A Puppet Show

The artist Gustave Baumann (1881-1971) is celebrated for his woodblock prints that capture the essence of New Mexico, as I have written and illustrated a number of times in my Missives. The comprehensive holdings of Baumann’s work at The New Mexico Museum of Art here in Santa Fe have provided the material for a retrospective which features not only his prints and paintings but his rarely seen marionettes.

His daughter, Anne (1927-2011), was responsible for helping to keep her father’s legacy alive, donating around 1700 of his works to the New Mexico Museum of Art and the artist’s archive to the New Mexico Museum of History. Here is a photo from the late 1930s of puppets he made depicting his family.

The current exhibition, “Gustave Baumann: The Artist’s Environment,” which closes February 22, 2026, is curated by the former Museum Director, Mark White, and Thomas Leech, who salvaged the contents of the artist’s studio to recreate it in a permanent installation at the center of the history Museum’s historic printing press room. The exhibition is mostly about the prints for which the artist is best known, but it includes his paintings as well as the puppets. It is hard not to absorb some Native American culture living in the Southwest, and sharing this experience, my favorite puppet in the show is a figure of a Koshare, one of the sacred clowns in Hopi culture.

Baumann’s puppets are carved in the central European tradition. The artist was born in Magdeburg, Germany, but his family moved to Chicago when he was 10 years old. He mastered the art of wood carving in 1905 when he returned to Germany for a year of study at the Kunstgewerbe Schule in Munich.

On a 1918 visit to artist friends in Taos, he drove down to Santa Fe and fell in love with the place, and decided to make his home here. For the amusement of his daughter, he began carving marionettes for which his wife Jane (1892-1984) made the costumes. He wrote scripts based on local happenings and folk tales or stories by popular authors and built a puppet theater for their presentation. Here is his drawing for the theater.

Happily, the Museum has installed 3 stages with Baumann’s sets and complete puppet casts. This scene is from a 1933 melodrama called “Nambé Nell and the Golden Dragon Mine".

Another show, called “Birthday of the Infanta”, was based on Oscar Wilde’s story of the cruelty of a princess towards a hunchback dwarf. After the hunchback sees himself in the mirror for the first time and becomes so upset that he refuses to perform for the Infanta, who is most upset because her birthday party has been ruined... It is said that watching it, 8-year-old Ann burst into tears. The scene is clearly based on Velázquez’s “Las Meninas,” featuring the Infanta Maria Theresa of Spain.

Gala Chamberlain, a trustee of the Ann Baumann Trust and director of the Annex Galleries, has represented the estate since Baumann’s death. She quotes Baumann: "With the persistence of a kitten that decides to adopt you, marionettes seem always to have hovered around my studio door waiting for a favorable chance to slip in. While I was still in Nashville, they did get in for a time and diverted my attention long enough to cause several heads of Hoosier character... Marionettes, like actors, are a temperamental lot - they do talk back and scold the puppeteer if strings are not properly placed, but ultimately it becomes a one-sided argument that can be solved by better workmanship."

Baumann’s marionette shows took place between 1932 and 1941, but the Museum continues what has become a beloved tradition by using reproductions of original puppets in the collection for annual holiday shows. This last panorama is from one of Baumann’s Christmas Plays, which he created using figures from other plays he had done. Of course, they all had to include Santa Claus.

Although most of Gustave Baumann’s prints relate to the Southwest, his marionettes and their plays represent a fantasy world whose appeal is universal.

Jeffrey Gibson

Anyone who has been reading my Missives for a while knows my interest in the art of Native Americans. Having grown up in the world of Old Masters and European decorative arts, it was quite a transition for me. Because like all things, you cannot have a reasonable opinion until you know something about your subject, and I had no frame of reference for either the art of the Native American or them personally until I spent a lot of time in the Southwest.

