Artist and teacher,
Alexandre Hogue was born in Memphis, Missouri, on February
22, 1898, and grew up in Denton, Texas. After graduating from high
school in Dallas, he attended the Minneapolis College of Art and
Design and later worked as a commercial artist in New York City. In
1925 he returned to Dallas to devote himself to painting and for
several years made annual sketching trips to the Davis Mountains
and Big Bend country of Texas or to Taos, New Mexico, which he
first visited in 1920. His painting Studio Corner, Taos was exhibited
at the National Academy of Design in 1928. The following year he
mounted his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
In 1931 Hogue began
teaching life drawing at the Texas State College for Women in
Denton, where he continued as an instructor until 1942. Meanwhile,
he received national attention for his “dust bowl landscapes”
depicting the effects of the drought that devastated the Great
Plains during the 1930s. He later produced a much publicized water
erosion series and in 1937 an oil industry series
for Fortune magazine. Meanwhile, he became head of the
art department at Hockaday Junior College in Dallas. In 1938 he
married Maggie Jo Watson, with whom he had a daughter, Olivia.
During World War II
Hogue worked as a technical illustrator for North American Aviation
in Dallas. In 1945 he moved to Oklahoma following his appointment
as head of the art department at the University of Tulsa, a post he
held for the next eighteen years. After stepping down as department
head in 1963, he continued to teach drawing, painting, and
lithography at the university until 1968, when he retired to a farm
and studio near Tulsa. In 1980 in Oklahoma City he accepted the
Oklahoma Arts Award for Lifetime Service from Gov. George Nigh.
Recipient of
numerous awards over a long and productive career, Hogue is
represented in the collections of the National Museum of American
Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Oklahoma
City Museum of Art, the Gilcrease Museum, the Philbrook Museum of
Art, and the Musée National d'Art Modern in the Pompidou
Center, in Paris, France. Alexander Hogue died July 22, 1994, in
Tulsa.