Roger Winter is an artist active in the Dallas art community beginning in the late 1950s, when he worked as a preparator at the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts (1956–1963). Winter went on to teach at Southern Methodist University for 40 years.
Interviewee: Roger Winter
Interviewer: Leigh Arnold
Date: May 9, 2012
Location: By telephone from New York, New York
Roger Winter: I might mention that—do you know Quin Mathews?
Leigh Arnold: I do know Quin Mathews. I was introduced to him a few months ago actually.
RW: Some time in the near future, he’s to make a film and the content will be somewhat like what you're looking for of that film.
LA: Oh really?
RW: And it will be for a show that I’m having at the MAC [McKinney Avenue Contemporary] in September.
LA: Oh, well that is great to know. I will get in touch with him about that.
RW: Yeah, and I think he is supposed to ask questions about—it's all a little bit undecided, but I think he’s supposed to ask questions about, like, the Oak Lawn Group and the Contemporary Museum, and that time, but if you have any questions, I’d be happy to respond to them.
LA: Great. Well, I’ll go ahead. I am recording this for the Oral History Program here in the museum, and so I just want you to put a little introduction into the recording so we have it for posterity. It’s May 9, 2012, and I'm on the telephone with Mr. Roger Winter of New York, New York, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. The following interview is part of the Dallas Museum of Art’s History of Contemporary Art in Dallas research project funded by the Texas Fund for Curatorial Research. I am Leigh Arnold, project researcher at the Dallas Museum of Art, and I will be speaking with Mr. Roger Winter, artist and arts educator.
Mr. Winter’s history with the arts in Dallas dates back nearly five decades, and today we hope to hear some of those memories and stories he has to share with us on this subject. So, with all of that said, thank you Mr. Winter for agreeing to be interviewed as part of this project.
RW: That’s fine, but I would prefer you to call me Roger.
[00:02:02]
LA: I can do that.
RW: I answer to Mr. Winter, but I would rather be called by my first name.
LA: Absolutely. Okay, Roger. Well, we can start at the beginning. You were born a Texan, so can you tell me a little bit about growing up in Texas and where you're from?
RW: Yes. As a matter of fact, our older son, Jonah Winter, has written and someone else has illustrated a children’s book that Random House published, and the name of it is Born and Bred in the Great Depression, and not only is it beautifully illustrated, by I think her name is Deborah Root, but also on the endpapers it has photographs from my original family in the 1930s and early 1940s. And it's a very touching thing. I think it would easy to get a copy on Amazon if you wanted to, but I think copies exist in Dallas like at the MAC and at the MADI Museum, but I was born during the Great Depression in very impoverished circumstances on the wrong side of the MKT or commonly known as Katy Railroad tracks. Denison was very much of a railroad town, and none of us knew anything about art, but I loved to draw. From earliest memory I drew. And I had seven older brothers and sisters, and none of them went beyond high school, but I had decided I would and lost as I was at the University of Texas, I did.
I learned quite a bit in my first home away from home about a passion for painting and drawing, and so I ended up majoring in art and I had some wonderful teachers. And then I was in the army for two years at Fort Bliss, Texas, and then I got a graduate degree from the University of Iowa in 1960. And my wife Jeanette Winter, who has over 60 children’s books on the market, she and I married the same year and moved to New York for a year, and then I got a chance to teach some classes at what was then called the Fort Worth Arts Center, which was really—which is now the Fort Worth Modern.
LA: Right.
RW: And then moved to Dallas, taught at the Julius Schepps, is that the name?
LA: Uh-hmm. Yeah, I recall.
RW: It's the Jewish Community Center, and then taught some classes at the Dallas Museum, had some outstanding students at the Dallas Museum, including Robert Yarber, Stephen Mueller, and—oh gosh, just any number. I shouldn’t start listing names but those two came to mind. And then I worked part time at the Contemporary Museum with Douglas MacAgy as the director, and the rest of us who worked there, David McManaway, Herb Rogalla, Roy Fridge, those were the ones that I can remember. I believe that Janet Kutner and Herb Rogalla’s wife, Jett Rogalla, worked there also. But anyway it was all centered around MacAgy’s vision and MacAgy’s chutzpah, you might say, at getting shows that you knew wouldn’t please the Dallas audience there. And we all lived in the Oak Lawn area and we were kind of thought of as like the Oak Lawn area of painters, and it was a very, very exciting time, I think, in Dallas art history.
