In the early 20th century, the artistic muse and social provocateur Mabel Dodge Luhan brought the world to Taos and Taos to the world. Yet her contributions to American culture have never been properly recognized—until now.

by PETER BG SHOEMAKER

Facing page: Nicolai Fechin, Portrait of Mabel Dodge Luhan, c. 1927, oil on canvas, the Anschutz

Collection. COURTESY MUSEUM OF NEW MEXICO PRESS

48 NEW MEXICO // MAY 2016 nmmagazine.com // MAY 2016 49 It’s an auspicious moment for the exhibition, of herself and her life: thick brocades on floors and spearheading as it does a season of high interest in its walls, gold carvings, damask, and lots and lots of silk. subject that includes the recent publication of Then she went in search of people who could fill in Rudnick’s second edition of Mabel’s memoirs, Intimate her vision of Renaissance excess. She lured her friend Memories; a new play by Stephen Lowe, Altitude from by writing, “Please come Sickness, based on an unfinished D. H. Lawrence satir- down here soon—the house is full of pianists, painters, ical play about Mabel and produced by the Fusion pederasts, prostitutes, and peasants. Great material.” Theatre Company; and the planned release this sum- She reported, however, that her husband “did not like mer of Awakening in Taos, a documentary on Mabel’s the people I was collecting.” spiritual conversion. In August, the Harwood itself is In the end, Mabel found Italy boring. She likened putting on a new Mabel-focused opera by the award- the people she knew there to “portraits in a gallery.” winning composer and librettist Nell Shaw Cohen, “They were,” she wrote, “just the casual figures of and a fashion display by Project Runway runner-up Florentine life in the early days of the 20th century. and Taos Pueblo native Patricia Michaels, entitled Finally I said to myself: ‘I have seen them.’” “The Heart of Mother Earth Gives to the Soul of Her next stop was 23 Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Women in the Arts Who Touched Taos.” Village. Naturally, Mabel attended to a decorative So if Mabel hasn’t really been understood or gotten remaking, completely in white; she imagined the her due, well, that’s all about to change. house as a “repudiation of New York,” a refuge. She translated her Italian mode of entertaining—theatri- abel’s entire life was spent trying cal, intentional, and edgy—into her own distinctly to remake the world into some- American idiom. Her invitees included basically every thing more vibrant and exciting avant-garde painter, writer, thinker, experimentalist, than the one she was born into. She and reformer who got near her gravitational pull. She began with her childhood home in claimed that her guest list included “Socialists, Trade- Buffalo, which she described years later as the place Unionists, Anarchists, Suffragists, Poets, Lawyers, M“where the occupations were so unvaried and the imaginations so little fed.” Born into an upper-class family mired in the Victorian niceties of the late 1880s, she presents a picture of a girl exquisitely sen- sitive to the emotional coldness, constraining pro- priety, and utter banality that characterized her HEN MABEL DODGE LUHAN As if to finally prove the point, Mabel editor and day-to-day life. died, in 1962, Taos and America biographer Lois Rudnick, along with longtime col- Mabel wrote that the tulip bed in the center of paid little attention. However laborator MaLin Wilson-Powell, has curated a major the yard was “a symbol for the rest of the house. It famous and influential she had new museum exhibition presenting the woman whom was all ordered and organized, nothing was left to been in her early-20th-century the painter described as “a real cre- fortuitous chance, and no life ever rose in it taking Wheyday, it no longer seemed to matter. In her later years, ator of creators.” Mabel Dodge Luhan & Company: its own form. My mother was too good a housekeep- she’d already started to seem more like a legend than a American Moderns and the West, which runs from er for that.” She did finally win a “little room up the real person. She was associated with a Taos-specific May 22 to September 11 at the Harwood Museum of stairs” to do with what she wanted, and found in the strain of utopianism, , and a vigorous approach Art in Taos, unveils its subject in a way she’s never reshaping of that space “the natural growth of a to arts and cultural patronage, and her house remains been seen before—not as a caricature of feminism, personality struggle to become individual.” And she a landmark to this day. Beyond that, appreciation of the spiritualism, or imperialism, as she’s often been por- got hooked on reinvention. essence of Mabel and her contributions to New Mexico trayed, but as herself, immersed in the novel and A few years later she started reshaping on a grand and America have long been mainly the domain of a few unorthodox worlds she helped bring forth. scale. First was the palace of Villa Curonia, where she scholars and dedicated fans. Based on a thousand pounds of scrapbooks, plus moved with her second husband (her first having given But there is to Mabel Ganson Evans Dodge Sterne photographs, books, letters, poems, paintings, and her a son before dying in a hunting accident). There, in Luhan (she had several husbands) a larger story: one sculptures from those she influenced, hosted, and the heart of Tuscany, she dived headlong into fin de about a great creative force in American arts and let- encouraged—Anglo, Hispanic, and Native alike, and siècle European decadence. In a place where “everyone ters, a central participant in a truly American artistic including artists like John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Mabel Ganson, age played with the past,” she played hardball. She dressed movement, a linchpin in New Mexico’s integration Awa Tsireh, and Pop Chalee—the exhibition moves 18, at her coming-out the part of Catherine de Medici (whose family had from Taos to the Albuquerque Museum of Art and party. Facing page: owned the house), had her portrait painted in into a broader national and international conversa- Ernest L. Blumenschein, tion, and a character as original as any, in a part of History, October 29–January 22, 2017, and ends in her Ourselves and Taos Renaissance style in a room where the “sun shone on Neighbors, c. 1940. tiger skin and roses,” and redecorated to suit her image the country filled with them. hometown of Buffalo, New York. COURTESY MUSEUM OF NEW MEXICO PRESS (2)

