
Alexandre Hogue (1898-1994)
was born on February 22, 1898, in Memphis, Missouri. He developed a
reputation as an artist for his remarkable renderings of the Dust
Bowl of the Great Depression of the 30’s. Most of his works are
expressed in realism and regionalism. Other subjects are of
the lives of the Indians of the Southwest as well as the oil
industry and farm life. He painted many fine canvases in the Texas
Big Bend area.
His early years were in Denton, Texas, and graduated from
Bryan Street High School in Dallas in 1918. Hogue took classes at
the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The following year he
worked as an illustrator for the Dallas
Morning News
and then on
to New York in 1921 where he found employment with designer and
advertising firms. Summer trips back to Texas often included
sketching trips with pioneer artist Charles Franklin (Frank) Reaugh.
When he returned to Dallas in 1925, he began to paint full-time. He
also taught summer classes at the Texas State College for Women from
1931 to 1942, and was head of the art department at Hockaday Junior
College from 1936 to 1942. During the 1920s and 1930s Hogue also
spent much time in the Taos, New Mexico, art colony and elsewhere in
the Southwest. In addition to having contact with artists like
Ernest Blumenschein, W. Herbert Dunton, and Joseph Imhof, Hogue also
became acquainted with the art and culture of Native American tribes
of the region. Their concepts of the centrality of nature and of the
human obligation to respect nature were significant in the
development of his artistic philosophy.

Early West Texas Pastel with Frank Reaugh
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During the 1930s Hogue was associated with other Dallas-area
artists such as Williamson Gerald (Jerry) Bywaters, Otis M.
Dozier, William L. Lester
and Everett Spruce. All sought to express the particular character
of their region, but it was Hogue's paintings of the ecological
disaster known as the Dust Bowl that gained the greatest fame. In
1937 his Dust Bowl series was featured in Life
magazine. Works such as
Drought Survivors
(1936) and Drought Stricken Area
(1934) became well known for their accuracy in depicting the Dust
Bowl environment and for the compelling message of the artist. In
these and other works on the subject, Hogue presented a new
interpretation of the American landscape-not as an infinitely
productive garden, but rather as a devastated and ruined wasteland
created through human greed, misuse, and disrespect. From 1939 to
1941 Hogue painted murals for the Treasury section of the Federal
Art Project. With the coming of World War II, he devoted himself to
defense work at North American Aviation in Dallas until 1945, when
he was named head of the art department at the University of Tulsa,
a position he held until 1963 and died in Tulsa in 1994. |
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