Among the personal artifacts that will appear in our upcoming retrospective for Janet Lippincott (1918-2007), there’s a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings. The folio of yellowed papers chronicles a tipping point in the New Mexico artist’s career—and the many wonders that came after—but it’s not the whole story. For the first half of Lippincott’s life, success was obscured behind considerable hurdles on the long path ahead. And yet, there’s one constant that carried her through. It’s visible in the portraits scattered through Lippincott’s scrapbook: a fiery, direct stare that never wavered.
On Friday, December 2 from 5-7 pm, Matthews Gallery debuts Janet Lippincott: A 70-Year Retrospective. The artwork and artifacts on display will complete the picture of an artist who was defiantly prolific long before she received recognition. Lippincott had a vision for her life, and it remained unmarred despite injuries and setbacks.
Lippincott was born in Brooklyn, New York, and exhibited artistic talent from an early age. Her family lived in Paris for part of her childhood, where she hungrily absorbed the aesthetic innovations of Picasso and Matisse. As a teenager, she studied at the Art Students League of New York, following in the footsteps of Georgia O’Keeffe and other modernists who would become art pioneers of the West.“I didn’t like to be told what to do,” she later recounted to a longtime art dealer. “So I quit that and I went off to war.”
As a member of the Women’s Army Corps during World War II, Lippincott served under General Eisenhower, and once put General Patton in his place when he barged into Ike’s office. During a German blitzkrieg of London, she broke her back when a building collapsed. Back in the States, she recovered and boldly embarked on her next adventure. Using the GI Bill, she traveled to Taos to study under Emil Bisttram.
“Bisttram told her flat out that she didn’t have what it took to be an artist,” wrote Westword in Lippincott’s obituary. “She spent the next half a century proving him wrong.” After furthering her studies in Colorado and California, she moved to Santa Fe for good. It was here that her career took off, with a series of group and solo exhibitions across the region in the 1960’s and 70’s. In 1972, Bisttram penned a positive review of her solo exhibition at Santa Fe’s legendary Jamison Gallery.
Lippincott had proved her point, never straying from the unapologetic ambition that marked her generation. Like O’Keeffe or Mabel Dodge Lujan, she was a New Woman of the West, who engaged in the gritty hand combat that led to sweeping social changes of the 20th century. Near the end of her life, she was awarded the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and the New Mexico Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Join us for Janet Lippincott: A 70-Year Retrospective on Friday, December 2 from 5-7 pm to celebrate this pioneer of New Mexico modernism, and discover the art and artifacts that were the kindling for her inextinguishable passion. Click here to RSVP on Facebook.
Among its many virtues Santa Fe has always been a refuge for dreamers, eccentrics and artists. Some of these magnificent souls bring with them an unmistakable effervescence, a radiant and slightly skewed take on the world that reminds us of what a life of complete freedom, with both its rewards and its costs, looks like.
If there were a poster child for Santa Fe artistic eccentricity it would have to be Tommy Macaione (1907-1992). Old time Santa Feans remember Macaione wandering through the city, usually with a few of his beloved dogs with him, painting area landscapes, gardens and street scenes. He was instantly recognizable with his leonine head of hair and bushy beard making him look like a Renaissance artist who just happened to drop into the latter part of the 20th century.
Tommy Macaione statue by Mac Vaughan, Santa Fe
We got some insight into Macaione when the author, Robert Wolf, stopped by the gallery a few months ago to talk about his new book, In Search of America. Wolf met Macaione and other Santa Fe artists when he lived here and the new book includes accounts of that period. In addition to Macaione, Wolf writes about artists including Alfred Morang, Harold West, Eli Levin and others.
We were so interested to hear some of these stories of Santa Fe that we are hosting a book signing for Mr. Wolf this month. In addition to Mr. Wolf’s appearance we’ll be showing some works by artists who appear in the book. The book signing and exhibition will take place Friday, October 16 from 5 to 7 pm at the gallery.
When Mr. Wolf was a student at St. John’s College he met Macaione and writes about the artist and other Santa Fe adventures in his new book, “In Search of America”. Following is an introductory comment and excerpt from the book by Mr. Wolf:
From the early 1960s through the early 1970s, I lived on and off in New Mexico. In February 1963, at age nineteen, I left an upper middle-class Connecticut home to rent an uninsulated shack in Duran for $10 a month, and stayed until late March. In 1965, I returned to New Mexico to enroll in St. John’s College. In Santa Fe, with my friends Mac and Alan, I began exploring the City Different. This excerpt from “In Search of America” recounts my first meetings with artist Tommy Macaione.
