained interests throughout his career; his works were featured in numerous festivals and at museums, and received many awards. In 1963, he moved to Port Aransas. He later worked as a visiting artist at Rice, where he taught two semesters of film and animation (1968). From 1969 to 1973, Fridge worked at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, building its “Film in Art” curriculum. He returned to Port Aransas in 1973. Selected Exhibitions

Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, 1961 (The Art That Broke the Looking-Glass; catalogue design) David Gallery, Houston, 1966, 1967, 1969 Atelier Chapman Kelley, Dallas, 1968 (three-person show with Jim Love and David McManaway) Southern Methodist University, Dallas, 1971 (one i at a time)

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Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, 1978 (Reflections of an Amateur Hermit); 1985 (Heroes, Hermits, Shamans, and Boats: Roy Fridge, Selected Works, 1959–1984) Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 1979 Moody Gallery, Houston, 1980, 1982, 1984 Stavanger Museum, Stavanger, Norway, 1982 (Art from Houston in Norway, 1982) Dallas Museum of Art, 1984 (Gateway Gallery Experience) Coastal Bend College, Beeville, Texas, 1985 (Roy Fridge: A Small Retrospective) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1986 (The Texas Landscape, 1900–1986)

serves as a docent at the Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens at the mfah. In 1995, Gadbois opened Faux Foods, a local company that offers museums and historic institutions custom-made earthenware and handmade artificial foods in the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury manner.

Selected Public Collections

Selected Public Collections

Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi Menil Collection, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum of Modern Art (film) San Antonio Museum of Art

Blanton Museum of Art, Austin Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Old Jail Art Center, Albany, Texas

Selected Exhibitions

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1949–1960 (Annual Exhibition of Work by Houston Artists); 1956 (D. D. Feldman Collection of Contemporary Texas Art) Houston galleries, 1950s–1960s, numerous shows Martin Museum, Waco, Texas, 2007 (Texas Modern)

George Grammer b. 1928, Fort Worth, Texas

Henri Gadbois b. 1930, Houston, Texas

The son of an artist, Gadbois enrolled in lessons as a youth at the Museum School at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, with Ruth Uhler. He later received his bfa from the University of Houston (1952), followed by a master of letters (1953), for which he worked with the noted modernists Robert Preusser and Lowell Collins. In 1952 Gadbois began teaching classes at the Museum School of the mfah—a post he held until 1965 (excluding time spent in the U.S. Army, 1954–1955). He married a fellow Houston artist, Leila McConnell, in 1956. Gadbois’s dedication to the Houston art community has been demonstrated by more than thirty years of teaching art at Houston public schools. He currently

Grammer graduated from Paschal High School in Fort Worth in 1945. He expressed an interest in the arts while a youth and was one of the youngest members of the Fort Worth Circle. Grammer received a scholarship to attend Texas Wesleyan College, where he studied under Kelly Fearing. Various people—especially Sallie Gillespie—introduced him to Fort Worth Circle artists. After graduation, Grammer attended art school in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, later enrolling at the Art Students League in New York. While there, Grammer was reunited with the artist June Amos (they had attended Paschal together); the couple was married in 1954. They lived in New York and spent weekends at their second home in New Jersey. Amos died in 1993; Grammer currently lives in New York.

S E L E C T E D A R T I S T S ’ B I O G R A P H I E S  |   2 7 5 Selected Exhibitions

Architectural League, New York Betty McLean Gallery, Dallas Dallas Museum of Art Downtown Gallery, New York Fort Worth Art Center M. Knoedler & Co., New York Nassau Gallery, Princeton, New Jersey Princeton Gallery, Princeton, New Jersey Texas Fine Arts Association, Austin Texas Watercolor Society, Austin Selected Public Collections

Art Institute of Chicago D. D. Feldman Collection of Contemporary Texas Art Dallas Museum of Art Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth Old Jail Art Center, Albany, Texas Witte Museum, San Antonio William Alexandre Hogue b. 1898, Memphis, Missouri–d. 1994, Tulsa, Oklahoma

Hogue first studied with Elizabeth Hillyar in Denton and with Frank Reaugh, later enrolling in the College of Art and Design, Minneapolis (1918). Hogue moved to New York (1921), where he frequented museums, returning to Texas for summer sketch trips with Reaugh. In the mid-1920s, Hogue moved to New Mexico, where he developed a lifelong fascination with the land and befriended Ernest Blumenschein (founder of the Taos Society of Artists). A passion for the Southwest stimulated Hogue’s role in the Dallas Nine group. Hogue taught at Texas State College for Women, Denton (1931–1942), directed the Art Department at Hockaday Junior College (1936–1942), received recognition for his

art in iconic American periodicals (Life magazine, Dust Bowl series, 1937) and was a charter member of the Lone Star Printmakers (1938). The artist enlisted as a technical illustrator for North American Aviation during World War II (1942). After the war, he headed the Art Department at the University of Tulsa (retired in 1968). In his honor, the Alexandre Hogue Gallery was established at the University of Tulsa (1976). Most recently, his work was documented in a major retrospective, Alexandre Hogue: An American Visionary—Paintings and Works on Paper (2011, traveling, curated by Susie Kalil and accompanied by her Texas a&m University Press monograph). Selected Exhibitions

Annual Allied Arts Exhibition, Dallas, numerous years and awards Texas General Exhibition, multiple years National Academy of Design, New York, 1928, 1934 (annual exhibitions) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1929 (A Collection of Texas and New Mexico Paintings by Alexandre Hogue), numerous other exhibitions Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1932– 1933, 1935, 1971 Museum of Modern Art, 1933 (Painting and Sculpture from 16 American Cities), numerous other exhibitions Art Institute of Chicago, 1935–1937, 1939–1940 Texas Centennial Exposition, Dallas, 1936 Musée du Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1938 (International Exhibition) World’s Fair, New York, 1939, 1974 Tate Gallery, London, 1946 Dallas Museum of Art, 1946 (solo), 1946 (Two Hundred Years of American Art), 1948 (solo), numerous other exhibitions

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Dallas Museum of Art Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa Pompidou Centre, Paris Dorothy Hood b. 1919, Bryan, Texas–d. 2000, Houston

Hood, who is known for her large nonobjective paintings, attended the Rhode Island School of Design (1937–1940) and the Art Students League (1941). From 1943 to 1961, she lived in Mexico, where she met the artists Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and José Clemente Orozco. She traveled frequently in Mexico, Central America, South America, and the United States. She married the Bolivian composer-conductor Velasco Maidana in Mexico City. The couple returned to Houston in 1961, where Hood accepted an instructorship at the Museum School of the mfah (1962–1976). Hood received numerous honors, including the Childe Hassam Purchase Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (1973). She participated in From the Heart, a documentary about nine female artists (1982, part of the MoMA Collectors Series) and Dorothy Hood: The Color of Life (1985, documentary film produced by PRP Productions for the mfah). She was named Texas Artist of the Year by the Art League of Houston (1984). She received an honorary doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design (1990). Selected Exhibitions

Meredith Long and Company, Houston, 1965 Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 1970 Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York, 1972, 1974

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1975 (Dorothy Hood Drawings and Modern Painting: 1900 to the Present); 1985 (Fresh Paint); 1993 (Artists Progress: Seven Houston Artists, 1943–1993) McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, 1978 Kunstverein, Salzburg, Austria, 1983 (New Art from a New City) U.N. Focus International Exhibition, Kenya, 1985 (American Women in Art: Works on Paper) National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., and Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, 1989 (Texas Women) Selected Public Collections

Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York McNay Art Museum, San Antonio Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum of Modern Art National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art The University of Texas at Austin Whitney Museum of American Art, New York DeForrest Hale Judd b. 1916, Hartsgrove, Ohio–d. 1992, Dallas

Judd is known for his depictions of nature and everyday life, employing bold, abstract colors and forms. He graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1939 and then studied at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (1940–1942), where he received instruction from Boardman Robinson and the Texas artist Otis Dozier. After serving in World War II, Judd moved to Dallas (1946), where he lived for the rest of his life, teaching art at the Dallas Museum of Art (1958–1964) and

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Southern Methodist University (full professor, 1967– 1981). In 1976, Judd was made an Honorary Life Member of the Dallas Chapter of the Texas Fine Arts Association (Texas Visual Arts Association). He worked as a full-time artist until his death. His late wife donated his art, sketchbooks, and ephemera to the Jerry Bywaters Special Collections repository at Southern Methodist University in 1993. Selected Exhibitions

Dallas Museum of Art, 1946 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1950 (American Painting Today) Southern Methodist University, 1950, 1965, 1969, 1981 Elisabet Ney Museum, Austin, 1952 Sul Ross State College, Alpine, Texas, 1957 Texas Tech Museum, Lubbock, 1959 Fort Worth Art Center, 1962 Beaumont Museum of Art, Beaumont, Texas, 1971 Cleveland Art Museum Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center Denver Art Museum Selected Public Collections

Cleveland Museum of Art Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center Dallas Museum of Art Southern Methodist University Dorothy Antoinette “Toni” LaSelle b. 1901, Beatrice, Nebraska–d. 2002, Denton, Texas

LaSelle is credited as the first female artist in midcentury Texas to create nonobjective works, encouraging the growth of modernism through her art and students. She received her BA from Nebraska Wesleyan University (1923), later attending the University of Chicago

(MA, 1926). In 1928, she accepted a teaching position in the fine arts department at Texas State College for Women, where she remained for over forty years, resigning in 1972. Committed to the education of her students (including Carlotta Corpron), LaSelle was an avid student herself, constantly seeking to widen her artistic horizons. She enrolled at Chicago’s Institute of Design, receiving instruction from László MoholyNagy (the two became friends, and she brought him to Denton to lecture in 1942). In 1944, she enrolled in Hans Hofmann’s summer class in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Throughout her later career, LaSelle divided her time between Denton and Provincetown, often returning to the East Coast for Hofmann’s classes. Selected Exhibitions

University of Chicago, 1926 (solo) Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition, Dallas, 1937 Dallas Museum of Art, 1947, 1968 (solo) Provincetown Art Association, 1948, 1950, 1981 (solo) Fort Worth Art Museum, 1959 (solo), 1963 New Arts Gallery, Houston, 1962 (solo) Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, 1963 Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York, 1968 Texas Woman’s University, Denton, 1991 (Early and Recent Work) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1996 (Texas Modern and Post-Modern) Selected Public Collections

Dallas Museum of Art Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Texas Woman’s University, Denton

278   |   M I D C E N T U R Y M O D E R N A R T I N T E X A S Thomas Calloway “Tom” Lea III b. 1907, El Paso, Texas–d. 2001, El Paso

Lea is a noted American artist who worked as a painter, illustrator, writer, and muralist. He enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1924, studying under the muralist John Warner Norton (Lea published a book on Norton in 1935); over the next few years, Lea worked as a mural artist and as Norton’s assistant. After a trip to Europe, Lea settled in Santa Fe (1933), where he worked part-time in the State Laboratory of Anthropology. Following the death of his first wife (Nancy Taylor, 1936), Lea returned to El Paso. During World War II, Lea was hired by Life magazine as a combat artist and correspondent; the record of what he saw was published in Life, 1942–1945. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Award from the U.S. Navy for his service. After the war, Lea returned to El Paso, working as a muralist, painter, and illustrator. In 1945, Life asked Lea to create a series of paintings depicting the history of the cattle industry; although the works were never published, Life donated them to the Dallas Museum of Art. Lea published many books, including The King Ranch (1957). He worked with the El Paso book designer and publisher Carl Hertzog, and illustrated writings by his friend J. Frank Dobie (Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver, 1936; The Longhorns, 1941). The Tom Lea Institute serves as a repository for his archives and legacy. Selected Exhibitions

Art Institute of Chicago, 1926 Texas Centennial Exposition, Dallas, 1936 El Paso Centennial Museum, 1939, 1994 (solo) Whitney Museum of American Art, 1939 (Forty-Eight States Competition) Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1939–1940 Texas General Exhibition, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, 1940

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1940 Dallas Museum of Art, 1948, 1950 (solo) El Paso Museum of Art, 1963, 1970, 1994 (all solo) Selected Public Collections

Dallas Museum of Art El Paso Museum of Art The University of Texas at Austin U.S. Army Center of Military History and U.S. Marine Corps Museum, Washington, D.C. William Lewis Lester b. 1910, Graham, Texas–d. 1991, Austin

Lester moved to Dallas in 1924, where he initiated art studies with his fellow Regionalist Alexandre Hogue (1928) and enrolled at the Dallas Art Institute, studying under Olin Travis and Thomas M. Stell, Jr. (1930– 1932). Lester worked as a draftsman for the Dallas Power and Light Company under the contemporary Dallas artist Charles Bowling (1929–1932, 1935–1936, 1942), and as a staff artist for the Civilian Conservation Corps near Palo Duro Canyon and at Fort Sill, Oklahoma (1934–1935). He taught at the Dallas Museum of Art (1940–1942) before moving to Austin for the remainder of his career. He taught at UT until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1972 (chair of art department, 1952–1954). After settling in Austin, Lester traveled extensively, painting the Texas coastal region and mountains in the western part of the state. He held brief teaching stints at Sul Ross State College, Alpine (summers of 1949 and 1950), and traveled frequently to Mexico, France, and Italy. Selected Exhibitions

Dallas Annual Allied Arts Exhibitions, multiple years Texas Generals, multiple years

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Dallas Museum of Art, 1932 (Nine Young Dallas Artists); 1940 (solo); 1947 (solo); 1978 (Seventy-Five Years of Art in Dallas); 1985 (Lone Star Regionalism: The Dallas Nine and Their Circle) National Exhibition of American Art, Rockefeller Center, New York, 1936, 1938 New York World’s Fair, 1939 (American Art Today) Texas Centennial Exposition, Dallas, 1936 Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco, 1939–1940 Whitney Museum of American Art, 1950 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1950 (American Painting 1950) M. Knoedler & Co., New York, 1952 (Texas Contemporary Artists) D. D. Feldman Collection of Contemporary Texas Art, Dallas, 1955, 1957 The University of Texas at Austin, 1962, 1965, 1966, 1968 (all solo) Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, 1970 (solo) Selected Public Collections

Blanton Museum of Art, Austin Dallas Museum of Art Metropolitan Museum of Art Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Torch Collection, Houston Whitney Museum of American Art John Ward Lockwood b. 1894, Atchison, Kansas–d. 1963, Taos, New Mexico

Lockwood studied art at the University of Kansas (1912–1914), followed by classes with Henry McCarter at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1914–1916). He served in the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I (and as a colonel in the U.S. Army during World War II). Following his service, he moved

to Paris and enrolled in classes at the Académie Ranson. After returning to the States in 1922, he worked as a commercial artist in Kansas City. Two years later, he moved to Taos, New Mexico, where he lived from 1928 to 1938. In 1938, Lockwood organized a new art department at the University of Texas at Austin, creating courses, finding faculty, and developing a system of exhibitions for art by students. He developed a dynamic program with faculty members who helped lay the foundations of modern art in Texas. After his service in World War II, Lockwood left UT to paint in Taos (1947). Beginning in 1948, he worked at the University of California, Berkeley, spending summers teaching in Taos; he retired in 1961, and in 1962, served as a visiting professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. Lockwood’s résumé is filled with numerous awards and exhibitions, including a retrospective traveling exhibition organized by the University of Texas at Austin in 1967 (which traveled to the Amon Carter in Fort Worth, and to museums in California, Kansas, New Mexico, and Colorado). Selected Exhibitions

National Academy of Design, New York, 1929 (Annual Exhibition) Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, 1929–1930 Whitney Museum of American Art, numerous years throughout the 1930s–1950s Art Institute of Chicago, 1931, 1932, 1934–1938, 1940, 1942 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1935, 1941 (solo) Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1935, 1939 Dallas Museum of Art, 1939 (solo) Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, 1949–1951, 1961 (solo) Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1950 Galleria Escondida, Taos, 1950–1951, 1954, 1956, 1962 (all solo)

280  |  MIDCENTURY MODERN ART IN TEXAS Selected Public Collections

Dallas Museum of Art Harwood Foundation, Taos McNay Art Museum, San Antonio Metropolitan Museum of Art Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. The University of Texas at Austin Whitney Museum of American Art Jim Love b. 1927, Amarillo, Texas–d. 2005, Houston

Love is known for his sculptures and assemblages, which are often accompanied by whimsical titles. Although Love worked primarily in Houston, he began his career at Baylor University, where he received a BA in business administration (1952). Elective college classes in theater, along with encouragement from his colleague and fellow artist Roy Fridge, inspired the young artist to pursue a career in theater and the arts, leading to his work as a stage-lighting technician for Theatre Inc., Houston (1953), followed by a position as set designer for Houston’s Alley Theatre (1955). He later accepted a post as the installation technician for the Contemporary Arts Association, Houston (1956, now the cam). Jermayne MacAgy, then director of the association and a fervent supporter of the local arts, recognized his talent and encouraged Love to pursue his work in sculpture. In following MacAgy’s advice, Love began a lifelong career in the arts, exhibiting throughout the nation. Selected Exhibitions

Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, 1957, 1959, 1961 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1958–1959 (Houston Annuals); 1963 (Some Recent Acquisitions, 1961–1963

and Sculpture from the Museum of Modern Art, New York); 1974 (Modern Sculpture in Houston) Museum of Modern Art, 1961 (The Art of the Assemblage) Whitney Museum of American Art, 1968 Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 1973 (Jim Love: In Pursuit of the Bear); 1979 (Fire!) The Institute for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, 1980 (traveling retrospective) Selected Public Collections

Alley Theatre, Houston Dallas Museum of Art Hobby Airport, Houston Menil Collection, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum of Modern Art Rice University, Houston Whitney Museum of American Art Florence Elliott White McClung b. 1894, St. Louis, Missouri–d. 1992, Dallas

McClung was raised in Dallas and studied art with Frank Reaugh, later receiving instruction from the regionalist artists Frank Klepper, Thomas Stell, and Olin Travis at the Dallas Art Institute, and during her college years from Alexandre Hogue (summer classes in Taos). She was appointed director of the Art Department at Trinity University, Waxahachie (1929–1942). She received her BS in education and BA in English and art from Southern Methodist University (1939, followed by a graduate degree at the Texas State College for Women, Denton). During the 1930s–1940s, McClung taught summer classes at Stonecrest Summer School for Girls and Lookout Camp for Boys, Colorado, and studied lithography at the Colorado School of Fine Arts, Colorado Springs (1941). McClung served

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as president of the Southern States Art League (1946– 1947), was the Texas chairman for the National Association of Women Painters, and participated in the Printmakers Guild. Selected Exhibitions

Annual Allied Arts Exhibition, Dallas, 1920s–1940s Trinity University, Waxahachie, 1930 (solo) Annual Texas Artists Exhibition, Fort Worth, 1932–1937 Joseph Sartor Galleries, Dallas, 1933 (solo) Dallas Museum of Art, 1935 (Dallas Painters in Oils); 1938 (Women Artists of Dallas County); 1941 (solo); 1945 (solo); 1985 (Lone Star Regionalism: The Dallas Nine and Their Circle, traveling) Texas Centennial Exhibition, Dallas, 1936 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1937 New York World’s Fair, 1939 (American Art Today) Texas General and Texas-Oklahoma General Exhibitions, 1940–1941 National Association of Women Artists, 1941–1944, 1945 (prize), 1946 Texas Printmakers Circuit Exhibition, 1942–1945, 1948 San Francisco Museum of Art, 1942–1944 National Academy of Design, New York, 1943–1944, 1946 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1943 (Artists for Victory) Selected Public Collections

Dallas Museum of Art Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Museum of Art New Orleans Museum of Art Torch Collection, Houston The University of Texas at Austin

Leila McConnell b. 1927, Los Angeles

At age six, McConnell moved with her family to Houston, where she currently lives and works as an artist. She enrolled at the Rice Institute (now Rice University) at age sixteen to pursue studies in art and architecture. She credits James Chillman (founding director of the mfah; tenure, 1924–1953) as having the greatest impact on her artistic education. After earning a BA (1948) and a BS in architecture (1949) at Rice, McConnell continued her studies at the Museum School at the mfah until enrolling in a summer course at San Francisco School of Fine Arts (1949). In San Francisco, she was instructed by pioneering American modernists, including Mark Rothko. Along with the artist Henri Gadbois (whom she married in 1956), McConnell worked as an instructor at the Museum School of the mfah (1950–1968, excluding 1954–1959, when she worked for the Houston architect Hamilton Brown). McConnell’s artistic studies and foundation were focused on figurative, traditional styles. Her later works, after her studies in San Francisco and an Italian trip in 1960, feature a minimal, abstract style with soft, atmospheric colors and sky-like imagery. Selected Exhibitions

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1949–1960 (Annual Exhibition of Work by Houston Artists) Rice University, 2004–2005 (Early Rice Art) Cushman Gallery, Houston DuBose Gallery, Houston Houston Artists Gallery Leslie Muth Gallery, Houston Polly Marsters Gallery, Houston Selected Public Collections

Menil Collection, Houston Old Jail Art Center, Albany, Texas

282  |  MIDCENTURY MODERN ART IN TEXAS David McManaway b. 1927, Chicago–d. 2010, Dallas

McManaway attended the Studio School in Chicago (1948–1949), later enrolling at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (1953–1958). After graduating, he moved to Dallas (1959), where he remained until his death in 2010. During his early years, McManaway created numerous paintings; after his move to Dallas, he began to create assemblages, creating whimsical works from found objects. He received numerous acknowledgments and awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1977) and the Engelhard Award from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1991). Selected Exhibitions

Dallas Museum of Art, 1959 and 1964 (Texas Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture); 1975 (solo) Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, 1961 (The Art That Broke the Looking-Glass) Chandler Gallery, Dallas, 1965 (two exhibitions) Atelier Chapman Kelley, Dallas, 1967, 1969 Whitney Museum of American Art, 1969 (Human Concern/Personal Torment); 1973 (1973 Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Art) Southern Methodist University, 1971 (one i at a time); 1979–1980 (Texas Painting and Sculpture) Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 1973, 1979 (Fire!) Dallas Museum of Art, 1975 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1986 (The Texas Landscape) Eugene Binder Gallery, Dallas, 1986 Moody Gallery, Houston, 1994, 1997, 2005 Menil Collection, Houston, 2005 (David McManaway and Friends)

Selected Public Collections

Dallas Museum of Art Menil Collection, Houston Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Octavio Medellín b. 1907, San Luis Potosí, Mexico–d. 1999, Dallas

As a youth, Medellín moved from Mexico to San Antonio with his family (1920). He pursued studies with Xavier Gonzalez and José Arpa at the San Antonio School of Art. In 1928, he moved to Chicago and enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After a period of study in Mexico (1929–1931), Medellín returned to San Antonio (1931) to teach sculpture at the Witte art school and at the Villita Art Gallery, which he founded with other local artists (1934–1937; Medellín was a self-taught sculptor). In 1938, he traveled to Mexico to study the art of his native country. Upon his return to Texas, Medellín accepted a five-year position as sculptor in residence at North Texas State Teachers College, Denton; taught sculpture, ceramics, and mosaics at the Dallas Museum of Art School (1945– mid-1960s); lectured at Southern Methodist University (1946–1947); and instructed graduate students in his dma studio (1962–1966). In 1966, he founded the Medellín School of Sculpture in Dallas. He received numerous accolades throughout his career for his work as an artist and art historian. Acknowledgments include the publication of his book Xtol: Dance of the Ancient Mayan People (dma, 1947) and the establishment of the Octavio Medellín Collection at Southern Methodist University (1994).

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Texas Generals, multiple years Texas Painting and Sculpture Annual Exhibitions, multiple years Texas Centennial Exposition, Dallas, 1936 National Exhibition of American Art, Rockefeller Center, New York, 1938 New York World’s Fair, New York, 1939 (American Art Today) Witte Museum, San Antonio, 1939 (solo) Dallas Museum of Art, 1942 (solo), 1985 (Lone Star Regionalism: The Dallas Nine and Their Circle, traveling) Museum of Modern Art, 1942 (Americans 1942: Eighteen Artists from Nine States) Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1995 (The Figure in American Sculpture: A Question of Modernity, traveling) Selected Public Collections

Dallas Museum of Art Numerous churches throughout North Texas Southern Methodist University The University of Texas at Austin Witte Museum, San Antonio Loren Norman Mozley b. 1905, Brookport, Illinois–d. 1989, Austin

Mozley was raised in New Mexico and attended the University of New Mexico until 1926, when he moved to Taos to join the local art colony. There he befriended John Ward Lockwood and John Marin, among others. He then traveled throughout Europe (1929–1931), studying at the Colarossi and Chaumiere academies in Paris. Upon his return to the States, he worked in New York as an engraver (1934). He next worked in the Art

Department of the University of New Mexico (1936– 1937), spending summers as director of the Field School of Art in Taos. In 1938, he moved to Austin with Lockwood and helped his friend organize the art department at the University of Texas. Over the next few years, he taught at UT (department chairman, 1942– 1945, 1958–1959), served as president of the Texas Fine Arts Association (1945–1946), and taught at the Texas Field School, National University of Mexico (1943– 1945). He had become interested in Latin American art after visiting Mexico City in 1938, and later published articles on Latin American artists. He traveled frequently throughout South America and Europe during the 1950s and 1960s, and taught for four summers at the University of Southern California (early 1950s). He retired from the University of Texas at Austin as professor emeritus in 1975. Selected Exhibitions

Texas General Exhibitions, frequently in the 1940s M. Knoedler & Co., New York, 1952 (Texas Contemporary Artists) San Francisco Museum of Art, 1956 Valley House Gallery, Dallas, 1967 (solo), 1978 (retrospective) Pan-American Union Building, Washington D.C., 1968 (A Particular Portion of Earth) The University of Texas at Austin, 1978 (retrospective) Selected Public Collections

Blanton Museum of Art, Austin Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe Old Jail Art Center, Albany, Texas San Antonio Art League Witte Museum, San Antonio

284  |  MIDCENTURY MODERN ART IN TEXAS Gene Owens

Robert Ormerod Preusser

b. Birdville, Texas, 1931

b. 1919, Houston–d. 1992, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Owens received his BA from Texas Wesleyan College in Fort Worth (1955) and his mfa from the University of Georgia in Athens (1958). While studying, Owens taught at Arlington State College (1955–1956) and the University of Georgia (1957–1958). He returned to Texas to lead the art department of Texas Wesleyan College (1958–1960). Owens worked alongside the leading modernist sculptor Charles T. Williams, developing new techniques for creating bronze sculptures. Many of Owens’s bronzes from this period are acknowledged as being the most progressive, modernist sculptures made in Texas. After suffering an allergic reaction to the bronze finishing chemicals, he turned his efforts to innovating in porcelain and stoneware. Owens worked as an assistant to Isamu Noguchi, traveling between Texas and New York for six years in the 1960s. He lives in Cleburne, Texas, south of Fort Worth.

Preusser was an award-winning pioneer of abstraction during a time when Texas art was dominated by regionalist styles. He began studying at age eleven in Houston with Ola McNeill Davidson (1930), and later with László Moholy-Nagy at his progressive “New Bauhaus” Institute of Design in Chicago (1939–1942). After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II (1942– 1945), he studied at the Los Angeles Art Center School (1946–1947). Preusser returned to Houston in 1947 and remained there until 1954, when he accepted a teaching position at mit. In Houston, he became a key figure in the burgeoning art community, teaching at the Museum School of the mfah (1947–1954), working as associate curator of education at the mfah (1952–1954), serving as a founding member of the Contemporary Arts Association (1948; now the cam) and later as codirector (1949–1951), and teaching at the University of Houston (1951–1954). After moving to Massachusetts, Preusser taught at mit until his retirement in 1985. Although Preusser spent most of his life in Texas and Massachusetts, he was known throughout the nation; Edith Halpert identified him as one of five young promising American painters for her Downtown Gallery in New York (1950).

Selected Exhibitions

University of Georgia, Athens, 1961 (solo) Fort Worth Art Center, 1962 (Two Texas Artists) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1962 (The Southwest: Painting and Sculpture) Fort Worth Art Center, 1964 (solo) Gallery in the Square, Fort Worth, 1967 (solo) Tarrant County Annual Exhibition, Fort Worth Art Center, 1968 (Best of Show award) Fort Worth Gallery, 1984 (Gene Owens and Kevin Marshall) Old Jail Art Center, Albany, Texas, 2012–2013 (solo)

Selected Exhibitions

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1935–1940, 1942– 1944, 1947–1955 (Annual Exhibition of Work by Houston Artists; in 1940, three of his abstracts were awarded the purchase prize); 1948 (solo); 1953, 1996 (Texas Modern and Post-Modern) National Exhibition of American Art, Rockefeller Center, New York, 1938 Texas General Exhibition, 1940–1944, 1946–1948 (prizes in 1941, 1946, 1948)

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Whitney Museum of American Art, 1946–1947 (Contemporary American Annuals) Dallas Museum of Art, 1957 (A Survey of Texas Painting) mit Museum, 1991 (retrospective) Martin Museum, Waco, 2007 (Texas Modern) Selected Public Collections

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans Texas Christian University, Fort Worth Witte Museum, San Antonio Edward Dickson Reeder b. 1912, Fort Worth, Texas–d. 1970, Fort Worth

Reeder was a founding member of the Fort Worth School (along with his wife, Flora Blanc Reeder), a group of artists focused on encouraging the growth of modernism in Texas. Reeder studied art at Central High School under Sallie Blythe Mummert and Sallie Gillespie (graduating in 1930). From 1930 to 1932, he attended the Art Students League, receiving instruction from Wayman Adams, George Bridgman, and Ivan Olinksy. Reeder traveled to Europe in 1936; in Paris, he and Flora Blanc studied at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17. The couple returned to New York and married in 1937, and then moved to Fort Worth in 1940, where Reeder taught art at Texas Wesleyan College. In 1945, Reeder and Flora founded the Children’s School of Theater and Design in Fort Worth (in operation until 1958). For brief periods during the 1940s and 1950s, Reeder worked with Hayter and Claude Dumec at the New School for Social Research, New York, and traveled to Paris. Once back in Fort Worth, Reeder taught art at the Fort Worth Art Center. Working in a range of media, he was primarily known for his portraits and figurative art that showed abstract, modernist tendencies. During his later years, he focused on creating portraits, producing plays, and exhibiting his art.

Selected Exhibitions

Fort Worth Annuals, multiple years Texas Generals, multiple years Texas Centennial Exposition, Dallas, 1936 Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition, Dallas, 1937 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1943 (Artists for Victory); 1950 (American Painting 1950) Weyhe Galleries, New York, 1944 (Six Texas Painters) Fort Worth Museum of Art, 1945, 1948, 1960 (solo) M. Knoedler & Company, New York, 1952 (Texas Contemporary Artists) D. D. Feldman Collection of Contemporary Texas Art, Dallas, 1955, 1957 Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, 1959 Gallery Koepcke, Copenhagen, 1959 (solo) Texas Christian University, 1988 (retrospective) Selected Public Collections

Art Institute of Chicago Blanton Museum of Art, Austin Brooklyn Museum, New York Dallas Museum of Art Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth Flora Blanc Reeder b. 1916, New York–d. 1995, Fort Worth

Blanc married the Fort Worth artist Edward Dickson Reeder in 1937 and moved with him to Fort Worth in 1940. Before their move to Texas, both artists received extensive exposure to New York and European modernist trends, spending time in Paris and studying printmaking at Atelier 17, run by Stanley William Hayter (the workshop was frequented by the European modern masters Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, and Joan Miró). Blanc received instruction also from Leon Kroll, George Grosz, and Fernand Léger.

