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Modernists in New Mexico: Works from a Private Collector

February 13 - May 10, 2009

 

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum is pleased to present an exhibition that includes a number of paintings designated as partial gifts to the Museum by an anonymous New Mexico collector. Since moving to Santa Fe eleven years ago and acquiring his first New Mexico picture at a local gallery, the owner of this collection has passionately pursued his love of American Modernism by collecting works that creatively engage the area's distinctive environments, landmarks, and residents. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum is delighted to be able to exhibit this superb selection, which demonstrates the richly productive encounter between some of America's most innovative twentieth-century painters and one of their favorite sources of inspiration -- New Mexico. The exhibition includes works by various modern artists, most of whom arrived in the southwest after 1912, when New Mexico, which had been a territory, attained statehood: George Wesley Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Robert Henri, Edward Hopper, Raymond Jonson, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, and John Sloan.

"It is very fitting that the Museum displays these magnificent works while the entire state is celebrating Santa Fe's 400th anniversary," stated Barbara Buhler Lynes, Curator, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and the Emily Fisher Landau Director, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center. "And, we are especially delighted to have several of these works in our collection, not only because of their inherent significance, but also because they greatly enhance our ability to fulfill one of the Museum's fundamental objectives: to organize exhibitions of O'Keeffe's contemporaries that shed light on the history of American Modernism, a phenomenon that began in America in the 1890s and continues into the present."

 

About the Exhibition

In 1916, the painter Robert Henri left New York for the first of three visits to Santa Fe in search of new artistic inspiration. He did so at a pivotal moment in the early history of American Modernism, during the Great War and amid the aftermath of the sensational Armory Show in New York, when many of his compatriots were responding inventively to the aesthetic challenge posed by the European avant-garde. Captivated by the beautiful, unfamiliar western places and peoples of New Mexico, Henri encouraged two close friends and colleagues, George Bellows and John Sloan, to follow his lead. Before long, many American Modernists had trekked to New Mexico as well, including Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Stuart Davis, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Edward Hopper. Some visited only once or stayed for just a short time, while others, notably O'Keeffe and Sloan, became longtime residents; for all of these American Modernists, though, visiting and picturing New Mexico became an artistic rite of passage of sorts -- a catalyst for aesthetic reinvention.

Some of the pictures in the exhibition clearly represent specific people and sites, as in Robert Henri's Julianita, 1922, John Sloan's La Cienega (1923), and two paintings of the Santuario de Chimayó by George Bellows (1917) and Joseph Bakos (1935), respectively. Other works evoke New Mexico in a more general way, as in Andrew Dasburg's Mountain Landscape, 1923, and Thomas Hart Benton's Train on the Desert (1926 or 1927). Still others -- such as Stuart Davis's Interior, New Mexico (1923), Raymond Jonson's Oil No. 5 (1940), and Georgia O'Keeffe's Black Place IV (1944) -- approach particular people and places with an abstracting vision so personal as to transform the subject into a vehicle of private expression and formal experimentation. In every case, though, New Mexico provided the artist with a distinctive creative point of departure -- a compelling array of subjects, forms, and colors -- that revitalized the creative process. Even realism achieved an innovative Modernist edge in works such as Edward Hopper's Adobe Houses (1925), which depicts characteristic New Mexico architecture and scenery with subtle attention to basic underlying shapes, arranged like so many abstract building blocks. Regardless of an artist's particular style then, the Modernist approach revealed New Mexico's essential beauty.

Modernists in New Mexico: Works from a Private Collection was organized by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

 

Acoustiguide tour script

INTRODUCTION
 
ALAN BRADDOCK:
 
Hello, I'm Alan Braddock, Associate Curator at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. Welcome to the Museum and to this special exhibition, Modernists in New Mexico: Works from a Private Collector. Today you'll see a wonderful variety of American Modernist visions of New Mexico from the first half of the twentieth century.
 
They demonstrate the richly productive encounter between some of America's most innovative twentieth-century painters and one of their favorite sources of inspiration. But more than that, these works speak perfectly to one of the Museum's fundamental objectives: to organize exhibitions of O'Keeffe's contemporaries that shed light on the history of American Modernism, a phenomenon that began in the 1890s and continues today.
 
Some of the artists featured here visited New Mexico for just a short time while others became longtime residents. For all of them, however, visiting and depicting New Mexico became an artistic rite of passage -- a catalyst of aesthetic invention.
 
These works are owned by a private collector who lives in here in New Mexico. Since he moved to Santa Fe eleven years ago and acquired his first New Mexico picture at a local gallery, he has passionately pursued his love of American Modernism by collecting pictures that creatively interpret the area's distinctive environments, landmarks, and culture.
As always, we invite you to visit our permanent collection, where you can see our marvelous collection of works by Georgia O'Keeffe.
To hear instructions on how to use this Acoustiguide, please press 4-1-1.
 