50 NEW MEXICO // MAY 2016 nmmagazine.com // MAY 2016 51 Murderers, ‘Old Friends,’ Psychoanalysts, I.W.W.’s, rest of the world. Although the Harwood exhibition Single Taxers, Birth Controlists, Newspapermen, includes some minor items from Mabel’s childhood Artists, Modern Artists, Clubwomen, Woman’s-place- and adventures in Italy and New York, it is the after is-in-the-home Women, Clergymen, and just plain period that sits at its heart. men.” The gatherings violated almost every Victorian Possibility always excited Mabel, and she was now social stricture on the books—regarding race, class, very excited. “In this country, life could come to one occupation, sexual preference, and public morality— more concretely than in other places,” she wrote, imag- and made her famous as a salon hostess. ining a world where words and ideas and symbols were Mabel also threw herself into social and cultural no longer just things flung around, but became real. It causes that appealed to her sense of rebellion and her was, in other words, just the place for Mabel. need to be needed, the most notable of which was the As usual, she moved quickly. In short order, Mabel 1913 . The first exhibition in the United cut her hair to match the style of the women at Taos States of Modern artists, many never before seen out- Pueblo, adopted the local dress, and found herself side of Europe, the exhibition was described in the New drawn to a new man—Tony Luhan, a married Taos York Tribune with a headline that read, “A Remarkable Pueblo Indian. “Maurice seemed old and spent and Affair, Despite Some Freakish Absurdities.” In other tragic,” she wrote, “while Tony was whole and young words, right up Mabel’s alley. in the cells of his body, with his power unbroken and “As soon as I collected a few pictures from here and hard like the carved granite rock.” there,” Mabel wrote, “and had written a check for five While Sterne failed miserably to operate a shotgun, hundred dollars [to one of the founders], I felt as though Luhan drummed every night to summon Mabel to his the exhibition was mine … It became, overnight, my own tepee, so before long, Mabel sent her husband away; little revolution. I would upset America; I would, with Luhan divorced his own wife and the two married. The fatal, irrevocable disaster to the old order of things.” drum survives and is in the new exhibition. But then came the Great War, and with it the pro- The marriage, considered radical even for a woman found sense of disillusionment that marked the end of of Mabel’s reputation, did not go unremarked upon in progressive innocence. And so, when Mabel’s third the rest of the world. A typical newspaper story headline husband, the sculptor Maurice Sterne, wrote to her in read, “Why Bohemia’s Queen Married an Indian Chief. 1918 from Santa Fe (where she had sent him to be out Fascinated by Paintings of Savage Life, the Former of her hair), begging her to come see for herself the Mabel Dodge Sterne Finds Its Reality So Much More possibilities of a different world, she got on the train. Delightful That She Accepts a Pueblo Brave for Her Fourth Husband.” They got the rationale and terminol- fter a few days of dealing with the art- ogy wrong, but it sold papers. Mabel’s former husband ists and women much like herself who Edwin Dodge wrote dryly, “Lo, the poor Indian.” made up the Santa Fe scene, she com- Together Luhan and Mabel transformed a low- plained to her husband, “All these slung adobe near the pueblo into a rambling three- people! I want to get away somewhere, story house that included 14 guest bedrooms, as well I don’t like living on this street and going to tea par- as five guesthouses across the property’s 12 acres. It Aties.” She decided to decamp to Taos, telling him, “You was called Los Gallos, in honor of the ceramic roosters needn’t go along if you don’t want to, but I’m going. perched on the roof. Tomorrow.” And so off they went. That 70-mile trip along the rugged, beautiful road ow Mabel was ready to resume her following the Río Grande had an impact on Mabel: destruction of the old world, or as “‘Holy! Holy! Holy!’ I exclaimed to myself. ‘Lord God Rudnick puts it, effect “the redemption Almighty!’ I felt a sudden recognition of the reality of of Anglo civilization from its urban- natural life that was so strong and so unfamiliar that industrialist bias, its individualist and it made me feel unreal. I caught a fleeting glimpse of materialist credo, and its Eurocentric vision of cul- my own spoiled and distorted nature, seen against the ture.”N The call went out. purity and freshness of these undomesticated sur- And what a response she had. Among the artists roundings.” and thinkers who came to visit were Marsden Hartley, On arriving, Mabel wrote that her life “broke in John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, , Rebecca Facing page: Arnold H. two”: the before and the after. It’s the after that altered Strand, , Elsie Clews Parsons, John Collier, Rönnebeck, Casa Luhan, the course of American arts and letters, and propelled Jean Toomer, Mary Austin, Carlos Chávez, Carl Jung, Taos, 1925, watercolor. New Mexico into a dialogue it’s still having with the Martha Graham, , Robert Edmond COURTESY MUSEUM OF NEW MEXICO PRESS

