The Taos School

Part Three: Mabel's Stable

Wonderful place. You must come. Am sending ticket. Bring me a cook.
~Mabel Dodge, in telegram to Andrew Dasburg~

Besides the Society of Taos Artists, another "institution" - Mabel's Place - deserves vast credit for the development of a world-class art market in what might otherwise be remembered, like Provincetown, as just a happy spot for those obligatory stay-at-home holidays during World War I.

Most of the artists discussed here - those of a "third wave" following TSA founders and others in residence soon enough to join - were members of "Mabel's Stable," given their first glimpse of the area as guests of Mabel Dodge Luhan, whom they'd known as an arts patron in New York before her marriage to Taos Pueblo leader Tony Luhan.

Heiress to a banking fortune, the legendary Mabel twisted the arms of every artist she knew (and some she hadn't met yet) and succeeded in filling her home with stars. Throughout the 1920's and 1930's, cultural life in northern New Mexico revolved around her ever-expanding home, where rum-runners from Mexico arrived punctually at 3:00 a.m. to ease the pangs of Prohibition and leading painters kept company with such literary lions as Thornton Wilder, Aldous Huxley and D.H. Lawrence, who bought mountain property nearby. (As an interesting sidelight, Mabel wooed Lawrence to the region by sending turquoise and silver Indian jewelry to his wife, Frieda, who later boasted of having "the only floor in the world to be scrubbed by both a Vanderbilt and a Guggenheim.")

Taos Valley “seemed like the first day of creation” to Andrew Michael Dasburg (1887-1979), when invited - okay, summoned - by Mabel.

Things were on the primitive side. In 1918, she hadn't yet built "the big house" or even divorced the seldom-mentioned Maurice Sterne.

Already a well-established artist by then, Dasburg become arguably the greatest of all Taos painters and was a key figure in American art as whole: a principal channel through which French Modernism spread.

Paris-born though raised in the U.S. from age five, he studied first at the Art Students' League in New York with Kenyon Cox and Birge Harrison, whose "tonalism" he rejected - going so far as to help form a rival group called The Sunflower Club, dedicated to using bright colors.

Subsequently, his work developed with guidance from Robert Henri and Gertrude Stein in the city of his birth, where he absorbed Cezanne's lessons in Vollard’s gallery and spent hours watching Matisse draw. Back in New York, Dasburg disseminated their ideas and exhibited four pioneering works in the Armory Show of 1913, which marked the start of modern art in America.

Dasburg didn't take up residence in Taos until 1933, but Mabel's became his regular summer refuge from duties as a master teacher in Woodstock, New York. Based partly upon his sharing a house there with Morgan Russell, leader of the American Synchronist movement, he was associated with that group. However, his primary allegiance then - and always - was to the example of Cezanne.

Criticized at times by other Taos artists for being too closely aligned with Cezanne, he was initially the only painter who portrayed the local landscape without employing the academic and documentary style of what came to be known as the Taos/Santa Fe School. (Santa Fe being just a few hours down the road, artists often moved between these locales and also to Albuquerque, an hour farther south.)

Decidedly a modernist even from earliest years, Dasburg progressively purified his vision - eventually rendering landscape in absolute essentials, bared to a geometry of its "bones."

A potent role model and teacher for younger artists, Dasburg exerted an influence that continues to be felt today, most notably in the work of Earl Stroh.

Given that Dasburg's record price at auction is still below $200,000, his pictures appear to be vastly undervalued, relative to his historical significance and their appeal on artistic grounds, alone.

One certainly can't say the same about the work of Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (1887-1986), whose best pieces offered at auction have fetched $2-$4 million lately.

Though O'Keeffe didn't make her first visit to Taos until 1929 or establish a year-round home in the region until 1946, she's being given preference in order here, due to her extremely close association with New Mexico art and her rank as America's most celebrated woman painter.

Among the many honors heaped upon O'Keeffe in life and posthumously, surely the greatest was the 1997 opening of a Santa Fe museum devoted to her art. Popular far beyond the Southwest, she was the first woman given a solo show by London's Hayward Gallery and her work is ardently collected around the world.

The color! The color!
~Georgia O'Keeffe, on first sight of New Mexico~

Like Dasburg but a decade later, O'Keeffe discovered New Mexico as a summer guest of Mabel Dodge - by then Mabel Dodge Luhan. She took to the area immediately for, despite her lengthy residence in New York, she seems to have been a country girl at heart. Raised on a large dairy farm in her hometown of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe savored New Mexico ranch life in near-seclusion after the death of her famous spouse, the renowned photographer and gallery owner Alfred Steiglitz, who was originally her mentor and promoter. Until she met Steiglitz, her career had undergone fits and starts.

Trained at the Chicago Art Institute (1905-1906) and Art Students' League in New York (1906-1908), she won prizes but abandoned painting for commercial art. Two years of drawing embroidery and lace for ads and a bout of measles so weakened her eyesight that she quit work in 1910 and rejoined her family, then in Charlottesville, Virginia. Visiting classes at the University of Virginia in 1912, O'Keeffe found her interest in art revived by the Orientalist theories of Arthur Wesley Dow.

