Jerry Bywaters, Interpreter of the Southwest

Jerry Bywaters, Interpreter of the Southwest

Author: Sam DeShong Ratcliffe

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2007-10-05

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 1585445916

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In the 1930s and 1940s, along with other members of a loosely affiliated group of artists known as the Dallas Nine, Jerry Bywaters pioneered the style later termed “Lone Star Regionalism.” Working with equal ability in oil, watercolor, tempera, and pastel, Bywaters portrayed the natural world, towns, and people of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and West Texas. This stunning retrospective volume of Bywaters’s paintings—more than forty of them arranged in a full-color gallery—vividly interprets the American Southwest. Underlying all of Bywaters’s work was some perspective on the interaction of people and the land. With character always the central feature, his portraiture featured a wide variety of subjects, from a prominent Dallas architect to two anonymous nuns the artist saw on a train and an unnamed member of the Navajo tribe he met on a visit to Shiprock, Arizona. He also depicted individuals in various tasks of everyday life, whether cowboys at a rodeo, oil field workers wrestling with a drill bit, or Mexican women washing clothes in a stream. In addition to the color gallery, the text is illustrated with letters, photographs, and ephemera from the artist’s papers, the Jerry Bywaters Collection on Art of the Southwest, housed in SMU’s Jake and Nancy Hamon Arts Library. Essays by three scholars who knew and worked with Bywaters—Sam Ratcliffe, John Lunsford, and Francine Carraro—add context and detail about his contributions, and an introduction by William H. Gerdts sets the stage for appreciating the art. Bywaters directed the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (now the Dallas Museum of Art) for two decades beginning in 1943. This book originated in conjunction with the exhibition, “Jerry Bywaters, Interpreter of the Southwest,” at SMU’s Meadows Museum of Art, November 30, 2007–February 24, 2008.


Jerry Bywaters

Jerry Bywaters

Author: Francine Carraro

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-07-22

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0292789947

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As an artist, art critic, museum director, and art educator, Jerry Bywaters reshaped the Texas art world and attracted national recognition for Texas artists. This first full-scale biography explores his life and work in the context of twentieth-century American art, revealing Bywaters' important role in the development of regionalist painting. Francine Carraro delves into all aspects of Bywaters' career. As an artist, Bywaters became a central figure and spokesman for a group of young, energetic painters known as the Dallas Nine (Alexandre Hogue, Everett Spruce, Otis Dozier, William Lester, and others) who broke out of the limitations of provincialism and attained national recognition beginning in the 1930s. As director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, art critic for the Dallas Morning News, and professor of art and art history at Southern Methodist University, Bywaters became a champion of the arts in Texas. Carraro traces his strong supporting role in professionalizing art institutions in Texas and defendlng the right to display art considered "subversive" in the McCarthy era. From these discussions emerges a finely drawn portrait of an artist who used a vocabulary of regional images to explore universal themes. It will be of interest to all students of American studies, national and regional art history, and twentieth-century biography.


Painting Texas History to 1900

Painting Texas History to 1900

Author: Sam DeShong Ratcliffe

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2014-11-06

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 0292785976

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Certificate of Commendation, American Association for State and Local History, 1994 T. R. Fehrenbach Book Award, Texas Historical Commission, 1992 San Antonio Conservation Society Citation, 1993 Dramatic historical events have frequently provided subject matter for artists, particularly in pre-twentieth-century Texas, where works portraying historical, often legendary, events and individuals predominated. Until now, however, these paintings of Texas history have never received the kind of study given to historical, fictional, and film versions of the same events. Painting Texas History to 1900 fills this gap with an interdisciplinary approach that explores these paintings both as works of art and as historical documents. The author examines the works of more than forty artists, including Henry McArdle, Theodore Gentilz, Robert Onderdonk, William Huddle, Frederic Remington, Friedrich Richard Petri, Arthur T. Lee, Seth Eastman, Sarah Hardinge, Frank Reaugh, W. G. M. Samuel, Carl G. von Iwonski, and Julius Stockfleth. He places each work within its historical and cultural context to show why such subject matter was chosen, why it was depicted in a particular way, and why such a depiction gained popular acceptance. For example, paintings of heroic events of the Texas Revolution were especially popular in the years following the Civil War, when, in Ratcliffe's view, Texans needed such images to assuage the loss of the war and the humiliation of Reconstruction. Though the paintings cut across traditional art history categories—from the pictographs of early historic Indians to European-inspired oil paintings—they are bound together by their artists' intent for them to function as historically evocative documents. With their visual narratives of events that characterized all of America's westward expansion—Indian encounters, military battles, farming, ranching, surveying, and the closing of the frontier—these works add an important chapter to the story of the American West.


Dictionary of Texas Artists, 1800-1945

Dictionary of Texas Artists, 1800-1945

Author: Paula L. Grauer

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780890968611

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Presents an alphabetical listing of artists who have lived, worked, and exhibited in Texas between 1800 and 1945; features color reproductions of one or more of each artist's works; and includes tables of the major exhibitions and competitions in Texas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.


