Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Rounded Up in Glory
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Canyon
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.panhandleplains.org/p/about/395 * http://www.wtamu.edu/academics/michael-r-grauer-bio.aspx
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 88267150
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n88267150
HEADING: Grauer, Michael R., 1961-
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035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca02585913
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |d TxCM
046 __ |f 1961-03-27 |2 edtf
100 1_ |a Grauer, Michael R., |d 1961-
370 __ |a Kansas City (Kan.) |c United States |2 naf
371 __ |m mgrauer@pphm.wtamu.edu
372 __ |a Curatorship |2 lcsh
373 __ |a Southern Methodist University |a Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum |2 naf
374 __ |a Museum curators |2 lcsh
375 __ |a male
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a Borg, C.O. Carl Oscar Borg, 1990: |b CIP t.p. (Michael R. Grauer) data sheet (b. 3/27/61)
670 __ |a Grauer, Michael R. Rounded up in glory, 2016: |b ECIP title page (Michael R. Grauer) data view (birth date: March 27, 1961; curator at the Panhandle Plains History Museum in Canyon, Texas; this is his first single-author book)
670 __ |a Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum website, viewed March 9, 2016: |b about > staff (Michael R. Grauer; Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs/Curator of Art and Western Heritage; museum’s Curator of Art, and oversees the weapons, sports, and cowboy and ranching artifact collections; born in Kansas City, Kansas, he received a bachelor’s degree with a double major in art history and painting from the University of Kansas and a master’s degree in Art History from Southern Methodist University; email: mgrauer@pphm.wtamu.edu) |u http://panhandleplains.org/pages/michael_grauer_associate_director_for_curatorial_affairscurator_of_art_and_western_heritage_72.asp
953 __ |a bc04
PERSONAL
Born in Kansas City, KS; married Paula Grauer; children: Matthew Finney, Hannah Grauer, Sarah Grauer.
EDUCATION:University of Kansas, B.F.A., 1983; Southern Methodist University, M.A., 1989.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, lecturer, curator. West Texas A&M University, art history professor. Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, art curator, 1987—. “Cowboy Mike” living history program, producer. Worked previously as an art history teacher at the Taos Institute of Arts, in Taos, NM, and at the National Museum of American Art (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum) in Washington, DC. Speaker, Prix de West, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, OK, 1997, 2009.
AVOCATIONS:Running, lifting weights, hunting, and being out of doors.
MEMBER:Center of the Advancement and Study of Early Texas Art, member; Taos Society of Artists Historians, member.
AWARDS:Distinguished Alumnus of the Kress Foundation Department of Art History, University of Kansas, 2012.
WRITINGS
Contributor to numerous periodicals, including American Art Review, Southwest Art, Persimmon Hill, Pastel Journal, Western Art & Architecture, and the Panhandle-Plains Historical Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Michael R. Grauer is a writer, lecturer, and professor of art history at West Texas A&M University, as well as curator of art and western heritage at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas. He taught previously at the Taos Institute of Arts in Taos, New Mexico.
Grauer was born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas. He attended college at the University of Kansas, where he double majored in art history and painting. He received his master’s degree in art history from Southern Methodist University. Following his completion of graduate school, Grauer worked at the National Museum of American Art (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum) in Washington, D.C., before accepting a position at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum.
Grauer is the director of Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum’s curatorial staff. As a Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum art curator, Grauer has curated numerous exhibitions about historic Texas, New Mexico, and Southwestern art since he became involved with the museum in 1987, including “The Old Guard: Santa Fe Art Colony Founders,” 2004; “Texas Impressionism: Branding with Brushstroke and Color,” 2012; and “Madonnas of the Prairie: Depictions of Women in the American West,” 2014.
Grauer has lectured at numerous symposia throughout the United States on historic Southwestern art, with an emphasis on Texas and New Mexico. He also produces and manages a living history program he created called “Cowboy Mike,” which is set in the 1890s and tells the stories of Southwest cowboys.
Grauer lives in Canyon, Texas, with his wife Paula and their youngest daughter, Sarah.
