Art
Thoroughly Modern
At 99 Denton's Toni LaSelle is the oldest living veteran of the artistic revolution that reshaped our world.
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After reading Moholy-Nagy, whom she found "electrifying," LaSelle arranged for him to lecture at the Texas State College for Women in the spring of 1942. "The lecture seemed to wake quite a few people up," she says. That summer she brought Moholy-Nagy back to the college for a series of talks and later attended summer classes in Chicago at the Institute of Design. She made an impression there; Moholy-Nagy's wife confided to LaSelle that her husband had hoped to offer her a teaching position at the Institute of Design but his budget wouldn't permit it. Had the job materialized, it would have put LaSelle at the hot center of a revolution in American taste: In the late forties the Institute of Design merged into the Illinois Institute of Technology (where Moholy-Nagy joined former Bauhaus director Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the father of the International style of architecture) and brought the Bauhaus to your house, defining the look of post-war America from its typefaces to its toasters to its office towers.
Despite her enthusiasm for Moholy-Nagy's futuristic vision, LaSelle realized it wasn't hers. "Moholy represented the machine age, the space age," she says; she felt a much closer affinity with another European émigré. Although she had never met Hans Hofmann, his work and theories had fascinated her ever since she first heard about him, during her San Francisco sabbatical. Hofmann was a German painter who had observed the genesis of Cubism in Paris during the first decade of the century and in 1915 had opened his own school in Munich, where he stressed that color itself could convey the deepest emotions. After leaving his homeland in 1930, Hofmann eventually settled in New York, where he mentored the American generation that would take the initiative in modern painting away from Europe in the fifties. For years LaSelle had planned a pilgrimage, but a strange litany of family crises and professional exigencies had always intervened; finally, in the summer of 1944, she enrolled in Hofmann's summer school in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
When LaSelle arrived in Provincetown, she had already tentatively entered the rarefied realm of nonobjective art. (A cubist might fracture a violin into a welter of geometric fragments without abandoning some semblance of the original object; a nonobjective painter, like Mondrian, would use abstract forms that no longer had any relationship to the material world.) Listening to "Hof's" theories about the "push-pull" of warm and cool colors, following the master around as he critiqued each of his student's work, LaSelle arrived at a mature style as assured and polished as that of any American nonobjective artist of the time—and far less derivative of Mondrian's. A small, untitled oil-on-board in the Barry Whistler Gallery show, painted in 1947, was a finished study for the larger Puritan, now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Working with a palette limited largely to green, black, and white and a minimalist vocabulary of triangles and rectangles, LaSelle juggled her forms into an intricate balance of classical serenity and expressive animation; her entirely original use of white as a sort of limitless negative space evoked the vast horizons of the sea as well as the prairie where she grew up.
In 1950 LaSelle got her first and only one-person show in New York, at the Rose Fried Gallery, on the heels of an exhibit by the French modern master Robert Delaunay. But the American avant-garde was an exclusive men's club, and within a few years testosterone-rich Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock dominated the scene. "Women," LaSelle dryly notes, "are not often credited with innovations." She continued to return religiously to Provincetown (she lived there full-time in the eighties) and remained a powerful voice in Texas, both as an artist and a lecturer; Hofmann himself wrote the catalog introduction for a major LaSelle exhibition at the Fort Worth Art Museum (now the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth) in 1959.
LaSelle's saga ends with the triumph of modernism, not only among the few who proselytized for it but also among the many who, though they might still pass a Mondrian and mutter, "I could do that," daily demand the progeny of modernist design theories in countless things they watch, listen to, drive, sit on, and reside in (try marketing an MP3 player that looks like a rococo music box). Nowhere is that disconnect more pronounced than in Texas, where arts cognoscenti and cultural conservatives alike cherish the notion that our state's nostalgic mythos was a lethal barrier to an ideology as iconoclastic as modernism; in most cultural histories, the state seems to leap from Victorian to postmodern in a single bound.
But the modernist chapter is actually long and lively, beginning with those Prairie-style homes of the teens and twenties—so venerated by preservationists from Dallas to El Paso—which represent Frank Lloyd Wright's then-radical emphasis on pared-down lines and mass production. Texas began to concertedly market itself as distinctly Texan at the 1936 Centennial Exposition in Dallas, staged in a huge new complex of buildings in the stylishly moderne art deco style. LaSelle herself was at the center of a vital enclave of advanced artists in Denton in the late forties; her TWU colleague Carlotta Corpron's innovative abstract photographs were deeply influenced by the Moholy-Nagy visit, and Denton-born nonobjective painter Myron Stout also owed LaSelle a significant debt. Despite the oft-cited organized opposition to "Commie" modernism in Dallas in the mid-fifties (similar protests took place in every major American city at the height of the red scare), by 1959 the city was busting its buttons over Wright's newly completed Dallas Theater Center, a work as aggressively modern as his Guggenheim Museum in New York. Houston, where abstract painter Robert Preusser (who also studied with Moholy-Nagy) led the way, came under the sway of Mies's disciple Philip Johnson in the fifties (Mies himself designed the Museum of Fine Arts' Cullinan Hall in the middle of the decade); by the sixties the city's business district was so relentlessly modernist that it served as ground zero for the inevitable reaction, postmodernism, in the mid-seventies.
Houston's Rothko Chapel, Louis Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum, Donald Judd's Chinati Foundation—the list of signal modernist monuments goes on and on. LaSelle's centennial, coming at a time when we can dispassionately accept "modern" as the period style of the preceding century, invites a revisionist theory about Texas and modernism in the broadest cultural sense: Maybe our retro-garde collective myth, largely coined from the thirties through the fifties by the Webb-Dobie-Bedichek literary troika and their acolytes, was more of a reaction against, rather than an obstacle to, Texas' surprisingly avid embrace of the new.
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