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sive portfolio of significant built works, his legacy became largely overshadowed by the rise of modernism. This book, with its awesome illustrations and intelligent, well-written text, will help revive the memory of this talented and prolific twentieth-century architect. Fox provides concise yet detailed descriptions and analyses of Staub’s significant houses, their grounds and neighborhoods. The Country Houses of John F. Staub acts both as an inspiring chronicle of Staub’s work and a diligent examination of academic classicism as seen in the elite suburban “country houses” built in America from the 1920s to the 1950s. Texas State University–San Marcos Peter Dedek Jerry Bywaters: Interpreter of the Southwest. Edited by Sam Deshong Ratcliffe, introduction by William H. Gerdts. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007. Pp. 120. Illustrations, color plates, index. ISBN 978-1-58544-591-2. $30.00, cloth.) This work evolved from the centennial commemoration of the birth of Texas artist Jerry Bywaters (1906–1989). Jerry Bywaters: Interpreter of the Southwest was edited by Sam Deshong Ratcliffe, head of special collections at Southern Methodist University’s Hamon Arts Library. Ratcliffe built upon SMU’s 2007 Meadows Museum exhibits that honored Bywaters, and has delivered a needed retrospective of the artist’s work. The impressively illustrated book highlights the transitional stages in the career of an important Texan artist. Bywaters, with other members of the Dallas Nine such as Otis Dozier (1904–1987), William Lester (1910–1991), and Everett Spruce (1908–2002), identified with and helped shape the creative legacy of Texan and Southwestern regional art in the twentieth century. The importance of Bywaters’s role increased over time because of his multifaceted stature. He was a capable and pioneering artist. However, Bywaters was also for twenty years director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, now the Dallas Museum of Art, and a teacher at Southern Methodist University’s Division of Fine Arts. In addition he forged a significant collection of regional art and culture , now part of the Jake and Nancy Hamon Arts Library, and was a writer with a sense of history. This latter facet perhaps stemmed from his undergraduate work at SMU in comparative literature, which translated into an appreciation of the written word as well as visual expression. Bywaters’s accomplishments were wide-ranging and informed. He was in tune with the wider development of art in America and Europe, and his interests included various schools, styles, and techniques, particularly print making. He also promoted sculpture, ceramics, mosaics, interior design, and photography. Of particular importance were the Mexican muralists of his day such as Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros. Pre-Columbian art also sparked his curiosity, especially that found in the Indian pictographs and petrographs left by the region’s earliest native residents. These interests influenced his exhibit policy during the years 1943 to 1964, 310 Southwestern Historical Quarterly January *jan 09 11/26/08 12:00 PM Page 310 when he was director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. As Dallas curator and museum director John Lunsford knew from personal experience, “Jerry Bywaters was often adventuresome, frequently pioneering within museum-world parameters of his time, and sophisticated regarding world art traditions” (p. 23). He brought to Dallas during these years national exhibits such as Leonardo and His Time (1949), Religious Art of the Western World (1958), the Arts of Man Exhibit (1962–1963), and Indian Art of the Americas (1963), which drew thousands of visitors . He developed an exhibit policy within the limitations of existing budgets and staged events to attract new audiences. This was especially noteworthy in the promotion of local and regional exhibits that reflected the considerable range in style and focus that was found amongst resident artists. In sum, he built the museum’s reputation and increased the permanent collection, giving Dallas a successful exhibit record and making the museum one of considerable promise. Bywaters’s talent as an artist was best revealed in the range of pictures that form the core of this book. These paintings span his entire active career from the 1920s through the 1970s. In addition they explicitly show Bywaters’s connection to the social and geographical fabric of his world. Stylistically his influences...

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