The Comptons of Texas: Rediscovered Works of Carl Benton and Mildred Norris Compton

William Reaves Fine Art announces The Comptons of Texas:  Rediscovered Works of Carl Benton and Mildred Norris Compton on view from September 25-October 24, 2015.

In this exhibition, the Reaves group brings this long-forgotten duo of Texas artists and a collection of their best works back to gallery walls for the first time in sixty years.

The exhibition features over fifty oils, watercolors, temperas, ceramic and wood sculptures from the couple’s time in Texas, spanning 1936 to 1955.  The Comptons of Texas is an exhibit of consequence, and it will hold special appeal to those who appreciate the rise of the arts in both Texas and Latin America during this signal period.

Mildred Norris and Carl Benton Compton were newly-weds in 1936 when, fresh from training at the Art Institute of Chicago, they relocated to Georgetown, Texas to staff the new arts program at Southwestern University.

Arriving on the scene just as Texas was experiencing its grand Centennial celebration, they quickly engaged with leading artists of the time in Austin, Dallas, Houston and elsewhere.

Carl Benton established an immediate statewide identity as Head of Southwestern’s emergent art department, with Mildred likewise, teaching at the University, and (beginning in 1939) serving as an art columnist for the Austin American Statesman.  Their professional network included many of the state’s leading painters of the day, the likes of William Lester and Everett Spruce, as well as Jerry Bywaters and Alexandre Hogue, with whom they exhibited in Belton, Texas, as early as 1937.

The Comptons exhibited often at Texas museums and university galleries, showing in juried exhibitions (and later one-person shows) in major venues such as the Dallas Museum of Fine Art (now the Dallas Museum of Art), The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Witte Museum of San Antonio.

Works by both artists were included in the Third Annual Exhibition of American Art in New York City (1938), and one or the other were shown during their tenure in Georgetown in important exhibitions in Denver, Kansas, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

In 1944, after one year at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Carl Benton Compton moved to the North Texas State Teachers College (now The University of North Texas) as a faculty member and Director of the College’s Institute for Inter-American Studies.  Mildred, restricted from teaching at the institution due to the nepotism regulations of the period, developed a successful career as public school teacher and counselor, while continuing to paint and exhibit through the 1950s.

In 1937, the Compton’s made their first trip to Mexico, a country they would return to often over the next 25 years, living and traveling there while studying the art, history and culture of the region.  While in the country, they became acquainted with prominent Mexican modernists and avant-garde art movements of the period, encountering work of Diego Rivera, and influenced especially by the Mexican surrealism of Frida Kahlo, Miguel Covarrubias, and Carlos Merida.

In addition to engaging with the contemporary Mexican art scene, Carl Benton became a serious student of Tarascan Indian culture, an archaic tribe distinguished as one of the three great Pre-Columbian nations of the country.  Carl Benton became an authority on Tarascan pottery and sculpture.

These Mexican experiences deeply affected the style and substance of their artwork; both artists increasingly inculcating the region’s surrealistic aesthetic into their own artistic production.  As such, they became early and active interlocutors and importers of Latin American modernism and folk art into the art environs of Texas (and beyond), and their work represented an important bridge in the transformations from Lone Star Regionalism to the modernist modalities that occurred within their professional tenure.

In a stunning exhibition tracing the artistic evolution of both artists, the selections include finely executed examples of their early Regionalist style, as well as an important series of watercolors and ceramics reflecting the influence of Tarascan art and other aspects of Mexican culture on the pair.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with essay on the artists and their work by Dr. D. Jack Davis, Professor Emeritus and Founding Dean of the College of Visual Arts and Design at The University of North Texas.  The exhibition will run from September 25 to October 24 at William Reaves Fine Art and will subsequently travel to the university galleries at UNT On The Square in Denton, Texas from March 1 to 27.