Painting Taos

Funding for the production of this program provided by the Albuquerque Tri -Sentennial. Community It's more than a word, it's a belief in action, a passion, standing behind neighbors and friends, sharing a smile, lending a hand, or a shoulder to lean on. First Community Bank The Touse Art Museum And Randy Briggs In 1898, the world -famous Touse Art Colony of New Mexico began with a road trip. Where we're going is we call it the sacred site. We'll be headed about almost 22 miles north of Touse. Those Touse painters were a very unusual bunch of people in a very unusual place at an impossible time. We

finally found it on July 16, 1993. It took us three years to find it. When they first came in, they had to figure out how do we handle this landscape. We found a rock that's pictured in the photograph, so we knew we had it. There was a deep love of a place that was new and endlessly entrancing. How many people have seen this site? Maybe 20, and you say? So from here, we walk. What Touse was for everybody and still is, is a place where people can be the person they really want to be. I wanted to disappear from all human knowledge again when we're all

gone. And then this will give incentive for a future generation of art historians to start all over again, including going on the hunt. The reason it's important, if you think about the great places in New Mexico, like the Palace of the Governors, or Trinity site. This is one of those sites in New Mexico, right here, where everything changed as a result of something happening here. Hold on just a second. Can I read you a letter? Well, as you can never find anything we're looking for. I wanted to read you this. This is an original manuscript written by Bert Phillips in 1898 about their trip from Denver to Touse. Phillips and Blue and Shine

were young illustrators in New York. They had both been studying in France. They were living together in New York and illustrating, and they just decided they wanted a Western adventure. Something that was symbolic of America, and America different from many places else in the world. This is a wonderful adventure. We're going to go to Mexico City. Do you know how far Mexico City is? And then back to Cincinnati and the wagon? But they didn't care. They were young. They bought a bunch of painting supplies in Denver before they left. Apparently, they knew so little about this, that they didn't even know how to hitch the wagon left. It was all an accident to have been in Denver. So there was once a road here, and it was

all flat. As you can see, it's not flat anymore. There used to be. As they were coming along, they would have hit a rut. They hit a rut, and I don't know if the wheel broke. I would guess something went wrong with the broken spoke. Okay, a spoke broke on the wheel. Somewhat the rim got distorted. The rim was messed up, and they were in trouble. Since they didn't want to leave all the stuff in the wagon, they brought some of it over and put it on this rather magnificent rock. So Phillips took his great photograph from over there looking right towards me. But it was this rock that we were looking for. Out of a million square acres in the Carson National Forest, we were looking for this particular stone. You can see how there were not other big rocks like that in the area. It was amazing. Bird Phillips is making notes. What shall we do? What

can we do? The wheel must be fixed, or we'll never get out of here. But you know what makes it good? These things were written when Bird Phillips was sitting there while it was happening. Bird Phillips had a problem getting paper. We're talking about 1900. But the grocery store had paper sacks. So that's what these things are. These are paper sacks that Bird Phillips would get and tear up and start riding on. Look at this. They probably would have walked up here and looked around because they were in a valley, trying to see how in the world they were going to get out of it because they didn't know what was ahead of them. There was no way for them to know. So all I could do is look out over these mountains which have been logged and wonder exactly what they should do next.

They later claimed that they'd flipped a $3 gold piece while standing down there by that rock and that the loser would have to carry the wheel into the house to get it fixed. Bloom and Cheyenne has the problem of going all the way into the house and Phillips gets to sit up here without a horse without any way of getting out and wondering if he's ever going to escape this place or not. I won the toss, settled up and started down the mountain. It was slow work getting down that long road. I would carry the wheel first in one hand and in the other around my shoulder, around my neck, on my foot until my muscles ached. I rode over foothills through gorges, out upon the great desert plateau. Slowly I moved across the vast sagebrush plain under vast and beautiful skies.

In the distance, snow kept mountains, romantic mountains, green ever lasting mountains. I saw a few wild animals, a few strange dark people, but they were quite insignificant in this superb landscape. All the time I was juggling that wheel, my eye was enraptured by the glorious impressions. I never shall if I get this first powerful impressions. My own impressions direct from a new land through my own eyes. Not another man's picture of this, not another's adventure. I was receiving under rather painful circumstances, the first great unforeseeable inspiration of my life. New Mexico had gripped me and I was not long in deciding that it Phillips would agree with me and if he felt as inspired to work as I. The Tows Valley and its surrounding magnificent country would be the end of our wagon trip. We're in a scheme of shine.

