Few states have attracted more important artists per capita than New Mexico. Drawn by volatile history and diverse cultures, indigenous crafts and people and warm climate and exotic scenery, painters and sculptors have flocked to the Southwestern state for more than 125 years.
Moreover, the state has offered an ambience in which Hispanic, Native American and European aesthetic conventions have become interconnected. Out of these cultural interactions an unpredictable, often contradictory unity has evolved in “The Land of Enchantment.”
That, at least, is the theme of a grand exhibition, “How the West Is One: The Art of New Mexico,” on view at the New Mexico Museum of Art through April 20, 2010. Organized by Joseph Traugott, the museum’s curator of Twentieth Century art, it comprises 47 paintings and a score of other artwork drawn from the museum’s permanent collection.
The art exhibited represents objects that exemplify shifting aesthetic traditions in Southwestern art. Rather than separating the work of Native Americans, Hispanics and European Americans, the exhibition presents the art of the region as a single, unified chronology. As museum director Marsha C. Bol puts it, “New Mexico’s relative riches from its many eras and multiple cultures have forged an intricate web of relationships between artists, art subjects and art appreciators.”
Traugott suggests that groundwork for New Mexico’s art was laid by “multiple ‘discoveries’ by nomadic Native Americans, Spanish colonists and missionaries, United States geological expeditions, anthropological research teams and, finally, by individual travelers making their own personal discovery of the landscapes and peoples of the region.” Thereafter, completion of the transcontinental railway through New Mexico in 1880 marked the end of the Spanish Colonial tradition.
In the “culture rush” that followed, European American scholars and documentary artists descended on the region to observe indigenous groups and collect artifacts. Early illustrators and photographers and later artists and social scientists believed that Indians were noble savages living in harmony with nature; at the same time, they feared that Native cultures would be altered and eventually disappear as they came in increasing contact with mainstream America.
The Museum of New Mexico Art Gallery was launched in 1917 under the directorship of Edgar L. Hewett, who championed the state’s fine arts and recognized their role in promoting tourism and economic development. Housed in a new building of Pueblo Spanish Revival architecture on the town plaza, the museum quickly became the centerpiece of efforts to promote Native crafts and art of the region.
Thanks to the advocacy of painter/activist Robert Henri, a longtime summer resident of Santa Fe, the museum adopted an “open door” policy that allowed any artist working in New Mexico to exhibit in the museum. Included in the museum’s initial exhibition: Henri’s powerful “Portrait of Dieguito Roybal, San Ildefonso,” 1916, a 651/8-by-487/8-inch likeness emphasizing the character and spiritual focus of a well-known local figure.
Displayed in the first exhibition and ever since is Gerald Cassady’s compelling “Cui Bono” (Latin for Who Benefits?), circa 1911. It depicts the striking figure of a dark Native American, swathed in a traditional white robe, looking directly at the viewer †a hint of his modernity. The ancient pueblo and venerable Taos Mountains behind him suggest the historic past from which he is taking a hesitant step into the Twentieth Century.
Traugott posits that the painting poses questions about Manifest Destiny †the belief that God sanctioned federal government domination of land from coast to coast †and the White Man’s Burden †the conviction that Christians had a moral obligation to convert Native Americans to Christianity. Traugott suggests Cassady’s image, in the context of widely supported efforts to acculturate Indians, poses the question about both Manifest Destiny and the White Man’s Burden: Who benefits?
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).
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).
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.
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.
