New to the Collection: Works on Paper

January 20, 2009 – April 4, 2009

Ruth Ann Wefald Gallery

Among the variety of items in “New to the Collection: Works on Paper,” a painting by Roy C. Langford.

The family of former K-State professor Roy C. Langford (1903-1990) has given the Beach Museum of Art more than seventy paintings and drawings by their father. Langford was a longtime resident of Manhattan, Kansas. He taught psychology at K-State for more than forty years, retiring in 1973.

Brought up an orphan in Southeast Kansas, Langford earned degrees at K-State and Stanford University. He earned a Ph.D. in psychology with a minor in fine arts at Stanford in 1932.

Langford pursued his interests in psychology and art with equal passion, sometimes combining them in inventive ways. He specialized in the psychology of visual perception, and at K-State he taught a class on the psychology of art. Langford worked with fellow artists in the Manhattan community to help establish K-State’s art museum. He became well-known locally for his landscape imagery. “For years,” as daughter Jean Andrews has described, “he gathered ideas by sketching—in pastures, in the hills, on the river bottoms, in the streambeds—anywhere off the beaten track.”

When he was not working out of doors, Langford painted in the studio he established in his home in east Manhattan on Claflin Road. He invited artist friends there to draw from hired models.

Andrews of Santa Cruz, California, worked with Beach Museum of Art staff to select a group of objects representative of the artist’s career. Andrews’s brother, Charles Langford of Corvallis, Oregon, joined his sister in making the gift, which includes watercolors, oil and acrylic paintings, loose drawings, and several sketchbooks. Langford’s ca. 1950 watercolor, Sandbar and Trees in River, probably a view of the Kaw River, will hang in the Wefald Gallery exhibition, “New to the Collection: Works on Paper,” through April 5. Andrews says she hopes placing her father’s art at K-State will allow his contributions as a Kansas artist to be more fully explored and appreciated.