Here in the red gold light of turn of the century Tows, an adventurous group of artists finds new inspiration. Near the ancient Indian Pueblo, in the shadow of the sangred to crystal mountains, Tows, New Mexico, is still very much a part of the old west. What a hell of a place that was. We just walked into the place. The history, the battles, the flags, the mountain myths, the patches that were written across that. The Comanches that had written the Spanish Army, the whole world had been there in battle. It was a great struggle for all this art. When Joseph Sharp joins friends Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips, they set out to create the next

great American art colony. What drew me to Tows was everything that drew Blumenschein and Phillips to Tows. I've interviewed many artists, scores of artists over time, and I've asked them what brought you there or what kept you here, which is maybe more important. Many people came here accidentally, they were passing through and a week later they own a house and they've moved here. I've heard this story many times. Almost every artist that you talk to who's here today, going back to Joseph Sharp, had that same experience. They came over one of these mountain passes. They looked at the valley and they thought, I'm home,

and been completely transfixed and transformed immediately. Tows isn't some great untouched wilderness when Phillips Blumenschein and Sharp arrive. Indian farmers and Hispanic pilgrims had already settled here at the edge of a deep gorge created by geologic forces eons before. In Tows, the dawn of the 20th century looks much like it has for the last 10 centuries. In my opinion that our Santa Fe would not have become an art center had it not been for the Tows painters. It was the mountains, it was a beautiful chimesa and a fall at Blum, beautiful yellow, and the indies on horseback, the romance, all the lines crossed at Tows in Mexico. We had heard

of Tows, the home and burial place of Kip Carson, of the Indian people who live in five storied communal houses, and the beautiful Spanish girls. Romance and beauty, pictures to be painted, adventure, all wore the sun. Then in a few short weeks I had found more inspiration and material for creative work than I could use in a lifetime. More than that I had found the ideal climate for outdoor work, also a realization that one artist along could do more than scratch the surface of this locality. While the great southwest and artistic empire was practically undiscovered country to the art world, especially by people in a profession that had almost lost the pioneer. Their spirit, bird fillers. People believed it, it was honest, and it was. And to look at a painting, if you've never been in the Tows country to see a painting there, I

think it's a spiritual thing that comes through. And the love for that landscape, what a landscape, and the great aspens out into that massive wondrous desert across that gorge it's in. It's a rival of any in the world, and there wasn't any houses out there there. It's just that great wondrous sagebrush desert. And the scent, you know, the least little breeze of that vast area of sagebrush is just like a special perfume factory. In the dating of the air, permeating the air and everything, it became part of it, but you liked it or not, you were bringing it right into your bloodstream. And all the way up from the desert to the high terrain of snow and a great golden aspens, how can you beat that for it? The peak of the new world. There's a new world to it. Still is to me.

Always will be. I love it deep. Even in those early days, I think there was the feeling I can't imagine quite what it was, but as artists came, as people came, they were sort of absorbed into the community like a sponge. And they came to understand the Hispanic traditions, the Pueblo traditions, and people were very much involved in all of these different areas of the house. People really lived in the house, not on the surface of the house. What house was for everybody and still is, is a place where people can be the person they really want to be, or maybe find the person that they really want to be. Sharpe, Phillips, and Bloom and Shine arrive in Tows,

hoping to start a new chapter in their careers. All three attended art school in Paris, only to return to America to face the hard reality of making a living. In New York, they joined the ranks of freelance illustrators for magazines and newspapers, where they developed a keen commercial eye. The artists were not slow to see what was popular and what was not. They learned to put the taste of the readers and their editors before their own. Illustration in the late 1800s was black and white, but all of these artists were in love with color. Another artist, Oscar Burninghouse, is hired to illustrate travel pamphlets for the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. Like others before him, it's a trip that will change his life. I boarded a narrow gauge freight train, affectionately known as the Chilli Line, known for Santa Fe, New Mexico. That was in 1899.