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In Fort Worth, Blanc and Reeder were introduced to a group of artists (including Blanche McVeigh, Veronica Helfensteller, Evaline Sellors, Kelly Fearing, Cynthia Brants, Bill Bomar, and Bror Utter) who were strong proponents of modernism, supporting the growth of the avant-garde in response to the conventional, regionalist styles prominent in Texas at the time. Blanc and Reeder created work and exhibited widely in Texas. Blanc, who had an avid interest in theater and acting, founded, along with her husband, the Children’s School of Theatre and Design in Fort Worth (1945– 1958, modeled after the King-Coit School of Theatre and Design, which Blanc attended as a youth). Selected Exhibitions

Annual Fort Worth Local Artists Show, 1941, 1943, 1947–1948 Texas-Oklahoma General Exhibition, 1941 Weyhe Gallery, New York, 1944 (Six Texas Painters) Texas General Exhibition, 1944–1945 Annual Texas Print Exhibition, Dallas, 1945 Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, the University of Texas at Austin, 1992 (Prints of the Fort Worth Circle: 1940–60) Bill Reily b. 1930, San Antonio, Texas

Reily grew up immersed in the San Antonio art scene. His father was a doctor who shared a practice with the husband of the art collector Marion Koogler McNay, who was Reily’s godmother. McNay and Reily were close friends, which gave the young artist exposure and access to the best modern art of the time and established an exceptional foundation for his career. After early studies at the McNay Art Institute, Reily received his bfa and mfa from the University of Texas at Austin (1952, 1962). Everett Spruce served as his graduate adviser, and Reily met Loren Mozley, Kelly Fearing,

Constance Forsyth, Galen Hanson, and others at the university. Between his undergraduate and graduate studies, he founded, along with his UT colleague Cecil Casebier, the San Antonio Men of Art Guild (the group encouraged the growth of abstraction in Texas art). After his studies at UT, Reily joined the faculty of Incarnate Word College, San Antonio (1962), where he worked for more than thirty years before retiring. Reily received numerous awards throughout his career, including Artist of the Year from the San Antonio Art League (1959). Selected Exhibitions

Texas Generals, multiple years Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1956 (Boston Printmakers) McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, 1956, 1971, 2002 (all solo) D. D. Feldman Collection of Contemporary Texas Art, Dallas, 1956, 1958, 1959 Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York, 1958 (Collages, Watercolors, Drawings) Witte Museum, San Antonio, 1959 (solo) The University of Texas at Austin, 1962 (solo) U.S. Information Service, 1965–1968 (Contemporary American Drawings, European tour) Incarnate Word College, San Antonio, 1969 (solo) Southern Methodist University, 1971 (Texas Painting and Sculpture: The 20th Century, traveling) San Antonio Art League Museum, 1996 (1950s Artists of the Year) Selected Public Collections

Dallas Museum of Art McNay Art Museum, San Antonio San Antonio Art League Museum The University of Texas at Austin U.S. Information Service, Washington, D.C. Witte Museum, San Antonio

S E L E C T E D A R T I S T S ’ B I O G R A P H I E S  |   2 8 7 Evaline Clarke Sellors b. 1903, Fort Worth, Texas–d. 1995, Fort Worth

Sellors was a champion of Texas modernism, founding and teaching at the Fort Worth School of Fine Arts, along with the artists Wade Jolly and Blanche McVeigh (1931–1941), and serving as an active figure in the Fort Worth Circle. She was a founding member, with McVeigh, of the Fort Worth Artists Guild—an institution focused on exhibiting local artists (1934). Sellors studied art at the School of Fine Arts, Washington University, St. Louis, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia. After her studies, she accepted an instructorship at Texas Christian University (1928), where she also taught sculpture (1939–1940). Upon closure of the Fort Worth School of Fine Arts, she accepted a position at the Fort Worth Art Center and taught evening classes in Dallas public schools. Selected Exhibitions

Annual Texas Artists Exhibition, Fort Worth, 1920, 1931–1937 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1931–1932 National Academy of Design, New York, 1934 Texas Centennial Exposition, Dallas, 1936 National Exhibition of American Art, Rockefeller Center, New York, 1937 World’s Fair, New York, 1939 (American Art Today) Texas General Exhibition, 1940, 1949 Texas-Oklahoma General Exhibition, 1941 Dallas Museum of Art, 1951 Fort Worth Art Center, 1962 (solo) Owen Art Center, Southern Methodist University, 1971 (Texas Painting and Sculpture: The 20th Century, traveling) Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas, 1993 (Women Artists of Texas 1850–1950)

Selected Public Collections

Dallas Museum of Art Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth Old Jail Art Center, Albany, Texas Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas Torch Collection, Houston Everett Franklin Spruce b. 1908, near Conway, Arkansas–d. 2002, Austin

Spruce met Olin and Kathryn Travis in 1925 while they were hosting a summer art camp in Arkansas. He moved to Dallas at their encouragement to pursue instruction at the Dallas Art Institute, studying under Olin Travis and Thomas Stell (1926–1929). Spruce later worked at the Dallas Museum of Art as a gallery assistant, instructor at the museum school, and docent. By 1935, Spruce had been promoted to registrar and assistant to the director. Spruce accepted a position as instructor of life drawing and creative design at UT (1940), later becoming a professor of art and serving as chair of the art department (1949–1950). In 1959, he was honored with a Ford Foundation grant for creative and experimental study. He remained at the University of Texas at Austin until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1974. Selected Exhibitions

Annual Allied Arts Exhibition, Dallas, multiple years Texas Generals, multiple years Dallas Museum of Art, 1932 (solo); 1932 (Nine Young Dallas Artists); 1957 (Survey of Texas Painting); 1958 (solo); 1985 (Lone Star Regionalism: The Dallas Nine and Their Circle, traveling) Dallas Art Institute, 1933 (solo) Texas Centennial Exposition, Dallas, 1936 National Exhibition of American Art, New York, 1936, 1938

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Whitney Museum of American Art, 1936–1937, 1940–1942, 1945–1950, 1959 Art Institute of Chicago, 1937, 1939–1942, 1943–1945 World’s Fair, New York, 1939 (American Art Today) Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco, 1939–1940 Museum of Modern Art, 1942 (Americans 1942: Eighteen Artists from Nine States) Annual Paintings of the Year Competition, National Academy of Design, New York, 1946 (prize), 1947 Galérie Giroux, Brussels, 1948 (Exhibition of Modern American Paintings, prize) Corcoran Biennial, Washington, D.C., 1949 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1950 (American Painting 1950) M. Knoedler & Company, New York, 1952 (Texas Contemporary Artists) Archer M. Huntington Gallery, the University of Texas at Austin, 1960, 1979 (solo) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1986 (The Texas Landscape, 1850–1950) Selected Public Collections

Dallas Museum of Art Metropolitan Museum of Art Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum of Modern Art Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Whitney Museum of American Art

Storms served as a fighter pilot in World War II and earned a bfa at Texas Christian University. He received acclaim for his sculptures: purchase prize at the Artists of the Gulf States exhibition (Delgado Museum of Art, New Orleans, 1964; now the New Orleans Museum of Art); the Pearl Brewing Company Sculpture Award at the 54th Texas Fine Arts Spring Jury Exhibition (Laguna Gloria, Austin, 1965); Rex J. Howard Sculpture Award, 28th Annual Exhibition of Tarrant County (Fort Worth, 1965); honorable mention in the Texas Painting and Sculpture Exhibition (dma, 1968); recommended purchase at the Tenth Annual Eight State Exhibition (Oklahoma City, 1968). Although a skilled sculptor, Storms abandoned art in the 1970s to focus on horticulture. He became a world-renowned expert on lithops, or “living or flowering stones” (succulents native to South Africa), publishing Growing the Mesembs (1976), Lithops and Other Succulents (1977), and The New Growing the Mesembs (1987). Selected Exhibitions

Texas Fine Art Association, 1960, 1961 Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, 1961–1962 Annual Exhibit of Southwest American Art, Oklahoma City, 1962, 1963 82nd Annual Exhibition, San Francisco Art Institute, 1963 Delgado Museum of Art, New Orleans, 1965 (solo) Witte Museum, San Antonio, 1966 Thirteenth Annual Eight State Exhibition, Oklahoma City, 1971

Edward Donald Storms b. 1924, Brady, Texas–d. 1987, Fort Worth

After training as a painter and working as an awardwinning photographer, Storms apprenticed in the studio of Charles T. Williams, where he learned bronzecasting methods (1961). Storms is primarily known for his work in that medium. Before meeting Williams,

Myron Stedman Stout b. 1908, Denton, Texas–d. 1987, Chatham, Massachusetts

Stout, who is known for his minimalist, geometric compositions, received his BS from North Texas State Teachers College, Denton, and his MA from Columbia University (1939), where he studied under Charles

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J. Martin. Stout taught art in Honolulu in the late 1930s and 1940s, and served in the Army Air Corps during World War II. In 1946, he was told by Toni LaSelle to attend Hans Hofmann’s school. Stout traveled often to Provincetown for Hofmann’s classes, eventually moving there in 1952 and focusing on his art for the remainder of his career. He received numerous awards throughout his life, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969. Stout lived in Provincetown, but died in Chatham after a long illness. Selected Exhibitions

Stable Gallery, New York, 1954 (solo) Hansa Gallery, New York, 1957 Whitney Museum of American Art, 1958 (Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting); 1962 (Geometric Abstraction in America); 1980 (retrospective) Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, 1959 American Federation of Arts, New York, 1960 (traveling) Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, 1968 Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 1977 (retrospective) Dia Art Foundation, Bridgehampton, New York, 1990 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1996 (Texas Modern and Post-Modern) Selected Public Collections

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo Art Institute of Chicago Brooklyn Museum, New York Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum of Modern Art Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Whitney Museum of American Art

Richard Gordon Stout b. 1934, Beaumont, Texas

Stout is known for his abstract works, which are rife with atmospheric color and landscape imagery evocative of his Texas home. His studies began early, with formal lessons in classical drawing in the public schools of Beaumont. During summers while he was in high school, he visited family in Ohio, attending sessions at the Art Academy of Cincinnati (1952–1953). After high school, he was awarded a full scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (bfa, 1957). There he studied art history with Kathleen Blackshear. Upon graduation, he moved to Houston (where he met his lifelong friend and fellow artist Dick Wray) and joined the faculty at the Museum School of the mfah (1959– 1967). He later pursued his mfa from the University of Texas at Austin (1966–1969). Stout was an instructor and professor at the University of Houston (1969–1996). Stout still paints daily and exhibits nationally and internationally. He was named Texas Artist of the Year by caseta in 2010. Selected Exhibitions

1014 Art Center, Chicago, 1956 (solo) Beaumont Art Museum, 1958, 1961 (both solo) New Arts Gallery, Houston, 1959 (solo) Meredith Long & Co., Houston, 1963–1985 (numerous solo shows) U.S. Department of Commerce, 1968 (Contemporary American Art) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1974 (Abstract Painting and Sculpture in Houston); 1985 (Fresh Paint: The Houston School) Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 1975 (solo) Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany, 1983– 1984 (New Art from a New City, traveling) Martin Museum, Waco, 2007 (Texas Modern), and solo exhibitions

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Beeville Art Museum, Beeville, Texas, 2010 (solo) Houston Baptist University, 2010 (solo) Selected Public Collections

Blanton Museum of Art, Austin Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio Dallas Museum of Art Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden, Germany Menil Collection, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Whitney Museum of American Art Stella Sullivan b. 1924, Houston

Sullivan is known for both representational and highly abstract, geometric compositions. She earned a BA in architecture (1945, Rice Institute). Before attending Rice, Sullivan frequented museum and gallery openings with her parents, took art lessons from Ola McNeill Davidson, and met the artists Ruth Uhler, Grace Spaulding John, and Emma Richardson Cherry. After graduating, Sullivan went to work for her father, a local architect, and continued her education at the Museum School of the mfah (1949–1950). She moved to Michigan to attend school at the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts (1950–1951, now the College for Creative Studies), and then at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, where she received her mfa in 1954. Once back in Houston, Sullivan taught private classes in painting, drawing, printmaking, and portraiture at the Museum School of the mfah (1961–1970) and the University of Houston (1962–1966). In 1971, she opened the Stella Sullivan School of Art in Houston, where she taught painting, drawing, design, and silk-screening for thirty years. She continues to exhibit in galleries throughout the state.

Selected Exhibitions

Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1954 (solo) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1951–1955 and 1959– 1960 (Annual Exhibition of Work by Houston Artists, awarded the Schlumberger Prize in 1951) D. D. Feldman Collection of Contemporary Texas Art, Dallas, 1956 Art League of Houston Dallas Museum of Art International Folk Art Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico Leslie Muth Gallery, Houston Lowell Collins Gallery, Houston Selected Public Collections

Bank of the Southwest, Houston D. D. Feldman Collection of Contemporary Texas Art, Dallas Episcopal Church of the Epiphany, Houston Chester Toney b. 1925, Littlefield, Texas–d. 1960, location unconfirmed*

Toney was a dominant force on the Texas modern scene, known for his nonobjective, expressionist works. He was a central figure in the foundation of the San Antonio Men of Art Guild (1952). Toney studied at the San Antonio Art Institute, where he was a colleague of Cecil Casebier and Bill Reily (fellow cofounders of the San Antonio Men of Art). Toney’s work met great acclaim, and San Antonio artists, collectors, and institutions (such as the Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute) encouraged him to pursue a nonobjective style. The San Antonio Art League recognized Toney’s achievements, nominating him as Artist of the Year in 1960.**

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Toney’s career was brief, but his success was significant, and his devotion to nonobjectivity was pivotal during a period of transition in Texas art from traditional, representational imagery to abstraction. * Toney’s life and death dates are not certain and sources offer conflicting information. ** Both 1957 and 1960 have been listed as dates for his San Antonio Art League Artist of the Year award. Selected Exhibitions

Dallas Museum of Art, 1954 (Texas Watercolor Society 5th Annual Exhibition); 1955–1956 (17th and 18th Annual Exhibition of Texas Painting and Sculpture); 1957 (Survey of Texas Painting) D. D. Feldman Collection of Contemporary Texas Art, Dallas, 1956 Olin Herman Travis b. 1888, Dallas–d. 1975, Dallas

Travis is known for his lifelong work as an artist and his devotion to art education. He first studied under R. Jerome Hill in Dallas, later working at the Art Institute of Chicago with Kenyon Cox, Charles Francis Browne, Ralph Clarkson, and Harry Mills Walcott (1909–1914). After graduation, Travis became an instructor at the institute (1914), later leaving to direct the Chicago Commercial Art School. In the early 1920s, Travis and his wife, Kathryne Hail Travis, moved to Dallas and founded, along with James Waddell, the Dallas Art Institute (founded 1926; Travis directed it until 1941). The couple also founded and ran the Ozark Summer School of Painting, an artists colony, for three summers in Cass, Arkansas. Travis and Kathryne divorced in 1934, and he later married the artist Josephine Oliver. While at the Dallas Art Institute, he made regular study trips around the state, avidly recording the Texas landscape,

and joined Frank Reaugh on one of his West Texas sketch trips (1933). Travis held teaching posts at the San Antonio Art Institute (1944–1945) and taught for several summers at the Texas Artists Camp in Christoval. Selected Exhibitions

Annual Texas Artists Exhibition, Fort Worth, multiple years Annual Exhibition of the State Fair of Texas, Dallas, multiple years Annual Allied Arts Exhibition, Dallas, multiple years Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1925 (Paintings by Olin Travis); 1986 (The Texas Landscape, 1900–1986) Museum of Modern Art, 1933 (Painting and Sculpture from Sixteen American Cities) Dallas Art Institute, 1934 (solo) Texas Centennial Exposition, Dallas, 1936 National Exhibition of American Art, Rockefeller Center, New York, 1936, 1938 Dallas Museum of Art, 1953 (50 Years of Painting in Dallas: A Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Olin Travis) Selected Public Collections

Dallas Museum of Art McNay Art Museum, San Antonio Torch Collection, Houston McKie Massenburg Trotter III b. 1918, Manchester, Georgia–d. 1999, Fort Worth, Texas

Trotter became affiliated with the Fort Worth Circle in 1947. Although he worked in a number of styles, his later, more abstractly expressionist works complemented the focus of the Fort Worth Circle. He became a regular at Charles T. Williams’s studio gatherings. Trotter studied at the College of William and Mary (BA, 1940)

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and the University of Georgia (mfa, 1950). Shortly after beginning his graduate studies, Trotter was called to duty overseas as an infantry captain; he was captured by the Germans. While imprisoned, Trotter kept a journal in which he often mentioned his desire to be an artist. Back in the United States in 1945, Trotter quickly returned to his studies. While completing his master’s thesis, he accepted a position at Texas Wesleyan College (1948–1953, instructor and professor of art). He moved from twc to Texas Christian University, where he was a professor for thirty-five years (1953–1988). Trotter’s distinguished teaching career was accompanied by an ambitious exhibition history, including numerous shows throughout the nation. Selected Exhibitions

National Academy of Design, New York, 1946 (Paintings of the Year) Dallas Museum of Art, 1950s (Annual Texas Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions); 1957 (A Survey of Texas Painting); 1960 (Southwestern Art: A Sampling of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture) M. Knoedler & Co., New York, 1952 (Texas Contemporary Artists) San Francisco Museum of Art, 1952 (Texas Wildcat) Fort Worth Art Association, 1954 (McKie Trotter) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1954 (Younger American Painters) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1956 (Gulf-Caribbean Art Exhibition) Grand Central Moderns, New York, 1956 (McKie Trotter) D. D. Feldman Contemporary Texas Art Exhibition, Dallas, 1956, 1958, 1959 Fifth Avenue Gallery, New York, 1960 (Painting: McKie Trotter, Sculpture: Charles Williams) Southern Methodist University, 1971 (Texas Painting and Sculpture: The 20th Century, traveling)

Selected Public Collections

Blanton Museum of Art, Austin Dallas Museum of Art Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth Old Jail Art Center, Albany, Texas Texas Christian University, Fort Worth Karl Julius “Charles” Umlauf b. 1911, South Haven, Michigan–d. 1994, Austin

Umlauf, a Texas modernist sculptor, is known for his figurative works. When Umlauf was young, his family moved to Chicago, where he attended a Saturday art program at the Art Institute. After high school, he enrolled full time at the institute and worked as an assistant at the Chicago School of Sculpture. Umlauf spent one year as an apprentice to Lorado Taft. In 1937, Umlauf married a fellow institute student, Angeline Allen. During this time, he created sculptures for public buildings under the auspices of the wpa Federal Art Project (1939–1941). Umlauf moved his family to Austin in 1941 after accepting an instructorship in sculpture in the UT art department. Students admired his dedication to art, which was evident when he received a Teaching Excellence Award. He retired as professor emeritus (1981). Umlauf ’s art is recorded in Charles Umlauf, Sculptor (1967) and The Sculpture and Drawing of Charles Umlauf (1980). He received numerous accolades, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and Ford Foundation grant. In 1985, Umlauf donated his home to the City of Austin; today it is the location of the Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum. Selected Exhibitions

Texas Generals, multiple years Texas Painting and Sculpture Annuals, multiple years World’s Fair, Chicago, 1933

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Dallas Museum of Art, 1946 (Charles Umlauf: Sculpture and Drawings) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1958 (God and Man in Art); 1963 (University of Texas Art Faculty: Past and Present, traveling exhibition and Sculpture from the Museum of Modern Art, New York) Valley House Gallery, Dallas, 1959 (The Sculpture of Charles Umlauf) Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, 1963 (University of Texas Art Faculty: Past and Present) Selected Public Collections

Metropolitan Museum of Art Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum, Austin The University of Texas at Austin Witte Museum, San Antonio Bror Alexander Utter b. 1913, Fort Worth, Texas–d. 1993, Fort Worth

A founding member of the Fort Worth Circle, Utter was known for his regionalist art characterized by a modernist, abstract style. He studied under Sallie Gillespie in high school and later enrolled in the Fort Worth School of Fine Arts, where he studied under Wade Jolly (1931–1936). Utter studied at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center during the summer of 1940. In Fort Worth, he taught painting classes at the Fort Worth Art Association, the Woman’s Club, and the Junior League. During the 1950s, he worked as a full-time artist and made the first of four painting trips to Italy (1954), where he studied the art and culture of Rome, Naples, Florence, and Venice. In 1960, Utter taught at Texas Wesleyan College and the Fort Worth Art Center. A battle with Alzheimer’s disease in his later years caused his creative output to diminish.

Selected Exhibitions

Annual Fort Worth Local Artists Show, 1940s (numerous prizes) Texas Generals, 1940s (numerous prizes) Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1943 (Artists for Victory) Dallas Museum of Art, 1943 (solo), 1951, 1957 (solo) Weyhe Galleries, New York, 1944 (Six Texas Painters) Fort Worth Museum of Art, 1946, 1953 (solo) Elisabet Ney Museum, Austin, 1948 (solo), 1960 Southwestern Prints and Drawings Annual Exhibition, Dallas, 1949, 1952 Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1950 M. Knoedler & Company, New York, 1952 (Texas Contemporary Artists) San Francisco Museum of Art, 1952 (Texas Wildcat) Whitney Museum of American Art, 1953 D. D. Feldman Collection of Contemporary Texas Art, Dallas, 1955, 1957 Witte Museum, San Antonio, 1958 (solo) Texas Christian University, 1985 (Bror Utter: Fifty Years of His Art) Selected Public Collections

Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center Dallas Museum of Art Denver Art Museum Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth Donald LeRoy Weismann b. 1914, Milwaukee, Wisconsin–d. 2007, Austin

Weismann is acknowledged for his work as an artist, educator, and art historian; he published multiple books and papers on art and art theory. Weismann received his BS from the University of Wisconsin (1935) and his PhD in art and art history from Ohio State

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University (1950). In 1940, he accepted a teaching position at North Texas State Teachers College, Denton, followed by posts at the University of Kentucky, Lexington (chairman of art department, director of university gallery) and at Wayne State University, Detroit. He joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin in 1954, where he taught until retirement in 1981, receiving the title of professor emeritus (art department chair, 1954–1958, and later as chairman of the comparative studies department). He was selected by President Lyndon B. Johnson to serve on the National Council on the Arts (1966–1972). Throughout his career, Weismann received numerous purchase prizes and exhibition awards. Selected Exhibitions

Rockefeller Center, New York, 1935 Art Institute of Chicago, 1937, 1939, 1941 Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1941 Texas Painting and Sculpture Annual Exhibitions, 1955–1956, 1958, 1962–1963 D. D. Feldman Collection of Contemporary Texas Art, Dallas, 1956 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1956 (Gulf-Caribbean Art Exhibition); 1963 (University of Texas Art Faculty: Past and Present, traveling) Dallas Museum of Art, 1957 (A Survey of Texas Painting); 1960 (Southwest Painters and Sculptors) Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, 1963 (University of Texas Art Faculty: Past and Present) Beaumont Art Museum, Beaumont, Texas, 1970 (solo) Milwaukee Art Institute Selected Public Collections

Art Institute of Chicago Blanton Museum of Art, Austin Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio San Antonio Art League Museum

Ralph Ernest White, Jr. b. 1921, Minneapolis, Minnesota–d. 2004, Austin

White’s commitment to the arts is seen in his prolific career, which included more than thirty years as a professor of art at the University of Texas at Austin. White attended the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and the University of Minnesota (graduated in 1942). In the Army Air Corps after graduation, he befriended Ward Lockwood, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Lockwood praised White’s artistic skill and convinced him to move to Austin after the war to pursue a career at UT; before moving, White attended the Pratt Institute in New York on a postgraduate fellowship awarded by the Minneapolis School of Art. He developed the graphic design program at UT, eventually forming the Visual Communications program (now the design program) within the Department of Art and Art History. In 1970, White received a grant for travel to Basel, Switzerland, and spent the next few months studying art in Europe. Upon his return, he was promoted to chairman of the art department at UT (until 1974). He retired as professor emeritus in 1982. White was the recipient of numerous honors, including a Ford Foundation grant in 1978; in 2003, he was named Texas State Artist and inducted into the Austin Arts Hall of Fame. Selected Exhibitions

The University of Texas at Austin, numerous shows Texas Painting and Sculpture Annual Exhibition, 1940s and 1950s Dallas Museum of Art, 1953 (University of Texas Faculty Exhibition); 1957 (Survey of Painting in Texas) D. D. Feldman Collection of Contemporary Texas Art, Dallas, 1956 Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, 1963 (University of Texas Art Faculty: Past and Present, traveling exhibition)

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Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1963 (University of Texas Art Faculty: Past and Present) Selected Public Collections

Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York Ford Collection of American Art, Detroit Minneapolis Institute of Art Witte Museum, San Antonio Charles Truett Williams b. 1918, Weatherford, Texas–d. 1966, Fort Worth

Williams was a pioneering modernist sculptor who created abstract works in bronze, wood, and stone, and using found objects. He studied engineering at Abilene Christian College (1940–1941), later moving to Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, Louise. During World War II, Williams relocated with the Army Corps of Engineers to Paris. After the war, he returned to Georgia. His wife’s death in 1947 caused him to return to Texas with their son, Karl (b. 1941). Williams pursued art degrees at Texas Christian University (bfa, 1952; mfa, 1955). His production over the next decade attests to his role as a key figure in the Texas modernist period. He befriended many Fort Worth artists and patrons, offering his studio as a location where they could gather and discuss art (1950s–1966). Williams accepted public and private commissions throughout Texas; examples of his work can be seen at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, Houston; Ridglea Country Club, Fort Worth; and Ridgmar Oil and Gas, Fort Worth. Selected Exhibitions

Texas Painting and Sculpture Annual Exhibitions, multiple years Fort Worth Art Center, 1952 and 1957 (solos) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1956 (Gulf-Caribbean Art Exhibition); 1962 (The Southwest: Painting and Sculpture); 1986 (The Texas Landscape, 1900–1986)

Fifth Avenue Gallery, New York, 1960 (Painting: McKie Trotter, Sculpture: Charles Williams) University of Oklahoma Museum, Norman, 1963 Southern Methodist University, 1971 (Texas Painting and Sculpture: The 20th Century) Selected Public Collections

Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston Dallas Museum of Art Delgado Museum, New Orleans Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City Witte Museum, San Antonio Hiram Draper Williams b. 1917, Indianapolis, Indiana–d. 2003, Gainesville, Florida

Williams grew up in Muncy, Pennsylvania. He took drawing and painting lessons while young, eventually enrolling in the Art Students League, New York (1940). A lack of funds forced him to drop out. In 1941, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in Europe. After the war, Williams married and moved to Philadelphia, where he found a job drawing cartoons. He enrolled at Pennsylvania State University, pursuing a degree in art. After a number of teaching stints, Williams accepted a job at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1958, Williams was awarded the first University of Texas Research Grant by the University Research Council, which allowed him to create a series of twenty-five large paintings. In 1960, Williams accepted a position at the University of Florida, where the successes he experienced in Texas continued; he retired in 1982. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962, and was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 1994.

296  |  MIDCENTURY MODERN ART IN TEXAS Selected Exhibitions

Selected Exhibitions

D. D. Feldman Collection of Contemporary Texas Art, Dallas, 1959 Museum of Modern Art, 1960 Whitney Museum of American Art, 1961 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1968 (Houston Collectors: A Selection)

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1962 (Southwest Painting and Sculpture Exhibition); 1970 (solo); 1974 (Abstract Painting and Sculpture); 1985 (Fresh Paint: The Houston School); 1986 (Texas Modern and Post-Modern) Museum of Modern Art, 1969 (Tamarind Homage to Lithography) Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 1975 (solo) Tyler Museum of Art, Tyler, Texas, 1978 (solo) Galveston Art Center, Galveston, Texas, 1979, 1989 (both solo) Moody Gallery, Houston, 1980s–1990s (numerous shows) Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany, 1983–1984 (New Art from a New City) Menil Collection, Houston, 1988 (Texas Art) Museum of East Texas, Lufkin, 1994 (solo) Art League of Houston, 2000 (solo) Martin Museum, Waco, 2007 (Texas Modern)

Selected Public Collections

Museum of Modern Art Whitney Museum of American Art Dick Wray b. 1933, Houston–d. 2011, Houston

Wray had a dynamic career, exhibiting yearly in galleries and institutions for more than fifty years, from 1959 until his death. He was the recipient of numerous accolades, including a Ford Foundation Purchase Award (1962), an nea Artist Grant (1978), and a Texas Artist of the Year award from the Art League of Houston (2000). Wray attended the School of Architecture at the University of Houston (1955–1958), but was unsure whether architecture was the right path for him. After graduation, he enrolled in the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf (1958), returning to Houston in 1959 to pursue a career as an artist. He met Houston artist Richard Stout (the two became lifelong friends) and James Johnson Sweeney (director of the mfah, 1961–1967). Wray remained in Houston for the majority of his career, except for time in Los Angeles as guest artist at the Tamarind Institute (1964). He served on the faculty of the Museum School of the mfah (1969–1982).

Selected Public Collections

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo Barrett Collection, Dallas Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum of Modern Art National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Notes

Chapter One

The epigraph is from a hand-edited manuscript in a private collection; used with the permission of the Estate of Robert Preusser. 1. I do not believe that Robert Preusser ever published this document. 2. Although the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston built the first museum edifice, today’s Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth traces its lineage to a charter granted in 1892. The Fort Worth museum built its first structure in 1954; see Auping, Karnes, and Thistlethwaite, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 14–15. 3. Kalil, Texas Landscape, 39. 4. Meecham and Sheldon, “What Is and When Was Modernism?,” in Modern Art, 3. 5. Rosenberg, “American Action Painters.” 6. Gestural painting is certainly still viable and practiced widely, but demands self-consciousness of its retardataire (outmoded) quality. Whatever one wishes to call today’s era, much contemporary art tends toward the cynical and skeptical, overlaid with a pervasive sense of irony.

7. Here I invoke Angela Miller’s authoritative reexamination of the American landscape tradition. Miller originated the now widespread term “synecdochic nationalism” to identify the phenomenon whereby the northeastern United States came to stand for the entire rest of the country; see A. Miller, Empire of the Eye. Wanda M. Corn applied Miller’s concept to American modernism in The Great American Thing. 8. From the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, the United States Information Agency organized international traveling tours of Abstract Expressionist painting that were intended to demonstrate, among other things, how American democracy promoted freedom. 9. Throughout this book, I use the term “midcentury” to refer to the period of approximately 1930– 1960, or roughly fifteen years before and after the end of World War II. I also call these the “middle decades.” 10. It is largely the case that Abstract Expressionism favored grandiose claims of universality over any indications of the local. Contrast New York School painting with the earlier Ashcan school,

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which found impetus in the city’s urban landscape. There are many examples of New York painting from the 1940s that did not reject the local urban idiom. Two magnificent examples are Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–1943), which brilliantly embedded the syncopation of local jazz into the painting’s plastic geometry; and Jackson Pollock’s “Sounds in the Grass” and “Accabonac Creek” series, which were made shortly after the artist moved to Long Island and evoke the rural vegetation and fauna via a lightened palette and tactile impasto. It should be noted that Mondrian was not American but Dutch; and the Pollock series were made in 1945–1946, before his fullfledged development of drip paintings in 1947, which came to overshadow his earlier production. 11. See note 7 above. 12. That statement rings with irony, since Texas’s early economic development was made possible through the institution of slavery and the widespread contributions of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. 13. For examples of excellent books that revisit California and Colorado modernism, see Karlstrom, On the Edge of America, and Paglia and Chandler, Colorado Abstract. 14. Nor had Clement Greenberg’s brand of modernism yet become ensconced. That happened closer to the publication of his Art and Culture in 1961. 15. Two of the most significant considerations of the historiography of American art are Wanda Corn, “Coming of Age,” and John Davis, “The End of the American Century.” 16. Quoted in Time, “Texas: Bluebonnet Boldness.” 17. The British musician Phil Collins is one of the world’s foremost collectors of Alamo memorabilia. 18. Fisk, Texas Artists and Sculptors, 7, 8.

19. All quotations from Forrester-O’Brien in these paragraphs come from Art and Artists of Texas, 26–32. 20. Fisk acknowledges modern influences on an artist like Emma Richardson Cherry. ForresterO’Brien, despite her valiant compilation efforts, may not have known about pockets of modernist activity or the extent of Cherry’s explorations. 21.  Forrester-O’Brien delicately avoids mentioning Stieglitz’s solo photographic exhibition in 1921 that included about forty-five photographs of O’Keeffe, several of them nudes. ForresterO’Brien was no doubt aware of the photographs, which generated wide publicity; see ForresterO’Brien, Art and Artists of Texas, 168. 22. One example of an artist who achieves both heroism and antiheroism is the sculptor Gene Owens of Cleburne. His bronze pours and intensive bronze polishing are heroic, while his smaller ceramics are delicate. At the other end of the spectrum is Forrest Bess. An Arts magazine critic illuminated the irony in 1957: “Unlike most things which one associates with Texas, the paintings of Forest [sic] Bess are very small in size and turned inward” (M.S., “In the Galleries: Forrest Bess,” 57). 23. I Some of these artists were indeed described as “frail” and “slight,” like the five-foot-seven-inch Myron Stout or the five-foot-five-inch Kelly Fearing, who physically enlarged his physique through a strict weightlifting regimen in the 1940s and 1950s. 24. Sandler, Triumph of American Painting. For two views of Abstract Expressionist heroism, see Harold Rosenberg, “American Action Painters,” and Gibson, Abstract Expressionism, 1–17. 25. The historian H. W. Brands’s Lone Star Nation opens: “The land was enough to excite any man’s lust, and perhaps emotions more deadly.”

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26. The Barrett collection has two primary components: Swiss turn-of-the-century modernism and Texas art, spanning the early history painters through contemporary art by those born as late as the 1960s. By 2008, the Barretts had given hundreds of works to the Dallas Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 27. Ennis, “Texas Vision,” 4. Ennis wrote the essay in 1992 for an exhibition that did not materialize for years; it was finally published in 2004. 28. Please see the bibliography for full citations of these authors’ contributions to the history of Texas art. 29. By “shepherd,” I am thinking specifically of Jerry Bywaters, who, in his role as museum director, took on tremendous responsibility in the 1940s and 1950s. 30. Ron Tyler provides a useful overview of the entire history of visual arts in Texas in The New Handbook of Texas, s.v. “Visual Arts.” Key book-length studies of early Texas art include Goetzmann and Reese, Texas Images and Visions; Hendricks and Reese, A Century of Sculpture in Texas; Pinckney, Painting in Texas; Ratcliffe, Painting Texas History to 1900; Powers and Powers, Texas Painters, Sculptors, and Graphic Artists; and Steinfeldt, Art for History’s Sake. 31. Rather, “Carpenter, Tailor, Shoemaker, Artist,” 269. Copley left the colonies and moved permanently to England on the eve of the Revolution. The end of the quotation, “not a little Mortifying to me” (from Copley’s letter of 1767 to Benjamin West or Captain R. G. Bruce), is not quoted in Rather’s article, but may be found on the website of the Seattle Art Museum: “The Collection,” Dr. Silvester Gardiner (1708–1786), by John Singleton Copley, “Copley and Taste in Eighteenth-Century Boston” (slideshow), http://www.seattleartmu seum.org/emuseum/code/emuseum.asp?style

=single¤trecord=1&page=search&profil e=objMakers&searchdesc=mysamid%20is%20 1156&searchstring=id/,/is/,/34531/,/false/,/ true (accessed December 2012). 32. Chipman and Joseph, Spanish Texas; “Sketch of Texas with the boundaries of Mexican States as shown on General [Stephen F.] Austin’s map of Texas published by R. S. Tanner, 1839,” Library of Congress. 33. On early Texas engravings, see Kelsey and Hutchison, Engraved Prints of Texas, and Tyler, Prints and Printmakers of Texas. 34. The full title of the painting is The Destruction of Mission San Sabá in the Province of Texas and the Martyrdom of the Fathers Alonso Giraldo de Terreros, Joseph Santiesteban; see Ratcliffe, “Escenas de Martirio.” 35. History painting is a European tradition that included all manner of “historia” (Italian) or storytelling. The genre therefore includes real, mythological, and biblical “history.” It was long prized in the hierarchy of styles and in the academies as the highest, most morally didactic form of painting. 36. Hafertepe, “Hermann Lungkwitz.” 37. Henry Arthur (Harry) McArdle, Battle of San Jacinto, 1898, oil on canvas, 95" × 167.5", and Dawn at the Alamo, 1905, oil on canvas, 84.25" × 144.75", both hang in the Texas Capitol, as does William Henry Huddle, Surrender of Santa Anna, 1886, oil on canvas, 72" × 114". The original Dawn at the Alamo burned in 1881; McArdle repainted it in 1905. 38. McArdle’s painting, heightened for drama and patriotism, is a fictionalized re-creation. Bowie, ill and cot-bound, was likely inside when the attack occurred; see Ratcliffe, Painting Texas History to 1900, especially chapter 2. On McArdle in general, see Hazlewood, “McArdle, Henry Arthur [Harry].”

