Port Arthur Texas Native Who Had No Exposure to Art as Such Until He Was Seventeen

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Questions of Texas: Avant Garde and Outlier

The thought of an fine art of the American Due south and how one might locate Texas within this concept is a complicated question for art history. There is the matter of whether Texas is part of the South, the West, or neither. Its geographical largeness and the diversity within the state further contribute to the challenges of its Southernness. Despite the omission of Texas from most contemporary art discourse, many artists who exhibited in the art capitals of the The states take roots in the S. Texas, in between New York Metropolis and Los Angeles, the two cities that dominate postwar narratives of American art history, is a infinite far removed from those art capitals, and its inhabitants are often excluded from those narratives. This essay focuses on 2 Texas artists, Forrest Bess (1911–1977) and Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), who are now considered important and established avant-garde postwar American artists.

Bess and Rauschenberg were built-in in Texas, and each offers an example of what the American South might hateful toward framing a postwar American art of the centre and its margins. Both artists grew up in Texas, did not complete traditional fine art undergraduate or graduate training, and served in the armed forces. Bess, born in Bay Urban center, initiated degrees in architecture at two Texas universities,ⁱ enlisted in the armed services during Globe State of war Two, and spent most of his adulthood in "near-full isolation" in his hometown.² Bess was mostly relegated to a identify exterior of the contemporary canon, despite his connections to scholar and critic Meyer Schapiro and early on years spent with the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City, a pioneering representative of postwar avant-garde artists. His first inclusion in the Whitney Biennial was posthumous and did not occur until 2012. In dissimilarity, Rauschenberg has come to ascertain advanced art practices in the postwar period and reached national and international acclaim during his lifetime. He was born in Port Arthur, began but did not complete his art degree at the Kansas City Fine art Institute, and attended courses at two established art schools, Black Mountain College and the Art Students League.^three A comparison between the reputations of these two Texas artists raises larger questions about regionalism in American art.^iv Looking closely at the careers and scholarly appraisals of Forrest Bess and Robert Rauschenberg helps us to annals how the Due south—and specifically Texas—is considered in relation to the histories of postwar American art at big.

While these artists would appear to share some details of biography and training, the scholarship on Bess and Rauschenberg recap dissimilar edges of the art-historical canon: the outlier and the advanced. Forrest Bess, whose work featured a network of personal symbols within the field of abstraction, exhibited in New York City during his lifetime (between 1949 and 1967⁵), as well as in Houston (his closest metropolis). Although he maintained contact with mainstream figures, such as Betty Parsons and Meyer Schapiro, Bess lived largely outside the art world and died in obscurity. Like Bess, Rauschenberg worked in such a way that many art historians effort to decode or read his fine art through his biography. Unlike Bess, still, it may be hard to name a more approved postwar artist than Robert Rauschenberg. Perhaps it comes downward to a question of geography; Rauschenberg lived mostly in New York City during his ascension career. Information technology was i of the art centers of the postwar menstruation, while Bess lived in Bay City, Texas. The focus here is on Bess and Rauschenberg, considering both worked at about the same time, using a like language of abstraction. All the same the labels used to describe the artists' practices imply different value systems. Indeed, if a postwar creative person working at the geographic periphery—especially in the South—challenged the parameters of avant-garde art, how did the structures and networks of the mainstream art earth react? This question is fundamentally rooted in the problems of art history and relates to the ways in which these same structures silence "unknown" artists.

Questions of the outsider and the avant-garde—and how to denaturalize the structures that delineate the two—are posed by Lynne Cooke in the 2018 exhibition and catalogue Outliers and American Vanguard Art. Cooke seeks to create a place where the nomenclatures of difference—between advanced and self-taught—no longer retain meaning as divide categories. To accomplish this, Cooke suggests "outlier" every bit a more useful term.⁶ This terminology may operate within questions of regionalism—an outcome which seems to be at the root of appraisals of most artists from smaller cities (for example, in the immediate postwar menstruation, any American city outside of New York City). While Cooke claims Bess as an outlier, Rauschenberg is then positioned as a part of the establishment. Cooke views Bess equally an outlier because he chose to find power in his social position; he "preferred life on the margins—a infinite of resistance, in bell hooks's words."⁷

