The Taos School

Part Two: The Second Wave

The "second generation" of Taos School painters were drawn to northern Mexico by even more than ties of friendship and the gorgeous landscape and light. The Taos Society of Artists - established in 1915 - was doing a crackerjack job of promotion.

When Walter Ufer, W. Victor Higgins, E. Martin Hennings, Julius Rolshoven, Catharine C. Critcher and Kenneth Adams arrived to capture the spirit of the Southwest, they could expect attention and patronage by joining the group, which had mounted successful national and international exhibitons and teamed effectively with the railroad to tempt tourists into the region. The newcomers, generally more modernist in their vision than the original Society members, began making their mark around 1917. (For details of the careers of STA founders Joseph H. Sharp, Oscar E Berninghaus, Ernest L. Blumenschein, Bert G. Phillips, E. Irving Couse and Herbert Dunton, see The Taos School, Part One.)

His work was stunning and won many prizes, but Walter Ufer(1876-1936) was by all accounts not a nice boy. A hard-drinking, placard-waving socialist, he was also an ungovernable spendthrift, always in debt. Though he'd hoped to sell this work - Their Audience, also called Taos Women, in which performers seem to pause and regard the crowd below - for a hefty $2,500, he was forced to let it go for a quick $485 from one of his loyal patrons: Dubuque-based William H. Klauer, who hung it in the Hotel Bismarck, Chicago.

Like others of the Taos School, Ufer had Chicago ties dating from student years at the Art Institute. His further studies were in Dresden, Hamburg and - after he abandoned an advertising career in 1911 - at the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Munich.

Teutonic influence is evident in his vivid palette and somewhat expressionistic style. After additional travels took him throughout Europe and into North Africa, Ufer returned to the U.S. and went to Taos - bankrolled by another patron, Chicago's former mayor Carter Harrison. Elected an active member of the STA in 1917, he was the first Taos artist to win at the Carnegie International. Despite achieving numerous honors, vast popularity, sales to major museums and considerable income during pre-Depression years, he was never financially secure. His wife, Mary, is said to have been a saint.

Ufer severely tried the patience of others, as well, often saying harsh things about his patrons behind their backs. He was further given to marching with striking workers in picket lines and lying about his German origin, claiming birth in Louisville, Kentucky, where he was raised by immigrant parents from the age of one.

Shattering estimates at auction, two of Ufer's paintings recently brought prices in excess of $700,000.

Like Ufer, William Victor Higgins (1874-1960), arrived in Taos in 1914, when both were commissioned by Carter Harrison to paint scenes of New Mexico. The generous Harrison's patronage had also made possible Higgins' studies in Europe from 1910 until 1914, during which he met Ufer and another young artist who would come to Taos, Martin Hennings. A formal sort who painted in a three-piece suit, Higgins was quite different type from the rough, blunt Ufer, but shared his distaste for the academic style.

Raised on an Indiana farm, Higgins was befriended by an itinerant signmaker who gave him his first paints. At the tender age of 15, he fled Shelbyville against his parents' wishes and enrolled at the Chicago Art Institute. He next studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and then was sent by his indulgent patron to Europe.

At the Academie de la Grande Chaumier in Paris and the Academy in Munich, Higgins mastered the sophisticated European techniques so evident in his work, regardless of its traditional subject matter. He subsequently taught at CAI, and Chicago remained his primary market even after his move to New Mexico. Though he joined the STA in 1915 and, with Ufer, was elected to full membership in 1917, Higgins seldom exhibited his work with other Taos artists, preferring one-man shows for his nontraditional creations.

Known principally as a landscape artist, Higgins retreated from figural painting after a major media brou-ha-ha over his portrait of an Indian on horseback, Fiesta Day, which won both the First Logan Prize ($500) at The Art Institute of Chicago and the First Altman Prize ($1,000) at New York's National Academy of Design in 1918. Hostile rants by dissenting critics took all the fun out of it.

Over the next three decades, he explored forms of Impressionism, Cubism and Modernism in still life paintings and scenic views, imbuing his physical surroundings with metaphysical content in such works as My Gateway, (top of page) and these examples, titled Mountain Forms #II and Winter Funeral.

For the latter, somber but spectacular, the catalyst was the death of Higgins' mother, though its imagery was probably supplied by a funeral he attended for a Taos boy killed in an automobile accident.

Described by his biographer as the "culmination of all of Higgins's training, exploration and experimentation in oil and watercolor," Winter Funeral features abstracted patterns, dark, bold colors and dry brushwork. Awarded the 1932 William M. R. French Memorial Gold Medal by the Art Institute of Chicago Alumni Association, it also received the $1,000 First Altman Prize in the National Academy of Design's 107th Annual Exhibition.

When the picture appeared in the New York Times, an art critic credited the NAD jury with "picking well" and termed it "easily one of the best achievements of the academy show; powerful and original in treatment, honestly dramatic and full of intensely felt harmonies." Despite wild acclaim, Higgins proved unable to sell the piece. He eventually strolled into the Harwood Museum in Taos and made a casual gift of it as "a painting for over the fireplace."

That hard-luck story notwithstanding, Higgins earned a very comfortable living from his art. His canvasses have recently sold for as much as $315,000.

Ernest Martin Hennings (1886-1956), who met Ufer and Higgins at the American Artists' Club in Munich, came to Carter Harrison's attention through them. With Harrison's backing, he arrived in Taos in 1917. In 1921, he became a year-round resident and, in 1924, an active member of the TSA.

