Title:
Roger Winter (Part 2) Subtitle:
History of Contemporary Art in Dallas Oral History Collection Thumbnail:
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 23, 2012 Location: By telephone from New York, New York
Fig. 1
Roger Winter: Just fine. Thanks for calling.
Leigh Arnold: You’re welcome.
RW: Yesterday, I was talking to—do you know Quin Mathews? Do you remember who that is?
LA: Yes, I do. I mean, I’ve met him in the past, yeah.
RW: Okay. He’s going to come out here and make a film in my studio and one of the suggestions for an approach for it is talk to him—he’s made a film already—but this would be to talk to me about the DMCA days and the Oak Lawn days, and I told him that the museum was doing this and that you were the person, as far as I know, doing the questioning—interviewing. And he asked me to ask you if you ever got the time, would you call him?
LA: Yes. I can, definitely. . . .
RW: I think he would really appreciate it because, you know he’s—Quin’s a professional. He’s been around for a long time.
LA: Yeah, I know. When I met him, he was describing all of the different interviews he’s done over the years and it just really boggled my mind, the amount of experience he’s had.
RW: I know. He travels a lot too. He used to be an anchorman on one of the Dallas—Fort Worth TV stations.
LA: Oh, really? I didn’t know that.
RW: Yes. That’s the only way our children, who are grown men and beyond, that’s the only way they knew him and once when he was in New York, we had dinner with him and our younger son and he was just amazed because he’d only seen him on TV when he was a kid, giving the news, and there he was sitting across the table. But then he’s gone on to other things and I think he has a very special interest in making films about artists and the art world.
LA: Well, that’s a great suggestion, and I would be happy to give him a call probably this afternoon.
RW: Oh, thank you. I’m sure he would appreciate it, and it’d probably be helpful towards his film.
LA: Yeah, absolutely. Well, it’s May 23, 2012, and we’re on the phone again with Roger Winter and this is going to be part two of our Oral History Interview for the Dallas Museum of Art’s History of Contemporary Art Collecting in Dallas Research Project, funded by the Texas Fund for Curatorial Research. Again, I’m Leigh Arnold, project researcher at the DMA, and I’ll be speaking with Roger, and again, thanks Roger for taking a little bit more time to talk to me some more.
RW: I’m happy to do that, and you said the last time we spoke that, there were some questions you had still that you didn’t get a chance to bring up, and so if you have any questions that would help me.
LA: Sure! In fact I think maybe we could start out and I was curious if you could maybe talk about the gallery scene or the lack of the gallery scene in Dallas when you arrived in the ‘60s and what the options were for emerging artists like you if you wanted to show your work.
RW: Well, there were so few compared to now. Of course, Valley House Gallery was there and had been there before we came for some time. I think it was originally owned by Betty Blake.
[00:04:03]
LA: Betty Blake.
RW: And somehow it became the property of Donald Vogel, I think. I’m not sure how that happened, but I think that was probably the first gallery in Dallas that showed modern art. When we arrived, there were two major galleries other than Valley House, and these are both in the Fairmount-Maple-Routh Streets area, and one of them was Atelier Chapman Kelley. And the other one was—oh, what was his name? I’ll think of it in a moment.
I had my first show—first solo show—at the Chapman Kelley Gallery and then everybody that I knew came to see it and everything, but Chapman was not considered very cutting edge, maybe he was too sympathetically tied with the Pennsylvania Academy where he’d studied and he’d bring painters like Hobson Pittman and people who had taught at the Pennsylvania Academy as guests. And I got a little bit of criticism for showing with him—oh, Hayden Calhoun was the other dealer. And he was on Fairmount. I got a little criticism for showing with Chapman but later somehow his image changed and I know David McManaway, Roy Fridge, Jim Love, probably Jack Boynton from Houston and various other contemporary people showed there—with Chapman—and he was especially proud of showing someone named Alberto Collie. Does that name ring a bell?
LA: It does. I have a funny story about Alberto Collie.
[00:06:00]
RW: Oh, you know about him, all right. [Laughter] Well, Chapman was very, very proud of showing his work because he had these Brancusi-like forms that were magnetic and he’d put them on a magnetic base, opposite poles together and tie them to the base with a strong nylon string, I guess. And I remember a Dallas critic for the Dallas Morning News, his name was Rual Askew, who was very supportive of Chapman’s gallery, I think it was the headline of an art review of Alberto Collie’s show it said, “Brancusi’s Bird Has Taken Flight.” Chapman would still say what a wonderful thing that was, but I always thought of it as more of a gimmick than it was really serious art. I don’t know what’s happened to Alberto Collie in recent years.
LA: As far as I know, he’s back in Venezuela. Is that where he’s from originally?
RW: I think so.
LA: I happened to meet his ex-wife by chance, just looking for an apartment in Oak Cliff. She happened to be the manager of it and she asked me if his name sounded familiar when she found out the work I was doing for the museum. And it was just a very funny moment because we here were, just strangers and then I found out her connection to Alberto Collie and all of a sudden, I’m just bombarding her with questions about what it was like to be married to him and when they lived in Dallas and how she met so many different people because of their relationship. It was very interesting.
[00:08:07]
RW: It’s possible that I met her but I don’t remember her. I remember meeting Alberto once. And you mention Oak Cliff—he and Chapman Kelley, both, were somehow related to a hotel management school that had an art department that opened in Oak Cliff.
