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NEW LANDSCAPES, NEW VISTAS: Four Women

May 30, 2015May 30, 2015 Matthews GalleryLeave a comment

NEW LANDSCAPES, NEW VISTAS: Women Artists of New Mexico ends on May 31st. Over the course of the exhibition, we’ve blogged about early women potters of New Mexico and their influence on women artists who migrated here. Here are the tales of four 20th century women who came from near and far to turn over a new leaf—or a new canvas—in the Land of Enchantment. Through their efforts, the Santa Fe and Taos art colonies were forever changed.

Beulah Stevenson (1891-1965) grew up in Brooklyn Heights, New York. After studying at the Pratt Institute, she enrolled at the Art Students League where John Sloan became her mentor. Sloan invited Stevenson to summer in New Mexico, where she was inspired to create modernist landscapes and wild abstract works in the vibrant palette of the Desert Southwest. She returned to New Mexico many times throughout her life.

Stevenson worked as a printmaker, painter, illustrator, art teacher and Brooklyn Museum curator. She was a staunch advocate of modernism and the avant-garde, working with the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors and numerous other artist organizations.

Ila McAfee (1897-1995) was born in Colorado, and first visited Taos on a road trip to California in 1926. She fell in love with the mountain village and its thriving art scene, and settled there with her husband Elmer Turner. They quickly befriended influential members of the Taos Society of Artists such as Blumenschein, Berninghaus, Hennings and Higgins. McAfee was a rare Western-born artist in Taos, where many artists were transplants from the East Coast. She captured the spirit of the West through her paintings of sweeping landscapes and the wild horses that roamed them.

Dorothy Morang (1906-1994) was born in Richmond, Maine. She met Alfred Morang in 1925, while studying at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Alfred was a violinist and Dorothy a pianist. They married on June 13, 1930 and moved to Portland, Maine soon after.

The couple moved to Santa Fe in 1937 in an effort to alleviate Alfred’s tuberculosis. In the City Different, they landed in the center of a colorful circle of artists. They threw Saturday night salons at their home not far from Canyon Road and taught music and painting to make ends meet.

In addition to painting, Dorothy Morang worked for many years at the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, primarily as a curator.

In her three decades in Santa Fe, beginning in 1972, Doris Cross (1907-1994) was known as the City Different’s “most avant-garde artist.” An excerpt from a 1990 biography by Anna Christine Hansen traces the artist’s New York roots and her early days in New Mexico:

Doris Cross began her career in New York City with the Art Students League. After meeting Hans Hoffman, who was known for encouraging artists to investigate their own ideas and unique styles, she went to the Hans Hoffman School of Art. “Hans Hoffman was it,” Doris said of him as a teacher. “…The possibility of discovery! That was the important thing, discovery.” […]

In the mid-1940’s, Doris received the Turner Award from the National Association of Women Artists for a painting which made the leap to large-scale. […] Like many women, she was married and raising a family in the 1940’s—a son and a daughter. In the early years of her development, while living in Woodstock, she painted a series of Madonnas. Later, she taught painting in a basement in Brooklyn in order to afford supplies to paint.

Click here to view all of the artwork in NEW LANDSCAPES, NEW VISTAS, and make sure to stop by tomorrow if you haven’t seen it. You can connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for daily gallery news.

NEW LANDSCAPES, NEW VISTAS: Southwest Premodernism

May 23, 2015May 30, 2015 Matthews Gallery1 Comment

This is part 2 of our blog series on the history of women artists in New Mexico.
Read part 1 here, and learn more at our May 8-31st exhibition
NEW LANDSCAPES, NEW VISTAS: Women Artists of New Mexico.

“I have alluded to Nampeyo as a ‘modern artist,’ because the more I understood her life and work, the more her extraordinary career seemed to parallel that path,” writes Steve Elmore in the last chapter of his book In Search of Nampeyo. Elmore stepped in as our guest blogger last week, which gave us some time to study the links between Pueblo aesthetic innovations and the diverse New Mexico art movements that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries.

