Taos in late May. (photo by Tad Wise)
In 1898 Taos, New Mexico was a very small village attached to one of the larger surviving Pueblos in the U.S. That summer a couple of landscape painters were camping under the stars, painting their way down from Denver by way a buckboard wagon which broke a wheel just north of the Pueblo. Ernest Blumenschein lost a coin toss to Bert Phillips obliging “Blumy” to saddle up and find a blacksmith. On that ride into Taos a spell was cast and by the time the wheel was fixed both painters were placed firmly in its thrall.
Phillips fell in love with a local doctor’s sister and never left. Bluemschein returned every summer until settling permanently in 1919. By then the two had founded the Taos Society of Artists. Membership rules were that a painter needed to have worked in and around Taos for three years and that existing members approved of a new member unanimously.
Sante Fe, 60 odd miles to the South, had a fair amount to do with the success of the Taos artist colony, which — in this first wave, anyway — consisted of regional artists painting landscapes, cowboys, Indians and what remained of their way of life. Mabel Dodge, the Gertrude Stein of the West, moved to Taos in 1917 with her second husband and built a sprawling compound. She promptly fell in love with and married an Indian chief, then set about inviting luminaries from Europe and America to her enchanted high-desert Valhalla.
Similarly the arts and craft colony of Byrdcliffe which opened in 1901, and hoped to support itself selling its creations in New York City, was almost exactly contemporaneous to Taos although it could not have been more different in temperament. Ralph Whitehead bankrolled the entirety of Byrdcliffe which opened as would a new college campus, with “thus and such a professor” teaching “thus and such a subject,” the entirety instilled with the strict philosophical tenets of John Ruskin. Nor was there a remarkable Pueblo settlement begging to be immortalized on canvas, next door. Woodstock’s charms were soon enough stuff of legend, just the same. We also have the bookend experience of Whitehead’s scout artist Bolton Brown “discovering” the extraordinary vista of Overlook, much as Blumenschein did Taos (although the first Anglo to settle outside the Pueblo was Kit Carson himself in 1848.) The avant garde influence of Mabel Dodge Luhan on Taos approximated the bohemian spirit of disgruntled Byrdcliffe Lieutenant Hervey White, who broke away to create the communal Maverick, although a Marxist-based poverty prevailed at the Maverick, paradoxical to Mabel’s conspicuous wealth. Woodstock soon added the third component of the Art Student’s League summer school which hit full stride in the 1920s. And so the stodgy high church of Byrdclife, low-church of the Maverick, and middle ground of the League’s “new school” melded and married in a marvelous stew wooing American Art’s strongman George Bellows in 1925, his wonders to perform.
Back in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s proudest import, D. H. Lawrence (circa ‘22), failed to write a novel immortalizing Taos. That artistic breakthrough awaited the disgruntled young wife of photographer and art pioneer Alfred Steiglitz whose semi-erotic nudes of his nubile bride, Georgia O’Keefe, shocked New York society. O’Keefe taught her husband a lesson, accepting Mabel’s long-standing invitation to visit Taos, where, in a nearby guest house, she experienced her breakthrough, succeeding where George Bellows back in Woodstock failed. In what? Why in by-passing the gauntlet thrown by New York’s 1913 Armory Show (partially organized by Mabel Dodge) all-but-insisting that the new way forward in modern painting must be cast in the European-based Cubist mold. After Bellows’ astonishing early canvases in what would soon become known as “The Ash Can School,” he foundered, becoming increasingly dependent upon composition theories, many of which harkened back to Italian Masters, wherein he sought a new classicism. Mrs. Bellows, a life-long adherent to Christian Science, cast a pale eye upon Woodstock’s astounding local physician’s perfect diagnosis of the profoundly inflamed appendix which — untreated — killed her husband a few short months later, in 1925. The result being: we will never know if Bellows might have forged his own American modernism, as did O’Keefe. Georgia seemed to have considered Freud, Marx, as well as “Nude Descending a Staircase,” (the abstract bombshell of the Armory Show) and found them all but irrelevant before the stark wonder of the New Mexican landscape.
Although tremendous fame (and the ubiquitous presence of ever-calm reproductions on doctor’s office walls) seem to have trivialized her accomplishment today, O’Keefe’s importance as a woman and an artist cannot be denied. But while that one-woman-revolution was quietly played out on Ghost Ranch, Woodstock and Taos continued to experience parallel painterly transformations on battlefields largely trod by men.
The most obvious go-between was Andrew Dasburg [“Lives of the Painters,”
Woodstock Times, March 7], who with Konrad Cramer and Henry McFee outraged Woodstock’s old guard through the teens. Gradually wooed from Woodstock by Mabel’s largesse, Dasburg’s Cubism together with an old-world charm, proved something of a feathered battering ram in Taos. The cowboy illustrator/artists, of course, were outraged. However the true geniuses of the Taos Society of Painters proved far more sympathetic to Dasburg’s soon Kandisky-infused explorations. For what Blumenschein gravitated to here and what he captured with uncanny ability, is the heightened light of the high dessert. Higgins and Ufer likewise were drawn as much to this visual phenomena, as to the often sentimental depiction of western life. “Blumy,” in particular, created mosaics of crystalline color anticipating abstract canvases, not unlike Klimt in Vienna — whose art deco tutelage paved the way for enfant terrible Egon Scheile’s cubist-free modernism. In Taos, the final irony was that though Andrew Dasburg is credited with leading the abstract movement here, and this “second wave” of painters was undoubtedly informed by his hero, Cezanne, Dasburg’s work again modulated under the visual sorcery palpable here. Like the Peyote ritual he first experienced in Mable Dodge’s Manhattan apartment, Taos became known as an outlandish “trip” every painter worthy the name should experience at least once. Bellows himself passed through Taos, soon knocking out candy-colored canvases closer to Peter Max than “Ashcan School Art.”
The Western/Mexican or Taosino influence in Woodstock art is most noticeable in the work Dasburg began out West and finished in Woodstock, as well as canvasses by the Magafan sisters, Eduardo Chavez, Otto Biershols, Marion Greenwood, Julio De Diego, and outsider John Ernst who, more than any other Woodstock artist, all but worshipped the revolutionary watercolors of John Marin — a painter of far greater influence in Taos than Picasso, himself.