LA: Oh right, it was Northwood Institute.
RW: Northwood Institute.
LA: Yeah, it’s actually in Cedar Hill, a little bit further south of Oak Cliff.
RW: All right.
LA: Yeah.
RW: South of Oak Cliff. But is it still out there?
LA: Yes, but it’s changed its name, it’s Northwood University now, and the experimental art program that both Chapman and Alberto were a part of no longer exists.
RW: I see. Well, Chapman, between him and Hayden Calhoun and I guess I could say Donald Vogel, but there were a couple of other galleries, but those were the major three in my memory. Well, there was Mary Nye who showed some of Otis Dozier’s work. And at one point I think showed David McManaway’s work. She was, I think, on Hall Street or in the Lee Park area. But Chapman was more involved in the political art world beyond his gallery than Hayden Calhoun was.
My second solo show was with Hayden Calhoun and Hayden closed because of some financial problem I think.
LA: Yeah, I think he was related to the Art Rental Program that the DMA or the DMFA was running. And I think his gallery and a few others kind of got up in arms and filed a lawsuit at the museum.
RW: There were often lawsuits. [Laughter] When Murray Smither, who was Chapman Kelley’s gallery director for several years and you probably know Murray or you’ve met him.
LA: I did, yeah. I met him last week actually. He’s very nice.
RW: When Murray Smither broke away from Chapman and opened Smither Gallery, which was on Allen Street in Dallas, Chapman thought he had found a reason to have Murray arrested for misusing an expense account. So on the opening of Smither Gallery on the afternoon that it opened, Chapman Kelley sent someone from the sheriff’s department to the gallery, who arrested Murray Smither and put him in jail.
LA: Were you there? Were you at the opening?
RW: No, I wasn’t. I later had a show at Smither Gallery, but no, I wasn’t. It would have been quite a scene. I bring it up to Murray now and then just as a reality check. And then, of course Murray was bought into by Laura Carpenter and Virginia Gable and the three of them became the co-owners of Delahunty Gallery. I think at that time, Delahunty Gallery was probably the gallery with the most polarity and probably the most respect that had been in Dallas at that time.
Sometimes I have trouble thinking of names, but I think Delahunty sort of went to New York and to Santa Fe and someone else, Eugene Binder, sort of took over. By the time we moved away from Dallas, the whole Dallas gallery world had become very complicated. There was D.W. Co-op and there was Richard Childers’s Gallery, I think it was 500X. I don’t know, maybe it still exists?
LA: It still exists.
RW: And just many, many other galleries in different parts of town, but Dallas was far more parochial and local when we moved there in the early ‘60s.
LA: Well speaking of local, I came across the gallery announcement that was in Paul Rogers Harris’s collection, because he keeps everything.
RW: I know he did.
LA: It was a gallery announcement from Hayden Calhoun Gallery from 1964 on a show called The Local Scene.
RW: I remember that.
LA: And it featured your work with Roy Fridge, Toni LaSalle, David McManaway, and Jeanette Winter.
RW: Yes, I remember that. I bought a little Toni LaSalle painting from that show. She borrowed it back. And at this point, Murray Smither has it and I’ve never received it back and that was in, what, 1964?
LA: It was, yes.
RW: That was really before Jeanette had started illustrating children’s books, and she did show at Hayden Calhoun’s, and he sold several things of hers from there.
LA: What was your work in that show? Do you remember what you were doing at that time?
[00:14:004]
RW: That was ’64? I really don’t. I had a show there in ’65 and I remember the things that I showed in ’65 and I can’t remember what was in that show. Was there anything in the review about the work?
LA: I haven’t had the chance to find the review, but it’s a neat little post card and I think ’64 would have been just after the merging of the Dallas Museum of Contemporary Art with the DMFA. So you guys were still showing together?
RW: Well, yes, and we were also kind of stranded at that point, I think. Because I believe by that time probably MacAgy had left.
LA: He had, yup.
RW: And it was like someone threw a grenade in the Oak Lawn area and people were kind of scattering. And then I remember a few, probably something I had in the 1964 show was a painting called The Dove and two things about it:
One thing, it was the first time I had ever used like a photographic image in a painting and it was just small image of our older child, the only child that we had then in a sailor suit. And then I found out later that someone I admired very much, named Romare Bearden, had done a painting, a very, very big montage collage and called The Dove also in 1964.
LA: Oh, really?
RW: Yeah. I had no idea that he had, but I was happy because I admired what he was doing as far as putting spaces together.
[00:16:02]
LA: Right. I was curious if you were there the evening, or either evening, because I understand there were two performances of Claes Oldenburg’s Injun at the DMCA.
RW: Yes, I was there. And Claes wanted Jeanette and me to take part in it, but Jeanette was very pregnant with our first son
LA: Oh, really?
RW: But Claes was saying, “Well, I know a dancer who danced when she was eight months pregnant,” but Jeannette didn’t want to do it and I didn’t either. I know, I think everybody who was in it. Joe Hobbs is the painter who taught at Arlington State at that time in Arlington. And he and a group of his painting students all were wrestling around on the floor, Hal Pauley was in the room with some newspapers playing, or pretending to play, a violin. There were just rooms in this house and Claes was dressed up like an Indian sort of some kind of savage-looking costume made out of shredded papers. He was dancing and moving around. I think I mentioned the last time, to view it we held on to a rope and sort of moved in through the rooms in the building that belong to the DMCA, moved in a certain direction. And I heard someone say behind us, “Boy, the membership in the DMFA is going to skyrocket tomorrow!”
