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A Contested Art
Modernism and Mestizaje in New Mexico
By Stephanie Lewthwaite UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5288-2
CHAPTER 1
"The Soul of Spain Laid Bare"
Anglo Patronage and the Spanish Colonial Tradition
"During a time when it was proper to go to Europe for traditional background," wrote Illinois-born artist and teacher Russell Vernon Hunter, "[Anglos] stumbled upon sources which made them feel at home in North America. ... It gave to these modern explorers a sense of art heritage which they could not find in any other place in their homeland." Writing in 1937 as state director of the Federal Art Project (FAP) and supervisor of the Portfolio of Spanish Colonial Design, Hunter implied why a generation of modernist artists, writers, and patrons had found inspiration in Hispano art and culture. In the Spanish colonial art of New Mexico, Anglos found evidence of "the soul of Spain laid bare," proclaimed Hunter, of something old and new, something European in origin and yet native to the land. In their search for a "transcendental" modernism indigenous to the region, the painters Georgia O'Keeffe and Marsden Hartley and the photographers Ansel Adams and Paul Strand all turned to the landscapes and artifacts of Hispano Catholicism. Meanwhile, the modernist primitivist sensibilities of writers and artists such as Mary Austin, Frank Applegate, Leonora Curtin, Russell Vernon Hunter, and E. Boyd stimulated efforts to preserve and revive Spanish colonial art forms in New Mexico. From the 1920s, these collective energies led to the founding of new markets and societies for the promotion of Spanish colonial art and to the federal sponsorship of Hispano artists under the government's New Deal program. Yet the Anglo patronage of Spanish colonial art fed the view that Hispano artistic production belonged to the realms of folk tradition and primitive art. Patronage created a static colonial art tradition in which assumptions about cultural authenticity and stylistic purity were prioritized over experimentation and hybridity. Tied to the reproduction of Spanish colonial art forms, Hispanos struggled to achieve recognition as modern artists.
Anglos, Hispanos, and Primitivism
In the landscape and culture of Hispano New Mexico, Anglo moderns believed they had found an antidote to the conflicts of the machine age. Here were new sources for moral, social, and aesthetic regeneration and new markets for art and cultural tourism. While Anglo newcomers expressed varying cultural and economic agendas, they shared a similar vision of Hispanos as tied to a premodern age. On first arrival, many Protestant-born Anglos deplored what they believed to be the primitive and uncivilized aspects of Hispano culture and religion, and they placed Hispanos below Native Pueblos in the tricultural hierarchy of New Mexico. In 1888, for example, Massachusetts-born writer, booster, and preservationist Charles Fletcher Lummis photographed the rites of the Hispano Catholic confraternity the Penitente Brotherhood in sensationalist style. In Lummis's eyes, the seemingly archaic and barbaric rites of the Brotherhood — self-flagellation and mock crucifixion — expressed a form of "despotism" that derived from Old Mexico. Furthermore, as modernity encroached, Hispanos were "fast losing their pictorial possibilities," according to Lummis, and they risked becoming a "vanishing" people.
This image of Hispanos as a primitive and vanishing people can be found in Anglo painting and literature from the period. Artists and writers depicted Hispanos as embedded in the landscape and as belonging to a timeless space through their enduring relationships with the soil and an archaic form of folk Catholicism. As laborers and paisanos, Hispanos remained tied to the land that their ancestors had tilled for centuries, and they embodied a type of sufferance, even "fatalism" in the midst of hardship. Ernest Blumenschein and Victor Higgins, both members of the realist Taos Society of Artists, depicted Hispanos engaged in forms of land-based labor as farmers, goatherds, and adobe plasterers. Hispanos were also portrayed as deeply religious and introspective subjects, as in Paul Burlin's The Sacristan of Trampas (1918; plate 1) and Bert Greer Phillips's The Santero (1930). These paintings mirrored the trend in Anglo portraiture for Hispano subjects to gaze away from the artist/viewer and toward another realm entirely, that of the spiritual, unworldly, and immaterial. In these and other portraits, religious artifacts and iconography preside over Hispano subjects as protective and mystical elements of a static worldview. In Gustave Baumann's 1919 color woodcut of Ranchos de Taos Church, the church's structure rises like a giant hulking force out of the earth and into the sky, dominating the tiny, huddled, faceless human figures below who become motifs on the landscape. A similar pattern characterizes Emil Bisttram's 1930 watercolor rendering of the same church, in which women clad in rebozos (traditional shawls) are reduced to abstract forms and blocks of black and primary color. Some modernist artists dispensed with human activity entirely, as in the case of Georgia O'Keeffe, who overlaid the New Mexican landscape with the recurring symbol of a dark cross. The cross became a substitute for the Hispano presence, evoking not simply a form of mysticism, but a larger primitive worldview in which human agency over the land was rendered almost futile. Whether oppressed by the force of the land or seduced by the mystical power of the saints, Hispanos, unlike Anglo moderns, lacked control over their environment. These characteristics justified the appropriation of Hispano land and culture, since they proved that Hispanos were incapable of adapting to modernity.
