DENVER, COLO. — If you think of Taos, N.M. — its mountains, trees, plants and flowers, its rivers, animals, dwellings, buildings, vehicles, its people — as a weaving loom (not a bad metaphor, with a nod to the incredible weaving tradition of the Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest), you can begin to organize and compare the works of Walter Ufer (1876–1936) and Ernest Martin Hennings (1886–1956), the two members of the Taos Society of Artists who are featured in “A Place in the Sun: The Southwest Paintings of Walter Ufer and E. Martin Hennings” at the Denver Art Museum through April 24 and traveling to the Philbrook Museum in Oklahoma May 29–August 28.
For Hennings, the Taos Indians are the shuttle, moving through the warp, as if their movement somehow creates the tapestries he paints: the soft light, dramatic, billowing clouds and beautiful stands of aspen glowing golden in autumn. For Ufer, the Indians are the weft; this is their land by virtue of what they have put into it. They have woven themselves into the landscape. They work it, even as it shapes them.
Where the two painters overlap is in the sense of belonging that each conveys in his painting. The subjects in a Hennings painting are clearly of Taos, in Taos, part of Taos, while the subjects in an Ufer painting are Taos. When you look at a Hennings painting, you find the people in the landscape; when you look at an Ufer, you find the landscape in the people.
Taos links Hennings and Ufer. Why? What was it that drew them and so many other artists, writers, composers and aesthetes of all stripes to this remote village in northern New Mexico? What is it that draws artists to Taos to this day?
The origins of the Taos Society lie behind a thin, romantic veil of myth. As the story goes, in 1898 painters Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips were on a covered wagon adventure from Denver to Mexico, searching for an authentic America to paint. Their wagon broke down, as it happened, in Taos, and the beauties of the place struck them. But, as James Moore states in his catalog essay, “That Man Out There in the Mountains: Ufer, Hennings and the Conflicted Allure of Taos,” the manner in which Blumenschein and Phillips “discovered” Taos conceals the fact that two different railroad lines would have gotten them there without the need for a wainwright in the wilderness.
In fact, as Moore writes, Taos “had reasonable access to rail transportation. The town, while appearing primitive in some ways, provided all necessary amenities. They lived in relative comfort in a place where living expenses were cheap because of the general poverty of the region. Taos’s artistic advantages were its setting in a dramatic, ever-changing landscape and its proximity to an Indian pueblo in which some residents were open to outsiders.”
In fact, Taos had been an important trading stop on the trail from Colorado to northern Mexico for centuries. And, as for artists “discovering” Taos, Peter Moran — brother of Thomas — had painted there in the late 1860s, and Joseph Sharp, who would become one of the original Taos Society members, first visited and painted there in 1893.
Taos had a certain charm for wealthy Easterners and Midwesterners who traveled there. Over the next few years, in Chicago and Cincinnati, in the art academies in New York, Munich and Paris, a group of American artists discussed the promise of this “primitive place, a holdover of the Wild West, and a place where people could still see Indians in an ‘unspoiled’ condition,” writes Moore. Meanwhile, men like Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison and industrialist Oscar Mayer saw the artistic potential in Taos and began to provide support — and exhibition opportunities — to artists who would venture there.
By 1915, Blumenschein and Phillips had made their homes in Taos. Sharp, Oscar Berninghaus, William Herbert “Buck” Dunton and E.I. Couse followed them. Seizing a “one for all and all for one” moment, these six painters formed the Taos Society of Artists, whose cooperative purpose was to create group exhibitions that would travel around the United States. In 1917, Victor Higgins and Walter Ufer were admitted as members. In that same year, the year America entered World War I — a dicey moment for German American artists, who often had to prove their patriotism — E. Martin Hennings would make his first trip there. But Hennings would not be admitted into the Taos Society until 1924, when he and Catharine Critcher were elected. Kenneth Adams would round out the group shortly before it disbanded in 1927.
Important patrons, especially Mabel Dodge Luhan, provided material assistance to the society, and cultural luminaries like Robert Henri, John Marin, Nicolai Fechin and D.H. Lawrence made Taos into a destination. At the same time, Santa Fe was becoming an artistic center in its own right and Georgia O’Keeffe moved to New Mexico in 1929, painting the bones of the desert just down the road at Ghost Ranch.
