Note: Author Nancy Kempf devoted her career to higher education and non-profit sectors with extensive experience in museums and non-profit arts organizations, including serving on a number of boards of directors in San Antonio. Numerous publications and curatorial projects. Contract public relations, writing, editorial, and curatorial services with national clientele. Specialties: Extensive non-profit experience: arts administrator, curator, researcher, writer; community/PR liaison; scheduling, project, and program coordination; crisis management; mentoring. She serves as Curator at the San Antonio Art League + Museum.
In the late 1890s, Ethel Tunstall Drought organized several groups of art enthusiasts within the San Antonio community with the intention to provide free access to quality artworks at a time when exposure to the arts was the privilege of the well-to-do.
She brought together interested individuals to form the nascent association that would become the San Antonio Art League in 1912.
Though San Antonio was the largest city in Texas at the time, it had no network by which to support local artists, nor did it have a museum.
The object of the League was to establish a free gallery for the public — a goal it maintains today.
To finance its goals, the League solicited subscriptions toward a fund for the purchase of one or more art objects each year. Acquisitions were to be housed in the Carnegie Library until a suitable gallery could be located.
In April 1912, the League took up the discussion of its first purchase. A group — charmingly called the Committee of Pictures — was established to recommend a painting for purchase. The first subscription contributions resulted in $65; even in 1912, that was insufficient to purchase an appropriate artwork. It was decided that a circular letter be sent to select individuals, to be followed by a personal appeal.
In May, the Committee of Pictures recommended the purchase of Sun and Moon by Charlotte B. Coman of New York, for $400. The San Antonio artist Julian Onderdonk presented a talk on Coman, and the committee’s recommendation carried by the board, though the funds raised at that point were short by half.
Tickets were sold to raise the balance, and an exhibition of paintings by the Onderdonk family was planned to promote the project.
By May 1913, the League was able to purchase Portrait of a Boy by Myrtle McLan, and in early 1914, Julian Onderdonk and his father Robert each promised to donate a painting.
In 1915, Jose Arpa’s Irish Flats was selected for purchase, and the Art League was firmly underway, gradually adding artworks through subscription purchases and patron financial donations.
Among those involved in promoting the endeavor was the earlier mentioned artist Julian Onderdonk, whose father, Robert Jenkins Onderdonk, originally from Maryland, had studied at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in New York City, where he was a mentor to William Merritt Chase and Charles Carroll Beckwith.
Robert, Sr. came to San Antonio and Dallas to teach but also expanded the cultural life of the region by forming arts organizations, which earned him the sobriquet: “Dean of Texas Artists.”
His son, Robert Julian Onderdonk, was born in San Antonio, and thrived as an artist here. His most popular subjects were bluebonnet landscapes, but his subject matter was diverse.
The Dallas Museum of Art devotes several galleries to Julian’s work, and his studio has been relocated to the grounds of the Witte Museum in San Antonio. He is fondly known as the Father of Texas Art.
Harry and Elizabeth Halff of San Antonio and Emily Ballew Neff spent 20 years amassing images of his oeuvre to compile a catalogue raisonne published in 2017. (Now going for $895.00 used.)
Julian’s sister, Eleanor Onderdonk, was only two years Julian’s junior but outlived him by 42 years. She also attended the Art Students League in New York, and though she began as a painter herself, that work soon took a back seat to her devotion to her curatorial position at the Witte Museum beginning in 1958, where, among many other exhibitions, she mounted three devoted exclusively to Texas artists, an effort that inaugurated a sense of pride in regional talent.
At the Witte, Eleanor also brought the work of prominent artists such as Picasso, Carlos Merida, and Diego Rivera to San Antonio, and had artists and critics lecture in conjunction with exhibitions, including luminaries of the time such as Thomas Hart Benton and Alexander Archipenko.
In later years, Eleanor would energetically serve in a curatorial position on the Art League’s board, mounting an impressive array of exhibitions each year.
The next chapter in the Art League’s growth was spurred by Edgar B. Davis, a rancher and wildcatter who believed in the Art League’s mission and in 1927, ‘28, and ‘29 organized an extensive series of purchase prize competitions specifically for establishing a permanent collection for the Art League.
The cash prizes were extraordinarily large, and therefore word spread like wildfire across the U.S. and even to Europe, especially to the Art Students League in New York City and to regional arts groups throughout the country such as the Taos Society of Artists.
