The Bob DeWeese sketchbooks and sketches

What is it?

Robert (Bob) and Genevieve (Gennie) DeWeese were pioneers in the modernist movement in the state of Montana. Primarily painters and printmakers, both artists influenced a generation of students through their teaching and involvement with the Montana arts community. Bob was Professor of Art at Montana State University from 1949 to 1977. Prior to that, he taught classes at Texas Tech University and Ohio State University. He earned his B.S. from Ohio State University and his M.F.A. from University of Iowa in 1948. In 1946 he married Gennie, who was a fellow art student at Ohio State.

This series of sketchbooks and loose sketches document how Bob interacted with and recorded his impressions of the world around him. Beginning in childhood, he sketched and made notes about art, world events, family, and all the people around him. A significant portion of the series was created while he served in the Pacific during World War II and has sketches of fellow soldiers, some with names. Subsequent notebooks relate to his education and early teaching career. A growing family, homes, and the business of art are also documented. Later sketchbooks are fewer.

The pages included in this collection were selected by Tina DeWeese.

Curator's Statement

By Tina DeWeese, September 2025

Aside from the obvious historical content of this collection of my father’s sketchbooks – which are a visual record of his life from his teenage years in the 1930s until the last week of his life in the beginning of the 1990s – I want to talk about my process of becoming familiar with them as the youngest daughter of five kids. I also feel that it is impossible to separate the acknowledgement of my father’s practice as an artist from that of my mother, Gennie, with whom he was partnered for 50 years. They were art students at Ohio State University from 1938-1940 and remained friends and confidants through their mutual frustrations of sustaining that practice through the war years, married in 1946, and partnered as a family of five until he died a month before his 69th birthday. We mourned his loss deeply. Having no more images from his sketchbooks to reflect the continuity of our lives left a profound vacancy.

This collection of images is a tribute to his lifelong practice of recording his visual world in sketches. Some ideas evolved into paintings and prints, but drawing was primarily his way of making notes in response to the moment.

As far back as I remember, a sketchbook always accompanied him. If not a sketchbook, Daddy always carried a loosely rubber band-bound packet of odd sized, often hand torn, papers in his shirt pocket, accompanied with stubby dull pencils, cheap pens, or mostly used up felt tip markers to jot visual notes of any occasion. His eyes often squinted to peel back the layers of hard definition to get at that internal impulse of response. In a later sketchbook, we find the note, “responsibility – the ability to respond.” Drawing was his means of keeping that response alive and was the fundamental ground of 37 years of teaching.

I set out on the essential editorial task of selecting from several thousand drawings during the winter of 2023. I’d been through these sketch books once before his last major exhibition, and some pages were still marked. David Spencer, beloved staff member from the Holter Museum, copied the drawings I marked to offer in a three ring binder at the 2006 show. It was important to me then to offer people an opportunity to leaf through these decades of drawings as basis for the multitudes of works spread across not only the walls of the Holter Museum, but also in three galleries in Bozeman of his prints. These exhibits, curated by Terry Karson, culminated in a three-day event at the Holter. Two catalogues were created for this exhibition: Robert DeWeese: A Legacy, gives tribute to Bob from close friends and colleagues, and A Look Ahead explores the work of three of his students and extends to the works of their students. Taken together, the catalogs document a legacy of influence that reverberates today, as the arts have been passed down through generations of practitioners in all cultures.

My own curatorial process was not so much an editorial process of selecting one image over another, so much as it was an exercise much like his own, and like my experience with digital photography. I’ve come to acknowledge that it is a practice “without ambition” of making a masterpiece of one image so much as it is about immersion into ANY moment of response to an image or environment, from which there might be multiple sketches, or “snapshots” as in photography (and which I’ve come to understand through the work of friend, dancer and choreographer Mary Overlie as “Postmodernist”). I think also about Robert Pirsig’s description of “Dynamic Quality”: that moment of perception prior to identifying, defining ,and stabilizing the experience that he identified as “static quality.” Dad’s line was fluid from a lifelong practice of sometimes glimpsing, sometimes peering into, whatever was essential to the transient moment. As one exasperated parent expressed, “Johnny starts out so good but he ruins it every time!” There was often a lot of scratching and smudging to draw out that essence along the way, “blurring the line” as often happens in this search! Bob imparted this explorative process to many students (and progeny!) over the years. (Josh DeWeese’s recent exhibit at Missoula’s Radius Gallery is “Blurring the Line.”) Learning to “see” was his personal practice, as much as it was his profession.

