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Ben L. Culwell (b. September 8, 1918, d. 1992) was a Texan painter and early participant in the abstract expressionist movement. He is most widely known for his participation in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1946 Fourteen Americans exhibition. His work is included in the permanent collection of Houston’s Menil Collection as well as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In 1977, Culwell's work was featured in a retrospective at the McNay Art Museum. In 2007, his work was included in an exhibition at Baylor University, Texas Modern: The Rediscovery of Early Texas Abstraction 1935-1965.

Early Work
Culwell lived in New York from 1936 until returning to Texas in 1937. Though he maintained contact with artists there, he found the urban life there bohemian and escapist, and choose a business career in Texas over continuing in the New York art world—this, he felt, would not preclude a serious pursuit of art.

Culwell enlisted in the U.S Navy in 1941, and boarded a transport ship headed towards Pearl Harbor, arriving shortly after the Japanese bombing. From Pearl Harbor, he boarded the USS Pensacola, where he served from January of 1942 until 1944.

Culwell’s first creative burst occurred during his years on the Pacific front in World War II. Restricted to the only materials obtainable, Culwell’s war paintings are small watercolor, ink, and mixed media works on paper. Though Culwell was inspired by twentieth-century art movements like Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism, all of Culwell’s images from this time retain a degree of naturalistic imagery, as in PICTURE. They also include automatic drawing, drips, pours, and trails of paint and ink, as well as the jabbing and scraping of the painted surfaces. As Walter Hopps described the war painting in his catalogue essay for Culwell’s Adrenalin Hour show at the Menil: “From the point of view of human content, these works, often including poetic diaristic inscriptions and made under the extremities of human endurance during the Pacific, are among our most powerful images of the horror of modern war.”

Culwell managed to get off the ship around 1944 and traveled to Dallas on a thirty-day leave. He showed his suite of watercolors to Jerry Bywaters, the noted regional artist and then-director of the Dallas Museum of Art. Culwell matted between thirty and forty works and left them in Dallas; it is these works, curated by Bywaters, that appeared in a one-man show at the Dallas Museum around 1946, where the Museum of Modern Art’s Dorothy Canning Miller saw them.

Fourteen Americans
Fourteen Americans, curated by Dorothy Miller, placed Culwell’s war paintings alongside works by well-established artists such as Robert Motherwell, Isamu Noguchi, Arshile Gorky, and Mark Tobey. The exhibition opened in September 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art. Though Culwell could not make the trip from Dallas at the time, his work impressed Robert Coates—famous for coining the term Abstract Expressionism —writing for The New Yorker: I was especially impressed, for example, with the work of Ben L. Culwell, a young Texan just out of the Navy after nearly five years of active service in the Pacific, whose “Death by Burning,” Death by Drowning,” “Fragment of Concussion Time,” and “Morning at Attu,” among others—all combining Abstraction and Expressionism in a way that produces a maximum of emotional intensity—are among the few really integrated interpretations of wartime experience that I have yet to come across.

Later work
Despite critical recognition following Fourteen Americans, Culwell—living in Dallas—returned to the business world in July 1947, after no galleries showed any interest in his work (his only sales were two paintings bought by MoMA from the Fourteen Americans exhibition). Culwell returned to the fire and casualty insurance that employed him before the war. This was not the end of Culwell’s artistic work. He continued to paint throughout his life.

In Dallas, Culwell began to experiment with non-figural and geometric abstraction. He started working with oil paints on canvas or wood surfaces that allowed him to apply paint thickly; moving away from the thinner surfaces of his war paintings. Soon Culwell began increasing the textural emphasis by adding sand or broken glass to the paint; later he began experimenting with Duco automobile lacquer either with oil paints or on its own.

Culwell also began revisiting the few oil paintings done before the war, scraping away at the canvases before painting over them again. This reworking became a major part of Culwell’s artistic process for the rest of his life, where he constructed, destructed, and then reconstructed—before destroying and recreating again. The final surface, produced in some cases after years of this process, not only exists in and of itself, but is the result of layers of buried images. The mainstay of Culwell’s postwar work is his continuing development of a dramatic and painterly abstract surface with daring and occasionally garish gesture, color, and texture. Similarly important are Culwell's development of contrasting approaches to abstraction, through combing geometric and grid-like structures with hectic organic gesture and heavy texture.

Later--in the late 50s--Culwell worked as the Executive Vice President of Southwest General Insurance Co. in San Antonio. While living in San Antonio, Culwell was an active member of the San Antonio Men of Art Guild, a local arts organization and cooperative gallery. Later he helped organize the Dallas-Fort Worth Men of Art Guild, and became its first chairman. Both groups gave solo Culwell shows in 1959.

Culwell’s work began to attract attention in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He began to win awards again at Texan art fairs and make more sales—for example, the E.M. Dealey Top Purchase Prize, 29th Annual Dallas County Exhibition in 1958 —even though local critics continued to pan his work. In 1959 Culwell had several one-man shows at the San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth Men of Art Guilds. The McNay Art Museum, in 1977, and the Temple Cultural Activities Center (1978 and 1989) held retrospectives of his work; and the Menil Collection, on the opening of its new building exhibited a suite of Culwell’s war paintings entitled Adrenalin Hour. Culwell worked as the Vice President of American Desk Manufacturing Co. in Temple Texas before finally retiring from business in 1974. and worked on unfinished paintings until his death in 1992.

List of selected exhibitions

 * Museum of Modern Art, Fourteen Americans, 1946


 * Theater ’51, 1951


 * Dallas-Fort Worth Men of Art Guild Galley, solo show, 1959


 * McNay Art Institute, Retrospective, 1977


 * Menil Collection, Adrenalin Hour 1987


 * Menil Collection, Texas Art, 1988


 * Cultural Activities Center, Temple, Texas, Ben L. Culwell: Retrospective (Paintings from 1946 to 1989), 1989, catalogue essay by Donald Kuspit


 * Martin Museum of Art, Baylor University, Texas Modern: The Rediscovery of Early Texas Abstraction (1935-1965), 2007