While the artists featured in Glimpses of the Past come from a variety of backgrounds, their artistic practices were all touched, for a brief period or an extended time, by the people and landscape of New Mexico.
Hand-colored woodblock print, 13 x 10 inches.
Emil Armin (1883-1971)
Emil Armin was born in Radautz, Austria-Hungary, a province now in Romania. His father was an amateur artist who taught his son woodcarving. Orphaned at the age of ten, Armin was encouraged by friends to follow a career in art, and he moved to Chernivtsi (now part of Ukraine) at the age of eighteen to pursue his studies. After immigrating to the United States in 1905, Armin studied at the Art Institute of Chicago with artists who had worked and/or lived in northern New Mexico, including George Bellows and Albert Krehbiel. In 1928, Armin began traveling to New Mexico himself and produced a body of work that includes woodblock prints, linocut prints, oil paintings, and watercolor paintings, all of which depict scenes in and around Santa Fe and Taos.
Herman Ilfeld Bacharach (1899-1976)
A native New Mexican, Herman Bacharach was a prolific artist, illustrator and book designer, particularly of children’s literature such as The Adventures of Pinocchio (1927) and Robinson Crusoe (1929). Bacharach was also employed by the Works Progression Administration (WPA) and worked in a variety of media including woodcut and linocut.
Orlin G. Baker (1886-1959)
A printmaker who worked in drypoint, etching, aquatint, lithography, and linocut, Orlin Baker was born in Kansas and spent most of his life in the Midwest. He studied at the Kansas City Art Institute, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and in California with printmaker Howell Brown. Baker’s work is scarce, and the vibrant color linocut included in Glimpses of the Past is a compelling example of his Southwestern work.
Dana Bartlett (1882-1957)
Known primarily as a California artist, Dana Bartlett was born in Michigan and studied at the Art Students’ League in New York with William Merritt Chase and Charles Warren Eaton. He relocated to Los Angeles in 1915, however, and became one of the foremost members of the California “Eucalyptus School” of plein-aire artists.
Oscar Edmund Berninghaus (1874-1962)
Embarking on a career as an illustrator, O.E. Berninghaus traveled to the West in 1898 on assignment for the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad and made his way to Taos. From that point on, Berninghaus returned annually to the Southwest and became a founding member of the Taos Society before moving to town permanently in 1925. Berninghaus was fluent in a variety of graphic media and produced etchings, lithographs, monotypes, and block prints.
Charles M. Capps (1898-1981)
Charles M. “Chili” Capps was a native of Illinois and one of the charter members of the famed Prairie Print Makers group. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts before moving to Kansas, where the Prairie Print Makers group was founded in 1930. While not a prolific artist, creating only around ninety prints in the course of fifty years, Capps was widely recognized as a master of the difficult technique of etching and aquatint.
Frederico Castellon (1914-1971)
While Frederico Castellon was born in Almeria, Spain, he immigrated as a child to the Brooklyn, New York, with his family. As a teenager, Castellon made the acquaintance of the famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. With Rivera’s support, he was able to secure a fellowship to return to Europe to study painting and printmaking. Castellon’s work evidences a distinct affinity for Surrealism—specifically the work of fellow Spaniards Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali, and the Belgian Giorgio DeChirico.
Howard Norton Cook (1901-1980)
A major figure in the history of 20th-century New Mexico art, Howard Norton Cook was a native of Springfield, Massachusetts. In the early 1920’s, he studied at the Art Students League in New York before traveling extensively in Europe and Asia. Between 1926 and 1927, Cook created a series of woodblocks and etchings that are recognized as some of the the masterpieces of New Mexico printmaking.
John Wesley Cotton (1868-1931)
A native of Dundas, Ontario, Canada, John Wesley Cotton was an accomplished and versatile artist who worked in oils, watercolor, graphite and graphic media. After studying art in Toronto, Chicago, and London, Cotton moved to California after World War I and established himself as a noted and widely exhibited landscapist. During the 1920’s, he visited New Mexico and produced a small group of colored aquatint/etchings.
