Artspace critic Dave Hickey once identified the Fort Worth Circle as
Texas’ first indigenous group of consciously cosmopolitan and irrefutably modern artists.
Their work, he wrote,
represents the fruit of a special time in the culture of the western United States. This book chronicles the Circle’s distinctive output during the 1940s, the decade of their genesis and greatest innovation. These
genuine citizens of the world,
as Hickey called them, possessed an unconventional vision that radically sidestepped the traditional art of post-Depression Texas. Drawing from their own fertile imaginations, the members of the Circle responded to modern art by creating a unique aesthetic based on contemporary surrealism and abstraction.Published by the Amon Carter Museum to coincide with an exhibition by the same title,
Intimate Modernism: Fort Worth Circle Artists in the 1940s
is a
must have
for any library of American modernism and the art of Texas.The catalogue also includes succinct biographies, accompanied by photographs, of each of the eleven artists of the Fort Worth Circle; a bibliography; exhibition checklist; and brief foreword.