Visual Arts

FORT WORTH – Fort Worth native Dickson Reeder went to Paris in the 1930s to study art. While there he met New Yorker Flora Blanc. The young couple married, moved briefly to New York City, and in 1940 returned to Fort Worth. But they missed the artistic and bohemian atmosphere of the Big Apple. Their solution was to transform their west Fort Worth home into a salon that soon attracted a crowd of young Texans interested in the advanced art of the day.

Matilda Peeler

Bill Bomar's 1947 oil painting Day Observation for a Harlequin

"Intimate Modernism: Fort Worth Circle Artists in the 1940s," currently at the Amon Carter Museum, examines the work produced by that group, which grew to include such artists as William P. (Bill) Bomar, Lia Cuilty, Veronica Helfensteller and Bror Utter.

It was a group whose members had first gotten to know one another through the Fort Worth School of Fine Arts, and the city became aware of their work through an annual exhibition known as "The Local," held at the Fort Worth Public Library. Kelly Fearing, another important member of the group, came to Fort Worth with a war-related job as a draftsman at Consolidated Vultee Aircraft, where he met Mr. Reeder.

Although their styles were too diverse to ever be considered a school unto themselves, these artists were united by their openness to European ideas and their fondness for the Reeders' gatherings, where drinks, conversation, music and the occasional costume party were the order of the day.

Their paintings were among the first on the local scene to depart from the stylized regionalism championed by a previous generation, a style that had suited the hard times of the Great Depression. Dave Hickey, an art critic originally from Fort Worth who will speak at the Amon Carter on Saturday, describes this group as "citizens of the world" and their moment as the first true burst of cosmopolitanism in this area.

Amon Carter Museum

Bror Utter's Presence, a 1947 gouache and watercolor work

Mr. Reeder for a time had a professional portrait studio in Fort Worth, and for several of the artists the portrait was a starting point for exploring new ideas. Mr. Bomar showed influences from both Latin American and European artists, but he brought to his images a distinctive elegance and sensitivity. He placed his subjects against flattened, ambiguous backgrounds and depicted them staring thoughtfully into a middle space.

Mr. Reeder, possibly because he did more work on commission, presented more fully formed figures, but it was his portrait of The Shannon Children, which won "The Local" competition in 1941, that caused the first stir associated with the burgeoning group. The two youngsters stare unnervingly straight at the viewer, and Mr. Reeder has placed them on a pink oval carpet and a tiled floor that tilts forward like the table in a Cezanne still life.

Although Mr. Reeder dismissed surrealism as a "European fad," in The Shannon Children he was exploring some of its motifs, and it became the mode of choice for much of the Fort Worth Circle.

Mr. and Mrs. E. Ogden Whipple

The Shannon Children, a 1941 oil painting by Dickson Reeder

Ms. Helfensteller took a storybook approach to her images. In one watercolor, a lady sits at a table in a forest playing cards with a centaur. In another that same centaur interrupts her formal dinner with her husband, and in several of her fanciful images giraffes lurk in the background.

Mr. Utter, at the time the most highly regarded of the group, placed his abstract, biomorphic forms in either vast plains or compartmentalized settings. His figures shifted continuously from human to purely abstract. At times they evoked creatures found in tidal pools and coral reefs, while others were more floral or suggestive of the sort of decorative ware found on midcentury tabletops. Mr. Utter's greatest strength was his sophisticated color, which could either ground his abstractions in Southwestern earth tones or immerse them in rich washes of red.

Mr. Fearing's surrealism was both meditative and melancholy. Like Ms. Helfensteller, he had a storybook and mythological side, but his best work created ambiguous narratives with isolated figures in barren domestic settings. Edward Hopper seems to have been an influence. Mr. Fearing's female subjects share their homes with aquariums sparsely populated with quirky combinations of fish that might include both small flounders and shrimp. The same overcast atmosphere that exists in his painting The Kite Flyers prevails in these interiors and in the stylized gymnasium where two young men work out with dumbbells and chest pulls.

Rainone Galleries

Masquerade by Dickson Reeder, a 1945 gouache and watercolor work

By the 1950s the Fort Worth Circle had begun to disperse. Mr. Bomar was dividing his time between New York City and New Mexico and eventually relocated to Taos, N.M., where he died in 1991. Mr. Fearing took a job with the University of Texas in Austin, retired in 1987 and continues to work in his studio there. After World War II, the Reeders became increasingly involved with the Reeder Children's School of Theater and Design. And inevitably the next generation of artists emerged with new ideas and approaches that caught the public's attention.

Charles Dee Mitchell is a Dallas freelance writer.

Plan your life

"Intimate Modernism: Fort Worth Circle Artists in the 1940s" is on view through May 11 at the Amon Carter Museum, 3501 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. Free. 817-738-1933. www.cartermuseum.org.

Dave Hickey, Schaeffer professor of modern letters at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, will lecture at 11 a.m. Saturday. Reservations required; call 817-989-5057 by Wednesday.