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39. Of the whole of Texas’s art history, the historian Scott Grant Barker noted that Gentilz is “one of Texas’ most historically accurate 19th-century painters and, as an observer of his time, perhaps the most important Texas artist of that century” (“Enduring Canvas of Texas Art”). See also the lengthy treatment in Ratcliffe, Painting Texas History to 1900, and Tyler, “Visual Arts.” 40. Cattle, which were not indigenous to North America, came to Mexico from Spain, perhaps as early as the late fifteenth century. Their descendants migrated north to Texas and eventually bred with northern European cattle that had been brought over by early Texas settlers. That stock was probably heavily English. J. Frank Dobie estimated the Texas longhorn was about three-fourths Spanish and one-fourth mixed or feral, but others believed the Texas variety was of British blood, the Longhorn Hereford type; see Dobie, Longhorns, and Worcester, “Longhorn Cattle.” Michael Grauer writes that Reaugh “sketched and painted the only images of true Texas longhorns before they were crossbred with European cattle” (“Wider Than the Limits of Our State,” 268). As I understand it, the “true” Texas longhorns were descended from the hybrid North African or Canary Island cattle brought over on Christopher Columbus’s second voyage; they then came north through Mexico. Emily Jane McTavish, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas’s Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, has done extensive genomic research on these cattle. 41. The Indiana-born William Merritt Chase trained at the Munich Royal Academy in 1872. He was well respected for his Impressionistic but distinctively American paintings and for his abilities as a teacher. Robert Henri (pronounced HENrye) trained first in Philadelphia and then at the

Académie Julian in Paris, and was eventually accepted at Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts. Taken with Impressionism, Henri became a founding member of New York’s gritty painters, the Eight, later nicknamed the Ashcan school. 42. Rudolph, “Julian Onderdonk through the Looking Glass.” 43. It is easy to forget how revolutionary French Impressionism was when it debuted in 1874. Those artists, who called themselves the Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs (Anonymous and Cooperative Society of Painters, Sculptors, Engravers), were reacting against the strict rules of the French Academy. Before the name “Impressionists” took hold in 1877, they were called “Independents” and “Intransigents.” 44. Walter Pach, fluent in several languages, was instrumental in bringing modern art (literally) to the United States, lecturing widely and organizing exhibitions on American, European, and Mexican art; see McCarthy, Walter Pach. Pach was Henri Matisse’s first U.S. agent and advised Walter and Louise Arensberg, whose salon-like circle included Katherine Dreier. In 1920, the Texan Emma Richardson Cherry joined Dreier’s Société Anonyme, which led to years of correspondence between the two women. See chapter three for more on Cherry. 45. Time, “Art: Texas Art.” 46. Reaves, Texas Art and a Wildcatter’s Dream, 1 and appendix. Incidentally, Davis simultaneously singlehandedly supported the entire production of— and free admission to—the Broadway play The Ladder, whose theme was reincarnation. Time mentioned this in its coverage. 47. Dawson Dawson-Watson won the premiere Davis Wildflower Competition, in 1927. Dawson-Watson

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had been living elsewhere in the United States, but settled in San Antonio, lured by the competitions. 48. Reaves, Texas Art and a Wildcatter’s Dream, 10. 49. Art Digest, “All Texans Do Not Paint ‘Wild Flowers,’” 3. 50. The Armory Show’s official poster borrows the pine tree flag from the American Revolution. “American & Foreign Art” is printed on the poster. The Armory Show, organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, traveled in modified form to Chicago and Boston. 51. The Armory Show was modeled after Cologne’s ambitious Sonderbund exhibition of 1912, which investigated the latest developments in European modernism. The full name of the Sonderbund— Sonderbund Westdeutscher Künstlerfreunde und Künstler—can be translated as “Special League of West-German Art Lovers and Artists.” (The Sonderbund group was itself antiacademic in character.) Two Armory Show founders, the painters Arthur B. Davies and Walt Kuhn, traveled to Cologne. The third founder was the artist-historian Walter Pach. 52. American Art News 11, no. 24 (March 22, 1913): 3; Doss, Twentieth Century American Art, 56. On the general history of the exhibition, see Trapp, “The Armory Show,” and a series of pamphlets published for the original show and later collected as Documents of the 1913 Armory Show. The University of Virginia maintains a useful website dedicated to the exhibition at http://xroads.virginia.edu /~museum/armory/armoryshow.html. 53. The original members of the Eight were Davies, William Glackens, Robert Henri, Ernest Lawson, George Luks, Maurice Prendergast, John Sloan, and Everett Shinn. 54. The Vienna Secession was founded in 1897 by the architect Josef Hoffmann, Josef Maria Olbrich, and Gustav Klimt.

55. Although Stieglitz moved his gallery to 293 Fifth Avenue, he retained the 291 name. 56. Arthur Wesley Dow was the head of the Art Department at Teachers College, Columbia University. O’Keeffe learned of Dow’s theories through his colleague Alon Bement. Dow’s book Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers (1899) was enormously influential in U.S. schools. 57. Now called West Texas a&m University, Canyon, Texas. 58. The Haskell and O’Keeffe quotations are in Haskell and Nicholas, Georgia O’Keeffe, 13. 59. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon III) commissioned Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann to transform Paris. From 1853 to 1870, Haussmann pursued a massive program of urban planning and renovation. 60. Baudelaire, Painter of Modern Life, 13. In the nineteenth century, “modern” and its cognates (“modernism,” “modernizing”) referred to changes to industrial and cultural life wrought by the Industrial Revolution. For more on Baudelaire and modernity, see Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity. 61. Jackson Pollock, interview by William Wright, radio broadcast, 1951; reproduced in Pollock, Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, 20. 62. Textbooks now refer to “Abstract Expressionism” (upper- and lowercase) as a historical period. Some authors, such as Irving Sandler, prefer the “New York School.” Regardless, the painters and sculptors in New York were not an official school, and their styles varied widely. They did have in common an abstract or expressionist style, but not always both, and Willem de Kooning famously depicted figures, even if expressionistically. 63. With the exception, of course, of American outliers like Arthur Dove or Marsden Hartley.

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64. The Oxford English Dictionary defines modernism thus: “A usage, mode of expression, peculiarity of style, etc., characteristic of modern times. Later more generally: an innovative or distinctively modern feature. Freq. in pl.” The earliest citation recorded by the oed occurs in a letter from Jonathan Swift to Alexander Pope, dated July 23, 1737: “The corruption of English by those Scribblers who send us over their trash in Prose and Verse, with abominable curtailings and quaint modernisms.” 65. See Hughes, Shock of the New. 66. Other major critics of the period who made substantial contributions were Harold Rosenberg and Meyer Schapiro. 67. Roman wall paintings of the Republican and Imperial eras indicate this striving to go beyond the flat surface. During the medieval period, such investigations were largely quelled, but resurfaced with a pictorial vengeance in the Renaissance. 68. The essay was originally a Voice of America Forum Lecture in 1960; it has been reprinted in numerous works and publications, including Greenberg, Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays, vol. 4. 69. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” (1960), in Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays, vol. 4. 70. In the first century A.D., Pliny the Elder recorded a tale (in book 35 of his Natural History) of the rival painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius competing to see who could produce the more realistic painting. 71. Joachim Pissarro has written an illuminating introduction to Greenberg’s selective borrowing from Kant; see Pissarro, “Greenberg, Kant, and Modernism?” 72. Greenberg’s lasting impact owes something to the fundamental simplicity at the core of his modernism: the idea that each art form should concern itself primarily with its own medium. See his essays “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), “Towards

a Newer Laocoon” (1940), and “Modernist Painting” (1960); all three are reprinted in Greenberg’s Collected Essays and Criticism (the first two in volume 1, the third in volume 4). John O’Brian’s introduction to the Collected Essays is helpful for situating the most famous U.S. art critic in the history of criticism. Greenberg’s own ideas can be traced to Hans Hofmann’s lectures in New York (which Greenberg acknowledged in Art and Culture) and to the work of Roger Fry, G. F. W. Hegel, and Immanuel Kant. Greenberg’s dominance has carried over well into the twenty-first century; see the remarkable tome by Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone. 73. See the epilogue for a brief discussion of postmodernism. The present chapter focuses on terms relevant to the three decades of this study: modernism, avant-garde, and abstraction. 74. Of course historians continue to find “postmodernist” examples in the earlier twentieth century—another reminder that art history is not linear. 75. For examples of post-Greenberg, expanded “modernism,” see Corn’s excellent Great American Thing, and Doss, Twentieth Century American Art, especially pages 12 and 37. 76. See especially Schapiro, “Nature of Abstract Art,” 186. 77. This relates to the reason why Plato banished images from his ideal republic: they are mimetic representations and therefore false. On defining abstraction in art, see Goodman, “Abstraction.” 78. Barr’s examples of inexact terms that define art historical periods are “Gothic” (an ethnographic term) and “Baroque” (a Portuguese word for an irregularly shaped pearl). To that I would add “Postimpressionism.” 79. Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 11. 80. The Russian artist Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891– 1956) may have been the first to use “nonobjective”

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to title a series of paintings. The Russian-born Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1964) gave the term wide dissemination in his Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912). Kandinsky’s preferred term was “concrete art.” 81. See Mark Cheetham’s discussion of abstraction in The Rhetoric of Purity. Chapter Two

1. Additionally, by 1936, Texas accounted for a staggering 40 percent of the oil produced in the United States. 2. In fact, the Texas Centennial was not an official, international world’s fair like those held in Paris, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. The first real world’s fair was the famous Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in 1851 in London and commonly called the Crystal Palace Exhibition for the ironand-steel building constructed for the event by Joseph Paxton. 3. The Big Show (1936) was directed by Mack V. Wright and Joseph Kane (uncredited). Autry plays two roles (himself and the movie star “Tom Ford”) in a plot that revolves around Ford’s delayed appearance at the Centennial and Autry’s role in covering for him. 4. fdr was given the high honor of unveiling the statue of Robert E. Lee at Oak Lawn (today Lee) Park. The text of his thirty-minute speech is available online at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu /index.php (accessed August 2011). 5. Marcus, foreword to Ragsdale, The Year America Discovered Texas. 6. Two significant Centennial exhibitions of fine art were the Fort Worth Frontier Centennial Exposition, which included work by the Texans Frank Reaugh and Harold Bugbee; and the University

Centennial Exposition in Austin, which required two consecutive exhibitions and included many Texas artists. Dallas, however, received the most attention. 7. Bywaters, interview by Kenneth B. Ragsdale, Dallas, February 23, 1978, in Ragsdale, Year America Discovered Texas, 180. About fifty local artists were hired to help the foreign-born designers. As Francine Carraro points out, the local artists were “dissatisfied with the lack of artistic freedom in their roles as executors of other artists’ designs” (Carraro, Jerry Bywaters, 102). 8. Ragsdale, Year America Discovered Texas, 182. 9. Quoted in Smith, “Texas Centennial Itself,” 26. 10. Jerry Bywaters, of Paris, Texas, earned a degree in English and journalism from Southern Methodist University in 1926. He followed that with art courses at Travis’s Art Institute of Dallas, the trip to Mexico, and summer study at the Old Lyme artists’ colony in Connecticut. In 1928 he studied at the Art Students League in New York, where he worked with John Sloan, among others. 11. Alexandre Hogue to Emil Bisttram, February 29, 1936; quoted in Stewart, Lone Star Regionalism, 58– 59. It is important to note that Emil Bisttram, who founded the Transcendental Painting Group in Taos in 1938, was creating sublime nonobjective, geometrically inspired paintings and gouaches at the time of the Texas Centennial. 12. After being provided with a photograph, the New York artist inserted a rendering of Anson Jones (Ragsdale, The Year America Discovered Texas, 183). Jones’s role in Texas history was contentious and viewed skeptically. As J. Frank Dobie wrote in his report for the Centennial planning, “Not many people anywhere, as matter of fact, care for Anson Jones” (quoted in ibid., 111).

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13. “All Texans Do Not Paint ‘Wild Flowers,’” 3. 14. “Young Texans, All Under 30,” 8. 15. Ibid. The ninth member of the group was James Buchanan (Buck) Winn, Jr., but Art Digest does not mention him by name. Everett Spruce’s Night illustrated the short article. 16. Rick Stewart’s pioneering exhibition catalogue, Lone Star Regionalism, remains the definitive source. 17. Southwest Review originated in 1915 at the University of Texas at Austin as the Texas Review. It bills itself as the “third oldest continuously published literary quarterly in America.” The journal moved to Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, in 1924, with a new name that reflected its broader mission. During part of the Depression (1932– 1935), the Southwest Review was jointly published by Louisiana State University and smu. 18. Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” 339. 19. The Dial’s contributors form a veritable who’s who: William Butler Yeats, Joseph Campbell, Van Wyck Brooks, Joseph Conrad, John Dewey, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams, among countless others during the 1920s. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land first appeared in the United States in the November 1922 issue. First published in 1840 as a transcendental magazine, the Dial was reborn into an art and culture journal in 1920. Its history included virulent disagreements at the end of World War I between pacifist followers of Randolph Bourne and the prowar pragmatic followers of John Dewey; see Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 232–240. The interested reader can find the Dial collected in print anthologies and in digitized form. 20. Quoted in Bywaters, Jerry Bywaters, 8. 21. The gallery of the Dallas Art Association, called the Free Public Art Gallery of Dallas, became the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts in 1933.

22. Carraro, Jerry Bywaters, 84–85; Stewart, Lone Star Regionalism, 43; oral history interview with Otis Dozier, June 10, 1965, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 23. The locals did help out as assistants on the Hall of State mural, though the commission went to the New Yorker. 24. Across the United States, “foreign-born” art became increasingly suspect in the late 1940s and 1950s. 25. Ragsdale, The Year America Discovered Texas, 184, 184n18. 26. The Centennial Building was also called the Hall of Fine Arts. The Dallas Museum of Fine Arts can be traced back to the Dallas Art Students League, founded in 1893 by Robert Onderdonk. In 1900, the upstairs of the Carnegie Public Library was dedicated to art, leading to the formation of the Dallas Art Association in 1903. Annual exhibitions were held in Dallas at the State Fair of Texas. The Dallas Artists’ League, formed in 1932, included Bywaters, Otis Dozier, Edwards Eisenlohr, Alexandre Hogue, and William Lester. 27. The third juror was Elsworth Woodward, the president of the Southern States Art League, respected for his knowledge of southwestern art. He replaced John S. Ankeney. There was talk of placing Hogue’s own painting in the southwestern art galleries, in lieu of the Texas section, to avoid a conflict of interest (Stewart, Lone Star Regionalism, 55). In the catalogue, however, Hogue the painter was represented in Texas Painting, First Room, and Drouth Stricken Area was selected for reproduction. 28. For an excellent essay on representations of and by women at the Centennial, see Cummins, “From the Midway to the Hall of State.” 29. According to Cummins: “Coreen Mary Spellman, Florence McClung, Louise Marks Goldstein,

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Ruby Stone, Emma Richardson Cherry, Ella K. Mewhinney, Kathryne Bess Hail Travis, Bertha M. Landers, Velma Davis, Bertha Hellman, and Blanche McVeigh all had works in the exhibition. In some cases, this exhibition brought these female artists to public notice for the first time and helped to launch their careers” (“From the Midway to the Hall of State,” 242). 30. Art Digest, June 1, 1936, 7. 31. The headline at the top of the page reads, somewhat redundantly, “Artists of Texas Point Way for Artists Who Would Be Significant.” Along with Bywaters’s and Hogue’s paintings is Emil Bisttram’s Comadre Rafaelita. Bisttram, of Taos, was a friend of Hogue’s and knew Bywaters. 32. Bywaters, “Against Narrowness,” 19. Bywaters was the editor of Esse Forrester-O’Brien’s dictionary of Texas artists, which she began in 1934. Both documents use the “scalping” phrase. ForresterO’Brien quotes, without attribution: “In the days when the Indians ruled the land . . . an unknown artisan was yet carving on the great door to LaSalle’s fort, Fort St. Louis, on Lavaca Bay, Texas, [when] the Indians smote him down. Art is especially slow where scalping is in style” (Art and Artists of Texas, 4). That memorable quotation is reproduced as the epigraph to Grauer and Grauer’s Dictionary of Texas Artists, 1800–1945 and appears also in Reily, Georgia O’Keeffe, 141, and Reaves, Texas Art, 15. 33. Bywaters, “Against Narrowness,” 19. 34. Howard, “Art of Texas.” 35. Howard, “Texas Painting,” 74–75. 36. In the aftermath of World War II, Howard was named deputy chief of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program of the Allied armies. The group was charged with locating artwork that had looted in Europe during the war. They have

recently been called the “Monuments Men” by Robert M. Edsel and Brett Witter; see the website Monuments Men, accessed January 2013, http:// www.monumentsmen.com/bio.php?id=147. 37. Howard, “Texas Painting,” 75. 38. Bywaters, “New Texas Painters.” 39. Life, “U.S. Dust Bowl.” Kalil discusses the controversy brought on by the national article (Alexander Hogue, 76–77). 40. DeLong, Nature’s Forms / Nature’s Forces, 23; DeLong, “‘Dust-filled Eyes.’” 41. DeLong, “‘Dust-filled Eyes.’” 42. White, “Alexandre Hogue’s Passion,” 69. 43. Kalil, Alexandre Hogue, 71. Kalil’s discussion of this painting is, like much of her book, trenchant. 44. DeLong, Nature’s Forms / Nature’s Forces, 25. 45. Hogue’s Erosion No. 2 and Bywaters’s Sharecropper were both included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s mammoth two-part exhibition of 1999–2000, The American Century: Art and Culture 1900–1950. 46. More than a decade later, Dorothy Miller of the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized an ambitious exhibition titled American Realists and Magic Realists; see the exhibition catalogue of the same name, edited by Miller and Alfred Barr. Hogue, familiar with the exhibition, was careful to distance himself, which may account in part for his later adamant statements about not being a “Surrealist.” But the catalogue’s definition of “magic realism” might apply to some of the Dallas Nine artists, especially the early Hogue: “By a combination of crisp hard edges, tightly indicated forms and the counterfeiting of material surfaces such as paper, grain of wood, flesh or leaf, our eyes are deceived into believing in the reality of what is rendered, whether factual or imaginary” (7).

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47. Francine Carraro notes that In the Chair Car marked a transition for Bywaters, who by that point “had absorbed the lessons of impressionism, post-impressionism, Mexican muralism, and pre-Raphaelite renaissance art and was forging his own personal style” (Carraro, “First and Foremost an Artist: A Retrospective,” in Bywaters and Ratcliffe, Jerry Bywaters, 37). Bywaters later commented, “I was combining human interest with abstract forms, a new accomplishment which gave me personal satisfaction” (Bywaters, Jerry Bywaters, 13). 48. Otis Dozier’s Abandoned House (1940) is evidently related directly to the Dallas Museum’s Annual Move (1936); see Schoen and Doss, Coming Home, 129. Much more deserves to be written on Dozier’s relation to modernist conceits. These paintings are quasi-Surrealistic, his structures imbued with human qualities and painted without nostalgia. 49. For the Entartete Kunst, see Barron, Degenerate Art. 50. Edmund Kinzinger was in the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts exhibition of 1938—“3 German Painters: Edmond [sic] Kinzinger, Carl Zerbe, and Josef Albers, February 1–28, 1938”—and had a solo show in June 1939, “Edmond [sic] Kinzinger: Pastels and Drawings.” See the museum’s exhibition history web page, accessed September 2011, http://dallasmuseumofart.org/Research/Exhibi tionHistory/index.htm. 51. Edmund Kinzinger filled in for Hans Hofmann in Germany and France in the summers of 1932 and 1933, when Hofmann was guest instructor at the Thurn School of Art in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Hofmann was expected to return to Germany, but his Munich school closed permanently in the fall of 1933. Thus began Hofmann’s permanent residency in New York and Massachusetts. 52. Edmund Kinzinger (1888–1963) earned a degree at the University of Iowa after arriving in

the United States. He was allegedly shell-shocked during the war, a trauma that may have affected him for life. He chaired the Baylor University Art Department from 1935 to 1950. I have located one catalogue: Kagle and van Keuren, Edmund Kinzinger. In 2013, Baylor’s Martin Museum of Art received a generous gift of Kinzinger’s and his family’s letters. 53. Today, some of these periodicals seem unlikely places for caustic right-wing essays. 54. On Benton’s political ideology, see Broun, “Thomas Hart Benton,” and Doss, Benton, Pollock, and Modernism. 55. Quoted in Friedman, Jackson Pollock, 18. 56. Erika Doss points out that the debate “actually centered on political ideology: Davis the leftist versus Benton the liberal” (Benton, Pollock, and Modernism, 116). Readers may be surprised to hear Benton called “liberal,” since his views later ossified into something akin to fascism. Benton was pro–New Deal and wrote for liberal journals such as Modern Monthly and Common Sense. Doss’s book crucially restores Benton’s role as a modernist; see especially 110–122. See also Whiting, Antifascism in American Art. 57. Jewell, “When Cobblers Turn from the Last.” 58. “Little magazines” is a term for small-circulation, noncommercial, independent American and European magazines. Many tended to be associated with modernism; most (though not all) were left-leaning. 59. Benton recognized the parallels between fascism and communism, observing in 1937: “Both share the same kind of political practices” (quoted in Broun, “Thomas Hart Benton,” 68). As it happened, the Columbia University professor John Dewey became the leader of the Provisional American Committee for the Defense of Leon

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Trotsky in 1936. The art historian and professor Meyer Schapiro joined the Trotsky defense as well; see Hills, “1936: Meyer Schapiro.” 60. Quoted in J. Fogel and R. Stevens, “Canvas Mirror,” 18. The reader might be interested to note that one of the article’s authors, Jared Fogel, is the son of the Texas muralist, painter, and sculptor Seymour Fogel. 61. Bywaters, “New Texas Painters,” 335. 62. Historians have since reevaluated the grand Regionalism of the 1930s, recognizing dissent from the Thomas Craven school of thought, subversion in Grant Wood, and political intelligence and wit in Benton; see note 67 below. 63. Howard, “Art of Texas.” 64. Bywaters, “New Texas Painters,” 336. 65. Art Digest, January 1, 1933, quoting from an article by Hogue in the Dallas Times-Herald; emphasis added. 66. Hogue was a tour de force draftsman and painter with a lifetime of provocative works. After studying in Minneapolis and working in New York in the early 1920s, he made his career in the Dallas area through 1945, spending much time around Taos and the Southwest. In 1945, he became head of the Art Department at the University of Tulsa. Hogue retired in 1968 but continued to travel and paint through his final years. It might be misleading that Hogue is best known for his Depressionera Dust Bowl paintings, for it has locked him into the category of Regionalist or American Scene painter. His response to being categorized was blunt: “Pigeonholing is a stupid act of the writers. I am an American artist who happens to prefer to live and work away from New York” (Kalil, Alexandre Hogue, 85). 67. See Doss, Benton, Pollock, and Modernism; Corn, Grant Wood; Evans, Grant Wood; and Kendall, Rethinking Regionalism.

68. Storr, “Regionalism in the 21st Century.” He continued, “It was a sign of America being driven back to itself by Depression and by international politics and a whole host of things.” 69. For more on Mayor, see Barker, “Assembling Early Texas Art,” 42. Olin Travis’s Mayor of Hoover City is one of several portraits of someone called “Tradghorn”; see S. Travis, “Pilgrims of the Palette,” 87– 92. A related publication is Travis and Travis, Olin Travis. 70. S. Travis, “Pilgrims of the Palette,” 85. Susan Travis’s father, David, was Olin’s son. Susan Travis’s cousin Patience Patterson interviewed their grandfather in 1972, during which he expanded on a Dallas Morning News interview from the 1930s for Vivian Richardson’s article. In what must have been a riotous retelling, Olin Travis described how he slowly realized that Simon Staten, whose mouth shifted awkwardly during the sitting, had no teeth. 71. Frontispiece, Survey Graphic 23, no. 5 (May 1934): 212. Survey Graphic published Lewis Hine’s photographic series of workers in the 1920s and dedicated its March 1925 issue to the Harlem Renaissance. 72. In 1949 Lucie H. Locke published Naturally Yours, Texas, a slim book featuring her line drawings of Texas’s distinct geographic regions and verses to accompany them. 73. Olin Travis and his wife divorced in the mid1930s. Her autobiographical painting The Unfinished Picture (c. 1935) reveals troubled lines in her face and may allude to the dissolution of the marriage; see Landauer and Reese, “Lone Star Spirits,” 200–202. The reasons for excluding Dorothy Antoinette “Toni” LaSelle from this essay elude me. Her close colleagues at Texas State Teaching College for Women are included, and she is pictured in a photograph with them in the catalogue.

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74. Quoted in “Everett Spruce,” in D. Miller, Americans 1942, 120. 75. Dallas Museum of Art, Kiest Purchase Prize, Ninth Annual Dallas Allied Arts Exhibition, 1938. 76. [Lewenthal], “Associated American Artists,” cited in Doss, “Catering to Consumerism,” 167n11. 77. Excellent sources are Niewyk, Jerry Bywaters; Stewart, Lone Star Regionalism; and Tyler, Prints and Printmakers of Texas. Tyler’s volume includes important essays by Francine Carraro, David Farmer, and Richard Cox. 78. Henkes, World War II in American Art, 55–56. If we assume that the Blanton’s Mauzey painting was made first, it should probably be dated to 1939 or 1940, since the artist’s lithograph was made in 1940. 79. In their defense, exhibition records, articles, and remarks show that the Dallas men were generally supportive of the women, except for the odd exception of the Lone Star Printmakers. 80. David Farmer, “The Printmakers Guild and Women Printmakers in Texas,” in Tyler, Prints and Printmakers of Texas, 121. 81. A lively memorial to Lea is Al Lowman, “Remembering Tom Lea.” 82. Tyler, “Visual Arts.” 83. Time, “Tom Lea Aboard the U.S.S. Hornet,” 49. Lea’s expert drawings of the officers are illustrated on 49–58. 84. B. Greeley, That 2,000-Yard Stare, 35. 85. Life, “Hornet’s Last Day.” 86. Sarah G. Forgey, curator, Army Art Collection, U.S. Army Center of Military History, e-mail message to author, February 19, 2013. 87. Lea’s painting appears on the covers of B. Greeley, That 2,000-Yard Stare, and Henkes, World War II in American Art. 88. See “Bloody Peleliu: Unavoidable yet Unnecessary,” by Jeremy Gypton, on MilitaryHistory

Online.com: http://www.militaryhistoryonline .com/wwii/peleliu/default.aspx. Lea and Captain Frank Farrell, the commander of the Marine company that Lea joined, wrote the captions that were published in Life, June 11, 1945. 89. Life, “Peleliu: Tom Lea Paints Island Invasion.” 90. Richard Foster Howard, director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, was reinstated as a captain in the U.S. Army in 1942. Bywaters, who had suffered a life-threatening fall as a child, was exempt from duty. He ran the museum from 1943 to 1963; see Carraro, Jerry Bywaters, 146–147. 91. A 1943 date for this unpublished sketch is plausible, since that is the latest date written on the undated drawing. In 1943 he became director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. 92. If I read Bywaters’s pale writing correctly, he misspelled “Rhome,” as in Rhome, Texas. 93. Jerry Bywaters, Tree of Texas Painting (pencil, undated, Jerry Bywaters Collection on Art of the Southwest, Hamon Arts Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas). Sam DeShong Ratcliffe reproduced it as the frontispiece to Painting Texas History to 1900. 94. Miguel Covarrubias, The Tree of Modern Art—Planted 60 Years Ago, Vanity Fair, May 1933, 36; the painting was published as part of Vanity Fair’s “A Simplified Guide to the Modern Movement, for the Uninitiated.” Bywaters almost certainly would have seen Alfred Barr’s now-iconic chart for the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art in 1936 (March 2–April 19). The image was used on the dust jacket of the accompanying catalogue. Inching closer to Texas, Nathaniel Pousette-Dart published A Tree Chart of Contemporary American Art, in Art and Artistes of Today (June–July 1938, 2), surely as a send-up of Barr. By far the most entertaining chart to come was

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Ad Reinhardt’s How to Look at Modern Art in America (P.M. magazine, July 2, 1946). 95. It is likely that Barr was influenced by Covarrubias’s art tree, given the wide circulation of Vanity Fair. Marcia Brennan presents an insightful interpretation of Barr’s chart, calling it a “complex and powerful formulation of androgynous masculine creativity” that extended forward and backward in time (Curating Consciousness, 31). 96. Platt, “Modernism, Formalism, and Politics”; Kantor, Alfred H. Barr. Today one can find numerous parodies of Barr’s chart on the Internet. Rosenblum is quoted in Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, 325. Chapter Three

1. In 1936, Houston held festivities that observed Texas independence in March, the Battle of San Jacinto in April, and Houston’s own founding in August. 2. As mentioned later in this chapter, the mfah is the only American museum designed by Mies van der Rohe, his only other museum project being the National Gallery in Berlin. James Johnson Sweeney, a close friend of Mies, was struck by the architect’s design for Cullinan Hall, with its curving glass front. When Sweeney arrived as mfah director in 1961, he and Mies planned an addition (the future Brown Pavilion Galleries) that incorporated Cullinan Hall. Sweeney departed in 1967 and Mies died in 1969. Sweeney’s successor, Philippe de Montebello, oversaw the project through to completion. These buildings today form part of the Caroline Wiess Law Building. 3. The Public School Art League (1900–1929) insisted on installing examples of “good graphics” and framed art reproductions in the public schools. The league’s founders were Lydia Adkisson, Emma Richardson Cherry, Roberta Lavender, Lavinia Abercrombie, and Cara Redwood.

4. Joseph S. Cullinan, a founder of Magnolia Petroleum and the Texas Company (Texaco), was also a civic leader and philanthropist. 5. Watkin, an architectural engineer, had studied with the École des Beaux-Arts–trained Paul Philippe Cret at the University of Pennsylvania. Watkin began working for the prominent Boston architectural firm Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson in 1909, which sent him to Houston as supervising architect of the Rice Institute buildings they designed. The Museum of Fine Arts of Houston had a permanent collection of fifty objects in 1924 (Johnson, Contemporary Art in Texas, 14). The Houston Art League legally amended its state charter in 1929, changing its corporate name to the “Museum of Fine Arts of Houston”; see the mfah archives on its website, http://fa.mfah.org/main.as p?target=eadidlist&id=67&action=3. 6. The Witte Museum in San Antonio opened in 1926. The Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, the first state museum in Texas, opened in 1933. As part of the overall Texas Centennial commemoration, nine museums were built across the state. 7. The complete mfah exhibition database is online at http://www.mfah.org/research/archives /archives-exhibition-database/. 8. For an interesting history of the soap-sculpture competitions, see Marshall, “Clean Cuts.” 9. Ima Hogg’s greatest legacy is Bayou Bend, her former River Oaks home, which sits on a fourteenacre tract. It houses a collection of American paintings, sculpture, decorative art, and furniture from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. She donated it to the mfah in 1957; in 1966 it opened to the public. 10. The mfah substantially increased its modernism holdings when Caroline Wiess Law (1918–2003) bequeathed her personal collection of significant

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European and American works by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still to the museum in the 1990s. During her lifetime, she underwrote the acquisition of Jackson Pollock’s work. 11. Sarah Campbell Blaffer was born in Waxahachie to a founder of the Texas Company. In 1909, she married Robert E. Lee Blaffer, of another prominent oil family. 12. Quoted in a biography from the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation page of the mfah website, accessed June 2011: http://www.mfah.org/art/depart ments/Sarah-Campbell-Blaffer-Foundation. 13. “Historical Records of Houston Public School Art League, Houston Art League, 1900–1924,” http:// www.mfah.org/site_media/uploads/attachments /2011-06-27/Scrapbook_Part_1_Section_A_ocr .pdf. 14. The Académie Julian was a destination for Americans well into the twentieth century, so much so that the Texan Robert Rauschenberg traveled there in 1948, but felt that he got there too late (remark by Rauschenberg to Mary Lynn Kotz in the author’s presence, Captiva, Florida, February 1988). 15. Quoted in Tibbits, “Houston Modernist Writes Home.” This essay represents a segment of the extensive research conducted on Cherry by Tibbits, who curated an exhibition of her work in 2013. 16. Steinfeldt, “Dawson-Watson, Dawson”; Tibbits, “Emma Richardson Cherry,” 21. 17. Tibbits, “Emma Richardson Cherry,” 39n9. 18. Tibbits, “Emma Richardson Cherry,” 33. 19. André Lhote was a “golden section” Cubist who exhibited at the Salon de la Section d’Or in 1912. 20.  Tibbits, “Emma Richardson Cherry,” 39n10 (world’s fair dates).

21. The name of the group is a pun: the American Man Ray had seen “S.A.” (Société Anonyme) on French products and thought it meant “anonymous society.” In fact, “Société Anonyme” designates a type of corporation. Marcel Duchamp, tickled at such an apposite title for a Dadainfluenced group, then added the redundant “Inc.,” making the group’s title mean “incorporated incorporated.” Dreier donated the Société Anonyme, Inc. collection of documents, photographs, and artwork to the Yale University Art Gallery in 1941; see the excellent catalogue based on the Yale collection: Gross, Société Anonyme. The group’s headquarters in New York City closed in 1928, but Dreier continued to organize events and accumulate artwork to add to the Société Anonyme’s collection. 22. In 1950, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Société Anonyme’s first exhibition, Dreier and Duchamp formally disbanded the group. 23. Randolph K. Tibbits to the author (e-mail), March 31, 2011. For the membership list, see Herbert, Apter, and Kenney, Société Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest, 7; see also Gross, Societé Anonyme. 24. In spring 2013, the Julia Ideson Building gallery was home to the first comprehensive exhibition of works by Emma Richardson Cherry. The exhibition and catalogue were prepared by Danielle Burns, Lorraine Stuart, and Randy Tibbits. 25. Grauer and Grauer, Dictionary of Texas Artists, entry on Ruth Pershing Uhler; Greene, Texas: 150 Works, 123. 26. Greene, Texas: 150 Works, 122. 27. Landauer and Reese, “Lone Star Spirits,” 204, 204n45. 28. All material on McNeill Davidson’s gallery of modern art is from Tibbits, “‘Our Little Gallery,’” 1. The local paper may be the Houston Press,

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but Tibbits’s notes refer to undated clippings from Robert Preusser’s paper in the Archives of American Art. 29. Tibbits, “‘Our Little Gallery,’” 2. The Alexandre Hogue quotation is from Hogue, “Progressive Texas,” 18. It runs in full: “The most progressive artists in Houston today, and the least appreciated, are two youngsters in their early twenties. Carden Bailey and Gene Charlton since they were small children have had the sympathetic and broadminded guidance of McNeil [sic] Davidson, herself an artist.” 30. Tibbits, “‘Our Little Gallery.’” Grace Spaulding John’s Houston Artists Gallery was the city’s first artist-run gallery; it opened in 1930 and closed around 1939. 31. Georgia O’Keeffe, as mentioned in chapter one, made the first known abstract paintings in the state; certainly, other artists in Texas made early pure abstractions that have yet to be discovered. Preusser taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1947–1954) and the University of Houston (1951–1954), and was a founding codirector of the Houston Contemporary Arts Association (1948–1950), the forerunner of the Houston Contemporary Arts Museum (cam). 32. Bywaters may have been indicating his confusion regarding the spelling of “Preusser,” which is pronounced “Proosser.” 33. Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past”; Bywaters, “New Texas Painters,” 342. 34. The list of winners at the second Texas Annual in 1941 is striking: Perry Nichols (Dallas Nine circle), Texas Spring, $100 prize; Charles T. Bowling (Dallas Nine circle), Mid-Winter, $100 prize; Robert Preusser (of Houston), Tonality, $50 prize; William McVey, Maternity, and Octavio Medellín, Penitents, each won a $100 prize; H. O. Robertson, Weighing

In, honorable mention; Gene Charlton (of Houston), Chartres, honorable mention. 35. The exhibition, sponsored by New York’s Municipal Art Committee, featured artists selected by each state’s governor. 36. Quoted in Greene, Texas: 150 Works, 123. 37. Martin, Nicholson, and Gabo, Circle. 38. Gabo, “Constructive Idea in Art,” 3. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 5. 41. Ibid., 7. 42. The mfah library owns a 1937 edition of the Circle manifesto, although the accession date is listed as 1998, the date the database was automated; my thanks to Alison de Lima Greene and Johnna Robinson for this information. 43. Gabo, “Constructive Idea in Art,” 9. “What is the use of showing us what is bad without revealing what is good?” Gabo asks. 44. Ibid., 5. 45. Importantly, Alexandre Hogue admired work of some of the Houston abstract artists. 46. Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 246. One could take Preusser’s use of the banderole/Möbius strip further with the aid of poststructuralist theory: Jean-François Lyotard interrogates the meaning of the skin-like surface of the Möbius strip in Libidinal Economy (1974). 47. Preusser’s Organization (1937) foretells, on the one hand, works like Drunkard (1948, oil on board, Vincent and Roula Jarrard Collection) and, on the other, the Ogden Museum’s Subaqueous Impression (1948, oil on canvas). 48. Mark L. Smith, “Minimal Remnant,” in Edwards, Smith, and Edwards, Texas Modern, 20. 49. Walter Paepcke later founded the Aspen Institute. 50. The tangled history of the New Bauhaus, the School of Design, the Institute of Design, and

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IIT is frequently misrepresented. One often hears that an artist studied at the “New Bauhaus,” which may be true in spirit, though that school existed only from 1937 to 1938. An accurate chronology is in Wingler, Bauhaus. Undoubtedly, Ola Davidson had heard of the New Bauhaus, though by the time she delivered Robert Preusser to Chicago, it had become the School of Design. 51. Marcel Breuer, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, and Walter Gropius left the Bauhaus in 1928. Moholy-Nagy next undertook a successful freelance design career in Berlin before the rise of Nazism forced him to move first to Holland and then Britain. 52. On Moholy-Nagy’s Chicago curriculum, see Findeli, “Moholy-Nagy’s Design Pedagogy,” and Lerner, “Foundations for Design Education.” 53. The rivalry between Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and László Moholy-Nagy went back to their days in Germany, partly from the latter’s avid advocacy of Walter Gropius. Once Mies was in Chicago, he felt that Moholy-Nagy had usurped the name “Bauhaus,” which Mies (as the last director of the Berlin location) felt entitled to be identified with; on Mies, see Schulze, Mies van der Rohe. The curator Katherine Kuh weighs in thoughtfully on the Moholy-Nagy and Mies van der Rohe rivalry in Kuh, “Interview with Katharine Kuh.” 54. On the entire history of Bauhaus (including its U.S. incarnation), see Wingler, Bauhaus, a massive documentary book. A more recent, excellent source is Bergdoll and Dickerman, Bauhaus, 1919–1933. 55. Greene, Texas: 150 Works, 124. Greene, a curator at the mfah, writes that Composition No. 1 plus two other studies from the same series received the purchase prize. 56. Ibid.