The members of the Taos Society do not share a single stylistic temperament — Higgins and Blumenschein lean toward abstract design, for example, while Couse and Berninghaus stick fairly close to Nineteenth Century Realism — but the mere fact that they painted the same places — Taos Mountain, the Taos Pueblo — and same people — models and friends like Ben Lujan and Jim Mirabal — lends a certain cohesion to their artistic output.
In background and individual temperament, however, the members of the Taos Society diverge significantly. Perhaps no two diverge so radically as Walter Ufer and Ernest Martin Hennings.
Born in Germany, Ufer’s family emigrated to Kentucky when he was 2 years old. That he would, in later years, assert that he was born here tells something about his strong belief in American art and in the key role he believed Taos would play. The son of a master gunsmith and engraver, Ufer came to painting after an apprenticeship in lithography. In politics, he was an avowed socialist — a position not at all incompatible with patriotism, at least not then — with an abiding interest in labor and sympathy with working people. Color on Ufer’s canvases rails and roils like his politics and he places viewers close to his subjects — sometimes uncomfortably so — with them, among them. They often look back impassively or with mild disdain as they go about their daily tasks. By any measure, Ufer was a hugely successful painter, but he often alienated friends, colleagues, patrons — Carter Harrison among them — and clients. He suffered from depression, was an alcoholic, and died of appendicitis.
Though Ernest Martin Hennings was born in New Jersey, his family moved to Chicago when he was a child. His family had no artistic bent, but when he was 12 or 13, Hennings and a friend visited the Art Institute of Chicago, and talent stirred in the boy. Hennings made his way to Munich, and was inspired there by an Art Nouveau idea of design inspired by natural forms — and derived in part from Japanese prints — that was known in Germany as Jugendstil, or “youth style.” Hennings met Ufer in Munich and the two traveled together to see the sights and art in Paris. Hennings, in antipodal opposition to Ufer’s alla prima, wet-on-wet technique, paints with a narrow palette and smooth, undulant brushwork; his idealized figures float through, over and above the overall design of the work.
Typically wonderful, beautiful Hennings canvases, like “Passing By,” “Through the Greasewood” and “The Rendezvous,” layer pattern on pattern, color against color. We would need metered verse to know what these people are doing, where they are going, but Hennings leaves specifics to our imagining. But the feeling the works convey is one of ritual, of timelessness. “Announcements,” on the other hand, is perhaps the most direct, most Ufer-like, large-scale painting Hennings ever did, probably in response to government pressure to seize Indian lands and forbid traditional cultural practices. Still, as direct and serious as the faces of the elders are, the eye is drawn to the stripes on the robes and the shadowy crags in the background. These things are quietly eternal, Hennings seems to say.
Ufer’s major works, paintings like “Her Daughter,” “Their Audience,” “Me and Him” and “Going East,” are direct, even confrontational compositions. Like “Announcements,” “Going East” is Ufer’s response to the government’s desire to vilify and nullify the annual pilgrimage of the Taos Indians to nearby Blue Lake, where adolescents were traditionally initiated into adulthood.
Though essays in the catalog suggest that Ufer’s work suffered after 1923, “Bob Abbott and His Assistant,” painted in 1935, a year before his death, is Ufer at the summit of his art. The two men look as though they might be weary of fixing the old jalopy. Bob Abbott, in fact, looks like any mechanic about to deliver the bad news. The Indian and the white man, together in Taos in the midst of the Depression, combine forces here, trying to keep things together, keep things running. It is a major work, ranking with Maynard Dixon’s “Forgotten Men” paintings as an epitome of Depression-era art.
Between the Depression and World War II and its aftermath, other generations of artists came to Taos. By then the world had changed and changed again. Artists scrambled to find their way in an American culture now dominated by radio, film and television. The Taos Society receded, acquiring the aspen patina of a golden age that it retains to this day.
Hennings is smooth; Ufer is rough. Hennings is a studio painter; Ufer prefers sunlight. Hennings distances; Ufer includes. Hennings is control; Ufer is release. Hennings is cooked; Ufer is raw. Hennings demurs; Ufer forces. Hennings seeks stillness; Ufer craves motion. Which Taos is yours, the shuttle or the weft? How will you get there, by rail or covered wagon?
The Denver Art Museum is at 100 West 14th Avenue Parkway. For information, www.denverartmuseum.org or 720-865-5000.
