Planting the Seeds of Art

Rice may have been founded as an “Institute for the Advancement of Literature, Science, and Art,” but pragmatism isn’t always kind to ideals, especially for a fledgling institute trying to make ends meet. In Texas during the early years of the 20th century, the petrochemical industry was booming, so science and engineering became a natural focus of the Rice curriculum. Literature played a secondary role, and art—well, art just didn’t seem to be on the horizon.

At the Tabard Inn, by John Stewart Alcorn

Even the architecture department was added as an afterthought when William Ward Watkin, who supervised the construction of the first buildings on campus, was asked to stay on to establish an architecture program. In addition to founding the department that eventually became the School of Architecture, Watkin’s most obvious legacy to Rice and Houston is the many important buildings he designed both on and off campus. But Watkin also can be credited with planting the seed that eventually bloomed into Rice’s Department of Art and Art History, which split in 2003 into two allied departments: the Department of Art History and the Department of Visual Arts.

Owls, by Stella Sullivan

Watkin believed that drawing was an important part of an architecture curriculum, and he hired appropriate faculty, and eventually, the department offered courses in freehand drawing, perspective, shades and shadows, and watercolor as well as art and architecture history. Indeed, there were a number of students more interested in the art aspect than the architecture, and many of these went on to establish careers as artists.

Randy Tibbits, team leader for the document delivery office in Fondren Library, who recently curated a retrospective of early Rice artists, became interested in the subject as an extension of his interest in early Texas art. He was looking, in particular, at the art that had appeared in the Houston Annuals—juried art shows sponsored by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from 1925 to 1960. “I noticed that many of the people whose names I was running across in my research were either faculty members or students at Rice,” Tibbits says. “That made me realize what a significant influence Rice had in shaping those early days of art in Houston and in inspiring later generations.”

As Tibbits looked more deeply into the genesis of art at Rice, he learned that some Rice artists who gained their training in the architecture department are still around, so he began trying to get in touch with some of them. One of his first contacts was Leila McConnell Gadbois ’48, who still signs her work Leila McConnell. He got to know both Leila and her husband, Henry, also a Houston artist. Gradually, he met other alumni artists and saw a lot of their work—some of which hadn’t been viewed in years. “Many of the Rice artists from this period who are still living have not always made their living from their art,” Tibbits says, “though some of them, like Gertrude Barnstone [’45], have. But even if art simply has been an avocation, it’s really been the center of their lives.”

Passage of Time, by Erik Sproghe

Surprisingly, the alumni artists uniformly credited the artistic training they received at Rice, despite the absence of a formal art program. “I was talking to Leila one day,” Tibbits recalls, “and she mentioned that one of her most important influences—if not the most important—was James Chillman. I thought that was interesting because Chillman was such a significant figure in early Houston art. He was the first director of the Museum of Fine Arts until the early ’50s, and he also was a faculty member at Rice from the formative years into the early ’70s. He worked half time as the director and half time on the faculty here.”

Erik Sproghe (left) and John Stewart Alcorn

Other art instructors praised by the alumni artists are Watkin (architectural drawing), John Tilden (painting), Frederick Browne (architectural drawing and painting), and James Morehead Jr. (perspective, descriptive geometry, and shades and shadows). Many Rice art faculty also taught at the Museum of Fine Arts School and contributed in other ways to the visual arts in the growing city. And many of their students followed in their footsteps as practicing artists and teachers.

Excited by the artists he’d met and the work he’d seen—and spurred equally by the vibrant interaction between Rice and early visual arts in Houston—Tibbits decided to organize an exhibit of early Rice art. The exhibit was on view in the Fondren Rotunda from November through the beginning of this year. “There are many fabulous artists associated with Rice later on,” Tibbits says, “but I wanted to look at those earlier people. I hope that students who walked through there thought, ‘Wow, this person was here 50 or more years ago, and they’re still having an important impact in Houston and elsewhere.’”

While by no means exhaustive, the exhibit presented work in various media and covered important touchstones in Rice art, such as Watkin and William McVey, who gained considerable renown as a sculptor and teacher. It also mixed the work of art instructors, including Frederick Browne and Charles Schorre, with the work of alumni, such as Blanche Harding Sewall ’17, Margaret Brisbine ’23, Bill Condon’48, and others.

According to many of the artists who are still living, learning artistic technique under the auspices of the architecture department had a lot of positives. “Leila says that architecture wasn’t a bad training for an artist because you had to learn to draw, and you had to learn to look at the world around you,” Tibbits explains. “Erik Sproghe [’54] says you can always tell architect artists because of their enhanced awareness of architectural space.”

Serious Moon Face, by Leila McConnell

That enhanced awareness led Sproghe to his career. “In my fifth year,” Sproghe relates, “a professor who also had his own architecture firm asked me to do a church illustration, which started me in the professional rendering direction.” Stella Sullivan ’45 didn’t go the same career route, but what she learned stuck with her. “I always remembered Mr. Chillman’s color chart assignment,” she says, “and later developed one for my students in oil painting based on his example.”

Even if the result wasn’t a career, the instruction enhanced the artist’s work, says John Stewart Alcorn ’54. “Mechanical drawing class proved useful,” he says, “since it sharpened my skills for rendering geometric subjects in a convincing manner.” But technique wasn’t the end of it. Gertrude Levy Barnstone notes that her architectural experience provided stimulus and inspiration for her later sculptural work.

Sullivan nicely sums up Rice’s formative period of architectural art training: “It was the Rice experience,” she says, “that developed my ongoing interest in current art and architecture and my desire to keep on painting.”

—Christopher Dow