0.2 David pryor adickes, b. 1927

Early lessons

I graduated from college in Huntsville (Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas) in Math and Physics in ’48 and then went straight to Paris for two years, then came back to Huntsville around Christmas of ’50 and to Houston in spring of ’51.

I opened a little art school and invited Herb Mears, my old colleague from Paris, to come down from New York—we opened this school, The Studio School of Contemporary Art, together. He was working as a window dresser for Abraham and Strauss in Brooklyn, so he was glad to get out of there and have some other sort of thing. So we opened this little art school, and it didn’t work. We made the basic mistake of charging people after they came rather than getting a commitment from them. So we didn’t make any money, but we had a lot of fun and met a lot of people.

The art school was on Truxillo Street between Main and Fannin. All the action was right there…because 2K’s was three blocks away, and that was the night action for all the theater people and writers and these types of people. The town was small in those days.

The james bute paint co.

The only real gallery selling contemporary art was the Bute Gallery downtown, run by the young impresario Ben DuBose. They had hired Ben out of the University of Houston to come and basically liquidate their prints. They had a big inventory of prints…everything was prints [back then]. Basically it was a big downtown store whose business was wallpaper and paint, but it had a little room in the back…where they sold framed prints. They weren’t doing well, so they hired Ben DuBose to liquidate the prints…have a sale and sort of wipe out the business. Well, Ben came in and saw that they could make this business go because they had a little frame shop [as]part of it. He said, “Let’s try to make a gallery out of this.” Then Ben started bringing in artists. I was one of the very first. I think not the first, but of the professional artists in town, there weren’t more than five or six.

The art league of houston

Early Spring of ’51, The Art League sponsored a show in the garage of the Shamrock Hotel…one of those exhibition spaces. I was brand new in town; Herb hadn’t even arrived yet—but he sent his stuff down and I had them on the wall…and he sold some, too, and he was not even in town yet. Robert Joy, the artist, says that this is the freshest, newest stuff—so he called Nina Cullinan, who came over and brought one or two or three other people who weren’t that well known. That’s where I met Ben. He had just developed his downtown gallery and says, “Come down and show with us,” so I did just a few weeks later and John de Menil bought the biggest one for $100. It was 48 inches square—a red still life.

Misjudged

Every year they had this marvelous show called the Houston Artists Annual and there was a $100 purchase prize and other prizes. I submitted to it in the spring of ’51 and was awarded the purchase prize by Judge William Lester of The University of Texas. When the show opened, he came over to the opening and I didn’t have the first prize, but had an honorable mention. So he went up to Ruth Uhler and said, “Now just a minute—I gave first prize to this man.”