Ben Culwell
Ben L. Culwell was an American painter and early participant in the abstract expressionist movement. He is most widely known for his participation in the Museum of Modern Art's 1946 Fourteen Americans exhibition. His work is included in the permanent collection of Houston's Menil Collection, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, as well as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In 1977, Culwell's work was featured in a retrospective at the McNay Art Museum. Ten years later in 1987, Culwell's early paintings were featured in Adrenalin Hour, an exhibition given at the opening of the Menil Collection, to critical acclaim. In 2007, his work was included in an exhibition at Baylor University, Texas Modern: The Rediscovery of Early Texas Abstraction 1935–1965.
Life
Early life and family
Culwell was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1918, the eldest of three boys. Culwell's father was a businessman who suffered great losses during the Depression, forcing the Culwell family to move from city to city during the 1930s. Culwell spent his early years in Houston, and his last year and a half in high school in Dallas. Though Culwell felt an early calling to pursue art, this was in conflict with his father, who wanted his son to pursue a practical career in business.When his father took a job in New York City in 1936, the family followed him to the east coast and Culwell enrolled at Columbia University. Though Culwell worked at Columbia towards a degree in business administration, he also took a number of art courses and studied under Walter Pach, who took him and other students to various private collections of modern art in the city. In that year, Culwell also attended a number of seminal shows in the history of modern art: Fantastic Art, Dada and Suurealism and Cubism and Abstract Art at MoMA, as well as the first exhibition of works by the American Abstract Artists Group. Culwell formed a number of friendships with New York avant-garde artists, and maintained contact with them throughout his life. However, Culwell found the New York Scene bohemian and escapist; combined with pressure from his father, this led him to choose a business career in Texas over continuing in the New York art world—this, he felt, would give him deeper insight into American life and would not preclude a serious pursuit of art. Culwell returned with his family to Dallas in 1938, where he entered business school.
In Dallas, Culwell continued to paint and keep in touch with the New York avant-garde, while also forming a number of ties to prominent Texas regionalist artists like Everett Spruce and Jerry Bywaters. In 1941, Culwell enlisted in the U.S Navy, and boarded a transport ship headed towards Pearl Harbor, arriving shortly after the Japanese bombing. From Pearl Harbor, he boarded the USS Pensacola, where he served from January 1942 until 1944.
Culwell's first creative burst occurred during his years on the Pacific front in World War II. Restricted to the only materials obtainable, Culwell painted at every moment he could, usually daily. Small watercolor, ink, and mixed media works on paper, each of Culwell's war paintings deals with an aspect of his life as a sailor. There are scenes of battle, scenes depicting the routine and frustration of a sailor's day-to-day life, and scenes of death. As Walter Hopps described the war painting in his catalogue essay for Culwell's Adrenalin Hour show at the Menil: "From the point of view of human content, these works, often including poetic diaristic inscriptions and made under the extremities of human endurance during the Pacific, are among our most powerful images of the horror of modern war."
Culwell managed to get off the ship around 1944 and traveled to Dallas on a thirty-day leave, before leaving for mid-shipman's school in upstate New York. He showed his suite of watercolors to Jerry Bywaters, the noted regional artist and then-director of the Dallas Museum of Art. Bywaters was interested in presenting the war paintings in a one-man show, and had Culwell mat between thirty and forty works and leave them in Dallas. These works, curated by Bywaters, appeared in a one-man show at the Dallas Museum around 1946, where the Museum of Modern Art's Dorothy Canning Miller saw them.
Fourteen Americans
Fourteen Americans went up once Culwell was living in Dallas. Culwell's work appeared in the show alongside such later well-established artists as Robert Motherwell, Isamu Noguchi, Arshile Gorky, and Mark Tobey, opened in the September 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art. Curated by Dorothy Canning Miller, Fourteen Americans was one of six Americans shows that introduced a range of artists to the museum's visitors. As opposed to the more common large group shows with this aim, Miller introduced a format with fewer artists and more works by each, thus allowing a more intimate engagement with the oeuvre of each painter and sculptor. Fourteen Americans, like the other shows in MoMA's special exhibitions and the Americans series was part of MoMA's attempts to introduce American artists to a public trained to appreciate European art. Though Culwell could not make the trip from Dallas at the time, his work impressed Robert Coates—famous for coining the term Abstract Expressionism—writing for The New Yorker:
I was especially impressed, for example, with the work of Ben L. Culwell, a young Texan just out of the Navy after nearly five years of active service in the Pacific, whose "Death by Burning," Death by Drowning," "Fragment of Concussion Time," and "Morning at Attu," among others—all combining Abstraction and Expressionism in a way that produces a maximum of emotional intensity—are among the few really integrated interpretations of wartime experience that I have yet to come across.
