Flautist/Composer Robert Mirabal from Taos Pueblo plays here, accompanied by the Rare Tribal Mob. It's from his Music From A Painted Cave album, released in '05 on Silver Wave Records. A reviewer wrote: "Throughout the CD there are moments where you feel time is suspended and you have been allowed into a different world (particularly on 'Painted Caves')." He's right. (4:32)
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d Any man who is really an artist will find the Southwest the most imminent and audible prompting of God that he has ever encountered. No other cue is so like to make him forget his audience and only remember his past, as a region where the ingenuity, the imagination, and the love of God are so visible at every turn. . . .It is high time for the artists to come upon the Southwest.
Charles F. Lummis "The Artist's Paradise," Out West, September 1908 c
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Ten members of the Taos Society of Artists, 1932
"When Ernest L. Blumenschein and Bert Phillips, two young artists who were traveling by wagon from Denver to Mexico in 1898, lost a wagon wheel some place north of Taos and were forced to head here for repairs, little did they know they were soon to start a trickle of artists into the Taos valley that would swell for the next forty years. A flood of artists and writers came to Taos for the native people, the landscape, the light, the silence. As D.H. Lawrence said, 'Taos is a state of mind.' It was. And is."
Brigitte Gastel Lloyd, Art Roots.com
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From Visions & Visionaries - The Art and Artists of the Santa Fe Railway Sandra D'Emilio and Suzan Campbell
In 1914, the romantic painting Wal-si-see - Good Medicine, [above] by E. Irving Couse (1866-1936) appeared on the calendar, the first of twenty-three paintings by him that would decorate the calendars. Couse, who had arrived in Taos in 1902, devoted his efforts almost entirely to painting the subtleties of the Indians' "smooth flesh, tense muscles, and fine bone structure." The portraits were idealized images of Indian men. "He picked the most classically ideal types to model for him and painted them with stunning accuracy," wrote Virginia Couse Leavitt. "His depictions of Indians engaged in craft, ritual, or hunting activities were always metaphors for the Native American perspective of life, which is inextricably intertwined with their religious view of the world. . . . His Indians, contemplative and timeless, are in constant communion with the spiritual universe that guides their every action." Taos Indian Ben Lujan modeled for Couse for "as long as the painter lived and came to be known as Ben 'Couse' Lujan. After working as model all morning, Ben served as gardener for Mrs. Couse in the afternoons."
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From DREAM TRACKS - THE RAILROAD AND THE AMERICAN INDIAN 1890-1930, by T. C. McLuhan
E. Irving Couse's work fit the Santa Fe Railway's mold, as did that of several other Taos artists. For Simpson's needs [Simpson was head of advertising for the Santa Fe], Couse was a "visual stenographer," posing his Indians and infusing his scenes with the romantic impulse. Couse removed the Indian from his cultural context and created an "unrelated" Indian. His Indians are irresistible, gentle, quiet ghosts of former beings, curiously unreal and dreamlike. A condition of innocence pervades all his work.
Walter Ufer, another Taos artist, whose work was also purchased by Simpson for the calendar, was, like Couse, a painter of tremendous talent who enjoyed considerable financial success. He sold a reported $150,000 worth of paintings in three years by turning out the same picture over and over, an Indian on a white horse posed against a Taos mountain looming in the background.
Couse, too, was immensely successful with his calendar images. They catapulted him, overnight, into national recognition. But his colleagues scorned him for his commercialism and accused him of pandering to the unformed opinions of an uninformed public. They also complained of his lack of taste. Blumenschein ridiculed his predictable choice of subjects and his lack of artistic enterprise, saying Couse "painted an Indian squatting before a buffalo hide on which he was drawing" He continued, ". . . that painting made him famous and he has been painting the same squatting Indian ever since." (continued below) a
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The Santa Fe Indian represented a prototype of preindustrial society. Simplicity. Freedom. Nobility. This was the life and culture that inhabited the Santa Fe's "friendly" oasis of the desert Southwest. In dire need of a powerful symbol to catch the public's imagination, the Santa Fe appropriated the Indian and his culture to establish for itself a meaningful emblem that would galvanize the American imagination. It's calendar images and the names the Santa Fe borrowed from Indian culture to christen their trains (for example, the "Chief," the "Navajo," and the "Super Chief") provided the public with instant and easy identification with Indians. The adoption of the Indian proved to be an important step for the Santa Fe Railway in its synthesis of corporate image making and primitive culture. Although not an explicit part of the Santa Fe's advertising goals, its promotional themes transformed the Indians into symbolic reductions of the American heritage. The success of that enterprise sprang from the American public's longing for belonging, its quest for roots, and its unconscious desire for liberation from a violent past. (continued below) a
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y (continued from above) The creative synthesis of business interests and culture by the Santa Fe Railway was a unique application of modern advertising techniques. The campaign centered on the patriotic: a call to get to know one's country. The railway's advertising images of the landscape and the Indian were glazed with beauty and picturesqueness, promoting a "last refuge of magic, mountains, and quaint ancestors." But they also evoked a sense of mythological place - a distant West as a land filled with natural wonders, with the promise of a whole new set of different experiences implying a "rite of passage" from the familiar East to the wild, exotic, and slightly dangerous West, where "normal" rules don't apply. The pictures had a refreshing and tantalizing effect. These technicolor fantasies were to become a source of the railway's advertising power. Their impact on the public was enormous. a
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a
(continued from above) The Santa Fe and Taos artists were seeking a rebirth of spirit and an alternative to urban culture. Bored by the European painterly tradition, they began to look to their own roots in an attempt to feed themselves from American soil and to establish something that could be called "truly American." New Mexico offered the restorative power, the regeneration of spirit, that these artists were seeking. Many of the artists drew creative and spiritual nourishment not only from their newly established proximity to the land but also from their contact with Pueblo culture. These cultures were of the American soil.
The Pueblo Indian and his life emerged as important themes in the work of some of the artists. The attraction was twofold. The Indians' unity with their natural environment as expressed through their religious ceremonials and daily life stirred the spirit and aroused the curiousity of the artist. In addition, their colorful and picturesque appearance and strange and exotic customs provided a strong visual stimulus. From the artists' point of view, the Pueblo Indian lived in a land of timelessness and had an "aura of innocence" about him. It was a fresh new universe for the painters.
Phillips, who had set out with Blumenschein min 1898 to tour the Southwest, decided to stay the moment he laid eyes on Taos. Mesmerized by the natural beauty and ethnic charm of the region, he devoted the rest of his life to recording it on canvas. He was particularly impressed with the strong sense of myth that imbued Indian life. On one occasion he marveled: "As I visit their villages and talk with my Indian friends, I see and hear the young bucks wrapped in their white blankets standing on the bridge singing a love song in the moonlight, and I feel the romance of youth. . . . I believe it is the romance of this great pure-aired land that makes the most lasting impression on my mind and heart." Thus, the Indian became a popular theme in the paintings of these talented artists, even though they knew little about the culture they were "capturing." The spirit that animates their work is genuine enough. The artists' subjects were portrayed in their natural landscape, where their lives were infused with a profound harmony with nature. Their images are an affirmation of sympathy with Indian life. These artists were, however, lacking in any apparent awareness of the particularities of the culture they were representing. They painted what they felt and what they wanted to feel. The Taos and Santa Fe painters revealed, as Poe said the true artist should, "a wild effort to reach the beauty above."
