Cenizo Journal Summer 2010 | Page 11

Photo courtesy Museum of the Big Bend, Sul Ross State University Xavier Gonzalez’ 1937 mural for the federal courthouse in Huntsville, Alabama, depicting the benefits of the Muscle Shoals dam and hydroelectric plant. an agricultural engineer who took consulting jobs in South America, and Gonzalez dropped out of school at the age of 13 to accompany him. After immigrating to the United States and sliding, as he said, into a career as an artist, he returned to Mexico and taught art in public schools there with Rufino Tamayo, who introduced him to the Mexican muralist movement popularized by Diego Rivera. In the late 1920s he joined his uncle, the artist Jose Arpa, at an art school Arpa founded in San Antonio. He also taught at the Witte Museum’s art school in San Antonio, and that may be when he first discov- ered the Big Bend. In 1931 he joined the art faculty at Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans, and he remained on the faculty there until World War II. But throughout the 1930s Gonzalez spent most of his summers in Alpine. He loved painting the Big Bend’s spec- tacular scenery. He told the Sul Ross newspaper, The Skyline, that “It is impossible to be sur- rounded by the most spectacu- lar landscape in the world with- out being touched by the desire to put it on canvas.” The Art Colony classes met at Kokernot Lodge, but Gonzalez took his students on field trips to Shafter and the Chisos Basin and even into the Davis Mountains. On a trip to Paris in 1936, Gonzalez met Pablo Picasso and had several conversations with him. The notes that he made on those conversations are in the Smithsonian Insti - tution’s Archives of Ameri can Art, and they record that Gonzalez talked to Picasso with great enthusiasm about Texas and the Big Bend. Picasso’s response was, “It must be an interesting place – so big and so few artists – no competition.” Photographs taken of Gonzalez during his Alpine summers show a tall, hand- some young man with a finely sculpted face, heavy black eye- brows and a mop of unruly black hair. The cover of the brochure for the 1937 Art Colony pictures him outdoors at an easel, surrounded by admiring young women. Gonzalez spent a month after the 1934 Art Colony trav- eling in Mexico and studying the contemporary murals in Mexico City. That fall he took flying lessons in New Orleans and obtained a pilot’s license. He told a newspaper reporter that flying improved his art. “From the ground one gets only a worm’s-eye view,” he said, “but in the air you get a different angle.” It was quite easy, he added, to paint while flying in an enclosed cockpit. In the summer of 1935 Gonzalez married one of his Sophie Newcomb students, a New Orleans girl named Ethel Edwards, in a ceremony in Alpine. She was 21, and Gonzalez was 36. The bride’s brother, Bruce Edwards, recalls that his parents were delighted with the match because his sis- ter had a beau in New Orleans who they considered to be something of a bad actor, and that in fact the wedding was held in Alpine for fear that he might disrupt it if it were held in New Orleans. Edwards also remembers that Gonzalez was unfamiliar with Protestant usage and kept addressing the Methodist minister as “Uncle.” The marriage lasted until Gonzalez’ death in 1993 at the age of 94. Gonzalez’ papers at the Smithsonian include hun- dreds of illustrated love notes that he wrote to his wife over the years. In the late 1930s, while teaching at Sophie Newcomb and Sul Ross, Gonzalez emerged as one of America’s prominent young muralists. One of his first mural projects was painted in 1933 for the San Antonio Municipal Audi - torium. It represented the wastefulness of war and was done in the style of Diego Rivera, featuring refineries, ships, loading cranes, artillery pieces, fighter planes and a row of military ambulances. It cre- ated such a furor in San Antonio that in the summer of 1935 Mayor Charles Quinn, bowing to pressure from the local American Legion, ordered that the mural, which was painted on canvas, be taken down and returned to the federal government’s Civil Works Administration, under whose auspices it had been cre- ated. Quinn pointed out that that it included a clenched fist, “the salute of a communistic organization,” and an open bleeding palm, “believed to be the insignia of some kind of socialistic group.” Gonzalez mildly replied from Alpine that the mural was about war, and that the fist was intended to express anger at the taking of lives and the bleeding palm the suffering and sacrifice incident to war. He seems to have shrugged his shoulders and gone on with the business of painting. Gonzalez’ other murals were more mature and less controversial. In 1934, in addi- tion to his Chisos Mountains mural, he executed a set of six for the new Art Deco Shushan Airport in New Orleans, show- ing airplanes over various sites around the world: the Eiffel Tower, the harbor of Rio de Janeiro, the Mayan pyramids. They were in a less realistic style than the Chisos painting and summoned up the accessi- bility to exotic places made pos- sible by the airplane. In 1937 he was commis- sioned by the Federal Arts Project to do a mural for the federal courthouse in Huntsville, Alabama, depicting the benefits of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Muscle Shoals Project; this was the largest and most expensive Federal Arts Project mural done in Alabama. In 1940 he executed four murals for the Kilgore, Texas post office for the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts program, which employed artists to decorate post offices all over the United States. The four panels, contrasting pioneer life with contemporary life in East Texas, were widely praised, and local people were especially gratified by a panel depicting a drilling crew on the floor of an oil rig. That same year Gonzalez’ wife, Ethel Edwards, painted a mural for the Lampasas, Texas, post office, showing cattle, hors- es and hogs behind a ranch house. The next year Gonzalez received a Treasury Depart - ment commission to do a mural for the Mission, Texas, post office, even though the postmaster had written to the assistant postmaster general saying that “if we have any choice, we prefer having a new adding machine.” Gonzalez’ mural, showing a Texas Ranger standing on a bluff above the Rio Grande adjust- ing his saddle, was locally acclaimed, and Edward Rowan, chief of the Section of Fine Arts, wrote to him that “the reaction of the general public to your work is most gratifying and, of course, those are the people for whom the work was intended, not the postmaster alone.” Gonzalez went on to paint a total of 17 important murals in major cities across the United States. He left Alpine for the last time in 1940 and spent World War II designing posters for the war effort. In 1946 he and his wife moved to New York, where he blossomed into something approaching a Renaissance man, a teacher, painter, sculp- tor, watercolorist, collage artist and jewelry designer. Even so, he mastered his first medium, oil murals, in the mountains of the Big Bend, and the earliest surviving evidence of his talent as a muralist remains on dis- play exactly where it should be, at the Museum of the Big Bend. The Museum of the Big Bend will mount a retrospective on the art department and art colony instructors and students, 1921-1950, in the fall of 2011. Please contact Mary Bones at [email protected] or 432.837.8734 for further information. Cenizo Third Quarter 2010 11