Fourteen Americans was one of the first shows to present Abstract Expressionism to a broader public. In fact, Coates' use of the phrase is one of the earlier combinations of the terms "Abstraction" and Expressionism" applied to the New York School.
Life in Dallas
After the war, Culwell returned to Dallas, where he was living when Fourteen Americans went up. Despite critical recognition following Fourteen Americans, Culwell—living in Dallas—returned to the business world in July 1947, after no galleries showed any interest in his work. over the year and a half that Culwell lived off military benefits and just painted, he did not make any money off his art. Culwell returned to the fire and casualty insurance that employed him before the war. This was not the end of Culwell's artistic work. He continued to paint throughout his life. Later he recalled, "Everyone else was in the same boat; Pollock, De Kooning, Kline all had other jobs. ... They all ended up teaching somewhere, but I had a scent of the politics of academics. I went back into business because I thought I'd have more freedom and maybe just as much time to paint."Thereafter Culwell maintained two careers, one in art and the other in business. In the late 1950s, Culwell worked as the Executive Vice President of Southwest General Insurance Co. in San Antonio, Texas. While living in San Antonio, Culwell was an active member of the San Antonio Men of Art Guild, a local arts organization and cooperative gallery. From 1954 to 1961, while working for another fire and casualty firm in Dallas, he helped organize the Dallas-Fort Worth Men of Art Guild, and became its first chairman. In 1961, Culwell moved with his wife Virginia and daughter Elizabeth to Temple, Texas, where he worked as the president of the American Desk Manufacturing Company.
The late 1950s and 60s brought new appreciation of Culwell's work. He began to win awards again at Texan art fairs—for example, the E.M. Dealey Top Purchase Prize, 29th Annual Dallas County Exhibition in 1958—and make more sales. Culwell also participated in the exhibition From the Executive's Easel in 1958, which toured through the United States and internationally for several years. In 1959 Culwell had several one-man shows at the San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth Men of Art Guilds; he sold a large number of works at the Dallas show.
The McNay Art Museum, in 1977, and the Temple Cultural Activities Center held retrospectives of his work; and the Menil Collection, on the opening of its new building, exhibited a suite of Culwell's war paintings entitled Adrenalin Hour. Culwell worked as the Vice President of American Desk Manufacturing Company in Temple, Texas before finally retiring from business in 1974. He worked on unfinished paintings until his death in 1992.
Work
War paintings
According to Joan Seeman Robinson, Culwell treated different subjects with different techniques in his war paintings. For example, Culwell's painting Adrenalin Hour, like other of his battle scenes, is rendered in gestural brushstrokes. Painted over frantic scribblings, the brushstrokes show a single face painted in fluid and watery lines. Culwell painted the face over a background of violent red and blue splotches, with sketchy depictions of a scene—probably a battle scene—but the exact subject is unclear. In Living with Torpedoes and other paintings of leisure time however, Culwell's technique relied on thin contour lines and more narrative-oriented description. Culwell rendered a multitude of downtime activities—listening to records, thinking about women, standing on deck, and painting at a desk above a sleeping torpedo—in thin inked contour lines. The greater detail given by ink and pen allowed Culwell to express a greater range of activities. The comparison of Living with Torpedoes and Adrenalin Hour speaks to Culwell's habit of changing techniques based on the psychological state he was trying to depict.In his war paintings, Culwell continued to work with ideas inspired by twentieth-century art movements, ideas that he began engaging with in New York and his time in Dallas during the late 1930s. Culwell's interest in complex and shifting depictions of space emerged from his interest in Cubism, while his attempt to render psychological states is an engagement with Surrealism's exploration of the human psyche. Tantamount, however, is Culwell's individual approach to Expressionism, as Dan Wingren noted in 1977:
Looking back on those paintings , Culwell today believes that "the abstraction was not 'Pure Abstraction' in any of them while the purpose of all of them was purely Expressionistic." Culwell uses his words with care. To him, to "express" is to "ex-press" to press-out. His "expressions" are not lax or negligent jottings, but they require straining and concentrated intensity."