Beginnings:Personal Notes About the Founding of the Department of Art and Art History (1965–1970)

By John O'Neil

In spring 1965, I received, in my office at the School of Art of the University of Oklahoma in Norman, a telephone call from Elinor Evans, a recently arrived teacher in the Department of Architecture at Rice University. Elinor, an artist with a master’s degree from Yale, where she had studied with Josef Albers, was calling to tell me that Rice wanted to establish a fine arts department as part of the humanities, and she had been asked to recommend an artist or art historian to be chair. Would I be interested?

Having just completed 14 years as a tenured professor and director of the School of Art at Norman, a school with a faculty of 14, a graduate program dating from 1934, 200 art majors, and a respected art museum, my interest in change was mild. However, I did send a note to Philip Wadsworth, then dean of humanities at Rice, asking for information. An exchange of letters followed, then a telephone call from Wadsworth asking me to come to Houston in order to meet several members of the architecture faculty and others from related disciplines. The meeting was low-key, conducted for the greater part over and after lunch in the Faculty Club at Cohen House. There had been difficulty in finding a room for my Houston stay since festivities attendant to the opening of the Astrodome were then in progress. I was given room in a Holcombe Street motel, where the air conditioner immediately failed, so my evaluation of Houston at this point was quite low.

During the visit, I found that there had been some art instruction on the Rice campus in past years, all within the Department of Architecture: James Chillman Jr., retired director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Katherine Tsanoff Brown, a graduate of Rice and Cornell, taught a few fundamental art history courses, as did Jasper Rose, a visitor from England holding a one-year appointment at Rice. Jasper departed in 1965 to accept an appointment to the instructional staff of the University of California at Santa Cruz, but not before he had surprised the Rice campus by wearing academic regalia to his classes. Once, striding across the quadrangle in his vivid and flowing robes, he encountered then-president Kenneth Pitzer, who asked him what the festive occasion was. Jasper replied, “Oh, I’m pretending that this is a university!”

Jasper also had taught a painting course at Rice and, at the end of the 1964 academic year, staged the first-ever art students’ exhibition. In the studio area, he also had a colleague, David Parsons, who had been recommended by Jimmy Chillman, director emeritus of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, to teach beginning drawing as well as sculpture to architecture students.

If Jasper Rose didn’t think highly of Rice as a university, it may have been because it had changed to that designation only in 1960, having previously been the Rice Institute. The new concept took root slowly. Interest on campus in the establishment of a Department of Fine Arts (later to be given the more accurate name Department of Art and Art History) seemed unenthusiastic. Some older faculty members actually were hostile. However, an effort had been made to find a suitable space to house the department, at least temporarily. Under consideration was the basement of the food services building (an idea eventually abandoned: cooking odors merging with that of oil paint!); the rent or purchase of a house on the campus periphery also was examined, as was the erection of a temporary steel structure. The latter option was adopted, with a location in the shadow of the track stadium: this was to serve for studio courses. In art history, a position already had been advertised and was accepted by William Kane.

During my campus tour, I found lecture rooms and studio rooms, all located in Anderson Hall, to be chaotic: a tumble of old and sometimes broken furniture, trash, wadded paper, and abandoned student paintings. The entire Rice campus seemed almost aggressively anti-visual. A Jacques Lipchitz bronze of Gertrude Stein, poorly shown in Fondren Library, bore the burden of the single work of art in this pocket of academia. I returned to Oklahoma realizing that, even though Rice enjoyed a fine reputation in science and engineering, any distinction in art would be hard won.

Soon after my return to Norman, there was a telephone call, followed by a letter from Dean Wadsworth: he offered me an appointment as professor and chair of the Department of Fine Arts. I delayed a decision until I could discuss the offer with my dean, Donald Clark. I thought Rice needed the help I felt qualified to give, and a plan was formed for me to take a year’s leave from Oklahoma to go to Rice as a visitor and acting chair. I planned to step away from these posts when the department had been prodded into existence. Rice agreed to the plan.

In fall 1965, the Department of Fine Arts appeared, and a major curriculum was approved. The instructional staff was Katherine Brown, David Parsons, William Kane, James Chillman, and myself. Three rather gloomy departmental offices, one with a window and two without, were assigned to us in the basement of Fondren Library. Studio courses in drawing and painting began in a temporary steel building situated in what proved to be a quagmire. One brave student, Paul Pfeiffer Jr., decided to risk becoming an art major.

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