For reasons unknown to me, the little train would stop every few miles, perhaps to cool down the axle, taking fuel and water, or to remove some fallen boulder from the mountain side. Anyway, whatever it was, this gave me the pleasant opportunity to make sketches of such objects as sagebrush, pinion trees, and rock formations. The train crew, taking interest in me and what I was doing, suggested I might ride the top of the freight car, that I may better see the country as we roll along. The crew soon ties a chair, a top of the train car, then ties Burninghouse into the chair. It was a beautiful bright sunny day in May. The warmth of the sun was warmth to the soul and body in this high altitude in northern New Mexico. The sun casting its glowing color over the hills, that gave the sun to Christo mountains

their name. I found Tau's just as beautiful as the break man had described it, and more so. Burninghouse decides to stay. Others soon follow. My grandfather was E .I. Tau's. He was one of the founding members of the Tau's Art Company, and had been told about Tau's fire in his broom and shine while they were living in New York. And he wanted a place to paint Indians that would be successful and ruined shines and said, there's no place like Tau's to go there and try it out. Irving Cousin's family arrived in 1902. They bought this house in 1999, but it was pretty primitive. Burninghouse said that there were only 25 Anglos who lived in town. There was no electricity, no running water, of course. It was the hottest summer that's ever been recorded. And you can imagine

the clothes that they were in those days were heavy, and so it was a very miserable existence for my grandmother. But my grandfather could have cared less. He enjoyed the painting so much. My grandmother in her letters tells a funny story about when they first arrived in 1902. She went to the butcher store, and she found that the butcher was also the undertaker. And he had the coffins and the sides of beef hanging side by side, which pretty much shocked her. And so she said she couldn't buy any meat until she found another place to buy it. Sometimes I ask myself why I remain away from the land of civilization, but never before have I tried to formulate a reply. I have simply been content to stay on. The charm of the great stretches of mountain and plains and interest of their inhabitants is never ending. As I visit their

villages and talk with my Indian friends, I see and hear the young bucks wrapped in their white blankets, standing on the bridge singing a love song in the moonlight, and I feel the romance of youth. So the answer comes as I write, and I believe that it is the romance of this great, pure, erred land that makes the most lasting impression on my mind and heart. Bird Phillips. American society was much more complex than we sometimes realize at that point. There were all kinds of social issues around poverty, around immigration, around development of all all kinds. So this was an escape, but also a passage into somewhere that seemed more connected to the past. To a kind of authentic American experience, where things were made by hand, where time moved a little more slowly, where life

was simpler as they perceived it. This was very appealing to a world in which industrialization felt like a runaway train. As the painters settled in Taos, they no longer see themselves as illustrators, but rather as pioneers, both of the untamed West and a new school of American art. The center of the art world was Paris. An American artist showing in Paris hadn't really come up with anything new, and one of the ways that they tried was by founding art colonies, Provincetown, Carmel, Taos. For most American artists who were European -trained and who had success, for example, in the Paris salons as Blumenschein and Sharp and Kaus did, it was a real sacrifice to come back to the United States and then decide you weren't going to make your career solely in New York, where you

could have regular gallery representation, where the buyers were, where life was easier. Coming to Taos was a way to concentrate on doing artwork as opposed to being part of the scene in New York or completely devoted to making a living. I believe that if America gets a national art, it will come from the Southwest and not from the Atlantic Board, because we are really different from Europeans, and the farther away from European influence, the better for us. Gradually, and with the Indians here, I believe we can give much to American art in the future. The Southwest has gradually gained, though it is still wild, by taking within its fold, the artist. What better group than these hungry commercial artists to sell the public on a new and distinct American art? They set out with

lofty dreams and paintbrushes in hand to showcase the beauty of a vanishing frontier before it was gone. There was incredible rainstorm last night, big thunderstorm, but to the west of here there were no clouds, so the sun was coming in and was incredibly bright at the same time that there was a rainstorm pouring down on us. And over the valley last night, this was this amazing double rainbow. It was fantastic. So when the painters of the Taos Society started capturing images like that and then circulating their paintings back east, this quality of light that they found was disbelieved. The kinds of greens that show up, the double rainbows,

sunlight during thunderstorms. All of this was thought to be either made up or truly spectacular, which of course is what it turns out to be. The Taos Art Scene is growing. The expanding group is joined by a real character, Blumenschein's former student, Buck Dunton. W. Herbert Dunton, I call him Buck, was a tall, good -looking man with a mustache and the women hovered around him. He was a real ladies man and he had a lot of hair and he'd pull his hat down on his head and there was lots of pictures of Buck with creases where the hat has been around his head. He becomes known as the Cowboy Painter. The Stetson Hat Company takes notice. Each year they send Dunton a new hat with his name spelled out in gold

