Center for the Advancement and Study of Texas Art --CASETA

As the website of this organization notes: "The mission of the Center for the Advancement and Study of Early Texas Art is to promote the preservation, study and appreciation of Texas visual arts and its history." In reality CASETA, as it is popularly known, is not a physical center with a dedicated building or actual location. Instead, it is an organization that brings together scholars, collectors, museum professionals, librarians, curators, gallery personnel, and others who have an interest in early Texas art. It defines early Texas art as any work produced forty years before the present date. CASETA holds an annual meeting at a varied location during the late spring that brings together its members to hear presentations about Texas artists, art history, and developments in the field. I presented a talk at CASETA dealing with Allie Tennant and her sculpture three years ago. The organization also sponsors an art exhibition at its annual meeting where dealers in early Texas art make works available for purchase. The group as well sponsors a series of art related events across the rest of the year while its newsletter provides a clearing house of information for its members regarding events related to early Texas art. The offices are based at the San Angelo Museum of  Fine Arts. Howard Taylor serves as executive director of CASETA.

Click Here for the website of CASETA

The New Regionalism of the 1930s and 1940s

 

The group of Dallas artists to which Allie Tennant belonged had become strongly committed starting in the late 1920s to the Regional movement then sweeping intellectual circles throughout the nation and Western Europe. As a Regionalist, Allie Tennant subscribed to most all of the attributes above, all of which formed part of the credo of this movement. For Allie Tennant and the other Dallas artists caught up in the movement, Regionalism was definitely not a home-grown concept, but instead had deep roots across the nation and elsewhere around the world. Art, for Regionalists, had to be made accessible to all people in society. Many Texas historians, writers, artists, musicians, photographers, and others involved in creative activities glorified the Regional experience. As did Tennant, they used Texas themes to inform their work. The first well-known, nationally-recognized artists who became practitioners of this new Regionalism during the 1930s were not Texans, but instead mid-westerners. Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, and Thomas Hart Benton all received much publicity early in the decade as artists whose work existed at the forefront of this movement.

For an introduction to Regionalism as related to Grant Wood, click here.

The Navarro Sculpture at Corsicana, 1938

Allie Tennant poses with the model of her Navarro monument

Allie Tennant sculpted a statue of Jose de Navarro as part of the State of Texas Centennial celebration. It was dedicated in the fall of 1938. A number of luminaries gathered in Corsicana for its formal unveiling on October 3rd. Richard Mays served as master of ceremonies. United States Senator Tom Connelly gave the major address of dedication with additional remarks delivered by Congressman Luther Johnson. Corsicana native Buford Jester, who was then serving on the University of Texas Board of Regents and would later be the governor of Texas, formally presented Allie Tennant a huge bouquet of golden chrysanthemums. A modest public speaker, she demurred politely from making extensive remarks at the dedication and instead said only that she wished her work to speak for itself

The Cornish Portrait Bust, 1931

 

In the fall of 1931, Tennant received a commission to make a memorial portrait bust from Mrs. Hilda Cornish of Little Rock, Arkansas. Mrs. Cornish was the widow of a prominent banker, Ed Cornish, who had been President of the American Bank of Commerce, the largest financial institution in Arkansas. Mr. Cornish had been a respected member of the community. He and his wife lived in one of the most palatial homes in Little Rock. Sadly, Cornish had suffered financial losses in the fall of 1928 and taken his life while staying in a New Orleans hotel, an action no doubt caused by despondency over his business situation. Nevertheless, Mrs. Cornish had inherited a considerable estate and it was her desire to place a bust of her late husband at his gravesite in the Oakland Cemetery at Little Rock. Accordingly, she traveled to Dallas and engaged Allie for the task. Tennant did her preliminary research on Mr. Cornish and completed her clay model at her Live Oak Street studio. After a few months, the bust was ready to be shipped to the foundry where it was cast in bronze. In the late spring of 1931, Tennant traveled to Little Rock where she supervised its placement in the cemetery. It was an interesting piece because it had a golden bronze patina and was set on a pink marble pedestal. In a later era, this gravesite became well-known in Arkansas, and not for the portrait bust. After her husband’s death Mrs. Cornish subsequently had a very public career in advocating birth control in the South, thus earning a title as the “Mother of Birth Control in Arkansas.” She died in 1965 and is today also buried in the plot which is marked by Tennant’s portrait bust.

 

 



Howard W. Odum, a 1930s Voice for Regionalism

Sociologist Howard W. Odum of the University of North Carolina

Dallas Regionalist artists including Allie Tennant found satisfaction in the work of  sociologist Howard Odum. He is today considered one of the most significant intellectuals associated during the 1930s with Regionalism. In 1938, Odum of the University of North Carolina and Harry S. Moore of University of Texas at Austin, published a seminal volume entitled American Regionalism that defined the parameters of this viewpoint and articulated its intellectual credo. Odum and Moore noted that "Regionalism is in reality the opposite of its most common interpretation, namely, localism, sectionalism, or provincialism." They observed that "Regionalism connotes unity in a total national composition, while sectionalism with its separatism is inherently different." Dallas artist Jerry Bywaters echoed this observation when he wrote about Regionalism by saying “the truth is that artists found nationalism before the politicians."

To learn more about Odum, see the webpage of the Howard W. Odum Institute at the University of North Carolina. Click Here
 

Who Were the Regional Artists?

The Regionalists were a varied group of Texas artists who lived mostly in the Dallas area during the late 1920s and 1930s, although some lived much farther away including Tom Lea from El Paso. Some of these artists from Tennant’s circle were branded with a term that subsequently came into widespread, popular usage to denote the entire Regional movement: the “Dallas Nine.” This originated with a 1932 showing of Regional paintings at the Dallas Public Art Gallery. The exhibit highlighted the work of nine Dallas artists, all men and all easel painters, each of whom was a self-described Regionalist. The artists in this show were Jerry Bywaters, John Douglass, Buck Winn, Otis Dozier, Lloyd Goff, Perry Nichols, William Lester, Everett Spruce, and Charles L. McCann. "The Dallas Nine” constituted, as art historian Rick Stewart explained decades later, “a larger group of painters” who embraced the Regionalist viewpoint. Some women in fact belonged to the community of Dallas artists comprising this school of expression. Florence McClung, Dorothy Austin, Coreen Mary Spellman and several of her colleagues in the Art Department of the female college at Denton; Stella L. LaMond at East Texas State Teacher’s College and then S.M.U.; Blanche McVeigh and Evaline Sellors -- all lived and worked in the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area of North Texas during the 1930s. Significant among these women, of course, was Allie Tennant, who emerged as the most prominent female Regionalist artist in Dallas and who was likely the best-known of them to the general public.

Many of the artists pictured in this 1931 image were Regionalists, including
Allie Tennant who is number 14

 

Read about the Dallas Nine in the Handbook of Texas. ClickHere

SMU Central Libraires Digital Archives of Texas Art

The Central Libraries of Southern Methodist University maintains an online archive of images relating to early Texas art. This is a cooperative venture with the Bywaters Collection of the Hamon Arts Library at SMU, the Meadows Museum of SMU, the Dallas Public Library, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin -- all of whom have contributed high quality images. It is possible to search by several parameters including the name of the artists. There are three distinct online collections at this site which pertain to early Texas art.

Texas Artists: Paintings, Sculpture, and Works on Paper

Octavio Medellin: Works of Art and Artistic Processes

Otis Dozier Sketchbooks