As we get older, it gets harder to accept what is new to us, be it technology or art. We must cope with the former but not necessarily the latter. Therefore, it took some time until I could understand and enjoy 20th-century art, and I am still dealing with the issues of 21st-century art. Which brings me to a 21st century Native American artist by the name of Jeffrey Gibson (1972-), Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee painter and sculptor. He was born in Colorado Springs and grew up in major urban centers in the United States, Germany, and Korea. He received his BFA at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in 1995 and his MA from the Royal College of Art in London, England in 1998. Since then, he has worked in various places in New York State.

The renowned gallery Hauser & Wirth has represented Gibson since last year in collaboration with his longtime gallery Sikkema Jenkins & Co. They published his biography, credits, and exhibitions, which amount to 24 pages and start in 2005.

I must admit, however, that I first heard of him last year when it was announced that he was chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale becoming the first Indigenous artist to have a solo exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion for this international event.

Gibson with his Hawk Photo Eileen Travell

This multifaceted artist has recently been commissioned to create his first large-scale works cast in bronze, as part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s program for the niches on its Fifth Avenue façade.

Photo by Jonah Rosenberg for the New York Times

The Met is calling this an exhibition because of its limited time on view and will end on June 9th. With the title “The Animal That Therefore I Am”, after a book by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Gibson’s four sculptures, according to the Museum press release, “explore the metamorphic relationships between all thriving beings and the environment”, in other words, both are continually transformed by one another.

Photo by Isa Farfen for Hyperallergic

In 2015 Gibson started to assemble ancestral spirit figures of beadwork, textiles, and paint. His challenge for the Met commission was to translate his delicate structures into bronze weatherproof sculpture without losing their essence. Here is a photo by the artist from 2015 called, “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” an ancestral spirit figure made from glazed ceramic and repurposed tipi pole, artificial sinew and copper jingles.

Each ten-foot bronze sculpture takes the form of an animal indigenous to the region; a hawk, a squirrel, a cayote and a deer, animals he has encountered where he lives in the Hudson River Valley and in the City’s Central Park. I was surprised to learn that you can find hawks in Central Park because all I remember are pigeons and squirrels! Here in the Southwest one can experience all four in a single week.

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

for the Metropolitan Museum

We like to pigeonhole everything, and it used to be argued that the Met should only have old art because there are modern art museums. By the same token, there is an element of surprise for museum goers in seeing indigenous artists presented outside an ethnographic context. To my mind art is art and categorizing original artistic creation as Black art, Jewish art or Indigenous art does an injustice to the artists and their work. I believe you should react directly to a work of art and only then deepen your understanding with information on the background of the artist.

The Art of the Greeting Card

I wonder how many of your grandparents got a greeting card or phone call last Sunday, September 7. I didn’t know it was Grandparents Day until it flashed across my screen on that day. It always seemed to me that it was the card companies that came up with some of these holidays, but in this case, it was a West Virginia housewife, concerned with the loneliness of the elderly. In 1970, she started the campaign, which resulted in President Jimmy Carter signing a Joint Resolution of Congress designating the first Sunday after Labor Day as a national holiday. So if you want to keep up, that is two cards in one week. Yes, there are Labor Day cards too.

This got me thinking about greeting cards. In all honesty, I send most of my greeting cards by email with e-cards. There is a better chance they will arrive on the right day, and even if I am willing to go to three stores, which I have done, searching for an appropriate card, I usually do not succeed. I end up with one that says “Thinking of you” or one for a different occasion that I adapt! However, if I go on one of the greeting card apps, I usually luck out.

In an article in the Michigan Daily by Kaya Ginsky under the title “The Unconventional Art in Greeting Cards” the author confesses “Greeting cards line my shelves and walls like artwork: a dog with a toilet joke from my sister, scoops of my favorite ice cream flavors falling from the sky from my parents, eight reasons my grandmother loves me (written by a copywriter), a joyful Yom Kippur message from a well-meaning Christian relative, a “drink up, it’s ur bday” from my hometown friends.”… art?

In our home, we leave them up on our dining table for a week and then store them so that when we are gone, our children can enjoy throwing them all out!

