Bror Utter

Bror Alexander Utter (August 26, 1913 – May 6, 1993) was a painter, printmaker, and art teacher who lived and worked his entire life in Fort Worth, Texas, but his art achieved national recognition. He worked in an array of styles ranging from landscapes influenced by Regionalism, still lifes, architectural scenes, and figurative works inspired by the theater to modernist abstractions. He was a prominent member of the Fort Worth Circle.

Early life Utter was born on August 26, 1913, at his parents' home in Fort Worth and showed artistic interest and talent from an early age. His mother was known for her drawings, and his maternal grandfather was a painter. His Finnish father, Bror A. Utter, owned a lithographic printing company in Fort Worth, Utter and Son Printers, where the junior Utter worked until 1950. Dutch Phillips, Utter's gallery representative, believed that his skill with color came from working at his father's company.

1930s After graduating from high school, he studied with Evaline Sellors, Wade Jolly, and Blanche McVeigh at the Fort Worth School of Fine Arts from 1931 to 1936. His first solo exhibition of watercolors was held in 1936 at the Fort Worth School of Fine Arts, and one critic stated that Utter was "probably one of the most original and individual young artists in town." In a 1938 announcement related to an exhibition at the YMCA of Oklahoma City, Charles Alldredge wrote, "Bror Utter, a young Texas of Swedish and Finnish extraction, sometimes paints like a Frenchman and sometimes like nothing else on earth. It is that last quality which makes him one of the most interesting of the exceptional group of younger painters with which America at present is blessed."

1940s In the summer of 1940, he continued his studies with the assistance of a scholarship at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center under the guidance of Arnold Blanche, Adolf Dehn, Otis Dozier, and Boardman Robinson.

In a Fort Worth Star-Telegram article on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition in 1979, fellow Fort Worth artist Stuart Gentling observed, "When I see his work I cannot help but marvel at the wonderful manner in which he has absorbed and sublimated the visions of artists from the contemporary to the most distant epochs. No matter what his technique—his subtle personal color, his preoccupation with inverse perspective—he always speaks to the inner mind."

Selected exhibitions

Fort Worth School of Fine Arts, Fort Worth, Texas, 1936 Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas, 1943 (solo), 1951, 1957 (solo) Texas Contemporary Artists, M. Knoedler & Company, New York, New York, 1952 Texas Wildcat, San Francisco Museum of Art, 1952, San Francisco, California, and Fort Worth Art Association, Fort Worth, Texas, 1951 Bror Utter, Fort Worth Art Association, Fort Worth, Texas, February 10–27, 1953 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, 1953 Retrospective exhibition [works from 1940 to 1970], New Gallery, Fort Worth, Texas, 1979 Retrospective exhibition, Fort Worth Art Gallery, 1990 Three Painters of the Fort Worth School, Fort Worth Gallery, Fort Worth, Texas, [date unknown]

Selected public collections

Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas - Show collection Colorado Springs Fine Arts Museum, Colorado Springs, Colorado Dallas Print Society, Dallas, Texas Denver Museum of Art, Denver, Colorado Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas Old Jail Art Center, Albany, Texas Texas Fine Art Association, Austin, Texas University of North Texas, Denton, Texas