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Harwood Museum of Art presents

The Taos Moderns

The 1940s marked the beginning of an important transition period for the Taos art community. A group of modernist artists arrived who would set a new artistic course for more than a generation. Following World War II, Taos became an important crossroads in contemporary American art, a place where the influences of European and American modernism came together.

Barbara Latham
Decoration Day, c.1940
painting tempera
24 x 29 15/16 in. (61 x 76 cm) Framed: 29 1/4 × 35 1/4 × 1 1/4 in. (74.3 × 89.5 × 3.2 cm)
Gift of the Artist
Harwood Collection

Artists from New York and San Francisco, the cradles of post-war abstract painting, found in Taos a conducive place to work devoid of the distractions of the big cities. Many of the modernist artists arrived in Taos with little if any knowledge of the earlier artists, as if inexplicably drawn to the Town's inherently creative atmosphere. Many came to study under the G.I. bill.

Dorothy Eugenie Brett
Three Indian Women (Three Witches), 1949
Oil painting
Overall: 24 x 11 15/16 in. (60.9 x 30.3 cm)
Collection of the Harwood Museum of Art, Gift of Millicent A. Rogers
Harwood Collection

Joining Andrew Dasburg as mentor to these new artists in 1939 was Thomas Benrimo, another early American modernist. New York artist Louis Ribak arrived in Taos in 1944 with his wife, painter Beatrice Mandelman, and emerged as a leader of the younger generation.

Thomas Benrimo
Mannequin, 1956
Oil painting
Framed: 42 5/8 × 42 1/4 × 1 1/4 in. (108.3 × 107.3 × 3.2 cm) image: 35 3/4 × 35 3/4 in. (90.8 × 90.8 cm)
Gift of Jane and Arthur Stieren
Harwood Collection

Thomas Benrimo
The Crucifixion (My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?), c.1950
Oil painting
Overall: 44 5/16 x 62 5/8 in. (112.5 x 159 cm)
Gift of Mrs. Howard E. Wurlitzer
Harwood Collection

Agnes Martin, now an internationally acclaimed artist came to Taos a few years later as a student with the University of New Mexico's summer Field School of Art.

Agnes Martin
Nude, 1947
Oil on cavnas
canvas: 20 × 16 × 3/4 in. (50.8 × 40.6 × 1.9 cm) Framed: 27 5/8 × 23 5/8 × 1 3/4 in. (70.2 × 60 × 4.4 cm)
Gift of John Schaefer
Harwood Collection

In the early 1950s, Clay Spohn, an abstract expressionist, and Edward Corbett, an artist with a growing reputation as a modernist, arrived from San Francisco. Their colleague, Richard Diebenkorn, although not a Taos resident, showed at the Town's premier art gallery, Galeria Escondida, as well as the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque where he received a Masters Degree in Art in 1951.

Clay Spohn
Mystery of Symbols - or Secrets of Isis, 1952
Oil on canvas
Overall: 26 3/16 x 31 7/8 in. (66.5 x 81 cm)
M.A. Healy Family Foundation Purchase Fund
Harwood Collection

In the same way that the Taos Art Colony in earlier decades attracted other artists to the area, these new artists were visited by their friends and associates, including such major figures as Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Clyfford Still and Morris Graves.

Emil Bisttram
Out of Space, 1954
casein
Overall: 27 1/16 x 36 in. (68.8 x 91.5 cm) frame: 32 1/4 x 41 1/4 in. (81.9 x 104.8 cm)
Gift of The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation
Harwood Collection

Emil Bisttram
Untitled, c. 1955
Pen and white conte crayon on paper
18 × 14 in. (45.7 × 35.6 cm)
Museum purchase made possible by Gus Foster
Harwood Collection

The influx of dozens of artists by the 1950s had established Taos as one of the centers of modernist artistic activity in the United States. In the middle part of the decade, a number of them began showing together in art galleries and museums and were collectively known as the Taos Moderns.

Emil Bisttram
Untitled Abstraction, 1952
Oil on canvas
Overall: 22 1/16 x 19 9/16 in. (56 x 49.7 cm) Framed: 21 x 18 5/16 in. (53.3 x 46.6 cm)
Gift of Isabeth Hardy in memory of Mayrion & EJ Bisttram
Harwood Collection

Although they never created a formal group such as the Taos Society of Artists had done, they changed the artistic direction of the community.

Louis Ribak
Red & Yellow Abstract, c. 1960
Oil on canvas
Overall: 44 x 58 in. (111.8 x 147.3 cm)
Gift of the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation
Harwood Collection

Louis Ribak
February, c. 1970
Oil on canvas
Overall: 41 x 50 in. (104.1 x 127 cm)
Gift of the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation
Harwood Collection

Their paintings were either abstract, using subject matter, or non-objective compositions of pure form. The stark New Mexico landscape brightened their palettes just as it had that of earlier artists. Cultural influences continued to be important as well.

Louis Ribak
Canyon # 28, 1960
Oil on Masonite
Overall: 74 x 86 in. (188 x 218.4 cm)
Gift of the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation
Harwood Collection

The timelessness they perceived in Pueblo Indian culture and the deep connection to the land they noted in the everyday life of both Indians and Hispanics influence experimentation and innovation in their own art.

Beatrice Mandelman
Convolutions, c. 1970
Oil on canvas
Overall: 76 x 49 5/8 in. (193 x 126 cm)
Gift of the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation
Harwood Collection

Beatrice Mandelman
No War #1(1B), c. 1960
Mixed media collage with acrylic on board
Overall: 14 x 18 in. (35.6 x 45.7 cm)
Gift of the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation
Harwood Collection

If there was any one guiding philosophy during this period, it was a commitment by artists to seek 'the new' in their visual imagery. Many of them were not content with depicting the surface beauty of the landscape or the figurative portraits done by earlier artists. Instead, they wanted to capture the underlying structure of a subject to reveal its true meaning.

Beatrice Mandelman
Carnival #12, c. 1990
Acrylic on Canvas
Overall: 48 x 36 in. (121.9 x 91.4 cm)
Gift of the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation
Harwood Collection

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