DALLAS.- There are two things to keep in mind while pondering the term "Texas Art." One is that Texas art encompasses so many decades, sensibilities and mediums that it's impossible to reduce it to "Western" themes. The second thing to remember, conversely, is that sometimes Texas art indeed evokes subjects and themes that are quintessentially Texan or Western. This dichotomy is the beauty of a category that's both sweeping and intimate for followers of Texas art: Texas-based artists are never limited by geography, but they don't necessarily attempt to dodge it, either.
In this respect,
Heritage's upcoming Texas Art Signature® Auction feels something like a homecoming. This is a return to familiar names and subjects that have lit up this category since the early 1900s, when Julian Onderdonk pitched his plein air easel out in Texas Hill Country to apply a bit of Impressionism's light play to the region's bluebonnets. Onderdonk and his father Robert Jenkins Onderdonk both have works in this auction: Julian's signature bluebonnets are well represented here by several outstanding paintings, including Spring Twilight from 1917; Robert's oil painting Shore to Shore is taken from a steel engraving printed by Clarence M. Dobell in the 1870s.
In fact, after several years of the uncertainty brought by the pandemic, this auction feels like a return to "normal" for Texas art. What has been lost these last few years, and what can we rediscover by returning to the work of our beloved mainstays: Umlauf, Salinas, the Onderdonk family, Alexandre Hogue, Dickson Reeder, George Grammer… we embrace these names and their works because they've captured something timeless and crucial about our place on this land. We yearn for the permanence that even contemporary Texas artists like David Bates and Benito Huerta find in their explorations of this frontier and its inhabitants.
A highlight of this auction is a stellar collection of paintings by Porforio Salinas. One is a bluebonnet painting from the middle of the last century (his are among the most sought after in the world); other works from this favorite artist of President Lyndon B. Johnson include a pair of bullfighters in bloody action and a trio of atmospheric landscapes of Texas and California settings. In 1925, at age 15, Salinas met his mentor, Robert William Wood, in San Antonio; Wood of course was the famous English landscape painter who settled in Texas and California and was a household name for his scenes of the Catskill Mountains, the Grand Tetons, the Cascades, and more—and most especially the Texas Hill Country. In this auction, Wood is represented by six paintings, including three Texas bluebonnet paintings—intimate oil paintings so fresh and alive that they could have been painted yesterday.
The legendary Texas sculptor Charles Umlauf takes pride of place in this auction with four signature nudes: A dancer in marble, a Prometheus in bronze, and also disrobing and reclining nudes in bronze that showcase Umlauf's style range, from realism to lyrical abstraction. Among Umlauf's fellow instructors at the University of Texas in Austin at the time was Kelly Fearing, a romantic surrealist and member of the Fort Worth Circle who has four works in this auction, including a watercolor of loggers at work and a striking collage of bird in a dreamlike skyscape. Another famed colleague of Umlauf from UT, William Lewis Lester, a member of the Dallas 9 and a leading regionalist, is represented here with a vivid oil-on-Masonite painting titled Old Man & Woman Planting Garden. Lester's robust composition and modern approach to his subject are on full display here.
And another regionalist modernist keeps company with Lester in this auction: Alexandre Hogue, with four works that show his own range; two of these include an untitled watercolor on paper of abstracted forms bursting through their frame, and the realist Liberators from 1943 is a patriotic lithographic portrait of U.S. warplanes flying above the stars and stripes and dove a peace.
Speaking of Modernists, German artist Edmund Kinzinger, who fled Nazi Germany and settled in Texas in 1935, left an indelible mark on the history of Texas art. There are four exemplary Kinzinger works in this auction, all from the 1930s. Most notable from this group is an oil on canvas titled Ladies with Fruit (Mexican Women), which depicts two clear-eyed women standing in front of an abstracted hilly landscape; they are looking at something in the middle distance, over the viewer's shoulder, as they make their way home from the market.