in the sweatband. Buck and the other painters have a hard time selling their oversized oil canvases from the Taos frontier. Individual sales come in fits and starts and they struggle to make a living. In 1915, the artists hatch a momentous plan. To sell more paintings back east, they will create a traveling group exhibit of their works. They call themselves the Taos Society of Artists. The Art Colony is born. There's a famous photograph of the Taos Society of Artists taken at this very spot. The first six members, of course, it was probably the first photograph taken of them as a society. The artists are friends and competitors and living together in the relative isolation of Taos brings out the best and worst in each other. It was loansome in

Taos and they needed each other and they helped each other. Joseph Sharp is the wise old man of the group. Sharp was one of the good guys in Taos and he was an eastern rich school in Cincinnati and when he was 14, he fell off a bridge into the water and he was deaf for the rest of his life. Sharp could get his dander up but I never heard of anybody disliking Bert Phillips. Bert Phillips is the group's anchor. Bert Phillips, like the rest of him, was an eastern. He came west and set up a house. Married his wife and lived there and never did leave. And then there's Blumenstein known around town simply as Blumen. This is a photograph of Ernest Blumenstein in his studio holding his palette and noticed a little and pretentious palette he has. I've always said that Ernest Blumenstein was a very severe person. He was set in his ways and he wanted you to be.

He wanted to do things his way. Taos is no Bohemia and the artists find ways to hold on to their east coast lifestyles. The Taos baseball team had uniform and there's Blumenstein standing. There were 11 players on the team. Here's a picture with his prize fish wearing a tie. Happy Christmas from Blooming. And he sent this to everybody he knew. I think everybody in North America got a picture of this because he was bragging about that fish. Blumenstein paid tennis with a towel, not a coat, but a tie. Certain times a sweater. They didn't do anything without wearing a tie. His wife hosts tea time in their Adobe home amidst French armchairs, Victorian lamps and oriental rugs. And there are endless

parties. The Taos society of artists have many paintings to exhibit. Inspiration is everywhere. If the landscape had brought them in, it was the Pueblo that made them stay. Here was the authentic America they hadn't found in art school in Paris. Just try to imagine New Mexico without the Pueblos in Northern New Mexico. What have you got? Half of wanting to live here is gone. Whether you are a spiritual person or a religious person or have no interest in any of that, the fact that some people have been living here and have hundreds of years of history, praying and thinking of the mountains, of the hills, of the rivers really makes New Mexico

special. The Taos Pueblo used to be an agricultural community. And the daily life was getting water at the river. One of my great -grandfathers, my father's grandfather, used to have an orchard. And he watered. He had access to the ditches and he bartered with the town, with the fruit that he grew, the pigs that he raised. I mean, it was just such a simple lifestyle. I think during those years, the beauty

of it was already here. The setting was very quiet, very conservative. A lot of limits were placed between the town of Taos and the Pueblo. Here, there was not that much intrusion. And our people are known for peace, and they like peace and tranquility. There is in the mind of every member of the Taosar colony the knowledge that here is the oldest of American civilizations. The Taos Indians are a people living in an absolutely natural state and entirely independent of all the world. If the rest of humanity were wiped from the earth, they would go ahead just as they are today, self -supporting, self -reliant, simple and competent. Their architecture is the only naturally American architecture in the nation today. All other styles were borrowed from Europe.

Dr. Higgins. When you think of the paintings of the Taos Society of Artists, it was just the whole freshness of it. Not only the beauty of the landscape, but new subject matter. You know, you weren't painting a Grecian sculpture, a Roman bus of Caesar. You were actually seeing something that hadn't been painted in America before. The word art is not in our native vocabulary. We don't have a word for that because everything that we do is a part of that thought. It's in our daily life. Everything that we do, it's an art form. The pottery that we make, the drums we make, the hides we tan, the horses we take care of, the fields we water. I mean, everything, that's an art form.