There is a misconception that the Davis competitions were made up only of Texas artists, and though Texas artists did certainly submit work, anyone from anywhere could enter the competitions. From wherever they hailed, however, the subject matter had to be Texas, and initially that was exclusively wildflowers.
In the two subsequent years of ‘28 and ‘29, Davis expanded the categories to Texas ranching and cotton picking.
William Reeves’s “Texas Art and a Wildcatter’s Dream” is the definitive book on the Davis collection and highly recommended for a comprehensive overview of the Davis Collection.
Davis was able to sustain his philanthropy for only three years — 1927, 28, 29 — until the Wall Street crash of October 1929.
In an effort to sustain the precedent set by the Davis purchase prize competitions, the Art League established an annual juried exhibition, of which 2025 marks the 95th anniversary year.
I want to digress a bit, but that digression will loop back to the Art League.
In Italy, in 1919, Mussolini founded the National Fascist Party, and the ensuing decade sees an ambitious Hitler take an unsteady path to power in Germany that will culminate in his inauguration as the supreme leader of Nazi Germany in 1934.
Seeing avant-garde art as a threat, the Nazi Party enlisted Adolf Ziegler to organize the Degenerate Art Exhibition in the fall of 1937, which was meant to denigrate the work of artists like Paul Klee, Otto Dix, Picasso, Grant Wood, Piet Mondrian, Kandinsky, Chagall, and others.
Though Hitler invades Poland in 1939, setting off the Second World War, it is not until the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, that the United States enters the war.
Men from across the U.S. enlist and are drafted into service. They head to the Asiatic-Pacific Theater and to the European Theater of Operations, and for most, it is their first experience of a culture beyond America.
This was no less true of the many artist soldiers who found themselves so dispatched.
A World War I-era popular song became relevant again: “How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?”
Artists who served in the ETO were exposed to those same artists the Nazis had ridiculed and to the movements they had heralded under the umbrella of abstraction: cubism, Impressionism, surrealism, symbolism, the neoplasticism of the De Stijl — and influences like the regionalism of a Grant Wood and the harsh realism of an Otto Dix.
WW II ended September 2, 1945, and as artists returned to their home towns, many felt a desire to connect with others anxious to explore these new ideas in artistic expression. In San Antonio, that desire manifested in a collective that came to call itself Men of Art.
(In San Antonio, originally from Italy, was Pompeo Coppini, who had immigrated to the United States in 1896 and moved to San Antonio in 1901. He was commissioned to create a number of Confederate monuments in Texas, including the Alamo Cenotaph on Alamo Plaza. He also has work on the campuses of Texas A&M and the University of Texas at Austin.
Coppini’s Academy of Fine Arts still sits on Melrose Place off McCullough. Coppini came to metaphorical blows with the Men of Art because he believed abstraction to be a betrayal of Art with a capital “A.” To this day, the Academy offers classes and the occasional exhibition, but to be a member an artist must work in classical figurative art modes.)
In 1946, with the war over, the Art League honored Julian Onderdonk, making the top cash prize in the annual juried exhibition his namesake. A number of the Men of Art group were subsequently winners of that prize, including Val Alexander, Carl Embry, Cecil Casebier, Bill Reily, Keith McIntyre, and Chester Toney. Another member of the group was Harding Black, a pioneer in ceramic glazes.
The Annual Juried Exhibition submissions were initially limited to a designated geographical radius around San Antonio. In recent years that has been expanded to anyone in the state of Texas.
Also in 1946, the Art League instituted the Artist of the Year Exhibition, which recognizes a San Antonio artist with a retrospective exhibition and an accompanying catalogue each year. The artist honored donates a work to the Art League‘s permanent collection.
These two annual exhibitions — the Juried Exhibition with its Onderdonk Purchase Prize and the Artist of the Year Exhibition— allow the collection to continue to grow as a representative collection of Texas art.
This is a unique way to collect because the ultimate decisions go to outside jurors, not to the Art League’s board. The Onderdonk award is decided by the outside juror.
Jurors can be working artists, curators, editors of an arts publications, arts educators, etc. — people with experience and respect in their arts milieu.
The process for the Artist of the Year is somewhat more complicated. The Chair of the Artist of the Year committee invites committee members to make nominations; the artists nominated are asked to submit portfolios; after reviewing the work submitted, the committee votes; and the top three nominees then go to three outside jurors, whose votes make the final determination.
