Jerry Bywaters: A Life in Art

Dr. Francine Carraro's biography of Dallas artist Jerry Bywaters provides a solid introduction to the art scene of the city throughout much of the 20th century. Bywaters, who was a Regionalist, had many professional contacts with Allie Tennant. In fact, the two of them shared much of their artistic careers in the city. Bywaters and Tennant both attended classes at the Art Students League in the later 1920s, returned to Dallas where they both became very active in the Regionalist art movement, and worked together in building the Dallas Museum of Fine arts. Bywaters served as the Director of the Museum during most of the time that Allie Tennant was a member of the institution's board of trustees. In particular, they cooperated during the mid-1950s when anti-communist fervor attempted to remove various works of art from the Museum's collection. This book by Cararro highlights many important developments in the arts community of Dallas and fully assessed the significant role Jerry Bywaters played in them.


By Francine Carraro



The Dallas Woman's Forum

The Dallas Woman's Forum's headquarters in Dallas

Allie Tennant enjoyed a close association with the Dallas Woman's Forum during the early years of her career.The forum had been established in 1906 as Dallas’s first “department” women’s club, which meant that its membership belonged to one or more different sections according to their interests. The art department was one of these divisions.Tennant’s art teacher, Dallas artist Vivian Aunspaugh, became in 1909 the person who arranged the programs of the Woman’s Forum art department, a paid position she would hold for over twenty years. This was likely the reason by a young Allie Tennant became involved in the art department. In 1911 the Forum decided to hold an annual exhibition of Texas paintings “as part of the organization’s educational offering and to give encouragement to young aspiring artists as well as recognition to those who had already achieved success.” This annual show became a major art event for Dallas for over a decade thereafter. Tennant’s first venue for showing her art publicly took place at the one of Forum’s annual art exhibitions.

Allie Tennant Hosts an Art Fundraiser, 1957

Allie Tennant was active for many decades in her support of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. In 1957 the Dallas Museum League sponsored a bus tour to raise money during which donors could tour studios of female artists including Allie Tennant, Evaline Sellors, Vivian Aunspaugh, and several others. On a Sunday afternoon in October, those participating were whisked around Dallas by bus, including a stop at Tennant’s studio on Live Oak Street. The Dallas Morning News featured a photograph of the participants walking along the fence in front of Tennant’s studio as they made their way inside. This studio tour proved to be a very successful event for the museum in terms of raising funds. It raised almost $2,000 and the organizers reported “the tour was far more successful than they had anticipated.”

Tennant at the Art Students League in New York City, 1927-1928

The faculty at the Art Students League during
the era when Allie Tennant was a student


 

Allie Tennant enrolled at the Art Students League during fall of 1927 and remained for most of 1928. Her second year there overlapped with young Dallas artist, Jerry Bywaters, who had also arrived in New York City to study at the school. She initially took studio classes at the Art Students League that involved both drawing and sculpture. Throughout her first year she diligently studied anatomy and attended sketching courses taught by noted illustrator George Brant Bridgman, one of the most celebrated members of the faculty. Much of the accurate detail later seen in Allie’s sculptural portraits no doubt came from her studies with Bridgman, who would later become well-known as Norman Rockwell’s artistic mentor. Although she excelled in drawing as a Bridgman student, Allie’s primary emphasis remained sculpture. She nonetheless thrived in Bridgman’s classes, noting "there is no conceptual difference between painting and sculpture" in terms of the concentration necessary for success. By her second year, she concentrated entirely on sculpture, learning from Arthur Lee, William Zorach, and Edward McCartan.

Where Allie Tennant studied: The Art Students League
at 251 W. 57th Street, New York City

 



Allie Tennant's Dallas Studio



The Sitting Room of Allie Tennant's Studio, circa 1939
with some of her favorite pieces



In the mid-1920s Allie Tennant built a studio located in the backyard of her family’s home on Live Oak Street. Dallas architect Walter Sharp designed the studio. He created an “Old English” building of the cottage style with a large work room located on the northern end of the structure so placed to catch the best natural light. The studio had "a vaulted ceiling, large north windows, and had shelves and niches for her work lining the walls." It also sported a large and gracious fireplace for winter heat. Tennant particularly liked the design of the studio because of its large north window. “North light is liked by all artists,” she once explained to a journalist interviewing her, “because there is no sunshine with it.” This building would be her studio for the remainder of her life, with all of her best-known work created there. She displayed many of her pieces on pedestals around the sitting room located at one end of the building.

Exterior of Allie Tennant's studio as it appears today

Tennant's 1939 Exhibiton at the Hockaday School in Dallas

Tennant's 1939 portrait bust of Hockaday's Mariam Morgan

In 1939 the Hockaday School sponsored an art show in honor of Allie Tennant, who had close ties to this prestigious Dallas school for girls. Its head, Ella Hockaday, served with Tennant on the board of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Allie’s long-time friend and fellow southwestern Regionalist, Alexandre Hogue, taught at the school where he served as chair of the art department.  Allie had recently sculpted a bronze portrait bust of Miriam Morgan, the beloved head of the residential department at the Hockaday School. This show highlighted that portrait of Morgan. The organizers dealt imaginatively with a problem that soon emerged in assembling an exhibition of Tennant’s work; namely, many of her most important sculptures were public art and of heroic size or garden pieces permanently affixed en situ, thus making it impossible to have the actual items in the show. Tennant solved this by furnishing large photographs of many of these pieces, which Hogue and his exhibition committee placed in the display area intermixed with smaller examples of her work which could be brought to the exhibition hall at the school. Critics raved about the Hockaday exhibit, noting that it constituted the most complete collection of the sculptor’s work that had ever been assembled in Dallas at one location to that date.

Allie Tennant Rests in the Oakland Cemetery, Dallas

Allie Tennant fell ill during the spring of 1971. She stayed at her home on Live Oak Street during much of her final illness across the summer and autumn months of that year, but eventually went to the hospital for better treatment. Allie Victoria Tennant passed away on December 19, 1971.  Sadly, she died largely forgotten by the public and press which had closely chronicled her sculpting career during earlier decades. The Dallas Morning News, for example, carried only a short, single paragraph notice of her death that made no mention of her artistic career or other accomplishments. Like her parents and brothers, she too was laid to rest in the family plot at the Oakland Cemetery, surrounded by many business and social leaders from the Dallas elite who she had known across the course of her life.