“A History of Ranching,” Buck Winn’s largest painting, is a 280-foot-long mural commissioned in 1950 that hung for decades in the “Corral Room,” at Pearl Beer’s brewery in San Antonio. At the time, it was the world’s longest mural.
His smallest painting was the basis for today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp, issued on December 29, 1945 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Texas becoming (at least officially) part of the United States of America.
While I could write many things about Texas and the stamp, I am intrigued by Winn and brewery mural.
In the mid-20th century, Winn was an internationally recognized painter, sculptor, muralist, and artist. He was one of the original “Dallas Nine,” a group of younger artists known for their interpretations of regional landscapes and people in a style dubbed Lone Star Regionalism. In 1936, he designed the large gold-leaf Texas star at the center of the Hall of State, the central building in Dallas’ Fair Park, which initially was built to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Texas’s independence from Mexico in 1836. Winn also created the 85-foot-high obelisk that stands at the park’s main entrance. He painted a host of other well-known murals, including two at the Memorial Museum in Gonzales and a 4-story mural at Texas State University in San Marcos, a project he saw as “an opportunity to say that Texas is big and that we have big art in Texas.”
In 1945, he won a competition help by the state commission to design a stamp honoring the state’s centennial. Winn also accepted a host of commissions from private businesses, including the Pearl Brewing Company, which, in 1950, was converting a cylindrical building that had been the stables for its brewery into an events venue called the Pearl Corral.
The entertainment room, which was called the Corral Room, featured a stage based on the saloon owned and made famous by the legendary Judge Roy Bean, who in the late 19th called himself “the only law west of the Pecos.” (Bean had been featured in Pearl’s other advertisements). Winn created a mural for that room’s second tier that included pastoral scenes of cattle and landscapes, as well as cowboys at work and around a chuck wagon.
In the 1970s, Pearl’s new owners, decided to turn the Pearl Corral into the “Jersey Lilly,” the name of Bean’s saloon, which, in turn, had been named after Lillie Langtry, a well-known British-American socialite and actress. They turned the Corral Room into the Lily Langtry Room, which featured a lot of red velvet and no mural.
No one thought to preserve the mural because by this time, the once-well-known Winn had faded from public view and his style of art was out of fashion. So it appeared that like several of his other works that had been in buildings that had been renovated or destroyed, the brewery mural would be lost forever.
But that’s not what happened. In the 1990s, several people, many of them from Wimberley, a small city between Austin and San Antonio where Winn lived from 1940 until his death in 1979, began concerted efforts to revive interest in his work. Historian Dorey Schmidt, who was a leader in this effort, came upon Winn’s sketches for the mural and soon learned its history and about its removal. But no one knew what happened after that.
Finally, after several calls to officials with that now owned the brewery site, someone connected her with Chuck Remling, a retiree who had managed the hospitality room.Schmidt called Remling and asked if he knew what happened to the mural. As she later recounted in an online article, “There was a brief silence on the other end of the phone line.” And then Remling asked: “‘Who wants to know?'”
After she explained, he told her “I always liked that mural, and when they were remodeling and took it down, they were just going to throw it in the dumpster. But I thought that it might have some historic value-or at the very least, there were a couple of panels that I thought I could cut out and frame for my house…So I took the rolls of canvas and put them on top of some cabinets in a storage room.” But, he added, “I kind of forgot about them.”
“I don’t know what happened to them,” he added. “I guess they could still be there.” They were there and the company was happy to donate them to Schmidt’s group. The next day, Schmidt, along with officials from the university and a nearby museum, met company officials at the brewery. Workers began to unroll the mural, which had been cut into 11 sections. “As they did,” Schmidt wrote, “one of the workers grabbed a straw broom to remove some of the twenty years of dust. The combined screams…persuaded him that was not the thing to do!”
The mural was not in good shape and needed extensive and expensive work. It has taken about two decades, but, under the direction of The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, 10 of the 11 panels have been restored. All 11 can be seen at the Wimberley Institute of Cultures and other sites in Wimberley and two sites in San Marcos including the newly renovated library at Texas State University.
“The scale” of these panels, “is difficult to absorb,” Michael Barnes recently wrote in the Austin American-Statesman. He added that while mural is extraordinary, it is not perfect. Winn’s history of ranching, for example, downplays the role of women and ignores the role of Blacks. Nevertheless, Barnes asserted, “It is unlikely that many people noticed these things…when the mural was unveiled in 1950. Instead, ‘The History of Ranching’ would likely have opened eyes with its scale and sparked imaginations with its fervently idealized images.”
I take heart from the fact that the mural’s rediscovery and restoration has helped fuel a new appreciation of Winn’s work. “Buck Winn deserves to be part of the mainstream Texas art conversation, much more than he is now,” Michael Grauer, coauthor of the Dictionary of Texas Artists, said in 2014. “He deserves to be up there with…the…greats of early Texas art.”
Hopefully, his stamp can help spread that important message.
Be well, stay safe, spark your imagination, fight for justice, and work for peace.