The Art of Scholarship

For more than three decades, William Camfield has been elevating the arts at Rice and in Houston.

The shelves in William Camfield’s office were legendary—a wall of books packed two deep, with more volumes wedged in along the top, reaching all the way to the 13-foot ceiling. Those monumental bookshelves are empty now that Camfield has moved out.

Camfield, the Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor of Art History, spent 33 years at Rice University, almost the entirety of his prestigious career. His academic pedigree, a Princeton AB and a PhD in Art History from Yale University might lead you to imagine wealthy East coast parents, prep schools, and an interest in the arts fostered by frequent visits to the Met.

But you would be wrong. Camfield is a Texas boy from San Angelo. He went to high school in El Paso. “I was the first one in my family to attend college,” he says. “Mostly they were construction workers, some ranchers; they really weren’t academic.” But they were supportive. At an early age, Camfield displayed, he says, a facility for drawing and painting. “It was one thing my parents picked up on right away. They began to give me private art lessons.” It was a meaningful stretch for a family of modest income.

Camfield, the future art historian, did not see modern art until his senior year in high school. A young art teacher who had, as Camfield dryly puts it, “somehow come into contact with 20th-century art,” brought in some books, and Camfield saw his first examples of cubist and surrealist art. “Some of my fellow students were amused,” he says, “and some were horrified, but I was fascinated.”

Camfield was an excellent student, and he might have hoped to attend Texas Western College (now U.T. at El Paso), if not for the efforts of William Roberts, a local businessman and devoted Princeton alumnus who recruited academic standouts from high schools in West Texas and New Mexico. With help from a scholarship, Camfield found himself at Princeton University.

According to Camfield, when he arrived at college, “I had almost a total ignorance of modern art, but I really liked it.”

It was at Princeton that his early love of making art expanded to the study of art history. Princeton had one of the best departments in the country. “I fell in love with it. I knew after a couple of courses that this was really what I wanted to do.”

Camfield joined ROTC at Princeton to help pay for college. After graduation, he was stationed at Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma. He and his future wife, Ginny, met in 1957 at the wedding of a mutual friend in Austin, where Ginny had recently graduated from the University of Texas. After many crossings of the Oklahoma–Texas border, they married in 1958, and that same year, he was sent to Korea with his artillery unit.

Following his discharge from the army, Camfield pursued his graduate studies at Yale University while Ginny worked to support the couple. “I couldn’t have made it without a working wife,” he says. “She had a good job, and we still barely made it.” He wrote his master’s thesis on the 1912 French exhibition of the Section d’Or, a loose group of artists identified with cubism, that included the work of Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. In doing his research, he felt that “people were dismissing Duchamp and Picabia as second-rate cubists who didn’t know what cubism was about.” Camfield decided to pursue Picabia for his dissertation “in an effort to understand this person better, to try to adjust unfair criticism. I have been engaged with it ever since.”

An article Camfield published on Picabia in the late 1960s would essentially change the way people thought about the artist. It dealt with the artist’s series of mechanomorphic drawings—works that previously had been derided as “antiart, antimachine, and totally nonsensical.”

Camfield’s research showed that the drawings were based on actual mechanical sources and that they had significant intellectual and artistic content. “These machines looked like nonsensical contraptions because they weren’t intended to function like conventional machines,” Camfield explains. “But they often were based on diagrams and even photos of machine parts to which he would add or subtract things. An internal combustion engine, a spark plug . . . they struck at the heart of modern life and were meant to be symbolic portraits of specific individuals. There were also larger paintings that dealt with religious or political concepts, eroticism, social conditions of the time, or concepts of god.” Camfield’s interpretation of the work accorded it a new stature.

While Camfield was a student, faculty as well as art-world figures went out of their way to help him, and their kindness became a model for his unfailing generosity toward his own students. Picabia died in 1953, but many influential artists who knew him were still alive, foremost among them, Marcel Duchamp.

When Camfield was beginning his dissertation, he says, “My professor picked up the phone and called Duchamp, and we met in New York around 1960.” Camfield sat down with a list of questions and chatted with the man who was one of the seminal figures of 20th-century art.