 
102. Thomas Moran (1837-1926), The Road to Acoma, 1902
Watercolor on paper
14 _ x 20 _ inches
Private collection
 
ALAN BRADDOCK:
 
Thomas Moran was one of America's leading landscape painters in the Romantic style that dominated the nineteenth century. Famous for his spectacular visions of Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Canyon, Moran traveled to New Mexico late in his career with the Santa Fe Railroad, which had hired him to create commercial images promoting western tourism.
 
In this picture, Moran brought the color and drama of Romantic landscape painting to a distinctly New Mexican subject: the rocky topography around Acoma Pueblo. It's one of the region's oldest Native American communities, located sixty miles west of Albuquerque. Visible atop the distant mesa in the center, the adobe village of Acoma was for centuries only accessible through a steep rocky pass, depicted here in the foreground and approached by a group of travelers on horseback.
 
By 1902, when Moran painted this picture, the railroad had been bringing tourists to the area for more than twenty years. But in The Road to Acoma he preserved a sense of Acoma's ancient beauty, a landscape seemingly untouched by modernity.
 
In the early years of the twentieth century, a small colony of Impressionist painters formed in Taos but the greatest number of artists ­ including many American Modernists -- flocked to the region after New Mexico became a state in 1912.
 
Although Moran himself did not embrace the formal innovations of twentieth-century American Modernists, his works and travels helped set the stage for other artists included in the present exhibition.
 
 
103. Robert Henri (1865-1929), Julianita, 1922
Oil on canvas
32 _ x 26 _ inches
Private collection
Promised partial gift
 
ALAN BRADDOCK:
 
In 1916, painter Robert Henri left New York City for the first of three visits to Santa Fe in search of new artistic inspiration. He did so at a pivotal moment in the early history of American Modernism: during the Great War and amid the aftermath of the sensational Armory Show in New York, when many of his peers were responding inventively to the aesthetic challenge posed by the European avant-garde.
 
As the leader of a group of urban realist painters in New York called the Ashcan School, Henri became captivated by the beautiful, unfamiliar places and peoples of New Mexico. In his words, "the real color of New Mexico is deep and strong" and he admired the Pueblo Indians for what he called "their communal greatness." Pueblo art contained, as he put it, "a bright spark of spiritual life which we others with all our goods and material protections can envy." Henri thus perceived New Mexico as offering a welcome alternative -- aesthetically, socially, and spiritually -- to the world he had left behind back East.
 
Those perceptions inform Julianita, Henri's vividly-colored 1922 portrait of a Tewa woman, who wears a beautiful silver squash blossom necklace. One of several portraits Henri painted of Pueblo people, Julianita reveals the artist's interest in aesthetic design and the universal humanity in his New Mexico sitters. Their particular ethnic traditions, Henri believed, contributed positively to America's evolving national identity.
 
 
104. John Sloan (1871-1951), La Cienega, 1923
Oil on canvas
18 x 22 inches
Private collection
Promised partial gift
 
ALAN BRADDOCK:
 
Artist John Sloan had worked in Philadelphia as a newspaper illustrator before moving to New York City, where he joined Robert Henri and the so-called "Ashcan School" realists in depicting everyday scenes of urban life during the first decade of the twentieth century. Sloan's early experience in journalism made him a keen observer of social relations and daily events.
 
Encouraged by Henri, who had spent time painting in the Southwest, Sloan made his first trip to New Mexico in 1919, driving to Santa Fe by car with his wife Dolly and the painter Randall Davey. In Santa Fe, where he spent nearly every summer for the rest of his life, Sloan became an observer of local New Mexico subjects and scenery. In this picture, the artist depicted the town of La Cienega, located a few miles southwest of Santa Fe. The Spanish name "La Cienega" refers to a spring and associated wetlands that made the town a lush green oasis. That's suggested here in the background vegetation and trees that frame the scene.
 
The true focus of Sloan's attention, however, is the central human drama -- specifically the contrast between the pair of fashionable young Anglo women in the foreground, wearing light modern attire, and the group of older Hispanic men and women in the background, dressed in darker traditional clothing.
 
 
105. Stuart Davis (1894-1964), Electric Bulb, New Mexico, 1923
Oil on canvas
32 x 22 inches
Private collection
Promised partial gift
 
ALAN BRADDOCK:
 
Stuart Davis, a Philadelphian, came to New Mexico in 1923 at the invitation of his friend John Sloan, one of the Ashcan School realists. Unlike Sloan, though, Davis developed a more abstract style informed by Cubism and popular culture.
 
His painting Electric Bulb, New Mexico humorously satirizes the Southwestern scenery celebrated by many of his colleagues. Instead of reveling in the vivid colors and expansive skies of New Mexico's outdoor environment, Davis purposely limited his palette to a bland combination of black, gray, and white. He also introduced an ironic note by illuminating the scene artificially with an electric bulb rather than emphasizing New Mexico's enchanting natural sunlight.
 