In Rounded Up in Glory: Texas Renaissance Man, the first ever Frank Reaugh biography, Grauer writes about the life of the artist, his work, and his legacy. “It is obvious that the author has devoted many years gathering information about Reaugh, visiting places where he lived or traveled,” wrote Jana R. Fallin in Great Plains Quarterly. The Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum holds the largest collection of Reaugh work in Texas. As director of the museum’s curatorial staff, Grauer is intimately familiar with Reaugh’s art. Bonnie A. Campbell, writing in Southwestern Historical Quarterly, noted that Rounded Up in Glory “represents impressive scholarship, exhaustively documented research, and adept handling of the historical method.”
Grauer opens the book with a brief history of Texas art up through Reaugh’s formative years. Though not a native of Texas, Reaugh spent the majority of his life in the state. He was born in 1860 in Illinois, and his family relocated to Terrell, Texas, when he was fifteen. Reaugh’s family moved to Texas at the height of the great cattle drive era. It was during this time that Reaugh was first exposed to cattle culture, a subject that would be very influential on his work. In 1890 Reaugh moved to Oak Cliff, which was later incorporated into the city of Dallas. He lived in Oak Cliff for the remainder of his life.
Despite living in East Texas for the entirety of his artistic career, the landscapes and cotton industry of East Texas are not found in his work. Instead, he was drawn to the cattle culture and open landscapes that were common on the west side of the state. His art grew in popularity in the period in which open-range cattle grazing was still common, though this practice died out within his lifetime. Despite its dwindling use, Reaugh continued to depict open-range cattle in his later paintings.
Though the subjects of Reaugh’s works were taken from the southwestern terrain, he was stylistically influenced by the works of the French Impressionists. After a brief trip to France and Holland, Reaugh became a dedicated Impressionist, and this style has come to define his work.
After Reaugh’s move to Oak Cliff in 1890, he gained national attention and acclaim. He traveled around the U.S. showing his work at major events, including the 1893 World Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, Illinois. Victoria Cummins, a reviewer for the Journal of Southern History, wrote, “Grauer highlights Reaugh’s accomplishments as a teacher and art promoter to make the case for his importance in Texas.”
After 1920, Reaugh placed his attention on teaching, focusing on mentoring young artists. Cummins noted that Grauer suggests Reaugh should be “lauded for his impact as a teacher, both for the number of Texas artists who were his students and for his innovations.” Unlike other art teachers of the time, Reaugh took female artists’ works seriously. He also taught his students directly on site, taking them on camping trips in the West to inspire their work and teaching them his techniques for developing his own pastels, paper, and frames to take with him on outdoor sketching outings.
As Reaugh aged, his Impressionist style began to fade out of fashion as the art world favored modernist styles. As the American Regionalism style grew in popularity, Reaugh and his work became increasingly marginalized in the Dallas art scene. Despite these circumstances toward the end of Reaugh’s life, Cummins wrote that his work is “currently enjoying renewed appreciation” in the Texas historical art community.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Great Plains Quarterly, Volume 37, number 4, fall, 2017, Jana R. Fallin, review of Rounded Up in Glory: Frank Reaugh, Texas Renaissance Man, pp. 327-329.
Journal of Southern History, Volume 83, number 3, 2017, Victoria Cummins, review of Rounded Up in Glory, p. 732.
Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 120, number 4, April, 2017, Bonnie A. Campbell, review of Rounded Up in Glory, pp. 530-532.
ONLINE
Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum Website, http://www.panhandleplains.org/ (January 29, 2018), author profile.
Preston Lewis Author, https://prestonlewisauthor.com/ (March 27, 2017), Preston Lewis, review of Rounded Up in Glory.
West Texas A&M University Website, http://www.wtamu.edu/ (January 29, 2018), author faculty profile.
Michael R. Grauer, M.A.
Instructor of Art
Office: Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Rm. 205
Email: mgrauer@pphm.wtamu.edu
Phone: 806-651-2262
Professional Profile
Mr. Grauer joined the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in 1987. He received a B.F.A. in Painting and in Art History (double major) from the University of Kansas in 1983, and an M.A. in Art History from Southern Methodist University in 1989. He was named Distinguished Alumnus of the Kress Foundation Department of Art History, University of Kansas, in 2012.
Teaching and Related Service
Mr. Grauer teaches art history at WTAMU. Mr. Grauer has also taught at the Taos Institute of Arts, Taos, New Mexico.