Santa Fe Winter Scene by Tommy Macaione
Winter snow was melting the afternoon Alan rushed into our dorm and announced to Mac and me that he had discovered a great painter. He sat down on the edge of Mac’s bed. “He’s as good as Van Gogh. You’ve got to see him.”
He drove us down the hill to Canyon Road and parked in front of a one-story stuccoed house. A hand-painted sign above the front door read:
PAINTINGS – Tommy Macaione—El Differente
El Differente had a painting propped in his window, an intense landscape reminiscent of Van Gogh.
We jumped out of the car. Alan knocked on the screen door and Tommy called, “Wait! Wait!” Moments later he pulled the door open, and through the screen said, “I can’t let you in yet. I can’t let my babies out.” He pushed his dogs aside with his feet, all the while talking loudly to them. We entered a tiny living room empty of furniture but stacked with paintings. The paintings were in various stages of completion. They were painted with thick daubs and streaks of color, wild profusions of emotion. But on one wall he hung two conventionally rendered paintings—one of a pair of flamenco dancers, another of a pipe and a bowl with fruit. “I hang those,” Tommy said, “so that people will know that I can paint like that, if that’s what they want.”
A stench filled the room. Tommy’s clothes were covered with dog hair. His bed was covered with dog hair, the sheets and cover balled together. Empty dog food cans with bits of decayed meat lay on the floor next to dog turds. There were wet spots and stains where his dogs had peed.
Tommy had the title “El Differente” legally affixed to his name. And different he was. He was in his mid-fifties with a long unkempt beard, hideous breath, and hair that shot out in all directions. He was missing several teeth; those he had were brown and yellow.
“I’m having a terrible time,” Tommy told us, “I’m STARVING. Things are worse, Alan. I passed out just the other day and the day before that, too, I’m so hungry. I haven’t enough to even feed my babies.”
His eyes watered and he spoke frantically, in a rush.
“We can help you out, Tommy,” Alan told him. “How about coming up to dinner this evening?”
“Boys, do you mean it?”
“Sure we do,” Alan said.
“I love you boys,” he said, grabbing Alan and hugging him. “Can you drive me downtown? Do you have time? I have to get some bones for my dogs, they’re starving. God would be very angry with me if I let them die.”
“Sure,” Alan said, “let’s get in the car.”
Tommy sat up front with Alan. His smell sickened me. Mac and I rolled down our windows but the rush of air could not eliminate his odor.
We drove to a grocery store where Tommy walked to the meat department and returned with large bags filled with bones and meat scraps. Meanwhile, I bought a box of spaghetti, several cans of tomato sauce, Italian sausage, two loaves of bread, and a can of soup.
“This ought to hold you for a while,” I told him.
He cried and hugged me.
I was happy for him and envious of his intensity and dedication and lack of inhibition, but his sentimentality embarrassed me.
That night Alan brought him to the dining room, a large hall with balconies and clean light wood tables. The hall was clean, spare, modern. Tommy wore a torn corduroy coat with bulging pockets, baggy pants thinning at the knees, and old cracked shoes with knotted laces. With his wild hair and unkempt beard Tommy looked as out of place as anyone could. But we were proud of our find; after all, we were mingling with the townspeople.
That struck me as the big gap between us and the other students: they had little to do with the town. Their interests were in the program, themselves, and a handful of friends. We, on the other hand, lived only partly for St. John’s. You might say the books were for us a jumping off point, a different way of exploring the world, a kind of background to it. The real thing was life, people.
“God bless you boys, God bless you,” Tommy kept saying.
When Kyle our waiter told us the selections, Tommy said excitedly, ”You mean I can have a choice?”
Alan said, “Sure. And if you want more later you can have it.”
When Kyle brought our orders Tommy immediately pitched into his food, gobbling it and talking while he ate. “St. John’s is a great school, a great school. You boys are very lucky to be here. Me, I didn’t have a college education. I went to art school. I knew very early I wanted to be a painter.”
“Have you always made your living as a painter?” I asked.
“A living!” he practically screamed. “I can’t make a living at painting now!”
“Right,” I said.
“I was a barber for years, in New York. When I came to Santa Fe in fifty-three I was a barber.”
His fingers were greasy from picking up food with his hands. When bits of meat and vegetables became entangled in his beard, he did not notice.
“If you boys want to do me a favor,” he said loudly, his mouth filled with food, “something God will bless you for, get me a show at St. John’s.”
“All right,” Alan said, “we’ll do that.”