For Anglos, Hispano primitivism was especially tangible in the religious rituals of the Penitente Brotherhood. The Brotherhood served as powerful subject matter for Anglo writers and artists, whether in the photographs of Lummis from the 1880s or the dramatic paintings of William P. Henderson, Willard Nash, and Will Shuster from the late 1910s. In their paintings, Henderson, Nash, and Shuster depicted lines of Penitente brothers in procession, whose indistinguishable bodies are contorted and splattered with blood from acts of self-flagellation and the pain of being hauled onto the cross in Christ-like fashion. These visceral representations evoked a type of folk Catholicism marked by superstition, archaic rites, and an irredeemably "primitive" spiritual life. Art historian Julie Schimmel suggests that Anglos were drawn to "the intensely dramatic reds and blacks of sin, guilt, and expiation" of Hispano Catholic rituals, perceiving within them "a powerful metaphor for creativity." More than this, in Alice Corbin Henderson's Brothers of Light: The Penitentes of the Southwest (1937), which was illustrated by her artist husband, William Penhallow Henderson, Hispanos become art objects rather than individual human subjects:
In this landscape of strange, austere beauty, the processions of the Penitentes have a significance of form and color which enhances the undeniably mystic element of their ceremonies. The heavy massed wooden crosses against the sky; the half-nude, barefooted men staggering under the weight of the heavy cross-beams; the upraised arms of the flagellants, as with a regular monotonous rhythm, they bring the braided yucca whip first over one shoulder and then the other; the crude blindfolded Cristo in red dress with black hair streaming in the wind; the heavy tired faces of the accompanying Hermanos; the old women in black shawls but with the V-shaped white of the face showing, looking exactly like the death-figure on the Carreta del Muerto — all of this has an inescapable emotional effect upon us, even though the faith that is moving these simple, impassioned people out of a bygone century is buried deep down in some remote fiber of our own race-memory.
Corbin Henderson's description of the Penitente procession demonstrates the ways in which the New Mexican scene became a living canvas for realist and modernist artists. Corbin Henderson emphasizes the intensity of form, color, and rhythm of Penitente rituals — the elements that made them inspirational subject matter for modernists in the literary, visual, and performing arts, including dancer-choreographer Martha Graham, whose Primitive Mysteries (1931) and El Penitente (1940) drew on the spiritual and aesthetic qualities of Hispano Catholic rites and art forms. The perceived isolation, austerity, mysticism, and primitivism of Hispano life, documented most vividly through religious ritual, also shaped Anglo understandings of Hispano art.
Corbin Henderson's fascination with religious ritual translated into a corresponding fascination with religious art. Describing the interior of a morada (chapter house), she wrote:
In the light of the candles, the crudely carved faces of the saints were curiously real and living. ... All of the figures, except one, were of native craft, the primitive wood sculpture of this country, in which passion and beauty are instinctively chiseled in the crudely painted wooden features. ... The austerity of Spain was retained in the blood be-spattered Cristos (like those of the Spanish sculptor Montañes), with touches of Indian paganism in the Astarte-eyed Virgins of Guadalupe.
The Penitente Brotherhood had been responsible for keeping the traditional practice of carving santos alive during the nineteenth century, when the importation of French-produced commercial goods under Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy after 1851, along with Currier and Ives religious prints and lithographs, threatened to destroy the art form. For Corbin Henderson, Hispano religious art was irredeemably primitive, its "crude direct realism" fashioned by the "instinctive" ability of its makers and by the "harshness" of New Mexico's landscape. Artist, patron, and teacher Russell Vernon Hunter characterized the religious art of colonial New Mexico in similar fashion, as "an art which showed the soul of extremes: passionately sensual, and at the same time morbidly ascetic and stoical." Like Henderson, Hunter developed a fascination with Penitente ritual before expanding his interests in Spanish colonial art as supervisor of the Portfolio of Spanish Colonial Design and state director of New Mexico's FAP. Colonial art, Hunter concluded, was "the soul of Spain laid bare in a manner more effectual than the art of Spain had done." For both Corbin Henderson and Hunter, colonial religious art was the product of geographic and cultural isolation. Expressing the character of an earlier Spanish aesthetic that was as much medieval as colonial in style, and modified by local cultural needs and environmental pressures, Spanish colonial art came to symbolize the persistence of the Old World in the New.