Outside their studio doors, there are endless new people and places to be explored in New Mexico. But the Taos artists still apply classical technique to their new Indian subjects. This is my grandfather's beautiful studio. One of the best in town, really, he designed it when they first bought the house in 1999. The first thing he did was build on this big studio. There was really nothing else he liked to do except work or prepare for his work. The family would take these field trips up into the mountains down to the river to do photographs. Photographs, studies, it was always working. Both my father and my grandfather would have cameras and would it be taking different photographs from different angles. After we had found about 5 ,000 of Kyle's original model studies and photographs and the films

in his dark room, we discovered cleaning up the studio over in this corner. The packing boxes were removed. We opened what we thought was just a blocked up doorway and another 5 ,000 of the negatives and prints were found in there. He would take the photograph and grid it in half inch squares and that was his means of transferring the pose to the canvas with charcoal. The body of work produced by the Taos Society artists had in many ways a level of personal involvement, a level of humanity in those subjects. In part that arose because these artists knew their subjects well, the models they hired became personal friends or almost like members of the family. When they painted these people again and again, sometimes over a period of decades, we can see into their faces, we can see

them age, we can see life in printing itself upon their features. All of the artists had special models. Ben Luhan was started posing for Grand Ed when he was 10 years old. He posed for him for what, 34 years. He helped raise me when I was my brother and sister when we were little. He was a part of the family. To be taken out of our community to model, it was a foreign concept, taking them out of their original space into a made up space. And the whole idea of somebody else coming in and impacting the daily life, you know, come to town, sit and model for me, I'll pay you. And they're listening to stories of other places, you know, it's going to impact the way we think. Our

visions are going to change. I mean, it gave us money, it provided for a few extra things. But I'm not quite sure that it really was a positive impact. And I think that the painters that were here assisted the changing perspective. The culture aspect of the Pueblo is constantly been practiced. We're one of the strongest for many of the Pueblo's. So we like to preserve that and protect it as much as we can. We don't want to exploit it, expose it. But the artist depictions of the native people bring the nation's attention to Taos Pueblo. Sales and publicity come

quickly. No longer art students or commercial illustrators, they finally made it into the fine art establishment. More artists are eager to join. Walter Ufer, Victor Higgins, and Martin Hennings, All Head West. Blooming in Phillips dream of a thriving art colony in the Rockies has arrived. The pioneer painters are on the verge of establishing a new American art. But maybe not the one they had originally envisioned. Their paintings will soon help to blow open the doors to their isolated pocket of paradise. In the late 1800s, the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad completes their line to California. Competition for tourist passengers is fierce, and no one understands this better than William Simpson. Hired by the Railroad to promote the Western lines, Simpson knows he needs to change the image of the

American Indian and the public eye. And the Taos Society is the perfect outfit to help them accomplish his goal. With color photography still years away, the bright colorful images in the Taos paintings and their depictions of peaceful, serene Pueblo Indians are just what Simpson needs to sell the West to Easterners, still frightened from the Indian Wars. They were not threatening pictures of Indians. Simpson really liked my grandads work very much and he saw the fact that it would be popular with people and how he would be able to promote the railway. And so he started buying paintings and in 1914 he had the idea to create a series of calendars and he bought a painting from cows that year.

And it was so popular that he continued to buy a painting from cows for the next, well, till cows died. The Railroad distributes the yearly calendars to 300 ,000 homes, schools and offices. The Taos paintings hang in Harvey restaurants and railway stations across the country. The Railroad executives, especially William Simpson, knew what the American traveling public was looking for. So he encouraged his painters to produce certain kinds of subjects or maybe to modify a subject that they had in mind. There's all kinds of correspondence, letters going back and forth. There were adjustments that were made. Dear Mr. Kouse, you may have noticed our pen and ink color sketch in the chief, folder and copy attached. What would you think of using that idea again, but making the standing figure of the chief

as large as possible by bringing it more into the foreground? If this can be done may I trouble you to submit a color layout for Mr. Black's inspection? Kouse complies, the painting, the chief appears in next year's calendar. Is it art or advertising? Hmm, some things cross over the line, but art has been used as a form of advertising as long as we can remember. It's not a new idea, but it was one that was very successfully exploited by the railway. The Taos artists find themselves doing the kind of commercial work they'd hope to leave behind. When you say a favorite road bought a painting, they bought the copyright with it. So the artist lost all control over it, which is not the way it happens today most of the time. Sale was a sale.

