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| "On Drawing" by Roger Winter, second edition. |
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| Roger Winter's dedication from the second edition of his book, On Drawing. Loren Mozley's name has been misspelled as "Mosely." |
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| Robert McDonald Graham Jr. |
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| Robert McDonald Graham Jr. |
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| Robert McDonald Graham Jr. |
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| Robert McDonald Graham Jr. |
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| Robert McDonald Graham Jr. |
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| Robert McDonald Graham Jr. |
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| Robert McDonald Graham Jr. |
Robert McDonald Graham Jr. (1919-2003) - Born in New Rochelle, New York, he studied at the Kansas City Art Institute with Thomas Hart Benton. He served as a combat artist during World War II, and after the war was influenced by the Belgian painter, Jules van Vlasselaer. From that time he did little Regionalist work in the style of Benton, meaning that those paintings by Graham are rare, but are also considered the most desirable. He was an art instructor at the University of Texas in Austin from 1951-1955 and from 1958-1975, taught at the University of Missouri at Kansas City.
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| Constance Forsyth |
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| Constance Forsyth |
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| Constance Forsyth |
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| Constance Forsyth |
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| Constance Forsyth |
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| Constance Forsyth |
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| Constance Forsyth |
Constance Forsyth (1903-1987) was the daughter of artist William Forsyth. She was a notable artist in the development of printmaking from 1900-1950.
Forsyth was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. In 1925 she received a B.A. in chemistry from Butler University, and in 1929 she received a diploma from the John Herron Art Institute.
In the Spring of 1930, as well as 1927-1928, Forsyth studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1932 and 1934 she spent the Summers studying at the Broadmoor Art Academy.
Forsyth helped Thomas Hart Benton work on the Indiana murals for the Century of Progress International Exposition, which was held in 1933.
From 1940 until her retirement in 1973 she taught at the University of Texas at Austin. Forsyth was the first female faculty member hired by their art department, where she headed their printmaking department.
As of 1973, her work had been exhibited in six countries and she had received several national prizes.
In 1985 Forsyth received the Southern Graphics Council's Printmakers Emeritus Award. She belonged to the Hoosier Salon and the Society of Print Makers, and was important to the founding of and activities of the Texas Printmakers Guild.
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| Everett Spruce |
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| Everett Spruce |
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| Everett Spruce |
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| Everett Spruce |
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| Everett Spruce |
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| Everett Spruce |
Everett Franklin Spruce was born on December 25, 1907 (some sources list 1908) in Holland, Arkansas, the oldest of six children, to William Everett Spruce and his wife, Fanny May. In 1911 his father moved the family to Adams Mountain in Pope County and later to Mulberry where Spruce graduated high school in 1925.
During these early years Spruce was influenced by both the rugged countryside in the foothills of the Ozarks and his father’s occupation of farming. This rural setting provided the young Spruce with ideas for sketching which caught the attention of family members. Word of his artistic talent reached Kathryn and Olin Travis who established a summer painting school in the Ozark Mountains in 1926. Impressed with Spruce’s work, Olin Travis offered him a scholarship at his newly formed Dallas Art Institute (DAI). Spruce moved to Dallas and studied at the DAI from 1926-29 with Travis and another Texas artist, Thomas M. Stell, Jr. Spruce met another art student at the DAI, Alice Virginia Kramer, whom he later married in 1934, and together they exhibited their work in Dallas and participated in the Travis Ozark Summer Art School.
The 1930s proved to be a productive period for Spruce. In 1931 he took a position as gallery assistant at the Free Public Art Gallery, later (1933) renamed the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, and was promoted to registrar when the museum opened its doors at its new location in Fair Park in 1936 in time for the Texas Centennial celebration. In 1932 Spruce exhibited with eight other Texas artists at the Dallas Public Art Gallery in the Exhibition of Young Dallas Painters (All young men under thirty years of age). A half-century later, scholars and art collectors began to employ this exhibition’s title as a general term to identify these and other Dallas artists of that period having a regionalist aesthetic as "The Dallas Nine."
Always inspired by his early influence of the Ozark Mountains and the austerity of Texas landscapes, Spruce continued to use everyday scenes in his work that soon began to gain national attention during the 1930s with the inclusion of his paintings in exhibitions across the nation including the Kansas City Art Institute (Kansas City, Missouri), the Rockefeller Center (New York, New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, New York), the Palace of Fine Arts (San Francisco, California), and the New York World’s Fair Exhibition (New York, New York).
