With museum director Edgar L. Hewitt's encouragement, Maria and Julian Martinez formulated a new style of San Ildefonso pottery featuring matte black and polished black surfaces. This "Jar with Avanyu,” circa 1919–1920, incorporating a feathered serpent representing water, was applauded by Anglo Modernists.
Hewitt sought to encourage residents of the nearby pueblo to improve the quality of their handmade goods via the "Santa Fe Program." A star participant, Maria Martinez, used prehistoric clay to fashion an intriguing canoe-shaped vessel decorated with a traditional image of a feathered serpent, and later evolved a new style of beautiful matte-on-black pottery that was highly popular.
Around the turn of the Twentieth Century, academic artists began settling in Taos, where they depicted the scene in a romanticized, European manner. Two leading figures, Joseph Henry Sharp and E. Irving Couse, applied their European training to striking paintings of Taos Pueblo Indians. Whereas Sharp emphasized the stoic nature of figures engaged in traditional rituals, Couse showcased his ample talent for capturing contrasting hues and flickering firelight on figures in "Taos Pueblo — Moonlight," 1914, and "War Shield," 1915, both of which emphasized Pueblo harmony with nature. His work, widely reproduced, came to symbolize New Mexico art.
In 1915, Couse and Sharp, joined by Ernest Blumenschein, Oscar Berninghaus, W. Herbert Dunton and Bert Geer Phillips, formed the Taos Society of Artists (TSA) to organize traveling sales exhibitions of their work. These well-established artists, joined by others over the next dozen years, painted nostalgic views of the daily and religious rituals of area Hispanics and Native Americans. Blumenschein, the most modern and abstract of the group, created an interesting body of work. In 1927, Catherine Critcher, a latecomer to TSA, painted a somber "Hopi Pottery Maker" in front of her handmade tall vases that had become popular commercial goods. Another late participant, E. Martin Hennings painted beautiful views of Native Americans among yellow aspens.
Word of the museum in Santa Fe's nonexclusionary exhibition program and receptiveness to new kinds of art encouraged Modernist artists, writers and intellectuals to relocate to the state after World War I. A forerunner of the avant-garde was Jan Matulka, who recorded his passionate response to local rituals in brilliant Cubist/Fauvist paintings like "Pueblo Dancer (Matachina)," 1917.
Modernists started arriving in Santa Fe somewhat later than the Taos group. Competition, even animosities, developed between the TSA traditionalists and the avant-garde (New Mexico Painters).
Many of E.I. Couse's images, reproduced on Santa Fe Railway calendars, helped promote tourism by showing Native Americans engaged in characteristic activities, such as in "War Shield,” 1915. Like other Taos artists, "Couse was not concerned with ethnography, but rather with the romance of noble Indians coexisting with nature,” says curator Joseph Traugott.
A key figure in promoting a form of Modernism in Santa Fe was Henri, who persuaded such colleagues as George Bellows, Randall Davey and John Sloan to visit; Davey became a permanent resident, and Sloan returned many summers. Images such as Sloan's animated depiction of Pueblo ritual clowns in action, "Ancestral Spirits," 1919, set an evocative, emotional tone that other artists followed.
One of the best, today underheralded, painters was William Penhallow Henderson, whose Cezanneseque, post-Impressionist images crackle with the drama and vigor of Native American rituals. Others who brought distinct styles were color woodcut ace Gustave Baumann; B.J.O. Nordfeldt, influenced by Cezanne and Gauguin; Stuart Davis (who created the monochromatic "New Mexico Peak") and Edward Hopper.
Modernist titan Marsden Hartley immersed himself in and wrote about the aesthetic value of Native American and Hispanic rituals and art. His appealing "El Santo" of 1917 reflects his appreciation for local cultures.
After World War I, a bohemian group of Santa Fe painters, led by Josef Bakos and known as the "Cinco Pintores," produced a body of work celebrating the state's scenery and people that was occasionally adventurous and experimental, but usually nostalgic and respectful.
Hewitt and others encouraged Pueblo easel artists, whose intriguing work was often exhibited side-by-side with Anglo modernists at the Museum of Fine Arts. "The Modernist artistic explosion in Santa Fe," says Traugott, "helped to transform New Mexico into a nationally known cultural destination."
Meanwhile, efforts to build an economy based on tourism encouraged the replacement of handmade Hispanic religious articles by goods manufactured in the United States — chromolithographs and plaster saints — that were sold as artifacts and curios. In the face of this competition, many Native artisans stopped carving devotional objects, like retablos, before World War I. Articles and photographs disseminated around the country played up the exotic, picturesque nature of the region and its people as a means of attracting tourists.
Economic development, tourism and the arts in the state were hard hit in the Great Depression.
In the 1930s, two groups of Modernists emerged in New Mexico. One group, associated with magnetic arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan, was centered in Taos. Early on, Cubist artist Andrew Dasburg painted a colorful view, "Taos Houses (New Mexico Village)," 1926, replete with flat planes, geometric forms and simplified shapes.