57. Forrest Bess also served in a (different) camouflage unit, a not uncommon placement for artists. 58. Robert Preusser’s son, Eric, published this information on his defunct website, www.artmusicpro duction.com. The material can be accessed via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine: http:// web.archive.org/web/20120205192352/http:// www.artmusicproduction.com/pages/ROP.hx .html. 59. Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 246. Chapter Four

1. Some of the biographical material in these paragraphs comes from an unpublished biographical essay on Ben L. Culwell (2007) written by the researcher Ariel Evans from primary-source material in the Culwell estate, private collection, Austin, Texas. This material was later used to develop the Wikipedia page on the artist; see http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Culwell. 2. Culwell thought that James Brooks also attended Woodrow Wilson High School. 3. Culwell names the jurors; see Kathryn Davidson’s interview, January 16, 1985, tape 4, transcript page 17. Kathryn Davidson, of the Menil Collection in Houston, conducted approximately six hours of oral history interviews with Culwell in November and December 1984, and then again on January 16, 1985. Subsequent references to these interviews are cited as “Culwell interview,” with the date and transcript details. Culwell was stung by his father’s insistence that he decline the scholarship. The “declined” scholarship reference appears in several Culwell biographical documents and in his own text for D. Miller, Fourteen Americans. Throughout his life, Culwell struggled with the business life–artistic life dichotomy.

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4. Culwell interview, December 7, 1984, tape 1, side 1, transcript pages 19–20. 5. Culwell’s recollection of Walter Pach comes from Culwell interview, January 16, 1985 (Davidson notes that only one side of the tape was used), transcript page 27. Pach was fluent in German, French, and Spanish and had lived as an expatriate in Paris as a member of Gertrude and Leo Stein’s circle. 6. Larsen, “American Abstract Artists,” 3. 7. Culwell interview, December 7, 1984, tape 2, side 1, transcript page 1. 8. Ibid. Culwell seems to have used a now-outmoded phrase, “I delighted in Turking myself,” a colloquial expression for acting like an upstart. The phrase originated with the Young Turks, a political group that sought to rejuvenate the Turkish nation before World War I. The term is now considered derogatory or pejorative (the Young Turks committed the Armenian genocide), but Culwell certainly meant it only in the sense of “upstart” or “insurgent.” 9. Culwell interview, December 7, 1984, tape 2, side 1, transcript page 3. Culwell believed that Man with Soul Indigestion won the $25 or $50 prize at the “Dallas Allied Art” spring exhibition in 1940, the Texas Annual being a fall affair. He distinctly remembered Richard Foster Howard’s role in the scandal. 10. Something similar happened to John Biggers at the dma—but because of his race (African American) rather than his artistic style. 11. The entire incident is recounted in Culwell interview, December 7, 1984, tape 2, side 1, transcript page 3; several details can be corroborated, and there is no reason for it to be a fabrication. 12. Culwell interview, December 7, 1984, tape 2, side 1, transcript page 4.

13. Culwell, “Ben L. Culwell,” 15. 14. Quoted in Jerry Bywaters, “Paintings by Ben L. Culwell (Chief Yoeman [sic], U.S. Navy),” Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, March 4–16, 1945, 3. Available at http://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/ metapth225403/m1/2. 15. Unpublished notes by Kathryn Davidson, transcribed from Culwell’s written caption on the back of The Burial Detail, Pearl Harbor, Dec. 1941 (1942/1944). 16. Culwell interview, December 7, 1984, tape 2, side 2, transcript page 8. 17. Culwell, “Ben L. Culwell,” 15. Also see Culwell interview, December 7, 1984, tape 2, side 2, transcript page 7. More research needs to be done to establish a time line for Culwell, who told Kathryn Davidson that “after some delay, [they] went on to Pearl Harbor” and that they were in Manila Bay (7–8). His recollection of dates and events does not precisely match those in historical accounts of the Pensacola, nicknamed the “Grey Ghost.” I believe he was on a different ship, one that arrived in Pearl Harbor a week after the events in his account; his statement in Fourteen Americans corroborates this. Culwell spent a month on burial duty at Pearl Harbor in January 1942. The Pensacola was escorting a convoy to Manila when Pearl Harbor was attacked; Japan bombarded the Philippines the following day. The Pensacola was diverted to Australia, entering Brisbane Harbor on December 22. Culwell must have boarded the Pensacola from Pearl Harbor in 1942. Culwell’s most disturbing images depict the carnage after the Battle of Tassarfaronga. 18. Culwell interview, December 7, 1984, tape 3, side 1, transcript page 1. 19. Ibid., tape 3, side 2, transcript page 1. 20. Ibid., transcript pages 3–4.

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21. Bywaters, “Paintings by Ben L. Culwell, CY,” corrected typescript of essay, February 18, 1945. Available at http://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/ metapth225403/m1/2/. 22. Culwell interview, December 7, 1984, tape 2, side 2, transcript page 14. 23. Culwell, “Ben L. Culwell,” 15. 24. Coates, “Art Galleries,” March 30, 1946, 83. The term “abstract expressionism” had been used in the German publication Der Stürm in 1919 to describe Wassily Kandinsky’s style. The game of etymological precedence is only that, the relevant point being that Coates actively sought, as did many, a name for this new group of New York painters of the 1940s. He saw in Culwell an Expressionism resembling that of the New York artists. 25. Coates, “Art Galleries,” September 21, 1946, 83. 26. Louchheim, “Favored Few Open Season,” 50–51. 27. The painting’s whereabouts are unknown; it was included in Entartete Kunst exhibitions put on by the Nazis and may have been destroyed. For the history of the painting and the controversy surrounding it, see Crockett, “Most Famous Painting.” 28. Time, August 6, 1934; clipping from archival files— no further information listed. 29. Figment of Erotic Torture (1942/1944, ink, wax crayon, tempera, Mercurochrome, scraping on paper, 11¼" × 6⅜"). For the quotation, see Ben L. Culwell, Adrenalin Hour, 16 (caption). 30. René Magritte, Le Viol (The Rape) (1934, oil on canvas, Menil Collection, Houston). Coincidentally, the Menil Collection has contributed more to preserving Culwell’s legacy than any other institution. 31. Breton, Qu’est-ce que le Surréalisme?; see also Barr, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, 264. For a detailed examination of Magritte’s image in the context of Breton’s text, see R. Greeley, “Image, Text and Body.”

32. Culwell repeats the conceit of superimposed face and figure in other works, such as the colorful Self Portrait (1946, mixed media, 13.5" × 9.5", private collection). 33. Culwell, “Ben L. Culwell,” caption for Adrenalin Hour, 16. 34. Culwell, “Ben L. Culwell,” 16. 35. Nation, November 23, 1946, in Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays, 2:113–114. 36. Hopps, Adrenalin Hour, 5. Adrenalin Hour: The South Pacific, World War II: Ben L. Culwell, organized by the Menil Foundation, traveled through 1990 to the Tyler Museum of Art, Southern Methodist University’s “The Gallery,” the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Cultural Activities Center in Temple, and the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi. 37. The retrospective was an admirable effort, but oddly restrained. Kuspit’s participation was laudable, but the Temple venue (with no touring locations) suggests that none of Texas’s major museums—the Menil Collection included—were able to host a full-scale retrospective for one of the state’s most compelling and original modernist painters. 38. Donald Kuspit, “Ben L. Culwell,” in Culwell, Ben L. Culwell Retrospective. The exhibition ran September 5–October 13, 1989, at the Cultural Activities Center in Temple. Culwell had a one-man show at the Dallas Museum of Art in 1945, which is how Dorothy Miller became aware of him, leading to his inclusion in Fourteen Americans (1946). Nevertheless, it had been forty years. 39. The New York School painters, or Abstract Expressionists, were never an official school (nor did their work share many formal qualities), but historians and chroniclers later grouped them together. 40. La Forte, “University of North Texas.” 41. Thompson, “Texas Woman’s University.”

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42. She contributed the “ornamental” cover design for the November 1922 issue of Nebraska Wesleyan’s alumni magazine; see “In University Circles,” Lincoln State Journal, November 26, 1922. 43. It was “an ornamental design”: “In University Circles,” Lincoln State Journal, November 26, 1922. 44. McCabe, “Her Twentieth Century.” 45. Some of this information was compiled from the online “University Archives” of Texas Woman’s University (http://www.twu.edu/library/univer sity-archives.asp), an invaluable source for historic photographs and documentation. 46. To study stained-glass techniques, LaSelle traveled to St. Louis, New York, and France (on the Queen Mary), where she visited Gothic cathedrals; see “Collegiate Artists Substitute for Experts in Designing Windows and Lights for Chapel,” Denton (TX) Record-Chronicle, December 24, 1938, and “S.C.W. Art Teacher Goes to France to Study Stained Glass,” Denton (TX) Record-Chronicle, August 21, 1939. 47. Ennis, “Thoroughly Modern,” 128. 48. “S.C.W. Broadcast Program for Monday,” Denton (TX) Record-Chronicle, November 13, 1935. 49. Grauer and Grauer, Dictionary of Texas Artists. 50. “Kiwanians Told of European Trips,” Denton (TX) Record-Chronicle, September 27, 1939. 51. It is plausible that other Texans were educated at the New Bauhaus, but the only ones I know of are LaSelle and Preusser. 52. At Provincetown, she studied with the philosopher-writer-artist Robert Motherwell in the early 1950s. 53. Lloyd, “Provincetown: Toni LaSelle,” 94. The review was occasioned by LaSelle’s first solo show in Provincetown, a retrospective that spanned fifty years. Suspension (1948, oil on canvas) is illustrated. Throughout the two-column review she is compared to Myron Stout.

54. Art Digest, “Non-tyro Toni LaSelle,” 20. 55. D.S., “Toni La Selle,” 49. 56. Preston, “By Groups and Singly.” 57. See Ennis, “Thoroughly Modern,” 130. 58. P. Jones, “Art and Artists: tscw Instructor.” 59. Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 12. The book is an extension of his earlier New Vision, but Vision in Motion focuses on work at the Chicago Institute of Design. 60. Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 114. 61. Moholy-Nagy did not share the rhetorical ire of his fellow Constructivist Naum Gabo regarding Cubism and its destructive nature. Whereas Gabo saw a need to rebuild, Moholy-Nagy saw it as a stage in a continuum of space-time depictions. 62. P. Jones, “Art and Artists: tscw Instructor.” 63. Alison de Lima Greene notes that “Stout and LaSelle parted ways after the early 1950s,” although Stout paid her tribute in a journal entry of 1953; see Greene, Texas: 150 Works, 214n21. 64. Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 150; emphasis added. 65. Ibid., 150, fig. 202; 151, fig. 203. In a sign of the interrelationship between the artists, the quoted Moholy-Nagy text is illustrated by a 1938 Willi Baumeister Composition and faced by a full-page Moholy-Nagy drawing of a “space modulator with fluctuating black and white arcs.” Baumeister cofounded, with Edmund Kinzinger, the Stuttgart Üechte-Gruppe. Oskar Schlemmer was the third Üechte-Gruppe creator and a founding member of the Weimar Bauhaus. Another Stuttgart student was Johannes Itten, a charismatic teacher influenced by Eastern philosophy; he stayed at the Bauhaus from 1919 to 1923, until replaced by Moholy-Nagy. Itten created one of the century’s most influential color wheels, which is still in use in many art schools today. Schlemmer’s work is illustrated in Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion; Itten’s is not.

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66. The first time I referred in public to Myron Stout, I used the cliché “an artist’s artist.” Stout did affect countless artists, who understand his work in a way that those who do not make plastic creations cannot, but the cliché implies a preciousness from which Stout did not suffer. A genius, he is a crucial link between Texas and the New York School. 67. Mérida’s trajectory is worth tracing, for it deals with what might be tactlessly called the “regionalism” of Central America. Born in Guatemala, he claimed descent from the Mayans and Zapotecs. From 1910 and 1914, he studied with Kees van Dongen in Paris, meeting Rivera, Picasso, Modigliani, and Mondrian. Back in Guatemala at the outbreak of World War I, Mérida founded a proIndian movement before moving to New York from 1917 to 1919. Following nearly eight years in Mexico, he returned to Paris in 1927, where his circle included Joan Miró and Paul Klee. Mérida’s early work consists of socially conscious, figurative murals resembling those of the Mexican muralists. Later, however, he developed his characteristic rhythmic abstractions that read like Mayan pictographs. 68. Hofmann first taught classes in New York (1933, 1934), then opened a studio in Provincetown, the site of summer sessions. In 1936, Hofmann’s New York school moved to 52 West 9th Street, and then to its permanent home at 52 West 8th Street in Greenwich Village. Clement Greenberg (and Arshile Gorky, among others) attended the Greenwich Village lectures. 69. Kramer, “Art: Myron Stout.” 70. B. H. Friedman, introduction to Schwartz, Myron Stout, 9. 71. Storr remarks that Stout makes no mention of romantic entanglements in his journals, and might— like Mondrian—have “abstained from any” (Storr,

introduction to Dickey, Journals of Myron Stout, xi). 72. Schwartz’s remark is quoted in Kramer, “Art: Myron Stout.” 73. “Gestalt” is loosely translated as “form” or “pattern,” but is understood to refer to wholeness or oneness. Gestalt psychology developed in Berlin in the early twentieth century, under Max Wertheimer (1880–1943), Kurt Koffka (1886–1941), and Wolfgang Kohler (1887–1967). It centers on the notion that human beings will necessarily look for patterns in parts and will complete even a partial pattern by mentally filling in the blanks. A textbook Gestalt illustration is to “connect the dots” of a pattern with missing segments. The Rubin vase, in which a person should be able to recognize the profiles of two human faces and one vase (a figure-ground reversal) also relates to Gestalt psychology. 74. Untitled (1951, 22" × 20", in the collection of Richard Brown Baker in 1980, current whereabouts unknown); see Schwartz, Myron Stout. 75. Stout, journal entry, August 18, 1953, in Dickey, Journals of Myron Stout, 205. 76. Stout, journal entries for April 21, 1953, and August 19, 1953, in Dickey, Journals of Myron Stout, 43, 61; “Narrative Chronology” in ibid., 277. 77. Haynes Ownby, interview by Tina Dickey, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1992, quoted in “Narrative Chronology,” in Dickey, Journals of Myron Stout, 281n7. 78. William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” available at http://www.bartleby.com/39/36.html. The next line of that oft-cited quotation is also relevant to Myron Stout: “The emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion . . . is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.”

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79. Quoted in Schwartz, Myron Stout, 81. 80. Ibid. 81. At the caseta conference in Austin, Texas, in April 2009, the late Ted Pillsbury reminded the audience that the art historian Konrad Oberhuber claimed that any artist’s first seven years (and by this he meant childhood) forever affected him or her. Stout lived in Texas for twenty-three years, returning again in the 1960s with plans to rebuild his demolished childhood home in Denton. 82. It is worth mentioning that Myron Stout was an accomplished pianist who abandoned his professional dreams only in his late twenties. More than painting or sculpture, music stands as the most abstract of art forms, bearing no relation to anything “seen” in the visual world. 83. Stout, journal entry, October 13, 1965, in Dickey, Journals of Myron Stout, 244–245. 84. John Yau, untitled introductory essay in “I Knew It to Be So!,” 7. 85. In 1967, Stout realized a lifelong ambition to go to Greece, thanks to a National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities grant; he went twice more, via a Guggenheim Fellowship, in 1970. 86.  Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays, 4:87. Greenberg clarified his position thus: “It is understood, I hope, that in plotting out the rationale of Modernist painting I have had to simplify and exaggerate. The flatness towards which Modernist painting orients itself can never be an absolute flatness. The heightened sensitivity of the picture plane may no longer permit sculptural illusion, or trompe-l’oeil, but it does and must permit optical illusion. The first mark made on a canvas destroys its literal and utter flatness, and the result of the marks made on it by an artist like Mondrian is still a kind of illusion that suggests a kind of third dimension. Only now it is

a strictly pictorial, strictly optical third dimension” (90). 87. Quoted in “Narrative Chronology,” in Dickey, Journals of Myron Stout, 264. 88. Quoted in Schwartz, Myron Stout, 88. 89. Another Texan, Milton Rauschenberg, chose the plainer sounding “Bob” on a bus ride to New York. The Miltonesque associations would have been especially appropriate when Rauschenberg made his series after Dante. 90. Friedman, introduction to Schwartz, Myron Stout, 16. 91. “Six Added to C.I.A. Summer Faculty, Strengthening Graduate Facilities,” Denton (TX) RecordChronicle, May 15, 1935. 92. Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 186–187. Corpron’s image, “pattern of light in a glass brick,” is most definitely a photogram, although similar effects could have been achieved photographically. 93. My paraphrase of Moholy-Nagy’s methodical explanation on 189–190. 94. Gerstheimer, Texas Bauhaus, 8. The original source (cited in the catalogue on 15n6) is Sandweiss, Carlotta Corpron, 8. Ida Lansky and Barbara Maples, Corpron’s protégées at twu, made interesting abstract photographs in the 1950s and 1960s. 95. Images are reproduced in Sandweiss, Carlotta Corpron. 96. Kepes, foreword to Sandweiss, Carlotta Corpron, 9. 97. Sandweiss, Carlotta Corpron, 6. 98. Kepes, Language of Vision. 99. Sandweiss, Carlotta Corpron, 11. Corpron says Moholy-Nagy was of little help: the advice she received from him was “so ridiculous in a way . . . to photograph the girls who were working their way through school” (11). The quotations are from Sandweiss’s series of interviews with the artist in 1980.

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100. Sandweiss, Carlotta Corpron, 13. Sandweiss does not acknowledge the play on words of “leitmotif.” 101. Stephen Madoff’s review of Corpron’s exhibition at the Marcuse Pfeifer Gallery in 1977 pegs many of the obvious influences while acknowledging that influence is sometimes “redirected into selffulfilling channels” (Madoff, “Carlotta Corpron,” 74). 102. Corpron, “Light as a Creative Medium,” 5. 103. Ibid., 6. 104. Maxcy, “Creative Approach to Photography.” I am grateful to Jack Davis for providing me with this essay. 105. Fluid Light Design (1941; see Sandweiss, Carlotta Corpron, 63, fig. 41); Flowing Light (c. 1947, gelatin silver print; ibid., fig. 43). Corpron’s egg compositions resemble some of Jean Arp’s Surrealist sculptures. 106. R. Smith, “Is Painting Small the Next Big Thing?” Charles Seliger and Mark Tobey also painted small works at a time when large-scale paintings dominated. 107. R. Smith, “Review: Art: Abstraction.” 108. John Yau, “On the Life and Art of Forrest Bess,” in Bess and Fischer, Forrest Bess, 24. 109. Bess’s Parsons exhibitions were in 1949, 1954, 1957, 1959, 1962, and 1967. 110. Parsons was initially reluctant to take over the contract, since Guggenheim had been supporting Pollock well. Historical coincidence allowed for Pollock’s most famous, “signature” style to debut on Betty Parsons’s gallery walls. 111. Forrest Bess to Meyer Schapiro, undated, Meyer Schapiro Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, reel 3458. I am indebted to Gibson, “Lesbian Identity and Representation.” 112. The Museum Ludwig in Cologne installed a major Bess exhibition in 1989. 113. According to Wayne Koestenbaum, “Evidently no

one can discuss him without using the rather ugly word ‘scrotum’” (“The Inner Life of the Palette Knife,” in “My Painting Is Tomorrow’s Painting,” 20). 114. The most thorough source is reported with a (mostly) clinical tone in Money and De Priest, “Genital Self-Surgery.” In his letters to John Money, Bess claimed that a doctor had performed the surgery but had since died in an auto accident. Money deduced that Bess had performed the “artificial hypospadias” himself. The highly graphic article provides ample evidence of Bess’s creation of the fistula and its intended and actual use. I should note that Money held a PhD from Harvard (earned in the Psychological Clinic in the Department of Social Relations) and spent his career at Johns Hopkins University, but was not a medical doctor. 115. John Yau remarks on Bess’s marginalization, noting that he “has been categorized as an isolated figure whose images are based on ‘obscure sexual references.’ By marginalizing the sources of his highly specific symbols in this way, critics have failed to recognize his deep affinities with Modernism’s enterprise and ignored his place in history” (“On the Life and Art of Forrest Bess,” in Bess and Fischer, Forrest Bess, 26). Money writes, “This patient considered himself to be ruggedly masculine in his nonerotic role in life” (“Genital Self-Surgery,” 286). What exactly was Bess after? As Money puts it, among other things, the union of the male and female aspects would result in the “rediscovery of the urethral orgasm” (286). 116. See A. Miller, Empire of the Eye, and C. Jones, Eyesight Alone. 117. The finest writers on Bess are Meyer Schapiro, John Yau, Barbara Haskell, and Robert Storr. 118. I use self-mutilation and self-surgery as synonyms in Bess’s case. The clinical essays describe this as

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self- or genital mutilation; the art writers tend to call it self-surgery. 119. Several art magazine reviewers ignore Bess’s surgery altogether (most likely, they either didn’t know about it or found it irrelevant for a short review). Meyer Schapiro’s frequently reprinted essay for the Betty Parsons exhibition of 1962 ends with: “We cannot read [these pictures] as the author does; but, undeciphered, we feel the beauty and completeness of his art” (“Forrest Bess”). Barbara Haskell refers to the “obscure sexual references” and “his anxieties and attitudes about his own sexuality,” but also provides some of the psychological and clinical background: “He advocated uniting male and female by means of a surgically produced fistula into the male urethra, which made possible urethral orgasm . . . He felt he had to involve himself physically; beginning in 1960 he underwent a series of operations in an attempt to prove the validity of his hypothesis” (Forrest Bess). 120. Schjeldahl, “Forrest Bess,” 21–22. Schjeldahl was clearly awestruck by the sixty paintings in the exhibition, writing that they “can make me feel that I’ve never before quite realized what a painting is.” 121. Haskell, Forrest Bess. 122. Ibid. 123. Elkins, Pictures of the Body, 42–43. 124. Robert Storr, “From the Back of Beyond,” in “My Painting Is Tomorrow’s Painting,” 15. 125. A detail of Untitled 11A (1958) provides the stunning cover to Greene, Texas: 150 Works. 126. Ennis, “Mod Squad.” 127. We know from Bess’s letters that coitus (with a female) was less satisfying for him than self-stimulation or his male-male experiences. Nevertheless, the word “coitus” (from the Latin coire), meaning “to go together,” applies.

128. All quotations in this paragraph from Greene, Texas: 150 Works, 43–44. 129. Consider that out of all the Texas works in the mfah, Untitled 11A was selected for the cover of a book about the museum. It is likewise reproduced in color in Yau, “Forrest Bess at the Whitney,” 140. 130. Forrest Bess to Pat and Ezra Cooke, July 17, 1963, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, reel 3752. 131. Brenson, “Gallery View: Forrest Bess.” Importantly, however, Brenson decided that Bess’s “sexual obsessiveness . . . not only drives but also diminishes the work, limiting its range, necessitating a language schematic enough to control it.” Chapter Five

The epigraph comes from Kelly Fearing, interview by author, August 24, 2007, Austin, Texas, copyright Estate of Kelly Fearing and Baylor University Institute for Oral History. 1. The best source on the Fort Worth Circle is Barker and Myers, Intimate Modernism, a lavishly illustrated and thoroughly researched exhibition catalogue. In 2009, Scott Grant Barker expanded his catalogue essay in “The Serendipity of Second Chances.” 2. “DeForest Judd Debut Here; A Local Eight,” Dallas Morning News, November 3, 1946. The reference is to the Eight of New York, who made headlines at their exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in New York in 1908. 3. Ibid. 4. For an explanation of the group’s current designation, the Fort Worth Circle, see Myers, “Progressive Rebels and True Believers,” 11–12. 5. The exhibition was organized by Cathy Nordstrom.

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6. For an excellent, expanded discussion of the Fort Worth Circle’s art and supporters over the years (including the artists’ gallery and museum exhibitions), see Barker “Serendipity of Second Chances.” 7. Myers, “Progressive Rebels and True Believers,” 52. 8. The eminent curator and author Carl Zigrosser was Weyhe’s director for twenty years before becoming curator of prints and drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1940. Zigrosser juried the Third Annual Texas Print Exhibition, held in Dallas in 1943. 9. “Six Texans,” Art Digest, October 1, 1944, 8. 10. Jewell, “New Group Exhibitions.” 11. Dickson Reeder did exhibit before the Centennial, in the Southern States Art League exhibition in 1934. 12. Barker and Myers, Intimate Modernism, 13. 13. For an illustration of Dickson Reeder’s untitled 1937 sketch, see Barker and Myers, Intimate Modernism, fig. 26, 41. 14.  Preston, “Modern Masters: Degas, Renoir, Rouault—Young Americans.” 15. M.B., “Bill Bomar in Second Show,” 20–21. 16. G.T.M., “Bill Bomar,” 47. 17. Day Observation for a Harlequin is reproduced in Barker and Myers, Intimate Modernism, pl. 63, 148. 18. The Robinson Jeffers adaptation of Medea debuted at the National Theatre before moving to the Royale Theatre. It was produced by and starred John Gielgud as Jason; Judith Anderson won a Tony Award in 1948 for the title role. Internet Broadway Database, “Medea,” accessed June 4, 2013, http://www.ibdb.com/production.php ?id=1789. 19. T. Collins, “Bill Bomar.” 20. According to Fearing, Sam Cantey III suggested that Mozley offer him the UT-Austin position.

21. Barker and Myers, Intimate Modernism, 38. 22. See chapter eight. Key exceptions are Octavio Medellín and a few other Mexican or Latino artists. John Biggers is one of the most important exceptions as well, though his modern idiom began in earnest in the later 1960s. 23. The painting is illustrated in Barker and Myers, Intimate Modernism, pl. 35, 115. 24. Jane Myers writes: “The painting leaves intriguing conceptual questions about the nature of childhood friendship during a period of severe racial prejudice,” but does not presume to offer Reeder’s position on his painting (“Progressive Rebels and True Believers,” 50). 25. Green’s blog entry continues: “Was there a backlash against the image in Fort Worth or discussion of the painting among Reeder’s circle or anyone else? The show’s catalogue doesn’t spend any time on the socio-cultural questions the painting raises” (“Intimate Modernism at the Amon Carter”). Green’s remarks about the Intimate Modernism catalogue echoes my own review; see K. Edwards, “Intimate Modernism.” In defense of the catalogue’s authors, exploring this material (especially while closeted artists were still alive) was challenging. Myers and Barker performed pioneering research on the Fort Worth Circle. Their first order of business was monumental: to document the group’s history and explicate its members’ work. The next stage needs to address the gendered and racial divisions that underlay the artists’ production. 26. It is either ironic or apt that during the nine-year era of the Republic of Texas, there was no statutory sodomy law; see Carpenter, “Unknown Past of Lawrence v. Texas,” 1469. 27. Ibid., 1470–1471. 28. Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), struck down the state’s sodomy law by a vote of 6–3; the complete ruling is available at Justia.com, accessed

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August 2012, http://supreme.justia.com/cases/ federal/us/539/558/case.htm. The “homosexual conduct” law (Texas Penal Code Ann. §21.06) had been called that since 1973. 29. Homosexuality within the Fort Worth Circle deserves serious attention by scholars better versed in gender studies than I am. The literature on the circle, seventy years later, continues to ignore the obvious implications of many of the paintings and prints. The goal is not to retroactively out the artists, but to help the current generation better understand their relationship to modernism and the codes that their art necessarily used. 30. Scott Grant Barker, “Remembering Josephine Mahaffey: The Texas Dynamo,” Fort Worth Community Art Center website, accessed February 2013, http://www.fwcac.com/?exhibition_detail/1326. 31. The information on Josephine Mahaffey was generously shared by Scott Grant Barker. 32. Three works by Trotter were featured in the Beyond Regionalism exhibition (1986), but he was not represented in the Intimate Modernism catalogue, which documents “first generation” adherents of the Fort Worth Circle. 33. The exhibition McKie Trotter: Back Again at Last, organized by Bill Reaves in 2008, may have been the first time Trotter’s work had been seriously considered in thirty years. 34. The William Reaves Fine Art gallery has contributed considerably to the Trotter renaissance. This section is modified from my essay “McKie Trotter: Both Real and Abstract,” written for a Trotter exhibition at the gallery. Galleries such as William Reaves Fine Art have made invaluable contributions to recording the history of Texas art. Furthermore, many galleries specializing in midcentury art keep it afloat by the sheer dedication of their staff, not by the money that it brings in.

35. I am indebted to Morgan Hollie Womack for much of the biographical information on Trotter. She interviewed his family and compiled photographs of extant works for her MA thesis, “The Paintings of McKie Trotter.” Her work has contributed admirably to preserving Trotter’s oeuvre and legacy. 36. Womack, “Paintings of McKie Trotter,” 6. 37. Womack, “Paintings of McKie Trotter,” 7. 38. Indeed it was a showpiece: Beach Castle was exhibited at least three times and won the $200 Convair Award at the Fort Worth Art Association Local Show in 1954. Two other strong paintings from this period deserve mention: Dry Dock (1953) was a Dallas Art Association purchase that year, and Red Wall (1953) was purchased that year by Mr. and Mrs. Ted Weiner. 39. Bright Peninsula was exhibited at the Annual Exhibition of Western Art in 1954. 40. Quoted in Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 75. 41. “In the Galleries,” Arts Magazine, June 1956, 58. 42. “McKie Trotter,” Art News, June 1956, 53. 43. Trotter’s exhibition schedule remained fairly strong in the 1960s, and then dropped off significantly in the 1970s and later. Trotter died in Fort Worth in 1999, at age eighty-one. Chapter Six

1. Austin had its share of Centennial celebrations, but none as grand as the statewide exposition in Dallas. Allocations from the Centennial budget allowed for the construction of the John Franz Staub (architect) and Paul Cret (consulting architect) Texas Memorial Museum on campus, very near the 1960s expansion of the Art Department. 2. Doty, College of Fine Arts, 49, quoted in Summers and Weathers, “University of Texas Department of Art and Art History,” 1. I am indebted to Robert Summers and Chelsea Weathers’s extensive

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research and scholarship for the history of the UT Art Department. For details on the development of the department, see their paper, available on the caseta website, http://www.caseta.org/files /UT_Art_Dept_Speech%20_2.pdf. 3. Summers and Weathers, “University of Texas Department of Art and Art History,” 4. 4.  For biographical information about Lockwood, see J. C. Haley, E. Loran, and S. C. Pepper, “John Ward Lockwood, Art: Berkeley,” April 1964, on Calisphere, a University of California System website, http://texts.cdlib.org /view?docId=hb6g500784;NAAN=13030&doc .view=frames&chunk.id=div00008&toc.depth= 1&toc.id=&brand=calisphere. 5. Denis, “Définitio du néo-traditionnisme,” reprinted in Denis, Le Ciel et l’Arcadie, 5: “Se rappeler qu’un tableau—avant d’être un cheval de bataille, une femme nue, ou une quelconque anecdote— est essentiellement une surface plane recouverte de couleurs en un certain ordre assemblées.” (“Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.”) 6. Denis’s familiar statement is sometimes misunderstood; for him, a finished painting was more than a surface covered in colors. This reminds me of a wry joke told by Chuck Close. He grids his huge canvases with pencil as a first step in creating his labor-intensive, at times photorealistic paintings: “If I were Agnes Martin, I’d stop right there” (Chuck Close, lecture, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, 2004). I am sure he has made that joke several times. 7. Sources for Mozley’s biographical information: Summers and Weathers, “University of Texas Department of Art and Art History”; Levers, Guerin,

and White, “In Memoriam: Loren Mozley”; Porter, Taos Artists and Their Patrons; Powers and Powers, Texas Painters, Sculptors, and Graphic Artists, 367– 368; Mozley, Goodall, and Vogel, Loren Mozley. 8. Mozley, “Yankee Artist.” 9. Quoted in Levers, Guerin, and White, “In Memoriam: Loren Mozley,” 6–7. 10. Judy Tedford Deaton, “A Child of the Cubist Order: The Art of Loren Mozley,” in Loren Mozley: Structural Integrity, 8. 11. Winter, “A Rose Is for Remembrance,” in ibid., 5. 12. For the species identification, see Deaton, “Child of the Cubist Order,” 9. 13. Greenberg, “Review of the Exhibition Landscape,” Nation, December 15, 1945; reprinted in Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays, 2:44. It is important to note that late in life Greenberg approved of Wyeth, listing him as among the greatest American painters. 14. A modified version of my discussion of Wyeth and Greenberg will appear in the forthcoming volume Rethinking Andrew Wyeth, edited by David Cateforis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2014). 15. Summers and Weathers, “University of Texas Department of Art and Art History,” 9. 16. Eldredge, Ward Lockwood, 90. 17. Carraro, Companions in Time, 7. 18. Time, “Art: Texas Realist.” 19. Ibid. 20. Quoted in Carraro, Companions in Time, 14. 21. Reproductions of both sculptures are in Danes, Sculpture and Drawing of Umlauf, 27, 30. 22. My discussion of Supplication is adapted from my editorial contribution to Texas Treasures, caseta catalogue, 2008. 23. “In Memoriam: Constance (Connie) Forsyth,” University of Texas at Austin Faculty Council,

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http://www.utexas.edu/faculty/council/2000– 2001/memorials/scanned/forsyth.pdf. 24. On Forsyth, see Seaton, Paths to the Press, 73–74, 126–127, and Newton and Weiss, Skirting the Issue, 220–228. 25. In addition to cited sources, this section relies on McCracken, McCracken, and Fogel, Art of Seymour Fogel; Berman, “Self-Knowledge into Form”; S.  Fogel, “Painter and Architecture”; S.  Fogel, “Painting and Sculpture Too!”; J.  Fogel and R. Stevens, “Canvas Mirror.” 26. The Federal Art Project was established in May 1935 to provide work relief to millions of Americans left unemployed during the Depression. The Federal Art Project officially became the Federal Art Program in 1939. 27. For “called down from the scaffold,” see Helm, Mexican Painters, 56. Rivera’s final painting, which included the portrait of Lenin, differed from the sketch he submitted. The incident is recounted in countless art histories and tales. Leah Dickerman (a curator at MoMA, which houses studies of the mural) and David Rockefeller, Sr., observe that the impact of Rivera’s gesture—which emphasized Lenin during a period of support for Stalin in New York—would have been lost on many viewers. Dickerman argues that the rupture was finalized by Rivera’s portrayal of the Prohibitionist John D. Rockefeller, Jr., holding a martini glass and fraternizing with young women; see Dickerman and Indych-Lopez, Diego Rivera, 40. 28. J. Fogel and R. Stevens, “Arizona Murals of Seymour Fogel.” The sentiment “God knew what he was about in making the white man victorious” (289) derives from Campbell, “Plains Indians,” a lecture delivered in 1929. 29. Holger Cahill began dating Dorothy Miller in the late 1920s and married her in 1938; see also the catalogue New Horizons in American Art.