That space of resistance is in full view in Bess's work, which registers the landscape of Texas and therefore speaks of an otherness in opposition to New York. Works such as an untitled painting sold at Christie'due south in 2012⁸ (northward.d.; current location unknown) suggest the expanse of the sky and water of Bay Metropolis, Texas. Likewise, another work from the same auction, dated 1968^nine (electric current location unknown) also features the suggestion of water—a familiar view. As Clare Elliott describes it: "A fisherman, Bess must have stared for hours at the Gulf of Mexico's apartment, unceasing horizon, and a deep connection to nature was imperative to his livelihood."¹⁰ She states that "many of his compositions dissever the canvas horizontally, creating the impression of a horizon line."¹¹ This is evident in Chinquapin ¹² (1967; previously manor of Bernard J. Wilford), whose title references the area he lived in most Bay Metropolis, while the pink sky—familiar to anyone who has seen a Texas sunrise—shoreline, and play of water suggest the landscape.

Through Bess's unique manner of abstraction, notwithstanding, these places could also exist anywhere. Examining work by artists both from and of Texas, such as Frank Reaugh (1860–1945), Everett Bandbox (1908–2002), Jerry Bywaters (1906–1989), Alexandre Hogue (1898–1994), and Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986), art historian Susie Kalil identifies what she calls a traditional Texas mural. Kalil locates Bess's paintings such as Chinquapin, Seascape with Sun (c. 1947; Museum of Contemporary Fine art Chicago), and Seascape with Moon (1950; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago) as "atypical" from other work past Texas artists of the same time period.^thirteen In "The Texas Landscape," she writes:

The Gulf itself held an most mystical appeal for Bess. His house, a ramshackle barge turned upside down and covered with tar and shells, was located on a spit of land reachable just by boat on the Intercoastal Waterway. Bess'southward highly charged, enigmatic paintings were atypical of the majority of works produced in Texas during the 1950s and 1960s. The oddly cute works are powerful symbols derived from the land and sea Bess encountered while fishing for his meagre livelihood.^fourteen

In this quotation, Kalil describes the importance of the Gulf of Mexico to Bess and how the landscape helped to ascertain Bess'southward inner life. The Texas landscape became part of his rich symbolic imagery signifying both the inner and outer life of Bess.

Finally, Alison de Lima Greene describes Bess's 1958 Untitled (11A) (fig. i) as both "transcendental aspirations" and connected to the Texas mural.¹⁵ She suggests a parallel betwixt the work of Bess and Georgia O'Keeffe, stating: "But Georgia O'Keeffe, during her early on years in Canyon, Texas, had found such liberating inspiration in the Texas mural."¹⁶ Bess himself wrote of the painting: "I felt it had something to do with a lone beach. . . . The sharp pointed shapes brought to mind driftwood—the silhouette of driftwood on a beach."¹⁷ He links the work to his ain experiences of the red sky, grassy shorelines, and open seas of the Texas coast.

Fig. ane. Forrest Bess, Untitled (11A), 1958. Oil on canvas, 17 3/iv × 24 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum purchase funded by Duke Energy, 88.66

For Elliott, Kalil, Greene, and other fine art historians, Bess is defined by Texas. These writers position Bess as function of an fine art-historical lineage—rooted in region (and perhaps regionalism) just transcending such tropes through his adaptation of a form of avant-garde modernism popularized by O'Keeffe. His use of brainchild to picture the Texas mural firmly positioned him inside a familiar modernist narrative. Indeed, Katie Robinson Edwards, in Midcentury Modern Art in Texas, asserts Bess as "1 of Texas'south finest modernist painters."¹⁸ Until the 1980s, Bess was "well known" in Houston but was mainly considered "a regional artist" in Texas.¹⁹

In Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Fine art, Miranda Lash offers a useful framework to address whether art tin exist Southern. She states, "Considering of the slipperiness of what 'the South' is and means, and the alien emotions information technology provokes, the region remains a recurring and politically potent concept."^twenty According to Lash, artists who identify every bit Southern are often excluded from mainstream gimmicky art exhibitions, citing the 2014 Whitney Biennial as i case.²¹ She describes how when the Due south enters into art-historical essays and museums, it is through classifications such as "'self-taught,' 'visionary,' or otherwise 'naïve,'" terms reminiscent of Cooke'southward utilise of outlier.²² As Trevor Schoonmaker elaborates, the Due south is non a "monolith" to those who live in that location, although it is often discussed in such terms by those who do non.²³ The question of a monolithic Southward gets more complicated with regard to Texas. Schoonmaker writes:

The question isn't, for instance, whether Texas, pushing the conversation westward, is function of the Due south or not. A better question is how much of the Southward is in Texas? For case, I recall Southeast Texan Robert Rauschenberg, San Antonian Dario Robleto, and Dallasite Erykah Badu accept demonstrated considerable southernness in their piece of work. And Houstonian Beyoncé has recently displayed her own credentials with the release of "Formation." But that doesn't mean all of Texas has a southern flavor, or that all Texans identify as southerners.²⁴

Schoonmaker provocatively argues that "several giants of mid-twentieth century American art" were "all southerners," including Romare Bearden, Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, and Rauschenberg.²⁵ Schoonmaker discusses the influence on Rauschenberg of the reuse of materials in Southern civilisation in his connectedness to later self-taught African American artists, such as Thornton Punch. Schoonmaker looks to how African American colloquial artists influenced contemporary African American artists who address the historical and present experiences of the Southward in their piece of work.²⁶

Equally for Bess, Texas figures into the scholarly appraisals and pop imaginings of Rauschenberg. Katie Robinson Edwards describes how:

When Milton Rauschenberg was boarding a coach in Kansas City spring for New York, he shed his given proper name and attempted to shed his Texas accent. Yet at that place is a large kernel of truth in the stereotypes that metaphorically connect Rauschenberg'southward grand-manner art to the yard country of his youth. The independence, freedom, and brashness of his fine art match the stubbornness, drunken antics, openness, and genuine friendliness of his personality.²⁷

While Rauschenberg attempts to get out the state and the proper noun Milton behind in this anecdote, Edwards ties Rauschenberg's personality and art to the state's reputation. Rauschenberg'southward attempted erasure of his Texan roots seems to crusade problems for those art historians who want to merits him for Texas. Elsewhere, Edwards has written how, "of all the artists to ever hail from Texas, a Port Arthur native made the greatest, longest-lasting touch on the international art earth. Robert Rauschenberg . . . broke through creative and social barriers repeatedly throughout his life."²⁸ In The Fine art of Texas: 250 Years, meant to celebrate Texas, Edwards cites Rauschenberg, working mainly exterior the land, as one of its most important artists.

Rauschenberg's origins have on quasi-mythic meaning in a unlike manner in scholarship not focused on Texas. Calvin Tomkins, in The Bride and The Bachelors: The Heretical Courtship in Modern Art, states: "Artists have, of course, come up from every believable sort of background, simply non many have grown up in an environment that would announced to be less conducive to artful development than the small Gulf Coast refinery town of Port Arthur, Texas, where Rauschenberg spent his starting time eighteen years."²⁹ In this frame, Port Arthur and Texas get well-nigh mythic in how nigh inconceivable it is that an artist such every bit Rauschenberg was able to succeed despite coming from such origins. Similarly, in Robert Rauschenberg, Catherine Craft includes a chapter titled "The Early on Years—From Texas to New York," albeit with trivial attention to those years in Texas.^xxx Texas is positioned as a mere starting point for Rauschenberg, 1 with little meaning later. Mary Lynn Kotz gives the most attention to Rauschenberg's connections to Texas in her 1990 volume Rauschenberg/Art and Life, writing that "Although he gave upward the idea of a religious calling while still a teenager, Rauschenberg's life and work have been shaped past the values and experiences deeply rooted in his Texas childhood. The key to understanding his art is to be plant there."³¹ Significantly, Kotz tries to assign biographical and generative meaning to Texas in Rauschenberg'due south career. Finally, Paul Schimmel also defines Texas as foundational to Rauschenberg'due south oeuvre. In describing echoes of Texas in an untitled 1954 work (Eli and Edythe Fifty. Broad Collection, Los Angeles), Schimmel writes, "The yellow crocheted drapery collaged in the lower right quadrant of the pictorial surface is a type of fabric that would reemerge in the Combines as a reference to American home decoration of the 1940s and to Rauschenberg'due south upbringing in Texas."³² Rauschenberg himself described how he had no exposure to art or any fine art preparation while in Port Arthur, Texas.³³ Despite this, when asked if "there is anything in your art of Port Arthur, Texas?," he responded, "Oh, there has to be."³⁴

