Ben Culwell

Ben L. Culwell (September 8, 1918 – 1992) was an American painter and early participant in the abstract expressionist movement. He is most widely known for his participation in the Museum of Modern Art's 1946 Fourteen Americans exhibition. His work is included in the permanent collection of Houston's Menil Collection, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, as well as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In 1977, Culwell's work was featured in a retrospective at the McNay Art Museum. Ten years later in 1987, Culwell's early paintings were featured in Adrenalin Hour,

Life

Early life and family Culwell was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1918, the eldest of three boys. Culwell's father was a businessman who suffered great losses during the Depression, forcing the Culwell family to move from city to city during the 1930s. Culwell spent his early years in Houston, and his last year and a half in high school in Dallas. Though Culwell felt an early calling to pursue art, this was in conflict with his father, who wanted his son to pursue a practical career in business.

Culwell's first creative burst occurred during his years on the Pacific front in World War II. Restricted to the only materials obtainable, Culwell painted at every moment he could, usually daily. Small watercolor, ink, and mixed media works on paper, each of Culwell's war paintings deals with an aspect of his life as a sailor. There are scenes of battle, scenes depicting the routine and frustration of a sailor's day-to-day life, and scenes of death (a constant wartime preoccupation).

Fourteen Americans Fourteen Americans went up once Culwell was living in Dallas. Culwell's work appeared in the show alongside such later well-established artists as Robert Motherwell, Isamu Noguchi, Arshile Gorky, and Mark Tobey, opened in the September 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art. Fourteen Americans, like the other shows in MoMA's special exhibitions and the Americans series was part of MoMA's attempts to introduce American artists to a public trained to appreciate European art. Though Culwell could not make the trip from Dallas at the time, his work impressed Robert Coates—famous for coining the term Abstract Expressionism —writing for The New Yorker: I was especially impressed, for example, with the work of Ben L. Culwell, a young Texan just out of the Navy after nearly five years of active service in the Pacific, whose "Death by Burning," Death by Drowning," "Fragment of Concussion Time," and "Morning at Attu," among others—all combining Abstraction and Expressionism in a way that produces a maximum of emotional intensity—are among the few really integrated interpretations of wartime experience that I have yet to come across.

Fourteen Americans was one of the first shows to present Abstract Expressionism to a broader public. In fact, Coates' use of the phrase is one of the earlier combinations of the terms "Abstraction" and Expressionism" applied to the New York School (though Alfred Barr used the phrase as early as 1929 in reference to Kandinsky's paintings).

Life in Dallas After the war, Culwell returned to Dallas, where he was living when Fourteen Americans went up. over the year and a half that Culwell lived off military benefits and just painted, he did not make any money off his art. This was not the end of Culwell's artistic work. He continued to paint throughout his life.

Thereafter Culwell maintained two careers, one in art and the other in business. In 1961, Culwell moved with his wife Virginia and daughter Elizabeth to Temple, Texas, where he worked as the president of the American Desk Manufacturing Company. Culwell also participated in the exhibition From the Executive's Easel in 1958, which toured through the United States and internationally for several years. In 1959 Culwell had several one-man shows at the San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth Men of Art Guilds; he sold a large number of works at the Dallas show.

Work

War paintings Ben Culwell, Living Among Torpedoes (Picture of my consciousness during operations at "Torpedo Junction" in Sept. 1942) 1942–1944. Mimeograph on paper. . Ben Culwell, Adrenalin Hour. 1942. Pencil, ink, tempera with egg white on paper. . Inscription by the artist: Our Closeness of Life to Death, Perhaps the Closest. Perhaps there are worse ways of dying than in that super conscious stratum of seeing-red rage: half-crying, half-god soar of strength, endurance, and selflessness. Herein are the only (and too few) medals earned.

