RICHARD STOUT

Richard Gordon Stout was born August 21, 1934 in Beaumont, Texas and began painting, drawing, and sculpting in grade school, racking up numerous national Scholastic art awards and landing his first solo show at the Beaumont Art Museum at the age of 17. Stout won scholarships to study at the Art Academy of Cincinnati on summers off from high school, then continued at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was awarded a BFA in 1957. After finishing the spring with a residency at Yale Norfolk School of Art, he surveyed a handful of Midwestern and Southern cities and settled in Houston, where he fell in with the city’s nascent art community and further developed his approach to abstracted landscape painting. “Many artists, new to the Texas scene… use for their starting point their reactions to nature’s elements,” wrote Contemporary Arts Association director Jermayne MacAgy in Art in America in 1961. “We see this very strikingly in the work of Richard Stout.” After brief stints with the Cushman Gallery and Katherine Swenson’s New Arts Gallery, Stout signed with Meredith Long & Co., who showed his work from 1960 to 1985. Stout began a long career as an educator at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 1959. He moved to the faculty of the University of Houston in 1967 and meanwhile commuted from Houston to Austin several times a week between 1966 and 1969 to earn his MFA at the University of Texas. In 1973, Stout served as the acting director of U of H’s Blaffer Gallery, where he presented a significant show by his friend Michael Tracy and resurrected the annual Houston Area Exhibition. Stout was recognized with solo shows at the Tyler Museum of Art (1973) and the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston (1975), and he participated in dozens of groups shows in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, including Abstract Painting and Sculpture in Houston at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1974); New Orleans Museum of Art Triennial (1983); Fresh Paint: The Houston School at the MFAH (1985); and Texas Art at the Menil Collection’s Richmond Hall (1988). Along the way, Stout’s work as a painter has moved between gestural and geometric abstraction and more representational views of coastal landscapes and domestic interiors, frequently referencing his Gulf Coast roots. At the same time, he’s immersed himself in the world of German Expressionism, with nearly annual trips to Berlin since 1980. Stout retired from U of H in 1996 and immediately produced a series of solo exhibitions in smaller venues in Houston, Galveston, Dallas, Beaumont, New Orleans, and Lufkin between 1997 and 1999. He also launched a new direction in his artistic practice when he began casting abstract forms in cast bronze. In 2004, he was named Texas Artist of the Year by the Art League Houston, and in 2010 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Center for the Advancement and Study of Early Texas Art. Since 2013, Stout’s work has been handled by William Reaves Fine Art, now Foltz Fine Art. With Reaves’ support in 2017, the Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont organized the career-spanning exhibition Richard Stout: Sense of Home, which traveled to the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi and the O’Kane Gallery the University of Houston’s downtown campus. A companion monograph was published by Texas A&M University Press, neatly summarizing Stout’s life’s work.

Notes: Pete Gershon interviewed Richard Stout at his home studio on May 28, 2019. Richard talks about his early years in Houston; his childhood in Beaumont including the interesting history of his family home; his education in Chicago and at Yale; his relationship with James Johnson Sweeney; his experience teaching at the Museum School and the University of Houston including his term as acting director of the Blaffer Gallery; his close friendships with European collectors; and the development of his work over the course of a career as an artist now seven decades long. There’s even a little neighborhood history about his block on Bonnie Brae between Graustark and Mount Vernon. Richard is such a gentleman and a steadfast keeper of our community’s history, and I’m always grateful and happy to have a chance to spend time with him.

For Further Research:

Modernism in Houston Art, 1950 to 1970, Part 1

Modernism in Houston Art, 1950 to 1970, Part 2

Modernism in Houston Art, 1950 to 1970, Part 3

Modernism in Houston Art, 1950 to 1970, Part 4

Modernism in Houston Art, 1950 to 1970, Part 5

Modernism in Houston Art, 1950 to 1970, Part 6

Modernism in Houston Art, 1950 to 1970, Part 7

The Shape of Art in Houston, Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, October 16, 2014

Kay Sarver’s Houston Art Tribe, Episode 8, 2018

Glasstire: Houston Meets Richard Stout, 2018

Glasstire: Richard Stout on Art Students, 2018

 This project was funded in part by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance