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David Adickes, the painter and sculptor responsible for some of Texas’s most popular public art, died on Sunday at the age of 98. His eight-decade career took him from a modest childhood in Huntsville to the galleries of France and Japan before landing him back in southeast Texas, where he became a pillar of the Houston art scene. In postwar Houston, Adickes’s idiosyncratic paintings—many featuring his trademark elongated figures, known as “Adickes men”—were exhibited in museums across the state and collected by wealthy Texans. Later in life, Adickes turned to public art, creating massive statues of Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin, as well as a nearly complete set of two-story-high presidents’ heads.
The future artist was born in the East Texas town of Huntsville in 1927, the third of four sons. His father owned an electrical-appliance store, while his mother was a homemaker and amateur artist. Adickes felt his vocation from an early age, ruining many of his schoolbooks by drawing obsessively in the margins. His artistic dreams were interrupted by World War II. Too underweight to become a pilot like his two older brothers, Adickes joined the Air Transport Command in 1945.
The ATC was charged with ferrying soldiers and supplies to the recently liberated French capital. “Paris changed my whole life,” Adickes would later say. After the war, he returned to France and enrolled at the Atelier Fernand Léger, recognizing the renowned Cubist painter’s name from an American magazine cover he had seen. Most of the instruction was done by Léger’s assistants, with the master coming by on Fridays to critique portfolios.
In 1951, Adickes returned to Houston, where he quickly made a splash with his colorful, quasi-Cubist landscapes and still lifes. He won major competitions across the state, signed with Houston’s prestigious DuBose Gallery, and attracted a following among collectors. Over the next few years, he had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Antonio’s Witte Museum; and Austin’s Laguna Gloria Gallery.
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Beginning in the 1980s, Adickes shifted his focus to public art, executing a series of increasingly ambitious commissions. He created a 36-foot-high cellist for Houston’s Arts District; a 26-foot-long trumpet for the 1984 World’s Fair, in New Orleans (it’s now on display in downtown Galveston); and an 8-foot-tall bronze statue of George H. W. Bush for Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport.
Topping them all was a 67-foot-high statue of Sam Houston off Interstate 45, in Huntsville. “Big Sam,” billed as the country’s “tallest statue of an American hero,” can be seen by drivers as far as six miles away. During construction, David met his life partner and love of his life, Linda Wiley.
After finishing Big Sam, Adickes dreamed up an even grander project—one that would consume the next three decades of his life and a substantial part of his personal wealth. After visiting Mount Rushmore for the first time in the 1990s, Adickes decided to build his own variation on the monument. “Of course, we don’t have sixty-foot-high mountains in Houston, but I could do smaller versions,” he later explained. While Mount Rushmore depicted four presidents, Adickes resolved to build a complete set.
Constructing busts of 41 presidents took around four years, by which time Adickes was forced to build a forty-second head, for George W. Bush. He installed the set in the early 2000s in Williamsburg, Virginia, where the heads formed the centerpiece of a short-lived tourist attraction called Presidents Park. A second set of heads ended up in South Dakota, where Adickes established a similar park. Both ventures eventually went out of business, although the deteriorating Virginia heads, which now sit on private land, have become a tourist attraction in their own right.
As you know, I have been a fan of David Adickes and his Giant Presidential Heads for basically the entire run of this blog. I was a fan of Big Sam on I-45 before I’d ever heard the name David Adickes. I admire the craft and the talent it takes to pull these things off, not to mention the sheer whimsy of it all. I greatly admire Adkickes’ tirelessness – he was cranking out new statues as recently as two years ago, at the tender age of 96. He’s a legend, and if the more serious parts of the art world took him and his output lightly, it’s their loss. Go drive by Mount Rush Hour and give David Adickes his props. Our city and our state are better for his life. The Chron has more.
This is fitting tribute to an unforgettable artist, Charles. Thanks. We lived in the Heights for 30 years and his nearby studio was a landmark in our neighborhood. We took many of our guests and visitors there. RIP.