52 NEW MEXICO // MAY 2016 nmmagazine.com // MAY 2016 53 “TK THERE’S HUGE ENERGY Jones, Paul Strand, and —along with Mabel’s traditional claim to fame, D. H. Lawrence. IN THE STARTUP WORLD The house in isolated northern New Mexico became not only what many of the surrounding conservative IN NEW MEXICO—THE’S —Pamela Weese, ABQid Catholic and Native communities thought of as a den of iniquity (free love, after all, was part of the Modernist package) but also the hub of a vital creative network. The question is: Why? Mabel needed collaborators, ones gifted in seeing the world in new ways, who could appreciate the les- sons she felt the Pueblo Indians had to teach white America: that simplicity, peacefulness, and spiritual integration could cure them and her of what she called their “epoch.” Through their reintegration as “whole beings,” they could heal a wounded America and world. But it wasn’t just the pueblo that fascinated Mabel and her guests. After a rough start, she found the intense spiritualism of Hispanic Taoseños intoxicat- ing; she had a particular interest in the Catholic Penitentes whose morada was nearby. These fascina- tions bore fruit, as Mabel’s guests strove—with her constant encouragement—to incorporate into their fall of 1922, accompanied by his wife, Frieda, Lawrence work not only the spiritual gifts of the wide-open entered Mabel’s life and the lore of the state. Mabel was Mabel and Tony Luhan, spaces and big skies, but the land and its people. c. 1920s, Mary Austin ready, she thought, for all his “dark gods” and what they Collection, Huntington Her guests painted and photographed and wrote, could do for her, both intellectually and physically. Library, Art Collections, capturing the symbolism of the local Native and Unsurprisingly, Mabel had a tense relationship and Botanical Gardens. artists whose approach resonated with her, and not Hispanic ways, but often, too, quotidian scenes of life Clockwise from above: with Frieda, as well as with Lawrence himself. He and Walter Ufer, Hunger, only bought their work but commended it to others. in the northern mountains. Marsden Hartley’s work Mabel had strong personalities and clashed repeat- c. 1919, oil on canvas, Many of her guests left with full trunks and the begin- in the exhibition offers two examples of this range: a edly: He said she was the only person whom he could Gilcrease Museum. Burt nings of museum exhibitions all over the country. stark appropriation of Native imagery in An Abstract imagine murdering. In an effort to get him to stay and Harwood, Comanche Mabel organized the first exhibition of Pueblo Arrangement of American Indian Symbols (1914–15) Dance, Taos Pueblo, write, she offered him a 180-acre ranch nearby. He 1915–1925, oil, Harwood painting at the then-new Museum of New Mexico in and a classic depiction of mesas, mountains, and declined the deed to the property (Frieda accepted), Museum of Art. Martha Santa Fe in 1920. There was work by Ta’e (a former arroyos folding over one another in Landscape, New but stayed there for a few months—long enough to Graham, El Penitente, janitor who became one of the great early Native water- 1940, gelatin silver Mexico (1920). The exhibition includes