In 1940 Spruce joined the art faculty at the University of Texas at Austin where he began as an instructor in life drawing and creative design. From 1949-1951 Spruce served as Chairman of the Department of Art and in 1954 he became Professor of Art. In 1958 Spruce was the first artist featured in the Blaffer Series on Texas Art, published by the University of Texas Press. The portfolio, entitled A Portfolio of Eight Paintings, includes "Everett Spruce: an Appreciation" by Jerry Bywaters, then director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.
In 1974 Spruce retired from the art department as Professor Emeritus yet continued to paint until he was 88 years old. Spruce died in Austin in 2002 at the age of 94, survived by his twin daughters and two sons. Spruce’s legacy continues today through the countless number of students he influenced during his tenure at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition, his work is now part of permanent collections at the Dallas Museum of Art, the Blanton Museum of Art (University of Texas at Austin), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York).
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| William Lester |
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| William Lester |
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| William Lester |
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| William Lester |
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| William Lester |
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| William Lester |
William Lewis Lester was born on August 20, 1910 in Graham, Texas to John Lewis and Mildred Matilda Lester. In 1924, the Lester family moved to Dallas where William attended Bryan Street High School for three years. There he met fellow artist Perry Nichols. In the fall of 1927, while on a sketching trip with Nichols, Lester picked up crayons and began sketching in color for the first time - an experience that opened his eyes up the world of color on an autumn day in Texas. Lester spent his senior year at Woodrow Wilson High School where he graduated in 1929. His interest in art thrived during his high school days when he drew cartoons and art work for the school newspapers and annuals. In 1927, he spent the summer at Alexandre Hogue’s art camp in Glen Rose, Texas, and attended classes at the Dallas Art Institute where he took classes from Tom Stell, who had arrived at the school in 1929. During the summers of 1931 and 1932 he studied painting at Olin Travis’s farm in Arkansas.
In 1931 Lester was already showing his work with other Dallas artists such as Jerry Bywaters, Alexandre Hogue, and Reveau Bassett at the Joseph Sartor Galleries in Dallas and would later, in 1932, have a one-man show at the gallery. In that same year, Lester exhibited with eight other Texas artists at the Dallas Public Art Gallery in the Exhibition of Young Dallas Artists (All young men under thirty years of age). Several of these Texas Regionalist artists formed a solid bond and promoted their interpretation of austere Texas and Southwest landscapes and everyday scenes through their paintings and prints.
Lester supported himself during the hard economic times of the 1930s by working at art-related jobs. From 1934-35 he served as a staff artist for the Civilian Conservation Corps stationed at Palo Duro Canyon and at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and from 1935-36 and in 1942 he worked as a draftsman for Dallas Power and Light Company.
While spending time in the remote areas of the Texas Panhandle and Oklahoma, Lester studied the rocky landscapes, a particular subject of interest for the young artist that he would later incorporate into his art work including his paintingOklahoma Rocks, which was exhibited in the Centennial Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture, and Graphic Arts in 1936 at the newly opened Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. In that same year, Lester exhibited his painting, In Oklahoma, in the First National Exhibition of American Art at Rockefeller Center in New York City and in 1939 showed two paintings in two major American exhibitions: The Three Crosses in the New York World’s Fair Exhibition American Art Today and Empty Silo in San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition.
Lester was also interested in printmaking, mainly lithography, and always included prints in the Lone Star Printmakers annual shows from their founding in 1938 through the group’s last circuit in 1942. Lester’s family also grew during this time when he and his wife, Sylvia, whom he had married in 1938, had a daughter, Edith, born in 1939 and a son, Paul David, born in 1942. Aside from art, Lester was also interested in classical music and was an avid collector of music albums.
From 1940-42, Lester worked as a teacher in the museum school at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts and had solo exhibitions at the museum in 1940 and 1947. His reputation as artist and teacher grew in the Texas art community. In 1942, Loren Mozley, chairman of the department of art at the University of Texas in Austin, offered Lester a position as an instructor in art. Lester served as the department’s chairman from 1952-54 and, in 1956, was appointed Professor of Art. Lester continued to teach at the University until his retirement as Professor Emeritus in 1972.
During the summers of 1949 and 1950 he taught at Sul Ross State College in Alpine, Texas, and beginning in 1952 through the 1970s began traveling to other countries to study art, including Mexico, Guatemala, France, and Italy. It was also during this time that Lester’s paintings began to take a turn toward the abstract with a bolder use of color -- a trend which Lester continued through the 1960s and 1970s.
