Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1302598
Photo of SuSie Kalil and RogeR WinteR by KaRen latham T exas cultural history owes a debt to art historian/ curator Susie Kalil. She's devoted decades of her life to resuscitating seminal figures from the past, digging deep into such talents as Dorothy Hood and Alexander Hogue, and paying tribute with books paired with exhibitions (2016 for Hood, 2010-2011 for Hogue). Now Kalil adds a third volume to her ongoing series, again published by Texas A&M University Press: The Art of Roger Winter: Fire and Ice ($50). Happily, the octogenarian subject is still alive and working in Manhattan. Writing about Winter was in many ways more complex than Hood or Hague. His career spans 26 years as a beloved SMU professor whose students included Julian Schnabel, John Alexander, David Bates, Robert Yarber, and Lilian Garcia- Roig. He was a member of the 1960s Dallas avant-garde, whose artist running buddies have all passed away: David McManaway, Roy Fridge, and Jim Love. But what makes Winter challenging to pin down is his prodigious talent with more styles than Rauschenberg; photorealism melded with a proto- pointillist vocabulary; Impressionism; Precisionism; geometric and/ or reductive abstraction meets minimalism; and a side of Surrealism. Kalil is up to the challenge, positioning the artist — who has largely lived in NYC since the 1990s — as the pivotal figure in Texas painting he always was. The author's lyrical, lively prose and unique insights convey Winter's complex career with text that sings, as she writes with conviction about an inventive iconoclast whose saga represents an American journey: from a modest upbringing in small-town Denison, Texas, during the Depression to the center of the action in 1960s-1980s boomtown Dallas. She deciphers the thread running throughout his canvases: "His paintings aspire not to disclose the timeless, but to discern the transient, to clasp the texture of experience." If the book weren't enough, Kirk Hopper Fine Art inaugurates its new Design District gallery (1426 N. Riverfront Boulevard) with a season of Winter, deftly curated by Kalil, with successive exhibitions. The first of these, now on view, presents the painter's important works in private hands — don't miss the showstopper Slim Aarons-style Horchow Sisters, 1978, and the intensely topical Texas Odyssey #1, 1994 — in "Dallas Collects Roger Winter" (through November 28). This survey is followed by Winter's latest: intensely personal narratives in "Stories from Memory" (December 4 – January 8). Kalil says of the painter's place in Texas' canon of greats: "Of all the artists who came to maturity between the 1960s and '80s, Winter is the preeminent figure who consistently captures the look and feel, as well as psychological character of the land and its people. No other Texas artist has accomplished the breadth of his work in such a long and prodigious career. Not every community is able to benefit from such a generous spirit. What he gave to Dallas has outlasted generations. He wasn't just decorating sofa space. He challenged the city and its artists to think about their lives in multiple ways. Families treasure Winter's art because he relates to them on a personal level." tamupress.com, kirkhopperfineart.com. Clockwise from top left: Roger Winter's Texas Odyssey #1, 1994, at Kirk Hopper Fine Art; from The Albritton Collection, Dallas. Art historian Susie Kalil and artist Roger Winter on Broadway, New York City, October 2015. Susie Kalil's The Art of Roger Winter: Fire and Ice from Texas A&M University Press. The season of winTer BY CATHeRINe D. ANSPON