TAOS, N.M. — When we think of Taos and its crucial place in American art of the Twentieth Century, we generally think of the Taos Society of Artists and the Taos Founders — Higgins, Blumenschein, Phillips, Couse, Ufer, Hennings, et al — and how they arrived in this remote village in northern New Mexico via the academies of Europe and the salons of Chicago and Cincinnati to “discover” an unspoiled land and its people.
The history of the Taos Society, until Catharine Critcher (1868–1964) is admitted just as it disbands, is an exclusively male tale. It is a story that touches on the Modernist movement, especially in the works of Higgins and Blumenschein, but does not delve into the influence of indigenous cultures on American Modernism, nor on American Modernism’s influence on Pueblo and Hispano people. Perhaps most crucially, it is a tale without Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879–1962), which means it is not much of a tale at all.
On view at Taos’s Harwood Museum of Art through September 11, and traveling subsequently to institutions in Albuquerque, N.M., and Buffalo, N.Y., “Mabel Dodge Luhan & Company: American Moderns and The West” showcases Luhan’s role in shaping the culture of Taos, and, by extension, American art in the early Twentieth Century.
Mabel Dodge Luhan was a lonely little rich girl. The ardent desire to remake the world that would become her passion stemmed, perhaps, from the fact that she was born into the stiffness of high society in Buffalo, then a burgeoning industrial capital. All but ignored by her parents, sent to school abroad, Luhan discovered at an early age that the friends she made as a result of mutual interests and intellectual curiosity were far more lasting than ties based on blood and breeding.
In Italy she attempted to recreate the Renaissance in Florence, sponsoring artists and hosting salons of interesting people, inspiring them to express themselves and let their ideas clash and complement one another. In Paris, Luhan soaked up the salons hosted by Gertrude Stein, bringing their ferment to bohemian Greenwich Village just in time for the Armory Show of 1913. When the outbreak of World War I dampened the Euro American cross-pollination of artistic approaches, Luhan decamped briefly for Croton-On-Hudson, N.Y. In 1918 she settled permanently in Taos, where she made her greatest contribution.
Ironically, it was a reproduction of a painting by Taos artist E.I. Couse that drew Luhan to New Mexico in the first place. The Couse painting she saw, one of many similar works in his oeuvre, is quite realistic, depicting a Native American squatting in front of a fire. Couse is about as far as you can get from the urban-centered Modernism of Paris, Greenwich Village or the Armory Show, but something in the painting, perhaps the artist’s warm treatment of firelight and its sense, however idealized, of a homegrown culture unspoiled and untainted, yet classically rendered, fired her imagination and sent her on her way.
Luhan fell in love with Taos, with the beauty of its landscape and with Taos Pueblo, continuously occupied for a millennium. She fancied the sacred geometry of Native American pottery and weavings, the warm adobe architecture, the carved bultos and painted retablos central to Spanish American religious art.
That Luhan misinterpreted some of what she saw, that some of her views of Native American and Hispano culture seem condescending and even racist, is indisputable. For the most part, her time in Taos and in particular her marriage to Tony Lujan, a Taos Pueblo Indian, amended her attitudes, which — and it is crucial to keep this in mind — were open to amendment.
Luhan sought an American culture and saw Taos as its Athens. American culture, in her imagination, would rise out of a combination of Native America, Hispano and Euro American art forms, out of the land and landscape, out of the great variety of people that inhabit the North American continent. Existing arts would combine in unlikely and fruitful ways, rewriting the conventions of human relationships by ushering in a new, enlightened era of civil rights, racial and gender equality and sexual freedom.
Cultural appropriation is a gotcha phrase these days, a trigger warning that inflames the comments sections on blogs and websites. But one of the most interesting subtexts of the exhibition is the extent to which Luhan’s philosophy, and dream, relies on cultural appropriation and the extent to which Anglo, Native and Hispano artists in Taos adapted aspects of aesthetics other than their own — sometimes clumsily, usually with a good measure of respect — to their own art. Which begs the question: are not all cultures products, ultimately, of appropriation? Of appropriation by conquest, by migration, by communication, by understanding, by misunderstanding? Can you make one culture without breaking others?