Andrew Dasburg (1887-1979)
A highly influential figure in the development of Modernism in American art, Andrew Dasburg was born in Paris and immigrated to the United States as an infant in 1892. After years of study and travel abroad and in New York, he relocated to New Mexico, where he lived in both Taos and Santa Fe until his passing in 1979. Dasburg was the most direct conduit between the cutting edge art scenes in Paris and New York and the distant artistic outposts of Taos and Santa Fe.
Rosella “Zella” de Milhau (1870-1954)
Born in New York, Zella de Milhau led an exceptionally accomplished and adventurous life that included service in World War I as a front line ambulance driver and as a motorcycle police officer at Southampton, Long Island. As a result of her service during the war, she was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French government. Unfortunately, virtually nothing is known about de Milhau’s time in New Mexico except that, at some point, she traveled to the region and produced at least one etching plate.
Fred Geary (1894-1946)
A native of Clarence, Missouri, Fred Geary was a designer, illustrator, muralist, graphic artist, and member of the Prairie Print Makers group who worked extensively in the Southwest. His work can found in the El Navajo Hotel in Gallup, the Desert View Watchtower at the Grand Canyon, and the San Felipe Church in Albuquerque. Known for his bold, graphic style, Geary exhibited his prints across the country at venues such as the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Chicago International Print Club, and the San Francisco Art Museum.
Todros Geller (1889-1949)
Born in the Ukraine, Todros Geller emigrated to Canada in 1906 before settling in Chicago. In 1929, he visited Palestine, a trip that inspired one of three primary themes that developed in his work: Judaica, social realism, and the Southwest. Geller traveled to New Mexico in the mid-1930’s and produced a number of woodblock and linocut prints, a dozen of which were published in his 1937 book, From Land to Land.
Norma Bassett Hall (1889-1957)
Born in Oregon, Norma Bassett Hall was an established, prolific printmaker with a strong interest in color techniques. After several years of study and working as an art teacher, Hall moved with her husband Arthur to El Dorado, Kansas, and became co-founders of the Prairie Print Makers. While she initially created block prints with oil-based pigments, in 1925, she switched to transparent, water-based inks after learning Japanese woodblock techniques. In 1942, the Halls moved to New Mexico, and Norma added the serigraph, or silkscreen, technique to her repertoire.
Trude Hanscom (1890-1975)
Gertrude Fandrich Hanscom was born in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and spent most of her life in New York and California. She studied at Syracuse University, Scripps College, the Otis Institute, and the University of California, Los Angeles. She also took private classes with the noted Western landscapist Sam Hyde Harris. Hanscom was a member of numerous artists’ organizations, including the Society of American Graphic Artists and the California Art Club. She became a master of both intaglio printmaking techniques and the aquatint process.
Elna Hogin (1918-2013)
A native of Kansas City, Elna Hogin worked as a commercial artist with the Hall Brothers Company, the makers of Hallmark cards. Her employers rewarded her work with a fellowship that allowed her to travel to San Francisco and Taos for further studies. While, in New Mexico, she met and married the watercolorist Roy Brook Pettus, there is little further information regarding her life and work.
Nils Hogner (1887-1970)
Born in Nederkalix, Sweden, Nils Hogner immigrated with his family to the Boston area in 1893. After several years of artistic study in Boston and abroad, Hogner traveled widely and pursued a highly diverse career, including a stint as an instructor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. While at UNM, he met and married Dorothy Childs, a successful author of children’s books. The couple collaborated on dozens of books, a number of which such as Pedro the Potter and The Navajo Flute Player have Southwestern themes.
Henrietta Dean Lang (1876-1940)
While little information is available regarding the life and career of Henrietta Dean Lang, it is documented that she lived and worked in Detroit and was one of twenty-eight Americans to represent her country at the 1936 International Print & Lithography Show in Chicago. At some point, Lang learned white-line woodblock printmaking, which she used to produce two known New Mexico prints.
Stella MacLean
An etcher of figurative Western subjects, little is known about the artist Stella MacLean. Her portrait of Juanita, a Pueblo woman, included in Glimpses of the Past, however, indicates that MacLean was a skilled artist with an excellent compositional sense and strong technique.