She soon resumed painting, while employed as an art educator in Amarillo, Texas. In 1914, she returned to New York for study at Columbia Teachers' College with Dow, who fed her passion for "filling a space in a beautiful way" with abstract forms and decorative patterns. At this time, she was also affected by Kandinsky's essay, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and Arthur Dove's early nature abstractions.

O'Keeffe taught next at Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina, where she produced the abstract charcoals and watercolors shown by her friend, Anita Pollitzer, to Steiglitz in 1916. "At last, a woman on paper!" he responded - then proved just as eager to have O'Keefe in person as to have her work for his gallery of modernists. By 1917, when he staged her first solo exhibition, she was also posing for him. A portrait series among the most remarkable in photographic history resulted. After two more years, during which O'Keeffe headed an art department in Canyon, Texas - a setting that spurred vivid canyon and plains landscapes - she moved back to New York at Seiglitz's urging and accepted his subsidies that allowed her to keep painting between shows. In 1924, she accepted his hand, too. The painter John Marin was witness to their marriage. Others in their circle were Dove, Marsden Hartley and Paul Strand, all exhibitors at the Steiglitz gallery, "291."

Known for painting Manhattan skyscrapers and spectacular "urban nocturnes," the young O'Keeffee also turned out nature-based abstractions during annual holidays in upstate New York. Botanical close-up's inspired by Strand's "Precisionist" photography followed in 1924, five years before she fell under the spell of New Mexico and its forms: the adobe structures, canyons, mesas, mountains and sun-bleached animal bones that she would immortalize from her final home at Abiquiu, 40 miles from Taos, where her lifetstyle was as austere as her art. During the 1970's, her sight badly impaired, O'Keeffe modeled clay pots that echoed the simplified shapes in her paintings and was assisted by the ceramicist Juan Hamilton in producing sculptures based on plasters made earlier in her career.

Even prior to settling in New Mexico, O'Keeffe had been honored with retrospective exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum (1927), the Art Institute of Chicago (1943) and New York's Museum of Modern Art. She had also been elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Additional retrospectives were held in 1960 (Worcester Art Museum), 1966 (Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth) Texas) and 1970 (Whitney Museum of American Art).

Championed by the women's movement, O'Keeffe garnered such further awards as the National Institute of Arts and Letters gold medal for painting (1970), an honorary degree from Harvard University (1973) and the Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor, presented by President Gerald Ford in 1979. One year after her death, the centennial of her birth was commemorated by a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

As we descend from the rarefied air of O'Keeffe-dom to mundane chronology, we find that other notables arrived in Taos much sooner than she. In residence from 1918 was Leon Shulman Gaspard (1882-1964), a Russian-born contemporary of Chagall - and, in fact, his art school classmate in Vitebsk.

Reportedly fascinated by the costumes and rituals of the region, Gaspard combined elements of French Impressionism with realism and painted a wide range of subjects in a style noted for brilliant coloration and intricate patterning.

Trained first locally alongside Marc Chagall, Gaspard advanced to the Academie Julian in Paris. There his work was well-regarded and appeared in annual Salon shows, but wanderlust struck in 1909, after his marriage to a wealthy American, Evelyn Adell. Their extended honeymoon began with a two-year jaunt in Siberia. This spree cut short by warfare, Gaspard suffered severe injury in a plane crash while serving in the French Aviation Corps. Hospitalized until 1916, he joined his wife in New York and was embraced by the arts community. He exhibited at the National Academy of Design and the Vanderbilt Gallery.

The Gaspards' foreign adventures continued, even after relocation to New Mexico. Such frequent absences presumably mitigated against membership in the TSA, which continued operating until 1927 but without Gaspard's participation. Travels took him and his wife to China, Mongolia, Tibet and North Africa, where they were stranded for several Depression years because funds were frozen in a failed bank. Ultra-adaptable, Gaspard learned to sketch aboard every conceivable conveyance: pony, horse, camel, wagon, riverboat, steamship, train, truck, car and plane. It's been said by some that, regardless of where he was, Gaspard lived in 'the Big World' - being filled with expansive ideas and creative spirit. By others, it's been said that he'd tell a lie when the truth would serve him better. He's remembered by all for good humor, romantic songs and entertaining stories - as well as staunch resistance to modernism. His idols were the French Impressionists, Post-Impressionists Matisse and Modigliani and the sculptor Rodin.

A 1918 painting, The Finish of the Kermesse (below), shattered its $80,000-120,000 estimate to bring $275,000 in 1990 - to date the auction record for a Gaspard.

Another Russian immigrant, Kazan-born Nicolai Ivanovich Fechin (1881-1955) arrived with even more gilded credentials. In Europe, he'd won first prizes among such distinguished rivals as Monet, Pisarro, Sisley and Sargent, after six years on scholarship at the Art School of Kazan (a branch of the celebrated Imperial Academy of Art of St. Petersburg) and further studies in St. Petersburg, Petrograd and Paris.

His work having been shown in America at the International Exhibit of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Fechin was greeted with wild acclaim when he arrived in New York in 1923 with his wife, Alexandra, and daughter, Eya. Helped by wealthy sponsors, Fechin secured a teaching post at the New York Academy of Art and became instantly successful as a painter of portraits for society people and celebrities including novelist Willa Cather.