Anyway, Douglas was the nucleus, the star, the center, Douglas MacAgy, and I think he generated quite a bit of it. But then we were some interesting characters there, and this was the time when we lived in what I’d call an “exotic poverty.” None of us had any particular money, but we worked and we were very excited about our work, and there was a lot of interchange. I especially was influenced by, I guess, you could say David McManaway, but also Roy Fridge. Jim Love lived in Houston, but he flew up to, ironically, Love Field, to Dallas.
LA: Right.
RW: Anyway, just about every week.
LA: Wow.
RW: And so, he was certainly part of the group as well, but Douglas’s shows were magnificent. He did a show, as I'm sure you know, I think it was the first one in America on René Magritte.
He did a show called 1961 that brought Claes Oldenburg and his Store and a Happening called Injun that Roy Fridge filmed, and I saw that film once just being played constantly at an exhibition at the museum—no, at the Whitney I guess, called The ‘60s. And so, it wasn’t just a one-time thing in Dallas, it’s got a little bit of a history, the film does, and Oldenburg’s Happening.
LA: Right.
RW: And Douglas MacAgy did another exhibition called Art of the Circus, and he brought any kind of work that related to the circus to the Contemporary Museum. It was a setback for each of us when the museum closed because, not only did we not have the jobs any more installing the shows, but we also didn’t have the shows that were being done by Douglas MacAgy. And I think, what's the man’s name who did—I can't think of his name. He only did five or six paintings in the—.
LA: Gerald Murphy?
RW: Gerald Murphy gave MacAgy a number of his very, very few paintings that he did, and this was all really exciting. It was a very exciting time and it was kind of like the time of Fellini films and La Dolce Vita, and there was a lot of partying and a lot of music making.
LA: Yeah.
RW: And it was really—looking back at it, it was really a rather wonderful and exciting time in our lives and in Dallas, and I know how this could sound—, but I think the group around MacAgy, in addition to a sculptor named Charles Williams who lived in Arlington—
We were about the most advanced thing that was being done in Dallas and Texas at that time. I know that many, many things have happened since then, and we're talking 50 years ago at least. And I started teaching. There were other forces in Dallas, too. I mean, it's not to be forgotten—Otis Dozier and Velma Dozier were known by each of us and were not closed to what we were doing. And then, I started teaching at SMU and I had a number of wonderful students. I just talked to one of them, John Alexander, who just called, and David Bates, Brian Cobble, Lilian Garcia-Roig, Laurie Hickman—I hate to do this because I am going to leave out names and they're very important.
LA: Yeah.
RW: But, many, many people from the period when I was teaching in SMU have gone on, have survived, let’s say, and they are still working artists and doing quite well, many of them. And then, I really don’t know what's happened since that time, at SMU or too much about the Dallas history since that time, of course Claude Albritton opened the MAC and I think that’s—I don’t know the whole history of it, but I think they have done some exciting things and then is it called the Contemporary Museum? There was another—
[00:12:02]
LA: Well, there was a D-Art, which became the Dallas Contemporary.
RW: It did?
LA: Mm-hmm, D-Art. It went through a couple of different name changes, but it was D-Art and then Dallas Visual Arts Center and then the Dallas Contemporary, but they did open a new building here a few years ago.
RW: Yes, I remember. They had the Legends.
LA: Mm-hmm.
RW: And I think they opened that new building the year after I was their “Legend” artist. I don’t feel like a legend, but they did give me the award and Bill Jordan, I guess you know, William Jordan. He was the director of not only the Meadows Museum but of the SMU Art Department during the years that were the very most vital and exciting. James Surls taught there, Dan Wingren taught there. I think Larry Scholder is still teaching there, and Barnaby Fitzgerald. So, it's been a vital school. I don’t think it was thought of that way before I had any relationship with it, but it grew and they built a new building, and now I think they have a very expansive arts library at SMU.
LA: They do.
RW: Pardon?
LA: Yes, they do. I was agreeing, yeah.
RW: Yes. And then, well you have some other specific questions? I can talk forever.
LA: I do. Well, that was actually a really great kind of breeze through the period. So, we might just go back into the history and maybe ask some more specific questions. As an artist, when did you begin to show your work? I think you—
[00:13:59]
RW: I started showing my work the first year we moved to Dallas, which was 1961, I believe. And so, well we moved to Fort Worth in 1961 and to Dallas in 1962, and my first show was at Atelier Chapman Kelley. And that was 1963. And then I had a show at Haydon Calhoun, does that name ring a bell at all?
LA: It does, yeah.
