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