Diagnosed with tuberculosis, Fechin was persuaded to try the drier climate of Taos. At Mabel's, he and his family rusticated in luxury for several months, then opted to stay. Though on hand in time to have joined the TSA, he's recalled as a loner. He was comfortable among Indians, though. They reminded him of the Tartars of Kazan. Also attracted to adobe architecture, Fechin built a house in that style. Personally. Drawing upon skills learned in the Volga Forest region from his father - an accomplished woodcarver, icon maker and gilder - he not only constructed the building, working around a previous structure, but also crafted intricately carved vigas, corbels, lintels, door, nichos for icons and furnishings. A work of architectural art, this edifice has been preserved in its maker's memory by his daughter.

Fechin, himself, was driven by a stormy divorce in 1927 from the home he had created so painstakingly and enjoyed far too briefly. While his former wife and their daughter remained in Taos, Fechin traveled extensively in Mexico and Arizona and finally settled in Santa Monica, California, where he established an art school and ultimately died. Art history, however, places this "moujik in art" - sometimes called the "Tartar painter" - firmly within New Mexico.

The $255,500 auction record for a Fechin was set when Manuelita with Kachina (above) changed hands in 1999, significantly exceeding its $175,000-225,000 estimate.

Emil James Bisstram (1895-1976), a summer guest at Mabel's in 1930, was Hungarian by birth. He'd come as a boy to New York, where he studied art at the National Academy of Design, Cooper Union and the Arts Students' League. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1931, he studied for several months in Mexico with Diego Rivera and taught briefly in Phoenix before settling permanently in New Mexico.

A Taoseno from 1932, Bisttram opened the town's first commercial gallery, Heptagon, and the Taos School of Art. One of the Southwest's leading art teachers, he espoused the ideas of Kandinsky and Mondrian, while his own style progressed from broad, calm 1930's classicism to cosmic abstractionism.

Meanwhile, in Santa Fe

Another colony of artist emigres took root in New Mexico's capital in the World War I era. Among the earliest arrivals were B.J.O. Nordfeldt and his former student, Raymond Jonson. Both had close ties to the Taos scene.

Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt (1878-1955), a Santa Fe resident from 1919, was a Swedish immigrant who trained and taught at the Chicago Art Institute. One of the best-known American modernists in the early 20th century, he produced landscapes, portraits, and still-life compositions emphasizing form rather than realistic depiction. Like Dasburg, Nordfeldt was influenced by the spatial experiments of Cezanne.

Later in his career, he returned to the East Coast, though not so soon as to be more strongly affiliated with any other state than with New Mexico.

Underappreciated now, his record at auction is $33,000 - attained in recent years by both the works below.

Few figures cast as long a shadow over art history in the Southwest as Charles Raymond Jonson (1891-1982). The prodigiously prolific creator of around 2,000 works, Jonson was also remarkably long-lived. A tiny figure in a lab-coat smock and a devilish goatee, he remained active in advanced years and circa 1980 was still personally welcoming visitors to the gallery that bears his name, a University of New Mexico landmark. I had the pleasure of knowing him, myself.

Born a preacher's son in Chariton, Iowa, Jonson grew up in Portland, Oregon, and studied at its museum school, then in Chicago - both under Nordfeldt at CIA and at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he remained to teach. He also designed sets and lighting for the innovative Chicago Little Theatre.

The 1913 Armory Show's visit to Chicago introduced him to modernism and converted him forever. Much influenced by Kandinsky, cubism, expressionism and mysticism, he became one of America's leading modernist painters, exhibited in New York and Chicago. For more than forty years, his was a lone voice for radical abstraction in the Southwest.

His first journey to New Mexico, urged by Nordfeldt, took place in the very early 1920's. Soon settled in Santa Fe, he began his famed Grand Canyon Trilogy in 1923 and, from 1927, declared himself a Transcendentalist. A Taos colleague, Bisttram, joined him in forming the Transcendental Painting Group, which aspired "to stimulate in others, through deep and spontaneous emotional experiences of form and color, a more intense participation in the life of the spirit."

During Depression years, Jonson - like many of his counterparts - became a WPA muralist and intensified his career as an educator. Besides teaching at his own school, Atalaya, in Santa Fe, he joined the faculty of UNM, commuting until he moved to Albuquerque in 1949, invited to live and work within a Pueblo Revival studio/gallery complex designed by the celebrated John Gaw Meem.

After retirement as Professor Emeritus in 1954, he continued serving as hands-on director of the Jonson Gallery almost until his death. He is also remembered for having organized the Modern Wing at the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe.

To date, the record price for a Jonson at auction is $88,000 - paid in 1992 for Cliff Dwellings, (above, top) a stunning 1928 work in which he was finding his way by painting what he called "earth rhythms" toward his mature style and the pure, high-altitude palette of what critics have termed his "desert Kandinskys."

Around us we have realism, strife, pain and greed.
I wish to present the other side of life,
namely the feeling of order, joy and freedom.
~Raymond Jonson~