RW: At Haydon Calhoun’s Gallery, and then I had—I won a couple of prizes at the competitive shows at that time, and I won the top prize in the Dallas County Annual and some kind of award at the Dallas—no, no, no. What was it called, the Texas Open or something?
LA: There were several juried shows in the early years—
RW: They had a—.
LA: There was the Southwestern Prints and Drawings exhibition—
RW: It was an annual—
LA: The Texas Annual Painting and Sculpture exhibition?
RW: Texas Annual, yeah that’s what it was, and it might have been called the Dallas County Annual, but that was just for our county.
LA: Right.
RW: And that’s—Jerry Bywaters was the director of the Dallas Museum and Jerry was very, very strong on artists from or working in Texas, and he was very supportive of Otis Dozier and some of the Austin artists, Everett Spruce, Loren Mozley, and William Lester. And he had a school there and as I have mentioned I taught there for a while and it was a good school but—
A director named Merrill Rueppel closed the school. He didn’t want to be involved. He didn’t want the museum to be involved in that, but it was a good resource for, especially on Saturday, for high school students. And that’s of course where I met Robert Yarber and Steve Mueller and some of the others. I still stay in contact with them, and that’s a long time ago! To still be talking to your ex-students, I suppose. But Jerry’s history there was about to end at that time, and he still kept contact with SMU. He directed the Pollock Gallery at SMU. And then other directors came in and times changed and the focus of the museum changed. And I think regional art became, whoever was doing it, became somewhat of a dirty word after new directors brought in whatever the new flavor of the month was.
LA: Yeah.
RW: And I don’t know where any of that stands right now. The last director that I knew was Harry Parker.
LA: Mm-hmm, okay.
RW: And I don’t even know who is the director now?
LA: Well, we just recently got a new director. His name is Maxwell Anderson and he had been the director of the Whitney for a few years and most recently was director at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
[00:18:00]
RW: Well, that’s impressive. It sounds good. It seems I had heard some woman who was very involved in education.
LA: Right. Bonnie Pitman retired last year. There was a period of time between directors when we—while they were searching for someone to come in after her. And we just recently got Max Anderson, who started in January.
RW: Well, you're catching me up. I know that I was very close friends with the Hanleys, and of course Nancy Hanley just passed away, and I know there's a gallery in the museum, I believe, named for the Hanleys. Nancy was very modest about it, but she came from one heck of a historical background in the United States. Her great-aunts were the Cone Sisters of Baltimore, Claribel and Etta Cone. So, she had quite a family background in art before I ever met her, but Nancy was a wonderful person. And the show I'm having at the MAC, I'm going to dedicate it in the catalogue to Nancy.
She was a close—well, she was a student of mine first for several years during the—probably the entire ‘70s or the biggest part of it. And then she and Tim and I were friends and then they became patrons of myself and many other artists in Texas and they were quite a wonderful force. I mean I know there are a lot of good collectors in Dallas and I know they really love their collections. But I was closest to them; with Claude Albritton and of course Ted Pillsbury, when he left Fort Worth became a force in Texas art world.
LA: Well, I actually worked for Ted for four years before I started working here.
RW: Where were you at that time? Where was he or—?
LA: We worked together at the Heritage Auction Galleries.
RW: At the Heritage Auction, I see.
LA: Mm-hmm. I was his assistant for a little over four years. That was my first job out of my undergraduate degree.
RW: Well, I may have met you, I don’t know.
LA: Possibly. I started working there in 2006 and then I worked with him until he died, so until 2010.
RW: Well, Ted and someone who was working with him at Heritage came to my little studio in New York once.
LA: Oh, that would not have been me.
RW: Okay.
LA: Perhaps, because I didn’t—I was the assistant so I stayed in Dallas while he did the fun trips, but I think maybe Marianne Berardi could have been with him.
RW: That name sounds possible.
LA: She’s an art historian. She’s married to Henry Adams, who has written and published several books on American artists—I can't recall their names, that’s terrible, but he’s up at Case Western. They live in Cleveland but she works for Heritage, too, and she’s really bright. So, that could have been who he was with.
RW: Yeah. Well, Ted moved around a lot after the Kimbell, and I knew him, of course, in the gallery that became Pillsbury & Peters; I showed there with Pillsbury & Peters. And then he went to the Meadows Museum, and he had a show for me at the Meadows. And made a catalogue and he was always very, very kind to me as he was to many people in the arts or in art. He was very inclusive—someone’s trying to call one of us, but that’s okay.
