Mabel Dodge Luhan: The Salon That Colonized a Colony
Near Red River, New Mexico
Mabel Dodge Luhan arrived in Taos in December nineteen seventeen with a freight car of furniture from her Fifth Avenue apartment in New York City. She had already hosted one of the most significant cultural salons in American history, in Greenwich Village, where she had introduced Emma Goldman and Walter Lippmann and Margaret Sanger to each other at her table. She was bored with New York.
Taos offered something that New York, in her judgment, lacked: authenticity. Pueblo life. Ancient ceremony. What she understood as the opposite of the industrial modernity she had grown up in.
She built a large house at the edge of Taos Pueblo lands, married Tony Luhan, a member of Taos Pueblo, and began importing her salon's guest list to New Mexico. D.H. Lawrence came in nineteen twenty-two and stayed, on and off, for three years. Georgia O'Keeffe came. Ansel Adams came. The psychiatrist Carl Jung visited. The composer Leopold Stokowski came. Mabel wrote letters in a literary style designed to make correspondents feel that refusing the invitation would mean missing the most important cultural event of the decade.
She was often right. The convergence she organized was real. Writers and artists who passed through her compound left with their work changed. D.H. Lawrence wrote some of his most significant essays on Indigenous ceremony and American landscape in a small cabin on her property.
The question that Mabel's salon did not ask, and that Taos Pueblo has been asking ever since, is what the Pueblo people whose culture attracted the artists received in return. The artistic careers built partly on Pueblo imagery and landscape largely benefited institutions in New York and London and Los Angeles. Tony Luhan guided artists and writers around the pueblo's ceremonial life for decades. His wages for that labor are not part of the standard biography.
The house is still there, operating as a bed and breakfast.
