FEATURED TAOS AND SANTA FE ARTIST: ANDREW DASBURG

Andrew Dasburg was born in Paris in 1887, but spent his early childhood in Germany. At the death of his father, he and his mother immigrated to New York, where Andrew was enrolled in a special school for the handicapped; he was left slightly lame after a childhood accident. His artistic training began with traditional studies at the Art Students League, followed by summer classes at the art colony at Woodstock, and night classes in New York City with Robert Henri.

He visited Paris in 1907 and became acquainted with many figures of the French avant-garde. Through a friendship with Morgan Russell, one of Matisse’s American students, Dasburg gained entry to the master’s studio, where he discovered the expressive content of line by watching Matisse struggle to perfect a contour in a work in progress. He was enraptured with the work of Matisse, Renoir, the Cubists and especially with Cézanne, who exerted a lasting effect upon Dasburg’s style. He once said that his life could be divided into two segments- the period before seeing Cézanne’s work and the period after.

Returning to the United States in 1910, Dasburg was a spokesman for abstract art. His first pure abstractions appeared around the time of the Armory Show. During this same period, he was frequenting the salon of Mabel Dodge, whose circle included some of the most avant-garde artists in New York City. He followed her and Maruice Sterne to Taos in 1917, and returned every year thereafter, until establishing a permanent residence there in 1930.

Recognizable images reappeared in Dasburg’s art beginning in 1916 and were further stimulated by his absorption of the New Mexican environment. In New Mexico, the artist found new inspiration for his art in the countryside and people of the area. He, in fact, traded in American Indian artifacts and used their motifs frequently in his Cubist-inspired still lifes of the period.

In the 1930s, Dasburg stayed mostly in Santa Fe. His work was interrupted from 1935 to 1946 due to a debilitating illness. Yet many critics, including the late Henry McBride and more recently, Sheldon Reich, feel that his late work included some of his best pictures; soft, spare, tonal landscapes and still lifes suffused with poetic line and atmosphere.

One of the most original and talented -- and certainly one of the most cosmopolitan artists to live in New Mexico, Andrew Dasburg stands even today as one of the earliest and greatest of American Modernist painters. His work, however, is easily recognizable as having a power, stature and enduring importance that go well beyond those of an artist of any mere school or region.

Taos & Santa Fe

The first professional artists established residence in Taos and Santa Fe in the 1890s, and both communities have been a destination for artists since that time. The Taos artists distinguished themselves as nationally recognized realist and romantic painters of the West through exhibitions, which circulated throughout the country between 1915 and 1927, when the Taos Society of Artists was active. At the same time, some 100 miles south of Taos, the Santa Fe Art Colony began to form as younger, more experimental artists flocked here in search of scenic, inexpensive places to paint, and dry, high desert climes for health reasons. Additionally, the newly formed Museum of New Mexico, in an effort to establish the city as a recognized art colony and tourist destination, offered artists unjuried exhibition spaces and summer studio spaces as early as 1917.

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