Dateline: March 17, 2005

PPHM to open two Bugbee exhibits

CANYON – The Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum (PPHM) will open two exhibitions of the work of the late Clarendon artist H.D. Bugbee on March 26, 2005

“Those who Came Before Us: The Indian Murals of H.D. Bugbee,” which Bugbee painted in the early 1950s, and “Capturing Texas Legends: H.D. Bugbee’s Panhandle Frontier,” show the influence of Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington on Bugbee’s work. 

“Those Who Came Before Us” will include Bugbee’s original thirteen murals for the Museum’s then-Indian Hall, plus four Indian dance murals he added to the cycle later, and sketches and studies (some made in the 1920s) for the murals. 

“Capturing Texas Legends” will comprise paintings with clear connections to Russell and Remington’s work, such as Bugbee’s copy of Remington’s now-destroyed Ceremony of the Scalps and Bugbee’s interpretation of Russell’s famous, Waiting for a Chinook.

Much like Russell and Remington depicted the American West in the 1890s and early 1900s, Bugbee portrayed historic and then-contemporary Southern Plains life, including cowboys, American Indians, and flora and fauna of the region.

At the suggestion of his cousin, cattleman T.S. Bugbee, Harold Dow Bugbee came to the Texas Panhandle from Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1914 with his parents.  He studied at Texas A&M College in 1917 and the Cumming School of Art in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1920.

Each fall, until the late 1930s, the artist traveled to Taos to paint with fellow artists “Buck” Dunton, Frank Hoffman, Leon Gaspard, and Ralph Meyers, often packing into the mountains to paint with either Meyers or Dunton.

By the mid-1920s, galleries in Denver, Chicago, Kansas City, and New York handled Bugbee’s work.  With the Depression and decreasing picture sales, in 1933 Bugbee turned to magazine and book illustrations in pen and ink.  He also continued to make easel paintings.

Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New deal, Bugbee painted the first of five murals for the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum’s Pioneer Hall in 1934. 

He later painted additional murals for the Old Tascosa Room in the Herring Hotel and for the Amarillo Army Air Field which now hang at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum).

In 1951, Bugbee became the museum’s first Curator of Art.  Two years later he began the Indian Hall mural cycle, which was then installed above the exhibit cases holding examples of ethnographic material from the Society’s collection.  The Museum also published a monograph on the Indian Hall cycle, Those Who Came Before Us, with a foreword by J. Evetts Haley and a description of each mural written by Bugbee.

Both exhibitions will run through March 2006, with “Those Who Came Before Us” in the Hazlewood Lecture Hall and “Capturing Texas Legends” in the Bugbee Gallery.  Reproductions of Bugbee’s work will be available in the Museum Store.