The Taos Society of Artists: When Painters Invented a Place
Near Red River, New Mexico
The six painters who founded the Taos Society of Artists in nineteen fifteen had not all chosen Taos the same way. Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Geer Phillips had arrived in eighteen ninety-eight, when their wagon wheel broke on a mountain road in Colorado and they flipped a coin to decide which one would ride into the nearest town for a replacement. Blumenschein lost the coin flip. He rode to Taos. He did not leave for twelve years.
The society they eventually founded was the first significant American art colony outside the East Coast. It held traveling exhibitions that appeared in Boston, Chicago, and New York, bringing Northern New Mexico landscape and Pueblo cultural imagery to American museum-goers who had no other context for either. The images the society produced shaped a national mythology of the Southwest that is still operating today: the adobe, the turquoise sky, the Pueblo figure in the foreground of an enormous landscape.
The question that the images did not ask is what the Pueblo people in those foregrounds experienced as subjects. The Taos Society painters developed personal relationships with Pueblo individuals who sat for them and guided them. They paid for the privilege, in amounts that the historical record does not preserve with precision. What the painters received was careers. What the Pueblo people received was a portion of a session fee, and the experience of watching their ceremonial objects and cultural practices become American art-world currency.
Taos Pueblo had been continuously inhabited for a thousand years before the first painter arrived. The landscape had been farmed, ceremonially used, and deeply known by Tewa-speaking and Tiwa-speaking peoples for centuries before anyone called it picturesque.
The Harwood Museum of Art in Taos holds works by the Society's members. The Society dissolved formally in nineteen twenty-seven, when the members had established careers and did not need the institutional support. The mythology they created is more durable than the organization.
