Edna Collins’s Camp Swift Murals and German Prisoners of War

Abstract

Edna Collins’s Camp Swift Murals and German Prisoners of War Cynthia Brandimarte (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Postcard of Recreation Hall No. 1 interior, Camp Swift. Figure 2 shows a mural featuring Moses Austin, Baron de Bastrop, and Antonio María Martínez visible on the right side of the rear wall. From the author’s collection. Texas artist Edna Collins left behind a rich record of her experiences when she designed and created murals for recreational buildings at the largest U.S. Army camp in the United States, Camp Swift in Texas, during World War II. Her murals were images of Texas and its history, as well as genre scenes of Mexico. She designed them to adorn buildings used by American soldiers whose knowledge of Texas and Mexico usually did not extend beyond what they knew from popular culture. Assisting her were artistically talented German prisoners of war (or POWs) and a few of Collins’s artist friends. Although the murals Collins created at Camp Swift did not survive the camp’s closure and sale of excess materials in 1948, photographs and sketches of the murals illustrate the work Collins did and amplify her recollections of it.1 For historians, Collins’s reminiscences, sketches, and photographs invite an examination that is relevant to current scholarship. [End Page 127] Collins’s works demonstrate the value placed on murals and other art by the U.S. military during the two world wars and the interwar period. They also record the use of POW artists to create murals in wartime internment camps like Camp Swift. Collins’s story is uncommon; there appear to have been relatively few civilian artists employed by the U.S. military for mural projects, few of those artists were women, and few collections of textual and visual records comparable to those Collins left us have been preserved. Born in Toronto, Canada, in 1885, Collins moved to Austin after her father, a pianist, accepted positions as choir director at St. David’s Episcopal Church and music teacher at the Texas School for the Blind.2 Collins attended Austin High School and took private art lessons from Robert Jerome Hill at the University of Texas (UT).3 Enrolling at UT, she took Samuel Gideon’s architecture class and Raymond Everett’s class in free-hand drawing and watercolors.4 As a sorority member, she met and befriended young women from across Texas and traveled to their hometowns to visit their families and attend their weddings.5 Her work habits and curiosity of mind attracted many friends, and her parents’ involvements in Austin’s cultural community gave Collins entrée to the city’s artistic circles. Amid her school, social, and cultural activities, Collins studied, practiced, and taught art.6 She took a short-term position as resident instructor in the Davis Mountains, where she stayed first at the Kingston Ranch and then at Duncan’s Ranch, absorbing unfamiliar landscapes she would later [End Page 128] depict in murals.7 During the 1910s, Collins became a mainstay of the Austin art community as an educator and exhibitor.8 A member and officer of the Austin Art League and the Texas Fine Arts Association, she was part of the art scene centering on the Elizabet Ney house.9 During the 1920s, Collins moved between Austin, Dallas, and New York City.10 While attending classes at the Art Students League in New York, she studied with Allen Tucker, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Dimitri Romanofski.11 When in Austin, she maintained a studio, taught at St. Mary’s Academy, and increased the frequency of her exhibitions.12 Competing at the State Fair of Texas in 1924, Collins was awarded first prize for oil portraiture.13 In 1925, she entered the Texas Art Exhibition of Fort Worth, at which she continued to exhibit during the following decade.14 In 1928, Collins entered the San Antonio Competition Exhibition, and she joined the Southern States Art League in 1929.15 She also competed in shows in Denver and Chicago.16 Collins worked mainly in portraiture during the interwar period, having received encouragement in this art form from her male instructors...