Amid his teaching responsibilities, Lester continued to show his work in museums and galleries including the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Austin’s Laguna Gloria Art Museum, faculty exhibitions at the University of Texas, the Shook-Carrington Gallery in San Antonio, and the Passedoit Gallery in New York City. He was also accepted into several annual exhibitions, including the Dallas Allied Art Exhibition, the Texas General Exhibition, and the Texas Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture (which toured the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston, and San Antonio’s Witte Museum). Lester‘s exhibitions included the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1970, the Texas Painting & Sculpture: 20th Century exhibition which opened at Southern Methodist University in 1971 and traveled to the Witte Museum in San Antonio, the University Art Museum in Austin, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, and The Museum on the Texas Tech University campus in Lubbock, and in 1974, a joint exhibition with fellow art department faculty member Constance Forsyth at the Archer M. Huntington Galleries at the University of Texas in Austin.
The 1980s brought a revival of interest for the Texas Regionalist artists with the opening exhibition in the newly constructed Dallas Museum of Art, Lone Star Regionalism - The Dallas Nine and Their Circle, curated by Dr. Rick Stewart -- an interest that remains strong today. In 1993 both Lester and his longtime UT art department colleague, Everett Spruce, were honored with an exhibition curated by Dr. Francine Carraro at the Laguna Gloria Art Museum: Companions in Time: the Paintings of William Lester and Everett Spruce.
Lester died in Austin on November 27, 1991, yet his legacy continues through the many artists he taught at the University of Texas at Austin and the many artists he influenced throughout the state of Texas.
Source:
Carraro, Betty Francine. Painters of the Southwest Landscape; Otis Dozier, William Lester, Everett Spruce. MFA Thesis, Southern Methodist University, 1976.
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| Loren Mozley |
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| Loren Mozley |
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| Loren Mozley |
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| Loren Mozley |
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| Loren Mozley |
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| Loren Mozley |
Loren Norman Mozley (1905–1989).
Loren Mozley, painter of Southwestern landscapes, was born in Brookport, Illinois, on October 2, 1905, to Charlie Almus and Ella (Phillips) Mozley. His father, a country physician, moved his family to New Mexico in 1906, and Mozley grew up in lumber and mining camps and Pueblos. He was initially introduced to the materials of oil painting by one of his father's Navajo patients and began to paint at age eleven, after his family settled in Albuquerque.
Following his graduation from Albuquerque High School in 1923 he entered the University of New Mexico. During the Summers he worked as a secretary for Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos, where he came into contact with members of the artists' colony active at that time. In 1926 he left college to move to Taos. For the next two years he painted, exhibited his work at the Harwood Gallery, and befriended artists Andrew Dasburg, Dorothy Brett, John Ward Lockwood, Kenneth Adams, and John Marin, among others.
From 1929 -1931 Mozley studied at the Colarossi and Chaumière Academies in Paris, copied paintings at the Louvre, and traveled in Holland, Italy, and Southern France. He returned to America penniless in 1931 and spent the next four years in New York City, working as an engraver for part of the time and painting when he could.
During this time he befriended Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Georgia O'Keeffe. In 1935 he returned to Taos, where he married Wilma Genevieve Meyer on December 15; they had no children. For the next few years Mozley worked to establish a career as a painter and teacher. He received WPA commissions to paint murals for the Federal Building in Albuquerque and the post office in Clinton, Oklahoma; exhibited his work as a member of the Taos Heptagon, an artists' gallery group; and published an article on his friend John Marin in the Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art (1936). In 1936 he began teaching in the Art Department at the University of New Mexico, and in the Summers of 1937-38 he served as Director of the Field School of Art at Taos. He also served as a member of the board of the University of New Mexico Harwood Foundation from 1937-38. He exhibited his work at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and the Denver Art Museum in 1938.
Mozley left New Mexico in August 1938 to help Ward Lockwood organize the new art department at the University of Texas in Austin. The two men put their jobs on the line by insisting on the necessity of nude models for life-drawing classes and worked to bridge the gap between academia and the larger arts community by hiring artists as teachers, bringing art exhibitions to the campus, and serving on juries throughout the state.
During the next few years Mozley completed a post office mural in Alvin, Texas, lectured in Texas museums, and served as Acting Chairman of the Department of Art from 1942-45 and as President of the Texas Fine Arts Association (1945–46). His work was exhibited regionally and began to win recognition: he received the Cokesbury Prize for an etching entered in the Dallas Museum Print Show (1943) and won first prize and the San Antonio Art League prize for paintings entered in Texas General exhibitions (1942 and 1945).