LA: Oh, I think it might be you, but—.
RW: Okay. Ted was quite a patron of a number of artists, and last year Gerald Peters in New York had a show as a kind of tribute to Ted. And there were some artists that didn’t participate even though they really loved Ted but they did not care much for Gerald Peters.
LA: Right.
RW: And so like, well not to name anyone, but it was quite a nice tribute. I don’t know if you can have that catalogue, but—.
LA: Yes, I do. Yeah, I have a copy.
RW: Each of us made a little comment about Ted. He was the nearest thing, in my limited experience, to Douglas MacAgy because he was adventurous and he could visualize things that he wanted to do. And well, I don’t know that he ever got in a position to be as adventurous as Douglas was, but Douglas MacAgy was, in my mind, he was a giant and we gathered around him like whatever planets around the sun and loved him and he was very important to us. And of course his wife was also, but his ex-wife was a big force in Texas art, Jermayne MacAgy.
LA: Mm-hmm, down in Houston, correct?
RW: Yes. So the two of them really made a difference to the recent history of Texas. I think if I’ve made any contribution it was probably during the years when I was teaching, because some people came and they needed help and I was able, luckily, to give it to them. And I think SMU, of all places, became like a breeding ground for young artists.
LA: Absolutely. When did you begin teaching at SMU, do you remember?
RW: I taught there for 26 years. The first classes I taught were in 1963, and the last class that I taught was in 1989.
LA: Wow.
RW: And we moved away to Maine at that time, and I haven't really been following it too closely since then, except if I’ve had some contact with a friend, Barnaby Fitzgerald, and occasionally a phone call with Larry Scholder. And of course, I don’t know what’s going on with Bill Komodore now, but he came there just after I left. I don’t know if he’s still teaching or even if he’s still—.
LA: I'm not sure either, I'm—.
RW: I'm just—I don’t know.
LA: I haven’t heard. I don’t know if he is still around the Dallas area or where he would be.
RW: I don’t know, but he lived in Dallas early on. And he had been involved with the Contemporary Museum early. And David knew him and Roy Fridge knew him, but then I met him really in New York, and I mean, on a visit to New York. And then he moved back to Dallas, and I decided to leave SMU, and I think Bill filled in for me then. Well, as I said it's possible.
LA: I'm not sure.
RW: And then we moved from Maine to the Hill Country in central Texas and then started living half time there and half time in New York, and then we moved to New York permanently in 2000. Oh, no, I'm wrong about that. Yes, we lived there permanently in 2000 and decided to spend the summer somewhere else, and that’s why we're in Santa Fe and New York. And I can say this, I have kept painting consistently, daily, since I left Dallas. Do you know Quin Mathews?
LA: Mm-hmm.
RW: Oh, I mentioned that, I asked you that before. Quin asked me once in a radio interview how many days a week I work, and I said, “Seven.” And he said, “Why seven?” and I said, “Because, that’s all there are. Give me more days and I’ll work those days, too.” But Jeannette and I both, are—that’s our life, is our work.
LA: We have a few of your paintings in the permanent collection here that I've been able to see. They’re nicely, the large scale is nice and I'm wondering, do you continue to paint in such large scale?
RW: Well, I’ve painted in various scales. The largest painting I ever did was 10 by 20 feet that I did for the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas.
[00:28:03]
LA: Uh-huh, yeah.
RW: I don’t know, I presume they still have it. I don’t know where the Federal Reserve Bank building is.
LA: I’ll need to track that down, but I do recall coming across the news article that announced that.
RW: And then I'm doing a show at the same time the MAC show is up in September. I'm going to have a show at Kirk Hopper Gallery.
LA: Oh, great.
RW: I think it is a very vital gallery. I feel like I'm lucky to be in it right now, and I’m doing a series of paintings that are each 5 by 5 feet that are based on the Hudson riverside. My studio overlooks the Hudson over into New Jersey.
LA: Wow.
RW: And I never painted it and never even thought of painting any subjects from there until recently, until late last year. And so I'm hoping to have, like, seven or eight 5-by-5 paintings for that show.
LA: Are you going to come into Dallas for the opening?
RW: Yes, I will.
LA: Well, wonderful. Then, I hope we get a chance to meet.
RW: Yes, I hope so too. Those paintings, while recognizable as subjects, I’d say they are more abstract than I've normally done and on canvas. I've done some things that are nonobjective work in acrylics that combine with kerosene but I felt a dense shadow of Rembrandt and various artists—
LA: Oh, yeah.
