Texas Centennial Exposition and Art Exhibition (1936)

The 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition was one of America's great world's fairs of the 1930s—this one celebrating the 100th anniversary of Texas's independence from Mexico. Local festivities started as early as 1935, and both the Dallas Exposition and Fort Worth's Frontier Centennial carried on through 1937. 

Texas Governor James Stephen Hogg (1851-1906) proposed the idea of the centennial celebration in a turn-of-the-century speech. In 1923, an official Centennial Survey Committee was established by the Advertising Clubs of Texas in association with the Texas Press Association. The dual goals of the expo were to commemorate the Texas Revolution and promote the state to the rest of the world. 

In 1932 a constitutional amendment authorized a centennial celebration, allocated funds for the event and led to the appointment of a Texas Centennial Commission. The federal government issued commemorative three-cent stamps and half-dollars to observe the anniversary, and many Texas newspapers issued special centennial editions.

The official $25,000,000 centennial exposition was touted as the first world's fair held in the Southwest. It opened at Dallas on June 6, 1936, featuring Texas history and progress. Fifty-two buildings were constructed for the extravaganza on the State Fairgrounds, now Fair Park. The "Cavalcade of Texas" was an historical pageant showcasing 400 years of Texas history and became one of the exposition's most popular attractions. Noteworthy, too, is that The Hall of Negro Life marked an exposition milestone—the first official recognition of black culture to be featured at a world's fair.

In addition to the main celebration at Dallas, the most popular observance was the Texas Frontier Centennial at Fort Worth, featuring the "Winning of the West." This exposition opened on July 18, and while both expositions attracted world-wide attention, Fort Worth civic leader Amon G. Carter is quoted as saying "Go to Dallas for education; come to Fort Worth for entertainment." The Fort Worth exposition closed on November 14, the Dallas exposition on November 29.

The elaborate plans for the world's fair included creating a "permanent" home for the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. [1] Eager to mount a worthy inaugural exhibition for their fine new building (and an exhibition grand enough to dazzle an international audience), the Dallas Art Association, working with the Centennial Committee, engaged as guest curators Robert B. Harsche, the well-known Director of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his young associate Daniel Catton Rich. The two had already worked together on the art exhibitions for Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition in 1933 and 1934.

In early December 1935, Richard Foster Howard was hired as DMFA Director, and as soon as he joined the Museum he left for Chicago, where he spent the remainder of the month working with Harsche and Rich on the Texas project. His first six months' salary was paid by the Centennial Corporation.

"After a month with Dr. Harsche," Howard recalled later, "I came on down to Dallas and found soon after I got here that they were digging a hole in the ground for the Museum." [2] The new building was designed by an association of architects (including Roscoe DeWitt of DeWitt and Washburn, Ralph Bryan, Herbert M. Greene, LaRoche & Dahl, and Henry Coke Knight) and built at a cost of $500,000. It was promoted for its use of native stone and air conditioning, "a most important factor for enjoying art during the summer season." [3] In the words of George Dahl, its style "might be described as modern, flavored  with the condiments of Egypt and Archaic Greece and finally seasoned with the warmth and sunshine of the Southwest." [4]

The opening of the art exhibition at the Texas Centennial was the subject of nearly the entire issue of The Art Digest for June 1, 1936. "This is the largest number of The Art Digest that has ever been printed, in the nearly ten years of its life," wrote Peyton Boswell, the editor of the magazine, "and maybe the most interesting for the American people." For Boswell, the opening of the new Dallas Museum and the Texas Centennial Exposition would "open the eyes of art lovers as to regional development." Richard Foster Howard, Alexandre Hogue, Jerry Bywaters, and John W. Rogers all contributed articles which supported the group's aesthetic and regionalist viewpoint. [5]

The Texas Centennial Exhibition was designed to introduce the public to international artists from all time periods, with an emphasis on American work and, more specifically, that of artists from the Southwest. Several galleries were devoted to contemporary Texas artists. Over six hundred works were organized by time period: the Primitives section included masters such as Hieronymous Bosch and Filippo Lippi; The Renaissance held Anthony van Dyck, Titian, Giovanni Bellini, Peter Paul Rubens, Francisco Goya, and El Greco; an International group ranged from Thomas Gainsborough to Marc Chagall and Diego Rivera; and 19th- and 20th-Century French Painting featured Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

The American rooms contained works by such artists as James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, and Edward Hopper, with well-known contemporary works such as Grant Wood's American Gothic (1930, The Art Institute of Chicago) and George Bellows's Sawdust Trail (1916, Milwaukee Art Museum). The large central court of the Museum was filled with nearly one hundred monumental sculptures surrounded by priceless hanging tapestries. American and foreign etchings, watercolors, and prints were included as were rare proofs by Albrecht Durer and Rembrandt van Rijn. Galleries were devoted to the work of Whistler and Bellows, and lithographs by Texas artists.

Since highlighting local art from the period was one of the primary goals of the exhibition planners, a well-balanced jury was assembled to determine which Texas works should be placed in the show. The three judges were Ellsworth Woodward, President of the Southern States Art League; Mr. James Chillman, Jr., Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Alexandre Hogue, a Dallas artist. By limiting each artist to only one work within a single medium and by considering issues of quality and public interest, the jury selected 110 paintings by Texas artists for the Centennial Exhibition.

Following the centennial, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts became a popular public attraction, along with the other museums in the new civic center. In 1937 the art  museum attempted to repeat the success of the Centennial Exhibition with another large  show, Art of the Americas—Pre-Columbian and Contemporary, which was part of the Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition (June 12- October 31, 1937). This exhibition divided works into four main areas: Middle America; Contemporary Art from the U.S.A., Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, and Cuba; Texas Artists; and Paintings from Texas Collections. While the Centennial Exposition was a celebration of the anniversary of Texas's independence from Mexico, the Pan-American Exposition was an effort to build and maintain relations with all of Texas's neighbors to the south.

[1] The Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (which changed its name to the DMA in 1983) operated out of the Fair Park building for nearly fifty years before relocating to the present Arts District location in 1984.

[2] Richard Foster Howard, from a speech given in San Francisco in 1939 on the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts' exhibitions for the 1936 Texas Centennial and 1937 Pan-American Exposition.

[3] Dallas Museum of Fine Arts press release, "Great Art Show Planned for Texas Centennial Exposition," 1936.

[4] Priscilla Smith. "The Texas Centennial Itself Is an Embodiment of Fine Art." The Art Digest (June 1936),26.

[5] Peyton Boswell, introduction, The Art Digest, June 1, 1936.

Adair Margo, "Tom Lea Drawings for the 1936 Texas Centennial Murals," gallery talk (October 2, 2013).  https://www.dma.org/audio/tom-lea-drawings-1936-texas-centennial-murals

13310738: UMO

Catalog from the exhibition, '1930's Expositions,' October 7-November 5, 1972, held by the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts at the New Dimensions Pavilion, State Fair of Texas. Includes: foreword, essays, list of artworks and artists in the exhibition, images, selected bibliography.

12712417: UMO

Archives lists numerous items related to Texas Centennial including: postcard, tickets, souvenir guide, souvenir pamphlet, and photos. There is a vertical file (folder 96) that has Fair Park artwork. Also several files connected to Eleanor Jones Harvey's exhibition, "Progressive Texas: Art at the Texas Centennial of 1936" (2003).

Postcard image included in this draft- Published in Debra Gibney, “The Texas Centennial 1936,” in Dallas Museum of Art, 100 Years , ed. Dorothy M. Kosinski (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, 2003), Pamphlet number 5. Caption- A colored light display at night illuminated the esplanade and reflecting basin at the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition.

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