In a way, the artists and Taos had to become jugglers. I think they were constantly weighing, is it worth it? What do I need to survive here as an artist? How can I sustain this? And what am I giving up by doing that? The artist came to Taos looking for an escape from the drudgery of their old lives. But staying in Taos proved even harder. When I first came to Taos at the beginning of the 1970s, I saw a painting here. The painting is called Winter Funeral. It's by Victor Higgins. And just before he died, he came into the harwood with this painting, hung it on the wall and said something like, that looks really good there. Why don't you keep it? In it, we see this amazing cloud bank, this storm of huge magnitude, which just dwarfs everything else. Including the people

in the cemetery. There's a funeral going on here that mean they are up to their waist and snow practically. Their vehicles can barely get through this. It's so deep. The mountain itself, which is looming above them, is so huge, is itself overwhelmed by the storm. But in this, there's a patch of blue sky. And no matter what's going to happen here, what is happening at the moment with this funeral, those clouds are going to break. And they're going to go away. And the blue sky is going to come back again. Success comes at a cost. Generating sales and gallery bookings from a remote corner of New Mexico requires countless hours of tedious work. And just as the society achieves fame,

cracks appear. At the recent meeting of the society at my residence, no action was taken, thanking me for my services during my two years in office. I was very careful to see that the society recognized the labors of the secretary. But the entire bunch, including the secretary, forgot there had been a president. I do not feel included to be a further surface to this organization. Tensions are mounting. When it comes time for Blumenschein to serve an office again, he refuses. They were mad at Blumenschein and it was not a world's hardest thing to do. It would be mad at Bernie's Blumenschein. Blumenschein's formal resignation from the Taoist Society of Artists comes in 1923. In 1924, Buck Dunton refuses to take a turn in his elected office. E2 is told to leave. But bigger problems are looming. Sales are falling.

Certain of the artists were predictable in the way that they returned to a particular subject matter and almost as if they were frozen in time. Critics who saw this work coming, saw it entered in the shows or on the circulating TSA exhibits, began to see in it a kind of predictability or a repetitiveness. And they'd say, oh no, here comes another group of Indians and aspens. And no one knows what waits in the wings. Photography has come a long way since the 1890s. It's better, cheaper and faster. It soon will become the medium to capture the West. Railroads are also giving way to the car with profits falling to Railroads Commission fewer paintings. And Taoist is far away from the new sources of artistic innovation. By 1913, the now famous Armory Show in New York had already introduced the public to a bold new direction of art.

The modern artists were providing us with a new way to see. This does not happen very often in history of civilization. And so this was one of the great turning points out of the last thousand years. Right from the beginning of the Tao Society of Artists in 1915, the world of modern art is already intruded on them. The new art form is taking the East Coast by storm and it's not long before modernists are looking to escape West. Mabel Dodge, the eccentric New York socialite and arts patron, arrives in Taoist in 1917. She was responsible more than anyone

for making sure that the Taoist art community would be a lasting success. Mabel built this place right at the edge of Taoist and made it a social center for Taoist. Andrew Dossberg, a leading modernist, comes in response to Mabel's telegram, which says simply, wonderful place, you must come and send tickets. Bring me a cook. Andrew was truly the first modern painter to come to Taoist, just at the turn of the year in 1918. Dossberg writes that Taoist Valley seemed like the first day of creation. When he arrived here, there was nobody else who came with his credentials in modern art and understanding of what was going on in Europe. Andrew Dossberg is just one of many modernists to arrive. Nikolai Fetchin travels all the way from Russia. John Marin and Marsden Hartley

are well established in the New York modernist scene, but they all head to Taoist to paint. In the years leading up to his arrival in Taoist, Marin is searching, and he writes, the true artist must perforce go from time to time to the elemental big forms. Sky, sea, mountains, plain, to sort of retrue himself up, to recharge the battery. And in Taoist, he does. For parts of two summers, 29 and 30, he spent here, lived here at the house, did less than 100 paintings in two summers, but they were fantastic. And everyone in Taoist, including Dossberg, Victor Higgins, many others were very much influenced by what he did, his fluidity