RW: — when I paint on canvas. But they're moving some, the paintings are. And that’s—I guess, been my whole story, is I never just painted one thing—one kind of thing because I don’t envision art that way. But I think of it as something that’s protean and that gives me a chance to grow and examine all different kinds of possibilities. And I have enough of a, whatever you want to call it, gift of some kind that I can do that and I can try different things. And I know that that is not what galleries would prefer.
LA: They want to market you, don’t they? They want—.
RW: Yes. This is a business. And I've never felt that art was a business, and it's just sort of serendipity I guess, when things get in galleries or doing museums but—do you know the person who is more that way than I have been was David McManaway, who almost became like a hermit during his late years. And I don’t know if he was still showing at the time of his death, I just—I don’t know, but I had great regard for David. I've done a number of texts on drawing, and in the last two or three, I've had a little section on David McManaway in a chapter called “Play.” And I describe it as not a—it's not like sports or something like that, but the willingness to let things happen.
LA: Right, the element of chance in your work.
RW: Yes, and David was a master at that. He would not force anything to happen. It would have to fall into place, just during the process of living and looking. And I really admire that side of him. He was deeply influenced, of course, by Joseph Cornell, but there were other dimensions there, too, that were more earthy and maybe even, he didn’t like this word, but maybe even magical or concerned with magic or something, that’s not visible, than his great influence, but certainly you have to think of Joseph Cornell because there weren’t many people who put things together like that.
LA: No, it's true. I came across a quote of yours in the One i at a Time exhibition catalogue.
RW: Oh wow. We’re really going back.
LA: We are. But it’s—you're speaking about David McManaway and it's kind of a fun quote. So, if you don’t mind I’ll just read what you said.
RW: No, that’s fine.
LA: And you said, “One spring night in 1963, David called me from the Standup Bar and asked me to bring my guitar there. He said that a large group from the DMCA membership and staff had dropped by for a beer and that Roy had his tub bass and he had his banjo. When I got there, the group had literally taken over the place. I got into the mood of it and we played for several hours. A drunk redneck at the bar danced by himself right through to the end. When we left, this guy shook my hand and said ‘I had it.’ I consider this the best and purest compliment I have ever received.”
RW: Well, it's got to still made close to it. Because I like to communicate whatever I do to a greater—a wide—broader and wider audience than just the art world or art historians or any aspects of the art world, and I think that may be the result of my early life where I became just—like I still belong, in a lot of ways, to the farm-labor class and the people of that class. I'm not just putting on a story here. You could ask my wife and our family, and they would agree that I feel sort of an egalitarian connection and a compliment from someone who deeply—obviously deeply, felt country music enough to be dancing alone while we were playing. That’s a big compliment.
LA: I also enjoy that quote because it said so much about the kind of atmosphere that surrounded the DMCA as far as the types of friendships. Maybe you can describe that for me.
RW: Yes, that's true. And that’s—the Standup Bar was a bar and David McManaway gave it that name. It was a bar on Cedar Springs about a block and a half north of Oak Lawn, I guess. And there was a long, long bar and David never sat down anywhere. He would always stand at the bar when he went in. When Claes Oldenburg was in Dallas, we got him in the habit of that. He was a very, very different young man and he became more elegant as he grew older. But he was at that time, eating hamburgers and drinking beer a lot. And he loved the Standup Bar, too and we’d go there every day at lunch while he was here. It was really quite a meeting place, like a watering hole, as they say. And we were all young enough; we could do things like that, and still go to work the next day. Oh, wow, that’s quite a memory. I remember that night.
LA: You do?
RW: And I remember Roy. Do you know what a tub bass is?
LA: Uh, no. What is it?
RW: It's about a number three washtub turned upside down. It has a hole in the center of it and then a stick that’s notched so that it fits on the rim of the tub and then a wash line rope tied to the stick and in through the hole of the tub and you can only—by moving the stick, you can change notes. And Roy was quite a master of this. He really loved it. And Roy loved parties, too. Sometimes I think—well, he and David and Norma were like the people that caused the parties to happen.
LA: Oh, really?
RW: Yeah. As I said, Jim Love always came up to those. And there was this man, Hal Pauley, who was in the One i at a Time show, and he was in charge of installations at the museum. And he and his wife, Ruth Pauley, and their children lived across the street from David and Norma. There was also Paul Harris and Peggy, a woman named Peggy Wilson. And Paul and Peggy ran the Children’s House that was connected to the Contemporary Museum. Art classes for children. So, they were always a big part of this also. And I don’t know if you know of the name even but MacAgy’s right-hand man was Urban Neininger, he and his wife, Jean Neininger were also always a part of the group.