Davis's interest in such a common household object -- the light bulb -- also anticipated America's Pop Art movement of 40 years later, famously epitomized by Andy Warhol's paintings of Campbell's soup cans.
 
 
106. John Marin (1870-1953), Mountains (Sangre de Cristo), 1930
Watercolor on paper
15 _ x 20 _ inches
Private collection
Promised partial gift
 
ALAN BRADDOCK:
 
John Marin's Mountains (Sangre de Cristo) explores abstract geometric patterns in nature, as filtered through the artist's imagination. The pretext for Marin's picture is the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, one of New Mexico's signature geological landmarks, named for the blood of Christ because of its dramatic crimson color at twilight. Marin's focus, however, is not on color but on structure and visual energy. Rendered as a series of interlocking triangles encircled by schematic cloud forms, the mountains seem to vibrate with dynamic geometry. The artist's supple paint handling even appears to bring them alive.
 
Marin was originally from New Jersey and had trained to be an architect. He also studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before spending five years in Europe, where he encountered the avant-garde art of Cézanne, the Cubists, and the Futurists in the early 1900s. With the support and encouragement of his dealer Alfred Stieglitz, Marin was free to pursue his unique artistic vision in New York, New England, and New Mexico. He visited New Mexico in 1929 and 1930 as a guest of Mabel Dodge Luhan, the progressive New York patron and collector whose home in Taos served as a Modernist salon.
 
 
107. Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Adobe Houses, 1925
Watercolor on paper
14 x 20 inches
Private collection
 
ALAN BRADDOCK:
 
Edward Hopper decided to visit Santa Fe during the summer of 1925 at the invitation of his friend John Sloan. Like Sloan, Hopper was a protégé of Robert Henri, but his realism downplayed human action in favor of subtle spatial relationships. Seemingly straightforward in their realism, Hopper's images are structured by an underlying abstract matrix of forms, animated by striking contrasts of color and light.
 
Although best known as an oil painter, Hopper was also an accomplished watercolorist, and he only produced works in that medium during his brief stay in New Mexico. Adobe Houses exemplifies Hopper's attention to the structural patterns and visual effects of Southwestern scenery. In the right foreground, for example, a row of vigas -- or round wooden ceiling beams -- extends beyond the roofline of an adobe building, creating an interesting play of shadows below while echoing the rhythmic array of hills in the background. Brief notations in Hopper's record book refer to these elements as "hot looking, ends of adobe poles, speckled hills, hills in background," confirming his interest in their spatial relationship. Elsewhere in the picture, areas of light and shade produce a jigsaw pattern of geometric shapes that lend further dynamism to the otherwise quiet and motionless scene.
 
 
108. Raymond Jonson (1891-1982), Oil No. 5, 1940
Oil on masonite
28 x 40 inches
Private collection
 
ALAN BRADDOCK:
 
Raymond Jonson visited New Mexico for the first time in 1922 and settled permanently there, in Santa Fe, two years later. By then, he had traveled extensively around the country, studying and working in Maine, Chicago, New York, and rural New Hampshire. He saw the 1913 Armory Show in New York and had [earlier] studied art in Portland, Maine, with a student of Arthur Wesley Dow, whose ideas about pictorial design helped lay the foundations for American Modernism. Admiring what he called the "Indian atmosphere" of the Southwest, Jonson produced works in an abstract style that drew inspiration from the region's ancient Native American cultures.
 
Oil No. 5 provides a beautiful example of Jonson's work in its subtle and rather ambiguous evocation of Southwestern colors and structures: the sun, clouds, and Pueblo architecture. Filtered through Jonson's Modernist imagination and constructed by him with meticulous attention to craft and surface texture, recognizable forms here transcend their usual appearance. Such an approach was consistent with Jonson's role as a leading painter in the Transcendental Painting Group, an alliance of New Mexico abstract artists he helped found in 1938.
 
 
109. Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), Black Place IV, 1944
Oil on canvas
30 1/8 x 36 1/8 inches
Private collection
 
ALAN BRADDOCK:
 
Georgia O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico briefly in 1917 with her sister, when she was returning by train to Texas from a vacation in Colorado. After making her name as a major American Modernist painter in New York City with the help of her dealer and husband Alfred Stieglitz, O'Keeffe returned to New Mexico in 1929. For the next twenty years, she visited the Southwest regularly, eventually relocating there permanently in 1949.
 
Black Place IV is one in a series of works by O'Keeffe depicting a barren, gray and black volcanic rock formation she particularly admired in a remote part of Navajo country in northern New Mexico, approximately 150 miles west of her homes in Abiquiu and the Ghost Ranch. O'Keeffe's other paintings of the site are dominated by somber tones of black and grey, but Black Place IV is a dramatic departure, offering a volcanic palette of reds, oranges, yellows, and pinks. Rather than an impressionistic response to particular light effects, however, the painting demonstrates O'Keeffe's belief in the Modern artist's freedom to explore the expressive power of different colors, regardless of natural appearances.
 

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