EXHIBITION ESSAY
We did not call them art. We called them pictures.[1]
The Amarillo Museum of Art holds a yearly exhibition entitled Achievements in Art, which honors an art collector and his vision. This annual offers viewers a rare opportunity to see a collection intact. Walking through two large galleries, viewers move through a landscape that is the collector’s mind. Patterns, biases, idiosyncrasies can be found – and ultimately coherency. This coherency reveals itself in the sum, or near totality, of the acquired works and the span of years in which the works were collected. This yearly show is about the collector and collecting.
Amarillo Museum of Art has made an unconventional choice this year. The honor goes to a public high school – Amarillo High School – located in the city of Amarillo, the center of the Texas panhandle.
The exhibition, An Uncommon Dream: The Amarillo High School Collection of 19th and 20th Century Art celebrates the vision of Amarillo High School principal R. B. Norman, the man who founded the school’s art collection in 1945. Norman foresaw an education that included a firsthand familiarity with the arts, despite the many miles that separate students of the panhandle from other cities and museums.[2]
The Amarillo High School art collection, comprising ninety-one works, represents a variety of movements and styles, such as Barbizon, American Impressionism, Tonalism, Post-Impressionism, Taos Society Artists, Texas and New Mexico regional schools, and Abstract Expressionism. The collection contains works by prominent American painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the artists, eleven were full members of the National Academy of Design and one was an associate member. Amarillo High School has four paintings by Frank Gervasi (1895-1986), the only Texas member of the National Academy.[3]
Amarillo High School is especially proud to have a painting by John Joseph Enneking (1841-1916). Enneking was one of the first American Impressionists and one of the first Americans to paint alongside Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro.[4] Similarly, the collection includes works by American Impressionists, George Pearse Ennis (1884-1936), Chauncey F. Ryder (1868-1949), and Walter Elmer Schofield (1867-1944).
The collection also includes Tonalist painters Ben Foster (1852-1926) and Robert Bruce Crane (1857-1937). Crane is ranked among the most important of American Tonalists. He studied at the Grez-sur-Loring art colony in France in 1882. He also studied with the influential landscape artist Jean-Charles Cazin (1846-1901). Crane was a part of the historically important Lyme Art Colony at Old Lyme, Connecticut.[5]
Additionally, the high school art collection includes works by founders of the Taos Society of Artists, Eanger Irving Couse (1866-1936) and Ernest Martin Hennings (1886-1956), as well as New Mexico modernists Eric Gibberd (1897-1972), Gene Kloss (1903-1996), Barbara Latham (1896-1989), Doel Reed (1894-1985) and Russian-born Nicolai Fechin (1881-1955).
For decades, Amarillo High School students lived with the works of notable artists around them. These paintings, displayed for their edification, were of museum worth, and yet in the words of Amarillo High School 50th Alumni Association president, Charlie Broomhead:
“We had no idea the value of what was to become the Amarillo High School art collection that was hanging on the halls for us to see. The halls were always crowded. As you glanced around you saw the pictures. You knew they were there—you knew they would always be there. You have to understand that we took it for granted. [We thought] that was the way high school was—you went into the school and you had pictures hanging in the walls.”[6]
In 1945, Amarillo High School joined a very small group of high schools with significant art collections. The Amarillo High School collection is exceptional in its strength and variety of styles and movements; high school collections tend to be focused on regional artists. Gardena High School in Los Angeles has a collection of California Impressionists. Hughes High School in Cincinnati began its collection in 1895 with the works of Cincinnati artists. Salt Lake City School District has an impressive collection of Utah artists.[7]
"I cannot remember Amarillo High without Mr. Norman."[8] Charlie Broomhead
For thirty-two years, from 1929 to 1961, R. B. Norman was the principal of Amarillo High School. His long tenure allowed him to shape the character of the school. Students, teachers, and parents—everyone clearly understood R. B. Norman was in charge. Mr. Broomhead, a 1956 graduate, recalled:
“One of the funny things about knowing R. B. Norman was the fact that he was the kindest, gentlest person until you missed English class and then he would decide this was the time for you to set an example and you learned then that even though he was a gentle giant he was in charge. He had a pocketknife that everybody had become familiar with. When he called an assembly he had a tradition of rapping it against one of those front seats and it would echo across the auditorium full of students.”[9]
Mr. Norman was also very clear about the artwork coming into the collection. There were three rules. One, the artwork had to “maintain a high investment quality as well as an aesthetic appeal.”[10] Two, local artists were not allowed in the collection; this was to prevent conflicts and jealousy. Three, the paintings had to “hang on the walls where students changed classes everyday.”[11] The collection was not meant to decorate the school’s offices. With these rules in place, R. B. Norman formed a committee to select the works to be purchased. The committee was led by three people, R. B. Norman, Dr. Carlton Palmer, an art dealer and gallery owner from Atlanta, and Bill Attebury, representative of the high school student body. When the committee selected a work of art to purchase, Norman helped secure the funds by working together with the Junior League of Amarillo, the school’s Activity Fund, the student council, and the senior class.[12]
“R. B. Norman wanted the artworks that would come into the collection to be significant works, not fads or kitsch,”[13] explained Gary Biggers, caretaker of the Amarillo High School art collection. Biggers, a retired Humanities teacher at Amarillo High, noted that the Enneking painting, Solitude, is the painting that began the collection. The Enneking painting came into the school with a bonus—its original frame. Incised on the back of the frame is the following: 1923 Carrig-Rohane Shop Inc. / R. C. Vose Boston. Carrig-Rohane Shop (1903-1962) was a prestigious framing house that worked closely with the American Impressionists and such galleries as R. C. Vose Galleries, considered the oldest art gallery in America.[14]
R. B. Norman was quite proud of the collection. The school’s first acquisition indicates his careful and discerning eye. Mr. Broomhead remembered this about Norman: “Mr. Norman knew every inch of every painting. He liked them. He walked the halls looking at the art. Every piece of art that you see from the Norman years has his fingerprints on it. If he did not hang it, he sure picked it. He told them where to hang it. He held the hammer and the ladder.”[15]
Fire. Some events in life are so momentous they change trajectories. By definition these changes are manifestly apparent. More curious, though, is the way pivotal events reshape and recolor time before they occur, as if their consequences ripple backwards, as well. For the Amarillo High School community, March 1, 1970 is an example of this sort of reformulation. It was an early Sunday morning when the school’s boiler exploded, blowing through the auditorium and third floor. Fire engulfed the building and destroyed it. It was the school’s darkest day. It was probably its finest, too.