Periodically the college hung an art exhibit in a gallery on the balcony overlooking the dining hall. We arranged Tommy’s show through Colonel Deal, who crated the exhibits. We arranged to meet Colonel Deal at Tommy’s studio. Colonel Deal brought his station wagon and selected the paintings and we stacked them in his car and in Mac’s. We spent the afternoon hanging the show while Tommy walked around, jabbering excitedly, “God will bless you. I pray for you. You are good boys for doing an old man this kindness.”
We had Tommy to dinner several more times. For fifteen years Tommy had starved in Santa Fe. Whenever things got especially tough he took out a large ad in The Santa Fe New Mexican—the town paper—pleading for help. He traded paintings for the ads. Now he thought his fortunes were changing. He thought that with a show at St. John’s he would begin to attract wealthy buyers. He wrote prices of three and five hundred dollars on small cards in a scrawl and posted them next to the paintings. Then he scratched out those prices and scribbled in higher ones.
For days afterwards we spent hours with Tommy in Mac’s room before a tape recorder as he told us his life story and his theories of art. He wrote huge summaries of these in his large hand on greasy papers. All this was for a biography and artist’s statement, which we were to type up and photocopy and put in a stack in the gallery. We never wrote the biography or the statement. Tommy kept walking or hitchhiking up to St. John’s to see the show. Benevolence and gratitude changed to indignation. He railed at us.
“For two months now you’ve done nothing,” he would say. “That’s not right. You made a promise and if you’re gentlemen you’re supposed to stick to them.”
He was right.
Tommy painted outdoors around Santa Fe in all weather. I remember his large paintings of hollyhocks that grew in profusion along Santa Fe sidewalks. Tommy was most interested in flowers, shrubs, and bushes, sometimes set against houses. In winter he wore several corduroy jackets and torn trousers, painting outside on the bitterest days. I saw him painting one evening at dusk to catch the last of the flowers before the autumn frost. When Tommy was not painting or begging scraps for his dogs, he would walk all five of his pets, getting the dogs and himself entangled as they dragged him across Santa Fe.
“Wonderful place. You must come. Am sending ticket. Bring me a cook.” Mabel Dodge Lujan’s telegram to artist Andrew Dasburg is a seminal moment in New Mexico art history. Lujan, a prominent arts champion from New York, had fallen in love with the Taos art colony and was determined to summon artists there from the East. The efforts of Lujan and her counterparts in Santa Fe and Albuquerque sparked a great influx of modernist artists to the region, eclipsing the traditional styles that had reigned there in the late 19th century. Matthews Gallery’s exhibition THE MODERNIST IMPULSE: New Mexico’s 20th Century Avant-Garde, will tell stories of revolutionary artists throughout the previous century in a special rolling exhibition from September through October, 2015.
We’re working in concert with Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and New Mexico Museum of Art’s Fall of Modernism: A Season of American Art event series to trace the grand arc of New Mexico’s modernist history. Starting with Lujan’s circle, which arrived in the 1920s, and moving forward through the decades, we’ll examine the strong impulse of modernist artists to settle in New Mexico and revolutionize the art colonies here.
Over the course of the two-month show, Matthews Gallery’s walls will shift through time. Early Taos modernists will give way for the Taos Moderns movement, Santa Fe artist and art teacher Alfred Morang will pass the baton to students such as Janet Lippincott and William Vincent, and rays of influence from the revolutionary Transcendental Painting Group will stretch far beyond its short existence. Contemporary artistEli Levin, who came to New Mexico in the 1960’s and knew many notable modernists, will round out the group.
Learn more about our contribution to Fall of Modernism on their newly launchedhomepage, and connect with us onFacebook, Twitterand Instagram for updates on the show.
Eric G. Thompson‘s new series of contemporary realist paintings arrived yesterday. As we pulled them from the box one by one, silenced by their cool gravitas, we saw them in a whole new way. First came a solitary bird in a tree, silhouetted against a pale sky. Was he watching the pensive girl strolling through the field that emerged from the package next? Perhaps she was headed to the barn in the following image, where she’d sit and munch on the late-summer pear in the still life. It was as though we were opening an intricate matryoshka doll, with each picture adding a new layer of details to the story.
Light flows across Thompson’s canvases and panels like meditative thoughts, revealing an endless array of materials with diverse textures and reflective qualities. As a self-taught artist, Thompson learned to capture all of these effects through looking, painting and looking again. When you come to the opening reception for Eric G. Thompson: New Works at Matthews Gallery this Friday, August 14 from 5-7 pm, make sure to take just as much care as you ponder each composition (and perhaps find connections between them). Here’s a special preview:
If a picture is worth a thousand words, what about a painting? For our exhibition WIDENING THE HORIZON: New Mexico Landscapes, we paired Southwestern landscape paintings with photographs of the places that inspired them. The results are fascinating, showing how artists interpret a setting based on style, sensibility and—particularly—sentiment. Explore the pairings below, and make sure to visit WIDENING THE HORIZON before it closes on June 30.