LA: Did you ever get Douglas MacAgy to join you in any of your social—?
RW: He did. He and his wife, and they were always so respected. They were treated differently. And the rest of us— They were like the parents and we were the children.
LA: Yeah.
RW: We did and so did Urban Neininger, who had once been voted the best-dressed man in America.
LA: Wow! That’s quite an accomplishment.
RW: Well, he had quite a flair for dressing himself. That's about all I can think of, but if you have other questions, I’d be glad to—I have to finish packing pretty soon but I’ll be glad to respond to—.
LA: Sure. I was just wondering how you became involved with the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, or the DMCA?
RW: Okay. I know the history of that quite well. So, Charles Williams, the sculptor who lives in Arlington, I actually worked for Charles welding things and soldering things and whatever he needed done. And Charles and his wife, Anita, asked Jeannette and myself, and David and Norma and Roy Fridge to come over at the same time for dinner in Arlington. And we seemed to be immediately friends. It was very easy to get along. And it came out that David played the banjo and I played the guitar.
And so David and Norma invited us over to their house in Dallas. We were—I think we were still living in Fort Worth when we met. And we just had a wonderful night and had so many things in common and we start visiting each other more often, and David asked Douglas if I could work there on the installation crew and he said, “Yes, that would be fine.” And so until it closed, we were all just a very close-knit group. And they were very careful about initiating outsiders, so I felt very proud of myself that I had become a part of it, and Jeannette had too.
LA: Were you teaching at the Museum School while you were at the DMCA, or what was the timing on that, can you recall?
RW: I'm not sure.
LA: I'm just curious because I was wondering what the relationship was between the museum, the DMCA, and the DMFA.
RW: They were not, they were kind of like, not close at that time. The DMCA represented more like an establishment and then I think they saw the—wait a minute. DMCA, did I say?
LA: Right.
RW: DMFA, I'm sorry. But the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts was more like “the establishment” and maybe “traditional.” And the Contemporary Museum, the DMCA, was more like the terrible infant of Dallas. I remember the night of the Oldenburg Happening, everyone had to hold on to a rope as they went along into the Happening and I heard someone say, “The DMFA’s membership is going to really skyrocket tomorrow.”
And there are just—I don’t know if—antagonism might be too big of a word but it wasn’t a friendly relationship. But then on the other hand, after the Dallas Contemporary closed, several—like Betty Marcus and Edward Marcus, who were still living at that time, they made an easy transition I think from the—well, there were others too, but they are the ones that I remember. They made, a sort of like, an easy transition from the DMCA to DMFA at that time.
And I remember they had a big party at their house for—kind of got together people from both museums when the collection at the Contemporary went to the Dallas Museum. We still missed the Contemporary a lot. It was then in that part of town where we lived, and it was just wonderful trying to figure out what on earth Douglas would come up with next. So he really had a very fertile—and in many ways was a visionary. And I have the highest regard for him.
LA: He seems like he did a lot for not—not only you but for many people.
RW: Oh, for the city and for the region. There was a painter, he had a show of Charles Williams, and I think David McManaway and a painter named Toni Lasalle, does her name ring a bell?
LA: Yes. She recently was shown at the Dallas Art Fair by the Barry Whistler Gallery here.
[00:44:02]
RW: Oh so, Barry’s handling her work.
LA: Yeah. I knew because of that and because of the project I found out how long she’d been teaching at Texas Woman’s for 40-some years.
RW: Oh gosh, yeah. And then she lived in—I guess in Provincetown. I think for many, many years after that lived to be a ripe old age. And her work—well, she had studied with Hans Hofmann, and she kind of brought some of the ideas of Hans Hofmann to North Texas. And of course this is something that MacAgy would have found out about right away and showed her work. I own one of her paintings, but she borrowed it back once, and now Murray Smither has it. And he’s always thinking he’s going to give it to me but this better happen soon, we’re not getting any younger.
She showed at Hayden Calhoun also.
LA: Okay.
RW: And Hayden Calhoun and Chapman Kelley both moved away for different reasons. And then Murray Smither became a dealer, and then Smither Gallery became Delahanty Gallery when Laura Carpenter and Virginia Gable sort of bought into it. And then of course there's always been Valley House.
LA: Right. Did you start showing with them early on or at what—?