30. The Index of American Design was a nationwide effort by fap to create watercolor renderings of traditional American arts and crafts made before 1890. More than ten thousand images were made; the results are now housed at the National Gallery of Art. The historian Lonn Taylor gave an excellent lecture on the Texas branch of the Index of American Design at the Heard-Craig Texas Regional Art Symposium in McKinney, Texas, on October 10, 2010; he has since published his findings. 31. Museum of Modern Art, press release, for release “September 12 or 13, 1936.” 32. Seymour Fogel was a New Yorker in 1936 and would be again later. I find no artists from Texas, other than James Brooks, in the New Horizons in American Art exhibition. 33. MoMA acquired Picasso’s Girl before Mirror in 1939; Three Musicians officially joined the collection in 1949, but was on display before its formal acquisition. 34. Pearson, Modern Renaissance in American Art, 220. 35. Pearson, “Modern Art in a Texas Church,” 14; emphasis in the original. 36. Seckler, “Gallery Notes: Talent on Its Way,” 59. Bill Bomar and Charles Umlauf are featured in the same essay. 37. Weisman and Fogel, “Architecture and Modern Art,” 241. 38. Ibid., 242–243. 39.  Seymour Fogel, freestanding sculptural form mural (1973, glass and steel), Gouverneur Hospital Diagnostic and Treatment Center, New York City. 40. Rual Askew, “Art & Artists: Latest Feldman Best Yet,” Dallas Morning News, May 27, 1958. 41. Weismann, “Introductory Art Class.” 42. The oil heiress and arts patron Marion Koogler McNay died the following year, in 1950, at sixty-seven.

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43. Jacqueline Edwards, Century of Art and Community. 44. Chester Toney’s birth and death dates are inconsistent in the scant published material on him. I believe he is the same Chester Toney who was born in Littlefield in 1925 and died in 1960, at age thirty-four. There is more information on his exhibitions, generally found in local newspapers and catalogue records. 45. The Men of Art sponsored awards in the 1950s at the State Fair of Texas Art Exhibition. 46. Larson, Hiram Williams, 4. 47. Quoted in ibid. 48. Weismann, “Project L-810,” 69. 49. Quoted in ibid., 70. 50. For Hogue, see chapter two, note 66. 51. Paraphrased in Larson, Hiram Williams, 16.





Chapter Seven

1. For current data on Houston, see “Houston Facts and Figures” on the City of Houston’s website, http://www.houstontx.gov/abouthouston/hous tonfacts.html. For the Port of Houston’s national rankings, see the 2012 Statistical Abstract of the United States, tables 1086 and 1087, http://www.census .gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1086 .pdf. By tons of traffic, Houston ranked second; by quantity of container traffic, seventh. 2. For the history of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Contemporary Arts Museum, see Greene et al., Texas: 150 Works; Marzio, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Brutvan, Mayo, and Cathcart, In Our Time. Both institutions maintain useful online archival sites: http://www.mfah. org/research/archives/ and http://www.camh. org/exhibitions/archive. For histories of Texas art and modernism in Houston, see the aforementioned works, plus Greene, “Modernism in Houston”; Rose and Kalil, Fresh Paint; and Kalil,





Texas Landscape. A group of interviews related to the Houston art scene are collected in Reynolds, Houston Reflections. 3. This chapter will not attempt the infeasible task of discussing all modernists active in Houston at midcentury. Please consult the exhibition and collection catalogues in note 2 above for further information, as well as the online catalogues published by William Reaves Fine Arts, which has been dedicated to unearthing works and data on many Houston modernists. I have selected Houston artists who worked at the abstract end of the spectrum or who warrant attention for a particular use or approach to art. 4. Duchamp’s lecture poked fun at the Abstract Expressionists and invoked T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”; see Perloff, “Duchamp’s Eliot.” 5. Jermayne MacAgy’s pacemakers were Jeremy R. Anderson, Forrest Bess, James Boynton, Robert Cremean, Joseph Goto, Walter Kuhlman, John Levee, Raymond Parker, Peter Shoemaker, Hassel Smith, Evelyn Statsinger, Robert Sterling, Pat Trivigno, Charles Williams, and Emerson Woeffler. 6. Several of the key participants at the AFA convention in 1957 had joined Douglas MacAgy’s twoday “Western Round Table on Modern Art” in San Francisco in 1949. MacAgy, responding to the influential “Life Round Table on Modern Art” of 1948, brought in George Boas, Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Burke, Marcel Duchamp, Alfred Frankenstein, Robert Goldwater, Darius Milhaud, Andrew C. Richie, Arnold Schoenburg, Mark Tobey, and Frank Lloyd Wright. See “The Western Round Table on Modern Art (1949),” edited by Douglas MacAgy, http://www.ubu.com/historical/wrtma/index.html. With MacAgy’s intensive

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involvement in contemporary art, it was no wonder the Menils contacted him in 1952 to craft a long-term plan for cam. 7. Smart, Sacred Modern, 65. 8. Virginia Field to Jerry Bywaters, March 8, 1957; Jerry Bywaters, telegram, March 15, 1957, American Federation of Art Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 9. Bywaters and Harwell, Survey of Texas Painting, n.p. 10. Texas was strongly evoked, despite Bywaters’s exclusion of historical paintings. Two interpretations of the Texas oil well anchored the catalogue cover: Wilfred Higgins’s evocatively textured blocks and George Grammer’s geometric nocturne. Exhibitors included leading painters from Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston, familiar through years of Texas annuals, solo shows, and circuit and gallery appearances. Otis Dozier, William Lester, and Everett Spruce formed a bridge, having also appeared in the Texas Panorama of 1944. Geometric urban networks by Donald Weismann and Seymour Fogel were buzzing with life, as were David Brownlow’s moodily worked surfaces. Life magazine published a photograph of the galleries displaying work by Dozier, Michael Frary, McKie Trotter, Luis Eades, Ethel Broadnax, and Weismann. The complete list of artists in A Survey of Texas Painting is a veritable who’s who that collectors have used to track down key works: David Adickes, Bill Bomar, Jack (James) Boynton, Cynthia Brants, Ethel Broadnax, Brownlow, Max Butler, Cecil Casebier, Lowell Collins, Ben L. Culwell, Otis Dozier, Luis Eades, Kelly Fearing, Raymond Fletcher, Fogel, Michael Frary, Henri Gadbois, George Grammer, John Guerin, Wilfred Higgins, DeForrest Judd, Chapman Kelley (spelled “Kelly” in catalogue), Walter Lengel, William Lester, Keith McIntyre, Jesse Medellin, Fred

Mitcham, Perry Nichols, Dorothy Poulos, Robert Preusser, Bill Reily, E. M. (Buck) Schiwetz, Everett Spruce, Chester Toney, McKie Trotter, Bror Utter, Peter Vatsures, Weismann, Ralph White, Hiram Williams, Clara Williamson, and Dan Wingren. 11. Bill Reily (b. 1930) was the godson of Marion Koogler McNay; Reily’s doctor father shared a practice with McNay’s third husband. 12. Life, “Turnout for Art in Texas.” 13. Charles Williams, Battleground (1956, steel with brass coating, 45"). These artists were in the Sculptors of Texas show at the Fort Worth Art Center. 14. Totems Not Taboo: An Exhibition of Primitive Art, assembled and presented by the Contemporary Arts Museum in the Cullinan Hall of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, February 26–March 29, 1959. 15. Jim Love is not mentioned in the catalogue, although Karl Kilian is on record as recalling having seen Love’s work in the original show; see Arnold, “Vim and Vigor,” 36. 16. Fox, “Cullinan Hall,” 159–160. 17. They recommended Johnson as the architect to design the master plan for the University of St. Thomas campus; as part of that plan, he designed the original conception for the Rothko Chapel. The paired Philip Johnson buildings Strake Hall and Jones Hall are now called the Academic Mall. 18. Pearson was a teacher and printmaker then teaching art education at the University of Texas at Austin. 19. All quotations are from Pearson, “All Texas Annual Revolts.” 20. Quoted in Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism, 270. 21. Ibid. It is worth noting that the composer Kevin H. Gray in 2008 wrote a work called The Spattered Hand: Five Pieces for Bassoon and Piano, inspired by

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American paintings. Gray selected Preusser’s Calligraphic Forms as one of his inspirational paintings. 22. Romare Bearden, a contemporary of Biggers and Simms, provides an example of an artist steeped in the climate of New York Abstract Expressionism who offered an alternative but still modernist point of view; see Witkovsky, “Experience vs. Theory.” 23. Edmund Barry Gaither, “John Biggers: A Perspective,” in Wardlaw, Art of John Biggers, 76. 24. Hampton began during the Civil War as a school for black children; after the war, it developed into a normal school for educating black teachers. For more on Biggers’s Hampton experience, see Alvia Wardlaw, “Metamorphosis: The Life and Art of John Biggers” in Wardlaw, Art of John Biggers, 23– 32. The traveling exhibition was co-organized by the mfah and Hampton University. 25. Even on campus, Wardlaw continues, studying African heritage was seen in “positive and negative” light (ibid., 26). 26. Sweeney, “Biggers, John Thomas.” Sweeney’s sources include John Biggers, Simms, and Weems, Black Art in Houston, 58–59, and Wardlaw, “Metamorphosis: The Life and Art of John Biggers,” 40–41. 27. Theisen, Walls That Speak, 29. 28. The shotgun house and its origins are a contested field. The first work on it was Vlach, “Sources of the Shotgun House”; see 69–73. Biggers was familiar with that source. A common belief, which Biggers shared, is that “shogon,” the Yoruba word for “God’s house,” became “shotgun” in the United States. See also Jay Edwards, “Shotgun.” 29. Edmund Barry Gaither, “John Biggers: A Perspective,” in Wardlaw, Art of John Biggers, 87. 30. Elgash, “Geometric Bridge across the Middle Passage,” 30.

31. See, for example, Taylor, “Order in Pollock’s Chaos.” 32. Biggers, Simms, and Weems, Black Art in Houston, 86. 33. The Adam and Eve stained-glass figures at Boynton United Methodist Church use brown skin tones, a refreshing departure from European depictions of Adam and Eve. 34. Biggers, Simms, and Weems, Black Art in Houston, 16. 35. Patton, African American Art, 180. 36. Lowery Stoke Sims, “Subject/Subjectivity and Agency in the Art of African Americans,” in Whitney Davis et al., “The Subject in/of Art History,” 588–589. Sims continues: “This position can be understood to some extent given the dearth of positive cultural markers and reaffirming tropes to African Americans. In the larger art world, African American abstraction failed to conform to its litmus test of being an ‘appropriate’ or ‘authentic’ strategy” (589). 37. See chapter 8, note 34 for the Partha Mitter reference. 38. The Menils had pushed for MacAgy to direct cam, sponsoring her financially. Following MacAgy’s four years at cam, the Menils hired her to cofound the Art History Department at the University of St. Thomas. When the Roman Catholic beliefs guiding the University of St. Thomas clashed once too often with the Menils’ own ideology, they transferred the department to Rice University. Near the St. Thomas campus, the Rothko Chapel, arguably the Menils’ greatest single modernist achievement, opened in 1971. Designed by Philip Johnson and Howard Barnstone as a home for fourteen enormous canvas panels by Mark Rothko, the entire plaza (including Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk) creates a sublime interplay

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of art, architecture, and sculpture. The Menil Collection, designed by Renzo Piano, opened in 1987. These two structures—the museum and the Rothko Chapel—represented the culmination of the Menils’ decades’ long championing of art. For more on the Menils’ patronage and collecting, see Helfenstein, Art and Activism, and Smart, Sacred Modern. 39. For a list of exhibitions and the included artists, see the archive on cam’s website, accessed September 2012: http://www.camh.org/exhibitions/ archive. 40. Gadbois and McConnell, “The Artist’s Eye,” 22– 23. 41. Quoted in Reynolds, Houston Reflections, 126. 42. By the 1960s and 1970s, exhibition space had proliferated, including Fredericka Hunter’s Texas Gallery (opened 1972) and the Betty Moody Gallery (opened 1975). The city’s two major universities, Rice University (Sewall Gallery, opened 1971) and the University of Houston (Blaffer Art Museum), held significant contemporary exhibitions. The Blaffer opened in 1973, but the University of Houston had been collecting works for its permanent collection since 1966, when the board of regents dedicated 1 percent of construction budgets to collecting works of art. Richard Stout, the Blaffer’s first acting director, put on a controversial exhibition of paintings and drawings by Michael Tracy (b. 1943) in September 1973. 43. Adickes next taught at UT-Austin for two years (1955–1957) before embarking on a world tour and purchasing a home in Antibes, France. 44. Adickes may be familiar to readers for his gargantuan statues of historical figures such as Sam Houston, the U.S. presidents, and the Beatles. Anecdotally and occasionally in print, his work is generally maligned by serious art critics. I am not convinced it should be written off, since his art

captured something of the kitsch quality already inherent in School of Paris paintings and then amplified it in his later years, when postmodernism and irony reigned. 45. The exhibition originated at the Dallas Public Library (September 22–October 10, 1958), then traveled to the Bank of the Southwest, Houston (November 3–14, 1958), and the Republic National Bank of Dallas (October 13–31, 1958). See the mfah exhibition history, accessed October 2012: http://prv.mfah.org/archives/search.asp?par1=3 &showid=870&extitle=salute+oil&exartist=&sye ar=&eyear=&cPg=1. 46. Wilson and Thompson, Pioneering Women, n.p. 47. Biographical information from ibid. 48. Quoted in Reynolds, Houston Reflections, 130. 49. Gray, “Life in the Abstract.” Hood’s opinion on the number of serious artists in Houston was colored by what may have been her somber mood after spending twenty years out of the country. 50. The art critic and historian Susie Kalil, who spent considerable time with Dorothy Hood in the 1980s, is currently preparing a major book and exhibition on the artist for Texas a&m University Press. In addition to linking New York, Texas, Mexico, and Europe together through Hood’s circles, it will address Hood’s correspondence with Dorothy Miller of MoMA (spanning thirty years), the sculptor Anthony Caro, the painter Jules Olitski, the critic Clement Greenberg, and the museum director Philippe de Montebello. 51.  Hood, “Dorothy Hood Interviewed.” Sylvia Moore’s “Dorothy Hood” is also valuable. 52. J.F., “Dorothy Hood,” 21. 53. Preston, “Artists One by One.” 54. These Hood drawings may have been featured in the Brooklyn Museum’s Golden Years of American Drawings, 1905–1956 exhibition.

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55. Hood, “Dorothy Hood Interviewed,” 9. 56. André Breton gave Meret Oppenheim’s iconic sculpture the punning title Déjeuner en Fourrure, after Édouard Manet. Alfred H. Barr bought the sculpture, which Oppenheim called Object, for MoMA after it appeared in the museum’s Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition of 1936–1937. 57. Tragically, Ann Williams Boynton took her life in 1964, leaving a husband and two young daughters. 58. Kalil, Alexandre Hogue, 172. Some of these illustrations were included in Kalil’s traveling Hogue exhibition of the same name. 59. The sculptor Charles Williams, a close friend of Jack Boynton, had recently given him a book on calligraphy (Boynton, conversation with the author, Houston, June 8, 2007). 60. Jack Boynton, handwritten notations on the author’s typed essay for William Reaves Fine Arts, 2007; collection of the author. 61. The Whitney Museum lists the medium only as “oil,” but Boynton himself listed “sand and oil.” 62. Jack Boynton, interview by the author, June 8, 2007, 25–33 (hereafter cited as Boynton interview); transcript copyright by the Baylor Institute for Oral History and the Estate of Jack Boynton. 63. Boynton interview, 21. 64. In 1961, the California School of Fine Arts became the San Francisco Art Institute. 65. In 1967, Boynton made a small preliminary pencil study of an event moving across a horizon. The event line is humped in the middle, bone-like at the ends. With its veiled reference to a human presence and a landscape, the drawing crystallizes the event motif as well as Boynton’s constant return to pure draftsmanship. 66. Boynton interview, 27. 67. Richard Stout and Lorene David became lifelong friends.

68. The work that Richard Stout admired is probably Alberto Giacometti, Three Men Walking II (1948– 1949, bronze, 29½" × 13" × 12½", Art Institute of Chicago, Edward E. Ayer Endowment in memory of Charles L. Hutchinson, 1951.256). The museum acquired it in 1951. 69. Years after he cast Opus I (Tempest) (1999), Stout came across an old slide of the sculpture he had made in Kathleen Blackshear’s class in 1956. That slide is reproduced here, but the original sculpture is lost. 70. Richard Stout, artist’s statement in Rose and Kalil, Fresh Paint, 176. 71. Richard Stout, interview by the author, Houston, August 6, 2007. 72. Dick Wray, interview by the author, Houston, August 8, 2008. 73. The 23rd Annual Texas Painting and Sculpture Exhibition (1961) traveled to Dallas, San Antonio, Beaumont, and Lubbock. Sweeney did not host it at the mfah that year. 74. Although Dick Wray did not identify which E. E. Cummings poem the painting referred to, it could be “as freedom is a breakfast food,” which includes the lines “time is a tree (this life one leaf) / but love is the sky and i am for you / just so long and long enough”; see Cummings, Complete Poems, 511. 75. Preusser, “Relating Art to Science.” 76. Kepes, Education of Vision, 208–219. The fifteen contributors to Kepes’s book include Rudolf Arnheim, Anton Ehrenzweig, Johannes Itten, Paul Rand, and Robert Jay Wolff. Preusser published other articles, including “Art and the Engineer,” and “Revitalizing Art and Humanizing Technology.” 77. Preusser, “Relating Art to Science,” 203, 200 (fig. 4).

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78. Ibid., 199. 79. Ibid., 200. 80. One might argue that the minimalist celebration of machine-made works is a method of incorporating current technology, except the results are still concrete. 81. Michael Fried’s essay “Art and Objecthood” (1967) was a send-up of the literalist nature of minimalist works of the time. Fried’s critique highlights the essential theatricality of minimalism, which pulls the viewer into a three-dimensional, interactive space. As Frances Colpitt stated it, Fried’s criticism rests on the “distinction between pictorial-modernist art and literal-theatrical objecthood” (Colpitt, Minimal Art, 92). Preusser is tacitly arguing for increased involvement, equivalent to Fried’s theatricality. 82. Preusser, “Relating Art to Science,” 201. 83. Ibid., 201. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid., 202. 86. Ibid., 203 (fig. 4), 204. 87. Ibid., 203 (fig. 4), 203–204 (fig. 5). 88. Ibid., 203 (fig. 4), 205 (fig. 12). 89. Ibid. 90. Preusser: “A more complex display of optical phenomena is shown in Fig. 10 (cf. color plate). Rear lighting reflects color from the back sides of planes in relief that are mirrored (with varying degrees of shape deformations) in a semi-circular wall unevenly surfaced with Mylar. Various transformations appear when the spectator’s position changes relative to the wall” (ibid., 199–206).











Chapter Eight

1. Jack Boynton always referred to it as “Charlie’s shop” in conversations with the author. Born in Mineral Wells, Charles Truett Williams studied



at Abilene Christian University and HardinSimmons University. After the war, Williams and his wife, Louise, lived in Atlanta. She died unexpectedly, leaving the widower and his young son, Karl, to move in with his Texas family. 2. Winter, quoted in Paul Rogers Harris, “Contemporary Art & Texas Artists in the 50s & 60s,” in Williams, Block, and Harris, Charles T. Williams, 26. 3. The Fort Worth art historian Scott Barker has expressed a similar thesis anecdotally about the city’s art world shifting from the Circle locus to Williams’s studio. I am grateful to Karl Williams for providing me the unpublished notes for his lecture at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden (no date), and for his telephone conversations and e-mail correspondence in the fall of 2012. Charles Williams’s first studio was on El Campo (4700 block); the second, built in 1952, was out in the country near what is today the intersection of Loop 820 and Sun Valley Road. 4. In Paris, Williams sought out Harry’s New York Bar, famed watering hole of Hemingway, and had a photograph snapped of himself with its namesake proprietor, Harry MacElhone. 5. In 1948, Rudolf Arnheim delineated the psychological, Gestalt-oriented role of the “hole” in Henry Moore; see “The Holes of Henry Moore.” 6. Braun, “Moore and Pre-Columbian Art,” 180n40. 7. One wonders whether Williams had conversations with Ted Weiner about theosophy, an esoteric philosophy that interested Weiner. Theosophy sought revelation of the divine within being and nature. Piet Mondrian was deeply influenced by theosophy in his early years. 8. Mr. and Mrs. Ted Weiner owned at least one Hans (Jean) Arp, Growth (1938, bronze), now in the collection of the Palm Springs Art Museum.

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Williams’s scale—many stone and wooden objects are around thirty inches high—is similar to that of Arp. 9. Weiner and Goodall, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Ted Weiner. They also collected European and American modernist paintings. Raymond and Patsy Nasher began collecting pre-Columbian objects in 1950 and modern European sculpture in 1961. As mentioned, they, too, regularly visited Charlie’s shop. 10. Ted Weiner befriended the English sculptor, even traveling with his family to visit Henry Moore at his studio and home. 11. Edward Larrabee Barnes is well known for having designed the Dallas Museum of Art building (1984). The Weiner home, his second domestic commission, was among his earliest works. 12. A large collection of Ted and Lucille Weiner’s sculptures is on long-term loan to the Palm Springs Art Museum in California, where the Weiners moved after leaving Fort Worth. 13. Boynton, quoted in Herbert et al., Jim Love, 24. 14. Karl Williams, e-mail to the author, February 18, 2013. 15. Paul Baker resigned from Baylor in 1963 over incidents of censorship at the Baptist institution, taking the entire drama department with him. The imbroglio made national news; see, for example, Time, “Baker vs. Baylor.” 16. “Jomo” was McManaway’s nickname for a faux talismanic object that was a complex visual joke, channeling Marcel Duchamp via Texas. One of McManaway’s early Jomo Boards was exhibited at the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts installation at MoMA’s The Art of Assemblage exhibition. “Jomo” is said to come from the film Juke Girl (1942, starring Ronald Reagan), in which a black peddler called Jo-Mo (played by Willie

Best) repeatedly comes on the scene to peddle his “Good Luck Jomos.” Versions of the Jomo origin myth appear in catalogues and articles, including Murdoch, Projects I. 17. The full name is the Twenty-Fourth Annual Texas Painting and Sculpture Exhibition. Williams’s Ancient Warrior won the $1,200 purchase prize by the San Antonio Art League; it still stands in the Art League’s yard on King William Street. 18. The Zuni ahayu:da is a guardian figure. The Brooklyn Museum of Art’s ahayu:da has long since been repatriated to the Zuni people. 19. Ennis, “Shrine of the Bleached Skull.” 20. The sound of David McManaway’s invented term, “Jomo,” is similar to the sound of “Jim Crow.” Both Jomo and Jim Crow originated with African American subjects. 21. Key sources in the considerable literature on the “primitive” and “primitivizing” in modern art include Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (1938), a pioneering work. Later scholarship was generated by the massive MoMA exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art (1984) and the accompanying catalogue, edited by William Rubin, who excluded Mesoamerican, South American, and Asian art for being “archaic” but not “primitive.” For critical responses to “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art that approach the question from very different viewpoints, see Kramer, “‘Primitivism’ Conundrum,” and Foster, “‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art.” See also Flam and Deutch, Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art; Rubin, “Modernist Primitivism”; Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art; Harrison, Frascina, and Perry, Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction; and McEvilley, “Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief.” 22. For Breton’s collection, see Breton et al., André Breton, a massive exhibition catalogue; and Conley, “Surrealism and Outsider Art.” On Breton’s first

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Easter Island acquisition, see Tythacott, “‘Convulsive Beauty,’” 50. 23. Paradoxically and fortuitously, the State of Texas’s actions, based on its adamant intent to uphold segregation, led to the formation of what became an inspiring intellectual center for blacks in Houston. Texas Southern University, where the state attempted to set up a law school for black students, drew academics and students from all over the country; see chapter seven for John Biggers’s and Carroll Simms’s presence at tsu. 24. For a contemporary (1956) African American assessment of the status of desegregation in Texas, see W. Jones, “Educational Desegregation in Texas.” 25. For excellent articles on segregation and the civil rights movement, see De León and Calvert, “CivilRights Movement” and “Segregation.” 26. Pachon and Moore, “Mexican Americans,” 113, quotation on 114. The study to which they refer is “Project Report: De Jure Segregation of Chicanos in Texas Schools,” Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 7 (March 1972): 370–390. 27. For a still-powerful early essay on Otherness that addresses the embedded ambivalence within stereotypes, see Bhabha, “Other Question.” 28. The Mexican-born Medellín had been making extended sojourns to his native country for decades. 29. According to Lewthwaite, Medellín referred to the chamber of the Temple of the Tigers. There are several Chac-Mool figures at Chichen Itza (“Modernism in the Borderlands,” 361). 30. Lewthwaite, “Modernism in the Borderlands,” 361. 31. Ibid., 350. 32. Karl Williams, telephone interview by the author, September 9, 2012.

33. The quotation is from Sam Ratcliffe, Ellen Buie Niewyk, and Judy Searles’s interview with Medellín in 1998, cited in Lewthwaite, “Modernism in the Borderlands,” 361. 34. Lewthwaite, “Modernism in the Borderlands,” 338. 35. A side note: For a small university museum, Baylor’s Martin Museum of Art owns many African objects. Stories are told of how a former Art Department chairman purchased a number of objects from the trunk of a Volvo in the late 1960s. I mention this to indicate the pervasive fascination with collecting what seemed like inexpensive African art in Texas at the time. I don’t believe it was an isolated instance; see Ramey, “African Art Collection at the Martin Museum of Art.” 36. Other helpful sources for this section are Corbey, “Ethnographic Showcases,” and Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter?” 37. Mitter, “Decentering Modernism,” 532. 38. Love’s Figure (1959) is in the Art of Assemblage catalogue checklist, but is not illustrated. 39. In 1965, when Tinguely was in Houston for his mfah exhibition, he visited junk shops with Jim Love; see Quaintance, “Sort of Sideways,” 35, 38n23. 40. Kathryn Swenson to Jack Boynton, quoted in Quaintance, “Sort of Sideways,” 23; Lynn M. Herbert, “Chronology,” in L. Herbert et al., Jim Love, 231. 41. I direct the reader to the entirety of Quaintance’s perceptive “Sort of Sideways.” 42. Several works by Texas artists reside in major museums but are seldom, if ever, exhibited. The works at the Whitney had not been professionally photographed by that institution until I requested them for this book.

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43. Several pieces from Jim Love’s “Tomorrow Is No Solution” series feature vertically aligned performing animals or people. 44. I have yet to locate a published reference in which Jim Love or anyone else mentions Bugs Bunny, but do not doubt that the cartoon inspired the sculpture and was a topic of conversation among his friends. 45. Directed by Isadore “Friz” Freleng, released December 3, 1949. On October 2, 2012, Warner Bros. declined my request to reproduce a still image from “Which Is Witch” for this publication, and subsequently denied my appeal. The studio’s refusal is understandable, given the provocative and racist underpinnings of the cartoon. But it does seem misguided to try to bury the cartoon’s existence rather than to allow it to stand as a marker of an older mindset. Any reader wishing to view “Which Is Witch” should be able to access it via the Internet. Cartoon Network declined to air it in 2001; see the Wikipedia entry for the cartoon, accessed September 2012: http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Which_Is_Witch. 46. Given the extreme racial and ethnographic stereotypes, I suspect further research on the cartoon depiction of the tribal women’s bendy strut would find a source in an African or even an African American dance style. 47. The Nasher Museum press release of October 11, 2011, announcing the museum’s receipt of the sculpture notes that Witch Doctor “underlines an interest in tribal arts that Love shared with his most prominent patrons, John and Dominique de Menil” (http://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/ About-nsc/Press/Archive/nasher-sculpturecenter-receives-gifts-of-signific, accessed September 2012). While this is true, I believe that Witch Doctor was more directly influenced by Bugs Bunny.

48. Karl Kilian recalls that Jim Love sculptures were present in Totems Not Taboo: “There were contemporary sculptures by Jim Love that were affinities, but you almost didn’t notice them. It was the tribal pieces you saw”; quoted in Arnold, “Vim and Vigor,” 36. 49. A number of posters by Barnum & Bailey and other circuses use phrases such as “Africa’s Deepest Depths.” 50. Nickell, Secrets of the Sideshows, 189. 51. Pamela B. Nelson, “Toys as History: Ethnic Images and Cultural Change,” accessed September 2012, http://www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jim crow/links/toys/homepage.htm. 52. Kruger, “‘White Cities,’” 20. 53. Ibid. 54. Quoted in Advancing American Art, 20. 55. D. S. Strother, “Display of the Body Hottentot,” in Lindfors, Africans on Stage, 3. After being removed from her homeland, Sarah Baartman was displayed in freak shows and putative scientific venues in France, Britain, and Africa from 1808 to 1815. After her death, Georges Cuvier, surgeon to Napoleon Bonaparte, performed an autopsy. Baartman’s body parts were subsequently displayed at the Musée de l’Homme for more than 150 years. 56. This is not to excuse the sculptors or defend their making racist caricatures. But any caricatures must be contextualized within the segregated and racist society in which they grew up. 57. D. MacAgy, one i at a time, 12. 58. Barker, Working at the Limits, n.p. 59. Elvin McDonald, “Pots in the Home: Ed Storms Takes a Great Deal of Pride in His Rock Group, ‘The Living Stones,’” Miami News, July 18, 1978. After Storms abandoned sculpture for horticulture, he became a world expert in Lithops plants.

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He published Growing the Mesembs (1976), Lithops and Other Succulents (1977), and The New Growing the Mesembs (1986). 60. I suspect Storms was already collecting Lithops examples in Texas in the 1960s, and modeled his Slithy Tove after one. As far as I know, Storms did not make his first trip to Namibia, where the species proliferates, until the 1970s. 61. James Johnson Sweeney and Douglas MacAgy both worked at MoMA before heading contemporary institutions in Texan metropolises. 62. Beasley, Douglas MacAgy, 80. 63. Roy Fridge filmed the event and edited a twelveminute short film based on the daytime dress rehearsal for Injun. 64. René Magritte in America was a collaborative effort with the mfah, where it was shown February 2– March 1, 1961. 65. Beasley, Douglas MacAgy, 88–89. 66. D. MacAgy, Art That Broke the Looking-Glass, 58. 67. Lewis Carroll: “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: / All mimsy were the borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe” (“Jabberwocky,” from Through the LookingGlass and What Alice Found There, 1872). 68. Alan Bromberg, quoted in Beasley, Douglas MacAgy, 82n124. MacAgy’s biographer, David Beasley, has a favorable opinion of the exhibition catalogue, which I find alternately preachy and opaque. Beasley, who is unlikely to have seen the original exhibition, believes “the show recovered some of the excitement of both artist and viewer at their discovery of the illusion of space” (83). Chapman Kelley attended the exhibition. In his memoirs, Kelley writes, “[It] left everyone scratching their heads as we sought to understand the work’s theme, let alone absorb its purported historical significance. In the 50 years since I have

not heard it mentioned once” (http://www.dallasarthistory.com/2012/01/chapman-kelleysmemoirs-chapter-5_08.html, accessed September 2012). 69. Rual Askew, “dmca to Seek New Quarters,” Dallas Morning News, July 19, 1962. 70. D. MacAgy, one i at a time, 17. 71. As described in Beasley, Douglas MacAgy, 81. 72. Francine Carraro, “Red, White, and Blue Art at the Dallas Museum,” in Carraro, Jerry Bywaters, 172–204. 73. Roger Winter’s photomontage for one i at a time playfully refers to the artists in the show. 74. D. MacAgy, one i at a time, 11. 75. Jermayne and Douglas MacAgy were married from 1941 to 1954; she retained the MacAgy surname after their divorce. 76. Beasley, Douglas MacAgy, 47. I have occasionally had trouble verifying some of Beasley’s facts. MacAgy was officially a consultant to the director of MoMA in 1954, possibly earlier. See the museum’s online archives, accessed October 2012, www .moma.org/learn/resources/archives/EAD/d Harnoncourtf. 77. Despite his extraordinary expertise and the high quality of his sculpture, Gene Owens has traveled under the radar for too long. For example, there is no mention of Owens in the Texas State Historical Association’s invaluable online encyclopedia. He does not appear in Hendricks and Reese, A Century of Sculpture in Texas, the impressive catalogue of an exhibition that traveled around the state. Aside from the tcu/Fort Worth retrospective of 1991, thoughtful small exhibitions have been organized by Janet Tyson, Scott Grant Barker, and Patrick Kelly. 78. Gene Owens was born in Birdville, which was voted the seat of Tarrant County in 1850, long

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before Fort Worth took the title. Birdville today is Haltom City, which was incorporated in 1949. According to the Birdville Historical Society, “Tarrant County in 1850 had a population of 599 whites and 65 slaves, and covered 877 square miles” (http://www.birdvillehistory.org/page4.html, accessed April 2012). 79. Gene Owens, “The Garden of Older Gods,” in Owens, Gene Owens Retrospective Exhibition, n.p. 80. Kelly, Gene Owens, 8. 81. Gene Owens, “About Water” entry, in Owens, Gene Owens Retrospective Exhibition, n.p. 82. Eventually Owens developed an allergy to the particles breathed in while polishing bronze, causing him to switch to the medium of porcelain. 83. Gene Owens, interview by the author, Cleburne, Texas, September 25, 2008, copyright Gene Owens and the Baylor University Institute of Oral History (hereafter cited as Owens interview). 84. For a general online video detailing the complex casting process, see the video by AP Gallery, “How to Make Bronze Sculptures—Lose Wax Bronze Casting,” accessed April 2012, http://www.youtube .com/watch?v=gVe3VeQfyzw&feature=related. 85. Many of Owens’s finest bronze sculptures were made in the 1960s and are thus at the outer edge of the midcentury time frame. Because he began making sculpture in the mid-1950s, under the influence of Fort Worth–area artists, and for his connection with Isamu Noguchi, a treatment of midcentury Texas art should include Owens. 86. Owens, “The Garden of Older Gods,” in Owens, Gene Owens Retrospective Exhibition, n.p., from the subsection “About Chance.” 87. Owens interview. I have edited out the “you knows” and altered punctuation only slightly for clarity. 88. Ibid.

