This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ A WORLD ELSEWHERE ART COLONIES IN CALIFORNIA AND NEW MEXICO, 1900-1940 Essen, Jennifer Michelle Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 30. Sep. 2021 A WORLD ELSEWHERE: ART COLONIES IN CALIFORNIA AND NEW MEXICO, 1900-1940 Jennifer Essen PhD American Studies King’s College London October 2016 1 For myself (after Georgia O’Keeffe) 2 Abstract This thesis analyses the distinct form of art colony that flourished in Carmel, California and Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, in the opening decades of the twentieth century. The diversity of people, experience and colony-produced art has largely discouraged analysis of western colonies as a group. My argument in this thesis is that new interpretive frameworks are needed to understand the defining and shared qualities of these colonies. Identifying patterns in seemingly disparate practices reveals the kind of colony this was, its features, its appeal and its influence on the artistic work of participants. I begin by charting the art colony tradition as it unfolded in the US and tracing the western art colony’s development out of this established model. Despite shared styles of sociality and retreat from urban America, the western art colony differed from its predecessors in its greater remoteness, particular style of community and opportunities for contact with Native and Spanish-speaking populations. In this they build on an established rhetoric of romantic otherness in these regions. Successive chapters explicate my definition of these colonies as networks of temporary association. Chapter Two explores the ways in which the colony’s community balanced a sense of belonging with opportunities for multi-directional movements, allowing art-colonists to control their engagement with the colony milieu. In Chapter Three I focus on Anglo-American art-colonists’ interactions with Native and Spanish-speaking peoples, specifically their formally experimental but problematic attempts to comprehend cultural difference. Chapter Four moves from intercultural to interpersonal interactions by exploring how these art colonies generated an arena for negotiating the intersections between gender and artistic autonomy. As improvisatory spaces these art colonies accommodated and even thrived on diversity and mutability. This thesis recovers western art colonies as important examples of collaborative artistic endeavour. 3 Table of Contents Abstract 3 List of illustrations 5 Acknowledgements 7 Introduction 8 Chapter One Defining the art colonies of Carmel, Santa Fe and Taos 53 Chapter Two Movement and community in New Mexican art colonies 101 Chapter Three Race and cultural interactions in New Mexican art colonies 156 Chapter Four Marriage and its discontents at the Carmel, Santa Fe and Taos art colonies 220 Conclusion 272 Bibliography 279 4 List of Illustrations Mary Austin’s Carmel study, based on a Paiute ‘wickiup’ 29 Xavier Martinez, Carmel Mission, [n.d.] 29 Georgia O’Keeffe, Another Church, New Mexico, 1931 30 Ansel Adams, South House and Church Gate, 1929 30 Francis McComas, Monterey Oaks, 1903 66 Arnold Genthe, Helen Cooke in a Field of Poppies, 1907 66 Austin, Sterling, London and Hopper on the beach in Carmel 67 William Penhallow Henderson, Walpi Snake Dance, c. 1920 67 Marsden Hartley, New Mexico Recollection No. 13, c. 1923 146 The northern New Mexican landscape viewed from the train to Santa Fe 146 Georgia O’Keeffe, Taos Pueblo, 1929 147 Georgia O’Keeffe, Black Cross, New Mexico, 1929 196 Ansel Adams, North House, Kiva Poles and Thunder Clouds, 1929 214 Ansel Adams, St. Francis Church, Ranchos de Taos, 1929 214 Georgia O’Keeffe, Ranchos Church, New Mexico, 1930 215 John Marin, Back of Ranchos Church, 1930 215 Paul Strand, St Francis Church, Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, 1931 216 The Spanish-Catholic façade of Ranchos Church 216 Ansel Adams, South House, Woman Winnowing Grain, 1929 217 Ansel Adams, A Man of Taos, 1929 217 Edward Curtis, Typical Apache, 1906 218 Ansel Adams, North House (Hlauuma), 1929 218 Ansel Adams, South House, Harvest, 1929 219 Jack London and George Sterling go for a swim in Carmel 238 5 Mabel Dodge Luhan with Native American bob hairstyle 271 Mabel Dodge and Tony Lujan in Lois Rudnick’s New Woman, New Worlds 271 6 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr Janet Floyd. I would not have been able to complete this thesis without her unerring support, candour and patience. In this respect, I would also like to thank Dr Lee Jenkins for sparking my interest in American literature. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the staff at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the Center for Southwest Research at the University of New Mexico and the research staff at the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library in Santa Fe for helping me rummage through many neglected archives. And to the managers of the Mabel Dodge Luhan House for welcoming me into her home and allowing me access to her inner sanctum. Like many of the artists I discuss, I found that there was something uniquely satisfying about actually ‘being there’. Thank you to my colleagues Dr Elizabeth Glyn and Dr Tomek Mossakowski. Like the artists discussed in this project, our interests were incredibly diverse but we connected through shared experience. That is, until they both became doctors before me. (No, of course I am not jealous.) And lastly, I would like to thank the kind man who works in the post office in Embudo, New Mexico. Without him, I may still be stranded in the desert. 7 Introduction In February 2014, my car broke down in the New Mexican desert. As I sat waiting for breakdown assistance to reach me on a remote canyon road, I gazed up at the beautiful mesa whose tumbling rocks had punctured my tyre. This recalled another breakdown in New Mexico, another broken wheel and another experience of being stranded in the desert. In 1898 painters Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Geer Phillips were travelling through New Mexico when their horse-drawn wagon broke its wheel on the outskirts of Taos.1 This was, ultimately, a fortuitous accident. Enamoured with what they saw as the town’s picturesque charm, they stayed to establish the Taos Society of Artists, a cooperative of painters who went on to form an art colony in Taos to promote paintings produced there.2 My journey to Taos seemed fraught and arduous, but it paled in comparison to that of Blumenschein and Phillips, or to salon hostess Mabel Dodge Luhan’s night time expedition through the desert in a car with no headlights, a journey described by D. H. Lawrence in ‘The Wilful Woman’ as a relentless succession of topographical challenges: A breathless scramble in deep cañons over what look like simple landslides and precipices, the car at an angle of forty-five degrees above a green rocky river, banging itself to bits against boulders, surging through the river […] with the devil’s own scramble up a rocky bank on the other side.3 1 Julie Schimmel and Robert Rankin White, Bert Geer Phillips and the Taos Art Colony (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), p. 59. 2 Robert Rankin White, The Taos Society of Artists (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), p. 2. 3 D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Wilful Woman’, in D. H. Lawrence and New Mexico, ed. by Keith Sagar (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1982), pp. 6-9 (p. 7). At this time her full name was Mabel Dodge Sterne. It became Mabel Dodge Luhan when she divorced her third husband Maurice Sterne and married Tony Lujan, a Taos Native American. Born to a wealthy family in Buffalo, New York, as Mabel Ganson, Luhan’s first husband was Karl Evans, with whom she had a son before he died in a hunting accident after just two years of marriage. She lived in Florence for seven years with her second husband, architect Edwin Dodge. Here, at the lavish Villa Curonia, Luhan entertained local artists as well as visiting American intellectuals, establishing herself as a gifted salon hostess. This talent she honed when she moved back to New York, now becoming estranged from her second husband. Luhan’s weekly salon at 23 Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village became the legendary haunt of the era’s movers and shakers and an epicentre for its progressive art and politics. But it was an entreaty from her third husband, painter Maurice Sterne, that prompted Luhan’s move to her final home and final husband in New Mexico.