Philosophical Society of Texas

I enjoyed attending the annual meeting of the Philosophical Society of Texas, a group to which I belong. The annual meeting was held this last weekend, February 15-17, in Dallas. Meeting sites alternated between the Anatole Hotel, the Southwestern Medical School, and the Bush Library at SMU. Chaired by Kay Bailey Hutchinson, with the assistance of Dan Branch as program supervisor, this year’s theme centered around research with special emphasis on medical advancements. Friday night’s induction of new members took place on the premises of the historic buildings in Oak Lawn which once served as Parkland Hospital, today the corporate offices of Crow Holdings. The members enjoyed a gala dinner hosted by Harlan Crow. Much of Saturday’s meetings took place at the Southwestern Medical School, including a memorable panel in which each member had won a Nobel Prize. Additional sessions dealt with recent breakthroughs in medical science. Saturday evening’s festivities included a banquet at the George W. Bush Library on the campus of SMU. Former President Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush welcomed all of us to the library in a rousing appearance at the podium. This meeting was memorable for me because my daughter Katherine Cummins Schmitz attended all of the sessions and dinners as my guest. She had the chance to meet a number of my friends who are members of this group. The weekend was particularly enjoyable for me because I had the chance to have several long chats with old friends from the Big Bend area who I had not seen recently.

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Waldine Tauch

Waldine Tauch (1892-1986) of San Antonio emerged as an important artist in Texas during her lifetime. As a student and protégé of Pompeo Coppini, Tauch had become by the 1930s one the state’s most promising sculptors. In 1935, in preparation for Centennial celebration of the following year, the State of Texas earmarked funds to underwrite a statue commemorating the role woman had played in the state’s history. Given the name “Pioneer Woman,” this statue would be placed on the campus of the College of Industrial Arts in Denton, today’s Texas Woman’s University. Waldine Tauch felt strongly this sculpture should be the work of a female artist and certainly not that of a male sculptor. She wanted badly to be person who sculpted it. Accordingly, she undertook a campaign designed to award her this commission. She contacted leading politicians, cultural figures, civic leaders, and educators across the state in her attempt to secure this contract, even to the point of attempting to enlist the support of J. Frank Dobie.  Tauch wrote a long memorial to the Centennial Commission outlining her views about the history of women in Texas and detailing why a female sculptor ought to receive this commission, pointing out in some detail why she should be the person selected to do it. This rather lengthy document represents an interesting expression of how one significant female artist of the 1930s saw the history of women in Texas. In the end, a male sculptor, William Zorach, received the commission. Tauch and her supporters thereupon embarked on a campaign of criticism and public complaint against his plans for the sculpture. They loudly objected because the model proposed by Zorach was highly stylized and abstract to the point, they said, it depicted a women without visible clothing – a statue of a nude women. This thus provoked a state-wide barrage of negative publicity and strident vituperation against the proposed Zorach statue planned for female college in Denton. The State of Texas accordingly pulled Zorach’s commission and gave it to a male sculptor from New York, who made the fully-clothed statue that still stands today on the TWU campus. This “nude women controversy” and Waldine Tauch’s role in it says for the historian much about how women were perceived in that era, and how one female sculptor attempted – albeit unsuccessfully – to express her viewpoints about the historical role of women in Texas and its history. This paper is based on research in the Coppini-Tauch Papers at the Briscoe Center at the University of Texas, the Evaline Sellors Papers at the Old Jail Art Center and Archives, and the Women’s Collection at TWU.