The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is presenting an exhibition that includes a number of paintings designated as partial gifts to the museum by an anonymous New Mexico collector. “Modernists in New Mexico: Works from a Private Collection” will run February 13 to May 10.
Since moving to Santa Fe 11 years ago and acquiring his first New Mexico picture at a local gallery, the owner of this collection has passionately pursued his love of American Modernism by collecting works that creatively engage the area’s distinctive environments, landmarks and residents. This selection demonstrates the richly productive encounter between some of America’s most innovative Twentieth Century painters and one of their favorite sources of inspiration †New Mexico.
The exhibition includes works by various modern artists, most of whom arrived in the Southwest after 1912, when New Mexico, which had been a territory, attained statehood †George Wesley Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Robert Henri, Edward Hopper, Raymond Jonson, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe and John Sloan.
In 1916, the painter Robert Henri left New York for the first of three visits to Santa Fe in search of new artistic inspiration. He did so at a pivotal moment in the early history of American Modernism, during the Great War and amid the aftermath of the sensational Armory Show in New York, when many of his compatriots were responding inventively to the aesthetic challenge posed by the European avant-garde.
Captivated by the beautiful, unfamiliar Western places and peoples of New Mexico, Henri encouraged two close friends and colleagues, Bellows and Sloan, to follow his lead. Before long, many American Modernists had trekked to New Mexico as well, including Marin, Davis, Hartley, O’Keeffe and Hopper. Some visited only once or stayed for just a short time, while others, notably O’Keeffe and Sloan, became longtime residents; for all of these American Modernists, though, visiting and picturing New Mexico became an artistic rite of passage of sorts †a catalyst for aesthetic reinvention.
Some of the pictures in the exhibition clearly represent specific people and sites, as in Henri’s “Julianita,” 1922, Sloan’s “La Cienega,” 1923, and two paintings of the Santuario de Chimayó by Bellows, 1917, and Joseph Bakos, 1935, respectively.
Other works evoke New Mexico in a more general way, as in Andrew Dasburg’s “Mountain Landscape,” 1923, and Benton’s “Train on the Desert,” 1926 or 1927. Still others †such as Davis’s “Interior, New Mexico,” 1923, Raymond Jonson’s “Oil No. 5,” 1940, and O’Keeffe’s “Black Place IV, 1944 †approach particular people and places with an abstracting vision so personal as to transform the subject into a vehicle of private expression and formal experimentation.
In every case, though, New Mexico provided the artist with a distinctive creative point of departure †a compelling array of subjects, forms and colors †that revitalized the creative process. Even realism achieved an innovative Modernist edge in works such as Hopper’s “Adobe Houses,” 1925, which depicts characteristic New Mexico architecture and scenery with subtle attention to basic underlying shapes, arranged like so many abstract building blocks. Regardless of an artist’s particular style then, the Modernist approach revealed New Mexico’s essential beauty.
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is at 217 Johnson Street. For information, www.okeeffemuseum.org or 505-946-1000.
