Alexandre Hogue: An American Visionary—Paintings and Works on Paper (review)

This long-awaited book is the definitive biography and analysis of Alexandre Hogue (1898–1994), an important American artist who had strong ties to Texas. Written by Houston-based curator, art historian, and art critic Susie Kalil, the matching of the author and the artist is perfect: both are brilliant, intense, driven by passion and uncompromising integrity, and intent on finding the greatest depth and breadth of meaning with razor-sharp clarity.

Kalil’s explication and evaluation of Hogue’s art was twenty-five years in the making. She carefully describes and analyzes Hogue’s art, drilling down to the psychological implications of Hogue’s style and subject matter. The timing of the publication accompanied a major touring retrospective exhibition that Kalil guest curated for the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi. Although the book is not considered an exhibition catalogue and does not have the list of the more than 100 artworks included in the exhibition, it is certainly beneficial as an accompanying resource to gain an in-depth understanding of Hogue’s art over more than seven decades. While the exhibition’s tour to The Grace Museum in Abilene and the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History will end in 2012, Kalil’s publication will endure as a significant study.

Kalil posits that Hogue had a uniquely American perspective as an artist and places him in context with important American artists of his day while asserting that he remained outside the mainstream of American Art. In the 1920s and 1930s Hogue was a leading figure in the ascendancy of Texas art on the American scene and he became internationally famous for his Dust Bowl paintings, which described the devastation of drought in Texas. Kalil certainly celebrates his Dust Bowl series, but she deserves major credit for embracing Hogue’s entire career and chronicling his enduring impulse to record nature and emphasize environmental issues.

This new assessment of Hogue’s art goes well beyond the focus on his Dust Bowl paintings and seamlessly connects his entire oeuvre. She gives special attention to Hogue’s lesser known paintings produced after 1945, and highlights the extraordinary series of landscape paintings he produced of the Big Bend from 1965 until his death. With great care, Kalil explains Hogue’s painting ability and identifies his abiding interest in constructing resilient compositions while placing each brushstroke precisely to create mass and content simultaneously. Remarkably, Hogue’s eye and hand were as steady and sure in his 90s as it was in his 30s. Hogue’s excellent draftsmanship supported the calligraphic architecture of his drawings and his paintings.

Kalil conducted and taped hours of in-depth interviews with Hogue at his home and studio in Tulsa between 1986 and 1994. This primary resource material proved to be invaluable. The study of Hogue’s art and career is filled with substantial quotations that render a sense of his voice, his accent, rhythm of speech, and moreover his careful constructing and framing of his ideas about his own art and his opinions of the art of his colleagues and artist friends over the decades.