A lifetime spent creating
Decades’ worth of couple’s contemporary pieces featured in Houston-centric exhibition
Leila McConnell and Henri Gadbois, who are celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary Sunday, like to say they never met.
What they mean is, they were never officially introduced. “You just knew people in the art world,” Gadbois said.
They came of age during a time when a small but sophisticated creative community in Houston embraced the concepts of modern art that were sweeping the globe, looking for ways to make those ideas their own.
“Everybody knew everybody. It was very congenial,” Gadbois said. “Nobody copied each other. We were not a school. It was all individuals.”
He and McConnell, both painters, were one of the scene’s young power couples. That era didn’t last long. By the 1980s, the galleries that had nurtured them were gone, art trends had changed, and a newer generation of talent took the limelight.
Gadbois and McConnell never stopped painting, but they were nearly forgotten until about 15 years ago, when collectors fascinated with local art history started a group called the Center for the Advancement and Study of Early Texas Art.
The couple is well represented in that group’s latest exhibition at the Heritage Society Museum, “This Was Contemporary Art: Fine and Decorative Arts in Houston 1945-1965.”
Curators Ginger Berni, Tam Kiehnhoff and Randy Tibbits thought it would be fun to riff
on a 1948 exhibit by the Contemporary Arts Association that promoted Bauhaus ideals of good design and featured an array of the coolest, newest objects on the planet — including furniture by Charles Eames, sculpture by Alexander Calder and architectural renderings by Frank Lloyd Wright. Only they wanted to showcase midcentury work made in Houston.
Surprised to discover how much existed — enough for several shows, really — they have packed the Heritage Society Museum with paintings, photographs, sculpture, ceramics, jewelry, architectural renderings, textiles and furniture.
The lighting is poor — this museum is not a white box — but the show illuminates a little of the story of Handmakers, a collective that sold artist-made goods in Houston for nearly 20 years — everything from silkscreened ties, greeting cards and glassware by Stella Sullivan to jewelry by Charles Pebworth (and others, including Gadbois). Sleek midcentury modern furniture from the archives of Brochstein’s, which is still in business, could be a hot seller today. The minimalistic, surrealistic ceramics of Ruth Laird are timeless classics, too.
The stories of fine artists such as John Biggers, David Adickes, Richard Stout and Lowell Collins may be better known. But to McConnell and Gadbois, it all looks familiar.
During the show’s opening, Gadbois pointed to Jack Boynton’s 1953 “Landscape,” a painting he and McConnell own. It’s a reductive image of gray earth with a rocklike form near the center that protrudes into a big sky of dark blues, greens and blacks.
Gadbois bought the painting the year it was made. He chuckled, noting that he’d spent an ungodly sum on it — $250, his whole month’s salary. At the time, he was working as the registrar at the Museum of Fine Arts, then a small organization limited to one building and two security guards, one of whom Gadbois remembers as a wino who often didn’t show up.
His own “Tribute to C.H.,” from 1958, is also in the show. It’s a stark landscape with no land — just barren, burnt treetops and an intense, hazy sky. McConnell’s “Bingle Road,” painted the same year, also has a pair of bare trees, but they appear to be in a prettier place, in autumn.
She and Gadbois painted these works side by side, but they have made it a practice never to compare notes or comment on each other’s work unless one of them asks for advice.
“It might throw you off,” McConnell said. “We don’t do that to each other.” The early years
McConnell thinks she first saw Gadbois in one of Ruth Pershing Uhler’s classes at the Museum of Fine Arts when they were teenagers.
They became a couple a bit later, often having coffee on Main Street after Bill Condon’s Friday-night printmaking sessions.
McConnell’s family moved to Houston when she was 6. By age 16, she was an architecture student at the Rice Institute, where the program included drawing and art history. Professor James Chillman, who had been the museum’s director, became a profound influence.
“I could have gotten a license, but I thought, ‘No, I’m a painter,’ ” she said.
She also took classes at the museum and spent the summer of 1949 at the California School of Fine Arts, hoping to learn more contemporary techniques.
Mark Rothko was among that school’s famous teachers. McConnell remembers how he peered over her shoulder, as she painted a still life of green and red apples with a white background, and recommended, “Why don’t you do that just in flat pattern?”
She still has that painting, somewhere, in the vast studio she and Gadbois built during the late 1960s, in the River Oaks home they inherited from her parents. Decades of projects are stored there, propped against walls and tables, tucked behind the furniture, stacked on shelves.
The room, now dense with memories, once had an echo.
“It was an empty, empty room,” Gadbois said.
He was encouraged by a father who painted realistic billboards, a grandfather who painted religious scenes for churches and his art teacher at Lamar High School — Norma Henderson — who appreciated modern art and had a studio in an artists’ compound on Pacific Street.