According to Joan Seeman Robinson, Culwell treated different subjects with different techniques in his war paintings. For example, Culwell's painting Adrenalin Hour, like other of his battle scenes, is rendered in gestural brushstrokes. Painted over frantic scribblings, the brushstrokes show a single face painted in fluid and watery lines. Culwell painted the face over a background of violent red and blue splotches, with sketchy depictions of a scene—probably a battle scene—but the exact subject is unclear. In Living with Torpedoes and other paintings of leisure time however, Culwell's technique relied on thin contour lines and more narrative-oriented description. Culwell rendered a multitude of downtime activities—listening to records, thinking about women, standing on deck, and painting at a desk above a sleeping torpedo—in thin inked contour lines. The greater detail given by ink and pen allowed Culwell to express a greater range of activities. The comparison of Living with Torpedoes and Adrenalin Hour speaks to Culwell's habit of changing techniques based on the psychological state he was trying to depict. Similarly important are Culwell's development of contrasting approaches to abstraction, through combining geometric and grid-like structures with hectic organic gesture and heavy texture.

Texture and media Culwell also began revisiting the few oil paintings done before the war, scraping away at the canvases before painting over them again. This reworking became a major part of Culwell's artistic process for the rest of his life, where he constructed, destroyed, and then reconstructed—before destroying and recreating again. At times certain panels disintegrated from the violence of this cycle—these Culwell termed "residues"—the surviving or finished paintings were, in Culwell's words, "alluviums of other paintings accreted on the same panels over a number of years". The final surface, produced in some cases after years of this process, not only exists in and of itself, but is the result of layers of buried images.

Culwell's interest in texture led him to experiment radically with material properties—often he combined oil paint, commercial oil enamel, and Duco on a single canvas. Duco and oil paint are not wholly compatible, which frequently led to the curdling and wrinkling of the paint surface—an effect that pleased Culwell, who took this property to extremes in the 1950–54 Roof series. Completed while Culwell lived in San Antonio, Texas, the Roof series consists of paintings that Culwell set to dry on the roof of his home. He found, during his experiments with Duco, that the paint emits noxious fumes while drying, which led him to place the paintings on the roof. This exposed the work to the sun and other elements, which allowed the dense accretion characteristic of earlier works but did not take the amount of intense labor and time.

According to Dan Wingren, a fellow Texan artist writing on Culwell's work in the 1970s, Culwell uses these symbols to suggest formal and spatial relationships: The principal elements of Culwell's pictorial vocabulary are virtually constant, and were present in the wartime paintings. It is an iconography of power-centers and relationships. Natural energies are suggested by stars, rivers, and flamelike shapes. These are often contrasted with less animated blocks and masses. Organic energies are suggested by cellular forms, biomorphic shapes, and close approximations to heads, hands, roots, and leaves. These elements are subordinate, however, to the formal aspect of his art. He knew about Clive Bell's theory of "significant form" as early as 1937, and has consistently used his formal means to create what he calls "modern space". He eschews the tricks of linear perspective or opaque overlap to create the impression of space. Rather, his image is primarily a surface, often dense and heavily encrusted with paint, so much so that it might give off the aura of danger (do not touch!), and this surface, overwhelmingly singular, a distinct entity in the surrounding universe, becomes its own universe. One can look into it and find his iconographical elements heaving and dividing in their own gravitational relationships. The impression of space generated this way can be exceedingly strong. By historical and personal associations, Culwell belongs to the generation of abstract expressionism, but the combination of his vision and his regional background separates him from his contemporaries. The abstract expressionists, centered in New York City, singled out gesture, sought the large scale, and reduced figure and form to abstract brushwork. Culwell sought images, concentrated on small surfaces and insisted on symbolic, even literary subjects and elements. But Culwell was also far too experimental in both concept and technique to be comfortable with (or accepted by the Texas regionalists.

In the years after the war in Texas, Culwell saw little interest in his work. Though he had one-man shows at the San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth Men of Art Guilds and a 1977 retrospective at the McNay, it was not until his 1987 show Adrenalin Hour that critics and artists came to see Culwell as a pioneering Abstract Expressionist.

List of selected exhibitions Museum of Modern Art, Fourteen Americans, 1946 Theater '51, 1951 Dallas-Fort Worth Men of Art Guild Galley, solo show, 1959 McNay Art Institute, Retrospective, 1977 Menil Collection, Adrenalin Hour, 1987 Menil Collection, Texas Art, 1988 Cultural Activities Center, Temple, Texas, Ben L. Culwell: Retrospective (Paintings from 1946 to 1989), 1989, catalogue essay by Donald Kuspit Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, 150 Works from Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2000 Martin Museum of Art, Baylor University, Texas Modern: The Rediscovery of Early Texas Abstraction (1935–1965), 2007