Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas by Light Townsend Cummins (review)

If historians have neglected to write about women artists, some of this neglect comes from the lack of source material about their lives. Light Townsend Cummins informs his readers of this obstacle at the beginning of his study of Texas sculptor Allie Victoria Tennant, a prizewinning American scene regionalist sculptor influential in the development of the Dallas art community. Despite Tennant’s fame and influence during her lifetime, little archival material survives to tell her story: a small cache of papers at the Dallas Historical Society “composed only of several dozen letters dealing with her sculptural commissions during the 1930s” and one family scrapbook, but no personal papers (p. xiii). Faced with this lack of sources, Cummins researched Tennant’s life by examining the archives of the organizations and institutions to which she belonged and the newspapers that covered her extensive public life. He examines Tennant as a “culture-bearer,” treating her history as inseparable from the history of the emergence of the Dallas art scene (p. xiv). The biography that results is the story of a public life with few hints about the private individual behind these accomplishments.

Tennant was, in some ways, unique: born in 1892, she was independent, wealthy, unmarried, and single-mindedly devoted to her art and the art world. In other ways Tennant was a woman of her time, reaching many of her goals by working through the voluntary associations and clubs available to a woman of her wealth and social standing. Cummins places Tennant in the context of the growth of the art community in the United States, emphasizing the symmetry between her personal life and the growth of art in Dallas.

While exploring her public life, Cummins also examines how Tennant contributed to women’s expanding importance in the art world. This analysis is something of a blind alley, though. Tennant’s ability to negotiate the gendered worlds of the (male) Dallas art scene and (female) garden club scene is fascinating, but we have no insight into what she thought of these spheres through which she moved, or how she conceptualized her success in a male-dominated field.

Cummins emphasizes that his book is a work of biography and social history, not art history. He details Tennant’s art education, her influences, and her embrace of regionalism, the midwestern branch of the American scene movement. He discusses her major works of art, starting with her first publicly exhibited sculpture, the 1919 prizewinning bronze Head of a Soldier. Cummins pays close attention to Tennant’s work for the Texas centennial celebration in Dallas, for which Tennant created perhaps her best-known work, the Tejas Warrior sculpture that still stands at the Hall of State. After World War II Tennant focused her efforts on her club work, through which she promoted the visual arts scene in Dallas, helping create the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (now, the Dallas Museum of Art). She gradually withdrew from public life, and by her death in 1971, she had been largely forgotten by the city whose art scene she helped create. While this book is an important work, filling a gap in our knowledge of women’s history and cultural history, the lack of personal source material does make parts of the story feel flat. However, Cummins’s strength lies in exploring the many layers of Tennant’s public works: teaching, working with society women’s clubs, public speaking, and becoming a leader in the more male-dominated Texas regionalism movement. Cummins connects Tennant to the larger forces shaping the art scene in Dallas, including local reactions to the New Deal, to fascism, and to communism.