Mr. Grauer has curated numerous exhibitions on historic Texas,New Mexico, and Southwestern art at Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, including “Madonnas of the Prairie: Depictions of Women in the American West (2014); “Texas Impressionism: Branding with Brushstroke and Color (2012); “Will James: The Hays Collection (2009); “Lone Star Still Lifes” (2009); “Urban Texas: Changing Images of an Evolving State,” (2007); “The Old Guard: Santa Fe Art Colony Founders,” and “Women Artists of Santa Fe,” (2004); “Neighbors: Texas Artists in New Mexico,” (2003); “Green Mountain: E. I. Couse in Taos,” and “Berninghaus: Taos Father/Taos Son,” (1998); “Women Artists of Texas, 1850-1950” (1993); “W. Herbert Dunton: A Retrospective,” (1991); and guest-curated “A Symphony of Shade and Light: Frank Reaugh and His Students,” for the McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas (2001); “Of This Vast State: Women Artists of Texas, 1900-1960” for The Women’s Museum at Dallas (2006); and Frank Reaugh exhibitions for Abilene, Beaumont, College Station, Dallas, Denton, Houston, San Angelo, Terrell, and Tyler.
He has lectured nationally on historic Southwestern art with an emphasis on Texas and New Mexico, and represented Texas at a national symposium on Regionalism at New York University in 2000. He has spoken several times at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, including at the Prix de West in 1997 and 2009. He is a charter member of CASETA and the Taos Society of Artists Historians.
Mr. Grauer is the author of W. Herbert Dunton: A Retrospective, co-author (with his wife, Paula) of the Dictionary of Texas Artists, 1800-1945, co-author of Frank Paul Sauerwein: The Biography, and co-author of A Fine Sense of Poetry: The Life and Art of Joseph Amadeus Fleck. Mr. Grauer also wrote the essay on 20th-century Texas art for Twentieth-Century Texas: A Social and Cultural History, the essay on Texas patrons of Taos art for Taos Artists and Their Patrons, 1898-1950, wrote biographies on Dunton and W. R. Leigh for the Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Book and Magazine Illustrators to 1920, and an essay on Dunton for a forthcoming book on the Taos Society of Artists. Mr. Grauer's articles have appeared in American Art Review, Southwest Art, Persimmon Hill, The Pastel Journal, Western Art & Architecture, and the Panhandle-Plains Historical Review.
Mr. Grauer currently does a living history program called “Cowboy Mike” focused on 1890s cowboys in the region, with an emphasis on the T Anchor Ranch. He recently guest-curated for the Grace Museum at Abilene, Texas, “Home on the Range” an interdisciplinary exhibition on ranching in central West Texas.
Research and Creative Activity
Currently, Mr. Grauer is working on a W. Herbert Dunton catalogue raisonne, a history of the T Anchor Ranch, and biographies of Texas artists Frank Reaugh and H. D. Bugbee.
Personal Sketch
Mr. Grauer lives in Canyon with his wife Paula and youngest daughter Sarah, three cats (Frank, Harley, and Gracie), and a rescue dog, Theordore Roosevelt. They have two older children, Matthew Finney and Hannah Grauer and her partner, Zachary Walls. He enjoys running, lifting weights, hunting, and generally being out-of-doors, and spending time with his grandson, Otto Lee Grauer-Walls.
MICHAEL R. GRAUER
ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR FOR CURATORIAL AFFAIRS/CURATOR OF ART AND WESTERN HERITAGE
Michael Grauer directs PPHM's curatorial staff, is the museum’s Curator of Art and Western Heritage, and oversees the art, weapons, militaria, sports, and cowboy and ranching collections. Born in Kansas City, Kansas, he received a bachelor’s degree with a double major in art history and painting from the University of Kansas and a master’s degree in art history from Southern Methodist University. After college he worked at the National Museum of American Art (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum) in Washington, D.C. Currently, in addition to working at PPHM, Michael is on the faculty at West Texas A&M Unviersity. Michael didn’t always plan on a museum career, though. Originally, he wanted to play professional football or be a cowboy. Instead he went to art school, “because I could draw horses better than anyone and I didn’t know what else to do.” If Michael could live anywhere else in the world, it would be Taos, New Mexico (for the art scene) or Saskatchewan, Canada, (because the name “sounds cool”).
Contact Michael at (806) 651-2262 or via email.
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Print Marked Items
Rounded Up in Glory: Frank Reaugh,
Texas Renaissance Man
Victoria Cummins
Journal of Southern History.
