Born on the Island: The Galveston We Remember

Introduction: To Return

Eugene Aubry’s watercolor perspectives of Galveston street scenes belong to an art genre historically associated with Galveston. In the late nineteenth century, when Galveston was Texas’ major seaport city, the immigrant German landscape painter Julius Stockfleth painted scenes of its streets, wharves, and harbor. Boyer Gonzales, who grew up in Galveston and lived there until he was middle-aged, exhibited his awareness of broader trends in art at the turn of the twentieth century in his paintings of Galveston. Emil Bunjes spent his adult life in Galveston drawing and painting scenes of daily life, which the best-known Texas topographical artist of the twentieth century, Buck Schiwetz, also portrayed during his forays to Galveston. The line drawings of Ralph L. Stuart and the whimsical paintings of Mary Clifford Lazzari carried this genre into the last quarter of the twentieth century. Gene Aubry’s motivation differs from these other artists. He is not simply documenting city scenes, as Stockfleth did, or specific buildings, as Stuart did. Nor does he depict the quaint, colorful scenes that attracted Bunjes and Schiwetz. His drawings are not winsome in the ways that Mary Lazzarri’s are, nor are they a pretext for exploring movements in contemporary art the way Gonzales’s were. Aubry’s topographical drawings explore a more allusive vein of inquiry: they are means through which Aubry seeks to identify what it is that draws him back to Galveston and understand the emotional claims that the streets, sidewalks, arcades, and raised cottages exert on his consciousness. The term for this longing is “nostalgia.” Nostalgia is often dismissed as nothing more than sentimentality , when instead it has the more precise meaning of homesickness, the biochemically stimulated sense of emotional desire for a remembered place. That you can experience homesickness in your hometown is the paradox around which Aubry’s fascination with Galveston revolves. Aubry is an architect. He engages the question of his relationship to the city where he was born and grew up (and where he has found himself spending more time in the past few years than he once might have thought likely) through buildings and places, rather than through music, literature, food, or social customs, all phenomena that also evoke nostalgic associations with place. Aubry’s Galveston is not the entire city but its nineteenth-century core: the Strand Commercial Historic District downtown, the commercial streets that parallel the Strand, the East End Residential Historic District within easy walking distance of downtown, and the humbler cottage neighborhoods south of Broadway, the city’s principal east-west thoroughfare, where Aubry grew up. Aubry’s Galveston does not encompass the harbor or the beachfront along Seawall Boulevard. He shies away from such iconic historical landmarks as the Bishop’s Palace, Ashton Villa, or the Ménard House. His vision does not encompass the medical center anchored by the University of Texas Medical Branch. Nor, with a few exceptions, does it Introduction To Return  2  introduction encompass the city’s twentieth-century neighborhoods. Aubry is not drawn to the buildings he himself designed in Galveston, such as the San Luis Hotel and Condominium on Seawall Boulevard or the Galveston News Building, produced while he was in partnership with Howard Barnstone. Nor is he attracted by the city’s mid-twentieth-century modern architecture, built when he was an architecture student in the 1950s. It is the exuberant Victorian structures and the streetscapes they compose to which he returns and which he records in his drawings and watercolors. Gene Aubry was born in Galveston in 1935. He graduated from Ball High School in 1954 and hoped to attend what was then North Texas State College to study music— until, Aubry says, his practical father let him know that music was not an economically acceptable career choice. So instead Aubry went fifty miles up the Gulf Freeway to the University of Houston, where he elected to study architecture , which his father conceded was more economically promising than music. Aubry’s design instructor in his fourth and fifth years was the architecture program’s best-known design critic, Howard Barnstone. Howard Barnstone had an instinct for spotting talent, and he saw that Gene Aubry had it. Aubry began working part-time at Barnstone’s firm, Bolton & Barnstone, in 1959 and joined it full-time following his graduation from the University of Houston in 1960. The buildings with which Bolton & Barnstone gained recognition in the 1950s bore no relationship to those of nineteenth-century...