LA: [Laughter] Because it was just so out there?
RW: Because it was so different for Dallas at that time. And it was part of a show called 1961, as I’m sure you know, but it was done in—and this was like MacAgy, the show was in 1962. And they had Oldenburg’s Store set up. And someone from one of the local news stations came to interview Claes and Pat Oldenburg. Well, mainly interview Claes, but Pat was there. I think the way I'm describing that is one reason that marriage didn’t last so long, because she did a lot of the sewing, she did a lot of things, but I don’t think Pat ever got the credit she deserved for that.
But anyway, David McManaway and I were up on a ladder. We’re up on a couple of ladders, just out of sight of the TV camera. And the reporter said, “Mr. Oldenburg, some of us don’t understand your art.” This was in the wake of abstract expressionism where everyone yawned in front of a Franz Kline. [Laughter] And Oldenburg said, “Well, I can explain it to you. This is an ice cream cone. This is a hamburger, and this is a tomato.” And Pat said, “That’s not a tomato. That’s a candied apple.” He said, “Yeah. This is a candied apple.” David and I were about to fall off the ladder because it was like presenting something that was so factual and so commonplace, that it wasn’t even understood. It couldn’t be seen as art.
LA: Right.
RW: I'll tell you something about the opening of that show that I think should be a part of Dallas—Fort Worth’s art history: Claes had a slice of like a meringue pie. I think something like a lemon pie, coconut pie made of plaster and enamel and probably burlap and chicken wire as the structure of it, and it was sitting on a little saucer on a chair that he’d borrowed from David and Norma McManaway, a blue chair—just an old-timey kitchen chair and a painter from Fort Worth, his name was Bror Utter—. Do you know that name?
LA: Yes. I’m familiar with that name, yeah.
RW: Okay. And Bror Utter came with a friend of his, Sam Cantey, who was, I think, president of one of the better banks in Fort Worth. And Bror, I think, got a little drunk and he was so outraged by all of this that he picked the piece of pie up off the chair and bit a piece out of it. Someone alerted Oldenburg that someone had bitten the pie so he took it and went to MacAgy and showed him what had happened and said, “What should I do about this?” And Douglas MacAgy said—I think he said, “Can you repair it?” And Oldenburg said, “Yes.” And he said, “I think you should just repair it and forget about it.” The main concern was it was borrowed. It was on loan to the show. But that seems always to me to be a remarkable reaction to art.
LA: Just taking a bite out of it.
RW: Yes! And also right through plaster and burlap.
LA: Yeah.
RW: It was very emotional reaction.
[00:22:01]
LA: Yeah, very visceral.
RW: Yes. Well, that was kind of like the nature of that show and for me, I had gone to—I brought that at the University of Iowa, which at one time had had a remarkable faculty and reputation for MFA degrees. And we both had found it pretty depressing, and the only thing that was really believed in there and taught was painterly realism, sort of a Fairfield Porter, redone.
I guess when I got to Dallas, that was about all that I had been taught, that’s what I've believed in at that time or the way I painted, and David, especially David and Roy and Douglas MacAgy with his shows like the René Magritte show, the 1961 show, the Art of the Circus show. These really transformed me, and I never returned to my original proportions, to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes—I’d been stretched by a new idea and that was in ’62, ’63, ’64, and it’s changed everything I did since then and made me feel like I was—well, it was my coming of age period in my work although it’s changed in various ways. It’s never gone back to where it was before MacAgy and before the Oak Lawn period. I guess David was probably the biggest influence because I’d been taught to be so very serious all the time and critical of everything and of my own work. And David and Roy too, although I knew David better, had such a beautiful sense of play and it wasn’t all ethically hung up. He was just so playful and, you know, we would kind of find things together in dime stores that didn’t look very congruous.
LA: Did you ever exchange Jomo’s with David?
RW: Well yeah. The two of us—in the house where Jeanette and I lived, on Newton Street, which is just off Oak Lawn. There was a garage there and the whole house was to be torn down and David and I in the garage started building this whole—you might call it—Jomo room.
LA: Oh, really?
RW: Oh, it was something! When we moved and the house was torn down—David and I went back by there, and one of the workers said, “Who was the artist that lived here?” Because they had found out all these strange things in the garage and I had made, by way of Claes Oldenburg, I’d have to say, I had made a dog and some colorful balls, a dog and balls, like a circus dog out of plaster, and I had them in our front yard on Newton, and someone stole it out on the front yard. I had something of Roy Fridge’s in our front yard on Irving Avenue, and someone stole that from that front yard. And I have never understood that kind of thief I guess who would want these.
[00:26:06]
LA: Someone with a good eye. [Laughter]
RW: Well, I guess so but you think that person would be not a thief.
LA: Maybe this person was collecting Jomos of his or her own.
RW: That very well could be. I’ve never even thought of that. They thought, “I like this. I’m going to take it.”
LA: Yeah.
RW: And you may have heard of this story, too, but David was once arrested and put in jail very, very early in the morning.
LA: I had not heard the story.
RW: Well, this is during a period when Oak Lawn as we knew it was being torn down and the big apartment buildings were starting to come up. David would go out very early before workers got there and he would pick up things. Well, David was a magician in a way. He would find things that no one else saw, and he would pick up things from destruction sites and construction sites.