Each year, the Art League mounts one-two exhibitions curated from the permanent collection. In 2019, pieces were selected to highlight the impressive number of pieces in the collection that could be said to reflect what is now referred to as the Mid-Century Modern period. Some of the pieces from that era are again on display in this exhibition celebrating Onderdonk purchase prizes spanning almost 80 years.
I hope one of the points this talk conveys is that the San Antonio Art League has been sustained for well over a century by devoted volunteers.
She brought together interested individuals to form the nascent association that would become the San Antonio Art League in 1912.
Though San Antonio was the largest city in Texas at the time, it had no network by which to support local artists, nor did it have a museum.
The object of the League was to establish a free gallery for the public — a goal it maintains today.
To finance its goals, the League solicited subscriptions toward a fund for the purchase of one or more art objects each year. Acquisitions were to be housed in the Carnegie Library until a suitable gallery could be located.
In April 1912, the League took up the discussion of its first purchase. A group — charmingly called the Committee of Pictures — was established to recommend a painting for purchase. The first subscription contributions resulted in $65; even in 1912, that was insufficient to purchase an appropriate artwork. It was decided that a circular letter be sent to select individuals, to be followed by a personal appeal.
In May, the Committee of Pictures recommended the purchase of Sun and Moon by Charlotte B. Coman of New York, for $400. The San Antonio artist Julian Onderdonk presented a talk on Coman, and the committee’s recommendation carried by the board, though the funds raised at that point were short by half.
Tickets were sold to raise the balance, and an exhibition of paintings by the Onderdonk family was planned to promote the project.
By May 1913, the League was able to purchase Portrait of a Boy by Myrtle McLan, and in early 1914, Julian Onderdonk and his father Robert each promised to donate a painting.
In 1915, Jose Arpa’s Irish Flats was selected for purchase, and the Art League was firmly underway, gradually adding artworks through subscription purchases and patron financial donations.
Among those involved in promoting the endeavor was the earlier mentioned artist Julian Onderdonk, whose father, Robert Jenkins Onderdonk, originally from Maryland, had studied at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in New York City, where he was a mentor to William Merritt Chase and Charles Carroll Beckwith.
Robert, Sr. came to San Antonio and Dallas to teach but also expanded the cultural life of the region by forming arts organizations, which earned him the sobriquet: “Dean of Texas Artists.”
His son, Robert Julian Onderdonk, was born in San Antonio, and thrived as an artist here. His most popular subjects were bluebonnet landscapes, but his subject matter was diverse.
The Dallas Museum of Art devotes several galleries to Julian’s work, and his studio has been relocated to the grounds of the Witte Museum in San Antonio. He is fondly known as the Father of Texas Art.
Harry and Elizabeth Halff of San Antonio and Emily Ballew Neff spent 20 years amassing images of his oeuvre to compile a catalogue raisonne published in 2017. (Now going for $895.00 used.)
Julian’s sister, Eleanor Onderdonk, was only two years Julian’s junior but outlived him by 42 years. She also attended the Art Students League in New York, and though she began as a painter herself, that work soon took a back seat to her devotion to her curatorial position at the Witte Museum beginning in 1958, where, among many other exhibitions, she mounted three devoted exclusively to Texas artists, an effort that inaugurated a sense of pride in regional talent.
At the Witte, Eleanor also brought the work of prominent artists such as Picasso, Carlos Merida, and Diego Rivera to San Antonio, and had artists and critics lecture in conjunction with exhibitions, including luminaries of the time such as Thomas Hart Benton and Alexander Archipenko.
In later years, Eleanor would energetically serve in a curatorial position on the Art League’s board, mounting an impressive array of exhibitions each year.
The next chapter in the Art League’s growth was spurred by Edgar B. Davis, a rancher and wildcatter who believed in the Art League’s mission and in 1927, ‘28, and ‘29 organized an extensive series of purchase prize competitions specifically for establishing a permanent collection for the Art League.
The cash prizes were extraordinarily large, and therefore word spread like wildfire across the U.S. and even to Europe, especially to the Art Students League in New York City and to regional arts groups throughout the country such as the Taos Society of Artists.
There is a misconception that the Davis competitions were made up only of Texas artists, and though Texas artists did certainly submit work, anyone from anywhere could enter the competitions. From wherever they hailed, however, the subject matter had to be Texas, and initially that was exclusively wildflowers.
In the two subsequent years of ‘28 and ‘29, Davis expanded the categories to Texas ranching and cotton picking.
William Reeves’s “Texas Art and a Wildcatter’s Dream” is the definitive book on the Davis collection and highly recommended for a comprehensive overview of the Davis Collection.