Markets, Modernism, and Patronage
Cultural and economic forces shaped the revival of Spanish colonial art in New Mexico. The arrival of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad in Santa Fe in February 1880 brought trade and tourism as well as new markets that stimulated the production of local art forms. The tourist regeneration and marketing of cities such as Santa Fe promoted a new civic identity and economy based on the consumption and commodification of local ethnic cultures. Cultural tourism, or what might be more accurately called ethno-tourism, relied on the production and sale of Native American and Hispano arts through commercial outlets such as the Fred Harvey Company, which had direct links to the Santa Fe Railroad, and the curio trade, operated by dealers and merchants such as Jake Gold, Jesús Sito Candelario, and Julius Gans. Commercial outlets and traders employed local craftspeople in their Santa Fe–based stores while branching out into mail order and wholesale distribution, as well as tapping national markets by displaying goods at major expositions. The market for local art and artifacts gained momentum after New Mexico achieved statehood in 1912. Edgar Lee Hewett, founder and director of the Museum of New Mexico in 1909, along with the ancillary School of American Archaeology in 1907, later renamed the School of American Research (SAR), began directing the transformation of Santa Fe by sponsoring a brand of "Santa Fe–style" architecture, reviving the Santa Fe Fiesta in 1918, and inaugurating Santa Fe's first Indian Market in 1922. Hewett's influence, together with the impact of SAR as a training ground for local academics, fostered a cadre of individuals, such as artist-scholar Kenneth Chapman, who worked at New Mexico's Spanish American Normal School, and the archaeologist Jesse Nusbaum, who became interested in local ethnic art forms. The drive to restore preindustrial village arts in New Mexico was also tied to a wider reform impulse embedded in the national Arts and Crafts Movement. As the market economy and wage labor disrupted village life and machine-made goods infiltrated New Mexico, thus displacing craft production as a mainstay of the local economy, Anglo nostalgia for "lost" and "vanishing" arts grew. Although Anglos shared a similar primitivist outlook, artist-preservationists, together with anthropologists and archaeologists, blamed tourists, boosters, and curio traders for the corruption and demise of "authentic" local arts, crafts, and folklore.
The market for Spanish colonial art grew slowly, however. Initially, Anglos were more interested in Pueblo art, architecture, and design. The curio trade, which focused primarily on the buying and selling of Native American goods, dealt in Chimayó weaving and colonial santos, but mostly by pitching these items as crafts, curiosities, and tourist souvenirs. The bloodied, crucified figures of Christ depicted in colonial retablos and bultos also disturbed some Anglo Protestant audiences, especially those outside the Southwest who were less familiar with the historical and cultural contexts of these regional art forms. Even in California and New Mexico, where colonial arts were popular in the Anglo market, they were viewed as functional domestic items and crafts rather than as fine art objects. Whereas the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology promoted the study of Native American art and culture, there was no defined "field" for documenting and interpreting Spanish colonial art. Not until the 1920s did Anglos view Hispano culture as useful for their economic and cultural ventures, and Spanish colonial art as the fruit of a native regional tradition.
The creation in 1924 of an alternative Santa Fe Fiesta to rival the official version sponsored by Edgar Lee Hewett (which had elevated Pueblo art and culture), and the establishment in 1926 of the Old Santa Fe Association, helped to promote Hispano culture. New Mexican senator Bronson Cutting also brought Hispano culture to the attention of Anglo audiences through his ownership of the New Mexican magazine and his political support for Hispanos from the 1920s. As the revived Santa Fe Fiesta began to focus more intently on Hispano culture, elite Hispanos such as José Seña, Jr., Benigno Muñiz, and Nina Otero-Warren joined the Fiesta's council. In shifting the emphasis away from the history of the Spanish don and conquistador and toward the working-class villager or paisano, the Santa Fe Fiesta also romanticized and rehabilitated Hispanos as members of a regional "folk" society who could be tied to the rest of the United States as representatives of an earlier preindustrial age. As part of the wider promotion of Hispano culture during the 1920s, Anglo artists, patrons, and collectors began to acknowledge Spanish colonial art. They also looked toward the old rather than the new, and toward what they saw as the folk and primitive qualities of these art forms.
Anglo artists, patrons, and collectors during this period helped elevate Spanish colonial art beyond the lowly status of craft and curio. Commenting on an early exhibition of santos in New York in 1925, Taos-based arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan proclaimed that the wooden sculptures were "not the work of artists but a people's necessity." Some ten years later, however, Luhan took a different view. She said, "No one had ever noticed them except to laugh, but here was an authentic primitive art, quite unexploited. We were, I do believe, the first people who ever bought them from the Mexicans." Parisian-born modernist painter Andrew Dasburg, who moved from Woodstock, New York, to New Mexico in 1921, was an early proponent of Spanish colonial art. According to Luhan, Dasburg "was soon absorbed in saint-hunting. ... It was Andrew who started a market for them." Massachusetts-born painter Cady Wells, who studied with Dasburg after settling in New Mexico in the early 1930s, also collected santos, and later donated his collection of more than 250 items to the Museum of New Mexico.
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Excerpted from A Contested Art by Stephanie Lewthwaite. Copyright © 2015 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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