“Southwestern Allure: The Art of the Santa Fe Art Colony”, currently
at the New Mexico Museum of Art, would be an obvious exhibition to have originated somewhere in the Southwest, but it
did not. Instead it comes out of the
Southeast, --Boca Raton, Florida. The
Director of the Boca Museum of Art, Steven Maklansky explains in the
introduction to the catalog for the show, “Here in Boca Raton we understand how
a warm climate, attractive natural resources and a bit of optimistic city
planning can make all the difference.” I
guess it is a choice do you prefer the mountains or the sea?
The show is guest curated by an art historian and
independent curator, Valerie Ann Leeds, out of New York. Her field of expertise is American art and she-has
written several books on the artist Robert Henri (1865-1929), who, it turns
out, had a strong Santa Fe connection.
New Mexico only became a State in the 20th century, 1912 to be exact. Edgar Lee
Hewett (1865-1946) who was an anthropologist and archeologist by training turned
into the guru of all things art at that time.
He felt that the historic Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, where he
established the Museum of New Mexico in 1909 was not enough to exhibit the work
of all the artists who were coming to Santa Fe, so he campaigned for the
construction of a separate art gallery, now the New Mexico Museum of Art, that opened
in 1917. It’s architecture was the model
for what is now known as “the Santa Fe
Style”.
Robert Henri was a great influence on Hewett who convinced
him to come to Santa Fe where a group of artists was already in residence in
1916. Henri had trained in the academic
tradition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and in Paris. but became one
of the leaders of the Ashcan School, and the organizer of "The Eight", a group
of artists who objected to the
restrictive exhibition practices of the conservative National Academy of Design
in New York. In Santa Fe, Henri could do
something about it, He convinced Hewett to adopt a policy of open non-juried exhibitions.
Although Henri continued to work in a number of locations including
Philadelphia and Paris and Ireland, but he also enjoyed working in Santa Fe and
became fascinated with Indian culture. “Macedonia”, 1917, from the Ray and Kay
Harvey Collection, is one of his many portraits of Native American subjects.
The first exhibition specifically of the Santa Fe Artists’
Colony was in 1915 in the Palace of the Governors, and a few more artists joined
in 1916, but it all came together in 1917 at the Art Museum’s inaugural show that
Hewett asked Henri to organize. He amplified
the representation of regional artists with names well known to Easterners such
as Leon Kroll and George Bellows. By
1918 Marsden Hartley came to New Mexico and John Sloan soon thereafter. Even Georgia O’Keeffe visited New Mexico in
1917 though she did come not here regularly until the 1930’s and it became her
permanent home only in 1949 when she was already in her 60’s.
I had always thought of John French Sloan as a New York
artist for his city genre scenes are so well known. He came to visit Henri, however, in Santa Fe
in 1918 and from then on came out for four months a year for the next thirty
years . In “The New Homestead” 1930,
courtesy of the Kaushaar Gallery in New York and the Gerald Peters Gallery in
Santa Fe, he depicted himself, (with pipe) in a gathering in the home of the
local artist Will Shuster.
Not all the artists who followed Henri’s lead stayed for a
long time but he did bring out some of the best. Edward Hopper, for instance, came for just one
summer in 1925, but recorded his impressions in a series of watercolors. George Bellows came a few times in order to
get together with his teacher Henri and friend Leon Kroll who also paid
periodic visits. In 1917 Bellows painted
one of the landmarks of the area, the “Santuario
de Chimayo”, collection of Judy and Lee Dirks.
The German-born Gustave Baumann (1881-1971), planning to
move to Taos, New Mexico, did not find it to his liking, but he had heard of
the new art museum which was welcoming to local artists in 1918 so he came down
to Santa Fe. This master of the color
woodcut made Santa Fe his home until his death.
Frank Applegate (1881-1931), who is one of my personal favorites, was
another East Coast artist who decided to move to California in 1920 but on his
way stopped in Santa Fe and stayed. His untitled "Indian Village" from the collection of Gerald and Kathleen Peters, shows a
pueblo feast day.
The
story of the artists’ colony would not be complete, however, without mentioning
the “Lungers”. Between 1880 and 1940 there
was a great influx of individuals seeking a cure from tuberculosis, which then killed
more people in the U.S. than any other disease.
One of the better known "Lungers”
was Will Shuster and one of his best paintings, “Corn Dance” done in 1920, from
the collection of Gerald & Kathleen Peters is in the exhibition.
