Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Tennant's Sculpture of the black cat "Pretty Boy Floyd"

Allie Tennant had a great sense of humor. In the 1930s she adopted a stray cat that appeared at her Dallas home. She named  it in honor of the then well-known gangster Pretty Boy Floyd. Allie grew close to the cat and sculpted it in Belgium marble.


Kurt Noell and Light Cummins pose with Allie Tennant's "Pretty Boy Floyd"

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Suanne Shafer, Author, blogs about Allie Tennant

Suanne Shafer, an author from San Antonio, is blogging about women in Early Texas Art. She recently turned her attention to Allie Tennant. Click here for a link to that blog entry.

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Allie Tennant at the Southland Paper Mill

In 1938 Tennant made a bas-relief plaque for the main offices of the Southland Paper Mill in Lufkin Texas. It memorialized the contributions of Francis P. Garvin and Charles Holmes Herty, two scientists who invented the process to make paper from pine pulp. This mill was the first to use this process. This plaque is today in the collection of the Texas Forestry Museum in Lufkin.

Tennant poses with the paper mill plaque in her Dallas studio

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Lone Star Regionalism

Lone Star Regionalism by Rick Stewart

This book, published in 1985 by Rick Stewart, remains today a ground-breaking study of the Regional art movement in Texas. Stewart's solid research and deep understanding of Regionalism make this volume the essential starting-place for anyone interested in learning about the artists who worked in this school of expression during the 1930s. Regionalism as an intellectual concept gained great currency in American life during the 1920s and 1930s. Its artistic orientation proved to be narrative and descriptive. As such, it was allied with the American Scene then popularized by artists including Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and James Stuart Curry. It gained currency in Dallas during the 1930s. Texas Regionalists centered their art on themes sometimes filled with “country folks and pastoral landscapes.” Regionalism was movement that celebrated the common folk while at the same time it sought to include them as part of its intended audience, especially in the area of public art. This proved a comfortable notion for Allie Tennant because her artistic training had always valued the social importance of public art. As did other Regionalists, she saw such artistic expression as art for the people, drawn from the wellsprings of the people themselves, celebrating the role of the common person. Rick Stewart's book provides a full discussion of this movement in Texas.