Michael Frary

News Obituary Listing

Michael Frary, a painter and former University of Texas art professor whose artistic career spanned nearly seven decades and who was an influential figure in a 20-century Texas art movement, died Tuesday. The cause of death was not reported. He was 87.

Members of UT's art department recall Frary's passion for teaching painting technique. He retired from UT in 1986.

"Michael Frary was an inspirational teacher," said Ken Hale, artist and professor at UT. "His classes were always full.

"Frary was a member of a very strong and influential faculty whose teaching has had a tremendous impact on developing the literally thousands of artists who have gone through the art program at UT," Hale said. "Frary and his peers were the catalyst that gave the studio art program at UT a national and international level of recognition beginning in the 1950s. He was an artist and a teacher of the first class."

Born in California in 1918, Frary was among those artists who landed in — or returned to — Texas after World War II and who created art that was conceptual and abstract in its approach. Along with artists such as Seymour Fogel, Ralph White and Kelly Fearing, Frary followed the creative cues of artists in New York or Paris who experimented with nonfigurative and non-narrative style.

"Frary executed tremendous abstract paintings," said attorney and art collector Robert Summers, who founded TexasModernArt.com to promote 20th-century Texas modernism. "Frary contributed significantly to mid-century modernist art in Texas."

But Frary is remembered as much for his landscapes as for his abstract style.

"Frary was a wonderful landscape watercolorist," Hale said. "His watercolors — reproduced in his books — are excellent chronicles of the diversity of the Texas landscape."

Three books of Frary's paintings have been published: "Impressions of the Big Thicket," published by University of Texas Press, "Impressions of the Texas Panhandle" and "Watercolors of the Rio Grande," published by Texas A&M University Press.

His work is in the permanent collections of the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., the Austin Museum of Art and the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio.

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699