A founder of the Taos Society Artists, Ernest L. Blumenschein (1874‱960) was a man of many parts: an illustrator in the Golden Age of American illustration, a classically trained painter, an early champion of Modernism, a fervent supporter of Indian culture and an independent artist whose style and vision set him apart from his compatriots.
Blumenschein (called “Blumy” by his friends) used vibrant colors, bold forms, Modernist motifs and a commitment to social issues to convey fresh images of the American Southwest. Whether painting a cerulean sky or a Native American in colorful garb, he animated his canvases with strong designs, expressive light and palpable emotion.
He found the landscape and people of New Mexico moving and exotic, writing soon after his arrival in Taos: “I saw whole paintings right before my eyes&Everywhere I looked, I saw paintings perfectly organized and ready to paint.”
Blumenschein’s respect for the traditions, culture and dignity of the Pueblo Indians was reflected in his work. His pictures constitute pictorial testimonials to the cultural integrity of Native Americans and respect for their lands. He played an important role in preserving Native American culture.
The artist’s colorful and inventive works are showcased in a welcome exhibition, “In Contemporary Rhythm: The Art of Ernest L. Blumenschein,” on view at the Phoenix Art Museum through June 14.
With 66 pieces, “This exhibition is the largest and most comprehensive effort ever made to assemble, analyze and celebrate Blumenschein’s remarkable work,” says exhibition curator Peter H. Hassrick, director of the Denver Museum of Art’s Petrie Institute of Western American Art. Hassrick makes a good case that Blumenschein’s work had a significant influence on mainstream art and national aesthetic developments, confirming “his stature as a significant American artist.”
Born in Pittsburgh, Blumenschein was raised in Dayton, Ohio, where his father directed the Dayton Philharmonic Society. As a teenager, Ernest was an outstanding athlete and studied the violin at the Cincinnati College of Music, training that profoundly influenced his art. “Movement, composition, rhythm, pattern, harmony and color appear in nearly every mature signature painting,” observes Hassrick.
Blumenschein next enrolled at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, where he discovered his true passion for visual art. After studying painting at New York’s Art Students League, he enrolled at the Academie Julian in 1894. In Paris, in addition to traditional academic schooling, he copied works at the Louvre and was exposed to the Impressionists. He also formed lifelong friendships with artists E. Irving Couse, Bert Geer Phillips and Joseph Henry Sharp.
Armed with this formal training, Blumenschein returned to New York and launched a successful career illustrating periodicals ( Harper’s, McClure’s ) and books (by Joseph Conrad, Jack London). An 1897 assignment from Scribner’s Monthly took him to New Mexico, an “experience that laid the foundation for his future work,” according to art historian Elizabeth J. Cunningham. Illustrating works by Hamlin Garland and other Indian sympathizers opened his eyes to the plight of Native Americans.
Blumenschein discovered Taos in 1898 while traveling with fellow artist Phillips on a sketching trip from Denver to Mexico, when a broken wagon wheel left them stranded outside town. The men tossed a coin to determine who would take the wheel to the nearest blacksmith for repair. Blumenschein lost and conveyed the injured piece on a 22-mile trek to Taos.
During a three-month stay, both artists fell in love with the spectacular scenery and interesting cultures of the Taos area. Phillips stayed, but Blumenschein returned East.
For parts of his heyday as an illustrator, 1896‱909, Blumenschein lived in Paris. In 1905, he married Margaret Shepard Greene, a prominent American artist who had resided in France since 1886. She was the second American woman, after Mary Cassatt, to win medals at the Paris Salon d’Automne, in 1900 and 1902. The Blumenscheins shared a studio in Paris where they created illustrations for American periodicals. Mary continued her career with considerable success, but her accomplished work is little known today.
After Mary’s inheritance left the family financially independent, the Blumenscheins divided their time between New York, where he taught at the Art Students League, and Taos, where he concentrated on painting. In 1919, he ended his commercial career and they settled permanently with their daughter in Taos.
Like other early Taos painters, Blumenschein accepted commissions from the Santa Fe Railroad, which used artworks to promote travel to New Mexico. Starting in 1910, Blumenschein provided the railroad with his vivid vision of an accessible and safe enchanted land and appealing indigenous culture. In return, he received free passage and, if lucky, a market for his work.
Blumenschein knew he was charting new territory in his early, nonrailroad paintings. “No artist,” he said, “had ever recorded the New Mexico I was now seeing. No writer had ever written down the smell of the air or the feel of the morning’s sky.” As it turned out, few artists could convey the look and feel of Taos better than Blumenschein.
He made many friends among his Latino neighbors, depicting their lifestyles, architecture, craftsmen and, in one of his masterpieces, “The Plasterer,” 1913, their hard work. The painting poignantly records an exhausted laborer pausing while repairing an adobe fireplace, surrounded by Pueblo designs and pottery.
Blumenschein developed a great empathy for local Pueblo Indians, who worked hard to preserve their traditions in the face of Hispanic and Anglo cultural domination. At a time when the federal government was trying to diminish or extinguish Native American traditions and abolish tribal land rights, Blumenschein championed cultural preservation, equality and full citizenship.
His series of sympathetic likenesses of Pueblos included a handsome young brave, “Eagle Fan,” 1915, and a striking model, “Portrait of Albedia,” circa 1918.
In paintings like “Superstition,” 1921, Blumenschein demonstrated his grasp of tensions resulting from competing religious doctrines that fostered conflict between the Catholic church and Pueblo spiritual traditions. The net effect of these battling influences, Blumenschein said, “is even more confusing than I can depict in my picture with its vivid colors and shapes.”