a wooden cross enjoy New Mexico’s charms. He never did succumb colorists), his nephew Awa Tsireh, the Hopi artist Fred from the area that strongly suggests a connection to print, University of New entirely to Mabel’s. Mexico Art Museum. Kabotie, and the Zia painter Ma Pe Wi, among others. the crosses that O’Keeffe painted. And of course the The experiences Mabel engineered and the visions Mabel owned all the pieces, and she later sent the exhi- famed San Francisco de Asis Mission Church in that underlay them, as well as the force of the timeless bition on the road to New York (along with her collec- Ranchos de Taos shows up in paintings and photogra- imagery and sensibility of the land, provided the foun- tions of Hispanic retablos and bultos—the first time phy, most notably with Paul Strand’s platinum prints. dation for what scholars call Southwest Modernism. this devotional work had been treated as fine art). Mabel also organized trips out into the country or But the results weren’t, as the new exhibition makes It’s the source of some lingering animosity toward into the pueblo (with Luhan serving as guide and abundantly clear, just another new Anglo view of the Mabel that, as Carmella Padilla, a noted interpreter of facilitator), invited people passing through to come in world, but something exceptional. Wilson-Powell calls Southwestern culture and history, has written, Mabel and speak, stirred up trouble in people’s relationships, it the birth of “native modernisms.” Mabel was sure had “no qualms about making an authoritative assess- and engineered conversations between locals and that the Native and Hispanic artists had things to ment of a tradition she knew little about.” But this visitors. The most famous of these is probably the long teach her guests: that not only were their ways of life wasn’t a failing unique to her or her time, and regard- talk between the psychoanalyst Carl Jung and the Taos models for how Americans might live, but their artis- less, her stature and energy paid dividends. Not only cacique Antonio Mirabal on symbolism and dreams. tic traditions had something valuable to offer as well. did Mabel help ensure that Native and Hispanic art She was both a hostess and provocateur. She put her time and resources on the line to prove it. was taken seriously and considered essentially Only D. H. Lawrence, of all the men in the world, In sending her husband’s niece Merina Lujan (later American, but she advocated for the people them- could “really see this Taos country and Indians, and known popularly as Pop Chalee) to study painting with selves. Collaborating often with John Collier, who went … describe it so that it is as much alive between the Dorothy Dunn at the Santa Fe Indian School, Mabel’s on to become the commissioner of the Bureau of Indian covers of a book as it is in reality,” Mabel wrote. She role as patron grew from buyer of art to creator of art- Affairs, she spent 20 years fighting for Native rights. Her begged him to come, and finally he did. Arriving in the ists. She kept her eyes open for up-and-coming Native COURTESY MUSEUM OF NEW MEXICO PRESS COURTESY MUSEUM OF NEW MEXICO PRESS (3) writing, often for newspapers and magazines back east,