in painting, his capturing of motion, was something that no one had ever seen before. A new generation discovers Taoist and experiences the same wonderment as the first pioneers. But the relationship between the old guard and the new arrivals is sometimes rocky. Lovely landscape here and there, but the society of cheap artists from Chicago and New York makes the place impossible, and they tell themselves that the great art of America is to come from Taoist. Well, there will have to be godlike changes for the better in this case. Marsden Hartley. It was like the difference between Frank Sinatra and Heavy Metal. There just wasn't much of a meeting place anywhere in between there. The two generations approach art in radically different ways. For the 19th century, trained society members, New Mexico means New Subject Matter. They're painting people and places never depicted before. For

the modernist, Taoist is inspiring, but for different reasons. It takes them back to the very basic principles. Color, form, shadow, line, rhythm. America extends the superb invitation to the American painter to be for once original. The sense of form in New Mexico is for me one of the profoundest, most original and most beautiful I have personally experienced. Marsden Hartley. When they looked at the landscape, it was not just looking at a nice mountain or a hill with trees on it or an orchard. They were very concerned about how the mountain got there. What made it a mountain? What were the forces of nature? Was it a volcano? What were the bones of a landscape?

Some artists of the Taoist society are influenced and inspired by the new arrivals and their take on the ancient land. Even Blumenschein, a founding member of the old guard, pushes his paintings in a bold new direction. In a way, he's the bridge between the two generations. I think with time what we'll see is the similarities more than the differences. What we'll see is that in their various approaches that they were all influenced by the amazing quality of light that was here. They were all influenced by the sense of space. They were all influenced by Native American and Hispanic cultures and the artifacts and art from those cultures. They were all influenced by those things. As the decade of the 1920s closes, Taoist is a very different place. The Western public relations campaign has been a success.

Taoist paintings meant to showcase its beauty and isolation end up drawing large crowds. Americans flock west behind the wheels of their new automobiles. Fred Harvey brochures Beckin Motors to New Mexico. First, it's usually worthwhile to visit every Indian village. Even if no dances and progress, other things will repay the time. Motorists crossing southwestern states are near to the primitive than anywhere else on the continent. Car culture has arrived. More and more tourists come to Taoist. As do billboards, hotels and summer crowds. By 1930, the art colony has become

the art market. Taoist is now firmly established as a jewel in the crown of the Rockies. It's the beauty of Taoist that continues to draw a wide array of painters, film makers and musicians. All come to experience its special light and majestic landscape even today. Yes, it was romanticized and yes, there was far too much of that. But there was a deep love of a place that was new and endlessly entrancing. One of the contributions of the Tao Society of Artists, as well as the modernists who came here, was to try to understand this landscape and try to make it visually coherent. It wasn't anything that it ever encountered. And so what the Taoist artist, this first generation of Taoist artists,

did that was different. It was not so much creating a new style of art, but coming to terms with the Western landscape. It hadn't done it before. Here's a telegram. Uncle Henry passed away Saturday afternoon, August 29th. Please notify all our friends of the funeral Tuesday morning, abs and wear, march and wear, as ever. Louise, be sharp. And sharp, those Taoist painters were a very unusual bunch of people in a very unusual place. At an impossible time, any quarrel said everybody else are 15 minutes. And he must have been thinking about the Taoist Society when he said that. And all of them were so good. It was just something that impossible to happen. But it did. It was a wondrous time. Every day was a great adventure. If you wanted

anywhere you could move, you didn't run into one of these artist writers. Our poets, our painters, it was wonderful. It never had been before and it'll never be again. Together the Taoist Society and the modernists created and branded the iconic images that had brought generations of artists to northern New Mexico. Images that had been interpreted and recreated again and again by each passing generation. And had become a classic American subject as much as the New York skyline or New England's rocky coast. I think at its deepest level, the very best painting is still dealing with the very basic idea of who we are, where we come from, why are we here? The early Taoist artists did more than imprint images on the American psyche. They showed the young nation that the high desert was more than just

a beautiful landscape to be painted. Taoist contains both physical beauty and spiritual truth. It's an ancient land that continues to inspire reflection. Painting Taoist is available on home video for 29 .95, which includes shipping and handling. To order your copy, call 1 -800 -328 -5663 or order online at www .knme .org slash catalog. www .knme .org Funding for the production of this program provided by the Albuquerque Tri -Sentennial.

Community, it's more than a word, it's a belief in action, a passion. Standing behind neighbors and friends, sharing a smile, lending a hand or a shoulder to lean on. First Community Bank. The Taoist Art Museum. And Randy Briggs. The Taoist Art Museum.