At the same time, there was someone that the police were looking for who they called the Oak Lawn Marauder. They happened to see David practically before daylight, and he had on tennis shoes, which the police thought marauders always wore. And so they picked him up as the Oak Lawn Marauder and took him to jail and told him he could make one phone call and he phoned Norma and she wasn’t even out of bed yet. This was early. And he said, “Norma, I’m in jail.” And she said, “Well, I will call a lawyer.” And she called someone they knew who is a lawyer and the lawyer said, “Make sure that he doesn’t tell them that he’s an artist.”
00:28:05
LA: Because then they would be certain, right?
RW: Well, that would erase any doubt. If he was an artist, he was at least strange enough to put him in jail.
LA: Yeah, exactly.
RW: But anyway, the lawyer went to the jail and got David out and the police realized they had made a mistake. I don’t know if a story like that is useful but I think it shows a little bit of the relationship of the Dallas artists and the police at that time. I can’t emphasize enough how often Jim Love came to Dallas. He loved the irony that he would fly up to Love Field and usually spend a weekend and spend his time at David and Norma’s house. I think I said before. I think they were the—
LA: The nucleus of the group?
RW: Yes. We all lived pretty near, but Hal Pauley and his family lived right across the street from David and Norma on Welborn Street and all of us were near. As I said, I think it was about the most vital thing going on in Texas at that time and a lot of that was the result of Douglas MacAgy.
LA: Were you ever involved or did you have any relationship with the Dallas Theater Center and Paul Baker?
RW: No, but the others did. He had taught at Baylor before he came to Dallas, which I’m sure you know. Jim Love and Roy Fridge somehow studied with them. Jim, I think he was majoring in business. I'm not sure what Roy was majoring in but they both worked with and were fans of Paul Baker. Roy Fridge married someone who—I think she might have even taken Paul Baker's place, Mary Sue Fridge or at least she became very important. She and Roy had split up, but she became very important at Dallas Theater Center. Of course we went to plays there. I mean, at that time very advanced plays, (00:30:47) theater of absurd plays.
LA: Oh, the art.
RW: Yes. And it was a vital place in Dallas, and of course the fact that it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, no matter how unrealistic some details in it were like—there was a stairway that led down into a wall.
LA: I didn’t realize that.
RW: Well, we didn’t until we went down to the stairs. But it was a vital place and that too was in the Oak Lawn area. I've lost track of that really and don’t know if that part of town still has any studios.
LA: Well, Turtle Creek is pretty much lined with tall high-rise condos and apartments. The Kalita Humphreys Theater is still there. But I think there are some small homes and maybe remnants of that neighborhood near Lee Park and kind of closer to Oak Lawn to and behind Oak Lawn but I don’t know where—
[00:32:15]
RW: Like there are still cottages?
LA: Yeah, and I don’t know where the artists’ neighborhoods would be today, but I think it’s just everybody is so spread out now.
RW: Yeah. For a while, there were lots of studios being rented out of old buildings around East Commerce and Elm and that part, but I don’t know if that’s still the case or not.
LA: Yeah, there are few artists living in that area and also near 500X and Exposition Park and that is kind of—I think it was very vital in the 1980s and 1990s. But the activity kind of slowed down for a little bit, and I think it's starting to pick up again.
RW: In that part of Dallas.
LA: Yeah.
RW: Well that’s where my gallery is that Kirk Hopper: East Commerce—
LA: No, go ahead, I’m sorry—
RW: Well, he has a very good space and a lot that he used like a sculpture garden in the back. From my point of view, he is doing very well. I don’t know if in general he is, but I'm happy I'm there.
LA: We're happy you are there too because that means you are still connected to Dallas in some way.
RW: Well yes, that’s right. I had been through three theaters and then later to Gerald Peters as you know he closed the Dallas gallery. That was a renaissance for that gallery while he was there because he added people like myself and David and Jim Love. He added a lot of things that—I don’t know, Gerald Peters had run into some problems when—what’s her name, Talley [Dunn]?—then left and a lot of artists followed her and artists who are still on the scene I think, like David Bates, and I'm not sure who else, a guy from Fort Worth.
LA: Vernon Fisher.
RW: Vernon Fisher is still there. And I think also that gallery—things are a little more cutting edge than Gerald Peters’s.
LA: How did Ted [Pillsbury] get or did you meet Ted through the Artist’s Eye program at the Kimbell [Art Museum], or how did you connect to local?
RW: That’s right. The first two people from that gallery talks in the Kimbell were myself and Vernon Fisher.
LA: Okay.
RW: And then Bill Jordan was like the associate director of—I'm not sure what his title was, but he was working with Ted and I knew Ted for very long before meeting him. And because he was a friend I guess with Philip Pearlstein, the New York figurative painter, and Pearlstein had done portrait of Ted and his wife and his daughter—
[00:36:15]
LA: Yeah, the two of them. I've seen that. That's beautiful.
RW: Oh, you have seen the painting.
LA: Uh-hmm.
RW: Do you know if this is off the subject but I saw Mireille, and she told me I could call her Mimi. That’s what her mother called her and I had trouble pronouncing her French name. I saw her last spring, a little more than a year ago and I wonder if she is—what’s her condition?
LA: She is still in treatment as far as I know. It's been terribly—it's been over a couple of months since last time I talked to her, but I think she is now living with her son and his wife and their new baby in Oak Cliff. But I think—sometimes I think she is going to live forever because she just has the will of that kind of person. But I think her condition has gotten a little bit worse in the past.
