Katie Robinson Edwards, MIDCENTURY MODERN ART IN TEXAS. (original) (raw)

Dr. Katie Robinson Edwards, Curator of the Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum in Austin, has produced this splendid book, which is deeply researched, clearly written, and lavishly and beautifully illustrated. Prior to serving at the Umlauf, Dr. Edwards taught at Baylor University's Allbritton Art Institute; she has written on such artists as Andrew Wyeth, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jackson Pollock. Art enthusiasts will relish this impressive volume, which won the Award of Merit for Non-Fiction from The Philosophical Society of Texas in 2015.

Dr. Edwards divides her study, roughly spanning the period 1930-1960, into nine chapters and a Postscript, "What Happened to Earnest Modernism?" Her topics include The Modernist Impulse and Texas Art; The 1930s and the Texas Centennial; Houston and the Foundations of Early Texas Modernism; Early Practitioners of Abstraction and Nonobjectivity; The Fort Worth Circle; The University of Texas at Austin in the 1940s and 1950s; The 1950s and Houston; Sculpture in and around the Studio of Charles Williams; and Are Texans American? MoMA's AMERICANS Exhibitions. Among the artists she examines are Forrest Clemenger Bess, Kathleen Blackshear, Jerry Bywaters, Connie Forsyth, Dorothy Hood, Toni LaSelle, Robert Preusser, Everett Franklin Spruce, Charles Umlauf, Donald LeRoy Weismann, Charles Williams, and Dick Wray.

MIDCENTURY MODERN ART IN TEXAS "covers the years in [the state] when abstract forms, marks, and lyrical color fields still felt novel and provocative, before Abstract Expressionism became an orthodox style." Edwards contends that her aim "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."

As a Fort Worth native, I especially enjoyed her examination of the Fort Worth Circle, which included such artists as Bill Bomar, Cynthia Brants, David Brownlow, Lia Cuilty, Kelly Fearing, George Grammer, Veronica Helfensteller, Dickson Reeder, Flora Blanc Reeder, and Bror Utter. "In midcentury Texas," Dr. Edwards asserts, "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. 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 commendable publication shows that Texas art consists of much more than rustic scenes of cowboys, windmills, and fields of bluebonnets.