What did romanticist painters of the early Santa Fe and Taos art colonies learn from Pueblo traditions that had been around for centuries before they arrived? How did the elegant abstract patterns on San Ildefonso jars and bowls influence abstract expressionists like Beatrice Mandelman and Janet Lippincott?

Elmore provided the first clues to this investigation in his biography of Nampeyo (1856-1942), a Hopi-Tewa potter whose innovative images bridged the ancient and modern worlds. Here’s more from In Search of Nampeyo:

While much of Nampeyo’s life was that of a traditional Hopi woman, we need to consider her life and work outside of the academic fields of archaeology and anthropology, which have heretofore defined how Nampeyo has been perceived by the public. Today, her masterpieces are mostly displayed in natural history museums next to Anasazi jars or in anthropological exhibits of Pueblo Indians—not in art museums—and certainly not as modern art.

Yet, in the end, Nampeyo was not an ancestral potter, nor even a traditional Pueblo potter, although these conditions were the context for her achievements. While she was trained as a traditional potter, she evolved into a unique artist using modern marketing techniques to sell her work to a new Euro-American audience.

As Elmore stresses, it’s important to understand Nampeyo, Maria Martinez and other influential Pueblo potters not as isolated traditionalists but as artists who interacted with newcomers and adapted to the cultural changes they affected. The realities of frontier living necessitated a constant dialogue between the first artists who emigrated from the East Coast and Pueblo artisans. This interchange continued as the market for Pueblo arts and crafts grew and shifted based on the demands of visitors.

Ila McAfee (1897-1995), one of the early “Euro-American” transplants, drew inspiration from Pueblo traditions in her work. McAfee often painted wild horses in profile, echoing the stark monochrome of pottery designs. In The Golden Triad, three beasts hover before a textured golden-brown field that captures the hues of high desert clay.

Taos art dealer Robert Parsons interviewed McAfee about her early years in Taos:

It was so different then. There was nothing between me and the mountain when we first got here. The village was small and the Indians remained uninfluenced by the invaders. Once I asked one of them, ‘What did you call this country before the Europeans came?’ ‘Ours,’ he told me.

Other early Taos artists such as Helen Greene Blumenschein (1909-1989) and Dorothy Brett (1883-1977) also interacted with the nearby Pueblo. Blumenschein meditated on the relationship between the new settlers and the natives in her Taos memoirs, and Brett spent years making genre paintings of the Taos Poblanos. Later on, Brett switched to more mystical subject matter that was inspired by Native American spirituality. Her paintings Cat Shaman and Moon Ray reflect her mature philosophies that link humanity and nature.

In the 1930s, Santa Fe artist and archaeologist Agnes Sims (1910-1990) arrived in New Mexico and began studying the ancient Pueblo petroglyphs. As she pondered the mysteries of the lost language, she began developing her own abstract symbol system in a series of paintings and sculptures.

Sims’ abstract experiments prefigured the innovations of Beatrice Mandelman (1912-1998) and Janet Lippincott (1918-2007), abstract expressionists who helped bring a bold new aesthetic to the Desert Southwest in the 1940’s. This wave of modernists surely took note of Pueblo aesthetic innovations that had spread from Nampeyo’s studio to the San Ildefonso Pueblo and beyond. From Elmore:

Nampeyo’s abstract drawings are strangely prescient of the abstractions of Euro-American modern art. This remains a large part of her mystique. In particular, critics have noted the comparison between Nampeyo’s abstractions of birds to Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque’s invention of Cubism, wherein an object is shown from multiple views at the same time.

Elmore’s observations complete the circle of influences, revealing a far more interconnected aesthetic evolution than we originally imagined. Check back next week for the continued tale of women artists in New Mexico, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest for daily gallery news.

*Images of Nampeyo’s pottery courtesy of Steve Elmore. Image of New Mexico petroglyph courtesy of Roch Hart.

