Art: Lone Star Artists

In Texas since the war, painters have blossomed like bluebonnets in April. There are armies of Sunday painters, courses and scholarships for young artists in the schools and colleges, competitions and exhibits of their work at the museums. And there is quality as well as quantity. Says Dallas Businessman H. Stanley (Neiman-Marcus) Marcus, an active trustee of the Dallas Museum: “Ten years ago you would have found only five or six good painters in Texas. Today the woods are full of them.”

To prove the point, Marcus and a group of fellow Texans sifted through the work of scores of artists, settled on samples from 53 of them for a show in Manhattan last week. The 53 were as varied as Texas itself. If there was any pattern, it was an apparent preference for the middle of the modern road. There were carefully drafted portraits, impressionistic canvases studded with sand and pebbles, meticulous still lifes, primitive religious scenes, paintings of mountains, barn dances, graveyards, oil wells, grasshoppers, madonnas and cathedrals. There was only a smattering of out & out abstraction.

Many of the artists were in their 20s and early 30s. Most were born and raised in Texas; others had moved in during or after the war. Many had exhibited before, but not many were known outside Texas. Among the best:

¶ Otis Dozier, 48, a self-taught Texan who started painting WPA murals during the Depression, now sells his light, brightly colored landscapes and pelicans for prices up to $800, including one to Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum.

¶ Janet Turner, 38, who likes neat, precise pictures of crumbling marble staircases and brightly speckled guinea fowl, arrived in Texas five years ago to teach at Stephen Austin College, has just won a Guggenheim to experiment in color prints.

¶ John T. Biggers, 28, a Negro who took his M.A. in art education at Pennsylvania State College, migrated to Texas in 1949 when he was offered a $6,000-a-year job at Houston’s Texas Southern University and a chance to keep drawing his sad pictures of tired newsboys and harvesters.

Manhattan seemed to like the show. “Hearty” and “personal” were some of the words the critics used to describe the exhibit, and all week long New Yorkers flocked in for a look.

Texas art boosters hoped news of the success would get around, especially to some of the wealthy patrons back home. Said Jerry Bywaters, director of Dallas’ museum: “Texas people will buy from a New York gallery the same painting they passed by at home at a third the price. After this, maybe they’ll remember that there’s a hell of a lot of good painting in Texas.”