A painting made small waves in Fort Worth before a native son’s big splash in New York
The year was 1959, it was Christmastime, and Fort Worth definitely was not ready to see a nude woman in a downtown show window.
“Big-As-Life Nude Art Slows Down Traffic,” was the newspaper headline across America as gawkers gathered — usually from a tasteful distance across busy Seventh Street — to shake heads and clutch pearls over the painting in Bob Ellison’s family’s furniture store window.
“It was kind of the moment when he decided that if the town wouldn’t accept this, they weren’t ready for him, and he went to New York and never came back,” said a cousin, Nancy Dozier of Fort Worth.
Ellison, a great-great-grandson of pioneer Texas trail driver Oliver Loving of Weatherford, died at 89 on July 5 in New York, just when a current Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit is showcasing his phenomenal collection of art pottery and gift of 600 works to the museum.
He was 29 when he and his wife, Nancy, left Fort Worth and moved to New York.
As far as I can tell, the Star-Telegram never mentioned them again.
Yet in New York, he became known as one of the world’s leading collectors of art ceramics. The Met director, Max Hollein, called Ellison a “visionary collector” and a “true trailblazer” in his obituary in The New York Times.
ARTNews eulogized him as a “champion of modern ceramics and pottery.”
“He was really a self-taught person about art, but he became respected all over the world,” Dozier said.
“It’s pretty amazing for a kid from Fort Worth.”
When it closed in 1992, Ellison’s Furniture had been a Fort Worth institution for more than 100 years, mostly at its eight-story showroom, 211 W. Seventh St. on the corner at Throckmorton Street.
Ellison’s parents, Bob and Margaret Ellison, had traveled to Europe and admired the art in Paris. But Bob Jr. served in the Navy and graduated with a college degree in philosophy, and not until his late 20s did he take an interest in New York artists and modern art.
In April 1959, Bob Jr. and Nancy Ellison returned from New York and opened Ellison Gallery inside the furniture store. They sold abstract expressionist works by New York artists and an occasional Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec or Pablo Picasso to Texas’ millionaire oil and ranching families.
That Christmas, Ellison took umbrage when the Fort Worth Art Center, now the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, chose but then rejected the nude artwork, Woodstock artist Ben Johnson’s “The Song.”
So Ellison hung it in the store window.
It was the next-to-last holiday shopping weekend at The Fair department store in the next block, along with major downtown stores such as Leonards’ eight-block superstore, Stripling’s, Monnig’s and Meacham’s.
The First Baptist Church of Fort Worth, a giant megachurch with ties to the conspiracy-crazed John Birch Society, was three blocks away.
“People went nuts — mainly the Baptist church down the street,” Dallas artist and author J. Larry Nance remembered. He shopped the gallery often and wanted to buy the painting, which was priced at $1,500.
The painting showed the subject, Johnson’s wife, from the side, Nance said.
At the time, Ellison told the Star-Telegram in a front-page story: “A few people came in and said it was lovely. I suppose the people who didn’t like it just went on by.”
The Fort Worth Art Association president, Garland Ellis, told the Star-Telegram that museum chose not to show the painting because “we’ve got some old ladies who criticize these things — they just give us hell.”
Ellis said showing a nude painting in the Art Center, then located in what is now the Community Arts Center, would be “like putting on a striptease in Will Rogers Coliseum.”
The Ellisons “had been to New York and they were captivated with the art scene,” Dozier said. “He wanted to bring part of that to Fort Worth.”
Ellison Gallery hosted prominent exhibits for abstract artists connected to the New York School, including Elaine de Kooning, Milton Resnick and Lester Johnson, and also for German artist Wolf Kahn. The Star-Telegram and KXAS/Channel 5 covered the shows, and Star-Telegram society columnist Cissy Stewart sometimes reported on the art scene from New York.
But the Ellisons closed the gallery in February 1962 and moved to New York to stay.
His own paintings didn’t sell. But he took an interest in pottery and ceramics.
“Bob called them the stepchild of art,” Dozier said.
The New York Times’ obituary said Ellison was walking through Greenwich Village and saw a shop with an early 20th-century white ceramic plate bordered in blue rabbits.
“My hand just seemed to reach out for it — it wasn’t a conscious process,” he said years later.
He went on to become a collector and an authority on ceramics, particularly the work of artist George Ohr. In 2009 and 2013, Ellison donated hundreds of pieces to the museum.
Nance credited Ellison with sparking local support for contemporary art.
“He and his family were special to the art community and particularly to the contemporary artists in Fort Worth and Texas,” Nance said. “That store was one of the driving forces in making an artist out of me.”
Dozier, Ellison’s cousin, described some of the works he collected as “bizarre beyond words.”
“He was always marching to his own drum forever,” she said.
He was a step ahead of Fort Worth.
This story was originally published August 27, 2021 at 12:22 PM.