A Christmas trip to Mexico City in 1938 sparked Mozley's interest in Latin-American art, and in 1940 he taught a course with Mexican critic Adolfo Best-Maugard in the fledgling Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas.
As a member of the University of Texas Field School at the National University of Mexico from 1943-45 Mozley taught courses on Latin-American art and earned the rank of Profesor Extraordinario. During the 1950s and 1960s he traveled extensively in South America photographing Pre-Columbian and Colonial sites and collections and establishing contacts with Latino artists, art schools, and museums. In 1964 he returned to Europe, where he made a thorough tour of Spain and briefly toured France, Italy, England, and Belgium. He visited Spain again in 1969 and 1973.
Mozley served on the first Faculty Senate and as secretary of the Executive Committee of the Latin American Institute at the University of Texas (1953–55). He spent four summers teaching at the University of Southern California in the early 1950s. In 1958–59 he served as Chairman of the Department of Art at UT. He published several articles on Latin-American artists in the 1940s and 1950s. He continued to paint and exhibited his work throughout the state, receiving the Purchase Prize (gouache) at the Texas Fine Arts Annual Exhibition in 1959 and the San Antonio Art League Purchase Prize at the Twenty-fifth Annual Texas Painting and Sculpture Exhibition (1963).
On the national level Mozley participated in two competitive exhibitions (1948) and the Texas Contemporary Artists exhibition (1952) at the Knoedler Galleries in New York City; exhibited his work at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (1948, 1949, 1951) and at the San Francisco Museum of Art (1956); and in 1968 was one of four Texas artists whose work was featured in A Particular Portion of Earth, held in Washington, D.C. A retrospective of his career was mounted by a Dallas gallery in 1967.
Mozley painted scenes from the American Southwest, Mexico, South America, and Spain in a methodical, geometric style, using a palette dominated by dusky purples and maroons, brightened with accents of gold, green, olive, and blue. Oil paints were his primary medium, although he also experimented with watercolors, lithography, and graphic techniques. He described himself as a "child of the Cubist order," but the work of Andrew Dasburg, an influential Taos painter who applied Cézannesque geometry to his Southwestern landscapes, was a more direct influence on his style.
The sensuous curves and light and dark contrasts of Adobe Buttresses (1940) suggest the influence of Georgia O'Keeffe. In some of his most powerful early works Mozley used objects such as roses, crowns of thorns, and bird nests to embody evocative scenes such as Tragic Landscape (1944) and The Hunter (1946). In Winter Fields (1948) the artist arranged two dead magpies and some milkweed pods on a snowy plain girded by mountains; he regarded the resulting stark study of contrasts as one of his best works. Other notable paintings include Big Pecans (1952), a masterly study of light and shadow that verges on abstraction, and the watercolor Broken Cypress (1956), painted on the Pedernales River from the vantage point of a fallen tree's stump.
Mozley's later works were more scenic and descriptive and often included people and architecture. His complex compositions filled the picture plane and were sometimes difficult to read. In works such as Rocky Hillside (1966) and Market of San Roque at Quito (1963–64) the geometry was used as a decorative motif rather than a structural element. The arrangements of shells, dried plants, butterflies, and skulls seen in such works as The Artist's Cupboard (1963–64), which the artist called "conceits," lacked the vigor of his earlier symbolic paintings. His scenes of Spanish villages and marketplaces, however, were imbued with a lyric, romantic air new to his work.
Mozley's style followed a progression untouched by passing fads; his work stands as a testimony to his meticulous craftsmanship and precision. In 1967 the artist noted, "I try my level best every time I pick up my brush to be a decent and skillful craftsman, a painter." Perhaps his greatest contribution was his insistence that students learn the basic techniques of their craft in an age when abstract, conceptual, and performance art techniques were in vogue.
Mozley retired from the University of Texas with the rank of Professor Emeritus in 1975. Three years later his career was commemorated by a retrospective exhibition and catalogue organized by the University of Texas Art Gallery. Mozley died on September 21, 1989. His work is in the collection of the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery in Austin, the Old Jail Art Center in Albany, and the Witte Museum in San Antonio.
Bibliography:
Loren Mozley, Loren Mozley: Exhibition, February-March 1967 (Dallas: Valley House Gallery, 1967). Loren Mozley Papers, Collections Deposit Library, University of Texas at Austin. University Art Museum, Loren Mozley: A Retrospective (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977). Vertical Files, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. Who's Who in American Art,
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