In the 19th century, artistic cards, first celebrating Valentine’s Day and later Christmas, were produced for sale.

ca. 1885

It was only in 1932 that Disney and Hallmark came together and corporatized the cards that we find in many varieties in pharmacies today. I don’t know if there are any stores left solely devoted to greeting cards, though there used to be. Still there are a few people who do publish their own photographs or designs on cards that can be found in specialty shops. No matter the talent of the maker, what is most appreciated is the extraordinary effort put into a hand-made card sent for a specific occasion.

Can a greeting card actually be considered a work of art? Certainly not if it is simply a reproduction of a known work. It might be, however, if it is an original artistic expression that goes beyond the occasion. The originals of cards sent to his friends by the renowned printmaker Gustave Baumann (1881-1971) have become valuable collector’s items.

Of course, a work of art created for you by a child or grandchild, no matter how young, may not be worthy of framing and putting up on your wall, but it is a treasure.

                        

Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945: Master Works from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

It is most unusual to see an exhibition of older European Art in New Mexico, but a fabulous one has come to the Albuquerque Museum of Art. Two and a half years ago, Andrew Connors, Director of the Museum, got wind of the formation of the show and went to Germany to lobby for it.

Noting the dates that the show covers, you can see that it begins shortly before WW I and goes through the end of WW II. Though one cannot ignore the poignancy of the politics, the sheer quality of the art in the show is extraordinary. The works all come from the National Gallery of Modern Art in Berlin. Compared with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which has 200,000 works of art, Berlin’s collection of 4,000 works is not large. However, judging by the 72 works they sent to Albuquerque, the collection is superb.

The exhibition opened at the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and after the show closes in Albuquerque on January 4, 2026, it will go on to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. I do recommend the catalog, which gives a fuller understanding of the period covered in the art, along with the background of each artist, accompanied by illustrations of remarkably high quality.

The exhibition here is installed in a totally comprehensible manner so that you can follow the periods and styles of the art. It gives emphasis to the politics while demonstrating the artistic achievements with some of the biggest names of the period.

In the Albuquerque venue, the show opens with a 1914 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) view of Berlin’s Belle-Alliance-Platz, later known as the Mehringplatz. At the center of the composition is the column that commemorates the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo. By 1945, by the end of the bombing, only the column with the Goddess of Victory at the top remained.

In 1914, Kurt Gunther (1893-1955) painted the “Radio Enthusiast”. The sitter is wearing headphones to pick up foreign transmissions, as regular broadcasts only started in Germany 9 years later. The portrait brought back the image of a friend from my teenage years who was a ham radio operator, maybe minus the cigar. Gunther was a forerunner of the Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity movement that became the dominant style in reaction to German Expressionism and World War I, when everyone was sobering up to the realities of politics and the world.

In the section titled “Politics and War” is the George Grosz (1893-1959) “Pillars of Society” from 1926. I will leave it to you to find all the symbols of the coming Third Reich, such as the Swastika tie pin of the earless figure in the front with sword in hand.

The climax of the exhibition, as presented in Albuquerque, is a striking installation of two sculptures and a triptych.

The bronze on the left is by Georg Kolbe (1877-1947), called “Descending Man” (1939-40) and stands 7 feet high (without the pedestal). Commissioned by the City of Frankfurt am Main for a ring of statues in the city. It was in tribute to Hitler’s favorite philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. I am fairly sure that he had Nietzsche’s “Übermensch” in mind. It was, of course, included in the 1940 edition of “The Great German Art Exhibition”. That took place every year from 1937 to 1944 to present the ideal of the Third Reich in contrast to the 1937 exhibition of “Degenerate Art”.

In the foreground is the bronze “Fallen Man” (1914-1916) by Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881-1919) (see installation photo above). It was the artist’s response to the devastation of war, and soon after its creation, he committed suicide. In 1937, all his works were declared degenerate art and confiscated from German museum collections. It is in perfect contrast to Kolbe’s work and a foreshadowing of what was to come. 

The work with the greatest impact of the show occupies the center of the installation, a painting by Horst Strempel (1904-1975) appropriately titled “Night Over Germany” (1945-1946). This stunning triptych with a predella repeats the tradition of an altarpiece.

