Burt Long, Jr.
(1940-2013)
Texas artist Bert Long grew up in the historic 5th ward of Houston. His father died in a steel mill accident when he was three, leaving his mother to raise four children while working as a housekeeper for a meager $4.00 a day. In the summers, Long helped earn extra money by picking cotton. Long served in the Marines for four years, attended community college and UCLA in the late 60s/early 70s and worked as a chef known for designing elaborate cakes and ice sculptures. He was a celebrated chef at luxury hotels such as the Ritz Carlton Chicago and the Hyatt Regency Houston. He also began making art and had his first art show at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas where he was executive sous chef. He decided to focus solely on art in 1975.
Long rose to fame in 1985, a defining year for Houston when the exhibition “Fresh Paint,” curated by Barbara Rose and Susie Kalil, travelled from the MFA Houston to New York. Suddenly, the art world was taking note of Texas artists such as John Alexander, Lucas Johnson and Bert Long. Long received an NEA grant in 1987, was named Texas Artist of the Year in 1990, and was selected for the prestigious Prix de Rome residency in 1990/91. He helped found Houston’s Project Row Houses in 1993
Although relatively untrained as an artist, Long had a sophisticated knowledge of art and art history gleaned through years of going to museums and studying art books. The whimsical folk art appearance of his work is deceiving. Though he approached art in a humorous way, his message is serious and complex. In 2004, Long wrote about his life philosophy: “My job as an artist is to diagnose what’s happening in society the way you diagnose an illness. If you diagnose an illness, you have a chance of curing it.”
Long was capable of rendering paint in a meticulous way, though he also enjoyed painting narrative, almost ghostly images with layers of oil wash. He made his own frames using plaster, paint and found objects. The frames sometimes overshadow the paintings in their elaborateness and echo his surrealist-inspired assemblages.
Bert Long had a strong relationship with Beaumont and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas for many years. Lynn Castle was instrumental in championing Long’s work. Under her guidance, AMSET purchased a quintessential construction called “Yellow Dog Walking on Water” in 1995, and a few years later commissioned a Bert Long “Happening.” The event, called “Other,” took place on April 16th, 1999 on the museum grounds. Long and an army of volunteers stacked and carved 100,000 pounds of color-injected ice blocks into a massive formation resembling a child’s colorful fort. City council members, the news media and hundreds of community members of all ages and stages came throughout the day to watch the process unfold.
Bert Long’s art may be found in the collections of the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Menil Collection in Houston, The Dallas Museum of Art, the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, the El Paso Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY.
Art on Campus
Title: Important, Not Important
Year: 1987
Medium: Acrylic on canvas with Hydrostone Frame and Mixed Collage
Location: Education Building South Stairwell
Gift of Rob Clark and Jerry Thacker
The frame of “Important, Not Important” is the star of this classic representation of Bert Long’s art. The underlying wood is covered with Hydrostone, a type of plaster used by artists to build up surfaces. As though applying layers to a dense cake, Long molded the Hydrostone to a depth of almost four inches. The brightly painted red surface is embellished with used paint tubes and various coins – quarters, nickels, dimes, pennies. Though coins no longer have the value they once did, when Bert was a child, and well into the 60s, the coins glued to this frame could have easily fed two people for a day.
Nestled within the frame is a painting of a shadowy figure with no defining identification as male or female. Hands and feet appear as amorphous forms. In the area of the face, a pale reddish shape is visible – perhaps a round mouth spewing liquid. On the chest is a colorful form, somewhat heart-shaped with a long stem pointing downward. Above the figure is a cloud formation. Visible brushstrokes flow downward through both the figure and background as though rain is pouring from the cloud. The figure is rendered in the same greenish gray tones as the background, defined only by the orange silhouette surrounding it.
There are no documents indicating Long’s meaning with this piece, but most of his art was created with purpose. Perhaps this is a self-portrait of Long working through some pain, a theme he frequently tackled. Of his infamous painting “Riding the Tiger” from 2000, he wrote:
Every day we wake up, and we get on this tiger. It’s on fire. There is no ground below it. The ocean is above it… The tiger has ferocious claws and a mouth full of teeth that will hurt you. Life is not easy. Life will chew you up, claw you up, set you on fire, toss you off a ravine, and pound your ass. And what you have to do every day is wake up and say, 'Okay, I’m ready to get on that tiger!'
Long was a large man with an even larger personality. He frequently dressed in overalls, his long beard flowing onto his chest. He always wore an elaborate handmade pendent around his neck, typically one adorned with an eyeball, his signature trademark. Bert Long lived life to the fullest - a cheerful, happy and engaging figure who expressed his trials and tribulations though his artwork rather than his personality.
