MAN IN THE MAZE

Searching for Creative Solutions

Who Am We?

Web Design/Photography

Documentaries

Narration/Radio

Slide Shows

The Curtis Project

US60Mags

THE SANTA FE SERIES

FOREWARD

ARRIVAL IN ALBUQUERQUE

MEANWHILE IN CHICAGO

SANTA FE INDIAN VILLAGE

APACHELAND

THE TRADING POST

THE ARTS AND CRAFTS

THE VISIONARIES

DESTINATIONS & DETOURS

DESTINATIONS & DETOURS 2

DESTINATIONS & DETOURS 3

DESTINATIONS & DETOURS 4

GUYS WITH CAMERAS

GUYS WITH CAMERAS 2

GUYS WITH CAMERAS 3

GUYS WITH CAMERAS 4

PASO DEL NORTE

PASO DEL NORTE 2

PASO DEL NORTE 3

PASO DEL NORTE 4

PASO DEL NORTE 5

PASO DEL NORTE 6

Headline
Headline
THE VISIONARIES
Headline
Headline
  Media
Painted Caves
 

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)

Headline
Headline
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

Headline
Headline
Headline
Headline


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 



Headline
Headline
Headline
Headline
Headline


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."

Headline
Headline
Headline


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

Headline
Headline
Headline
Headline
Headline


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

Headline
Headline
Headline
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

Headline
Headline
Headline
Headline
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."

a

Headline
Headline
Headline
Headline
Headline
Headline



Click here for Chapter 8, DESTINATIONS & DETOURS.

Copyright 2022 Man in the Maze Productions