William Lester

Art Brokerage: William Lester American Artist: b. 1910 - 1991. He was a member of the Dallas Nine, a group of artists located in the Dallas area who were prominent during the Depression. While Lester, like the other artists in this disparate and ever-shifting coalition, could be classified as a regionalist, such a classification would be an imperfect one. When he was associated with the Dallas art scene, Lester, indeed, painted images inspired by his environment; but he never permitted this to transform into a narrow parochialism. Eventually, he came to disdain representation entirely, embraced the wild colors found in the Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo's works and, in the 1960's, became a committed abstractionist. Lester's restlessness is the quality that, perhaps, best aligns him with the other major figures in the Dallas Nine. Like Everett Spruce and Otis Dozier, in particular, he abandoned a youthful dedication to naturalism and became, in his maturity, an imaginative abstractionist. And like Spruce and Dozier, Lester was an important contributor to American modernism. Lester was born in Graham, Texas in 1910. He displayed an early interest in art and music; his colorist tendencies were in evidence even in his youth. Lester recalled being disappointed with the limitations imposed by the colors in crayon boxes, saying I wanted to draw people with very realistic pink skin tones; I couldn't accept the simple forthright statement of color. In 1928, Lester committed to becoming a professional artist. While on a sketching trip, he experienced what could only be called a revelation. A scene which he had previously sketched in winter now with energy and life when he saw it again in the spring; Lester later said I had never really seen the world until that moment. In that same year, he attended a summer workshop in landscape painting in Glen Rose Texas. In high school, Lester attended Saturday classes in painting and figure drawing at the Dallas Art Institute, where he took classes under Tom Snell. In addition, he spent two summers painting in the Arkansas cabin of the artist Olin H. Travis. Lester began exhibiting his work soon after he graduated from high school, in 1929. In 1931, he was already exhibiting with galleries in Dallas and in 1932 had a successful exhibition at the Joseph Sartor Galleries. In the same year, Lester exhibited with eight other Texas artists at the Dallas Public Art Gallery in the Exhibition of Young Dallas Artists. The artists included in this exhibition would form the core of the Dallas Nine. During the mid-1930's, Lester supported himself by working as a staff artist for the Civilian Conservation Corp; he was stationed in Palo Duro Canyon and in Fort Sill, Oklahoma during this time. Lester developed an interest in the desolate, remote landscapes that surrounded him when he was working in the Civilian Conservation Corp. His painting, Oklahoma Rocks, was exhibited in the Centennial Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture, and Graphic Arts in 1936 at the newly opened Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. In the same year, he exhibited his painting, In Oklahoma, at the First National Exhibition of American Art at Rockefeller Center in New York City. In 1939, he showed two paintings in exhibitions of national significance; The Three Crosses at the New York World's Fair Exhibition American Art Today, and Empty Silo at San Francisco's Golden Gate International Exposition. Lester's successes in the late 1930s testify to his standing in the national art community. Lester's works from the 1930s display a pronounced attention to compositional structure and to painterly effects. In his 1938 painting, The Rattlesnake Hunter, for instance, Lester mingled the dramatic vertical and horizontal lines of bare rocky outcrops to striking effect and rendered them in a Cubist manner. Lester, in an effort to capture the parched quality of the Panhandle's sun-blasted earth, mixed pure white into his palette. The end result is a chalky, discordant and slightly disconcerting image. Even here, as he was ostensibly depicting the Texas landscape, Lester was showing himself to be uneasy with mere representation. National recognition brought with it teaching opportunities for Lester. From 1940 until 1942, he worked as a teacher in the museum school at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. He would eventually be offered a position as an instructor of art at the University of Texas at Austin; he would serve as the departments chairman from 1952 until 1954. He was made a professor of art in 1956 and taught at the University until retiring in 1972. During the 1940s and 1950s Lester's works were shown in a number of prominent local and national exhibitions. His works were shown at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts (1940), the Brooklyn Museum (1941), the Fine Arts Society of San Diego (1941), the Art Institute of Chicago (1942), the Denver Art Museum (1944), the Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, San Francisco (1952), the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (1955). Lester's works were shown in solo exhibitions at the Passadoit Gallery in New York (1948, 1950, 1953); and the Dayton (Ohio) Art Institute (1949). Lester continued to exhibit throughout Texas throughout the 1940s. Lester persisted in creating abstract, gestural works for the remainder of his career. He died in 1991. His works are represented in many prominent museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum, New York; the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Witte Museum, San Antonio; the Huntington Art Museum of the University of Texas at Austin; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; and the American Embassy in Paris. nWilliam Lester's career demonstrates, first, that the regionalist classification inadequately describes many of those who have been saddled with it. While Lester was inspired by his environment and by rural Americana, he was always more intrigued by the expressive capacity of color and composition than by any specific subject matter. Perhaps more importantly, the trajectory of Lester's career demonstrates that regionalists were amenable to external influences and were active participants in the national art community.