NEW LANDSCAPES, NEW VISTAS

May 6, 2015 Matthews Gallery1 Comment

NEW LANDSCAPES, NEW VISTAS: Women Artists of New Mexico
opens with a special reception on Friday, May 8 from 5-7 pm.
We hope to see you there!

The history of women artists in New Mexico stretches back countless generations, to the early Pueblo artisans who developed innovative ceramics and weaving techniques. That’s just the starting point of our spring exhibition NEW LANDSCAPES, NEW VISTAS: Women Artists of New Mexico. From Native women potters to pioneers of New Mexico modernism, all the way up to trailblazing women artists of today, the May 8-31 show tells stories of incredible persistence and beauty in the Land of Enchantment.

“The Southwest gave me a whole new language, new vistas to paint,” said Henriette Wyeth, who moved to Taos, New Mexico in 1939. At the beginning of the 20th century, the isolated Santa Fe and Taos art colonies offered a fresh start for women artists who had struggled to find recognition back East. In the same era, Maria Martinez of Northern New Mexico’s San Ildefonso Pueblo worked to combine various traditional Pueblo pottery styles and techniques, bringing the age-old tradition to new audiences.

The efforts of Martinez and her contemporaries meshed well with inquisitive new transplants like Agnes Sims, who studied Pueblo petroglyphs and used them as inspiration for paintings and sculptures. Meanwhile, artists like Beatrice Mandelman and Janet Lippincott came to the Southwest to pave new paths, experimenting with abstraction. Dorothy Eugenie Brett, Doris Cross and Dorothy Morang became powerful voices among the Santa Fe and Taos avant-gardes, while arts champions such as Mabel Dodge Lujan and Mary Cabot Wheelwright acted as powerful patrons and creative muses.

Scroll down for a preview of the artwork, and follow our blog in the coming weeks for stories of women artists across New Mexico history.

Nampeyo

Agnes Sims

Beatrice Mandelman

Beulah Stevenson

Dorothy Morang

Doris Cross

Janet Lippincott

Annie O’Brien Gonzales

Heidi Loewen

Learn more about NEW LANDSCAPES, NEW VISTAS on our homepage, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for daily gallery news.

SPRING OF MODERNISM: The Circle

March 14, 2015March 14, 2015 Matthews Gallery4 Comments

Mabel Dodge Luhan and Georgia O’Keeffe

If you visit our SPRING OF MODERNISM show this month, two things will become abundantly clear about the 20th century artists in the exhibition. Firstly, they’re all linked, in one way or another, to the 1913 Armory Show in New York City. Secondly, they are all tied to each other. In fact, the modernists of the Santa Fe and Taos art colonies are so intertwined that we tried and failed to create a chart of their relationships. There are so many connections, it reminds us of Gertrude Stein’s Paris! Here’s just one line of the friendship chain, which begins with Stein herself:

Jan Matulka, Surrealist Landscape, 1935, Gouache on Paper

MATULKA

Jan Matulka (1890-1972) was born in Austria-Hungary, now the Czech Republic. He moved to New York City in 1907 and enrolled at the National Academy of Design soon after. A Joseph Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship enabled him to visit the Desert Southwest in 1917, where he was inspired by the cultures of the Pueblo Native American Tribes. He maintained studios in Paris and New York during the 1920s, befriending Gertrude Stein, Andre Lhote and Max Weber.

Andrew Dasburg, April Snow, 1967, Pastel on Paper

DASBURG

Andrew Dasburg (1887-1979) also knew Stein. He was born in Paris and emigrated to New York City in 1892. He studied at the New York Art Students League and spent time in Paris with Stein, Henri Matisse and Morgan Russell as a young man. In 1913, he exhibited Lucifer (above) at the Armory Show, and was later invited to New Mexico by Mabel Dodge Luhan. He moved to Taos in 1921, and was part of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz’s circle here.