With Germany totally defeated, Strempel dealt with its shame of the preceding decade plus. The catalog entry states, “In the central panel, the artist processed his own experience of the concentration camps’ barbarism. The left wing depicts civilians’ fear during the nights of bombing; the right shows the terror of a hidden Jewish family. Only the lower panel, showing the resistance in the underground, hints at a vague hope of liberation.” Standing before it today, one shares the experience of its first public exhibition in 1947 when observers agreed it was a masterpiece “whose accusation stirs, whose silence speaks”.

New Words

Before reading a book called “Made in America” (by Bill Bryson, published in 1994), I never gave much thought to words being added to the dictionary. Of course, I realized that we were suddenly using words we had not grown up with. Some are obvious, like “Laptop” as in a portable computer, a word that had that meaning in the early 1980s but was used generally only when they became ubiquitous, maybe 20 years later. Many more that I had thought were always in my vocabulary, I learned were actually coined long after I was born.

Bryson investigates words through the lens of U.S. history. He writes about names of objects that we thought were the original word, but had actually been changed several times before the final name was settled on. For example, the word “automobile”, concocted from Greek and Latin, had become the popular term for car by 1899, even before there were decent roads to drive them on. Some of the names it was known by before were Machine, Road Engine, Self Motor, Locomotive Car, Motor Buggy, Horseless Carriage, and even a Stink Carriage, and there were more!

1886 Benz Patent-Motorwagen

It got me thinking about the quantity of words that have come into our vocabulary in the 21st century. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has roughly half a million entries, adding approximately 1,000 words or changes, or additions of meanings per year. The online OED is revised quarterly. Assuming these figures are accurate, there have been 25,000 new words or meanings added since the beginning of this century. To me, that is absolutely mind-boggling.

According to the OED, the word “texting “was first used in the 1950s. The form “to text” began being used in the 1990s and became mainstream as of 2010, possibly as a result of the first iPhone, having was introduced in 2007.

There are words we often understand in context, though we may not have encountered them before, such as “twitterati”; however, I have seen retweet quite often. These were clearly introduced when the Twitter app came into existence in 2006. The name is derived from how we describe birds communicating, short and sweet.

Technology has given us so many additional ways to communicate. A series of oral or video posts on a similar subject has come to be known as Podcasts.

Advertising, of course, has a long history of expanding our vocabulary with terms like “manscaping”, indicating grooming the male body, that way glorifying the use of the razor! How about “binge-watch”? I consider a show that Netflix informs me is worthy of binge-watching, as something so good I will want to watch more than one episode at a time.

Lastly, consider the term “viral”. It is what every advertiser or individual making internet “posts” wants -- to have their message repeated all over the internet.

Come to think of it, I could wish that for my Missives as well.😊

Splitting The Art

As I read an article by Tim Brinkhof written earlier this year about reuniting paintings with their lost parts, I started to think more about “The Strange Life of Objects,” as Maurice Rheims, French auctioneer, art historian, and novelist, called his book.

Medieval manuscripts have had their pages torn out of their bindings for centuries, but starting in the 19th century, and more so in the 20th, the illuminations were cut out to sell them separately. One such example is a large, illuminated prayer book by Jean Bourdichon from 1498 of the “Hours of Louis XII”. Sometime after 1700, it was in England that it was split up. Parts are today in the British Library, the V&A in London, the Free Library in Philadelphia, and the Louvre. In 2003, the Getty acquired 3 more pages, and 20 years later, the missing half of one of those pages is illustrated here.

Diptychs and triptychs were painted on separate panels, so they were easily separated and dispersed. One way or the other, these panels arrive in different places, but they are occasionally lent to a museum that holds the central panel for a special exhibition. The central panel of “The Entombment,” recently discovered and identified as by the Dutch artist Marten van Heemskerck (1498-1574), was acquired by the Worcester Art Museum and exhibited with its side panels on loan from the Selldorff family’s private collection. 

