The pair came to Austin from New Mexico, where they had been living in Taos, home of a thriving artists' colony with strong ties to European art. Though neither artist is featured in "Austin Art Seen," the department's first chair, Ward Lockwood, and first instructor, Loren Mozley, undeniably set the tone for the years ahead. During the nearly 25 years between its founding and 1961, the art department underwent transformations of its own, even as it fostered the larger Austin art scene. This shift, however, did not happen all at once. But the university attracted such a diverse and talented group of instructors, as well as students, that the course of art in Austin was irrevocably changed. (Does the name Elisabet Ney ring a bell?) In fact, the Austin-based Texas Fine Arts Association had been lobbying for the creation of one for years. Of course, there had been artists living in Austin before there was an art department. While a scene may be a loose descriptor, Austin's had a definite spark: the establishment, in 1938, of an art department at the University of Texas encompassing studio art, art history, and art education. McQueary uses selections from local collections to offer us a glimpse of a visual landscape, a slice of the creative foment that swept Austin during the mid-20th century.įrom top to bottom: Michael Frary, Straight and Curved Constance Forsyth, Grackles Everett Spruce, Untitled Abstract The work in the show might be loosely characterized as modern or abstract, but the artists featured here never signed a group manifesto, and no curator in their time (or since) ever canonized them as a school or movement. Despite its year-specific title, the show includes prints, drawings, paintings, and sculpture made by 17 artists from the 1940s through the 1960s, a time when Austin was at the center of the Texas art world. "Austin Art Seen, Circa 1961," the exhibition currently showing at Austin Museum of Art-Laguna Gloria, describes a scene above all else. In the case of art, it might be as simple as a specific place and a specific time. There are the insiders, the fringe dwellers, and the outsiders, a mix of people who fall in and out of the group, but there has to be, in general, something that ties these people together. A scene doesn't have a leader so much as people who are more or less influential than others. In contrast with a movement or a school, a scene describes a much looser association of individuals.
Attach a few artists' names and stylistic traits to these headings, and you're ready for the exam (or, perhaps, the museum), where images of paintings loom on a screen (or a white wall), devoid of context, ready for your appreciation.īut did anyone ever test your knowledge of a scene? Anyone who's ever taken a 19th or 20th century art-history class has probably felt a little inundated by the parade of "-isms," movements, and schools that generally shape how we think about art.
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