Gadbois worked in a studio above his parents’ garage as a teenager. He began showing his work at 18, earned his art degrees at the University of Houston and had his first solo show in 1953, at James Bute Gallery — which was inside a paint store — before serving two years in the Army. He continued painting even during his tour of duty in Germany.
After Gadbois and McConnell married in 1956, they bought a house in Spring Branch from one of Gadbois’ teachers, the highly regarded abstract painter Robert Preusser, who left Houston for MIT after World War II.
The young couple was all in, all the time, in those days, as artists and teachers. Both taught at the museum school at various times, and Gadbois taught art for more than 30 years at Lee High School.
Their painting styles have evolved over the decades.
McConnell, who paints with her fingertips rather than brushes to achieve her atmospheric compositions, found her way to abstraction more than a decade after she took the class from Rothko, inspired by colored stucco walls she and Gadbois saw in 1960, when they spent a summer in Italy. That’s where Gadbois came up with the idea for a technique he called “field patterns,” after viewing landscapes through a train window.
Even guests at their home were expected to show some creativity.
McConnell and Gadbois still have a room dedicated to displaying the small, square “flags” they used to ask guests to paint before dinner. That collection is now a veritable who’s-who of midcentury Houston.
Eventually, life brought other priorities for Gadbois and McConnell — including their children David and Laura, who were born in 1965 and 1967, respectively. They now also have three grandsons.
“Your life, there’s a lot of things to do,” McConnell said. “It’s not all painting.”
The River Oaks home burned soon after David was born, a major upheaval that required rebuilding most of the interior. “We were lucky that we had insurance, so it was all redone. Since then, it’s been going downhill,” McConnell said with a wicked grin.
Throughout their home — not just the studio — collections of all kinds fill every tabletop, shelf and wall — Staffordshire figures, plates, all kinds of art, boxes, cigar-band plates.
“I’m an addict,” Gadbois said goodnaturedly. ‘You keep going’
Gadbois had some “really good years” in the late 1960s, when his paintings sold well at DuBose Gallery, Houston’s first major contemporary art gallery.
But teaching and parenting consumed much of his time in the 1970s, and in the late 1980s he got sidetracked by an enterprise he called Faux Foods.
It started when he was sponsoring Lee High School’s Key Club, which sold grapefruits every holiday season to raise funds. He wanted to give an award to the top seller, but no ordinary silver cup would do. So he molded an earthenware trophy in the shape of a grapefruit.
McConnell, who was working as a docent at Bayou Bend, talked him into making faux food to help decorate the museum’s holiday tables. Soon, a whole group of docents — the “Mudpie” group — was gathering at the studio often to help mold faux peas and flowers.
“Things take over, and you’re having so much fun. It’s absolutely worthless for the income, but it’s fun for you to do,” Gadbois said.
Fax Foods wasn’t exactly worthless: An industry group named Gadbois a top American craftsman several times, and he made the pineapple ornament that topped the White House Christmas tree in 1999.
Always prolific and never idle, Gadbois has been making art glass lately — agateware plates — that are sold at the Bayou Bend Gift Shop. And he used up McConnell’s collection of antique black buttons recently to make a few holiday ornaments.
He and McConnell learned a long time ago to go with the flow in their art, as in everything else.
“It’s sort of like being on a road and you don’t know where you’re going, but you keep going,” McConnell said. “I call it the time between — there’s a long, long wait, and you know something is coming, but you don’t know what it is.”
She started making collages in 1976, when she managed a chapter of the Bluebirds, a national organization for girls modeled after the Cub Scouts. Laura and the rest of the girls wanted to make paper one day, and while they were working at her studio table, McConnell busied herself, too.
“I thought, ‘Oh, that was fun,’ and did a little more. Then the collages started influencing the paintings,” she said. “I started getting a hard line, where they had been more amorphous before.”
Now she senses her art may be taking another turn. She’s doing a “conversation” with a former student of Gadbois’ in which she does a painting, then he responds with a painting and so on. “I’m doing stuff I don’t think I would have done otherwise. There’s some realism in it,” she said.
Gadbois sees his landscapes looking more realistic, too. “I want something more, so I’m in a very changeable spot at this time.”
The couple often spends weekends at their “soul-satisfying” place out in Ingram, in the Hill Country, but they still love the stimulation of the city.
Tibbits, who owns a number of paintings by Gadbois and McConnell, has become one of the couples’ most ardent new fans.
“In some respects, they expected when they died somebody would just pull a truck up to the back door and shovel the stuff out,” Tibbits said. “It’s been exciting for them to have even the small community that we are excited about their work again.”
“(Weighing in on each other’s work) might throw you off. We don’t do that to each other.” Leila McConnell, on her and Henri Gadbois’ painting side by side but separately