DALLAS, TX.- The Dallas-based David Bates announced his retirement in 2021, and just two years on, it's already easy to feel a sharp pang of nostalgia for one of Texas' most beloved contemporary artists. These kinds of feelings can kick in quickly about a number of Lone Star artists, as they (and we) move from one era into another and we understand the work we have from them is limited and will grow more so with each passing year. The veterans of our lifetime who have shown us an incredible range of talent and sensibilities — from those we've lost in recent years, such as Vernon Fisher, Bob Wade and Luis Jimenez, to those who are still defining the stage like Dario Robleto, Billy Hassell, Terry Allen and Melissa Miller — now find their rich and varied output is prime-timed for auction. A host of newer and younger collectors scramble to buy and honor the work, to complete collections, to surround themselves with the best that Texas has ever offered.
In an event teeming with earlier historical greats such as Julian Onderdonk, Alexander Hogue and Jerry Bywaters, it's a painting by David Bates that leads the pack in
Heritage's December 2 Texas Art Signature® Auction. And Bates' contemporaries, listed above, are represented here too, along with other state-born luminaries who are alive and well and making great work today, which gives this particular auction a feel of renewal and vibrancy: the circle of life, so to speak, as traced across the canvases and studios of mentors and mentees, influencers and those who came up behind them to influence and inspire new generations. It's hard to look at the list — David Aylsworth, Julie Speed, James Surls, Mary Vernon, Linda Ridgway, Aaron Parazette, Otis Jones, Dan Rizzie, Robyn O'Neil and more — and not feel sentimental, if not a surge of pride. The auction is, all at once, both the history and the vital present of Texas art.
Bates' 2007 oil painting Tennessee Street II is from his acclaimed body of work The Katrina Paintings, which he created in response to the devastating storm that hit New Orleans and its surrounding regions in 2005. Bates already had a long history of painting the Gulf Coast — swamps, bayous, communities, fishermen, wildlife — and this series hit hard and made an impression on even the most critical audience. Of the paintings, which she took in at D.C. Moore Gallery, the New York Times' lead art critic Roberta Smith wrote: "...these images bring the self-contained glower that hovers behind his work out into the open and give it the immediate force of human emotions and events. These works suggest that even in times of crisis, paintings can be as powerful as photographs." Her assessment of Bates became something like Texas lore. She wrote of his paintings, "They bristle like carpentered objects, press forward with every molecule and demand attention." His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, the Hirshhorn, the National Museum in D.C., and of course every major museum in Texas.
Tennessee Street II is one of the less harrowing but more anthemic from the series, depicting a wood-clad house that's buckled in the storm and been pierced by a car and finds its perfect reflection in the floodwater that surrounds it. Dense, graphic and eerily quiet, the painting captures in one scene an entire grief-stricken city, if not a whole nation. You can smell the salty sky and seawater. The house, like everyone who took in these images in person and through the media, is in shock; it encapsulates all of the humanity that built it, loved it, lived in it, and lost it.
"While our Texas Art department has long been known for offering fabulous works of Early Texas Art, it has been our great pleasure to see more top-notch Modern and Contemporary Texas works in our auctions," says Atlee Phillips, Heritage's Director of Texas Art. "We really do have something for everyone's collecting tastes — whether you love bluebonnets or totally abstract art. I am extremely proud of the group of works in our December 2 auction."
Alongside Bates in this well-rounded event are works from his best-known contemporaries. This includes a 2003 print on canvas by Bob Schrope "Daddy-O" Wade (who died in 2019) titled Hood Ropin', depicting the very kind of thing we had come to expect from a Cosmic Cowboy and larger-than-life jokester: A woman roping a cow from the saddled hood of a vintage car. A giant 2005 drawing by the visionary Robyn O'Neil, whose auction record was previously set by Heritage, is here: Titled This Man Might Lose Everything, the work shows us, at a distance, one of her tiny men dangling precariously over a cold and expansive mountainscape, and it epitomizes O'Neil in her prime. A jewel-like canvas by Billy Hassell titled Night Fishing on the Wind River is from 2003 and proves his remarkable manner of abstracting flora and fauna through unapologetic shape and color. One of Otis Jones' enigmatic (and instantly recognizable) compositions is here, this one a mixed-media on paper titled, aptly, Two Lines Four Circles — Jones' trademark milky, waxy backdrop envelops the darker punctuations that give the work its name. The late Luis Jimenez — not only one of the state's greatest but arguably one of the greatest of all American artists — is represented by four prints in this event, and his fans well know that Jimenez's love of printmaking means that even his most casual impulses take on the authority of masterpieces.
The auction is tight and thoughtful, yet the list of contemporary artists is encompassing. There are signature sculptures by Dario Robleto, watercolors by Melissa Miller, a 1976 lithograph from Terry Allen's wry and knowing Juarez Suite, several lithographs from the much-missed Vernon Fisher and many more. Fittingly, works from the 1970s through the '90s make up much of this trove of contemporary works finding their way to auction. Art by this generation of artists out of Houston, Dallas, Denton, the Hill Country, the Panhandle and all corners of Texas has resonated far beyond the borders of this state.
We would be remiss to not mention that works by the forebears of our living artists provide the foundation of the auction. Other leads in the event are paintings by landscape greats Robert William Wood, G. Harvey and Porfirio Salinas; a fantastic selection of drawings by Alexandre Hogue; charismatic works by Gerald Williamson "Jerry" Bywaters and Clementine Hunter; and ever-popular midcentury works by George Grammer and Bror Utter.
There is also a remarkable painting by Julian Onderdonk in the event: The oil-on-canvas Early Morning seems to depict, in the words of art historian James Graham Baker, "...a rising sun viewed from the highlands of Arrochar looking southeast out to the Lower Bay of New York and on to the Atlantic. It is dated 1904, during the time Julian and Guy du Bois had opened the Onderdonk School of Art at the old Barrett Mansion in Arrochar, when Julian had begun to roam the Staten Island landscape, painting scenes that captured his visual interests." Baker wrote the essay on this painting for Heritage's auction catalog; his book Julian Onderdonk in New York: The Lost Years, the Lost Paintings was the subject of a New York Times article and profile and establishes Baker as a leading scholar on an artist Texas so happily claims. Of this painting, Baker goes on to write: "The lone shepherd urging his flock up a muddy pathway adds a touch of humanity ... The lightly rendered structures, along with the shoreline, the sun's rays and the muddy road serve to direct and hold one's vision in the heart of the painting."
