Biography from Paul Edelstein Studio and Gallery:
| Born in 1907 in Terre Haute, Indiana, Burton Callicott spent much his
of childhood and his seventy-year career as an artist and educator in
Memphis. Callicott graduated in 1931 from the Cleveland School of
Art, where he began an exploration of the use of light and dark that
would follow him throughout his life. He is perhaps best known
regionally for his set of three large murals in the Memphis Pink Palace
Museum titled The Coming of De Soto.
Completing his
training in sculpture at the Cleveland School of Art in the midst of
the Depression, Callicott returned to Memphis, where his mother and
stepfather, Michael Abt, resided. The director of the western
division of Tennessee’s Federal Works of Art Project, Abt played a
major role in launching Callicott’s career. He put Callicott to
work immediately on Memphis Cotton Carnival floats and displays for
other Memphis festivals while also helping him secure a commission for
a Public Works of Art Project mural in 1933. Installed in the
Memphis Museum of Natural History (now the Memphis Pink Palace Museum),
the three-panel mural depicts Hernando De Soto’s arrival in West
Tennessee. Another of Callicott’s most recognized works, The Gleaners
(1936), was completed during the early years of his career and received
much attention at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. These early
projects set Callicott off on a long and successful career in Memphis.
Callicott
became a founding faculty member of the Memphis Academy of Art (now the
Memphis College of Art) in 1937. As Tennessee’s first
professional art school, the Cleveland School of Art provided Callicott
a solid base for the demanding program of instruction for the new
school. He began as a teacher of sculpture and ceramics and went
on to teach drawing, painting, and calligraphy. Making an impact
on artists of local, regional, and national renown during his decades
of teaching, Callicott became professor emeritus in 1978.
Callicott’s
early interest in sculpture quickly shifted in the 1930s to painting
and the depiction of light and color on natural objects, using the
powerful expression of light to reflect the spiritual in nature.
Frequently illustrating the racial inequalities of the South as seen in
The Gleaners, his early work often took on the social realist
tone of American Scene artists, as influenced by figures such as
Jean-François Millet, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco.
Although
at first he was interested in the representation of volume in
figurative forms, his introduction to the work of Hans Hoffmann in the
1940s encouraged him to pursue the flattened perspective of Abstract
Expressionism in his later career. With this shift toward the
abstract, he began to focus on images of sunlight and rainbows as a
portrayal of the true spirit of light and color. Works such as Tree in the Sun (1950) and the Rainbow series (1970s) characterize the evolution of his later style.
Callicott’s
works have been exhibited at various museums across the state and
region, including the Cheekwood Museum of Art and the Tennessee State
Museum in Nashville, the West Tennessee Regional Art Center in
Humboldt, the Knoxville Museum of Art, the Carroll Reece Museum at East
Tennessee State University, the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock, and
the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia. Samples of his artwork
are on permanent display at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art and the
Memphis Pink Palace Museum. The Tennessee Arts Commission chose to
honor the work of Callicott in 2000 with a specialty license plate for
which he designed a rainbow with the caption, “art is . . . a rainbow.”
Callicott continued to live in Memphis until his death in 2003.
Elizabeth H. Moore, Center for Historic Preservation, Middle Tennessee State University
Suggested Reading(s): Celia Walker, “Painting in Twentieth-Century Tennessee,” in A History of Tennessee Arts, ed. Carroll Van West (2004): 99-125; “Century of Progress: Twentieth Century Painting in Tennessee,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 61 (2002): 4-73; Susan Knowles, “Sculpture in Tennessee, 2000 Years,” in A History of Tennessee Arts, ed. Carroll Van West, 57-78.
See Also: ART, MEMPHIS COLLEGE OF ART, MEMPHIS BROOKS MUSEUM OF ART, PINK PALACE MUSEUM, TENNESSEE ARTS COMMISSION |
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