89. Ibid. 90. When Hans Hofmann complained that Pollock did not work from nature, the younger artist famously responded, “I am nature” (quoted in Polcari, Abstract Expressionism, 51–52). In telling the story in interviews, Lee Krasner (who introduced Pollock to Hofmann) emphasized “am.” 91. Alberto Giacometti, Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932, bronze, 8" x 34½" x 25", Museum of Modern Art, © 2012 Artists Rights Society [ars], New York/adagp, Paris). 92. Gene Owens was familiar with Giacometti’s Woman with Her Throat Cut (conversation with the author, June 2012). 93. Cummins, “From the Midway to the Hall of State,” 240–244. 94. For a riveting read on the topic, including a discussion of Giacometti’s piece, see Markus, “Surrealism’s Praying Mantis.” Chapter Nine

1. It was a notoriously heady era in which American art ultimately “triumphed.” It was the era of the Dies Committee and the later, notorious House Un-American Activities Committee weighing in on abstract art. In August 1949, Congressman George Dondero announced that modern art—“abstractionism” included—was “shackled to communism” (Dondero, Modern Art Shackled to Communism). But other governmental officials recognized that abstract painting could be touted overseas as proof of American freedom and democracy. By the later 1950s (that is, after McCarthy), the U.S. government mounted a major exhibition of abstract painting that toured abroad. The money trail indicates some covert activity within U.S. leadership, though not enough for me to accept arguments that carelessly claim the cia

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helped Abstract Expressionism succeed. Groundbreaking works by Eva Cockcroft, Max Kozloff, Fred Orton, Griselda Pollock, and Serge Guilbaut have investigated U.S. policies, the international reception of Abstract Expressionist art, and liberal ideologies. Orton and Pollock’s excellent study of Greenberg in the 1930s was first published in 1981 in the journal Art History; in 1996 they published it in the collection Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed. See also Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art; as testament to the force of Guilbaut’s argument, virtually every author dealing with this material responds (both positively and negatively) to his book. In the early 1990s, historians examined the Abstract Expressionist cultural milieu more closely. Michael Leja placed the work into what he called the ‘modern man’ discourse, focusing on the art as representations of selfhood and the unconscious (Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism). Stephen Polcari looked at the art as a response to twentieth-century spiritual crises (Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience). Later, documents made available through the Freedom of Information Act gave researchers access to previously classified fbi material. Three studies were published in relatively quick succession. Saunders, Cultural Cold War, an examination of the seemingly incongruous links between the Left and the Right, was first published in the UK by Granta in 1999; it is extensively researched and helpful for disentangling the cia’s attempts at cultural influence. The author’s discussion of the artwork itself, however, is scant. Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique, argues that Abstract Expressionism operated from a position implicitly critical of much of its contemporary culture. His examination of the response by Latin American painters is a reminder that artists allow art—not





governmental intervention—to speak to them. Nancy Jachec argues that the U.S. government promoted avant-garde art precisely for its radical qualities, which it thought would appeal to followers of European philosophy. Jachec, Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism, makes no reference to Craven. The proximity of these books highlights the continued British interest in midcentury American cultural politics. 2. Sandler, Triumph of American Painting. Among many other writings, Sandler’s follow-up to the classic Triumph was Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience. 3. Like commercial galleries, museums offered work for sale in the 1930s and 1940s. 4. Jack Boynton, in conversation with the author, Dallas, Texas, April 21, 2007. 5. Kimmelman, “Dorothy Miller, Who Discovered American Artists, Dies at 99.” 6. Dorothy Canning Miller (born 1904) spent nearly a year in a museum training program at the Newark Art Museum in 1925. Her course was cotaught by Holger Cahill (1887–1960), whom she married in 1938. As Cahill’s assistant from 1930 to 1932 while he was acting director of MoMA (during Alfred Barr’s sabbatical in Germany), she worked on several major exhibitions. In late 1934 she officially joined MoMA as an assistant to Barr, remaining there for more than thirty-five years in increasingly more prestigious curatorial capacities. Some of the Americans exhibitions were roundly panned. Barr, MoMA’s founding director, worked there from 1929 until his retirement, in 1967. On Barr, see Kantor, Alfred H. Barr. 7. See www.moma.org/about/history, accessed June 3, 2013. 8. Paintings by Nineteen Living Americans, MoMA, December 13, 1929–January 12, 1930; see the MoMA

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press release for December 11, 1929, http://www .moma.org/learn/resources/press_archives/ 1920s. The nineteen artists were Charles E. Burchfield, Charles Demuth, Preston Dickinson, Lyonel Feininger, Pop Hart, Edward Hopper, Bernard Karfiol, Rockwell Kent, Walt Kuhn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Ernest Lawson, John Marin, Kenneth Hayes Miller, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jules Pascin, John Sloan, Eugene Speicher, Maurice Sterne, and Max Weber. 9. Lynn Zelevansky, “Dorothy Miller’s ‘Americans,’ 1942–63,” in Elderfield, Museum of Modern Art, 56–107. 10. Cahill left New York in 1935 for Washington, D.C., to organize the wpa relief program; soon he became national director of the Federal Art Project. He kept that position until the relief programs ended in 1943. 11.  Zelevansky, “Dorothy Miller’s ‘Americans,’” 58–59. 12. Quoted in ibid., 59. 13. Kamrowski was included in Sandler’s tome, but not Ashton’s. 14. D. Miller, foreword to Americans 1942, 9. 15. Octavio Medellín’s figurative-based sculptures were made from materials that included sandstone, limestone, terra-cotta, and cast stone. Spruce’s paintings were oil on either canvas or composition board. 16. Octavio Medellín, statement in D. Miller, Fourteen Americans, 102. 17. Ibid. 18. Artists for Victory was sponsored by Pepsi-Cola and ran at the Met from December 7, 1942 to February 22, 1943. 19. The Americans 1942 catalogue titles Spruce’s painting Mending Rock Fence (120). 20. McCausland, “Living American Art,” 18.

21. Jim Edwards, “Texas Modern: The Rediscovery,” in Jim Edwards, Smith, and Edwards, Texas Modern, 11. 22. Exhibitions such as American Realists and Magic Realists and Romantic Painting in America (both 1943) were thematic. Originally, Miller wanted them all to be part of the same series, but the Americans exhibitions brought together painting and sculpture by artists with heterogeneous aims and inspirations, making them distinct from the thematic shows. As mentioned, Lincoln Kirstein’s involvement was invaluable, but also changed the direction of the show. 23. Dorothy Miller, foreword and acknowledgment in D. Miller and Barr, American Realists and Magic Realists, 5. 24. Lincoln Kirstein, introduction to D. Miller and Barr, American Realists and Magic Realists, 7. 25. D. Miller, foreword to D. Miller, Fourteen Americans, 7. 26. D. Miller, Fourteen Americans, 8. 27. D. Miller, foreword to 15 Americans, 5. 28. Robert Rauschenberg, Bed (1955, oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports, Museum of Modern Art). 29. For Rauschenberg’s Bed, see Kotz, Rauschenberg. I was Mary Lynn Kotz’s research assistant. 30. Glasco worked at a skewed parallel to Rauschenberg. The same year that Rauschenberg created his notorious Bed, Glasco embarked on a full year of images of Salome, the legendary temptress who danced for King Herod in order to secure the head of John the Baptist. Although Glasco’s series can be considered “classical,” and his work of the period is considerably subtler than Rauschenberg’s, both Bed and Glasco’s “Salome” series enact patricidal or matricidal scenes (Rauschenberg’s death bed and Glasco’s castration-anxietyridden “Salome” series).

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31. Joseph Glasco, statement in D. Miller, 15 Americans, 33. 32. Ibid. 33. Alison de Lima Greene, “Joseph Glasco: The Collage Canvases,” in Glasco, Toperzer, and Greene, Joseph Glasco, n.p. 34. On the New York School’s interactions with the mainstream press, see B. Collins, “Life and the Abstract Expressionists.” One of Collins’s chief points is that Life was “essentially supportive on behalf of the vanguard tradition” (283). While I agree in general, the tone and captions in the 1949 Life article on Pollock and in many of the essays in Time (also a Luce publication) encouraged dismissive winks and nods from readers. 35. Life, “Irascible Group of Artists,” 34. The Metropolitan Museum director was Francis Henry Taylor, who served as a juror for the State Fair of Texas Exhibition in 1956. 36. Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s studio was at 46 East 8th Street. After the war, Brooks moved into Krasner and Pollock’s studio when they moved to Springs, East Hampton. Eventually, Brooks likewise moved to Springs. 37. James Brooks, oral history interview, June 10 and 12, 1965, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 38. Ibid. 39. S.P. [Stuart Preston], “Six New Arts Shows.” 40. D. Miller, foreword and acknowledgment in D. Miller, Sixteen Americans, 7. 41. Shortly after Sixteen Americans opened in 1959, the New York Times critic John Canaday wrote a letter to the museum: “For my money, these are the sixteen artists most slated for oblivion”; see L. Pollock, “Mama MoMA.” 42. Milton Rauschenberg chose “Bob” for its ordinary appeal. The name “Robert” was applied later professionally.

43. Jack Boynton, in conversation with the author, June 8, 2007. 44. Halpert had sexual relationships with Charles Sheeler and Holger Cahill, who had earlier been married to Dorothy Miller; see L. Pollock, Girl with the Gallery, for an account of Halpert’s personal and professional lives. 45. Lindsay Pollock made a significant contribution with The Girl with the Gallery, a biography of this largely forgotten immigrant. 46. Life, “New Crop of Painting Protégés.” The article is in black-and-white. 47. None of these artists became household names, although several made strong work for years. They may occupy the same position as Preusser: well known among a small circle, but without national attention today. 48. Life, “New Crop of Painting Protégés,” 87. 49. The location of Preusser’s Cavernous Impression is unknown to the author. 50. Originally published as “The Ideas of Art: Six Opinions on What Is Sublime in Art?” (1948); reprinted as “The Sublime Is Now,” in O’Neil, Barnett Newman. 51. Even if Preusser did not visit Betty Parsons’s gallery to see Newman’s exhibition of 1951, the painting and exhibition created a huge stir in the art world and the gossip channels. Chances are good that Preusser visited Parsons when he was in town doing business with Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery. Postscript

The epigraph is from Dave Hickey, “Roots of Contemporary Texas Art,” 33. The art historian Frances Colpitt pointed the way to rescue Texas regionalism in the twenty-first century in her review of the sculptor and performance artist Ken Little: “His affinity for animals and tooled leather established his reputation as

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a regional artist whose subjects and materials identify him as not only a ‘rural,’ western artist but more specifically—due to associations with cowboys and jackrabbits—a Texan” (“Regionalism without Apology”). The Summer 2004 issue of Artlies, in which Colpitt’s review appears, is dedicated to regionalism and includes “Texas Fusion,” an excellent essay by Michael Ennis. 1. Harold Rosenberg, “American Action Painters.” 2. The full stanza, from Merlin and the Old Woman: J’ai fait des gestes blancs parmi les solitudes Des lémures couraient peupler les cauchemars Mes tournoiements exprimaient les béatitudes Qui toutes ne sont rien qu’un pur effet de l’Art

3. Ernest Hemingway’s short story “A Clean, WellLighted Place” was published in 1933. 4. Dave Hickey is a Texan. Born in Fort Worth (1940), he studied at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and then Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. He earned an MA (in linguistics) in 1963 from the University of Texas at Austin, where he also hung around and scouted for decent art. He opened A Clean Well-Lighted Place with his then-wife Mary Jane Taylor at 2300 Rio Grande, moving to 600 West 12th in 1969. A significant exhibition, South Texas Sweet Funk, organized by A Clean Well-Lighted Place was held at St. Edward’s University. In 1971, Hickey and Mary Jane moved to New York City; the gallery closed a few months later. In 2001, Hickey’s renown as an art writer, critic, and curator earned him a MacArthur “genius” award. 5. The full quotation: “In fact, that first show I did for Jim Franklin was a show of his abstract paintings. At that time, abstract painting was Jim’s vocation. Shiva’s Headband album covers were his day job” (Hickey, “Generation Gaffe”).

6. Glenn Whitehead first developed the armadillo theme in 1966 for the University of Texas student magazine The Texas Ranger, earning him the campus nickname “Armadillo Man.” Whitehead also “had the pleasure of working with Dave Hickey several times” (Whitehead’s personal website, accessed May 2, 1012, http://glennwhitehead.com /biograph.html). Evidently, Whitehead’s and Franklin’s mammalian depictions differed anyhow. By the time Franklin began using the armadillo, Whitehead had ceased using the symbol; see Richmond, “Iconographic Analysis of the Armadillo,” 29–31. 7. Hickey, “Generation Gaffe.” 8. Hickey, “Roots of Contemporary Texas Art,” 33. 9. Duchamp and Picabia possessed ample humor. For that reason and for their prescient observations on American society, the New York Dada of Duchamp has been mined by postmodernists. 10. The idea that modernist art was a purely formal, apolitical expression made Abstract Expressionism a cause célèbre of the 1950s. The complicated situation is replete with irony. See the sources listed in chapter two and Guilbaut’s classic How New York Stole the Idea of the Avant-Garde. 11. Ed Ruscha, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas (1963, oil on canvas, 64½" × 121¾", Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire). 12. Robert Smithson is often characterized as postmodern, but the somberness of his endeavor, his ancient and primitive sources, and the monumental heroism behind his achievements are hallmarks of a late modernist. He certainly is not, however, a Greenbergian type of modernist.

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Rudolph, William. “Julian Onderdonk through the Looking Glass: What He (and We) Found There.” Lecture delivered at the caseta (Center for the Advancement and Study of Early Texas Art) Annual Conference, Dallas, April 12, 2007. Storr, Robert. “Regionalism in the 21st Century: A Panel Discussion.” Lecture delivered at the Amon Carter Museum of Art, Fort Worth, May 7, 2011. Selected Websites

Some of these websites provide catalogues, exhibition records, images, or detailed data not found elsewhere online or in print publications. Center for the Advancement and Study of Early Texas Art. http://www.caseta.org/. Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Exhibition history online: http://www.camh.org/exhibitions /archive.

David Dike Fine Art. http://www.daviddike.com/art ists.html. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Exhibition history online: http://prv.mfah.org/archives/search.asp?p ar1=3&showid=870&extitle=salute+oil&exartist= &syear=&eyear=&cPg=1. San Antonio Art League Museum. Online catalogue of the permanent collection: http://www.saalm .org/permanent.html. Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections. Texas State Historical Association: A Digital Gateway to Texas History. http://www.tshaonline.org/. William Reaves Fine Art. http://reavesart.com/.

Illustration Credits

1.01 Downtown Gallery records, Edith Halpert Collection at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of Eric Preusser. 1.02 Courtesy of George and Beverly Palmer and of Eric Preusser. 1.03 Courtesy of Tom and Tam Kiehnhoff and of Richard Stout. 1.04 Courtesy of Randy Tibbits and Rick Bebermeyer. Photograph by Earlie Hudnall, Jr. 1.05 Blanton Museum of Art, the University of Texas at Austin, gift of D. D. Feldman, 1964. 1.06 Courtesy of the Summers Collection and the Estate of Toni LaSelle. 1.07 Courtesy of Linda and William Reaves and copyright © Cynthia Brants Trust. 1.08 Menil Collection. Photograph by Paul Hester. 1.09 Courtesy of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum. 1.10 Courtesy of Collection of Charles M. Peveto, Austin. 1.11 Courtesy of Richard D. Hardin and of the Estate of William Lester. 1.12 Courtesy of George and Beverly Palmer and of the Estate of Alexandre Hogue.

1.13 Courtesy of the Bobbie and John L. Nau Collection. 1.14 Courtesy of Georgia O’Keeffe Estate and licensed by Artists’ Rights Society. 2.01 Collection of Sam and Julie Stevens. 2.02 Private collection. Photograph courtesy of the Georgia Museum of Art. 2.03 Alexandre Hogue. 1936 Museum purchase, 1946.4. © 2014 the Philbrook Museum of Art, Inc. Tulsa, Oklahoma. 2.04 Courtesy of the Albritton Trusts and copyright © Jerry Bywaters Special Collections, Hamon Arts Library, Southern Methodist University. 2.05 Courtesy of Scott Grant Barker. 2.06 Dallas Museum of Art, gift of an anonymous friend. 2.07 Courtesy of the Geralyn and Mark Kever Collection. 2.08 Courtesy of George and Beverly Palmer and of Paul Lester. 2.09 Blanton Museum of Art, the University of Texas at Austin, Michener Acquisitions Fund, 1984. Copyright © Jerry Bywaters Special Collections, Hamon Arts Library, Southern Methodist University.

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2.10 Courtesy of the James E. Sowell Collection. 2.11 The quote is from “Assembling the Puzzle of Early Texas Art,” Texas Heritage 1 [2011]: 42. The image (2007_15_56) is courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art, the Barrett Collection, Dallas, Texas. 2.12 Courtesy of George and Beverly Palmer. 2.13 Courtesy of Ray W. Washburne. 2.14 University Art Collection, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. Gift of the Senior Classes of 1939 and 1940, uac.1940.02. 2.15 Courtesy of the Geralyn and Mark Kever Collection and the Estate of Everett Spruce. 2.16 Private collection. Photograph courtesy of the Georgia Museum of Art. 2.17 Courtesy of the Geralyn and Mark Kever Collection. 2.18 Courtesy of Grace Museum; gift of Claire Tate 1947.008.001. 2.19 Dallas Museum of Art; gift of A. H. Belo Corporation and the Dallas Morning News. 2.20 Blanton Museum of Art, the University of Texas at Austin; gift of the artist, 1971. 2.21 Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum; gift of the artist in memory of his wife, Maggie (1969.50.2). 2.22 Copyright © Dallas Museum of Art; gift of Helen, Mick, and Thomas Spellman. 2.23 Courtesy of the Army Art Collection, U.S. Army Center of Military History, Washington, D.C. 2.24 Courtesy of the Army Art Collection, U.S. Army Center of Military History, Washington, D.C. 2.25 Courtesy of Richard G. Hardin. 2.26 Gift of Professor Paul Peter Hatgil, Collection of Martin Museum of Art, Baylor University. Photograph courtesy of Bob Smith.

2.27 Jerry Bywaters Collection on Art of the Southwest, circa 1900–1989, Jerry Bywaters Special Collections, Hamon Arts Library, Southern Methodist University. 3.01 Courtesy of private collection, Keller, Texas. 3.02 Paris, Grand Palais, Room 11 (Cubists) (Published in “Au Salon d’Automne,” L’Illustration, no. 3633, October 12, 1912, 268). 3.03 Courtesy of Randy Tibbits and Rick Bebermeyer. Photograph by Earlie Hudnall, Jr. 3.04 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Twelfth Annual Houston Artists Exhibition, museum purchase prize, 1936. 3.05 Courtesy of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum. 3.06 Courtesy of the Collection of David Lackey and Russell Prince. 3.07 Courtesy of Randy Tibbits and Rick Bebermeyer. Photograph by Earlie Hudnall, Jr. 3.08 Courtesy of Randy Tibbits and Rick Bebermeyer. Photograph by Earlie Hudnall, Jr. 3.09 Courtesy of the Collection of Richard Stout and the Estate of Frank Dolejska. 3.10 Courtesy of the Collection of Linda and William Reaves and the Estate of Frank Dolejska. 3.11 Courtesy of the Collection of James and Kimel Baker and of Eric Preusser. 3.12 Courtesy of the Summers Collection and of Eric Preusser. 3.13 Courtesy of the Summers Collection and of Eric Preusser. 3.14 The quote is taken from an oral history interview with Robert O. Preusser, 1991 Jan.–Oct., Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; transcript in the public domain. The image is courtesy of the Summers Collection and Eric Preusser.

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4.01 Courtesy of the Collection of Elizabeth Culwell-Collins and the Estate of Ben L. Culwell. 4.02 Courtesy of the Geralyn and Mark Kever Collection and Elizabeth Culwell-Collins and the Estate of Ben L. Culwell. 4.03 Courtesy of the Collection of Roula and Vincent Jarrard and Elizabeth Culwell-Collins and the Estate of Ben L. Culwell. 4.04 Courtesy of Elizabeth Collins and the Estate of Ben L. Culwell. 4.05 Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by scala /Art Resource, NY; and courtesy of Elizabeth Culwell-Collins and the Estate of Ben L. Culwell. 4.06 Culwell, Ben L. (1918–1992) Copyright Death by Burning (c. 1942). Purchase (4.01947). Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by scala /Art Resource, NY; and courtesy of Elizabeth Culwell-Collins and the Estate of Ben L. Culwell. 4.07 Courtesy of Elizabeth Culwell-Collins and the Estate of Ben L. Culwell. 4.08 Courtesy of the Geralyn and Mark Kever Collection and Elizabeth Culwell-Collins and the Estate of Ben L. Culwell. 4.09 Courtesy of the Woman’s Collection, Texas Woman’s University, Denton, Texas. 4.10 Courtesy of the Geralyn and Mark Kever Collection. 4.11 Courtesy of the Woman’s Collection, Texas Woman’s University, Denton, Texas. 4.12 Courtesy of the Woman’s Collection, Texas Woman’s University, Denton, Texas. 4.13 Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; gift of the Frank Freed Memorial Painting Fund. 4.14 Courtesy of private collection, Dallas, and courtesy of Barry Whistler Gallery and the Estate of Toni LaSelle. Photograph by Allison V. Smith.

4.15 Stout, Myron (1908–1987) Copyright ©. Number 3, 1954. Oil on canvas, 20⅛" × 16" (50.9 × 40.6 cm). Philip Johnson Fund, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, usa. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by scala /Art Resource, NY. Courtesy of Joan Washburn Gallery for the Estate of Myron Stout. 4.16 Copyright © 1988 Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas; gift of the artist, P1981.35.4. 4.17 Copyright © 1988 Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas; gift of the artist, P1981.35.1. 4.18 Courtesy of Charles and Amy Attal. 4.19 The Cartin Collection. 4.20 The Menil Collection, Houston; bequest of Jermayne MacAgy. 4.21 The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; gift of Duke Energy. 4.22 Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) Copyright vaga, NY. Flag. 1954–55 (dated on reverse 1954). Gift of Philip Johnson in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, usa. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by scala /Art Resource, NY and Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. 4.23 Untitled (The Dicks) by Forrest Bess, copyright © 1946. Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Logan, Utah; gift of the Marie Eccles Caine Foundation. 5.01 Courtesy of anonymous private collection, Fort Worth, Texas, and Pam Arnoult. 5.02 Courtesy of Kathryn and Morris Matson Collection and George Grammer. 5.03 Courtesy of Beth and David Dike. 5.04 From the Collection of the Old Jail Art Center, Albany, Texas; gift of Bill Bomar. 1986.013.

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5.05 Courtesy of Tom and Tam Kiehnhoff. 5.06 Courtesy of Dow Art Galleries, Fort Worth, Texas, and Mr. Charles and Gaylon Smith; art copyright © the Estate of Kelly Fearing/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. 5.07 Courtesy of the Summers Collection. 5.08 Courtesy of Richard G. Hardin and Mr. Charles and Gaylon Smith; and courtesy of the Estate of Kelly Fearing, copyright © Estate of Kelly Fearing/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. 5.09 Courtesy of the Collection of Linda and William Reaves and of Mr. Charles and Gaylon Smith and the Estate of Kelly Fearing; art copyright © the Estate of Kelly Fearing/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. 5.10 Courtesy of Mr. Charles and Gaylon Smith; art copyright © the Estate of Kelly Fearing/ Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. 5.11 Courtesy of Scott Grant Barker and Pam Arnoult. 5.12 Courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art, Lida Hooe Memorial Fund. 5.13 Courtesy and copyright © the Cynthia Brants Trust. 5.14 Courtesy of Dow Art Galleries, Fort Worth, Texas. 5.15 Courtesy of Dow Art Galleries, Fort Worth, Texas. 5.16 Courtesy of Scott Grant Barker and Margery Brinkley. 5.17 Courtesy of the Estate of McKie Trotter. 5.18 Courtesy of the Estate of McKie Trotter. Photograph by Morgan Hollie Womack. 5.19 Courtesy of the Summers Collection and the Estate of McKie Trotter. 6.01 Courtesy of the Collection of James and Kimel Baker. 6.02 Courtesy of the Summers Collection.

6.03 Courtesy of the Collection of James and Kimel Baker. 6.04 Courtesy of the Collection of Susan H. and Claude C. Albritton. 6.05 Winter Fields, 1942 tempera © Andrew Wyeth. Tempera, oil, ink, and gesso on composition board, 17 ⁵∕₁₆ × 41 in. (44 × 104.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Benno C. Schmidt, in memory of Mr. Josiah Marvel, first owner of this picture 77.91. Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins. 6.06 Courtesy of private collection. 6.07 Courtesy of Andrews Kurth llp. 6.08 Gift of Professor Paul Peter Hatgil, Collection of Martin Museum of Art, Baylor University. Photograph courtesy of Bob Smith. 6.09 Courtesy of the Collection of James and Kimel Baker and of Ruby White for the Estate of Ralph White. 6.10 Courtesy of the Collection of James and Kimel Baker and of Ruby White for the Estate of Ralph White. 6.11 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase 58.34. Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins. 6.12 Courtesy of the Geralyn and Mark Kever Collection. 6.13 Courtesy of Richard D. Hardin and the Estate of William Lester. 6.14 Courtesy of Harvell-Spradling Collection and the Estate of William Lester. 6.15 Courtesy of Richard D. Hardin. 6.16 Courtesy of the Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum and the Estate of Charles Umlauf. 6.17 Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas; purchase funded by Dr. and Mrs. Douglass Hyde.

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6.18 Tyler Museum of Art, purchase with funds donated by Amy and Vernon Faulconer, 2008.2. Courtesy of Karl Umlauf. 6.19 Courtesy of Susan Forsyth Selby Sklar. Photograph courtesy of Ben Sklar. 6.20 Courtesy of Susan Forsyth Selby Sklar. Photograph courtesy of Ben Sklar. 6.21 Courtesy of the Summers Collection. Photograph courtesy of Gayle Laurel. Art copyright © Seymour Fogel/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. 6.22 Courtesy of the Summers Collection and copyright © Fogel Art llc and copyright © the Estate of Seymour Fogel/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. 6.23 Courtesy of Harvell-Spradling Collection and copyright © Fogel Art llc and copyright © the Estate of Seymour Fogel/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. 6.24 Courtesy of the Summers Collection and copyright © Fogel Art llc and copyright © the Estate of Seymour Fogel/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. 6.25 Courtesy of the Summers Collection and copyright © Fogel Art llc and copyright © the Estate of Seymour Fogel/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. 6.26 Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Dallas Morning News. Image of Fogel Art copyright © the Estate of Seymour Fogel/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY; image of Weismann courtesy of Anne W. Shea; image of Boynton courtesy of Sharon Boynton. 6.27 Courtesy of the Summers Collection and of Anne W. Shea. 6.28 Courtesy of Richard G. Hardin. Art copyright © the Estate of Michael Frary/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY.

6.29 Gift of Dorothy and Terrell Blodgett, Collection of the Martin Museum of Art, Baylor University. Photograph courtesy of Bob Smith. Art copyright © the Estate of Michael Frary/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. 6.30 Gift of Dorothy and Terrell Blodgett, Collection of the Martin Museum of Art, Baylor University. Photograph courtesy of Bob Smith. Art copyright © the Estate of Michael Frary/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. 6.31 Courtesy of the Bobbie and John Nau Collection. Art copyright © the Estate of Michael Frary/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. 6.32 Courtesy of the Collection of Linda and William Reaves and the Estate of Bill Reily. 6.33 Courtesy of Carl R. McQueary. 6.34 Courtesy of the Summers Collection. 6.35 Courtesy of the Summers Collection and of Kim Williams Boyd and the Estate of Hiram Williams. 6.36 Courtesy of Charles and Amy Attal and of Kim Williams Boyd and the Estate of Hiram Williams. 6.37 Blanton Museum of Art, the University of Texas at Austin, gift of Mari and James A. Michener, 1991, and courtesy of Kim Williams Boyd and the Estate of Hiram Williams. 7.01 Courtesy of the Collection of Linda and William Reaves and of Ava Jean Mears. 7.02 Courtesy of Harvell-Spradling Collection. 7.03 Maurice Miller, photographer. American Federation of Arts records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 7.04 Courtesy of Gwen Weiner and copyright © the Estate of Michael Frary/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. 7.05 Courtesy of the Summers Collection.

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7.06 Ogden Museum of Southern Art, gift of the Roger H. Ogden Collection and courtesy of Eric Preusser. 7.07 Courtesy of Harvell-Spradling Collection and courtesy of Eric Preusser. 7.08 Dallas Museum of Fine Art; art copyright © John T. Biggers Estate/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. 7.09 The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; gift of Duke Energy; art copyright © John T. Biggers Estate/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. 7.10 Reprinted from Black Art in Houston: The Texas Southern University Experience by John Biggers and Carroll Simms (1978). Used by permission of Texas a&m University Press. 7.11 Photograph courtesy of Amanda Slater. 7.12 Courtesy of the Collection of Linda and William Reaves and of David Adickes. 7.13 Courtesy of the Collection of Linda and William Reaves and of Henri Gadbois. 7.14 Courtesy of the Collection of Linda and William Reaves and of Leila McConnell. 7.15 Courtesy of Randy Tibbits and Rick Bebermeyer. Photograph by Earlie Hudnall, Jr. 7.16 Courtesy of Bill and Linda Reaves and of Stella Sullivan. 7.17 Brooklyn Museum of Art, gift of Clara Radoff; and courtesy of Dr. Krishna Dronamraju for the Estate of Dorothy Hood. 7.18 Philadelphia Museum of Art; gift of Mrs. Eugene H. Wagner, 1960; and courtesy of Dr. Krishna Dronamraju for the Estate of Dorothy Hood. 7.19 Courtesy of Harvell-Spradling Collection and of Sharon Boynton. 7.20 Courtesy of Sharon Boynton. 7.21 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Allade

Foundation, Inc. 58.35. Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins and courtesy of Sharon Boynton. 7.22 Blanton Museum of Art, the University of Texas at Austin, gift of D. D. Feldman, 1964; and courtesy of Sharon Boynton. 7.23 The Menil Collection and courtesy of Sharon Boynton. 7.24 Courtesy of Sharon Boynton; photographic assistance from Sondra Brady. 7.25 Courtesy of Collection of Charles M. Peveto, Austin, and of Richard Stout. 7.26 Courtesy of George and Beverly Palmer. 7.27 Courtesy of the Collection of Tara Lewis and John Swords, Dallas, Texas, and courtesy of Richard Stout. 7.28 Courtesy of the Collection of Rick and Nancy Rome and of Richard Stout. 7.29 Scan of slide courtesy of Richard Stout. 7.30 Courtesy of the Summers Collection and of the Estate of Dick Wray. 7.31 Courtesy of the Estate of Dick Wray, with special thanks to Robert Wray. 7.32 Photograph by Nishan Bichajian for Leonardo magazine, summer 1973, p. 206. Courtesy of the mit Press, mit School of Architecture; and courtesy of Robert Preusser. 8.01 Photograph by Charles Truett Williams, courtesy of Karl B. Williams Collection. Special thanks to Karl B. Williams and Scott Grant Barker. 8.02 Photograph by Robert LaPrelle. Courtesy of Karl B. Williams. 8.03 Courtesy of the Collection of Gwendolyn Weiner; and courtesy of Palm Springs Art Museum and reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation. 8.04 Courtesy of Howald Family Collection, St. Louis, and courtesy of Karl B. Williams.

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8.05 Photograph by Robert LaPrelle. Courtesy of Karl B. Williams. 8.06 Courtesy of Sharon Boynton and of Karl B. Williams. Photograph by Karl B. Williams with assistance from Sondra Brady. 8.07 Courtesy of Ridglea Country Club, Fort Worth, and courtesy of Karl B. Williams. 8.08 Courtesy of Ridglea Country Club, Fort Worth, and courtesy of Karl B. Williams. 8.09 Photograph by Robert LaPrelle. Courtesy of Karl B. Williams. 8.10 Courtesy of Karl B. Williams. 8.11 Courtesy of San Antonio Art League and of Karl B. Williams. 8.12 Pencil drawing by Johnna S. Robinson. 8.13 Courtesy of Karl B. Williams and of Elizabeth C. Moody and the Estate of Roy Fridge. 8.14 Courtesy of Karl B. Williams and of Norma McManaway, representative of the McManaway Estate, Dallas, Texas. 8.15 Courtesy of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum. 8.16 Digital Image copyright © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by scala /Art Resource, NY, copyright © the Estate of Jim Love. 8.17 Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; gift of Elizabeth B. Blake. Photograph by Kevin Todora, copyright © the Estate of Jim Love. 8.18 This image is not licensed by Warner Bros. and author in no way intends to infringe on Warner Bros. copyright. Drawing by Lee T. Edwards. 8.19 The Baltimore Museum of Art; gift of Alan Wurtzburger, bma 1954.145.44. 8.20 Photograph by Robert LaPrelle. Courtesy of Karl B. Williams. 8.21 Princeton University Library Circus Poster Collection, Graphic Arts, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

8.22 From the Collection of the Old Jail Art Center, Albany, Texas, and courtesy of Ruth Storms. 8.23 The New Growing the Mesembs (asin: B00071N5V8); reproduced with permission of Ruth Storms. 8.24 Courtesy of the Summers Collection and of Ruth Storms. 8.25 Used with permission of the Dallas Museum of Art and courtesy of Elizabeth C. Moody and the Estate of Roy Fridge. 8.26 Courtesy of Karl B. Williams. 8.27 Courtesy of the Summers Collection and of Gene Owens. 8.28 Courtesy of the Summers Collection and of Gene Owens. 8.29 Photograph courtesy of the Old Jail Art Center, Albany, Texas, and courtesy of Gene Owens, artist and owner. 8.30 Courtesy of the Summers Collection and of Gene Owens. 8.31 Art copyright © Alberto Giacometti Estate/ Licensed by vaga and ars, New York, NY © vaga, NY & ars, NY. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital Image copyright © the Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by scala /Art Resource, NY. 8.32 Courtesy of Gwen Weiner. Photograph courtesy of Janet Tyson. 9.01 Photograph courtesy of Octavio Medellín Papers, copyright © Jerry Bywaters Special Collections, Hamon Arts Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. 9.02 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase 52.4. Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins. 9.03 Kay Bell Reynal, photographer. Photographs of artists taken by Kay Bell Reynal, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 9.04 Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc., © 2009.