In an article by Richard Whiddington, we learn about Giorgio Vasari’s commission in 1541-42 of 9 panels for the ceiling coffers of the Palazzo Corner-Spinelli in Venice, where they remained for 200 years. Then, starting in the 18th century, it began to be broken up. Most of the panels had been sold by the middle of the 19th Century, ending up in various European collections. Starting in 1980, Venice made a concerted effort to reassemble all the panels, and after more than 40 years, including search and restoration, they are now installed in a reconstructed ceiling in Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia with two spaces left for the still missing elements.

And one more…After the death of Edouard Manet, one of his four versions of “The Execution of Maximilian" was cut into pieces and dispersed by his family. Degas, a friend of Manet's, was incensed at this desecration of the work and went about acquiring as many fragments as he could locate and rejoined them. In 1917, the National Gallery in London acquired the painting and took it apart again, showing the pieces individually for 80 years before stitching them together once more, still missing the parts that Degas had not been able to find.

To end with another book title, Thomas P.F. Hoving’s “The Chase, the Capture, Collecting at the Metropolitan”, Museum that is. Published in 1975, it detailed how the museum curators and the director pursued works for the collection. That is a whole different subject, but I was reminded of it by the exciting and continuous efforts to reunite what has been violated in the past and is part of the strange life of objects.

The Art of the Manhole Cover

When we are young, we walk down a street looking ahead, but when we get old, we tend to look down and watch our step. As I was stepping down off a curb in Santa Fe the other day, I noticed a manhole cover I had probably passed 100 times before, but this time I really looked at it.

I took a photo as it seemed an interesting design. Wondering what the symbols were, I began to do some research. Incredibly, I was not the first person to take notice of a manhole cover! 😊 There was even an exhibition in 1996 on the subject in the public courtyard of the Wadsworth Atheneum. It was in counterpoint to the exhibition inside about Samuel Colt, inventor of the Colt 45. As a statement on gun violence, artist Bradley McCallum melted down 11,194 guns confiscated by Connecticut police, creating the commemorative manhole covers that were installed in the city streets of Hartford after the exhibition.

The earliest manhole covers were stone or wood slabs used to cover trenches that carried sewage away from cities. They date from 3500 BCE. With the industrial revolution in the mid 19th century when more complicated water, sewer and gas systems were installed they were updated and often marked with what system was down below.

Getting back to “my” manhole cover, I found that the design was based on the seal for the city of Santa Fe, with symbols from the coats of arms of Spain and Mexico, plus the 13 stars for the United States. 

Further down the rabbit hole I went! The official seal of Santa Fe has three dates on it, none of which is the one when New Mexico became a State in 1912. The dates represent the sequence in which the three countries have held sovereignty over Santa Fe. 1610 marks the formal establishment of the city as the Capital of the Spanish “Kingdom of New Mexico”. In 1821, Mexico gained its independence from Spain, and the Santa Fe Trail was opened. 1846 was the year during the Mexican-American War when General Stephen Watts Kearny led the Army of the West into Santa Fe and declared it part of the United States. The date on “my” manhole cover, however, is 1998, clearly the date it was made!

Manhole covers have been called “The Art of the Streets”. Diana Stuart wrote a book called “Designs Underfoot: The Art of Manhole Covers in New York City”.

She laments the fact that these bits of urban architecture are being lost to urban renewal. There is one way to preserve these objects, and that is by collecting them, and people have done so, but maybe not in city apartments, as they are rather heavy. Most are made of cast iron and weigh between 100 and 250 pounds, depending on their size!

Most manhole covers are monochromatic, and you have to be looking for them to notice their design. You certainly can’t see them when you are driving over them. In Japan, however, manhole covers are created as colorful works of art. This actually makes people want to look down, that is, if they have the time. The vast majority of municipalities have their own manhole covers as a point of pride and creative art. As an example, here is one from Shizuoka City commemorating, among other things, the World Cultural Heritage site of Mt. Fuji and Miho Matsubara Beach.

By all means, when walking, look straight ahead and take in the sights and view the skies as well, but don’t forget, every once in a while, to look down and see what treasures of urban architecture you might find.