A glimpse of Middle Truchas Peak from Eli Levin‘s studio in Dixon, New Mexico.
This Alfred Morang painting may show artist Olive Rush’s garden on Canyon Road. Rush and Morang were close friends. Compare to the photograph at right.
Alice Webb‘s monotype of the iconic San Francisco de Assisi Mission Church in Taos, New Mexico gives us a sense of the surrounding landscape.
Eli Levin‘s interpretation of Abiquiu’s colorful rock formations.
Dorothy Morang paints a Santa Fe summer storm in watercolor.
Maynard Dixon‘s pastel of New Mexico’s dramatic cloud formations.
Mt. Carmel, Utah, according to Santa Fe artist Arthur Haddock.
Tommy Macaione brings out the purple and blue tones of a snowy Santa Fe street.
Click here to learn more about WIDENING THE HORIZON: New Mexico Landscapes, and connect with us onFacebook, Twitter and Instagram for daily gallery news.
“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 bookIn 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 dealerRobert Parsonsinterviewed 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 asHelen 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 Shamanand 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 newaesthetic 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 theSan 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: 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.
At our special COLLECTOR’S FORUM workshop last Friday, we presented an inside look at the art world to a room packed with collectors, artists and dealers. We also debuted a special live stream of the event, broadcasting to art lovers across the country and our friends on social media. Check out an edited recording of the event above.
One highlight of our workshop was a special appearance by Matthew Horowitz, head of conservation at Goldleaf Framemakers. Matt is a brilliant conservator who has collaborated with us before, and recently appeared in Fine Lifestyles Magazine and the Santa Fe New Mexican. Here’s an excerpt of Chris Quintana’s superb profileof Matt:
Matthew Horowitz had a prestigious job as an art restorer at Lowy Framing & Restoration in New York City, the nation’s oldest and largest fine arts services firm.
Recently he recalled lying on the floor of his empty Manhattan apartment and crying about leaving that life and career behind. But coming home to Santa Fe turned out to be a good decision for Horowitz, now 32.
He established an art restoration department at his father’s shop, Goldleaf Framemakers of Santa Fe. He now leads the team constructing Zozobra, the 50-foot-tall marionette burned every year at the beginning of Fiesta. And he is engaged to be married in June.
At Goldleaf Framemakers, where he works on restoring and cleaning damaged and dirty artwork, the smell of pungent lacquer and burned cigarettes wafts through the air. Music plays from a loudspeaker against the soundtrack of sanding and hammering…
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 (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 (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 (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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 frontierof 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 andFlickrfor daily gallery news.
The 102nd annual Armory Show opens in New York City this weekend. Its history stretches back to 1913, when the exhibition introduced the European modernist movement to the United States. Featured artists included Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Vincent van Gogh Gogh and other Europeans. The show also included American artists such as Randall Davey, John Sloan, Paul Burlin, Andrew Dasburg, Edward Hopper, Marsden Hartley and more who had been influenced by the artistic revolution taking place across the Atlantic.
Not-so-coincidentally, we’re launching a modernism show of our own this Friday, and it features several New Mexico artists who participated in the original Armory show. During the first half of the 20th century, Davey, Sloan, Dasburg and a great variety of their East Coast contemporaries ventured to New Mexico and reshaped the Taos and Santa Fe art colonies into Western outposts for bold aesthetic innovation. The Taos Moderns, the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG) and other collectives engaged with new developments in the movement, gaining an influential presence on the international art stage.
Our SPRING OF MODERNISMexhibition will follow every twist and turn of New Mexico’s modernist movement through significant artworks by Davey, Dasburg, Max Weber, Doris Cross, Russell Cowles, Howard Schleeter, Rolph Scarlett, Paul Burlin, Cady Wells, Jan Matulka, Dorothy Brett and others. It features TPG mavericks Raymond Jonson, Emil Bisttram and William Lumpkins, Taos Moderns such as Beatrice Mandelman, and pivotal Santa Fe modernists including Alfred Morang and Janet Lippincott.
The scope of the show is as ambitious as its title suggests— we’re highlighting 50 transformative years of New Mexico modernist history. SPRING OF MODERNISM shows how New Mexico’s art community became one of the largest and most influential in the nation.
Look below for some of our favorite works from the exhibition, and check out a special preview on our website. Also, make sure to attend the opening on Friday, March 6 from 5-7 pm!
MATTHEWS GALLERY BLOG 
