Artists played a quirky, but important, role in World War II. Right here in Fort Worth

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“Right in der Fuehrer’s Face” might have been a stretch for a story about Fort Worth artists involved in World War II, but the work they did enabled pilots, crew, and repair workers to safely do their jobs.

The first B-24 Liberator bomber rolled off Fort Worth’s mile-long assembly plant on April 17, 1942, and as with any piece of complex machinery, it needed “how to” manuals to go with it.

Consolidated Vultee (Convair or the “bomber plant”) hired an English teacher, Mrs. Cozette Lane of El Campo to write and edit the service and instruction manuals. Finding good artists was harder.

Convair hired a few commercial artists. N. K. Richards, who drew illustrations for newspapers and magazines, came to Fort Worth from Chicago to head the “illustration department.” John H. Herbert left his job as the Fort Worth art director for Interstate Theaters (for that job he worked out of the Hollywood Theater downtown), and Ralph E. Houp moved from Lexington, Kentucky. Houp liked Fort Worth so well that he stayed and founded a commercial art firm called The Artshop.

But the war effort was huge, so Convair turned its sights to a more unusual pool of possibilities – fine artists. Dickson Reeder (who brought together a group of artists that became known as the Fort Worth Circle) was not eligible for the draft, so he volunteered for civilian service. He was assigned to Convair, which also hired Kelly Fearing, Juanita Montgomery Gilbert, and Sybil Wilson.

Reeder was recognized for his portraits and probably the best-known artist of the group at that time. He drew the key illustrations for the manual – larger, more creative, and dramatic pictures like a B-24 bombing an enemy location or a proud pilot standing beside his airplane.

In the illustrations, the pilots are always men – even though women did fly planes in non-combat roles. The Museum of Flight in Seattle has posted a 1945 B-24 pilot’s manual online, although its illustrations are likely not by the Fort Worth-based artists.

A footnote: Jeff Reeder, Dickson’s nephew, says that his uncle spent a good deal of his time crawling about the aircraft under construction to draw the various components as they were mounted and installed. Spending a lot of time with the harsh chemicals and particles in the air led to lung conditions, which caused him health problems and an early death from pulmonary fibrosis. The fact that he was a heavy smoker before and after this exposure, of course, did not help.

Kelly Fearing, from Louisiana, was new to town and came for the defense job. Despite protests that his work at Convair left him little time to paint, he was a regular prize winner at local exhibitions. After the war ended, Fearing led the art department at Texas Wesleyan College (now Texas Wesleyan University) from 1945-1947 before moving on to the University of Texas.

Through Reeder, he became a member of the Fort Worth Circle, and his work moved from regionalism to a spiritual romanticism.

Fine artists Juanita Montgomery Gilbert and Sybil Wilson focused on more technical illustrations. They drew diagrams of the planes keyed to a specific section of the manual or small images that highlighted specific sections.

Gilbert was known for her antique book illustrations (Shakespeare and Omar Khayyam), but regularly exhibited her own paintings, watercolors, and drawings with the Fort Worth Art Association. She also taught art students, but kept her “day job” at Convair for over 20 years.

Sybil Wilson took a different route. Raised in Fort Worth, she graduated from Yale and studied at the Art Students League. Her stint as an artist at the bomber plant was a stop along the way. She was a young artist, just starting out.

In 1954, Wilson became an assistant professor of art at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, where she taught for over 25 years. She embraced abstraction – particularly segmented and manipulated canvases – and exhibited her work regularly, including in New York City.

Mention must be made of one other artist who aided in defense work, but not in the illustration department. David Brownlow crafted sheet metal at North American Aviation in Grand Prairie during World War II and moved to Convair during the 1950s. According to Scott Barker and Morris Matson, who interviewed Brownlow, he taught orthographic projection – the art of visualizing a two-dimensional blueprint as a three-dimensional airplane.

As of 1943, there were about 20 artists working for Convair. Although there were jokes about their bohemian attitudes and “carefree eccentricities,” these fine artists filled a real need with their “futuristic paintings, fine engineering and technical sketches of the planes and their thousands of component parts” – information that could make or break the completion of a mission. It was, after all, war.

Carol Roark is an archivist, historian, and author with a special interest in architectural and photographic history who has written several books on Fort Worth history.