Raised in Chicago though born in Pennsgrove, New Jersey, Hennings studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and then for five years at the Art Institute of Chicago, from which he was graduated with honors in 1904 and where he taught for several years during World War I, while working also as a commercial artist and muralist. Inspired by a second-place finish in the 1912 Prix de Rome, he had previously left a career in commercial art to pursue European studies - principally with Walter Thor Franz von Stuck and Angelo Jank at the Munich Academy.

Pre-war Munich was one of the most exciting cultural centers in Europe, where battles raged between classical academy art and Jugendstil, a German Art Nouveau movement. Not at all avant-garde, Hemmings was nonetheless open to a variety of influences: He tended to paint with thick, broad brush strokes and darkened palette of the Munich School, but also employed the sinuous lines characteristic of Jugendstil.

Known as a calm and orderly man, Hemmings reflected those qualities in his art, which gained national recognition and many awards. His favorite subjects were Native Americans, whom he depicted as people of great dignity. Hemmings' skill in this arena was honored by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, which commissioned him to produce portraits of the Navajo tribe.

Dating his work presents a ongoing problem for art historians, since Hemmings noted dates on few pieces and the careful records kept by his wife were lost in 1979, when she moved as a widow from Taos to Chicago. Even without such details, Hemmings' paintings are highly prized today, some selling in the $500,000 to $1 million range.

Detroit-born Julius Rolshoven(1858-1949) is unique among early Taos artists, in that he didn't arrive via the friends-of-friends network, nor did he "marry" the town. His stay was an extended honeymoon - literally.

On their wedding trip to New Mexico in 1916, he and his bride stumbled upon Taos and couldn't bring themselves to leave for two years! The artistic community embraced him and Rolshoven became an associate member of the TSA in 1917, then was elected to active memberhip in 1918. However, most of his "Taos" works - usually romantic depictions of Indian life in oil or pastel - were produced from a studio in Florence or Santa Fe. (He returned to associate TSA membership in 1923.)

The son of a German jeweler, Rolshoven learned design principles in his father's workshop Inspired to an art career by exhibits at the 1876 Philadelphia Exhibition, he studied with Ernst Plassman at the Cooper Union School in New York, then sailed in 1878 for Europe. There he received advanced training at the Academie of Dusseldorf, from Frank Duveneck at the Royal Academy of Munich and from Adolphe Bouguereau at the Academie Julian in Paris. By 1890, Rolshoven was teaching art in Paris - and, by 1896, he was doing so in London. Upon return to the United States, he established himself as a portrait and landscape painter on the East Coast and married Anna Chickering of the piano manufacturing family. When she died a few years later, he moved overseas again and lived in Italy until the outbreak of World War I.

Another "wild card," Catharine Carter Critcher (1868-1964) was the only woman in the TSA - unanimously voted into active membership in 1924. "No place could be more conducive of work," she wrote during her first visit to Taos in 1920. "There are models galore and no phones." Each summer, Critcher made her way to New Mexico, producing notable portrait studies and returning to the East Coast with a startling suntan in an era when this was unfashionable. A "society" portrait painter in Washington, DC, she also taught there at the Corcoran School of Art (1911-1917) and as head of her own art academy from 1923.

Born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, Critcher studied at Cooper Union in New York, the Corcoran and the Academie Julian - lingering in Paris to found and operate the Cours Critcher painting school until 1909. There she displayed the same combination of administrative and artistic abilities that brought success to The Critcher School of Painting and Applied Arts in Washington. She remained its director until 1940, then retired to paint full-time.

Prices for both Rolshovens and Critchers appear decidedly on the upswing. At recent auctions, a Rolshoven went for $277,500 and a Critcher for $111,250 - smashing top estimates of $50,000 and $30,000, respectively.

The last inductee into the TSA was painter and printmaker Kenneth Miller Adams (1897-1981). Following studies at the Chicago Art Institute and the Art Students' League in New York City, Adams received advanced training in summer classes at Woodstock with Andrew Dasburg. He studied further in France and Italy, urged by Dasburg, and went to Taos in 1924 - also at the suggestion of Dasburg, who had visited the area since 1918 and would settle there in 1933.

A permanent resident by 1926, Adams was voted into active membership then, becoming the group's youngest member. Initially the Topeka, Kansas, native emulated his mentors' styles and choices of subject matter. In time, however, he became an innovator. Known for breaking down natural shapes into geometric patterns of line and color, he served as a pivotal figure bridging the gap between New Mexico's "old guard" realists and new arrivals working in modernist styles. The greatest influences on Adams' art were Cezanne, Dasburg and, in later years, Mexican muralists whose vision prompted him to paint Spanish-American models frequently.

His mysterious Taos Indian, Evening sold recently for almost $400,000 at auction in New York.

The Plasterers (at left) illustrates the fact - somewhat surprising to outsiders - that finish work on adobe structures is a traditional craft among New Mexico women.

Awarded a Carnegie Corporation Grant in 1938, Adams moved to Albuquerque as the first artist-in-residence at the University of New Mexico, where he rose to full professor and taught until 1963.

An Associate Member of the National Academy of Design since 1938, he was named a full member in 1961.

Associate Members

When the Taos Society of Artists disbanded in 1927, its mission accomplished, the group included - in addition to the artists discussed on this and the prior page - three Associate Members. These were Robert Cozard Henri (1865-1929), John Sloan (1871-1951) and Albert L. Groll (1866-1952) - all distinguished painters who had spent appreciable amounts of time in Taos, but who were not permanent residents. Henri and Sloan, though not native New Yorkers, taught there and were active in the "Social Realism" movement. Groll, born in New York, relocated to Santa Fe and was known for paintings and etchings of Southwestern subjects.