Exhibition
MODERNISTS IN NEW MEXICO: Works from a Private Collector
Modernists in New Mexico: Works from a Private collection was organized by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.
The present exhibition of works from the collection of an anonymous local collector provides an excellent selection of American Modernist visions of New Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century. Since he moved to Santa Fe eleven years ago and acquired his first New Mexico picture at a local art gallery, the owner of this collection has passionately pursued his love of American Modernism by collecting works that creatively engage the area's distinctive environments, landmarks, and residents.
Some of the pictures in the exhibition clearly represent specific people sites (fig. 1), but others evoke New Mexico more abstractly, as in Stuart Davis's Interior, New Mexico (1923, fig. 3) and John Marin's Mountains (Sangre de Cristo), 1930 (fig. 2.). Shortly before his first trip to Taos in 1929, Marin wrote "the true artist must perforce from time to time go to the elemental big forms -- Sky, Sea, Mountains, Plain ... to sort re-true himself up, to recharge the battery."
Still other works in the exhibition -- such as Georgia O'Keeffe's Black Place IV (1944, cover) -- approach particular forms and places with an abstracting vision so personal as to transform the subject into a vehicle of private expression and formal experimentation. In every case, New Mexico provided a distinctive artistic pretext, a compelling array of forms and colors with which renovate the creative process.
The present exhibition of works from the collection of an anonymous local collector provides an excellent selection of American Modernist visions of New Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century. Since he moved to Santa Fe eleven years ago and acquired his first New Mexico picture at a local art gallery, the owner of this collection has passionately pursued his love of American Modernism by collecting works that creatively engage the area's distinctive environments, landmarks, and residents.
Some of the pictures in the exhibition clearly represent specific people sites (fig. 1), but others evoke New Mexico more abstractly, as in Stuart Davis's Interior, New Mexico (1923, fig. 3) and John Marin's Mountains (Sangre de Cristo), 1930 (fig. 2.). Shortly before his first trip to Taos in 1929, Marin wrote "the true artist must perforce from time to time go to the elemental big forms -- Sky, Sea, Mountains, Plain ... to sort re-true himself up, to recharge the battery."
Still other works in the exhibition -- such as Georgia O'Keeffe's Black Place IV (1944, cover) -- approach particular forms and places with an abstracting vision so personal as to transform the subject into a vehicle of private expression and formal experimentation. In every case, New Mexico provided a distinctive artistic pretext, a compelling array of forms and colors with which renovate the creative process.
