Social compatibility and shared affinities for modern art and classical music provided common ground among members of the circle and contributed to the group's cohesion.
Additionally, at the conclusion of World War II the ranks of Fort Worth's art community swelled with the return of artists who had served in the military.
[1] The colony's presence was acknowledged by Dallas newspaper critic John Rosenfield in 1948 when he observed that a "school" of modern artists was at work in neighboring Fort Worth.
[3] As enrollees at the Fort Worth School of Fine Arts, Lia Cuilty, Veronica Helfensteller, Marjorie Johnson, Sara Shannon and Bror Utter first met and exhibited together in the 1930s.
As youngsters, Bill Bomar, Veronica Helfensteller and Dickson Reeder took private art lessons from the same teacher, Mrs. Sallie Blyth Mummert.
Upon the couple's arrival, Bill Bomar (1919-1991), Lia Cuilty (1908-1978), Veronica Helfensteller (1910-1964), Marjorie Johnson (1911-1997), Sara Shannon (1920-1996) and Bror Utter (1913–1993) were quickly drawn into the Reeders' social and professional orbit.
During World War II and afterwards, the Texas General Exhibition offered statewide exposure and attendant publicity for the art of Bill Bomar, Veronica Helfensteller, Dickson Reeder and Bror Utter.
The opening of Six Texas Painters at the Erhard Weyhe Gallery in New York City in 1944 marked the first time that media coverage portrayed members of the Fort Worth Circle as a "compatible and independent-minded group".
Through play selection, set design, costuming and innovative musical accompaniment, the school's annual theatrical productions were seen by the public as an extension of the Fort Worth Circle's international aesthetic.
Cynthia Brants (1924-2006) returned to Fort Worth in 1945 with a degree in studio painting from Sarah Lawrence College and a desire to explore the limits of cubism.
[12] During the Circle's heyday, Bill Bomar lived in New York City; however, he often returned to Texas and exhibited paintings regularly in Fort Worth.
Johnson settled in New York City after World War II and attended the Art Students League but, like Bomar, continued to exhibit paintings in Fort Worth.
[16] The six who were represented by Betty McLean Gallery were Bill Bomar, Cynthia Brants, Kelly Fearing, George Grammer, Dickson Reeder and Bror Utter.
Knoedler Galleries included works by Bomar, Brants, Cuilty, Dickson Reeder and Utter in a large show of contemporary Texas painting held in New York City in 1952.
As young people, artists of the Fort Worth Circle painted conservatively and "shared a focus on rural, small-town, and, sometimes, urban life, tinged with the measured optimism that accompanied difficult times".
[19] With The Shannon Children as a baseline, over the next several years artists of the Fort Worth Circle "produced numerous figural studies set in imaginary space".
By the mid-1940s, Utter began to aggressively explore biomorphic abstraction, an aesthetic that combined organic or vaguely human shapes with fanciful colors.
Bill Bomar revealed a serious interest in abstraction when he entered Cat in Portia's Garden in the 1944 Local Artists Show and won First Prize for oil painting.
Based on his Italian observations, Utter developed a unique pictorial approach that broke solid structures such as buildings and columns into intersecting planes.