RW: It’s Christine?
LA: It's their daughter.
RW: Is the daughter visiting at all?
LA: She's gone to visit Christine and her husband and family in Malta.
RW: Yes, in Malta now?
LA: They have a home in Malta but they live mostly in Singapore. But I think traveling to Singapore is just too far and too hard on Mireille. So the last time I think she visited the family in Malta. And I don’t know how often Christine comes to Dallas. She came back a few times you know in 2010 and then in 2011 to help kind of settle up Ted’s—but I think for the most part, she likes to have Mireille visit her at their various locations.
[00:38:11]
RW: It’s so good that Mireille has the stamina to make the trip.
LA: That’s true.
RW: And I love her and Ted both. I met Christine and she’s just like them.
LA: Yeah, she’s just like Ted.
RW: I know, she’s just terrific. I was very happy I meet her. She asked me about the images of little paintings in a certain period and I did it, and he brought one.
LA: Oh, that’s so nice.
RW: Oh, it really was. I was shocked and very happy.
LA: That’s so nice, yeah. But it was through his Artist’s Eye program that you’ve kind of got involved with that.
RW: I think so, and that’s where I met him was giving a talk at the Kimbell. We just spoke briefly that day, and then I didn’t see him again until Gerald Peters’s days. And then he did so to maybe to know at the Meadows [Museum at Southern Methodist University] with recent work of mine. It was very, very different from the earlier works I've done. It's called The Subway Series and Beyond, and Ted wrote the catalogue where there were several—our sons wrote some. And then after that I kind of lost track of him. I last saw Ted in 2007—no, 2008. I did a little show at the MADI Museum in Dallas. And they had a dinner afterwards and Ted and Mimi were there. She liked that because it reminds her of her mother.
LA: Right. That’s sweet. Next time I talk to her, I'll mention that.
RW: Sure, please do and I remember her so well.
LA: Yeah, she's great. I was wondering while you were a professor at SMU and teaching, if you were connected to what William Jordan was doing at the Meadows Museum and with the University of Pollock Galleries.
RW: I never saw that. Well, it was Pollock Gallery and then it was called the University Gallery for a while. They were all really I guess part of somehow the Meadows Museum, but I was there before Bill and I had a sort of almost messianic drive to teach. It was a way to make money to support a family, but I really love teaching since University of Texas days with teachers like Lauren Mosley, who did a catalogue for this and Everett Spruce, Constance Forsyth, William Lester. I wanted to be a teacher because they were so important to me, and I never knew there was such a thing as an “artist/teacher,” but they're the ones who certainly wouldn’t worthwhile . So I want the kind of life that could be and that’s what I wanted to be and that’s why I went to the University of Iowa to get the MFA. At that time that was what you needed as a background in order to teach.
Jerry Bywaters—before Jordan came to SMU—Jerry Bywaters was, you know, the director of the Dallas Museum [of Fine Art] but was being sort of phased out. He would ask me—and he was head of the Art Department at SMU—and he asked me once, "Brother Roger, would you like to teach a photography class?" And I said, "I don’t know anything about photography." And the next year, he asked me if I would like to teach a design class, and that was more interesting, but I said, “No, I don’t think I would want to do that.” And then he asked me if I would like to teach a drawing class and I said, "I would love to." And the art department was on the third floor of Dallas Hall at that time. Well, I had already been teaching it at the Dallas Museum and in SMU’s high school, and I just got totally absorbed in the art department on the campus and spent altogether 26 years teaching at SMU.
LA: Wow.
RW: I think that I had some very, very outstanding students during that time. Also from the Dallas Museum School, that served a big purpose for the high school. There were high school classes, and so many people who are still around started with me in the Dallas Museum School at Saturday classes. It’s a painter name Robert Yarber. I don’t know if you know his work.
LA: No, I'm not familiar.
RW: Sort of flying figures and people falling from—anyway, Robert Yarber started there. Stephen Mueller started there. He taught until he retired, I guess, at Bennington College. People are still working in the Dallas area. Charlotte Davis started the museum classes. I love that high school age because they had their hearts on their sleeves—and they’re saying most on about things.
To tell you what historical period this was, one of my students was a valedictorian at a Jesuit high school, and he couldn’t attend the graduation and give his valedictory speech because he was in jail for marijuana possession. [Laughter] That is a true ‘60s story. [Laughter] I love my students at SMU and I love the idea of teaching and I've done five texts on drawing. I understand from Quin Mathews that you have a friend who has done a very, very elaborate textbook.
LA: I do, I guess. Her name is Debbie DeWitte. She did basically a textbook.
RW: Don’t the permission rights for all the reproductions cost thousands and thousands of dollars?
LA: I'm sure.
RW: I don’t know who that is.
LA: It was a friend of mine who I know shows a graduate program at UT Dallas. She worked with a larger publishing company and coauthored an art history textbook, but instead of the usual chronological order, I think her approach takes a look at art history through themes as opposed to chronology, and as a way to kind of incorporate Eastern and non-Western perspective I guess you could say. That’s the best way to put it.
She wrote it because she teaches at UT Arlington and at the University of Dallas, and most of her students are nonwhite, non-Western, and they were just not engaging with a lot of the traditional textbooks that are used because traditional textbooks focus on typically white, typically Western culture, and so she decided to offer a book that could include everything and kind of be something a little bit different.
