0.35 Richard stout, b. 1934

Getting started

I was born [in Beaumont, Texas] at the height of the depression. We survived. My older brother was given piano lessons; I was given violin lessons. Then at the age of 12 I was given formal art lessons in classical drawing—it was a small group of us. I learned how to render in charcoal. Right away I became very involved in the new Beaumont Museum. Through the city schools I had very good art teachers; I entered several scholastic art awards contests each year and won lots of awards. Then in my junior year in high school my aunts in Cincinnati had me come up to the Cincinnati Art Academy for summer classes, and the following summer—the summer after I graduated from high school—I also went to the Cincinnati Art Academy. That fall I went to the Art Institute of Chicago on full scholarship, and stayed on scholarship the entire four years I was there.

Doing reconnaissance

I didn’t know where I was going to go after school so I arranged to get a Greyhound bus ticket that would allow me to go to several cities working my way back to Houston, and on to Beaumont. I didn’t want to consider moving to the west coast or the south. The west coast seemed to be too far away for me intellectually, and the south—I felt nothing would happen there for a very long time.

I knew New York from many trips to New York as a student. I spent time in Boston and Washington and Baltimore and Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Cincinnati. I spent time in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Dallas, and finally Houston—in each of these places checking out the Chamber of Commerce to find out what the per capita tax was, what cost of living was, what new art things that were happening, and [considering] whether it would be a comfortable place to be and what the people were like. And I decided I’d do this for Houston, too, even though it’s awfully close to home. I found that Houston was by far the most interesting of the places I’d been.

I went back to Beaumont, had a garage sale of paintings and the like, and raised $400 and moved to Houston with one name that had been given to me of someone who might introduce me around and that was Preston Frazier. He put me up in his warehouse building.

Fast friends

Henri and Leila Gadbois had a party the next night at their house on Bingle Road. It was a house built by Robert Preusser, the painter who had just left Houston for MIT—an important abstract painter in Houston from the 30s and 40s. At that party I met about 30 people who would be very close friends through the next several years, including Herb and Ava Jean Mears and Polly and Lee Marsters—a great list of people who were artists and collectors, and these were to be my closest friends for a long period of time. Many still are. That was in November of 1957.

I quickly found a small apartment on the 1200 block of Bissonnet to rent—a garage apartment. It was so right in the middle of “swell” Houston; I could climb my steps to my apartment and look down and see all the swells of Houston having their martinis on silver [trays] in the backyard—very impressive. You wouldn’t see anything like that in Chicago—not in the part of Chicago that I lived in.