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9.05 Courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate. 9.06 Blanton Museum of Art, the University of Texas at Austin; gift of Dr. and Mrs. Paul L. White, 1986; art copyright © the Estate of James Brooks/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. 9.07 naa-Thomas C. Woods Acquisition Fund of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln; art copyright © the Estate of James Brooks/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. 9.08 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 59.1546; art copyright © the Estate of James Brooks/Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. 9.09 Courtesy of Collection of Charles M. Peveto, Austin, Texas, and courtesy of Eric Preusser.

Index

bio/exh refers to Selected Artists’ Biographies entries. pictured refers to photographs of artists. Boldface page numbers refer to figures. Above the Falls on the Pedernales River (Lungkwitz), 17 Abstract Bronze (Owens), 233–234 (233) Abstract Expressionism, 297–298n10, 301n62, 314n24; and African American artists, 183; “all-over” painting of, 147; Bess and, 104; Biggers and, 181–182; Brooks and, 248; and the cia, 334n1; Culwell and, 84, 88; Duchamp on, 324n4; Fogel and, 271; Glasco and, 245–246; Hiram Williams and, 166–167; international emergence of, 105; Johns and, 111; loss of effectiveness of, 2; in New York, 2–4, 10, 24, 240–241, 248, 260, 301n62; parody of, 3; Preusser and, 178; Romare Bearden and, 326n22; and the U.S. government, 334n1 abstraction, 26–27; in Texas, 6–7, 20, 59, 70, 183–184, 240–241. See also Abstract Expressionism Abstraction (Frary), 161–162 (162)

abstractionism and communism, 334n1 “abstract surrealism,” 188 Adams, Kenneth, 138, 140 Adams, Wayman, 120 Adickes, Ava Jean, 185–186 Adickes, David, 184–186, 327nn43–44; works: Still Life with Lime, Melon Slices, 185 African Americans and segregation, 218–219 Aftermath (Boynton), 193 (193) Air Raid (Fearing), 124 Alamo, 5, 8, 16, 18, 299nn37–38 Albers, Josef, 205 Altman, Ralph C., 175 Ambiance (Boynton), 192–193 (192) American Abstract Artists, 81, 155, 241 “American Action Painters” (Rosenberg), 10, 257 “American” art, 11, 255 American Art since 1945 (Ashton), 241 American Federation of Arts (afa) convention, 169, 171–173 (172) Amon Carter Museum, 128 Ancient Warrior (Williams), 214 (214) Angelico, Fra. See Madonna and Child (Fra Angelico)

Ankeney, John Sites, 33, 304n27 Annual Texas Painting and Sculpture Exhibition, 134, 159 Annunciation, The (Fearing), 125 Ant Farm, 261; works: Cadillac Ranch, 261–262 antiheroes in Texas history, 9–10 antimodernism, 41–42 “apocalyptic wallpaper,” 2, 3 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 92, 257 Aquarist, The (Fearing), 125 Archipenko, Alexander, 18, 63 “Architecture and Modern Art” (Fogel and Weisman), 159 Arensberg, Walter and Louise, 300n44 Armadillo World Headquarters, 258–259 Armory Show, New York, 20–21, 301nn50–51; Salon d’Automne artists in, 63; Walter Pach and 18, 80; Ward Lockwood and, 138 Arp, Jean (Hans), 208, 210, 234, 318n105, 329–330n8 Arpa, José, 15, 242 Art and Artists of Texas (ForresterO’Brien), 8–9, 35 “Art and Objecthood” (Fried), 204

366  |  MIDCENTURY MODERN ART IN TEXAS Art Center (on Broadway, San Antonio), 164 Art Center School (Los Angeles), 77 Art Digest, 158, 176–177, 189 Art Digest Texas Centennial issue, 34– 35, 40 Art in America (Bywaters), 135 Art of This Century Gallery, 105, 201–202 Art That Broke the Looking-Glass, The, cover design (Fridge), 229 Ashcan school, 20–21, 297–298n10 Ashton, Dore, 241–242 Askew, Rual, 230 As Never (Dolejska), 69 (69) Association of American Painters and Sculptors, 20 At Bert Willoughby’s Sportatorium (Travis), 44–45 (45) Austere Charade, An (Hood), 189 (189) Austin, Dorothy, 39, 219; works: Noggin, 39 Austin, Stephen F., 8, 15, 17 Autry, Gene, 29–30, 303n3 Baartman, Saartjie “Sarah,” 226, 332n55 Bacon, Francis, 166 Bailey, Carden, 67, 68, 311n29 Baker, Paul, 213, 215, 230, 330n15 Barker, Scott Grant: Fort Worth circle and, 120, 131, 319n1, 320n25, 329n3, 333n77; on Gentilz, 300n39; Intimate Modernism exhibition, 118; on Storms, 227; on Travis, 46 Barnes, Albert C., 64 Barnes, Edward Larrabee, 175, 211, 330n11 Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 240–241; on “abstract” as an aesthetic designation, 26–27; chart of modern art by, 58– 59, 81, 308–309nn94–96; Cubism

and Abstract Art exhibition, 81; and Culwell, 79, 85; and Dix exhibition, 85; and Dorothy Canning Miller, 335n6; Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition, 80; and MoMA, 240– 241; and Oppenheim, 328n56 Barr, Howard, 158 Barrett, Richard and Nona, 11 Bates, David, 149 Bats in a Cave (Treuter), 131 Baudelaire, Charles, 23 Bauhaus, German, 75–77, 91, 103; Corpron and, 103; Drewes and, 81; Gropius and, 72, 76; Itten and, 315n65; Mies and, 61, 76, 312n53; Moholy-Nagy and, 75–77, 94, 312n53, 315n65; Preusser and, 76–77, 205, 254; Schlemmer and, 315n65; Wiegart and, 196 Bauhaus journal, 75–76 Baur, John I. H., 147 Baziotes, William, 180 Beach Castles (Trotter), 134, 135 Bearden, Romare, 326n22 Beasley, David, 333n68 Beaumont, Texas, 4 Beaux, Cecilia, 249 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 231–232 Bell, The (John), 67 Bellows, George, 34, 44 Benners, Eleanor, 79 Benton, Thomas Hart: Constance Forsyth and, 152; depictions of blacks by, 180–181; and Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 41; Eleanor Onderdonk and, 18; on his early works, 42, 180–181, 306n56; political views of, 306n56, 306–307n59 Bess, Forrest Clemenger, 62, 104– 113, 232, 260; John Yau on, 9, 318n115; as locus of heroism, 10,

298n22; self-surgery, 318n114, 318– 319nn118–119; bio/exh: 263–264; works: Untitled (1935), 105; Untitled (1947), 10; Untitled (No. 5) (1949), 106; Untitled (The Dicks) (1946), 111– 112 (112); Untitled 11A (1958), 109– 111 (110); View of Maya, 107 Betty Moody Gallery, 327n42 Betty Parsons Gallery, 105, 107, 254, 319n119 Beuys, Joseph, 201 Beyond Regionalism (Gillespie), 117 Beyond Regionalism exhibition, 117, 118, 321n32 Biggers, John, 178–182, 184, 191; works: Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa, 181; The Contribution of Negro Women mural, 180; Cotton Pickers, 180; The Cradle, 179, 180; Despair, 180; Dying Soldier, 179; Jubilee: Ghana Harvest Festival, 181; Sleeping Boy, 180 (180); Two Heads, 180 Big Pecans (Mozley), 143–144 (144) Billboard (Spruce), 147 (147) biomorphism, Surrealist, 70, 77 Bird Trap (Boynton), 191–192 (191) Bisttram, Emil, 31, 303n11, 305n31 Blackshear, Kathleen: as Art Institute influence, 196, 199; Chicago composition class led by, 199, 200, 328n69; bio/exh, 264; works: Kitchen Table, 197; Texas Synthesis, 12 (12) Black Wave (Stout), 197 Blaffer, Sarah Campbell, 62–63 Blake, William, 189 Blanc, Flora, 120 “Bluebonnet School,” 15, 117 Bomar, William Wells “Bill,” 121–123, 129, 207; in Fort Worth Circle, 117; Old Jail Art Center and, 117; in Weyhe Gallery exhibition, 121; bio/exh, 264–265; works: Avocado,

I N D E X  |   3 6 7 121–122; Day Observation for a Harlequin, 122–123; Flora, 122; Jewel’s Feathered Hat, 122; Medea’s Bath, 122, 123; Sara, 122 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon, 301n59 Bonner, Mary, 62 Boswell, Peyton, 34 Bower, Anthony, 168 Bowie, James, 8, 16, 299n38 Bowling, Charles T., 52–53; works: Church at the Crossroads, 39; Down Stream, 52; Low Land, 52; Sunflowers, 52; Texas Landscape, 52 (52); Texas Windstorm, 53; Trailerville, 52, 53 Boynton, Ann Williams, pictured, 206 Boynton, James W. “Jack,” 191–196; and Charles T. Williams, 207, 213; on dealers mining Texas for artists, 240, 253; event motif of, 328n65; expressionism, 259; and Texas modernism, 12; bio/exh: 265–266; pictured: 206; works: Aftermath, 193 (193); Ambiance, 192–193 (192); Appian Way, 195–196; Arch, 192; Bird Trap, 191–192 (191); David and Goliath, 195; Guyed Form, 193; Homage to Constantin Brancusi, 195; Identity Being Consumed by Its Own Offspring, 195 (195); Inland Lights, 193; Jerry’s Nail, 195, 195; Outpost, 194 (194); Samson and Delilah, 195 Boynton Methodist Church, 182 Brancusi, Constantin, 242 Brands, H. W., 299n25 Brants, Cynthia: in Fort Worth Circle, 117, 129, 207; bio/exh: 266; works: Still Life (in Light from Window), 7; Still Life with Bones, 129 Braque, Georges, 27 Breckenridge, Hugh Henry, 63 Brenson, Michael, 113 Breton, André, 86, 190, 217, 220

Brisac, Edith: pictured, 89; works: Still Life, 90 Bromberg, Alan R., 229 Brooks, James, 207, 248–251, 260, 312n2, 337n36; pictured: 249; works: Dolamen, 252; Oil Well at Sunset, 250; U-1951, 251 Brooks, Van Wyck, 33, 70 Brown, Don, 59 Brownlow, David, 117, 325n10; works: Untitled (1956), 119 Brown v. Board of Education, 218 Brushy Hillside (Spruce), 146, 147 Bryant, Keith L., Jr., 41 Bugbee, Harold, 303n6 Bugs Bunny Which Is Witch episode, 222–224 (223), 226 Buñuel, Luis, 190; works: Un Chien Andalou, 190 Burke, Edmund, 200 Bywaters, Williamson Gerald “Jerry,” 308n90; accused of promoting communism, 230; and Culwell, 84; as Dallas Nine member, 19, 30; as director of Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 43, 57, 299n29; and Great Hall mural, 30–31, 33; and move to modernism, 172; and Paris style, 41–42, 72; on regionalism, 42–43; and Texas Centennial, 30– 31, 35; and Trotter, 134–135; bio/ exh: 266–267; works: In the Chair Car, 37–38 (38), 41, 49, 306n47; Oil Field Girls, 43; Tree of Texas Painting, 58–59 (59), 70 Cabrera, Miguel, 16; works: San Sabá Mission Painting, 16 Cadillac Ranch (Ant Farm), 261–262 Cahill, Holger, 155, 241 Calligraphic Forms (Preusser), 178 (178), 256

Canaday, John, 168 Cantey, Sam iii, 207 Carnohan, Harry, 39; works: West Texas Landscape, 39 Carra, Carlo, 244 Carraro, Francine, 14, 147, 230, 306n47 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 171 Casebier, Cecil, 164 Cassatt, Mary, 249 Catcher of the Yellow Bird (Fearing), 125 Cat Cracker/Refinery (Mears), 170, 186 Catherine Viviano Gallery, 245 Catlett, Elizabeth, 179 Cavelier, Robert, 30 Cedar Tavern (New York), 207 Centennial Art Exhibition, 35, 50 Chac-Mool figures, 208, 215, 219–220 Charlton, Gene, 67, 68, 311nn29, 34; works: Glowing Through, 68; Untitled (1956), 68 Chase, William Merritt, 63, 249, 300n41 Cherry, Emma Richardson, 62, 63–67, 300n44; bio/exh: 267–268; works: Study in Compositional Spaces, 65 Children Carrying Driftwood—Fisher Watching (Fearing), 119, 120 Chillman, James, 62, 71–72, 179–180, 188 Chirico, Giorgio de, 244 Christ and the Lambs (Simms), 182, 183 Cinderland Cedar (Locke), 46, 48 (48), 49 Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art, 71–73 A Clean Well-Lighted Place (Austin), 258, 338n4 Close, Chuck, 322n6 Collector, The (Fearing), 125 Collins, Lowell, 192; pictured: 172 Colpitt, Frances, 329n81 communist scare, 255, 334n1 Conclave (Fogel), 157 (157)

368  |  MIDCENTURY MODERN ART IN TEXAS Condon, Bill, 12, 169; works: Houston Ship Channel, 13 Constructivism, 71–73, 75, 77, 155, 205, 254, 315n61 Contemporary American Art Exhibition (1939 World’s Fair), 243–244 Contemporary Arts Association/Museum (caa/cam), 176, 178, 180; Pacemakers, 171, 213; Painting, Sculpture, Ceramics by the Students and Faculty of the Texas Southern University, 180; This is Contemporary Art, 176; Totems Not Taboo, 61, 169, 174–175, 223–224 Continuum (Williams), 208 (208), 211 Copley, John Singleton, 15 Corn, Wanda M., 297n7 Cornell, Joseph, 229 Corpron, Carlotta Mae: and Denton, Texas, 104; egg compositions, 318n105; as Little Chapel-in-theWoods sponsor, 89 (89); and Moholy-Nagy, 100–102, 317n99; photograms, 101–103, 317n92; bio/exh: 268; pictured, 89; works: Church in Havana, 101; Design with Oil Tank, 101; Glass Cubes and Patterned Bricks, 102; Light Circles, 101; Light Volumes, 102; Oil Tanks with Bridge, 102 Cotton Pickers (Dozier), 51 Covarrubias, Miguel, 188; works: Tree of Modern Art, 58, 308–309n94, 309n95 Cox, Kenyon, 249 Cram, Ralph, 65 Cranbrook Art Academy, 182 Craven, Thomas, 41 Cret, Paul, 30 Cubism, 203; Bomar and, 121; Brants and, 266; Cherry and, 63; depicting multiple moments, 93; emergence of, 20, 27; exhibitions featuring, 58, 63, 64; Fogel and, 156;

Frary and, 173 (173); Gabo on, 71– 72; Hiram Williams on, 168; Kinzinger and, 41; Lhote and, 310n19; Mears and, 186; Moholy-Nagy and, 315n61; Mozley and, 140, 141, 143; and music as fourth dimension, 178; Preusser and, 74, 75, 203; Spruce and, 244; Trotter and, 134 Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition, 81 Cuilty, Lia, 122 Cullinan, Joseph S., 62 Cullinan, Nina J., 61, 171, 174–176 “culture,” double meaning of term, 3–4 Culwell, Ben L.: Coates on, 314n24; Dallas Allied Arts Exhibition award given to, 82; Dallas Museum of Art one-man show by, 314n38– 39; early life of, 79; and expressionism, 260; and Everett Spruce, 82; in Fourteen Americans exhibition, 84– 87, 239; move to New York by, 80– 81; in San Antonio, 164; service on uss Pensacola of, 82–83, 244, 313n17; in Temple, Texas, 87–88, 104; on “Turking” himself, 82, 313n8; and Walter Pach, 80; and wpa, 79; bio/ exh: 268–269; pictured, 87; works: Adrenalin Hour, 86; The Burial Detail, 82; Critical Moment of Torpedo Plane Attack, 85, 86; Dance in Dallas, 81; Death by Burning, 83, 84; Death by Drowning, 84, 86; Figure of Erotic Torture, 85–86; “Four in Love Aspects” No. 50-2, 87; Guadalcanal, 84; Man with Soul Indigestion, 82, 313n9; Me and the Battle of Tassafaronga, 83, 84, 86; November 30, 1942, 84; Now II, 81; Redbuds and the Smell of Fresh Asphalt, 87; Self Portrait, 314n32; Untitled, c. 1947, 80; Young Man as Artist in U.S.A., 78, 79

cummings, e. e., 202 Cummins, Light, 34 Cunningham, Bob, 206 Cunningham, D’Aun, 206 Dada, 226, 260, 310n21; Boynton and, 195; Breton and, 217; Charles T. Williams and, 210, 215; Culwell and, 85; Duchamp and, 310n21, 339n9 Dahl, George, 30 Dalí, Salvador, 149, 190; works: Persistence of Memory, 149 Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 34, 59, 180; African, Oceanic, and Pacific Primitive Artifacts, 220; Annual Dallas Allied Arts Exhibition, 82; The Art that Broke the Looking-Glass, 228–229 (229); Prints and Drawings, 180 (180); A Survey of Texas Painting/Contemporary Texas Painting, 172 Dallas Nine: origin of name, 32; as reaction to wildflower competitions, 20; as “regionalist,” 14, 19 Dallas Public Art Gallery (Fair Park), 32 Dance in Dallas (Culwell), 81 Dancer, The (Medellín), 220 Dasberg, Andrew, 138 David, Lorene, 196 Davidson, Kathryn, 83 Davidson, Ola McNeill, 311n29; and Bess, 104; and Cherry, 67; Hogue on, 68; and Preusser, 70, 74, 77, 311–312n50; and Sullivan, 188; ties to San Antonio, 164; bio/exh: 269; works: Dead Live Oak, 67 (67), 69 Davies, Arthur B., 21 Davis, Edgar B., 18, 19 Davis, Stuart, 42 Dawson-Watson, Dawson, 19, 63 Dead Live Oak (Davidson), 67 (67), 69 Death by Burning (Culwell), 83, 84

I N D E X  |   3 6 9 “Death of the Hornet” series (Lea), 55–56 (55) Deaton, Judy Tedford, 140 decalcomania, 163, 191 Defenbacher, Daniel, 207 Delaunay, Robert, 92 DeLong, Lea Rosson, 36 Delphic Studios, 49 Denis, Maurice, 138 Denton, Texas: Little Chapel-in-theWoods, 90–91 (91), 158, 159; and Myron Stout, 95–100; and “Toni” LaSelle, 88–94 Design with Oil Tank (Corpron), 101 Dewey, John, 93, 95–96 Directions in American Painting (Carnegie, Pittsburgh exh.), 70, 71 Dispute, The (Reeder), 128 (128) Dix, Otto, 85; works: The Trench, 85 Dobie, J. Frank, 54, 300n40, 304n12 Dolamen (Brooks), 252 Dolejska, Frank, 67, 68–69; bio/exh: 269–270; works: Music in Brasses, 69; As Never, 69 (69) Dondero, George, 334n1 Doss, Erika, 26, 306n56 Doty, Ezra William, 137, 160 Dow, Arthur Wesley, 21–22, 301n56 Downtown Gallery, 102, 253–254 Dozier, Otis Marion, 115, 117; bio/ exh: 270; works: Abandoned House, 306n48; Annual Move, 40; Cotton Pickers, 51; Grasshopper and Farmer, 149; Still Life with Striped Gourd, 40 Dreier, Katherine, 64–65, 300n44, 310nn21–22 Drewes, Werner, 81 Du Bois, W. E. B., 184 DuBose, Ben, 184 Dubuffet, Jean, 201 Duchamp, Marcel, 20, 64–65, 174, 310n21; pictured: 172; works:

Fountain, 246; Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy?, 174 Dürer, Albrecht, 229 Dust Bowl images, 36 Duveen-Graham Modern Art (gallery), 159 dynamic symmetry, 64 early Texas artists, 15–20 Earth Rhythms, No. 3 (Uhler), 65 (66) Eastman, Seth, 16 Ecclesia (Preusser), 254–255 (255) Education of Vision (Kepes), 203 Edwards, Jim, 244 Eglash, Ron, 181; works: Web of Life, 181 Ekster, Aleksandra, 120 Eldredge, Charles, 61n, 138 Electronic Icon (Weismann), 159, 160 Elkins, James, 108–109 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 33 Ennis, Michael, 11–12, 109 Ensor, James, 189 Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”), 41 Entrance to the Fair (Trotter), 133 Erosion No. 2—Mother Earth Laid Bare (Hogue), 37 (37), 49 Explosion (Lea), 55 Expressionism, 147 Fall, Frieda Kay, 102 Fauvism, 186 Fearing, William Kelly, 123–125; on Dozier, 115; and Fort Worth Circle, 207; modernist method of, 163; move to Austin by, 125, 129, 144; physique of, 298n23; technical illustration work by, 192; bio/ exh: 270–271; works: Air Raid, 124; The Annunciation, 125; The Aquarist, 125; Catcher of the Yellow Bird, 125; Children Carrying Driftwood—Fisher Watching, 119, 120; The Collector,

125; Fishermen, 125; Tobias (and the Guardian Angel), 125 Feldman, D. D.: Invitational Exhibitions, 160, 164, 192, 194; pictured, 159 Fence, The (Fisher), 38–39 (39) Field, Virginia, 172 Figure (Love), 221–222 (222) Fisher, Frank. See Fence, The (Fisher) Fishermen (Fearing), 125 Fisk, Frances Battaile, 8, 16 Flag (Johns), 111 (111) “The Flagellants” series (Fogel), 157– 158 (157, 158) Fluxus movement, 260 Fogel, Jared A., 155 Fogel, Seymour, 144, 153–159, 160; bio/exh, 271–272; pictured: 154, 158, 159; works: The City, 159; Conclave, 157 (157); The Creation, 149– 150; “The Flagellants” series, 157– 158 (157, 158); History of the Gila Valley, 155; Kachinas, 156; The Ladies, 156; Limestone No. 10, 156 (156); Musicians, 156; New York World’s Fair Mural (1939), 155; Red and Black, 156–157 (157); The Rehabilitation of the People, 155 Forgey, Sarah G., 55–56 formalism, Greenbergian, 25, 107, 143, 204. See also universalism, formalist formalist universalism. See universalism, formalist Forrester-O’Brien, Esse, 8–9, 16, 35, 298n21 Forsyth, Constance “Connie,” 144, 152–153; bio/exh: 272; works: Deep Valley Rocks, 153; Evening Clouds (Forsyth), 153; Evening Sky (Forsyth), 153; The Hefties, 152, 153; A High Place (Forsyth), 153; West Texas Mesa, 153 (153)

370   |   M I D C E N T U R Y M O D E R N A R T I N T E X A S Fort Worth Circle, 7, 115–120, 321n29 Fountain (Charles Williams), 212 “Four in Love Aspects” No. 50-2 (Culwell), 87 Fourteen Americans exhibition, 79, 84–87 Fox, Stephen, 175 Frankenthaler, Helen. See Mountains and Sea (Frankenthaler), 249 Franklin, Jim, 258–259 Franklin, Mary Jane, 258 Frary, Michael, 144, 161–163; bio/ exh: 273; works: Abstraction, 161– 162 (162); Forgotten Totems, 163; Red Apartment House, 163 (163); Sea Wall, 173 (173); Secret Totem, 163 (163); Still Life with White Platter, 162 Frazer, James. See Golden Bough, The (Frazer) Fridge, Roy, 207, 213, 215, 230; bio/ exh: 273–274; works: cover design for The Art That Broke the LookingGlass, 229 (229); Untitled (Gift Object), 216 Fried, Michael, 204 Friedman, B. H., 96, 100 Fuller, Buckminster, 207 Futurism, 147 Gabo, Naum, 71–72, 77, 205, 315n61 Gadbois, Henri, 186; bio/exh: 274; works: Two-Tiered Formation, 186; Watermelon and Pomegranate, 186, 187 Gaither, Edmund, 178, 181 Gama Gallery (Mexico City), 188 Gauguin, Paul, 220 Gentilz, Théodore, 16, 300n39; works: Fall of the Alamo, 16 geometricism, 77, 181, 259 German Expressionism, 62, 78, 81, 85, 180 German immigrant painters, 16 Gestalt, 96, 97, 99, 112, 316n73

gestural painting, 297n6 Ghost Town (Judd), 57 Giacometti, Alberto, 149, 199; works: Woman with Her Throat Cut, 235–237 (237) Gillespie, Sallie, 117 Giorgione, 212; works: La Tempesta, 199 Glasco, Joseph M., 245–248; works: Portrait of a Poet, 245 (245); Salome series, 336n30; Sleepers, 246, 247 Glass Cubes and Patterned Bricks (Corpron), 102 Glowing Through (Charlton), 68 Gogh, Vincent van, 176 Golden Bough, The (Frazer), 233 Gold Medal Exhibition (Architectural League of New York), 159 Goldwater, Robert, 175, 218 Gonzalez, Boyer, 144 Gonzalez, Xavier, 48, 242 Gorky, Arshile, 166 Gossaert, Jan, 229 Grammer, George: bio/exh: 274–275; works: Offshore, 116 Grand Central Art Galleries, 135 Grande Odalisque (Ingres), 212 Graves, Robert, 195 Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition (Dallas, 1937), 91 Greeley, Brendan M., 55 Green, Tyler, 127, 320n25 Greenberg, Clement: on Culwell, 86–87; on flatness, 100, 317n86; formalism of, 25, 107, 143, 205; ignoring minimalism, 204; impact on modernism of, 24–26, 298n14, 302n72; Louis’s and Noland’s visit to, 249; on Wyeth, 142–143 Greene, Alison de Lima, 76, 110 Green Grass Man (Wray), 201 Gropius, Walter, 72 Grotto, The (Mozley), 143 (143)

Guerin, John, 144; works: Mysterious Coastline, 145 Guggenheim, Peggy, 201 Guilty II, The (Williams), 167 (167) Guston, Philip, 153 Guyed Form (Boynton), 193 Halpert, Edith, 77, 102, 253–254 Hansa Gallery, 99 Hardin, Richard D., 149–150; works: San Angelo Dust Storm, 149, 150 Harman, Dave, 226 Harnoncourt, René d’, 175 Hartley, Marsden, 244; works: Ghost of the Forest, 244 Haskell, Barbara, 22, 108, 319n119 Hatgil, Paul, 144 Hefties, The (Forsyth), 152, 153 Helfensteller, Veronica, 117, 119–120, 129 Hemingway, Ernest, 258 Henderson, Norma, 186 Henri, Robert, 44, 115, 300n41 hermeticism, 176, 260 heroism, as Texas theme, 8–10, 12, 298nn22, 24 Hickey, Dave, 257 Hirschl and Adler Modern exhibition, 108 History of Texas Artists and Sculptors, A (Fisk), 8 Hofmann, Hans, 92–93, 96–100, 121, 196, 334n90 Hogg, Ima, 62, 309n9 Hogue, William Alexandre, 62; in Art Digest Texas Centennial issue, 34–35; and Centennial Exposition, 34, 304n27, 307n66; as Dallas Nine member, 19; on French modernism, 43–44, 72, 168; and Great Hall mural proposal, 31; on Houston progressive artists, 68; purchasing

I N D E X  |   3 7 1 Culwell artwork, 79; technical drawing during wwii by, 192; bio/ exh: 275–276; works: Drouth Stricken Area, 36, 41; Erosion No. 2—Mother Earth Laid Bare, 37 (37), 49; Erosion series, 36; Neighbors, 14 Holding, Eileen, 71 Hollow Tree (Spruce), 49, 50, 146 Holy Family/Flight Into Egypt (Umlauf), 150, 151 homophobia, 128–129 Hood, Dorothy, 188–191; on “biomorphic consciousness” of women, 190; and expressionism, 260; bio/ exh: 276; works: An Austere Charade, 189 (189); Butterflies of the Future, 189; Fear, 189; Furred Flower, 189; The Seeming Beginning, 189; Walking Away from the Sun, 190 (190) Hoover, Herbert, 45–46 Hopps, Walter, 87–88 “Hottentot,” 226 Houston, Texas: in the 1930s, 1; in the 1950s, 169; in the early 1900s, 61–62 Houston Artists Gallery, 68 Houston Docks (Lockwood), 60, 61, 138–139 Houston Ship Channel (Condon), 13 Howard, Richard Foster, 34, 35, 43, 82, 308n90, 313n9 Hubbard, L. Ron, 107 Huddle, William Henry, 9, 16; works: The Surrender of Santa Anna, 16 Hudson River School, 3 Huntington Gallery (Blanton Museum of Art), 117 Identity Being Consumed by Its Own Offspring (Boynton), 195 (195) Impressionism: French, 18–19, 300n43; Texas, 7, 19, 20, 58, 73, 82, 117, 300n41

Industrial Landscape, The Austin Concrete Co. (White), 145 Ingres, Jean-Auguste Dominique. See Grande Odalisque (Ingres) In Oklahoma (Lester), 50 (50) International Exhibition of Modern Art (Armory Show), 18, 20–21, 63, 80, 138, 301nn50–51 International Show of Abstract Painting and Sculpture, 71 In the Chair Car (Bywaters), 37–38 (38), 41, 49, 306n47 Intimate Modernism: Fort Worth Circle Artists in the 1940s, 118, 127, 128, 319n1, 321n32 “Irascibles” photograph (Life), 248–249 Iwonski, Carl Gustav von, 16 Jed Perls Gallery, 245 Jerry’s Nail (Boynton), 195 (195) Jewell, Edward Alden, 120, 129 Jim Crow laws, 179, 218, 331n23 John, Grace Spaulding, 65, 68; works: The Bell, 67 Johns, Jasper, 2–3, 111, 231; works: Flag, 111 (111); Painting with Two Balls, 3 Johnson, Marjorie: 117; works: The Old House, 118; Still Life with Grapes, 118 Johnson, Philip, 175 Joke, The (Lockwood), 138, 139 “Jomo,” 216, 222, 230, 330n16 Jones, Anson, 31, 303n12 Jubilee: Ghana Harvest Festival (Biggers), 181 Judd, DeForrest Hale, 57; bio/exh: 276–277; works: Ghost Town, 57 Juke Girl (film), 216 Jung, Carl, 112–113 Kalil, Susie, 2, 36, 327n50 Kamrath, Karl, 176 Kamrowski, Gerome, 241

Kandinsky, Wassily, 302n80 Kant, Immanuel, 25 Kaprow, Allan, 260 Kelley, Chapman, 229, 333n68 Kelpe, Paul, 155 Kepes, Gyorgy, 76, 77, 101–103, 203; works: Language of Vision (Kepes), 102 “Khoikhoi,” 226 Kimmelman, Michael, 240 Kinzinger, Edmund, 62, 306nn50–52; bio/exh: 41; works: Italian Shepherd, 40–41 Kirstein, Lincoln, 244, 336n22 Kitchen Table (Blackshear), 197 Klee, Paul, 7, 74, 77, 201 Knoedler and Company, 254 Komodore, Bill, 230 Kruger, Loren, 225 Kuh, Katherine, 192 Kuhn, Walt, 128 Kupka, František, pictured, 64 Kuspit, Donald, 88, 239 Laird, Ruth, 187; works: Untitled (c. 1950s), 187 Lam, Wifredo, 191 Lambert, Joe, 207 Lancaster Valley (McClung), 32 Landers, Bertha, 54 Landscape and Interior (Lester), 13 landscape of Texas, 10–15 (12, 13, 14) Lange, Dorothea, 36 Langer, Susanne, 97 Language of Vision (Kepes), 102 Larson, Robert, 166 La Salle, Robert, Sieur de, 30 LaSelle, Dorothy Antoinette “Toni,” 308n73; at Denton, Texas, 88–91 (89), 158; exhibitions for, 92–94; geometricized abstraction, 259; bio/exh: 277; pictured, 89; works:

372   |   M I D C E N T U R Y M O D E R N A R T I N T E X A S Puritan, 93, 94; Study for Puritan, 94; Theme 1, B, 6; Vision in Motion, 93 Late Wilderness (Wingren), 58 Law, Caroline Wiess, 309–310n10 Lawrence, Jacob, 180, 253 Lea, Thomas Calloway “Tom” iii, 54– 56; bio/exh: 278; works: Explosion, 55; Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (Sarah), 55; That 2,000 Yard Stare, 56 Lee, Robert E., 30 Leen, Nina, 248 Le Fauconnier, Henri, 64 Léger, Fernand, 296 Le Moyne, Jacques, 15 Leonardo journal, 202, 205 Lester, William Lewis, 148–150; artistic evolution of, 148; and Culwell, 79; and landscapes, 145; and Spruce, 148; at University of Texas, 144, 148; bio/exh: 278–279; works: Carnival, 149; Carnival Flags, 149; House Near Terlingua, 148; Landscape and Interior, 13; In Oklahoma, 50 (50); Oklahoma Rocks, 40 (40), 50; Old Fort Davis (Lester), 148; Possessed by the Trees, 148; Rattlesnake Hunter, 50; Untitled [The Beetle], 149 Lewenthal, Reeves, 50 LeWitt, Sol, 97, 261 Lewthwaite, Stephanie, 219–220, 331n29 Lhote, André, 64, 67, 310n19 Libido (Storms), 228 Lichtenstein, Roy, 2–3 Life magazine, 55–56, 174, 253–254 Limestone No. 10 (Fogel), 156 (156) Little Chapel-in-the-Woods, 90–91, 158, 159; pictured: 91 Little Galleries of the PhotoSecession/291, 21 Locke, Alain, 179