RW: At least a lot of the drawing text, it was women who drew were scarce, and I even thought at one point of doing one of my texts and having messing with drawings or examples about women, and just because it was so solidly male in the earlier—I mean, like, the ‘50s and ‘60s.
LA: Yeah, that would be interesting. Maybe you should do it!
RW: Well, it would be interesting. I might do that. I always have more projects than I need; I might as well add that one! But actually I wanted to say that I certainly know about the cost of reproduction rights and even refusals. It’s not an easy thing and it takes someone with probably a good—I don’t know what you’d call it—administrative mind to keep up with. She probably had an assistant, your friend.
[00:48:04]
LA: I don’t think she did. I kind of like to call her superwoman because on top of writing the textbooks, she taught at three different places, and is working on her PhD, and she is a mother.
RW: Oh boy! She is a person after my own heart. She is my kind of person.
LA: I know. She's unstoppable.
RW: Overload yourself. Do you know the painter Robert Birmelin?
LA: No, I don’t.
RW: He was sort of a big name for a while like a lot of people, he lost it, or however you want to say it, but he refers to me as a man of many parts because I seem to have a lot of different things going at any given time with just—perhaps like your friend, it seems natural.
LA: Yeah. Well, yeah.
RW: Not natural to everybody.
LA: No.
RW: I guess.
LA: Yeah, I can relate. I think I'm more productive when I have a lot of projects.
RW: Oh yes, I am too. I'm more alive unless I have less energy to worry about things because I don’t have time for that.
LA: That’s exactly right.
RW: Bill Jordan, when he came to us, two things happened. He came at the same time that SMU moved its art department and its whole arts program into a different building that was built just for the arts. Bill also added a kind of glamour to SMU's art department and I doubt if it ever had before. He knew people. He and Dennis Hopper were very close for a while, and he got SMU involved, for better or worse, in the summer program art house. I think they may have lived and at the Mable Dodge Luhan House a while.
[00:50:05]
LA: Yeah, I think you're right.
RW: His being there was definitely a plus for the school starting from graduate department was probably good because it brought in more mature students and there were Meadows grants in Meadows Museum that covered tuition. And maybe some grants beyond that. Some people were coming in from other parts of the world to SMU, and I certainly worked awfully hard as a teacher. Maybe everyone wouldn’t say my work was good. Everyone would admit that that I did everything that I could to make it as strong or good as I could.
LA: Do you recall any of the exhibitions that Bill Jordan brought in to the university gallery?
RW: Pardon?
LA: Do you recall some of the exhibitions that Bill Jordan brought in to the university gallery?
RW: Yes, I can't tell you the titles. I mentioned Dennis Hopper. He did an exhibition once where the motorcycle from—was it Easy Rider?
LA: Yes.
RW: It was one of the exhibitions in the university gallery. He was far more adventurous. He would take great chances with exhibitions. He and I, basically the two of us, we were so into every possible kind of drawing we could collect, any form of drawing, and someone even gave us some drawings of music sheets that [Enrique] Caruso had drawn.
[00:52:14]
LA: Oh really?
RW: Yes, and that was really exciting to people because it's kind of extended the idea of what drawing was. It wasn’t just an atelier thing to do with skylights, lights filtering down. That’s broad, you think, but maybe someone did without even knowing to call it drawing. He didn’t have money or any of the shows that would compare with MacAgy shows. But then he did do, you know, he’d had a catalogue, he is the one that fostered one at a time [One i at a Time, Pollock Galleries, Southern Methodist University, March 20–April 25, 1971], so by getting MacAgy to curate it and getting all these works together.
LA: Why do you think he decided to do that show? It wasn’t sure, knowing you and knowing some of the other artists that he came—
RW: I was triggered by—Roy Fridge came down to SMU. He was, I think, teaching at University of Oklahoma at that time. Roy came as a visitor and of course that caused a lot of get-togethers in the evening. I think it was Bill's idea sort of triggered by David, Roy, and myself probably getting together again. And then he got MacAgy into it, and then MacAgy has dreamed up the show, and pretty well selected the things that would be in the show and wrote a very unusual catalogue for the show.
I don’t really like MacAgy’s writing, but I don’t think everyone really liked it that much. I wanted to mention something. Janet Kutner's name would come up. Janet and John have a little house on—oh gee, it wasn’t Hall Street but it was one of the streets in the Oak Lawn area. In the back of the house, there was probably a guesthouse, and they rented that out. I know David McManaway was in it for some time. It could be that Herb Rogalla has used it as a studio. So Janet and John were great supporters of the contemporary museum and great supporters of the artists in that area, in the Oak Lawn area.
LA: I need to speak with her. I'm sure she would have a wealth of information to share.
RW: I'm sure she would and I don’t remember what her job was but she worked at the DMCA.
LA: Right. I think I've seen places she wrote PR for the DMCA and she was a secretary to MacAgy, and she kind of did a few different odd jobs working there.
RW: Their houses were often used for big parties or dinner parties because their house kept getting bigger. [Laughter] The little house, I think it was on Sale Street. That was just an Oak Lawn cottage, and then they moved to Inwood—or just off Inwood—and that was a much more impressive home, and then they bought a home and grounds at North Dallas. We were there many, many times, and I'm not even sure where Janet and John live now. They had moved to an apartment the last I heard.