Fig. 2. Robert Rauschenberg, Rodeo Palace (Spread), 1975–76. Solvent transfer, textile, cardboard, acrylic, and graphite on cardboard on wood panels with objects, 144 10 192 ten 40 3/8 inches; depth variable. Lyn and Norman Lear Drove, Los Angeles. ©Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, RRF Registration# 76.001

A handful of later works, such as his Rodeo Palace (1975–76) (fig. two), more than definitively link Rauschenberg with the state of Texas. From his Spread series, Rodeo Palace was deputed by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth to illustrate the theme of "the Great American Rodeo" for its celebration of the national bicentennial.³⁵ While other participating artists are listed in the corresponding exhibition catalogue as from Texas or other states, Rauschenberg'southward Texas roots are left out, and he is described equally "painter Robert Rauschenberg"³⁶ and "an American master of intuitive and poetic fine art."³⁷ Kotz describes the work and Texas inside the context of the W:

For Rauschenberg, at the age of fifty, Rodeo Palace was a breakthrough, jubilant his roots in images as straightforward and homely as those in the old combines. The references to the West include horses, cactus, and an oil derrick. At the height of the painting's six panels, on a surface painted in opalescent peach, is a picture of an ordinary bucket, like the kind used to water horses. In the terminate, Rauschenberg did non just confine Rodeo Palace to rodeos or the quondam West. Through his joyous, random-order imagery, Rauschenberg once again became the reporter of past and present.³⁸

While Rodeo Palace is described as inspired by Texas, the work is placed, through its clan with the rodeo, equally participating in the American West, not the American South.³⁹

Rodeo Palace features heavily in later Rauschenberg retrospectives, where information technology is alternately defined as either virtually Texas or about Rauschenberg's biography. The piece of work was included in the Smithsonian Institution's Rauschenberg retrospective, an exhibition for a living American artist as a celebration of the nation'southward bicentennial.^xl Benjamin Forgey, in his ARTnews review of the 1977 retrospective, wrote: "Rodeo Palace, the virtually recent painting on view, is a huge compendium piece, similar a travelogue of Rauschenberg's own amazing journeying."⁴¹ As the well-nigh recent piece of work in the exhibition produced by the artist, Rodeo Palace functioned, perchance not by the will of the artist, as an encapsulation of Rauschenberg's career through his Texas beginnings. Also, for a 1997 retrospective, Joan Young positions Rodeo Palace equally "one of Rauschenberg's first artworks postdating the Combines to include references to his Texan roots."⁴² Similarly, William H. Goetzmann describes the work as "a sincere tribute to Texas nostalgia" that "evokes the sense of the shabby Texas farmhouse and rural poverty amidst plenty every bit well as any work of its fourth dimension."⁴³ Finally, Walter Hopps notes how "it'southward equally though he's gone back to the special waters and flowerings of his roots on the Gulf Coast, only in a new and triumphant way."⁴⁴ These various quotations demonstrate how both national and local writers responded to Rodeo Palace equally specific to Texas and Rauschenberg's biography.