Duchamp was “very kind,” putting the young scholar at ease and offering him a beer and a cigar. He was helpful and generous, answering questions and facilitating further research for Camfield. “Duchamp enjoyed enormous respect on both sides of the Atlantic, and he immediately put me in contact with collectors and some of the historic figures in the history of 20th-century art. Each visit resulted in more contacts, and eventually I met scores of surviving artists and authors associated with Dada and surrealism, their families and friends.” The list includes name like Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, and René Clair.

When Camfield was near the end of his PhD program, he began considering positions at several schools along the East Coast. He recollects that “back then it was assumed that you would stay on the East Coast between Washington and Boston.” But he let his dissertation director, George Heard Hamilton, know that he would be looking at schools in Texas before making his decision. In fall 1963, he was introduced to Jermayne MacAgy.

MacAgy was well known for the exhibitions she organized as director of the Contemporary Arts Association (now Museum) in Houston. She had gone on to head the art history department at the University of St. Thomas and run its art gallery. Camfield recalls her as “an inspiring teacher and creator of exhibitions that brought art alive.” With her dynamic agenda for the department and the gallery, MacAgy was overworked. She appealed to the department’s benefactors, Dominique and John de Menil, for an additional teacher.

The Camfields came into Manhattan to meet with the de Menils. They thought they would be visiting the pied-à-terre of a wealthy Texan. Instead they found themselves in a five-story townhouse with a phenomenal art collection.

There was a Matisse collage in the hallway, “two gorgeous Rothkos in the dining room,” and Max Ernst sculptures in the garden. The upstairs rooms were filled with “Ernst, Magritte, Picasso, tribal arts, and a French renaissance painting.”

Camfield would later come to know the de Menils and their Manhattan home very well. He remembers that it was always populated. The de Menils had given the young couple an open invitation to stay whenever there was a room available. “You could always count on a good breakfast,” Camfield recalls and describes the salon atmosphere of the meal: “When you went downstairs, you never knew who would to be there—a priest from Lebanon, a museum director, European art historians, family members, filmmakers. . . .” The de Menils filled their home with art and people who had ideas.

The de Menils invited the Camfields to Houston to visit St. Thomas. Going to teach art history in Texas in 1964 was considered by many of Camfield’s East Coast colleagues as “going to the frontier,” but the de Menils were confident in St. Thomas’s program.

Camfield made the trip and was impressed with what he saw. Through MacAgy’s efforts and the de Menil’s support, St. Thomas, an “unknown little liberal arts catholic college had one of the most interesting programs going.”

Camfield accepted the job, figuring they would stay for “three to five years and get back in touch with friends and family in Texas.”

Tragedy struck six weeks after Camfield’s arrival. Jermayne MacAgy died from complications related to diabetes, and Camfield was left with the entire teaching load and the daily operations of the department. Mrs. de Menil was appointed chair of the art department and took over the scheduled exhibitions. “Dominique stepped up immediately and did a great job,” he says. It was a year before they could bring on additional faculty. John de Menil, “who was especially interested in film,” recruited James Blue, the man who would go on to found Rice Media Center. The following years were spent working to build and expand the department.

During this time, Camfield was gaining acclaim for his work, and he began to entertain other university job offers. After five years, he and Ginny had decided it was time to move on. Days away from signing a contract with Brown University, they went to talk with the de Menils and “thank them for the wonderful experience.” The de Menils looked taken aback when he told them his news. He was puzzled by their reaction, the two couples had become friends, “sharing political and social sentiments as well as aesthetic ones,” but the de Menils knew his position at St. Thomas was short term.

The de Menils spoke with each other and then said to Camfield “It is premature, but the situation with us at University of St. Thomas is unraveling. We are thinking of separating from the university and going to Rice. We think this is going to happen. Would you please stay?” The Camfields thought about it and agreed. “We had to completely reverse our psychological engines,” Camfield says, “but we are very glad we did.” In fall 1969, de Menil founded the Institute for the Arts at Rice, and most of the art faculty from the University of St. Thomas joined the Department of Fine Arts at Rice. Camfield was among them, and the university became his home for the next 30-odd years.