83.3 (Aug. 2017): p732+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
Rounded Up in Glory: Frank Reaugh, Texas Renaissance Man. By Michael R. Grauer. (Denton:
University of North Texas Press, 2016. Pp. xxiv, 403. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-57441-633-6.)
Collectors, gallery owners, museum professionals, art historians, and critics interested in early
Texas art will welcome this new volume. The art of Frank Reaugh (pronounced "Ray") is
currently enjoying renewed appreciation by the early Texas art community after decades of
semi-neglect. Michael R. Grauer, who is art curator at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum
in Canyon, Texas, oversees the largest collection of Reaugh's work in the state. This monograph
rests on a rich base of public and private archival sources as well as published material. The
author's goal is to provide the first critical look at the life and career of a man who has been
previously presented as an eccentric and "to let Mr. Reaugh, and the truth about him, speak for
themselves" (p. 3).
Charles Franklin Reaugh was born in 1860 in Illinois and moved to Texas with his parents at age
fifteen. They lived first in Terrell before Reaugh settled in Oak Cliff, soon to be incorporated into
the city of Dallas. He remained a resident of the city for the rest of his life (he died in 1945).
However, as an artist, the cotton culture and landscapes of East Texas did not inspire him. He
devoted his long career to depicting the land of West Texas and its cattle culture. Reaugh's art
career flourished in the period in which open-range grazing still dominated the cattle industry in
the West. His prolific output documented that era even as it was vanishing.
Grauer begins his study with a brief overview of art in Texas up to Reaugh's formative years.
Next comes a long chapter discussing the numerous influences on Reaugh's art, from the Hudson
River School to the French Impressionists. After a sojourn studying in France and Holland,
Reaugh embraced Impressionism and remained an Impressionist to the end of his life.
Reaugh's career peaked in the period from 1890 to 1915 when Impressionism dominated the
American art scene. He exhibited regularly with other leading American Impressionists and
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acquired a regional reputation in the West and Midwest. He had similar status to the betterremembered
Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell as an artist of the vanishing West.
Grauer says that Reaugh should also be compared to Texas historical painters William Henry
Huddle and Henry Arthur McArdle because he was witness to the vanishing open range.
Grauer highlights Reaugh's accomplishments as a teacher and art promoter to make the case for
his importance in Texas. Reaugh should be lauded for his impact as a teacher, both for the
number of Texas artists who were his students and for his innovations. He took women students
seriously and took student groups on camping trips to the West to inspire their landscape work.
He made his own pastels, paper, and frames to facilitate open-air sketching. The artist used his
contacts to organize traveling shows of nationally and regionally known artists and bring them to
Dallas. He lobbied for a public art gallery and helped found the Dallas Art Association and its
collection in 1903.
In the 1920s the rise of Regionalism began to render Impressionism unfashionable. As he grew
older, Reaugh found himself increasingly marginalized from the art scene in Dallas by a younger
generation of Regionalists, some of them his former students. His progressive alienation
culminated in his exclusion from the art show at the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition, the most
important exhibition of Texas artists' work to date. It was a fate undeserved by so important an
early leader in the growth of the visual arts in Texas.
Victoria Cummins
Austin College
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cummins, Victoria. "Rounded Up in Glory: Frank Reaugh, Texas Renaissance Man." Journal of
Southern History, vol. 83, no. 3, 2017, p. 732+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501078175/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bfa69a93. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501078175
Old-Timer
Posted on March 27, 2017 by prestonlewisauthor
Frank Reaugh
Frank Reaugh
You know you are getting old when you read a history book and realize you knew nine of the people mentioned. Encountering those names was an unexpected pleasure when I got a review copy of Rounded Up in Glory: Frank Reaugh, Texas Renaissance Man by Michael R. Grauer.
Reaugh (1860-1945), pronounced “ray,” was a Texas artist best remembered for his impressionistic pastels of Texas longhorns. Known as the “Leonardo of the Longhorn,” Reaugh was a peer of cowboy artists Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell, but unlike them he was in Texas during trail-driving days and actually witnessed what he painted. He focused much more on the longhorn than the cowboy and produced hauntingly beautiful landscapes of West Texas.
