Art flourishes where powerful visual stimuli
meet an artist's fertile sensibilities. New Mexico's diverse
landscape and its rich cultural mosaic have long attracted painters
in search of fresh subject matter, clear light and spiritual
intensity. Here they have established communities of artists—first
at Taos, later in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. For many observers,
the work of the early Romantic-realist painters of Taos has come
to represent Anglo-American art in New Mexico. But a fuller understanding
of the state's artistic heritage must take into account the contributions
of another kind of painter, the modernist.
These artists, for whom nature functioned as
a metaphor of personal freedom and individual fulfillment, were
determined to create a new, expressive visual language appropriate
to the twentieth century. They formulated many visual dialects,
but most held in common the desire to express an inner experience
of reality rather than to reproduce the external world. For some,
that involved painting's formal issues: Fauvism's analysis of
color or Cubism's study of the abstract structure lying behind
surface appearances. Line, mass and color--the formal building-blocks--were
more important than a painting's subject matter. Still other
modernists—those of an Expressionist bent—sought
to capture in their painting the expression of feeling and mood.
New Mexico attracted modernists of all stripes,
starting soon after the 1913 Armory Show in New York ignited
the spirit of artistic dissent and began to explode old myths
and expectations about what painting should look like. Paul
Burlin (1886–1969), whose drawings had been included in the
Armory Show, moved to New Mexico and began to paint bold landscapes,
daring in their deliberate distortions of color and form. The
massive shapes of New Mexico's hills, the strength of its earth-born
adobe structures and its vibrant color all found their way into
Burlin's early encounters with the land. For him, intuition overrode
the intellectual in art.
The exaltation of intuition was also strong
among many New York artists and intellectuals associated with Alfred
Steiglitz's gallery 291 and his publication Camera
Work. In the 1910s and 1920s, a number of these people made
their way to New Mexico. Pivotal in bringing avant-garde painters
to the state was Mabel Dodge, who settled at Taos in 1917.
Already a veteran of the avant-garde intellectual scene in Greenwich
Village, Dodge now set about to establish a haven for artists
and writers in Northern New Mexico. Believing Taos a place of
intrinsic spirituality, she invited painters, poets, composers
and photographers for long stays at her compound adjacent to
Taos Pueblo. Her reverence for the region's native inhabitants
became an intrinsic part of Dodge's philosophy, especially after
she married Tony Luhan. Exposure to native lifeways, as well
as to the area's physical beauty, solitude and transcendent mystical
nature were all part of the experience she afforded to her visitors.
Since these attractions—the mystery of
nature, its spiritual overtones and introspective qualities—were
central to much modernist thinking in the visual arts, it is
not surprising that Dodge's visitors were often powerfully struck
by their encounters with New Mexico. Marsden Hartley (1877–1943),
long a member of the Stieglitz circle, was invited to Taos by
Dodge in 1918. During a visit stretching into some eighteen months,
Hartley produced a body of highly intuitive explorations of the
landscape and of still life subjects. His essentially spiritual
approach, combined with a hypersensitivity to light and to the
visual rhythms he felt in the land, set Hartley's work apart
from most other New Mexico landscape paintings.
Another of Dodge's guests in 1918 was Andrew
Dasburg (1887–1979), whose approach to nature owed more
to French modernist innovations than to Hartley's brand of
intuitive response. In Paris, Dasburg had absorbed the formal
lessons of Renoir, Matisse, the Cubists and Futurists; but
his artistic vision was most strongly shaped by Cezanne's explorations
of shifting space, tensional lines, and structural use of color.
By 1913, when he exhibited in the Armory Show, Dasburg was
well along on the path to abstraction. The New Mexico landscape,
peppered with ready-made cubiform structures defined by sharp
sunlight, challenged him to pick out geometric form and impose
structure. Still life and portraits were also formal testing-grounds
for Dasburg, who settled permanently in New Mexico in the 1930s,
but landscape—increasingly refined and abstracted—remained
his most powerful achievement.
Raymond Jonson (1891–1982), during nearly
six decades of painting in New Mexico, pursued a singular goal:
to express the immaterial through the material means of paint.
Like Hartley and Dasburg, Jonson became well acquainted as a
young artist with advanced artistic theory, particularly the
writings of the Russian Wassily Kandinsky. Convinced by his reading
that nature and humanity were part of the same cosmic whole,
Jonson began to explore relationships between nature and subjectivity,
between rhythms in color and form, between painting, music and
mathematics. Such concerns, coupled with the visual grandeur
of New Mexico, formed the basis of a lifetime's work. The significance
of things, wrote Jonson, can be heightened "when properly manifested
through a rhythmic unified whole . . . which moves and calls
forth the spirit of each object."
The summer of 1929 marked a turning point in
the legendary career of Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986),
whose shadow still looms large in the history of American and
New Mexican art. That year she responded to Mabel Dodge Luhan's
invitation to visit Taos. She would never be the same. Though
she had spent time in the Southwest before, the landscape of
northern New Mexico spoke to O'Keeffe that summer, engaging her
will and her artistic imagination in an insistent dialogue that
would culminate in her permanent move to the state in 1949. Rightly
called both a realist and a modernist painter, O'Keeffe gracefully
accommodated both visions, sometimes within the same painting.
She was a modernist in the sense that her paintings gave pictorial
form to what she described as "the intangible thing in myself." In
New Mexico, isolated images of bones, trees, and crosses became
vehicles for her lyric vision. But she also celebrated the realities
of its architecture, distant hills and colored earth, balancing
an impulse to dream with a lifelong search for timeless and universal
experience in the landscape.
New ways of thinking about painting—theorizing,
organizing and practicing it—are the hallmarks of the modernist
painter. New Mexico's art has been flavored by a potent blend
of styles, a mixture enriched by dozens more modernists than
could be discussed here. Collectively, their achievement has
added luster to the artistic reputation of the state, while continuing
to influence the vision of younger artists who have inherited
their restlessness, their willingness to experiment and fail,
and their commitment to authentic personal expression.
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