LA: Yeah, I'm not sure either.
RW: But she would certainly be a fantastic source of information and just remembrance of things
LA: Well, over the course of all of your time in Dallas, can you think of any major turning points in the Dallas art scene?
RW: I think it was in the process when we moved there at the contemporary museum making a big difference, and the contemporary in the DMFA. They were really competitors because the DMFA still had the regional shows, and I'm not saying that in a disapproving way, but Jerry Bywaters is just a very big supporter of those painters who have taught at UT and all of those are—do you know I wrote a little book about other shows I think last year for Valley House Gallery?
LA: No, but I will look into it.
RW: I wrote a little essay, and then I also interviewed David Bates, because in later years Otis Dozier and Velma Dozier became like very supportive of some of the younger artists at that time. David Bates, Delabano, the guy who lives in Austin now whose father wrote for the Dallas Times Herald, The Texas Talk or something—Frank Tolbert Jr.!
[00:58:05]
LA: Right. They made the chili parlor, didn’t they?
RW: Pardon.
LA: Didn’t the Tolberts have a chili parlor in Dallas?
(Crosstalk 00:58:13 — 00:58:18)
LA: Didn’t the Tolberts have a chili parlor in Dallas?
RW: Yes. The father started the chili cook-off in Terlingua, Texas. And then I know his son Frank Jr. had a restaurant like that in Austin I believe. Frank is still around. He's in Kirk Hopper Gallery as well, I mean, Frank Jr. and he still comes around.
But anyway, Otis Dozier is very supportive of them. Otis also wanted to meet James Surls because he felt that affinity—which had a background at Surls had, which is more of east Texas bushwhacker type or something than an eastern establishment type. I think that can be said without fear, the accuracy with having known Surls well for a long time.
LA: Yeah.
RW: The essay and interview, I titled it because of something David said: A Transfer of Spirit. Otis wanted to like transfer his feelings and maybe ideas about art to younger generations I guess is a natural and, maybe, a teacherly instinct. He would have the younger artists over for dinner, and after Otis died, Velma put some things out on the table that belonged to Otis and invited the same group of artists, David and Delabano—I can’t think of the son’s first name.
LA: Martin?
RW: Martin Delabano. I should be able to because my sister was once married to Barney’s brother.
LA: Oh, really?
RW: We would have probably the same hometown from Denison, Texas. Anyway, Velma asked them over and told them if they saw anything that they liked, to pick it out, to just take it and Otis would certainly be happy. David said he was little embarrassed but also really happy to do this. He took a brush that had a little bit of paint dried, and he put it up on his studio wall, and it’s still there. And I’d asked David, you know, why did he have the brush up on his studio wall and he said, “Well there again, it’s kind of like a symbol of the transfer of spirit.” So there is that lineage going on.
LA: And these were your students, too, at SMU?
RW: Yes.
LA: Did you think about it in the same way? Were you as a teacher interested in passing along your spirit too?
RW: No. Well, I guess, yeah. I guess I’d never think of it that way but I wanted my students to find their own voice. That was very important. There is no easy route. You couldn’t just bypass things because that was too hard if you didn’t want to learn it or whatever, but you have to find your own voice.
You had to find something that was strong in yourself, something about yourself that was really important, and I guess that‘s when I have treated my own work and so in that respect, yes, I guess I was trying to. But I didn’t try to pass along any style. I've never really had one. But it was more like an attitude toward art making and attitude toward what art was, and it was a medium for a person using paint to speak, a language without words, beyond words.
So in that regard, I guess I did. I used to take people, my students, out to artists’ houses or studio all the time, and I asked him to be a guest in the classes, too, because I respected very much what he represented as an artist. It wasn’t an easy route. It was like the real McCoy, and then he and Velma both were just very curious and intellectually, they wanted to find out about everything that came across their paths and David was amazed that Velma Dozier was showing him some kind of a jewelry and she said, “Sandy made this for me.” And he found out that Sandy was Alexander Calder and that the Doziers have gotten around in their time.
Anyway, this is so complex culturally. I don’t know that it can all be put together but there were many strands there. I don’t know. I guess that was like a catalyst trying to make everyone aware of them and have them come together.
[01:04:16]
LA: Did you go to gallery shows a lot?
RW: No.
LA: No.
RW: Not very much.
LA: Where did you go to look at art?
RW: Well, in Dallas, around Dallas—Fort Worth, the possibilities were limited, but Jeanette and I often made trips in New York and we moved to England for—I got the first sabbatical leave than everyone here in the art department or in the arts at SMU, and we moved to England most of the year.
Well, I haunted the museums in Europe and in New York. It all depended, if I were really intensely focused on something in my work I didn’t want to see a lot of different kinds of paintings or works. But if it was a time when I was just kind of drifting and not sure what to do, I’d take on everything, and I've always read a lot about art and I love to read about artists and art and the history of art.
LA: All right. Good.
RW: I certainly appreciate your friend or the person you know who wanted to make a text that wasn’t quite so focused on Europe and United States. I feel like a product of American art, so that’s the thing I might naturally identify with, but I'm very interested and curious about other cultures, other times.
[01:06:11]
LA: Well, let me talk to Debbie and see if we can get a copy of the textbooks.
RW: Oh boy, that would be wonderful. I’d love it.
LA: Yeah, and maybe I can give her your number and she can talk to you about it.