Davis was able to sustain his philanthropy for only three years — 1927, 28, 29 — until the Wall Street crash of October 1929.
In an effort to sustain the precedent set by the Davis purchase prize competitions, the Art League established an annual juried exhibition, of which 2025 marks the 95th anniversary year.
I want to digress a bit, but that digression will loop back to the Art League.
In Italy, in 1919, Mussolini founded the National Fascist Party, and the ensuing decade sees an ambitious Hitler take an unsteady path to power in Germany that will culminate in his inauguration as the supreme leader of Nazi Germany in 1934.
Seeing avant-garde art as a threat, the Nazi Party enlisted Adolf Ziegler to organize the Degenerate Art Exhibition in the fall of 1937, which was meant to denigrate the work of artists like Paul Klee, Otto Dix, Picasso, Grant Wood, Piet Mondrian, Kandinsky, Chagall, and others.
Though Hitler invades Poland in 1939, setting off the Second World War, it is not until the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, that the United States enters the war.
Men from across the U.S. enlist and are drafted into service. They head to the Asiatic-Pacific Theater and to the European Theater of Operations, and for most, it is their first experience of a culture beyond America.
This was no less true of the many artist soldiers who found themselves so dispatched.
A World War I-era popular song became relevant again: “How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?”
Artists who served in the ETO were exposed to those same artists the Nazis had ridiculed and to the movements they had heralded under the umbrella of abstraction: cubism, Impressionism, surrealism, symbolism, the neoplasticism of the De Stijl — and influences like the regionalism of a Grant Wood and the harsh realism of an Otto Dix.
WW II ended September 2, 1945, and as artists returned to their home towns, many felt a desire to connect with others anxious to explore these new ideas in artistic expression. In San Antonio, that desire manifested in a collective that came to call itself Men of Art.
(In San Antonio, originally from Italy, was Pompeo Coppini, who had immigrated to the United States in 1896 and moved to San Antonio in 1901. He was commissioned to create a number of Confederate monuments in Texas, including the Alamo Cenotaph on Alamo Plaza. He also has work on the campuses of Texas A&M and the University of Texas at Austin.
Coppini’s Academy of Fine Arts still sits on Melrose Place off McCullough. Coppini came to metaphorical blows with the Men of Art because he believed abstraction to be a betrayal of Art with a capital “A.” To this day, the Academy offers classes and the occasional exhibition, but to be a member an artist must work in classical figurative art modes.)
In 1946, with the war over, the Art League honored Julian Onderdonk, making the top cash prize in the annual juried exhibition his namesake. A number of the Men of Art group were subsequently winners of that prize, including Val Alexander, Carl Embry, Cecil Casebier, Bill Reily, Keith McIntyre, and Chester Toney. Another member of the group was Harding Black, a pioneer in ceramic glazes.
The Annual Juried Exhibition submissions were initially limited to a designated geographical radius around San Antonio. In recent years that has been expanded to anyone in the state of Texas.
Also in 1946, the Art League instituted the Artist of the Year Exhibition, which recognizes a San Antonio artist with a retrospective exhibition and an accompanying catalogue each year. The artist honored donates a work to the Art League‘s permanent collection.
These two annual exhibitions — the Juried Exhibition with its Onderdonk Purchase Prize and the Artist of the Year Exhibition— allow the collection to continue to grow as a representative collection of Texas art.
This is a unique way to collect because the ultimate decisions go to outside jurors, not to the Art League’s board. The Onderdonk award is decided by the outside juror.
Jurors can be working artists, curators, editors of an arts publications, arts educators, etc. — people with experience and respect in their arts milieu.
The process for the Artist of the Year is somewhat more complicated. The Chair of the Artist of the Year committee invites committee members to make nominations; the artists nominated are asked to submit portfolios; after reviewing the work submitted, the committee votes; and the top three nominees then go to three outside jurors, whose votes make the final determination.
Each year, the Art League mounts one-two exhibitions curated from the permanent collection. In 2019, pieces were selected to highlight the impressive number of pieces in the collection that could be said to reflect what is now referred to as the Mid-Century Modern period. Some of the pieces from that era are again on display in this exhibition celebrating Onderdonk purchase prizes spanning almost 80 years.
I hope one of the points this talk conveys is that the San Antonio Art League has been sustained for well over a century by devoted volunteers.
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© San Antonio Art League & Museum 2016-2024
© San Antonio Art League & Museum 2016-2024