Cady Wells, Taos 1947, Ink and Watercolor on Paper

WELLS

Cady Wells (1904-1954) knew Luhan and O’Keeffe and studied under Dasburg. He grew up in Southbridge, Massachussets and traveled extensively as a young man, studying music and the visual arts before deciding to become an artist in his late 20s. He moved to New Mexico in 1932, where he found an enthusiastic mentor in Dasburg and drew inspiration from the rich culture of the Desert Southwest. The Smithsonian American Art Museum writes:

Portraying the Southwestern landscape in watercolor, Wells moved through various modernist idiots. His early work incorporated gestural, calligraphic lines suggestive of Chinese ideograms. Later he investigated the structure of natural forms [and the] pattern-like appearance of the landscape. Influenced by Dasburg, Raymond Jonson and Georgia O’Keeffe, Wells developed a personal semi-abstract style that brought considerable praise from his peers.

Raymond Jonson, Oil No. 12, 1958, Oil on Canvas

JONSON

Wells’ friend Raymond Jonson (1891-1982) was born in Chariton, Iowa and grew up in Portland, Oregon. He attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the Chicago Art Institute as a young man, but his true artistic breakthrough came when he attended the 1913 Armory Show and saw the artwork of early abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky.

Jonson traveled to New Mexico for the first time in 1922, and moved here two years later. Here he founded the Atalaya Art School and took a teaching position at the University of New Mexico.

Along with his friends Emil Bisttram, Agnes Pelton and others, Jonson formed the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG) in 1938. The collective was inspired by early abstract artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, as well as Theosophy, Zen Buddhism and Dynamic Symmetry. The TPG only lasted a few years, disbanding in 1942 because of World War II. However, the collective’s influence endures in the Southwest and beyond. Some consider the group an heir to Russian Constructivism, Gino Severini and the Bauhaus.

Emil Bisttram, After the Blizzard, 1956, Oil on Panel

BISTTRAM

Jonson’s friend Emil Bisttram (1895-1976) was born in Hungary and immigrated to New York City with his family at 11. It wasn’t until his mid-30s that he visited Taos, but he fell in love with the area and would become a major player in the art colony when he moved there a year later.In 1933 Bisttram helped open the first modern art gallery in Taos and in 1938 he co-founded the Transcendental Painting Group. He promoted the ideas of the collective through the Emil Bisttram School for Transcendentalism, where Janet Lippincott was one of his students.

Janet Lippincott, Llano Ridge, 1959, Oil on Canvas

LIPPINCOTT

Bisttram’s student Janet Lippincott (1918-2007) was born in New York City to a wealthy family, and spent part of her childhood in Paris. There she learned about the aesthetic innovations of Picasso and Matisse. Back in New York, she took classes at the New York Art Students League as a teenager.During World War II, Lippincott enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps and was wounded. She pursued art studies in Colorado and San Francisco on the GI Bill, and also attended the Emil Bisttram School for Transcendentalism in Taos in 1949 and the Alfred Morang Academy of Fine Art. In 1954, she moved to Santa Fe permanently and lived here for over five decades.Lippincott was considered part of a “second wave” of New Mexico modernists, who ventured to the Southwest after WWII. She is known as an abstract expressionist, but her early modernist influences in Paris stuck with her, as evidenced in her career-spanning series of figurative prints.

Alfred Morang, Blue Mountain, Yellow Sky, Ink and Watercolor on Paper

MORANG

As a young man, Lippincott’s teacher Alfred Morang (1901-1958) suffered from tuberculosis. He left his home in Portland, Maine in 1937 and came to New Mexico to recover in a dryer climate. The reports vary, but when Morang got off the train he was met by Randall Davey or Raymond Jonson, two of the city’s most established modernist artists. Morang’s bohemian manner quickly charmed the Santa Fe art world, and the City Different became his permanent home.

Late in his life, Morang moved to a Canyon Road studio just behind Claude’s Bar. Just across the street was an artist and writer’s compound run by Agnes Sims.