Daniel MacMorris (1893-1981)
A native of Sedalia, Missouri, Daniel MacMorris lived and worked in a number of important art centers over the course of his lifetime. After beginning his studies in Kansas City, MacMorris studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, where one of his instructors was the famed Art Nouveau graphic artist Alphonse Mucha. Following his time at the Art Institute, MacMorris traveled to New Mexico, and in the 1920’s, became the protégé of celebrated Russian artist Leon Gaspard. After serving in both World Wars and several years living in Paris, MacMorris returned to the States, where he spent time in New York before returning to Kansas City permanently in 1945. His New Mexico work is scarce, and his prints especially so.
Albert H. Marvin, Jr.
Another artist about whom little is known, the scant documentation available on Albert H. Marvin, Jr. indicates that he was a student at the Kansas City Art Institute in the 1930’s. While serving in the Air Force during the Second World War, he painted a series of murals documenting the history of flight before studying aeronautics at Reed College.
Blanche McVeigh (1895-1970)
Born in Missouri but raised in Texas, Blanche McVeigh studied art at several institutions such as Washington University in St. Louis, the Art Students League, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Additionally, McVeigh studied privately with New Mexico/Oklahoma artist Doel Reed, from whom she learned the complexities of the aquatint process. After teaching at the Ft. Worth School of Fine Arts, she worked extensively as a commercial artist and illustrated numerous books that dealt primarily with New Mexico scenes and southern subjects.
Frederick Monhoff (1897-1975)
Though a native of New York City, Frederick Monhoff moved to Los Angeles with his family as a child. After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War I, he studied at the University of California at Berkeley with the artist Armin Hansen. Throughout his career, Monhoff worked in watercolor and oils and produced forty-four etchings, including a suite of small New Mexico scenes.
Peter Moran (1841-1914)
Peter Moran was the youngest of the prodigiously talented Moran brothers, which included John (a photographer), Edward (a painter of marine subjects) and, most famously, Thomas—one of the premiere American landscape artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. After immigrating with his family to Philadelphia from Bolton, England, Moran began his artistic training as an apprentice to a lithography firm. He studied with his brothers Edward and Thomas and developed great fluency as a draftsman, watercolorist, oil painter and etcher. He accompanied Thomas on a trip to Wyoming in 1879, and in 1880, made his first trip to New Mexico. His return trip in 1881 is well documented, and it is thought that he might have made further excursions in 1882 and, perhaps, later in the decade. Between 1880 and 1890, Moran created fifteen etchings with New Mexico subjects, three of which are presented in Glimpses of the Past. Burros, horses, and oxen appear in most of Moran’s New Mexico images (back in Pennsylvania his reputation was primarily as an animalier—a painter of rural scenes featuring domestic livestock).
Thomas Moran (1837-1926)
Born in Bolton, England, like his artist brothers, Thomas Moran rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most celebrated and successful American artists of his era. He apprenticed with a wood engraving firm in Philadelphia during his teenage years and then studied with his older brother, Edward, a talented painter of marine genre subjects who had studied with Martin Johnson Heade, Sanford Gifford and John F. Kensett. Thomas traveled regularly to the West and passed through New Mexico on several occasions until he was in his 60’s. He sketched numerous pueblo scenes and developed them into etchings and oil paintings back in his studio in Newark, New Jersey.
Roi Partridge (1888-1984)
A native of Washington state, Roi Partridge’s family moved to Seattle when he was a child. He began showing his work in Seattle as part of an avant garde artist’s collective called “The Triad.” In his early twenties, Partridge moved to New York to study at the National Academy of Design before traveling through Europe, then returning to settle in California. He was married to the noted photographer Imogen Cunningham from 1915 to 1934. Partridge’s work is distinguished by his highly articulate line work in which forms are built up from dense accumulations of fine etching with little or no reliance on drypoint or other techniques to build up darker areas.
