Early Artists of Santa Fe and Taos
/A little over a hundred years ago, the mystique of the art colonies of Santa Fe and Taos was increasingly a topic of intrigue in the cultural centers of this country and abroad. Interest was piqued by tales of the area's phenomenal light, awe-inspiring landscapes, and authentic cultures - a reputation reinforced by the activities of groups such as the Taos Society of Artists artist cooperative and Los Cinco Pintores artist collective in Santa Fe. These early artists and cultural visionaries solidified the status of Santa Fe and Taos as international art centers. They laid the foundation for the robust art market and unique museum system that endures today. We hope you enjoy having a look at the following available works by some of the early artists of Santa Fe and Taos.
Gustave Baumann (1881-1971) came to New Mexico in 1918 at the invitation of Walter Ufer and soon decided to settle in Santa Fe where he remained for the rest of his life. The vivid colors of the Southwest fascinated him and immediately appeared in his works such as this woodblock print, Pecos Valley (edition #75/129). The Santa Fe artists' community embraced Baumann, and in 1926 he constructed the first effigy of Zozobra from designs by Will Shuster. He was elected an associate member of the Taos Society of Artists and was a founding member of both the Society of New Mexico Painters and the Santa Fe Art Club. His woodblock prints are forever identified with Santa Fe art of the 20th-century.
Soon after arriving in Santa Fe, Will Shuster (1893-1969) met four painters with whom his name would become linked. In 1921 Shuster, along with Willard Nash, W.E. Mruk, Josef Bakos, and Fremont Ellis, formed the original Santa Fe art colony. With a nod in the direction of New York's The Eight (and decidedly away from Taos's more famous association of artists), the group called themselves The Five, or Los Cinco Pintores in deference to Santa Fe's Spanish heritage. This small etching, titled Witter Bynner's Home in Santa Fe (ca. 1930), is an ode to the famed poet who promulgated the area's cultural status among such artistic and literary luminaries as Ansel Adams, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Martha Graham, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, Carl Sandburg, Igor Stravinsky, Carl Van Vechten, and Thornton Wilder.
Fremont Ellis (1897-1985) moved to Santa Fe permanently in 1919 and was the youngest member of Los Cinco Pintores, the 1920s society of Santa Fe artists. Ellis and his colleagues, Jozef Bakos, Walter Mruk, Willard Nash and Will Shuster, created an awareness of contemporary art which was essential to the foundation of the Santa Fe artist colony. Ellis committed to an impressionistic style of painting and had an ongoing love affair with the natural light and beauty of New Mexico as seen in this unforgettable oil on canvas entitled Road to Aspen Ranch.
Painter, printmaker, and children's book illustrator Barbara Latham (1896-1989) was born in Walpole, Massachusetts, in 1896. She was raised in Norwich, Connecticut, and studied at the Norwich Free Academy and then attended Pratt Institute from 1915 to her graduation in 1919. She then studied with Andrew Dasburg at the Art Students League's summer school in Woodstock, New York. She spent the early part of her career in New York, where she worked for the Norcross Publishing Company and did illustrations for Forum magazine and the New York Times Sunday magazine. In 1925, Latham went to Taos for the first time to seek material for illustrations for a greeting card company. She met artist Howard Cook, who was in the process of developing illustrations for Willa Cather's Death Comes to the Archbishop. The couple married in 1927 and in 1933 made their home near Taos where she made paintings like this 18x24-inch oil, entitled Taos Plaza, in a style that was a blend of the colorful approach to landscape developed by the original Taos painters and later followers, and a certain muscularity of form suggestive of Thomas Hart Benton. In 1976, Barbara Latham and Howard Cook settled in Santa Fe.
The renowned Russian-born artist Leon Gaspard (1882-1964) first came to New Mexico on his doctor's advice and with an invitation to visit from Sheldon Parsons. After he failed to take a liking to Santa Fe, it was Parsons who advised him to move to the small primitive village of Taos. One of the first people Gaspard would become acquainted with was the former cowpoke, illustrator, and aspiring painter, W. Herbert "Buck" Dunton. In his book on Gaspard, author Frank Waters writes that “week after week” the two “packed into the wild Sangre de Christo Mountains, fishing in the trout-water streams that emptied into the turbulent Rio Grande, hunting on the high, forested slopes, and leisurely sketching. In return for these outings, Gaspard gave his guide lessons in oil painting.” This untitled 11x14-inch oil of Taos Adobes is among the paintings Gaspard made that first year he arrived in 1919.
Allice Schille (1869-1955) studied with famed American artist and educator William Merritt Chase, and in 1904, while studying at Académie Colarossi, five of her works were displayed at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts (the Paris Salon). She was among the earliest American artists to fully embrace European modernism, and she is often credited for bringing the style back to the United States through watercolor. Schille's first visit to Santa Fe and Taos in 1919 was most likely the result of her longtime friendship with Olive Rush, but she was also familiar with the region by virtue of her acquaintance with John Sloan and Randall Davey. In 1920, four of Schille's works were included in an exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art. This diminutive 5x6-inch watercolor, entitled A Summer Storm, New Mexico (ca. 1923), is a vivid example of Schille's fluid use of color to capture the ethereal mood of this place. She would continue to paint in the state at various times through the mid-1930s.