Party to Luhan’s creation were the many visitors to the compound she built, Los Gallos. Authors D.H. Lawrence and Willa Cather, conductor and composer Leopold Stokowski, dancer and choreographer Martha Graham and designer Robert Edmond Jones stayed and worked there. And then there are the artists: John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andrew Dasburg, Nicolai Fechin, Rebecca Salsbury Strand and Edward Weston, to name a few. Key works in the exhibition, Marsden Hartley’s paintings “Abstract Arrangement” and “Blessing the Melon” appropriate Native American and Hispano imagery, distilling their forms into pictorial elements largely divorced from their cultural contexts.
Hartley once called Luhan the “creator of creators.” As true as that is, it does a disservice to her own labors, especially the articles and memoirs she wrote and published to describe her experiences, set down her ideas and, perhaps, work past her own prejudices.
Jose Rafael Aragon’s circa 1820–62 retablo “St Veronica’s Handkerchief,” one of many pieces Luhan collected and donated to the Harwood, illustrates some of the issues that arise as the exhibition examines the cultural collision in Taos. As co-curator MaLin Wilson-Powell writes, “European-trained artists understood the image of Christ’s face on Veronica’s veil as a traditional symbol of painting itself. For New Mexico santeros, scholar William Wroth convincingly argues, Veronica’s veil was a primary image because it was a miracle ‘made without hands,’ consequently embodying the divine. For the modernists, eighteenth and nineteenth century santos were spare, reductive and authentically ‘primitive,’ a term that is now controversial and represents a fraught concept, rooted in the presumptions of white hegemony.”
Victor Higgins’s “Winter Funeral” is a masterful piece of modern naturalism, associating the somber, dramatic event with the glowering weather. From this distance, the mourners are a small, single mass, barely more than a line. Cars, trucks and horse-drawn wagons allude to past and present. The Taos Mountains brood in steely green, blue, gray over all. A patch of sun, breaking through at upper left, and the open water of the little river at lower center hint at the flow of time and the beauty that waits just beyond this moment of sadness. Higgins places viewers at a very respectful, unobtrusive distance from the proceedings, at the very point, in fact, where the mourners and their modes of transportation begin to separate themselves from the scene in an identifiable way.
Awa Tsireh, Wilson-Powell writes, “was the most prolific Pueblo artist of his generation and among the most admired and supported by Anglos. In 1917 he sat for a portrait by Santa Fe artist William Penhallow Henderson, who introduced him to the finest materials, encouraged him to use his art books, and engaged him in critical discussions of postimpressionism, Japanese woodblock prints, and Persian miniatures.” Appropriating and assimilating the artistic approaches and techniques he absorbed, a work like Tsireh’s “Eagle Dance” takes its place in a context far larger than Taos. The figures have a sculpted quality, one you might as easily observe in an Assyrian relief as in a Diego Rivera mural. Its geometric patterning and limited palette calls to mind medieval European illuminations. Luhan’s cultural mixing seems to have found its mark here.
Mabel Dodge Luhan was the real deal, the lightning rod and the lightning. Sure she was wealthy, sure she belonged to an elite, yet somehow she overcame her origins by looking always to broaden her experience of the world. She was an original, advocating what we might name a radical aesthetic form of government, a way of organizing society that begins with culture and evolves fluidly through the clashing and crashing of diverse forms.
“Mabel Dodge Luhan & Company: American Moderns and the West” was organized by MaLin Wilson-Powell and Dr Lois Rudnick for the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico. Beginning in 1999, Wilson-Powell served as the first curator of art after 1945 at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas. She returned to Santa Fe in 2004 as an independent art critic, lecturer, curator, editor and educator. Rudnick is professor emerita of American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she taught for 36 years.
Following its close in Taos, the exhibition travels to the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History (October 29–January 22, 2017) and to the Burchfield Penney Art Center (March 10– May 28, 2017).
The Museum of New Mexico Press published Mabel Dodge Luhan & Company: American Moderns and the West. The heavily illustrated catalog includes an introduction by Dr Wanda Corn and essays by Rudnick, Wilson-Powell and Carmella Padilla.
The Harwood Museum is at 238 Ledoux Street. For information, www.harwoodmuseum.com, www.mabeldodgeluhan.org or 575-758-9826.
