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 Fort Worth is the List of cities in Texas by population, fifth-largest city in the U.S. state of Texas and the List of United States cities by population, 13th-largest city in the United States. It is the county seat of Tarrant County, Texas, T ...

, 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 The Fort Worth Circle was a progressive art colony in Fort Worth, Texas. The colony was active during the 1940s and much of the 1950s and formed around younger artists, most of them native Texans under-30, who embraced themes not traditionally seen ...

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. His formal art education began at Central High School, where he studied under Sally Gillespie and Ella Ray Ledgerwood.

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 work from the 1930s focused on landscapes and motifs from the theater. During this period, he also experimented with collage, combining paper cloud forms reminiscent of

Jean Arp Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp (16 September 1886 – 7 June 1966), better known as Jean Arp in English, was a German-French sculptor, painter, and poet. He was known as a Dadaist and an abstract artist. Early life Arp was born in Straßburg (now Str ...

and surreal figures cut from sample stock certificates. 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 Adolf Dehn (November 22, 1895 – May 19, 1968) was an American artist known mainly as a lithographer. Throughout his artistic career, he participated in and helped define some important movements in American art, including regionalism, social r ...

, Otis Dozier, and

Boardman Robinson Boardman Michael Robinson (1876–1952) was a Canadian-American painter, illustrator and cartoonist. Biography Early years Boardman Robinson was born September 6, 1876 in Nova Scotia. He spent his childhood in England and Canada, before movin ...

. In the early 1940s, he started to experiment with compartmentalized space in his work. By the mid 1940s, Utter had developed a distinct style he referred to as "embellished forms" that often combined biomorphic shapes with a compartmentalized arrangement, a style described as "organic Surrealism." In the mid 1940s, vessels starting appearing as a prominent feature in his work, which was inspired by seeing a painting of vases by

Paul Klee Paul Klee (; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented wi ...

. He and a cadre of progressive Fort Worth artists, including Bill Bomar,

Veronica Helfensteller Veronica Helfensteller (1910–1964) was an American painter and printmaker, who was a member of the Fort Worth Circle, a group of artists in Fort Worth, Texas, active in the 1940 and 1950s. Life Veronica Helfensteller was born in 1910 to Armin ...

, Dickson Reeder, and Donald Vogel, began to gain national attention in the 1940s, propelled by a 1944 group exhibition, ''Six Texas Painters'', held at Weyhe Gallery, New York. This group of artists were to be later labeled the

. In 1941, IBM purchased a watercolor painting, ''Texas Oil Refinery'', for its art collection.

1950s and beyond

Utter's professional success peaked in the 1950s after devoting himself full time to making art. One of his paintings, ''Nun's Distillery'', depicting a series of carriages and pharmaceutical cabinets, received national attention in 1953 when it was included in the

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–194 ...

's annual exhibition of contemporary American sculpture, watercolors, and drawings. Utter embarked on a series of productive painting trips to Italy starting in 1954 that reinforced his interest in architecture and influenced his work from this period, including a series of watercolors depicting Fort Worth architectural landmarks from 1956 to 1957 that was commissioned by First National Bank of Fort Worth, now in the collection of the

Amon Carter Museum of American Art Amon may refer to: Mythology * Amun, an Ancient Egyptian deity, also known as Amon and Amon-Ra * Aamon, a Goetic demon People Momonym * Amon of Judah ( 664– 640 BC), king of Judah Given name * Amon G. Carter (1879–1955), American pu ...

. Landscape and architecture continue to prominently appear in his work through the 1970s influenced by his travels to Italy, Mexico and New Mexico (to visit longtime friend Edwin Bewley), though he never completely abandoned his earlier abstract conventions. In many of his 1960s landscapes, he added a

crazing Crazing is the phenomenon that produces a network of fine cracks on the surface of a material, for example in a glaze layer. Crazing frequently precedes fracture in some glassy thermoplastic polymers. As it only takes place under tensile stress, ...

effect to skies. In the late 1970s and after, he pivoted back to more abstract work, embodied by his ''Three Musicians'' from 1986, an homage to Picasso's masterwork of the same title. In a 1956 newspaper article published at the time of a solo exhibition in Washington, D.C., he claimed that Texas had become the capital of contemporary art. 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." A home, studio, and garden he built on Mattison Avenue in Fort Worth was condemned in 1979 to make way for the

Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine The University of North Texas Health Science Center (UNTHSC, UNT Health Science Center, or hsc) is a public academic health science center in Fort Worth, Texas. It is part of the University of North Texas System and was founded in 1970 as the T ...

