ART BUILDING AND ART MUSEUM:
THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS / DEDICATION & 25TH FACULTY EXHIBITION
Mrs. J. Lee Johnson, III [preface]
Mrs. J. Lee Johnson, III [preface]: ART BUILDING AND ART MUSEUM: THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS / DEDICATION & 25TH FACULTY EXHIBITION. Austin, TX: The College of Fine Arts of the University of Texas, 1963. First edition. Text in English and Japanese. A very good staple bound book with thick printed wrappers and minor shelf wear. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Design and Typography by Kim Taylor.
7.75 x 8.5 staple-bound soft cover book with 40 pages and 42 black-and-white illustrations. Includes a Program of Events [November 15 -17, 1963], a preface by Mrs. J. Lee Johnson, III, an excerpt from an address by Harry H. Ransom to the 46th Council on Education, introductory notes by E. W. Doty and Donald B. Goodall, an exhibition list and a list of the Art Faculty including their birth date, education, exhibitions, awards, collections they're included in, and their teaching history.
Profiled faculty include Donald B. Goodall, Albert Alhadeff, Marian B. Davis, Claude L. Kennard, Mort Baranoff, George Bogart, David Bradley, Albert Buscaglia, Lincoln Eddy, Kelly Fearing, Kenneth B. Fiske, Constance Forsyth, Bill D. Francis, Michael Frary, Terence Grieder, John Guerin, Paul Peter Hatgil, Bill Hoey, Peter Jenkyn, Michael Lacktman, John Lednicky, William Lester, Robert Levers, Vincent A. Mariani, Loren Mozley, Alvin A. Nickel, Everett Spruce, Kim Taylor, Charles Umlauf, Donald Weismann, and Ralph White.
Before Abstract Expressionism of New York City was canonized as American postwar modernism, the United States was filled with localized manifestations of modern art. One such place where considerable modernist activity occurred was Texas, where artists absorbed and interpreted the latest, most radical formal lessons from Mexico, the East Coast, and Europe, while still responding to the state's dramatic history and geography.
By 1963 the University of Texas was the home base for the Texas Modern Movement. The members of the Dallas Nine and the 1936 Texas Centennial paved the way for Modernism in the Lone Star State, establishing the foundations of early Texas modernism in Houston including early practitioners of abstraction and non-objectivity. Later the Fort Worth Circle and Houston artists in the 1950s made significant inroads, but the art faculty at the University of Texas at Austin created and maintained the high water mark for Texas Modernism from the sixties onward.
From the The College of Fine Arts' web page: "The Art Building was designed by the architecture firm Page, Southerland, Page and was dedicated in 1963, the 25th anniversary of the founding of the College of Fine Arts. Funds to construct the building came from the sale of land donated by Archer M. Huntington in October of 1927 specifically to support an art museum on campus. Included in the design of the Art Building was a series of galleries, which became the home for the University Art Museum. The museum galleries in the southwest corner of the Art Building displayed a distinctive roofline of vaults, and these galleries became the scene for contemporary art, scholarly exhibitions, and the museum’s growing permanent collection."