In his effort to depict Indians as people of dignity and worth, he drew on classical sources, such as ancient Greek sculpture. The pose of the young warrior in Blumenschein’s “The Peacemaker,” 1913, puts one in mind of the “Apollo Belvedere.” Here, he used symbolism to champion Native cultural survival †or perhaps hope for peace as Europe careened toward World War I.
Blumenschein was deeply affected by viewing the 1913 Armory Show in New York, which introduced European Modernism to America. His own paintings, while remaining realistic, became increasingly stylized and symbolic.
In 1915, Blumenschein, Couse, Phillips, Sharp and fellow artists Oscar E. Berninghaus and W. Herbert “Buck” Dunton, most of whom had classical training in Europe, formed the Taos Society of Artists (TSA) to promote their work and appreciation for the Taos area. The first artist colony west of the Mississippi, it was a diverse group, bound together neither stylistically nor philosophically. They were mature professionals; as art historian E.P. Richardson wrote, “Most of the artists were well trained when they arrived in Taos and they simply continued to quietly and competently develop styles that were correct for them.”
Their successful traveling exhibitions encouraged more artists to settle in Taos and join the society. It grew to 21 members and was active until 1927, when it disbanded.
Blumenschein was considered the most complex and most accomplished painter of the TSA. His mature style focused on the power of design, large masses of harmonious color and elegant lines. As art historian William H. Truettner observed, Blumenschein was “perhaps the most versatile painter” in the group, who “never lost his representational style,” but modified it to the extent that “narrative gave way to bolder, more aggressive compositions, the design of which often carried a message more basic than the painting’s immediate content.”
When looking at subjects, Blumenschein did not see people, structures or rock formations, but shapes that he used to create patterns and repetitions.
Blumenschein found solace and inspiration in mountains. In “Haystack, Taos Valley,” painted prior to 1927 and reworked in 1940, “The vigor of the brushwork and vibrancy of the palette speak to Blumenschein’s vitality of spirit and physical energy as a man,” says Hassrick. In “Sandia Mountains,” 1942, the swelling forms of distant mountains form the backdrop for the foreground of sagebrush and chamisa, which takes up two-thirds of the picture.
Fascinated by Pueblo culture, he often depicted Indians living in harmony with their environment. One of his most striking canvases, “Moon, Morning Star and Evening Star,” 1923, based on the Pueblo Deer Dance, was done from memory since Indians do not permit artists to sketch their festivals. Its rich color and close attention to detail recreate the dramatic scene with extraordinary effect. A large oval of dancers, along with scores of minute figures surrounding them, is featured. In this boldly decorative interpretation of a mystic ritual that the artist clearly reveled in, the Native Americans become almost bit players in a patterned composition.
As his art matured, his favorite subject, Taos’s Pueblo Indians, became as interesting for him in terms of line, shape and design as they were as individuals. In “Extraordinary Affray,” 1920, reworked 1927, he arranged the action into a swirl of bodies and weapons.
By the mid-1920s, interest in paintings of Indians had begun to fade among art patrons in the East, where most sales took place. Although his landscape paintings were successful, Blumenschein never abandoned his passion for Native Americans. In “Indians in the Mountains,” 1936, reworked 1938, patterns of shade, structure and forestation in the hills are echoed in the riders’ woven blankets, suggesting a close connection between nature’s rhythms and Native people. His predilection for bold designs is apparent in “Canyon Red and Black,” 1934, where he concentrated on the play of light, shadow and color on rocks from a lower vantage point.
“Jury for the Trial of a Sheepherder for Murder,” 1936, shows diverse members of a jury convened for the trial of a Hispanic teenager charged with murder, an actual scene witnessed by Blumenschein. The painting reflects tensions between traditional Latino ways †represented by the coarse, peasant-style clothing of jurors †and the Anglo, more impersonal system of justice †represented by the faceless icon of George Washington hung on the wall above the jury. The painting’s rich tonality, vigorous composition and emotionally charged content reflect Blumenschein’s curious personal blend of Modernism with the traditional and concrete. Art curator David Witt has called “Jury” one of the three most important New Mexico paintings, 1900‱950.
Blumenschein developed a special affection for Albuquerque, where he lived for much of the last decade of his life. The city, its architecture and rail yard became favorite painting themes, culminating in “The Chief Goes Through,” 1956, showing the Santa Fe Railroad’s prototype for the future †a sleek, aerodynamic train. The picture won wide acclaim.
Becoming an associate member of the prestigious National Academy of Design in 1911 and a full member in 1927, Blumenschein received numerous awards for his work, was honored by many institutions and traveled the world to exhibit his paintings. In 1948, he was the subject of the first solo retrospective at the Museum of New Mexico.
As seems inevitable for painters of the American West, Blumenschein is not as well known as he should be in the rest of the country. This may be in part because he was not prolific and was such an unusually complex painter of the Southwest. His admirable affinity for the Hispanic and Native Americans of New Mexico, the strong Modernist touches in his canvases and his evocative body of work constitute a proud legacy as an artist and a man of boundless enthusiasm and high standards.
“Through his art, with its Western subject matter and experimental design-oriented style,” says Hassrick, “he promoted a modern way of viewing themes that had traditionally been presented in strictly academic terms.” New York gallery owner Ernie Barrie, noting the originality and individuality of Blumenschein’s oeuvre, said it deserves “a place in American art of all time.”
The Blumenscheins’ adobe home and studio in Taos, a National Historic Landmark, are preserved today as a house museum, with much of the original furnishings in place and works by the old owners and other Taos painters displayed.
The exhibition catalog is filled with a series of essays about the artist and his times, led by Hassrick and Cunningham; it is published by the University of Oklahoma Press in cooperation with the Albuquerque, Denver and Phoenix Museums.
The Phoenix Art Museum is at 1625 North Central Avenue. For information, 602-257-1222 or www.phxart.org .