Reviewing these sketchbooks, marking pages and editing down to the essential process I could see through his pages, engulfed my attention through the season of watching the return of a looming autocratic interception of our democratic rule of law, on the threshold of fascist takeover that felt lightyears away from the world my folks left behind. But there were premonitions in their lifetimes: my dad left when George H. Bush was showing his military might with “smart bombs” in Iraq, which set the grounds for his son, George W. Bush, to follow through with full-fledged war in the guise of threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction. My mother lived through those events and left just before Obama was elected with her own hopes for a better future.

Opening the sketchbooks and delving through the decades helped flesh out a context for me to see deeply into the ebb and flow of war and peace in the world. Many of these drawings were made while Dad was stationed in Hawaii during World War II, where he honed his skill at portraiture of the soldiers and civilians he encountered during his adventure overseas. He also explored his hand at political commentary, both the horrors and the humor.

The sketchbooks after that time represented a Golden Age between wars when family and community really mattered. My siblings and I grew up believing that this was the nature of life: that the arts and humanities prevailed over military and religious predominance of social dictate and power over liberty. For us, it was a time when immersion into nature was a prevailing counterpoint to a cultural heritage in pursuit of creative expression through a privileged educational smorgasbord of opportunity. We grew up in a period of renaissance where there existed very little dictate of behavior but rather an unfolding opportunity to pursue our individual explorations.

Of course, we encountered the social and political turmoil of war with Vietnam, but we held communion with our deep-rooted family bonds through our respective protests. My sister Gretchen headed away from academia by bus with a saddle on her back to seek her dream of packing horses into the wilderness. My oldest sister Cathie’s examination of our habitual posture of colonial dominance in the world became a guidepost for all of us to question our collective identity as “exceptional” Americans. My own story wound through a 26-year partnership with a Vietnam vet who became both my backpacking guide and co-habitant in the heart of Eden before stumbling his way to suicide from a chronic addiction to alcohol. My brother Jan’s dedication to exploring and teaching cultural roots of music guided his service to Southeast Asian refugees in the wake of that war, and now Afghan friends who are refugees from that war. Brother Josh carried the torch of the artist legacy far beyond our father even knowing as Director of the Archie Bray and Ceramics Professor in the School of Art--and now as director of the department! It always makes me sad to know that Dad never knew all that. And what fantastic work Josh makes along the way! His studio is primary to his life, much as Dad’s was for him. They could certainly commiserate today about “How goes the battle?”--speaking about war and peace!

As a father of five, Dad recorded our family through all the years that he was here. Now we see these reflections of ourselves growing up over decades, with the prevailing comfort of a family that holds these bonds yet today, struggles and all. Community with other families and friends was an organic overflow and held common ground through the decades intellectually, politically, and ideologically. Figurative, imaginative, and sometimes uncanny likenesses and portraits of friends and family were a common thread of focus for Bob through the years. Like family, these bonds with friends extend through the decades to the next generations and continue today, as do multitudes of Bob’s sketches tacked on walls of old friends’ homes!

As I turned the pages through the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s I followed the threads that carried Bob from one era to another of his lifelong pursuit of being responsive to the moment through his lifelong practice of drawing what he sees. Some of that perception was focused outward, some inward--and it was all recorded through these pages.

The family has long discussed creating a book of Bob’s drawings, and the digital collection from these sketchbooks will be a valuable resource if we take that step.

For further reference, interested researchers can visit the www.deweeseart.com website, created by myself and published by the family in 2015 to show the works of Bob and Gennie. It is incomplete but ongoing to accommodate the multitudes of files of their lifeworks.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], Bob DeWeese sketchbooks and sketches, Montana State University (MSU) Library, Bozeman, MT, [Item permalink or DOI]

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