54 NEW MEXICO // MAY 2016 nmmagazine.com // MAY 2016 55 gave her skin in the game, and she tirelessly publicized not only the independent character and quality of Native culture, but the importance of land rights in pro- tecting and maintaining that culture.

nevitably, Mabel’s utopian project of healing the world failed. As she grew older, she penned a few nostalgic pieces about what could have been, but after the 1950s, Taos had moved on. It was still considered a place for creative people, and its beauty certainly hadn’t diminished, but its repre- Isentative characters had dispersed. After a couple of small strokes, Mabel was rarely part of the ebb and flow of Taos life. She and Luhan spent time traveling, and when at home they kept largely to themselves. Mabel Dodge Luhan & Company isn’t so much about a collection of individuals as it is about the intense creative world they found themselves part of, and helped mold. But it does reveal a woman whose place in American and New Mexican cultural history was as more than a patron of the arts or an experienced and skillful hostess. She was undoubtedly “a creator of creators” as well as a creator in her own right. Her talent wasn’t the same as many of those she collected, NEED TO KNOW: All Things Mabel but it shared some of the same qualities. She, like Mabel Dodge Luhan Altitude Sickness, a new tion whose robust sched- them, sought new ways of exploring reality, of making & Company: American play by Stephen Lowe, pro- ule of workshops stays visions true things, of finding meaning and purpose. Moderns and the West duced by the Fusion Theatre true to its namesake’s Her creation was a sort of cultural infrastructure— opens at the Harwood Company, premieres at mission of inspiring cre- the places, support, and interactions necessary for Museum of Art in Taos on Taos Center for the Arts ativity. 240 Morada Lane, others to do their own transformative work. It is one May 22 and runs through May 19. (575) 758-2052; Taos; (800) 846-2235; September 11, then will tcataos.org mabeldodgeluhan.com Clockwise from top left: that clearly endures. be at the Albuquerque Georgia O’Keeffe, Grey Cross A new opera about Mabel’s The D. H. Lawrence Rudnick has written that because of Mabel, Taos Museum of Art and with Blue, 1929, oil on canvas, early years in Taos, by Ranch, 20 miles north became “one of the centers of modern art, literature, History from October 29 Albuquerque Museum of award-winning composer/ of Taos, is open to the through January 22, 2017. Art. Maurice Sterne, Mabel patronage, and Native American rights activism in the librettist Nell Shaw Cohen, public on a limited basis. The exhibition’s accompany- Dodge, 1917, ink wash on nation.” But Mabel’s new—or newly understood—leg- opens at the Harwood (575) 770-4830; dhlaw- ing book of the same title paper, collection of J. B. Lane. acy is at once a thing of history and a call to the pres- Museum on August 12 at rencetaos.org Awa Tsireh (Alfonso Roybal), (Museum of New Mexico 5:30 p.m. (575) 758-9826; Eagle Dance, 1930–1935, ent. Wilson-Powell talks of Mabel helping create a Press, 2016) includes essays FURTHER READING: watercolor on paper. Facing worldly and connected New Mexico, one that was at harwoodmuseum.org on the art, culture, and “Lawrence of New page: Edward Weston, once sophisticated and full of unharnessed raw pos- history of Mabel and the “The Heart of Mother Mabel Dodge Luhan, 1933, Mexico”: In 1936, Mabel sibility. Mabel recognized the continuing power of world she wrought. Consult Earth Gives to the Soul gelatin silver print, Center wrote a piece for this mag- of Women in the Arts for Creative Photography. ideas and culture to be valuable in their own right, mabeldodgeluhan.org for azine as an introduction to Who Touched Taos,” a worth nurturing and growing. That legacy holds true more information. Lawrence’s own paean to fashion display by Project today as well. The Harwood Museum the state, both of which Runway runner-up and has put together a travel are available at mynm.us/ When she died, in 1962, Mabel had survived to the Taos Pueblo native Patricia itinerary that includes luhanlawrence. end of what Padilla calls an “epic cultural transition,” Michaels, takes place O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch, “Looking for Lawrence”: one she had helped bring about. A few years later, August 18 at 7:00 p.m. at the Mabel Dodge Luhan & Inspired by Lawrence’s America, and Taos, would be in the midst of another the Harwood Museum. Company exhibition, a meal vision of the state, Henry (575) 758-9826; great cultural shift. Mabel’s house would pass to at Eloisa Restaurant, and Shukman found that harwoodmuseum.org and a whole new crop of those hoping accommodations at the Inn much of his country- to escape the world and create something new. � and Spa at Loretto, in Santa The Mabel Dodge man’s NM experience Fe, and El Monte Sagrado Luhan House Historic was still relevant in the Contributor Peter BG Shoemaker is featured in Resort and Spa, in Taos. Inn and Conference 21st century: mynm.us/

COURTESY MUSEUM OF NEW MEXICO PRESS (TOP RIGHT AND FACING PAGE) “Storytellers,” p. 12. mynm.us/artpackage Center is a Taos institu- lookingforlawrence.

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