Agnes Sims, Dance Rattles, Watercolor on Paper

SIMS

Morang’s Canyon Road neighbor Agnes Sims (1910-1990) was born in Devon, Pennsylvania. She managed a marionette theater and worked as a textile designer in Philadelphia before moving to Santa Fe in 1938 and founding a Canyon Road artist’s compound. In New Mexico, she took an interest in the ancient petroglyphs of New Mexico’s Native American Pueblos, and received a grant to study and sketch them. Her archaeological work inspired a series of paintings and sculptures in which she developed her own semi-abstract symbolism.

Sims’ longtime partner was the literary editor of Harper’s Bazaar, and helped popularize Truman Capote‘s work. Capote was friends (and sometime enemies) with Georgia O’Keeffe. And so the circle comes back around to Andrew Dasburg!

We could do this for ages, but you get the point. The New Mexico art community was a western frontier of avant-garde innovation, forged by a group of passionate friends whose efforts gave birth to the Land of Enchantment of today. And thank goodness for that!

Click here to see all of the artwork in our Spring of Modernism show, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr for daily gallery news.

SPRING OF MODERNISM

February 6, 2015February 7, 2015 Matthews GalleryLeave a comment

We’ve had some unseasonably warm days after last weekend’s snowstorm, and it’s making us excited for the end of winter. It’s the perfect time to release our spring exhibition schedule, which is a period of exciting growth at Matthews Gallery.

In light of Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s brilliant Modernism Made in New Mexico exhibition and New Mexico Museum of Art’s recent emphasis on Southwestern modernists, we’re declaring a ‘Spring of Modernism’ in Santa Fe. It begins with our exhibition of influential New Mexico modernists, and features women artists of new mexico, rare artifacts from legendary artists’ studios and much more. Check it out:

Spring of Modernism: Seminal New Mexico Modernists
March 6-31, Opening Reception: Friday, March 6, 5-7 pm

Matthews Gallery declares a “new spring” of modernism, as this rich period in New Mexico art history returns to the spotlight. Featured artists include Emil Bisttram, William Lumpkins and Raymond Jonson of the Transcendental Painting Group, Alfred Morang and Randall Davey of the Santa Fe art colony, and Beatrice Mandelman of the Taos Art Colony.

Collector’s Forum Workshop
April 17, 6:30 pm

We offer an inside look at art collecting for this special Art Matters event. The workshop is for anyone who’s ever considered buying, selling or caring for fine art and has questions about the inner workings of the art world. Forum participants will get an inside look at every step of the process from one of Santa Fe’s top galleries. The event is free but seating is limited, so give us a call if you’d like to participate – 505-992-2882. Read about our past Collector’s Forum workshops here and here.

New Landscapes, New Vistas: Women Artists of New Mexico
May 8-31, Opening Reception: Friday, May 8, 5-7 pm

In the first half of the 20th century, a number of women artists who were frustrated by a lack of the recognition on the East Coast packed up and left everything behind. In New Mexico’s isolated art colonies, they found the freedom and social acceptance to excel. Matthews Gallery presents the stories and artwork of Janet Lippincott, Agnes Sims, Doris Cross and other women who found a powerful voice in the Land of Enchantment.

The Artist’s Toolkit: New Mexico Artists at Work
June 4-10, Opening Reception: Friday, June 5, 5-7 pm

This special exhibition features rare artifacts of legendary New Mexico artists alongside their work, giving visitors insight into the complex process of conceptualizing, mixing and applying color. Visitors will get a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view Tommy Macaione’s paint palette, John McHugh’s brushes, Alfred Morang’s notes on color, Hilaire Hiler’s color wheel and other behind-the-scenes ephemera from Santa Fe private collections.

Widening the Horizon: New Mexico Landscapes
June 12-30, Opening Reception: Friday, June 12, 5-7 pm

New Mexico’s endless vistas offer an opportunity and a challenge to artists. Matthews Gallery looks back at legendary artists’ attempts to capture and reimagine the High Desert horizon, from early Santa Fe and Taos art colonists including Datus Myers and William Vincent Kirkpatrick, to modernists including William Lumpkins and Beatrice Mandelman, who evoked the spirit of the landscape through the language of abstraction.

Learn more about our exhibition schedule here, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest for daily gallery news.