RW: Well, no. I started with—what’s his name?
LA: Atelier Chapman Kelly and then—
RW: But then I went—I started showing in the late ‘60s with Donald Vogel at Valley House. I believe that Betty Blake originally owned Valley House
LA: She did. It was called the Betty McLean Gallery.
RW: That’s right, yes. And then for some reason, it became Donald’s and then it became Valley House.
[00:46:05]
LA: Well, it's funny because depending on whom you talk to, that reason changes. Some people say it’s because she remarried and her husband didn’t like the—his wife having a job or I don’t know. There's always gossip.
RW: Is that when she became Betty Blake?
LA: I think that was when she became Betty Guiberson.
RW: Guiberson [correcting pronunciation].
LA: Oh, okay. Guiberson, thank you. I’ve been mispronouncing that for a year now.
RW: Well, that’s the way they pronounced it. I don’t even know if that’s correct. But that’s the way—I think it was Alan Guiberson.
LA: Okay.
RW: That's the way people I knew pronounced his name. And then Betty Blake was also very much a fan of Douglas and of those of us who work for him. And I imagine she’s got something—is Betty still living?
LA: She is. And she recently gave to the Nasher Sculpture Center two works by David McManaway and then another work by Jim Love possibly, I can’t remember.
RW: How wonderful.
LA: Yeah. It is wonderful.
RW: That's wonderful. I'm so glad to hear that. And I was going to say, she probably owns something by each one of us who worked at the Contemporary Museum. She was just—such a faithful patron and friend. There was some—there were other collectors who were involved too—I can’t quite recall all the names at the moment, but many of the Dallas collectors were good to the museum and of course the Kutners were.
LA: I think I read somewhere that the Kutners had a garage apartment or something in the back where artists would kind of rotate in and out of living there.
[00:48:01]
RW: Yes, that’s true. I think it was on Sale Street. That’s the street near that park on Hall Street?
LA: The Lee Park?
RW: Yes, Lee Park. It was near there, just off from there. But would you like to hear how the title of One i at a Time came to be?
LA: I would love to hear that because it seems very—it implies something but I want to know—I would love to hear that. Yes, please.
RW: Yeah. Okay. Douglas was living in Washington, D.C., I think, and he came down. And I think Bill Jordan was the one that initiated this whole One i at a Time thing. But Douglas MacAgy came down and one of the things he wanted to do while he was in Dallas was to figure out a name for the show. And Jim Love was talking to me. And I should say at Janet Kutner’s house. Janet and John had a big party for all of us, sort of a buffet dinner for all of us. And I was sitting right beside Douglas MacAgy and Jim Love was talking to me. And sometimes I drift away. I drift and sort of get out of focus, and I sort of blink my eyes, it’s like a nervous tick. I don’t do it so badly anymore but I did then.
I knew that I was blinking one eye at a time because they see things so differently. My eyes do and they’ve been that way since childhood. And then Jim Love saw that I had drifted away, and he threw his napkin at me and said, “Goddamn it! Stop blinking your eyes and listen to me!” And I said, “It's not eyes, it’s one eye at a time.” And Douglas sort of hit me on the knee and said, “You’ve got it Roger. That’s going to be the title of the show!”
And what he was thinking of was the way a peep show is viewed. More like in David McManaway and Roy Fridge’s work, like you look at a peep show with one eye at a time. And then he turned the eye into the letter “I” instead of the E-Y-E eye. And that's the way it happened. It never changed. I mean it was just that one instance, and that gives probably a lot more insight into Douglas than Jim Love or me because he saw all of that instantly. He heard that sentence and everything fell into place for him. And if anyone tells you any other story, it's not correct.
LA: Well, I have it on record now. This is going down on record—.
RW: Yeah so that’s precisely the way that it happened. Well, there’s nobody left now that was there to witness it. But maybe Jeannette was witness to it. But Jim, his throwing the napkin and everything was just his way of being friendly.
LA: Yeah.
RW: It's funny. Jim was also a wonderful character and I'm sure you’ve heard that from others. He’s a great artist and a great guy.
LA: And he came up from Houston. So, did you guys ever go down to Houston to visit him?
RW: Not very much. Roy Fridge and I drove down once to see a show that MacAgy had curated for some museum or organization there called Pop Goes the Easel. Roy and I drove down for that and Jim, Roy, and I hung out. I remember that visit. It was mostly Jim who would just fly up, it didn’t take much time.