, and afterwards he moved to a small apartment across the street from the

Kimbell Art Museum The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, hosts an art collection as well as traveling art exhibitions, educational programs and an extensive research library. Its initial artwork came from the private collection of Kay and Velma Kimbell, w ...

. Alzheimer's disease curtailed his artistic activity towards the end of his life, and he died on May 6, 1993.

Teaching career

He started teaching in the mid 1930s and became the first official art instructor for the Fort Worth Woman's Club. He taught at a number of Fort Worth institutions during his long teaching career, including the Fort Worth Art Association, Fort Worth Art Center, Texas Wesleyan College, Fort Worth Woman's Club, and the Fort Worth Junior League. He also regularly lectured and taught workshops in the Fort Worth region.

Selected exhibitions

* Fort Worth School of Fine Arts, Fort Worth, Texas, 1936 * Annual Fort Worth Local Artists Show, 1940s * Texas General Exhibition, 1940s * ''Artists for Victory'', Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1942 *Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas, 1943 (solo), 1951, 1957 (solo) * ''Six Texas Painters'', Weyhe Gallery, New York, 1944 * Fort Worth Art Association, Fort Worth, Texas, 1946, 1953 (solo) * Associated American Artists, New York, 1948 * Elisabet Ney Museum, Austin, Texas, 1948 (solo), 1960 * Associated American Artists, New York, 1949 * Southwestern Prints and Drawings Annual Exhibition, Dallas, Texas, 1949, 1952 * Brooklyn Museum, New York, rint exhibition 1950 * Betty McLean Gallery, Preston Center, Dallas, Texas, September 17-October 13, 1951 * ''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 * D.D. Feldman Collection of Contemporary Texas Art, Dallas, Texas, 1955, 1957 * Witte Museum, San Antonio, Texas, 1958 (solo) *Haydon Calhoun Gallery, Dallas, Texas, 1961 (solo) * ''Bror Utter: Retrospective Exhibition'', Fort Worth Art Association, November 1961 * Retrospective exhibition orks from 1940 to 1970 New Gallery, Fort Worth, Texas, 1979 * ''Bror Utter: Fifty Years of His Art'', J.M. Moudy Exhibition Space, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas, January 19-February 15, 1985 * ''Beyond Regionalism'', Old Jail Art Center, April–July, 1986 * Retrospective exhibition, Fort Worth Art Gallery, 1990 * ''Prints of the Fort Worth Circle, 1940-1960'', Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, September 4-November 1, 1992 * ''Three Painters of the Fort Worth School'', Fort Worth Gallery, Fort Worth, Texas,

ate unknown Ate or ATE may refer to: Organizations * Active Training and Education Trust, a not-for-profit organization providing "Superweeks", holidays for children in the United Kingdom * Association of Technical Employees, a trade union, now called the Nat ...

Selected public collections

, Fort Worth, Texas
Show collection
* Colorado Springs Fine Arts Museum, Colorado Springs, Colorado * Dallas Print Society, Dallas, Texas *

Denver Museum of Art The Denver Art Museum (DAM) is an art museum located in the Civic Center of Denver, Colorado. With encyclopedic collections of more than 70,000 diverse works from across the centuries and world, the DAM is one of the largest art museums between t ...

, Denver, Colorado *

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (widely referred to as The Modern) is an art museum of post-World War II art in Fort Worth, Texas with a collection of international modern and contemporary art. Founded in 1892, The Modern is located in the c ...

, Fort Worth, Texas *

Old Jail Art Center The Old Jail Art Center (OJAC) is an art and regional history museum in Albany, Texas. It is housed in a former jail that was completed in 1878. After being replaced by a new jail in 1929, the old jail building was saved from demolition by local ...

, Albany, Texas * Texas Fine Art Association, Austin, Texas *

University of North Texas The University of North Texas (UNT) is a public research university in Denton, Texas. It was founded as a nonsectarian, coeducational, private teachers college in 1890 and was formally adopted by the state 11 years later."Denton Normal Schoo ...

, Denton, Texas

Bibliography

Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Bror Utter Papers

Archives of American Art, Bror Utter Papers, 1938-1975
- microfilm reel 1514 and 1595 also available at th
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Research Library

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Utter, Bror 1913 births 1993 deaths American printmakers Artists from Fort Worth, Texas Painters from Texas