Fig. 3. Robert Rauschenberg, Whistle Cease (Spread), 1977. Solvent transfer, material, and newspaper on woods panels with objects and train point light, 84 x 180 x 9 inches. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Museum purchase and commission, The Benjamin J. Tiller Memorial Trust. ©Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, RRF Registration# 77.002

Another work in the series, Whistle Finish of 1977 (fig. 3), makes reference to Texas and, through those connections, to Rauschenberg'due south childhood. The series proper noun, Spread (1975–83), makes associations with Texas, equally "a term used to draw a wide expanse of country, as well equally a fabric roofing; information technology also refers to the large calibration of these detail artworks. Pigment and solvent transfer are applied to wood panels and often to fabric collage, while constitute objects, mirrored Plexiglas, and electric lights are commonly included."⁴⁵ Whistle Terminate, as well commissioned by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (and in that collection), holds meaning personal associations to Texas and is dedicated to Rauschenberg's father. In the work, Rauschenberg uses images that reference his mother, "the yellow rose of Texas," a ship with "Gulf" on information technology, and the Southern "shotgun" house, like to Rauschenberg's begetter'south babyhood home.⁴⁶ As Kotz explains, "the dominant object in Whistle End is a minor ruddy lantern, similar to ones on the caboose of Port Arthur-to-Beaumont trains in use long ago."⁴⁷ The lantern, which blinks and focuses the viewer'due south attention, is the most visible aspect of the work and makes a connection to Texas.

In conclusion, in art-historical scholarship, Forrest Bess and Robert Rauschenberg seem to occupy a infinite within Texas when it suits the art historian. Connections to Texas within their work alternately become a tool for either camouflaging or expressing Texas; for representing them every bit either a geographic bibelot or an outlier. While sometimes that subject position is non necessarily specific to Texas, and Texas stands in for anywhere exterior the center, on other occasions it is Texas, and not the American South, that determines an outlier status. For Bess, his life spent in Texas amplifies his status as an outsider to the mainstream fine art world. In contrast, for Rauschenberg, Texas is described past scholars with wonder—how did he get from there to here? These artists both challenged and conformed to scholars' and audiences' ideas of what a Texas avant-garde artist might wait like; one who stayed mostly in Texas and one who left. Through this historiography of fine art-historical writing on Bess and Rauschenberg, I hope to raise questions about the identify of Texas in postwar American fine art and, past extension, ask where the South might be located within such art. Through these art-historical references, Texas becomes a site of almost mythic origins for Rauschenberg's rise in the art globe and the infinite in which Bess (mostly) remained unknown.

By asking questions about how Texas fits within the work of Bess and Rauschenberg, I promise to expand the scholarship on Southern art and the canon of American modernism. Both artists, identified as Texans by fine art historians within and outside of the state borders, at times depicted the thought of Texas in abstract terms in their piece of work. Bess, whose paintings abstracted the landscape of Texas, and Rauschenberg, who may have abstracted the idea of what Texas meant to him in his work, provide a style of looking at an already abstract concept—Texas, a state, a region, or a place that holds meaning.⁴⁸ The land of Texas is expansive and does not signify one unified or fixed pregnant and/or identity; attempts to ascertain Texas are arbitrary and confining. Bess's and Rauschenberg's Texas origins show the ways Texas is written in and out of their careers in fine art history. Further studies might look more closely at historical and gimmicky artists in Texas through a more than inclusive lens. New studies, specifically focusing on silenced, unknown artists, those who express an intersectional identity, or who take been ignored by the mainstream art institution due to their work in a geographic periphery, are necessary to expand how these structures impact historical and gimmicky creative practices and art history. The question of Texas, then, begs us to consider the piece of work of Chicanx and African American artists and of the place of Texas itself, which was in one case a part of a United mexican states, in histories of the art of the The states of America. Bess and Rauschenberg, both fixed into the catechism of postwar art as either outlier or avant-garde master, offer a place to start.

Cite this article: Melissa L. Mednicov, "Questions of Texas: Avant Garde and Outlier," Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Fine art 6, no. 1 (Spring 2020), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.9899.

PDF:Mednicov, Questions of Texas

Notes

Most the Author(southward): Melissa L. Mednicov is Associate Professor of Art History at Sam Houston Land University

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Source: https://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/article/little-of-artistic-merit/questions-of-texas/