LA: What was he—was it the DMCA that brought him to Dallas so frequently, or was it just that he was such good friends with everybody?
[00:52:10]
RW: Both.
LA: Both.
RW: Those were inseparable.
LA: Mm-hmm.
RW: And of course the friendship remained long after the DMCA closed.
LA: How did you feel about the merger of the museums and the closing of the DMCA?
RW: Well, I think it enriched the DMA in many ways. It caused some of the artists, certainly, to be more sympathetic with the DMA because, as I said, it had that shadow of regionalism, which was the last year’s ideas. And maybe that's not really fair because the DMA had a broader collection that Jerry Bywaters was very, very supportive of, regional artists working in sort of a post-cubist sense, making Texas landscapes in a cubistic way. By way of—the Mexican artist, [Rufino] Tamayo had a great influence on the stylization, I think, of Texas painters at that time.
And of course the person I'm going to talk about tomorrow in Abilene, Loren Mozley. His background was in New Mexico, or a big part of it was. His mentor was Andrew Dasburg, who had more direct relations with French cubism and the beginnings of it. And Mozley certainly brought that aesthetic point of view to University of Texas when he came there. A very generous man.
[00:54:12]
LA: Did you study with him at the university?
RW: I did, and he was more than a teacher. And I hope you get a copy of the catalogue—I’ve forgotten what they called it. I wrote the essay for the catalogue.
LA: Oh, okay. I’ll be sure I’ll get it.
RW: And it's out now and I'm very, very happy with it. You could get one from Lisa Hees at the MAC.
LA: Okay.
RW: And I would like for you to—I’d like for you to have it.
LA: Sure.
RW: If I had more copies, I would send you one, but Claude Albritton’s been a little stingy with these copies. But I told him, “I’ll get them in good hands, don’t worry!” I worked hard on the essay and it's going to be at the Dallas Museum next February.
LA: Wonderful.
RW: The show. But I don’t know who’s involved with it. I guess it wouldn’t be the contemporary curator, would it? It would be more like—.
LA: We have an American curator, Sue Canterbury, I think her last name is. And she is new—I’ll get in touch with her though about this exhibition.
RW: Well, in the catalogue, it says—it gives the days that it will be at the Dallas Museum. And then years from now, I mean 2015, it's supposed to come to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum here in Santa Fe.
LA: That will be nice. So, it’ll come back here?
RW: Well, it will be, and I hope I'm around to see it at that time. I’ll be getting a bit long in tooth by then, but they had, their calendar is so filled, they’re—it's not able to— Pardon?
LA: That’s a crazy amount of time.
RW: I know.
LA: Their calendar, they’re a busy, busy place.
RW: I know. And as soon as I get back from Abilene I'm going to bring the catalogues to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and ask, “Can’t they speed it up a little bit?” I'm not getting any younger. And they do have—I'm sure you’ve been there and they do have—they have adequate space to have a separate show. And Loren Mozley was O’Keeffe’s driver for a long time, and friend and—I've heard his prized possession was a cow skull that she gave him and he always kept it over his mantle. And so he had a connection there and he was the secretary typist for Mabel Dodge for several years. And I think he brought this sort of glamour to the University of Texas, and I noticed something as his student at the University of Texas, I noticed that some of the other teachers would—say kind of bad things about him and at that point I just wondered why because he seemed so great to me.
And when I started teaching, I began to understand the kind of backbiting and rivalry and jealousies and kinds of things that go on in an art faculty. And I think Loren Mozley was a little bit more cultured and his background was a little more connected to the art world than some of the others who taught there. And there was probably jealousy going on.
LA: I'm sure.
RW: It's my guess.
LA: Yeah. That’s usually the root of those kinds of problems.
[00:58:00]
RW: But as an 18- and 19-year-old, it confused me that one teacher would say something bad about the other. That didn’t happen in Denison High School. And that was my only model for school. Well, I would hate to be the one to bring this to an end because I love to talk, and I love to talk about those wonderful years but I do have to pack and get boarding passes.
LA: Sure. I completely understand, and I have kept you long enough. I think I have almost got you on the phone for an hour now.
RW: Well, that's not because of you, that’s because of me.
LA: No. And I enjoyed this. This is great and I'm wondering if you might be willing to do a follow-up conversation after you’ve gone to Abilene and after you maybe settled in and we can have—I can get some more information. . . . I have just tons more questions and it would be great to speak with you again. So, maybe do you have more free time later in the month or maybe in another week or so?
RW: Oh yeah, sure.
LA: Okay, great.