He continued his work on Picabia, in 1970 organizing an exhibition at the Guggenheim. It included the artist’s controversial later works—strange figurative images that Camfield had to fight to have included. His decision was validated with resurgence of interest in Picabia in the 1980s and 1990s when the exhibition was, ironically, criticized for not having had more of those same works.

In 1973, he received an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship and spent a sabbatical year in Paris with his wife and their three children working on his book about Picabia. Published in 1979, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life, and Times remains the basic study of the artist.

In 1981, Camfield returned to Paris for another sabbatical, this time supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and a Brown Foundation grant. He began work on a new book and exhibition of the work of Jean Crotti and Suzanne Duchamp. The exhibition was presented at venues that included the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

In addition to doing research and organizing exhibitions in Europe, Camfield was heavily involved with Houston’s art community. The Camfields added the work of local artists to their personal art collection, and Camfield curated an exhibition of Houston artists that circulated in Austria and Germany, concluding at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. For a number of years, he was actively involved with the MFAH, serving as a trustee and teaching museum internship courses.

He also worked with the Menil Collection, producing a major study of Duchamp’s notorious Fountain for an exhibition curated by Walter Hopps. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and spent a third sabbatical year in Paris. Research there on Dada and Max Ernst culminated in another collaboration with Walter Hopps on the exhibition titled Max Ernst, Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism, with venues at the Menil Collection, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Camfield’s catalogue won a Vasari Prize.

At Rice, Camfield was not content to simply teach but was a balanced academic who also enjoyed hands- on experience with artwork as well as scholarship and research.

He was active, especially, with the campus art installations of Michael Heizer and Robert Irwin. The accolades of brilliant scholar and brilliant teacher are not always synonymous, but Camfield’s intellectual curiosity and his generosity have made him a beloved and oftentimes life-changing figure for his students. “I have always loved teaching,” he says, “and I am sure I will miss it.”

In his last years at Rice, Camfield focused on chairing the department and bringing in new faculty. At 69, he now feels the time is right to move on, leaving behind a department with “great teachers and new faculty with new gifts and new visions.” The university has separated art and art history into two departments, and Camfield feels this will allow both of them to flourish.

Camfield still keeps abreast of contemporary art, his curiosity unabated. He is embarking on a self-admitted “sham retirement” in which he and Ginny plan to spend time with their grandchildren, but he also will be hard at work with the Comité Picabia on the multivolume catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work.

Ask Camfield what appeals to him about Picabia, and you see his continued enthusiasm for his subject. “What there is about Picabia that engages most people in a positive way is the freedom of spirit, the monumental ambition, the monumental self-centeredness to do anything he wanted to do,” Camfield explains. “He did not want to be trapped by any systems or hierarchies. He didn’t want to be trapped by any proscriptions of society or the art world, and this earned him a lot of admirers and critics. He would literally destroy and recreate his own paintings. He has done that to work that was historically significant, that would be worth quite a bit of money. He would literally paint right over it. He was not bound by his own work.

“Picabia said ‘The only way to save one’s life is to sacrifice your reputation.’ How many people could live like that? There are very few artists I know who have done that, and none of them have done that with the alacrity that he did it. He said ‘God made our heads round so our ideas could change.’” Though Camfield characterizes it as a choice rather than a risk, he indeed risked his own reputation by rejecting prestigious art history positions at Ivy League schools, a seemingly foolhardy decision in the academic climate of the 1960s. Thanks in part to his efforts, Houston has become one of the country’s leading cities for art. His choice paid off for him, for Rice, for Houston, and most of all, for his students.

Although Camfield has had friendships with numerous art world figures, he lacks a collection of posed celebrity photographs. For him, these associations sprang from a desire to learn rather than have a brush with fame.

When asked for a photograph for the article, Camfield unearths an image of himself and Dominique de Menil taken at a Menil Collection opening. They are sitting on a bench, de Menil’s back is to the camera, and they are engaged in animated conversation. It’s a telling image that shows Camfield, true to form, simultaneously teaching and learning.

—Kelly Klaasmeyer