An Illinois native, he came to Texas in 1876 and came to love the land, the longhorns and art, eventually earning the honorific title of “Dean of Texas Painters” for his plein air techniques and his influence on other outdoor Texas artists. His work “The Approaching Herd” is his best known piece.
The Approaching Herd by Frank Reaugh (Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum)
Reaugh is less remembered than Remington or Russell, who were much more commercial in outlook, selling their art, whereas Reaugh saw his body of work as a historical record of a time before the plains were fenced and plowed. When he died, his will stated that that he wanted his pictures to be kept together for historical reasons.
Problem was many had been split up among various institutions, including the Panhandle-Plains Museum in Canyon, the University of Texas and Texas Tech University and its Southwest Collection, where I did a lot of my early research and even served a year as interim director before I moved to Angelo State. The estate took more than two decades to settle, though some claims on ownership remain unresolved.
My Texas Tech connections mentioned in the book included former Southwest Collection Directors S. V. “Ike” Connor and R. Sylvan Dunn as well as administrators Curry Holden and Bill Parsley. The two mentioned TTU connections I got to best know were former Tech President Grover Murray and former Gov. Preston Smith, a Tech alumnus. My Western Writers of America affiliation allowed me to meet artist Tom Lea and Texas historians J. Evetts Haley and Don Worcester, who are also included in Rounded Up in Glory.
So, renewing old acquaintances in print has been an unanticipated joy in reading Rounded Up in Glory for review.
Rounded Up in Glory: Frank Reaugh, Texas Renaissance Man by Michael R. Grauer (review)
Jana R. Fallin
From: Great Plains Quarterly
Volume 37, Number 4, Fall 2017
pp. 327-329 | 10.1353/gpq.2017.0066
University of Nebraska Press colophon
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Reviewed by
Jana R. Fallin
Rounded Up in Glory: Frank Reaugh, Texas Renaissance Man.
By Michael R. Grauer. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2016. viii + 314 pp. Illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. $39.95 cloth.
It is fitting, as we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Chisholm Trail, to review Michael [End Page 327] Grauer's book about the art of Frank Reaugh. The era of the great cattle drives was also the time when Frank Reaugh's family moved to Texas and a young Frank began developing his interest in observing and drawing cattle. Reaugh's lifelong love of the American Great Plains was to be the lifeblood of his art.
Reaugh stated, "I like to be where the skies are unstained by dust and smoke, where the trees are untrimmed and where the wild flowers grow. I like the brilliant sunlight, and the far distance. I like the opalescent color of the plains. It is the beauty of the great Southwest as God has made it that I love to paint" (Frank Reaugh, Biographical [Dallas, self-published, 1936], n.p.).
Having grown up near the Concho River, I like to think that Reaugh did some of his painting near my home. This book documents that on a 1933 sketch trip, he traveled to Brownwood and on toward Santa Anna peaks in Coleman County, my home county. He wanted to be at the source for his paintings, and this close proximity to the actual land is reflected in his art. He designed a portable sketch easel to use on these trips.
His art has a contemporary quality that makes it seem current, even today. Reaugh's art is much more contemporary, even for our twenty-first-century eyes, than works by other prominent western artists of the same time period. Marked differences in his art and that of other artists working in the western genre perhaps are due to Reaugh's dedication to making sketch trips to the actual land where the cattle were grazing. The way Reaugh captures the wide-open spaces, the colors, and movement of the herds is unique to his art, and often harkens toward impressionism. Reaugh even developed his own line of pastels which he marketed.
His presentation of art, music, and narration, and his exploration of the relationships in the arts, are all an indication of Reaugh's progressive spirit. For several years he worked in this multi-art environment, with his major contribution being Twenty-Four Hours with the Herd. Reaugh debuted this piece November 9, 1933, in Highland Park Galleries in Dallas. He collaborated with Texan David W. Guion, who composed the music. Grauer states, "To bring together—to orchestrate—painting, music, and prose in one production was brilliant and very progressive" (233). The multimedia performance of Twenty-Four Hours with the Herd was repeated at numerous other venues, including a performance at Baylor University on April 18 and 19, 1935.
Reaugh's exclusion from the Centennial art celebration in Texas is a sad commentary on the art community at that time. It is particularly disappointing to me, a native Texan whose parents attended the Centennial Celebration in Dallas in 1936, that Reaugh's art was ignored at this historic celebration of 100 years as a state. That an artist who spent months camping and sketching on the Texas land, taking groups of fellow artists with him on these trips, painting the land and its cattle, to not be included in the Texas section of the art exhibition indicates a severe lack of good judgment on the part of the Centennial organizers.