Making a Hand

Making a Hand

Author: Michael R. Grauer

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2019-10-14

Total Pages: 118

ISBN-13: 1623498058

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Winner, 2021 National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum Western Heritage Award, Art/Photography Book (The Wrangler) Sometime in 1947, a letter arrived in the mailbox of Harold Dow Bugbee, already a well-known and highly sought illustrator for western pulp magazines and other publications. “Sir,” it began, “I have seen several of your pictures in the Cattleman. Sure like them and I am writing you to ask if you have all of your pictures in a book—if you do—we want to buy one.” “After seventy years of waiting,” writes Michael R. Grauer in this colorful survey of Bugbee’s life and career, “here is such a book.” Bugbee and his family arrived in Clarendon, Texas, in 1914, from Massachusetts. He helped his father with the 1,000-acre family ranch and eventually attended the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, where he studied architectural drawing. Subsequently, he enrolled at the Cumming School of Art in Des Moines, Iowa, but left after two years when the founder of the school told the young Texan that he had learned all the school had to offer. Bugbee avidly absorbed cowboy scenes and the lifestyle that birthed them. He filled canvases with colorful, authentic images that capture the spirit of the American West of the early to mid-1900s, especially in and near his beloved Texas Panhandle. By the 1930s, Bugbee was providing pen-and-ink sketches for magazines such as Ranch Romances, Western Stories, Country Gentleman, and Field and Stream. This richly illustrated overview of the man and his art provides a valuable and entertaining resource for collectors and students of western and Texas art.


Rounded Up in Glory

Rounded Up in Glory

Author: Michael Grauer

Publisher: University of North Texas Press

Published: 2016-08-15

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 1574416332

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Frank Reaugh (1860-1945; pronounced "Ray") was called "the Dean of Texas artists" for good reason. His pastels documented the wide-open spaces of the West as they were vanishing in the late nineteenth century, and his plein air techniques influenced generations of artists. His students include a "Who's Who" of twentieth-century Texas painters: Alexandre Hogue, Reveau Bassett, and Lucretia Coke, among others. He was an advocate of painting by observation, and encouraged his students to do the same by organizing legendary sketch trips to West Texas. Reaugh also earned the title of Renaissance man by inventing a portable easel that allowed him to paint in high winds, and developing a formula for pastels, which he marketed. A founder of the Dallas Art Society, which became the Dallas Museum of Art, Reaugh was central to Dallas and Oak Cliff artistic circles for many years until infighting and politics drove him out of fashion. He died isolated and poor in 1945. The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in Reaugh, through gallery shows, exhibitions, and a recent documentary. Despite his importance and this growing public profile, however, Rounded Up in Glory is the first full-length biography. Michael Grauer argues for Reaugh's importance as more than just a "longhorn painter." Reaugh's works and far-reaching imagination earned him a prominent place in the Texas art pantheon.


Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas

Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas

Author: Light Townsend Cummins

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2015-09-24

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1623493285

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Winner, 2016 Liz Carpenter Award for the Research in the History of Women, presented at the Texas State Historical Association Annual Meeting At Fair Park in Dallas, a sculpture of a Native American figure, bronze with gilded gold leaf, strains a bow before sending an arrow into flight. Tejas Warrior has welcomed thousands of visitors since the Texas Centennial Exposition opened in the 1930s. The iconic piece is instantly recognizable, yet few people know about its creator: Allie Victoria Tennant, one of a notable group of Texas artists who actively advanced regionalist art in the decades before World War II. Light Townsend Cummins follows Tennant’s public career from the 1920s to the 1960s, both as an artist and as a culture-bearer, as she advanced cultural endeavors, including the arts. A true pathfinder, she helped to create and nurture art institutions that still exist today, most especially the Dallas Museum of Art, on whose board of trustees she sat for almost thirty years. Tennant also worked on behalf of other civic institutions, including the public schools, art academies, and the State Fair of Texas, where she helped create the Women’s Building. Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas sheds new light on an often overlooked artist.


Working with Words & Pictures

Working with Words & Pictures

Author: Lori Siebert

Publisher: Betterway Books

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13:

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How to make the most of 2 essential elements of layout & design: type & illustrations, using show & tell format.


Art Guide Texas

Art Guide Texas

Author: Rebecca S. Cohen

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2004-10-01

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 9780292712300

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Texas is an art lover's paradise. More than one hundred venues located within the state welcome visitors to experience the visual arts. These include internationally recognized collections such as the Chinati Foundation, the Kimbell Art Museum, the Menil Collection, and the Nasher Sculpture Center; renowned encyclopedic institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the San Antonio Museum of Art; and dozens of first-rate art centers, alternative spaces, and university galleries. In addition to delighting the eye with a wide-ranging assortment of exhibitions, many of these museums and galleries are housed within architectural gems. To enhance the reader's visits to familiar destinations and to encourage the exploration of lesser-known venues, Art Guide Texas presents the only in-depth survey devoted exclusively to the state's nonprofit visual arts institutions. Rebecca Cohen organizes the book regionally. Individual entries for museums and galleries give essential contact information, including phone numbers and Web sites, as well as a description of the collection(s) and past exhibitions, a brief history of the institution, significant architectural details about the building, and assorted practical tips. Black-and-white photographs accompany many of the entries, as well as notable quotes on art and architecture. In addition, Cohen's essays on the phenomenal late-twentieth-century growth of the arts in Texas and on arts activity in the different regions of the state provide a helpful context for exploring the arts in Texas.