Ralph Pearson (1883-1958) was an accomplished etcher at a time when the art was just emerging as a popular medium in the United States. He was one of the earliest printmakers in New Mexico, settling in Taos about 1915. He is known for his images of New Mexico Indian pueblos - works such is this 5x9-inch etching from 1920, Taos Pueblo. Pearson was a member of the Chicago Society of Etchers, the New York Society of Etchers, California Art Club, California Society of Etchers and the Brooklyn Society of Etchers. He exhibited widely and won numerous awards including a medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. His work can be found today in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Art Institute of Chicago, Mobile Museum of Art, San Diego Museum of Art, and Columbia University.
Gene (Geneva) Kloss (1903-1996) and her husband, poet Phil Kloss, discovered Taos in 1925 during a road trip to the East. That same year she produced this 7x9-inch etching, Old Mesilla. In 1929, the couple settled permanently in New Mexico, and during a career spanning more than six decades, Gene produced more than 600 prints, drypoints, aquatints, etchings, intaglios, and mezzo tints. Although printmaking was her preferred medium, Kloss was also very accomplished in the watercolor medium. From the late 1920s Kloss' subject matter focused on the life of the Pueblo Indian, the landscape of New Mexico, the rites of the Penitente Brotherhood and related indigenous subjects. Kloss believed that her subject matter would direct the technique she used. Her preference for a concealed light source in a scene, for long, sinewy shadows, and her stop-action approach to figure drawing have become signature marks for her collectors.
E. Martin Hennings (1886-1956) enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1901, graduating with honors after five years. He then traveled to Munich to study with leading teachers Franz von Stück and Angelo Junk and remained in Germany until the outbreak of World War I. After returning to Chicago, Hennings attracted the attention of businessman and art patron, Carter Harrison Jr., who sponsored a trip for Hennings to paint in Taos in exchange for works created while he was there (a proposition he had also made to Victor Higgins and Walter Ufer). Hennings came to New Mexico to fulfill his part of the arrangement in 1917, and that same year exhibited three paintings in the inaugural exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe. He ultimately became a member of the Taos Society of Artists in 1924. Although Hennings' work was greatly influenced by his traditional academic training, after his arrival in Taos his work began to embrace modernist tendencies as seen in the stylized way he used form, color, and line to interpret the landscape and figures in this 12x14-inch oil, Crossing the Stream.
Sheldon Parsons (1886-1943) first arrived in Santa Fe in 1913, following on the heels of other early artists who were part of the coalescing art colony including Carlos Vierra, Kenneth Chapman, Olive Rush, Gerald Cassidy, and Paul Burlin. Prior to his arrival, Parsons was a New York portrait artist of significant repute, but once in New Mexico, he found the terrain so irresistible that he gave up portraiture and never again returned to figure painting. Parsons quickly became a major force in the burgeoning Santa Fe art scene. When the New Mexico Museum of Fine Art was constructed in 1917, Parsons became its first director. In the ensuing years, he assisted many of the area's early artists while garnering increasing recognition for his own serene, impressionistic landscapes - works like this Untitled Landscape (ca. 1914) painted the year after his arrival.
Henry Balink (1882-1963) was born in Amsterdam, and in 1909 he entered the Royal Academy in Amsterdam on the Queen Wilhelmina Merit Scholarship. He graduated in 1914 and immediately began working as a professional artist in Holland. The onset of World War I prompted Balink to immigrate to America where he would work for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and later paint murals for the Art Institute of Chicago. After viewing a poster in a railroad station, Balink developed a fascination with the American West. As a result of his interest, Balink stayed briefly in Taos, New Mexico, in 1917 and returned on occasion until he permanently settled in Santa Fe in 1924. Balink's extensive training in the Dutch Old Master tradition of painting made him a skilled draftsman and prepared him for the complexity of his chosen central theme, the American Indian. His work is in the permanent collections of the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe. This 20x16-inch oil is titled Koot Kaw - Governor of Walpi.
Oscar E. Berninghaus (1874-1952) began his career in his native St. Louis as a commercial lithographer. In 1899, as a reward for his hard work in taking night classes at Washington University and at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts, he was given a month's paid vacation and provided with free passage to the West by the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. While visiting Taos, Berninghaus met Bert Phillips, who became a lifelong friend, and was inspired to join the new Taos artist colony. Berninghaus established a seasonal rhythm based on his family's needs, spending winters in St. Louis pursuing a successful career as a commercial artist and summers in Taos painting the Native Americans, their horses, and the landscape. These candid paintings of Taos earned him great respect among the other artists and he became a founding member of the Taos Society of Artists in 1915 and he settled in Taos permanently in 1925. This 12x16-inch oil is titled The Well in the Corral.
““Name me no names for my disease,
With uninforming breath;
I tell you I am none of these,
But homesick unto death —Homesick for hills that I had known,
For brooks that I had crossed,
...Before I met this flesh and bone
And followed and was lost… .And though they break my heart at last,
Yet name no name of ills.
Say only, “Here is where he passed,
Seeking again those hills.””