As he said in 1936, "It is my hope that my pictures portraying those times, aside from any artistic merit that they may possess, will tell their story, and will be preserved because of historical value; for the steer and the cowboy have gone, the range has been fenced and plowed, and the beauty of the early days is but a memory" (Frank Reaugh, Biographical, n.p.). The following quote from the Heritage Auctions webpage indicates that Reaugh's art continues to be valued, despite the snub at the [End Page 328] Texas Centennial: "His painting Breezy Morning, 1896...
restricted access Rounded Up in Glory: Frank Reaugh, Texas Renaissance Man by Michael Grauer (review)
Bonnie A. Campbell
From: Southwestern Historical Quarterly
Volume 120, Number 4, April 2017
pp. 530-532 | 10.1353/swh.2017.0022
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Reviewed by
Bonnie A. Campbell
Rounded Up in Glory: Frank Reaugh, Texas Renaissance Man. By Michael Grauer. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2016. Pp. 480. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.)
The setting of Rounded Up in Glory is framed by the American Southwest but focused in Texas. The biography represents impressive scholarship, exhaustively documented research, and adept handling of the historical method. It is the story of Charles Franklin Reaugh, an important Texas artist whose life and career straddled the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (1860–1945), whose work was shaped by the increasingly potent tensions [End Page 530] of rural versus urban and tradition versus modernity. It is the story of an artist forever captivated by the subtle, shimmering beauty of the “great Southwest as God has made it” (287) and devoted to preserving it—and the early Texas longhorn who once roamed its prairies—through his art.
Taken from an old cowboy lament, the book’s title suggests a paean to Reaugh, a tribute at times reverential, perhaps even emotional. The arc of Reaugh’s life is so compellingly told, his successes and accomplishments so well delineated, that the reader comes away better understanding the author’s early declarations that he was “a genius”; that he was “Texas’s ‘Leonardo [da Vinci]’”; that “his paintings are unparalleled in American art”; and, that he “may have had greater impact on the future of Texas art than any other artist or teacher prior to World War II, and possibly even today” (2).
The book is the definitive biography of Reaugh, following his artistic trail over seven decades. This “Texas Renaissance Man” was first and always an artist, primarily working in the Impressionist style, but he was also an inventor, teacher, and arts promoter. Early sketches confirm that his lifelong “chosen muse” (27) was the landscape of the American Southwest. Between 1890, when he moved from tiny Terrell to big city Dallas, and 1920, Reaugh gained national attention and received critical acclaim. He exhibited in major cities and at important events, including the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition, having at the time perhaps “a more prestigious national exhibition record than any artist in Texas history” (97). From the 1920s onward, his focus turned to teaching young artists. His countless roster of students reads like a “Who’s Who” of pre-1945 Texas art. Chapter titles for the 1930s and 1940s (“Betrayal” and “Slow Fade”) warn that the climbing arc of Reaugh’s career was headed back towards the dusty earth. The aging Impressionist, in his seventies, was no longer in the game, marginalized (perhaps not intentionally or maliciously) by the current arts establishment and eclipsed by younger, modernist artists.
While an excellent biography, Rounded Up in Glory is much more, suggesting the author, too, is a Renaissance man. Michael Grauer’s commanding knowledge of Texas art has been developed over a long career, including twenty-eight years at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, the primary repository of Frank Reaugh’s oeuvre, made up of thousands of small, plein air pastel sketches and dozens of larger pastels and oil paintings. Grauer is equally knowledgeable about the Southwest: his descriptions of the cattle-drive era and the government’s early western expeditions are firmly grounded. He is just as comfortable discussing the complex philosophical, aesthetic, and artistic movements popular in nineteenth-century America, demonstrating their relevance to Reaugh’s artistic temperament and subject matter. By the by, he also provides a perfect crash course in nineteenth-century American art. [End Page 531]
Historian by career he may be, Grauer has the soul of a poet, a quality that enriches his scholarly writing and one well suited to tell the story of a man who deeply valued the spiritual connection between nature and art.
Bonnie A. Campbell
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston