Ben L. Culwell (September 8, 1918 – 1992) 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.Dorothy Canning Miller, ed. Fourteen Americans (New York City: Museum of Modern Art, 1946). His work is included in the permanent collection of Houston's Menil Collection,Patricia C. Johnson, "What's New at the Menil," Houston Chronicle (September 19, 2004). Zest section. the Dallas Museum of Art,Dallas Museum of Art Collections Online the Houston Museum of Fine Arts,Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Annual Report for the Fiscal Year. July 1, 2006 to June 30, 2007, 57, as well as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Painting and Sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art 1929–1967, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977) In 1977, Culwell's work was featured in a retrospective at the McNay Art Museum.Robert Tiemann, "Painter Culwell's best asset is color," San Antonio Express (October 6, 1977). Art Review. 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.Katie Robinson Edwards, Jim Edwards, and Mark L. Smith, contributors. Texas Modern: The Rediscovery of Early Texas Abstraction (1935–1965), (Austin and Waco, Texas; Texas Art Books and the Martin Museum of Art at Baylor University, 2007).
Life
Early life and family Culwell was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1918,Joan Seeman Robinson, "Ben L. Culwell: Adrenalin Hour," The Tyler Museum of Art Review, Tyler, Texas, (December 1988-January 1989): 6-7. the eldest of three boys.Dan Wingren, "Ben L. Culwell: An Introduction," in Paintings by Ben L. Culwell, (San Antonio, Texas; Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute, 1977). An exhibition catalogue. 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.Ben L. Culwell, "Artist's Statement," in Fourteen Americans, 15.
Culwell's first creative burst occurred during his years on the Pacific front in World War II.Ben L. Culwell, Adrenalin Hour, essay by Walter Hopps (Houston: The Menil Collection, 1987). 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 (a constant wartime preoccupation). 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."Ben L. Culwell--A Brief Introduction, AskArt," Fred R. Kline Gallery
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.Robert Coates, "The Art Galleries: All-American," The New Yorker (September 21, 1946). 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.Deirdre Robson, "The Avant-Garde and the On-Guard: Some Influences on the Potential Market for the First Generation Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s and early 1950s," Art Journal 47, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 219-220. Though Culwell could not make the trip from Dallas at the time, his work impressed Robert Coates—famous for coining the term Abstract ExpressionismPaul Wood, Jonathan Harris, F. Frascina, and Charles Harrison, Modernism in Dispute: Art since the Forties, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993): 42.—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.Robert Coates, "The Art Galleries: All-American," The New Yorker (September 21, 1946).
Fourteen Americans was one of the first shows to present Abstract Expressionism to a broader public.Robson, 219-220. 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 (though Alfred Barr used the phrase as early as 1929 in reference to Kandinsky's paintings).Barr himself intimated that the phrase had seen earlier use. Though Barr did not specify—and it is not totally clear that he knew—"abstract expressionism" was first used in 1919 in the pages of the German periodical Der Sturm. -- Helen A. Harrison, "The Birth of Abstract Expressionism," in Abstract Expressionism: The International Context, ed. Joan Marter, (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2007). A publication based on the proceedings of two scholarly conferences "Abstract Expressionism: An International Language" (May 2004) and "All-over: Abstract Expressionism's Global Context," (April 2005), held at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.
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 (his only sales were two paintings bought by MoMA from the Fourteen Americans exhibition).Donald Kuspit, "Review of Ben L. Culwell, 'Adrenalin Hour' Houston, Menil Collection," Artforum XXVI, no. 6 (February 1988). 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.Culwell biography, in Ben L. Culwell: Retrospective (Paintings from 1946 to 1989), (Temple, Texas: Cultural Activities Center, 1989): 9. 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."Charlotte Moser, "Artistic recluse finally emerging from corporate jungle," Houston Chronicle, June 19, 1977.
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.Rual Askew, "Housing Problem Solved," Dallas Morning News, May 12, 1957, Art and Artists section. 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.Askew, "Culwell Wins Dealey Prize In 29th Dallas County Show," Dallas Morning News, June 19, 1958, Art and Artists section. Culwell also participated in the exhibition From the Executive's Easel in 1958, which toured through the United States and internationally for several years.Unknown Author, "Review of From the Executive's Easel," Art News 57, no. 2 (April 1958): 67. 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.