When Luhan attracted Georgia O'Keeffe to Taos, she also encouraged visits by others from the Alfred Stieglitz circle, including photographers Ansel Adams and Paul Strand and artists John Marin and Rebecca Salisbury Strand (later James).
This iconic image, "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico,” 1941, was recorded by photographer Ansel Adams late one afternoon when he stopped along a road passing by the village. The moon rising over Hernandez emphasizes its isolation, the expanse of surrounding landscape and the dramatic interplay of light and dark on the horizon. Traugott opines that the picture "symbolizes the triumph of Modernism in New Mexico.”
A highlight from this period is O'Keeffe's mysterious "Bear Lake (Desert Abstraction)," 1931, one of the iconic images she produced of the grandeur of the New Mexican landscape. Adams's "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico," 1941, a dramatic view of an isolated Hispanic village, "has evolved into the one icon that symbolizes the triumph of Modernism in New Mexico on the cusp of World War II," says Traugott.
The major figure in introducing nonobjective art to New Mexico, Raymond Jonson, taught at the University of New Mexico and painted colorful abstractions, such as "Watercolor No. 8, 1940," with great sophistication and technical skill. He and other nonobjective artists formed the Transcendental Painting Group to promote abstract painting, primarily in Santa Fe. One of Johnson's followers, Willard Lumpkins, painted a successful abstract watercolor, "This Was a Breakthru," in 1935.
A photograph, "First Atomic Explosion at a Distance of About Five Miles, Trinity Site, New Mexico, July 16, 1945," immortalizes the detonation of the Manhattan Project's first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, N.M. After the carnage and violence of the war, a return to nostalgic genre scenes was out of the question for most New Mexico artists. Rather than Taos or Santa Fe, artists now tended to concentrate in Albuquerque, around the University of New Mexico. A magnet was avant-garde teacher Jonson, who opened a gallery in his home/studio that still stands on campus. One of his star students, Richard Diebenkorn, was just beginning experiments with Abstract Expressionism.
Nonobjective artists who thrived included Frederick Hammersley, a geometric abstractionist who settled in Albuquerque and created small, organic abstractions like "Scissors," 1989, and the much-admired Agnes Martin, who returned for a second and final stay in New Mexico and painted precise, horizontal bands of pale tones of such subtlety that are open to multiple interpretations.
Meanwhile, a new generation of Native painters, notably Fritz Scholder and T.C. Cannon, adherents of Abstract and Pop Art, recast Indian stereotypes. They "poked fun at the colonial representations of academic painters," says Traugott, and "substituted a political view of Native life that centered on ironic situations and social confrontations."
Some Modernists worked in Taos, including Dasburg, James, Martin, Beatrice Mandelman and Louis Ribak. O'Keeffe's mystique continued to grow at Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch. Eliot Porter's starkly simple photograph of a horse skull around Abiquiu reminded viewers of O'Keeffe's art and the omnipotence of death in the desert.
Multiple forms of artistic expression, growing out of the counterculture of the 1960s, popped up. This work has ranged from Florence Miller Price's reliefs created by pouring layers of resin on Plexiglas to Bruce Nauman's use of words and phrases on lithographs to cartoonist Patrick Oliphant's deft lampoons of political figures in paint and sculpture. Rather than depicting grand vistas, Gail and Zachariah Rieke create miniature landscapes in boxes filled with found objects.
In "Deluxe Samba Pulling Bambi,” 2005, Carol Sarkasian applied rhinestones, glass beads, gold leaf and silver leaf to a model car and trailer, transforming them into glittering, eye-popping objects. Responding to her interest in travel and tourism, she elevates tourism and popular culture to a high level, undermining distinctions between jewelry and sculpture.
The presence in the state of feminist art icon Judy Chicago and other talented artists like Harmony Hammond has stirred dialogue about the place of women in society and the roles of men and women today.
Ceramicist Rick Dillingham aroused interest with his broken, reconstructed, repainted, refired vessels, such as "Small Globe," 1990, while Luis Jimenez drew attention with his large polychromed fiberglass sculptures. Wonderfully bright colors — paint, rhinestones, beads, metal — animate the work of a number of contemporary artists, such as Luis Tapia and James Luna, perpetuating an updated Hispanic tradition. They are reminiscent of the museum's shiny Harley-Davidson motorcycle of 1940, its leather saddle bags festooned with chrome studs.
As the Twenty-First Century begins, cultural barriers are breaking down and New Mexico artists are creating diverse works that, like art in the rest of the country, meld varied artistic sources into strong, individual statements.
As Traugott summarizes, "Since the 1880s, New Mexico art has been caught between forces pushing for a homogeneous national culture and those interested in perpetuating intercultural traditions." He concludes that today, "Tension between national and regional movements ensures that the future of New Mexico art will reflect an unpredictable synthesis of these opposing forces."
Traugott's 276-page, fully illustrated catalog of the museum's collection, which serves as the exhibition catalog, is published by the Museum of New Mexico Press and sells for $55, hardcover.
The New Mexico Museum of Art is on the Plaza at 107 West Palace Avenue. For information,
www.nmartmuseum.org
or 505-476-5072.