B. Pat Pattison
Who B. Pat Pattison was—where they were from, where they studied, how long they lived in Taos—is currently unknown. Years of searching revealed no information about the artist who created the two striking linocut images in this exhibition, until recently. An article from the November 6, 1938, edition of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal recently posted online describes in detail an exhibition of Taos artists that was to take place at Texas Tech University. Among such notables as O.E. Berninghaus, Nicolai Fechin, Dorothy Brett, Howard Cook and Gene Kloss is a mention of the inclusion of three works by Pat Pattison, including the two prints presented in Glimpses of the Past: Elk-Foot and Ol’ Boy. The graphic vibrance and bold modernity of these portraits is remarkable, particularly in consideration of the fact that they are at least eighty-three years old. Like his portraitist, the identity of Ol’ Boy remains a mystery, but his cohort Jerry “Elk Foot” Mirabal is well known as a model for both E.I. Couse and J.H. Sharp.
Ralph M. Pearson (1883-1958)
It is thought that the Iowa-born printmaker Ralph Pearson was the first person to have an artist’s printing press in New Mexico. A visit to the acclaimed 1913 Armory Show in New York had opened his eyes to the possibilities of Modernism, and in 1915, Pearson moved to a ranch just south of Taos. He is known to have been pulling prints of New Mexico scenes by 1918. In addition to studying at the Art Institute of Chicago with John Vanderpoel, Pearson was a member of the Art Students League of Chicago, the New York Society of Etchers, the California Society of Etchers and other arts organizations.
Leon Rene Pescheret (1892-1971)
Born in London to French immigrant parents, Leon Pescheret moved with his family to Washington, D.C. in 1910. After service in World War I, Pescheret became interested in the graphic arts and began his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. He studied interior design with Albert Fleury and struck his first etching plate in 1926. Following studies in Europe, in 1936, he settled in Whitewater, Wisconsin. Pescheret then began visiting the Southwest regularly in the late 1930’s and spent time in Arizona, New Mexico, and old Mexico. As a result of his visits, he began producing prints of Southwestern subjects, often by utilizing the soft ground etching and aquatint techniques.
Coy Avon Seward (1884-1939)
C.A. Seward was an important and prolific printmaker who was noted for his innovative techniques and graphically bold and beautiful images of New Mexico and his native Kansas. Seward showed artistic talent from an early age but it was his visit to the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis (an event in which two major works by E.I. Couse were on exhibit) that set him on the path to becoming an artist. By 1907, Seward had opened a commercial art studio in Wichita and, three years later, founded an art school. He subsequently worked for a couple of large commercial printing companies, including the Western Lithograph Company which, through Seward’s contacts, produced prints for many Kansas and New Mexico artists. In 1930, Seward became a charter member of the famed Prairie Print Makers group. Between 1923 and 1930, he created approximately forty New Mexico prints.
Dorothy Brenholts Stauffer King Hay (1901-1974)
A native of Iowa, Dorothy Brenholts displayed artistic talent from an early age. She studied at the University of California at San Diego before completing her philosophy degree at Stanford. Afterwards, she took art classes in Los Angeles and was teaching at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco by the age of twenty-four. After further artistic studies in Europe, a stint in Denver, and several marriages, Brenholts moved throughout the Southwest before settling in Tucson in 1962. Her primary medium was etching, and she executed several mural projects in New Mexico as well as small “gift” prints of views of Santa Fe and pueblos along the Rio Grande.
Harold Joe Waldrum (1934-2003)
One of many colorful characters in the long history of art in New Mexico, Harold Joe Waldrum was a native of Savoy, TX. While his first love was music, and he earned a bachelor’s degree in that field from Western State College in Gunnison, CO, he returned to school to pursue the visual arts and earned his MFA from Fort Hays State College in 1970. In the early 1970’s, Waldrum relocated to New Mexico before an incident with a gang of criminals caused him to spend several years shuttling between New York and Taos. By the early 1980’s, Waldrum had developed his signature style: views of northern New Mexico adobe churches and chapels in a square format, reductive in composition but frequently lush in carefully layered color. In addition to painting, he was a prolific printmaker who worked primarily with etching, aquatint, and linocut. Although Waldrum does not fit into the 1880-1950 time frame of Glimpses of the Past, he is included in recognition of the beautiful and influential work that he completed while living and working in the 1915 J.H. Sharp studio on the Couse-Sharp property in the 1980’s.
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146 Kit Carson Road, Taos, New Mexico 87571
Glimpses of the Past 