Ernest Leonard Blumenschein (1874-1960) Untitled (Mountain Wood Gatherers) signed 'E.L. Blumenschein/Taos' (lower left) oil on canvas 23 x 50 in. (58.4 x 127 cm.) Painted circa 1926.
Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Variations on America: Masterworks from the American Art Forum Collections, April 13-August 3, 2007.
Literature
A.B. Scott, The Taos Society of Artists: Masters & Masterworks, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1998, p. 37. R.R. White, The New Mexico Painters, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1999, p. 37, no. 27. Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Variations on America: Masterworks from American Art Forum Collections, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., 2007, p. 135, illustrated. P. Hassrick and E.J. Cunningham, In Contemporary Rhythm: The Art of Ernest L. Blumenschein, exhibition catalogue, Norman, Oklahoma, 2008, pp. 177-78, illustrated.
Provenance
The artist. Private collection, Colorado. Private collection, New Mexico.
Notes
Displaying an early talent for both music and painting, Ernest Blumenschein was encouraged by his father to attend the Cincinnati College of Music while taking additional classes at the nearby Art Academy of Cincinnati. This dual interest continued to New York where he enrolled at the Art Students League in 1892 while maintaining the prominent role of first chair violin at the National Conservatory of Music. A fortuitous meeting in 1894 at the Académie Julian in Paris with fellow American students E.I. Couse, Bert Geer Phillips, and Joseph Henry Sharp, would provide the framework that would define the rest of Blumenschein's illustrious career. "There I met Henry Sharp, who, learning of my interest in the American Indian told me of the village of Taos, where for a couple of weeks he had sketched. It was located at the foot of a mountain in New Mexico. I recall being impressed, as I pigeon-holed that curious name in my memory with the hope that someday I might pass that way." (P.J. Broder, Taos: A Painter's Dream, New York, 1980, p. 67)
In order to secure a steady income upon his return to the United States, Blumenschein accepted an illustrator position with McClure's and in 1898 was sent on assignment to Arizona and New Mexico. Over the next several years, Blumenschein would spend time working in New York and Paris until 1910 when he had enough financial success to establish summer residence in Taos and devote his time to painting the local people and landscape he had become enamored with. In 1915, along with Phillips, Couse, Sharp, Oscar E. Berninghaus and W. Herbert Dunton, Blumenschein officially founded the Taos Society of Artists, "to promote the highest possible standards in painting, to educate the public about the western scene through their art, to circulate joint exhibitions for the purpose of sales and mutual promotion, and to encourage excellence in allied forms of art such as sculpture, architecture, music, and literature." (P. Hassrick, "In Search of the Real Thing, Blumenschein in the 1910s" in In Contemporary Rhythm: The Art of Ernest L. Blumenschein, exhibition catalogue, Norman, Oklahoma, 2008, p. 94)
Fully immersing himself in the local culture, Blumenschein bought a small adobe home in Taos in 1919. Recognizing the rapidly changing life and the plight of the Indian, Blumenschein sought to preserve this swiftly evolving community and landscape with dignity and a sense of the majestic in his art. More-so than any other artist in the Taos society, Blumenschein realized in his art the natural association the Taos Indian felt to the land. In his struggle to find a compelling personal style while respecting his academic tradition, the artist found a sympathetic subject in the Taos Indian gravely pursuing his everyday ritual. The figures depicted in Untitled (Mountain Wood Gatherers) move through the landscape at a measured pace sharing the inevitability and authority of the surrounding environment. Behind the beautiful panoramic scenery captured in the present painting lies a passionate commitment to both the Indian cause and the cause of American artistic independence and contemporary aesthetic theories.
Untitled (Mountain Wood Gatherers) tells of an intensely felt and closely observed world. Blumenschein reveals this intensity through his voluminous brushwork, the saturation of color and the rejection of easily decorative effects. The composition is pared down to minimal planes of light and shadow, with broad areas of quilted landscape dominated by towering hills and backlit clouds that saturate the canvas with luminosity and texture. An adamant supporter of the avant-garde Blumenschein sought to exploit the most current artistic trends in his painting, mingling Post-Impressionism into his deeply rooted traditional subjects. His emphasis of the geometric forms of the topical landscape is underscored by his strong sense of draftsmanship. Blumenschein uses vigorous diagonal lines to unite the scene and stimulate the eye with a constant current of energy in an otherwise quiet panorama of the northern New Mexico landscape. The dynamic structure of his compositions, coupled with his use of a strongly contrasting warm and cool palette of boldly applied paint, serve to further underscore the harmony of man and nature. Depicted from a slightly elevated vantage point, Blumenschein is able to establish a distance from this quiet procession and in doing so, present the panoramic scene in a powerfully simple and universal manner that retains the romantic and mystical qualities that remain the hallmarks of his distinct style.
Blumenschein's fine reputation rests both on his skill as an artist and the accuracy with which he recorded the magnificent terrain and way of life in Taos. Untitled (Mountain Wood Gatherers) is a superlative example of the artist's realization of this remarkably beautiful and compelling part of the Southwest, composed with an accuracy and sureness of palette and draftsmanship that would come to define Blumenschein's career. A faithful depiction of the place he first saw in 1898, Blumenschein summarized his reverence for Taos in a 1939 interview. "If I could picture in words the superb mountains, the moving grandeur of great plains, the sunshine that makes people happy, the storms that inspire paintings and books, the grand forests of pine and spruce and juniper, the beautiful streams, the out-door life of work and sports, it would be New Mexico, the land where my great adventure was started...and where it has long continued." (as quoted in Taos: A Painter's Dream, p. 65)