Locke, Lucille, 46, 48; works: Cinderland Cedar, 48, 49 Lockwood, John Ward, 137–140, 144, 152–153; bio/exh: 279–280; works: Houston Docks, 138–139, 60, 61; The Joke, 138, 139; Untitled (1958), 139 (139) Lone Star Printmakers, 50–51, 53–54, 119, 308n79 Long, Meredith, 190 longhorn cattle, 300n40 Louchheim, Aline, 85 Louis, Morris, 249 Love, Jim, 230; and Charles T. Williams, 207, 213–215; and James Boynton, 194–195; and Mark Rothko, 194; and Texas primitivism, 221–224, 226; bio/exh: 280; pictured: 214; works: Figure, 221–222 (222); Witch Doctor, 222–224 (223), 226 Lowenfeld, Viktor, 179, 184 Luce, Henry, 54–55 Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 140 Lungkwitz, Karl Hermann, 16; works: Above the Falls on the Pedernales River, 17 “lyrical abstraction,” 188 MacAgy, Douglas, 187, 228–231 MacAgy, Jermayne “Jerry”: as cam director, 184, 194, 213–214; as a collector, 218; and the Menils, 214, 231; and James Boynton, 194–195; and Pacemakers exhibition, 171; and Totems Not Taboo exhibition, 61, 174–175, 223–224 Macbeth Gallery, 143 Mack, Joseph L., 179 MacKie, Fred, 176 Madonna and Child (Fra Angelico), 161

magic realism, 305n46 Magritte, René. See Viol, Le (Magritte) Mahaffey, Josephine, 130–131; works: One Way Bridge, 131 (131) Malone, Lee, 171, 175, 191 Manet, Édouard, 10, 127; works: Olympia, 127 Manhattan, modernism in, 3–4 Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The (Wilson), 168 mapping of Texas, 15 Marcus, Stanley, 30, 171, 174, 207 Marin, John, 138, 140 Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute, 164 Marsh, Stanley, 261–262 Martin, Agnes, 322n6 Martin Museum of Art, 331n35 Masson, André, 156 Matisse, Henri, 186, 300n44; works: Blue Nude (Memory of Biskra), 212; Reclining Nude 1 (Aurora), 212 Matta Echaurren, Roberto, 191 Matthews, J. C., 89–90 Mauzey, Merritt: My Brother’s Keeper, 53 (53); Vanquished, 53 Maxcy, Mabel, 103 Maxwell, Paul: pictured: 172; works: Red Field, 171 Mayor of Hoover City (Texas) (Travis), 45–46 (46) McArdle, Henry Arthur (Harry), 8–9, 16, 299n38; works: Battle of San Jacinto, 9, 16; Dawn at the Alamo, 16 McCarthy, Joseph, 226 McClung, Florence Elliott White, 102; bio/exh: 280–281; works: Lancaster Valley, 32 McConnell, Leila, 186–187; bio/exh: 281; works: Blue Painting, 187; The First Bar of Peace, 187; Ruth Laird’s

I N D E X  |   3 7 3 Pots, 187 (187); The Time Between, 187 McGinniss, John H., 33 McKinnon, Isabel, 196 McManaway, David, 207, 214–216, 230; bio/exh: 282; works: Untitled (Gift Object), 216 McNay, Jesse Marion Koogler, 164 McVey, William, 144 Me and the Battle of Tassafaronga: (Culwell), 83, 84, 86 Mears, Herb, 184–186; works: Cat Cracker/Refinery, 170, 186; Still Life with Mask, 186 Meat Plate (Williams), 166 Medea’s Bath (Bomar), 122, 123 Medellín, Consuelo, 207, 219 Medellín, Octavio: and Charles T. Williams, 207–208, 219–220; at MoMA exhibition, 242–243; and primitivism, 220, 242, 260; and ties to Mexico, 219–220; and ties to San Antonio, 164, 219; bio/exh: 282–283; works: The Dancer, 220; Holy Roller, 242; Penitentes, 242–243 (243); Primitive Woman, 242; At the Stake, 242 Meecham, Pam, 2 Mending the Rock Fence (Spruce), 49 (49) Menil, Dominique and John de, 326n38; and 1957 afa convention, 171–172; Adickes’s work purchased by, 185; and Contemporary Arts Association, 175, 176, 231; and Love sculptures, 214; tribal arts collection, 218 Menil Collection, 83, 87–88, 175, 189 Men of Art Guild, 164 Mérida, Carlos, 18, 95, 219, 316n67 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 248– 249; American Painting Today–1950 exhibition, 248; Artists for Victory

exhibition, 196, 243; Lancaster Valley (McClung), 32 Metzinger, Jean, pictured, 64 Mexican Americans and segregation, 219 Mexican muralism, 31, 95, 153–155, 179, 306n47, 316n67 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 61, 76, 169, 174–175, 309n2, 312n53 Miller, Ada, 46 Miller, Angela, 3, 297n7 Miller, Dorothy C., 335n6; Americans series, 155, 240–242, 244–245, 251– 253; and Ben Culwell, 79, 84–85, 87; on Hiram Williams, 168; and Jackson Pollock, 248; Michael Kimmelman on, 240 minimalism, 329n80; Bess and, 109; Fearing and, 123; Michael Fried on, 204, 329n81; Myron Stout and, 288–289; Preusser and, 205; Sol LeWitt and, 97, 261 Miró, Joan, 156, 174 Mitchell, Margaretta K., 101 mit School of Architecture and Planning, 202–203 Mitter, Partha, 184, 221 modernism: defined, 24, 302n64; emergence of, 2; French, 43; Partha Mitter on, 221; post–World War II, 177; pre–World War II, 3; in Texas, 2–8, 239; and transition to postmodernism, 259–260 “Modernist Painting” (Greenberg), 24–26 Modern Painting: Way and Means (caa), 180 Modigliani, Amedeo, 7, 63, 117, 123; works: Girl with Braids, 123; sculptural heads, 64 Moholy-Nagy, László: and Cubism,

315n61; and German Bauhaus, 72, 75–77, 91, 103; memorial exhibition for, 176; and Mies van der Rohe, 312n53; and New Bauhaus, 74–77, 92, 311–312n50; on spirals, 73; works: Space Modulator, 76; Vision in Motion, 72–77, 92, 94, 100–101 Mondrian, Piet: color choice of, 156; and Constructivism, 72; Greenberg on, 317n86; influence of, 87, 96, 99; personal life, 316n71; works: Broadway Boogie Woogie, 298n10 Monet, Claude, 18, 63 Money, John, 107, 319n115 “Monuments Men,” 305n36 Moore, Henry, 208, 215, 219; works: Reclining Figure, 209, 211 Moore, Joan, 219 Morris, Robert, 97 Mountains and Sea (Frankenthaler), 249 Mozley, Loren Norman, 125, 138, 139–143; on John Marin, 140; bio/ exh: 283; works: Big Pecans, 143–144 (144); The Grotto, 143 (143); Ranchos Church, 140; Winter Fields, 141–143 (141) Mummert, Sallie Blyth, 130 Murchison, John and Lucille (“Lupe”), 207 Murphy, Gerald, 88 Museum of Arts and Design (New York), 183 Museum of Fine Arts of Houston (mfah), 62; Annual Exhibition of Houston Artists, 62, 65, 69, 71–72, 76, 179, 201; and Dorothy Hood, 190; International Exhibition of Abstract Painting and Sculpture, 73; and Jim Crow segregation, 179; Texas Centennial Exhibition, 61; Three Brothers exhibition, 171

3 74   |   M I D C E N T U R Y M O D E R N A R T I N T E X A S Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA): American Realists and Magic Realists, 244, 305n46, 336n22; Americans 1942 (New American Leaders), 241–243; Americans series, 155, 240– 242, 244–245, 251–253, 335n6; The Art of Assemblage, 221, 228, 330n16; Barr diagram for Cubism and Abstract Art, 58–59; Cubism and Abstract Art, 26–27, 58–59, 81, 308n94; defining “American art,” 7; Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, 80–81, 86; Fifteen Americans, 245–246, 248, 251; Figures and Faces, 189; Fourteen Americans, 79, 83, 84–87, 239, 244–245; Painting and Sculpture from Sixteen American Cities, 33; Paintings by Nineteen Living Americans, 240–241, 335n8; Sixteen Americans, 251–252; Twelve Americans, 248, 251 Music in Brasses (Dolejska), 69 My Brother’s Keeper (Mauzey), 53 (53) Mysterious Coastline (Guerin), 145 Nail, Reilly, 117 Nasher, Raymond and Patsy, 207 National Exhibition of American Art (Rockefeller Center), 71 naturalism, 16, 21, 95 Neighbors (Hogue), 14 Neo-Impressionism, 203 Neruda, Pablo, 188 New Bauhaus, 74–77, 92, 311–312n50 Newcomers exhibition, 254 “New Crop of Painting Protégés” (Life magazine), 253–254 New Horizons in American Art exhibition, 155, 323n32 Newman, Barnett, 10, 254; works: Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 254 New Negro, The (Locke), 179 New York City, 2; Abstract

Expressionism in, 2–4, 10, 24, 240– 241, 248, 260, 301n62; Texas artists exhibiting in, 7 New York School, 301n62 New York World’s Fair Mural by Seymour Fogel (1939), 155 Ney, Elisabet, 16–17 Nicolaides, Kimon, 250 nihilism, 226 Noggin (Austin), 39 Noguchi, Isamu, 199, 207, 209, 231–232 Noland, Kenneth, 249 Norton, John Warner, 54 notan, 21 “Notes on Sculpture” (Morris), 97 Now II (Culwell), 81 Oberhuber, Konrad, 317n81 Object (Déjeuner en Fourrure) (Oppenheim), 189–190 Odalisque (Williams), 211–212 (212) Offshore (Grammer), 116 oil, 4–5 Oil Field Girls (Bywaters), 43 (43) Oil Field Lights (Rascoe), 5 Oils and Watercolor in Atlanta (Southern States Art League), 132 Oil Tanks with Bridge (Corpron), 102 (102) Oil Well at Sunset (Brooks), 250 O’Keeffe, Georgia: in Texas, 6, 9, 21; and Uhler, 65–67; works: Painting No. 21 (Palo Duro Canyon), 22; Red Landscape, 22 (22) Oklahoma Rocks (Lester), 40 (40) Old House, The (Johnson), 118 Old Jail Art Center, 117, 232 Olympia (Manet), 127 Onderdonk, Eleanor, 18 Onderdonk, Robert Jenkins, 15, 18, 163; works: The Fall of the Alamo, 18

Onderdonk, Robert Julian, 15, 18, 62; works: Dawn in the Hills, 18 one i at a time (smu exh.), 230 One of Five Is a Tree (Wray), 202 (202) One Way Bridge (Mahaffey), 131 (131) Ono, Yoko, 260 Oppenheim, Meret. See Object (Déjeuner en Fourrure) (Oppenheim) Opus I (Tempest) (Stout), 199, 200 Orphism, 92 Our Little Gallery, 67–69 Oursler, Tony, 205 Outpost (Boynton), 194 (194) Owens, Gene, 207, 214, 231–238, 298n22; bio/exh: 284; pictured: 231; works: Abstract Bronze, 233–234 (233); Fu Dog (Barking at the Moon), 233; Girl Crying, 233; The Hand, 233; Parturient Machine, 235–237 (236); The Sentinel, 233–234 (233); Shiva, 233 (234); Snake, 233; Space Symbol, 233 Ownby, Haynes, 98 Ozenfant, Amédée, 121 Pach, Walter, 18, 80, 300n44 Pachon, Harry, 219 Paepcke, Walter, 74 Páez, José de, 16 “Painter of the Longhorn,” Reaugh as, 18 Painters under Forty exhibition, 254 Painting No. 21 (Palo Duro Canyon) (O’Keeffe), 22 (22) Pall (Stout), 199 Paris, France, 2, 186 Parrhasius, 302n70 Parsons, Betty, 109 Parturient Machine (Owens), 235–237 (236) Patton, Sharon, 183 Pauley, Hal, 230

I N D E X  |   3 7 5 Pearson, Ralph, 156, 176–177 Peck, Patricia, 120 Pecos River petroglyphs, 15 Penitentes (Medellin), 242–243 (243) Pepsi-Cola Annual (National Academy of Design), 132–134 Peridot Gallery, 251 Petri, Richard, 16 petroglyphs and pictographs, 15 Pevsner, Antoine, 71 photograms, 100–101 Photo-Secession, 21 Picabia, Francis, pictured, 64 Picasso, Pablo, 18, 27, 156, 166, 174, 229, 255; works: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 217 Pillsbury, Ted, 317n81 Pinacotheca (Rose Fried Gallery), 92 Plato, 302n77 Pliny the Elder, 302n70 Pollitzer, Anita, 22 Pollock, Jackson: “Accabonac Creek,” 298n10; and Caroline Wiess Law, 309–310n10; at Cedar Tavern, 207; drip paintings of, 97, 100, 105, 182, 235; exhibition at Parsons gallery by, 105, 318n110; Fifteen Americans exhibition, 248; Glasco and, 248; “I am nature” comment by, 334n90; Life magazine on, 248, 337n34; name change of, 100; Owens on, 235; photograph showing, 248; public reactions to, 24; “Sounds in the Grass,” 298n10; Sweeney’s essay on, 201–202; use of staining, 249; pictured: 249; works: Number 30: 1950 (Autumn Rhythm), 248 Pomodoro, Arnaldo, 227 Popol Vuh, 95 Portrait of a Poet (Glasco), 245 (245) “Portrait Painting as an Art” (Travis), 46

Possessed by the Trees (Lester), 148 (148) Postimpressionism, 63, 67, 146, 303n78 postmodernism, 259–261, 302n74, 327n44, 339n9 Practice of Psychotherapy (Jung), 112 Praying Mantis (Sellors), 237–238 (237) Precisionism, 32, 39 (39), 102, 259 Preston, Stuart, 121, 189, 251 Preusser, Robert O., 176–178; after leaving Texas, 202–205; as abstractionist, 59, 70; background of, 1; as codirector of cam, 180; compared to Reeder, 121; and Downtown Gallery, 253; geometricized abstraction, 259; and Bauhaus under Moholy-Nagy, 72–77, 92, 176; and Edith Halper, 253; pronunciation of last name, 311n32; on theory of modern art, 1; on validity of modern art, 3; bio/exh: 284–285; pictured: xii; works: Calligraphic Forms, 178 (178), 256; Cavernous Impression, 253–254; Ecclesia, 254–255 (255); Elsewhere, 73, 178; Hydroscopic Realm, 177; Interior Movement, 177–178; Organization, 73; Receding Transit, 2; “Relief planes illuminated . . . ,” 204; Subaqueous Impression, xii, 176 (176); Tonality, 70–71 (70); Tonal Oval, 177; Untitled, 1937, 72; Untitled, 1937–38 (Stars and Circles), 73–74, 75; Warlike Theme, 76, 77 Price, Vincent, 171, 174 primitivism, 216–218; Charles Williams and, 163, 220; Goldwater on, 175, 218, 330n21; Medellín and, 220, 242, 260; in “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art exhibition, 330n21; in Texas, 218, 221–226, 242, 260; in Totems Not Taboo exhibition, 61, 169, 174–175, 223–224 Primitivism in Modern Art (Goldwater), 218, 330n21

Primitivism in Modern Painting (Goldwater), 175 Printmakers Guild, 50, 54 Prints of the Fort Worth Circle, 117, 118 psychoreality/psychorealism, 36, 49 Public School Art League (Houston), 62 Puritan (LaSelle), 93, 94 Puteaux Cubists, 185 Quaintance, Don, 221 racism, confronting, 126–128 Ragsdale, Kenneth, 33–34 Railroad Signal (Spellman), 28, 39 (39) Ranchos Church (Mozley), 140 Rascoe, Stephen, 186; works: Oil Field Lights, 5 Rauschenberg, Milton (Robert), 231, 252; at the Académie Julian, 310n14; name change of, 252, 317n89, 337n42; works: Bed, 246– 247, 336n30 Ray, Man, 101, 310n21 realism, 104, 244, 302n70; American, 115; American Realists and Magic Realists exhibition, 244, 305n46, 336n22; French, 10; magical, 143, 241, 259, 305n46; Mozley and magical, 143; social, 26, 44, 46, 133, 180, 241, 254; Texas, 14, 81–82, 117; Trotter and, 132–133, 136; urban “Ashcan,” 21; Wyeth and, 142–143 (142) Reaugh, Charles Franklin “Frank,” 15, 17–18, 303n6 Reaves, William, 19 Receding Transit (Preusser), 2 Recent Arrivals exhibition, 254 Reclining Figure (Moore), 209, 211 Red and Black (Fogel), 156–157 (157) Red Apartment House (Frary), 163 (163)

376   |   M I D C E N T U R Y M O D E R N A R T I N T E X A S Redbuds and the Smell of Fresh Asphalt (Culwell), 87 Red Field (Maxwell), 171 Red Landscape (O’Keeffe), 22 (22) Redon, Odilon, 189 Reeder, Edward Dickson, 120–121, 129, 207; compared to Preusser, 121; and Fearing, 123; Jane Myers on, 320n24; photograph of, 206; bio/ exh: 285; works: Conversation Piece, 127–128; The Dispute, 128 (128); Sallie Gillespie, 120 Reeder, Flora Blanc, 207; bio/exh: 285–286 Reflections (Toney), 165 Refugees (Umlauf), 151 regionalism, 41–44, 56, 95, 149, 177, 243; and antimodernism, 41–42 Reily, Bill, 164; bio/exh, 286; works: Billy the Kid, 174; Breakers, 174; Chisos Mountains, 173–174; Marblehead, 174; Masts, 174; Ship Yard, 173–174 (174); Texas Beach, 174; Untitled [Thin Longhorn], 164 Reinhardt, Ad, 231 “Relating Art to Science and Technology” (Preusser), 202–203 “Relief planes illuminated . . .” (Preusser), 204 Remington, Frederic, 34 Renaissance Society Gallery (Univ. of Chicago), 90 Rhythmic Plowing/Rhythmic Fields (Spellman), 54 Richter, Gerhard, 201 Rigaud, Jean-François, 229 Rivera, Diego, 18, 153–155 Road to San Antonio from Austin, The (White), 145 Robertson, H. O., 81–82 Robinson, Boardman, 138, 250 Rockburne, Dorothea, 247

Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 302n80 Rogalla, Herb, 230 Rogan, Robert, 5; works: Untitled (c. 1950s), 5 Rokeby Venus (Velázquez), 212 Romanticism, 35, 244 Romantic Painting in America exhibition, 336n22 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 90 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 30 Rordorf, Conrad Caspar, 16 Rorschach test, 107 Rose Fried Gallery (Pinacotheca), 92 Rosenberg, Harold, 2, 3, 10, 257–258 Rothko, Mark, 194, 196, 231 Ruscha, Ed, 260; works: Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, 260 Ruschianthus falcatus (Storms), 227 Ruth Laird’s Pots (McConnell), 187 Saarinen, Eliel, 182 Salinas, Porfirio, 15 Salon d’Automne (Paris), 63 San Angelo Dust Storm (Hardin), 149–150 (149) San Antonio, Texas, 163–164 Sandler, Irving, 10, 240, 241–242 Sandweiss, Martha, 102–103 Sargent, John Singer, 249 Savage, Eugene, 31 Schapiro, Meyer, 26, 105–106, 171, 319n119 Schenck, Edgar, 192 Schiwetz, Edward M., 62 Schjeldahl, Peter, 319n120 Schneemann, Carolee, 260 Schwarz, Sanford, 96 Sea Wall (Frary), 173 (173) Seckler, Dorothy Gees, 92, 159 Secret Totem (Frary), 163 (163) Self-Portrait (Stell), 31 Sellors, Evaline Clarke, 237–238; bio/

exh, 287; works: Praying Mantis, 237–238 (237) Sentinel, The (Owens), 233–234 (233) Shahn, Ben, 26, 153 Shannon, Sara, 129; works: Ballet on the Stairs, 129 Sheeler, Charles, 253; works: Suspended Power, 102 Sheldon, Julie, 2 Ship Yard (Reily), 173–174 (174) Shiva (Owens), 233 (234) Shiva’s Headband, 259 Shivers, Allan, 218 Shorebound (Treuter), 130 Sic Transit (Weismann), 160, 161 Simkins, Martha, 249 Simms, Carroll, 178, 182–184; works: Christ and the Lambs, 182, 183; Jonah and the Whale, 182; Miracle of Changing Water into Wine, 182 Sims, Lowery Stokes, 183 Six Texas Painters exhibition, 119–120 Slag Pullers (Umlauf), 151, 152 Sleepers (Glasco), 246, 247 Sleeping Boy (Biggers), 180 (180) Slithy Tove (Storms), 227, 228–229, 333n60 Sloan, John, 121, 123 Smith, Emily Guthrie, 127–128; works: Halloween Party (Smith), 127–128 Smith, Henry Nash, 33 Smith, Mark L., 73–74 Smith, Roberta, 104 Smithson, Robert, 339n12; works: Amarillo Ramp, 261 Soby, James Thrall, 189 social realism, 46 Société Anonyme, Inc., 64–65 South Texas Sweet Funk (A Clean WellLighted Place exh.), 338n4 Southwestern Exhibition of Prints and Drawings, 180

I N D E X  |   3 7 7 Southwest Review, 33, 35–36, 304n17 space in Texas, 10–11 Spanish influence on Texas art, 15–16 Spanish Surrealism, 119 Spellman, Coreen Mary, 62, 102; works: Railroad Signal, 28, 39 (39); Rhythmic Plowing/Rhythmic Fields, 54 Spindletop oil well, 4–5 Springsteen, Bruce, 262 Spruce, Everett, 48–49; in Americans 1942 exhibition, 243; and Ben Culwell’s award check, 82; and Bill Reily, 173–174; Elizabeth McCausland on, 243–244; and Marsden Hartley, comparisons between, 244; at MoMA exhibition, 242; in Time magazine, 147; at UT–Austin, 144, 145–146, 243–244; bio/exh: 287–288; works: Billboard, 147 (147); Broken Tree, 146; Brushy Hillside, 146, 147; Canyon at Night, 146; Cathedral Mountain, 146; The Cliff, 147; The Hawk, 243–244; Hollow Tree, 49, 50, 146; Low Tide in the Gulf, 147; Mending the Rock Fence, 49 (49), 243; Night, 49; Night Landscape I, 146; Pecos River, 147; Rider, 147; Suburban Landscape, 40 Squibb Galleries, 81 Stable Gallery, 99 Stalin, Joseph, 42 Stars and Circles (Preusser), 73–74, 75 Stell, Thomas M., 31, 48, 51; works: Portrait of Miss Dale Heard, 39; SelfPortrait, 31 Sterne, Maurice, 91 Stevens, Lawrence Tenney, 29 Stevens, Robert L., 155 Stevens, Wallace, 258 Stewart, Rick, 14 Stickell, John H., 77 Stieglitz, Alfred, 21–22, 103, 140, 298n21

Still Life (Brisac), 90 Still Life (in Light from Window) (Brants), 7 Still Life with Bones (Brants), 129 Still Life with Grapes (Johnson), 118 Still Life with Lime, Melon Slices (Adickes), 185 Still Life with White Platter (Frary), 162 Stockpole, Ralph, 91 Storms, Edward, 207; bio/exh: 288; works: Libido, 228; Ruschianthus falcatus, 227; Slithy Tove, 227, 228– 229, 333n60 Storr, Robert, 44, 96, 109 St. Oswald’s Church, 182 Stout, Myron: on abstract painting, 95; and Denton, Texas, 95–100; on flatness, 100; geometricized abstraction, 259; on marijuana, 97; as a musician, 317n82; on nonobjectivity, 23; and Pearl Harbor, 95; physique of, 298n23; on Texas, 98, 99; and Toni LaSelle, 96; on Wordsworth, 98; bio/exh: 288– 289; works: Number 3, 1954, 99 (99); Quartet, 96 Stout, Richard, 184, 196–200; bio/ exh: 289–290; works: Black Wave, 197; Cave, 198; Flowers, 198; Opus I (Tempest), 199, 200; Pall, 198, 199; Passion, 198; Remember the Race, 197; Seiche I, 198; Sunset Landscape, 197; Twin Derricks, 4; Untitled (1956), 200 Study for Puritan (LaSelle), 94 (94) Study in Compositional Spaces (Cherry), 65 Subaqueous Impression (Preusser), xii, 176 (176) “The Sublime Is Now” (Newman), 254 Submerged Memory of a Melody (Toney), 165 Sullivan, Stella: bio/exh: 188, 290; works: Symbols: The Eucharist, 188

Summers, Robert, 137 “surface appearance of nature,” 1 Surrealism, 189–191, 203, 208, 217, 305n46; Arp and, 208, 318n105; automatic drawings, 156; biomorphic, 70, 74, 77; Bomar and, 264; Boynton and, 191–192 (191); Breton and founding of, 86, 217; Carnohan and, 39; Corpron and, 318n105; Culwell and, 86; decalcomania in, 163; Fearing and, 123, 125; Fort Worth Circle and, 7, 117, 119; Franklin and, 259; French, 119, 208; Fridge and, 229 (229); Giacometti and, 235, 237; Hogue and, 305n46; Hood and, 188–191; Magritte and, 189, 228; Owens and, 236 (236); Preusser on, 203; vs. psychorealism, 36; Reeder and, 121, 123; Sellors and, 237–238 (237); Texas, 53; Texas humor and, 149; Trotter and, 134; Utter and, 126 (126) Survey Graphic magazine, 46 Sutherland, Graham, 166 Sweatt v. Painter, 218 Sweeney, James Johnson, 201–202, 309n2 Swenson, Kathryn, 184 Symbolism, 189 Symbols: The Eucharist (Sullivan), 188 Tachisme, 68, 68 Talbot, Fox, 101 Tamarind Lithography Workshop, 196 Tanguy, Yves, 180 Tanning, Dorothy, 189; works: Les Cousins, 189 Tapies, Antoni, 201 Tchelitchew, Pavel, 85, 189 Telenews Theatre (Dallas), 115 Temple, Texas, 88, 104

378   |   M I D C E N T U R Y M O D E R N A R T I N T E X A S Tennant, Allie Victoria, 219; Tejas Warrior, 39 Texas: 150 Works from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Greene), 76 Texas Art and a Wildcatter’s Dream (Reaves), 19 Texas Centennial (1936), 9, 14, 29–32; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 59; Great Hall mural, 30–31, 33; Texas Centennial Celebration Bill, 156 Texas Centennial Exhibition (Fair Park), 59 Texas Centennial Exhibition (Houston mfah), 61 Texas Contemporary Artists exhibition, 254–255 “Texas Eight.” See Fort Worth Circle Texas Fine Arts Association, 17 “Texas funk,” 259 Texas Gallery, 327n42 Texas General Art Exhibitions, 138, 177 Texas Landscape (Bowling), 52 (52) Texas Modern, 2007 exhibition, 73 Texas Oil ’58 exhibition, 186 Texas-Oklahoma General Exhibition, 70–71 Texas Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions, Annual, 136, 159, 328n73, 330n17 Texas Print Exhibitions, 91, 320n8 Texas sodomy laws, 128–129 Texas State College for Women, 92 Texas Synthesis (Blackshear), 12 (12) “Texas Vision” (Ennis), 11–12 Texas Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions, 19–20 That Two Thousand Yard Stare (Lea), 56 Theme 1, B (LaSelle), 6 Thoreau, Henry David, 33 Three Posts (Williams), 212, 213 Tibbitts, Randy, 68 Time magazine, 147

Tinguely, Jean, 331n39; works: Monstranz, 221–222 Titian, 212 Tobias (and the Guardian Angel) (Fearing), 125 Tonality (Preusser), 70–71 (70), 74 Toney, Chester, 164–166: bio/exh: 290–291; works: Reflections, 165; Submerged Memory of a Melody, 165 Torso (Williams), 209, 210 Torso #2 (Williams), 210 Totem (Ancient Symbol) (Williams), 209– 211 (211) Totems Not Taboo (caa), 61, 169, 174– 175, 223–224 Tracy, Michael, 199 Trailerville (Bowling), 52, 53 Travis, Olin Herman, 44–48, 62, 164, 249, 307n70; bio/exh: 291; Dallas Art Institute, 33, 79; works: At Bert Willoughby’s Sportatorium, 44–45 (45); Mayor of Hoover City (Texas), 45–46 (46); A Workman, 46, 47 Travis, Susan, 46 Tree of Texas Painting (Bywaters), 58–59 (59), 70 Trentham, Eugene, 144 Treuter, Lirl, 129–131; works: Bats in a Cave, 131; Shorebound, 130 Triumph of American Painting, The (Sandler), 10, 240, 241–242 Trotter, McKie Massenburg iii: Annual Texas Painting and Sculpture Exhibition and, 134–136; on art both real and abstract, 132; Boynton compared to, 192; Bywaters’ Art in America essay on, 135; and expressionism, 260; and Fort Worth Circle, 132; in Grand Central Moderns exhibition, 135; in McKie Trotter exhibition, 321n33; service and internment in wwii, 132–133; in

Young American Painters exhibition, 135; bio/exh: 291–292; pictured: 206; works: Beach Castles, 134, 135; Bright Peninsula, 135; Earthscape, 136; Entrance to the Fair, 133; Exits, 134; Flood, 134; Harbor, 136; High Shoals, 134; Intersection, 134; Refugees, 133; Sea Things, 134; Sky Lift, 136; Skyscraperscape, 136; Southwestern Landscapes #2 and #3, 136; Three Windows, 134; Two Cities, 135; Untitled [Entrance to the Fair], 1954, 133 Truman, Harry, 226 Trumbo, Dalton, 168; works: Johnny Got His Gun, 168 “Turking,” 82 Turner, J. M. W., 135 Twin Derricks (Stout), 4 291 gallery, 21 U-1951 (Brooks), 251 Ubangi Woman (Williams), 224, 225 Uhler, Ruth Pershing, 65–67, 69, 186; works: Earth Rhythms, No. 3, 65 (66) Umlauf, Karl Julius “Charles,” 144, 149, 150–151, 158; in Artists for Victory exhibition, 243; bio/exh: 292–293; works: Adam, 151; Eve, 151; Holy Family/Flight Into Egypt, 150, 151; Mother and Child, 151; Refugees, 151; Slag Pullers, 151, 152; Supplication, 151 universalism, formalist, 178 University of Texas (Austin): College of Fine Arts, 17, 137, 144, 156, 168; and Sweatt v. Painter, 218 “unmarked case,” 184, 221 Untitled (Gift Object) (Roy Fridge), 216 Utter, Bror, 126, 191; as abstractionist, 59; bio/exh: 293; pictured: 206; works: Untitled (1946), 126; Untitled (July 1952), 115

I N D E X  |   3 7 9 Van Pappelendam, Laura, 196 Velasco Maidana, José María, 189–190 Velázquez, Diego. See Rokeby Venus (Velázquez) Veronese, Paolo, 229 Versen, Kurt, 253 Vienna Secession, 21 View of Maya (Bess), 107 Viol, Le (Magritte), 86, 189 Vision in Motion (Moholy-Nagy), 73, 77, 93, 94, 100–101 “Visual Education for Science and Engineering Students” (Preusser), 202–203 Vorkurs, 75 Vytlacil, Vaclav, 81 Waddell, James, 249 Wade, Bob “Daddy-O,” 259 Walking Away from the Sun (Hood), 190 (190) Ward, Eleanor, 99 Wardlaw, Alvia, 179 Warhol, Andy, 260 Warlike Theme (Preusser), 76, 77 Warner Bros. Bugs Bunny, 222–224, 226 (223) Watermelon and Pomegranate (Gadbois), 186, 187 Watkin, William Ward, 62, 65 Weathers, Chelsea, 137 Weiner, Gwendolyn, 212 Weiner, Ted and Lucille, 175, 207, 211 Weisman, Winston, 159 Weismann, Donald L., 144, 160–161, 167, 293–294; works: Electronic Icon, 159, 160; Night Works, 160; Sic Transit, 160, 161 West Texas Mesa (Forsyth), 153 (153) Weyhe Gallery, 119 White, Charles, 179 White, John, 15

White, Mark, 36 White, Ralph Ernest, Jr., 144; bio/exh: 294–295; works: Industrial Landscape, The Austin Concrete Co., 145; The Road to San Antonio from Austin, 145 Whitehead, Glenn, 338n6 Whitman, Walt, 33 Whitney Museum of Art: American Century exhibition at, 305n45; Boynton Aftermath at, 193; Brooks retrospective at, 251; Everett Spruce at, 49, 147; Joseph Glasco Portrait of a Poet at, 245; Stout retrospective at, 96 Wickes, Francis, 112; works: Inner World of Man, 112 Wiegart, Paul, 196 Wight, Frederick, 192 Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions, 19–20 Williams, Anita, 207 Williams, Charles Truett, 134, 163, 207–216, 230, 329n1; and Octavio Medellín, 219; studio of, 206, 329n3; and Texas primitivism, 226– 228; bio/exh: 295; pictured: 206, 214, 231; works: Ancient Warrior, 214 (214); Battleground, 174; Continuum, 208 (208), 211; The Exhibitionist, 214; Fountain, 212; Odalisque, 211–212 (212); Three Posts, 212, 213; Torso, 209, 210; Torso #2, 210; Totem (Ancient Symbol), 209–211 (211); Ubangi Woman, 224, 225 Williams, Hiram Draper, 166–168: bio/exh: 295–296; works: Challenging Man, 168; The Guilty II, 167 (167); Guilty Men I (Williams), 168; Meat Plate, 166; Untitled (1959), 167 Wilson, John, 98–99; works: Burden of Egypt, 98–99 Wilson, Sloan, 168 Wingren, Dan, 57, 160, 325n10; works: Late Wilderness, 58

Winter, Roger, 140–141, 207, 230 Winter Fields (Mozley), 141–143 (141) Winter Fields (Wyeth), 142–143 (142) Witch Doctor (Love), 222–224 (223) Witte Memorial Museum (San Antonio), 105, 164, 177 Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze), 201 Woman with Her Throat Cut (Giacometti), 235–237 (237) Woodruff, Hale, 179 Wordsworth, William, 98 Workman, A (Travis), 46, 47 Works by Houston Artists, Annual Exhibition of, 179, 201 Works Progress Administration (wpa), 241 World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago 1893), 17 Wray, Dick, 186, 201–202; bio/exh: 296; works: Green Grass Man, 201; One of Five Is a Tree, 202 (202) Wyeth, Andrew, 142–143; works: Winter Fields, 142 Yau, John, 9, 99, 318n115 Young Americans (Whitney Museum exh.), 193–194, 265 Younger American Painters (Guggenheim exh.), 135, 265 Young Man as Artist in U.S.A. (Culwell), 78, 79 Young Negro Art (MoMA exh.), 179 Zelevansky, Lynn, 241 Zerbe, Karl, 85 Zeuxis, 302n70 Ziegler, Samuel, 237 Zingg, Jules-Émile, 138 Zuni “War God,” 215 (215) Zurbarán, Francisco de, 229; works: Veronica’s Veil, 229