Fresh Paint: The Houston School

Inspired by Houston's complex mixture of small-town folkways and urban hustle, glitzy skyscrapers and sluggish bayous, space-age life style and Southern gentility, the Texas artists have turned their backs on the formalist concerns of New York, Rose notes in her catalogue introduction. They have produced instead a ''humanist figurative'' art, emphasizing ''content and moral concerns,'' narrative incident, interest in detail, ''tactile values'' and drawing. And, working away at the fine-art tradition while New York basked in what she calls the ''novelty-oriented'' 60's, they refused to believe that painting was dead.