RW: Or maybe she can get me a discount. Is it a big, big book?
LA: I'm trying to think. It’s several hundred pages because it’s like a typical survey course textbook for art history with a much different approach that what you would normally take it to be, but it’s pretty great and I’ve been talking to professors who have been using it this past semester and they said it’s interesting and it’s helping them to kind of think about things in a much different way too.
RW: You know something y’all mentioned; our sons are both poets, and one is married to an opera singer and the other is married to a poet, and our older son following Jeanette’s footsteps really has written and sometimes illustrated children’s books and recently he’s been very, very successful and in June of this year, the Dallas Museum was doing some kind of convention on children’s books.
LA: Oh, yeah. I think I saw an email about that.
RW: Our son will be a guest there, and I don’t think they know that he grew up in Dallas.
LA: Well, they should know that.
RW: Jonah Winter, and I think the two books that they’re focusing on is one this year called something like Just Behave Yourself, Mr. Picasso [Laughter] and the earlier one is about Frida Kahlo.
[01:08:03]
LA: Here we go. He sent us an email and Jonah Winter’s Just Behave, Pablo Picasso!
RW: What is it? Just Behave—
LA: Just Behave, Pablo Picasso!
RW: He also did, and I'm going to suggest that he mentioned this for two years. He did a book last year about my childhood, it’s called Born and Bred in the Great Depression, which is a children’s book. And the woman’s name I think is Kimberly Root. Kimberly Bulcken Root illustrated it, and she did a beautiful job. I hope he mentions that because you guys have a few of them—two or three things in your collection, and no one might associate Jonah with Dallas and all of that.
LA: Right, with you. Well, they should. I’ll mention that to somebody maybe because he is going to be talking—
RW: During the lunch hour—
LA: — that looks like he’ll be doing story telling in the galleries and then he has a presentation and then a book signing at four o’clock.
RW: Ah, well, Jonah is a fantastic entertainer. I don’t know who will be in the audience but he is just wonderful. I mean he’s been in plays and he has done a lot of different things. He has very diverse sort of talents. When I've seen him with children or talking to adults about children’s books, he really puts on a show.
LA: Well, that’s really neat. I’ll have to—
RW: I don’t have any way to predict what that show will be as I’ve never been able to predict what Jonah will do. But he’s just a very creative person. I think you all will enjoy or maybe be annoyed but I don’t know. We’ll see, but I hope he mentions the Born and Bred in the Great Depression.
[01:10:14]
LA: Yeah, I’m sure. That’s great! What a nice connection!
RW: Well, I'm very pleased with our sons, and Jeanette has done over 60 books. That’s quite a number, I think.
LA: Oh my gosh, yeah! Does she write as well as—
RW: She does! She didn’t for many, many books but she really—everyone got tired of doing out of people stories. The advance and royalties are a lot bigger if she did the writing and the illustrating. So it’s just commercially more interesting to do it that way.
Jeanette’s done some very well-received books. She did one called The Librarian of Basra, about a librarian in Basra who saved most of the books and these weren’t paperback. These were, like, ancient columns in that library hiding them in the basements of various friends and the library was bombed, but she saved 70 percent of the books. That got Jeanette and that librarian who visit to Parma for a book thing, and I tagged along as a—whatever you want to call it—“The Not-Royal Consort!”
But anyway, that’s enough for my family history. Our younger son has a small—he and his wife have a small press called Solid Objects in New York. I'm very, very proud of the works that they’ve published and they’re both poets.
[01:12:00]
LA: Did your kids—were they proud to think of you as an artist? I bet that you were really neat to have an artist as a parent. Did they understand that when they are young?
RW: I think it might have confused Jonah that I had such a different life from the others. Jeanette and I were very different from a lot of the other kids’ parents in Highland Park and University Park. But I think it’s dull. They are very, very proud if it and Jonah has said this. Max was so young when this happened, but Jonah said he is so happy that we moved to Europe at that time and we just had all that time to explore things and go to Paris and drive through Germany and the Scandinavian countries. This really meant as an adult, it means a lot that he did it.
LA: Yeah. I bet.
RW: Max remembers very little—the only thing our younger son remembers is in our little town in England in Wiltshire: there was a rubber ball factory. And one day when we were in that little town, some of the balls escaped from the factory and they were all bouncing down a hill. I think that’s his memory of Europe.
LA: That would capture any child’s imagination!
RW: I guess it would. Just the sight of it, it’s fixed.
Well, if you have more questions I’ll keep talking.
LA: No, I think we’ve covered so much within the past two interviews and I'm just really thankful that you are willing to share so much information with me today.
[01:14:07]
RW: Well, I'm just happy to do it. You know, the poet, Jane Valentine interviewed me for a catalogue. That’s going to be at the MAC show in September [RW: Lost Highway—A Painter’s Journey]. In the interview, I quoted something James Surls, you know James, had once said and used this quote. Well, he wrote this and I used this quote, “Thank you art. I love you.” And I thought that was so touching and I never even thought of coming at it from that direction, but it’s like your life. Your work is your life, and I hope I have a little more of it.
LA: I do too. Well, I'm going to keep an eye out when your show opens so I can be sure to be there to meet you.
RW: Oh yeah, please. I’ll make sure you’ll find out.
LA: Okay.
RW: And if you do think of calling Quin Mathews, it would probably be helpful.
LA: I will. That’s a great suggestion, and I’ll give him a call this afternoon.
