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.