Amarillo firefighter Ray Mathis said in an interview for the Amarillo Globe-News that when he arrived at the scene of the fire Sunday morning “he saw kids running in and out of the burning building, trying to save prized artwork and books from burning inside the growing fire.”[16] “We had quite a time gettin' them stopped…I worked the front of the school, and when the fire reached the front of the building, the heat was so hot from that building that it looked like the wall was moving and swaying two or three feet."[17] Students and teachers were dropping paintings out of second floor windows into the arms of students on the school’s front lawn. Allied Van Line provided a truck to shelter the paintings. Khoury Brothers Fine Art Appraisers of Amarillo provided an on the spot appraisal so that the artwork would have an insurance value before the paintings were stored by Allied Van Line.[18]
Charlie Broomhead said this about the fire:
“We saw smoke but no flames…there was a glimmer of hope…but after you talked to the firemen and saw ten fire trucks there you knew there was something bad going on…suddenly you look around and it is kids everywhere and they were crying…It did not take long before they [students] found out that they could get inside the building and began hauling things out…I remember seeing [a student holding] a trophy in one hand and a picture in another…One kid even brought out the fire extinguisher…It was a black fire. You could see smoke from miles away.”[19]
Forty years after the fire, many still wonder what was lost; the collection was located on all three floors. But Gary Biggers, an alumnus of the high school, has reconstructed the history of the collection and concludes that not a single painting was lost in the fire.
Whenever the collection is talked about, the fire inevitably comes up. It’s part and parcel of the collection now. It’s not just an art collection; it’s an art collection that was almost destroyed. R. B. Norman wasn’t just the principal of Amarillo High School. He was the principal at the old school – the one that burned down. Catastrophes have a mysterious way of working themselves into our memories, no matter the timeline.
To this day, witnesses still shed tears recalling that Sunday morning. Looking at the blissful scene of Raymond Thibesart’s Blossoms Near Paris or the exquisite gold frame around Enneking’s Solitude, one cannot help but feel the fire’s threat.
R. B. Norman’s retirement in 1961 ended the liveliest part of the school’s art collection history. Mr. Biggers has written: “Despite attempts by some on the faculty to continue buying art for the collection [after 1961], the new principal, Mr. Ross Larsen, would not permit further expenditures on the collection. As a result only a few paintings have been added during the past three decades, primarily through donations from individuals outside the school or as memorials presented to the school.”[20]
In 1987, Biggers started researching the history of the art collection. He has been motivated by his love of the collection, a love that began when he was a student at Amarillo High. He points out that his research is really a reconstruction because information was lost in the fire. He also works with a sense of urgency because the teachers and alumni who were a part of the history are passing away. “We are losing our contact with the past,”[21] he states bluntly. What was lost in the fire and what cannot be gleaned from remnant information must be garnered from the memories of those who were there.
The Amarillo High School 50th Alumni Association shares Biggers’ pride. The group also shares his anxiety about the future of the collection, its integrity, and its maintenance. In fact, in the association’s bylaws, the organization pointedly assigns itself the task of “providing funds to maintain and sustain the extensive R. B. Norman collection.”[22]
The collection today remains in the hallways for students to appreciate. The paintings have been placed in elegant glass cases and thoughtfully arranged by Biggers and his students. Biggers has been a determined and tireless caretaker of the Amarillo High School art collection because he truly believes “there is nothing more vital than a tradition that continues to live.”[23]
Graziella Marchicelli, Ph.D.
Executive Director/Chief Curator
© Copyright Amarillo Museum of Art 2010. All rights reserved.
END NOTES
[1] Charlie Broomhead, documentary video interview by the author, Amarillo Museum of Art, Amarillo, Texas, 20 January 2010.
[2]Gary G. Biggers, “History of the Collection,” A Lasting Legacy: American Paintings from the Amarillo High School Art Collection, (Canyon, Texas: Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, 1991):11.
[3] Michael R. Grauer, “Introduction,” A Lasting Legacy: American Paintings from the Amarillo High School Art Collection, 13-14.
[5] Florence Griswold Museum, (accessed 11 August 2009), http://www.flogris.org/learning/insitu/html/south/crane.php.
[7] Michael R. Grauer, documentary video interview by author, Amarillo Museum of Art, Amarillo, Texas, 26 January 2010.
[10] Gary G. Biggers, “History of the Collection,” A Lasting Legacy: American Paintings from the Amarillo High School Art Collection, 11.
[13] Gary G. Bigers, documentary video interview by the author, Amarillo Museum of Art, Amarillo, Texas, 15 January 2010.
[20] Michael R. Grauer, “Introduction,” A Lasting Legacy: American Paintings from the Amarillo High School Art Collection, 11.
