Melvin Charles Warren

For western art to achieve the distinction of fine art, it must first satisfy an artistic criteria and only then deal with the particularity of western subject matter. Melvin Warren understands this concept. His work is an accomplished artistic statement that also presents images which are faithful to western reality. Warren was born in California in 1920 and lived in Arizona and New Mexico before coming to Texas at the age of 14. He has seen the beauty and felt the lure of the Southwest and it stimulated his boyhood desire to be an artist. After service in World War II, Warren entered Texas Christian University and received a degree in fine arts. During the day, he worked in the best tradition of commercial art work, and in the evenings he painted out the western fantasies that crowded his mind. These paintings and the process of creating them encouraged Warren to seek a gallery outlet. The subtle sensitivity to his subject matter and an obvious control of the technical elements of painting made his work readily acceptable to a broad range of collectors. He became a special favorite of Lyndon Johnson, who ultimately acquired many Warren oils. He is buried at Clifton Memorial Park, Clifton, Bosque County, Texas. His palette emphasizes earth tones -browns, reds and yellows. His subject matter emphasizes the history of the West - cattle trails and frontier forts. He was a member of the Cowboy Artists of America. His work is extensively exhibited at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and is housed at the LBJ (Lyndon Baines Johnson) Library in Austin.

Emerging in 19th-century France, Impressionist art embraced loose brushwork and plein-air painting to respond to the movement of daily life. Although the pioneers of the Impressionist movement — Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir — are now household names, their work was a radical break with an art scene led and shaped by academic traditions for around two centuries. These academies had oversight of a curriculum that emphasized formal drawing, painting and sculpting techniques and historical themes.

The French Impressionists were influenced by a group of artists known as the Barbizon School, who painted what they witnessed in nature. The rejection of pieces by these artists and the later Impressionists from the salons culminated in a watershed 1874 exhibition in Paris that was staged outside of the juried systems. After a work of Monet’s was derided by a critic as an unfinished “impression,” the term was taken as a celebration of their shared interest in capturing fleeting moments as subject matter, whether the shifting weather on rural landscapes or the frenzy of an urban crowd. Rather than the exacting realism of the academic tradition, Impressionist paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings represented how an artist saw a world in motion.

Many Impressionist painters were inspired by the perspectives in imported Japanese prints alongside these shifts in European painting — Édouard Manet drew on ukiyo-e woodblock prints and depicted Japanese design in his Portrait of Émile Zola, for example. American artists such as Mary Cassatt and William Merritt Chase, who studied abroad, were impacted by the work of the French artists, and by the late 19th century American Impressionism had its own distinct aesthetics with painters responding to the rapid modernization of cities through quickly created works that were vivid with color and light.

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