Historians and critics like to insert artists into neat, simplistic slots — a tendency that can distort and diminish the standing of those who don’t fit easy categorization. Exhibit A is Ernest Blumenschein.
Certainly, the paintings of this co-founder of the Taos Society of Artists and longtime New Mexican painter can be found in museums across the country, and his name is cited regularly in art history books.
Yet, he continues to be dismissed by some experts as an academic painter or, worse, an anti-modernist, and shunted aside as a Western artist — a label soaked with stereotypes and generalizations.
A sweeping new exhibition, which opened Saturday at the Denver Art Museum and runs through Feb. 8, sets aside such preconceptions and offers a fresh, engaging look at Blumenschein (1874-1960) and a career that stretched more than six decades.
Accompanied by a 400-page catalog, the exhibitit makes a powerful case for Blumenschein not just as a pivotal artist of the Southwest but as an essential figure in the totality of 20th-century American art.
The show was organized by the Denver Art Museum along with the Albuquerque Museum and Phoenix Art Museum, venues where it has already traveled. Peter Hassrick, director of DAM’s Petrie Institute of Western American Art, served as co-curator.
With 66 works, a sizable portion of the artist’s extant output, including most of his signature paintings, it is the largest and most comprehensive retrospective ever devoted to Blumenschein.
He created a little more than 400 works, including illustrations and studies — a tiny number compared with the 3,000 or so produced by some of his peers. Of those, he is believed to have destroyed or repainted at least 150.
In 1898, Blumenschein, already a promising illustrator, and his New York studio mate, Bert Phillips, suffered what might be the most famous transportation mishap in American art history. The rear wheel of their wagon broke on the way from Colorado to New Mexico.
Traveling two days in search of the nearest blacksmith, Blumenschein stumbled onto Taos and the breathtaking valley surrounding it. He and his art were forever transformed.
“This, I knew at once, was what I wanted to paint and where I wanted to live,” he said in a 1926 interview.
That chance discovery led in 1915 to his co-founding of the Taos Society of Artists and ultimately established Taos and nearby Santa Fe as one of the most important artistic centers in the United States.
Although he stayed for just three months after his first encounter with Taos and did not move there permanently until 1920, he returned regularly to the region. By around 1912, Southwestern subject matter came to dominate his painting, as it would for the rest of his life.
Although it is impossible to characterize Blumenschein as an avant-garde artist in the vein of, say, Marsden Hartley, who was born just three years after him, it is also not fair to label him as a reactionary.
Like Hartley, who spent several years in Europe, the Pittsburgh native, who grew up in Dayton, Ohio, studied for two years in Paris and returned to France for several subsequent stays.
During these visits, including two summers in Giverny, where Monet famously spent the last years of his life, Blumenschein was signficantly influenced by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, especially Matisse and Cezanne.
While he was not exactly a trailblazer, he was always interested in the latest artistic trends, never attempting to ignore them or stifle them like some of his peers.
Not only did he respond favorably to the landmark Armory Show in 1913, which did more than anything else to introduce European modernism to this country, he defended it in a prescient essay in Century magazine titled “The Painting of To-morrow.”
Realizing that these movements would have an unstoppable impact, he wrote “that a new truth has been added to our knowledge, and one which will be welded into all future art.”
He left the Taos Society in 1923 in part over a spat between traditionalists and modernists and fought in the 1920s for the inclusion of modernist art in exhibitions sponsored by the National Academy of Design, then a heretical notion.
A melding of principles
In his own art, Blumenschein never abandoned figuration, even when it was eclipsed by abstract expressionism in the 1940s, and he continued to follow many of the academic principles from his 19th-century studies.
But what sets him apart was his ability to meld these traditional artistic principles with more progressive ideas gleaned from avant-garde artists, creating a distinctive, responsive style.
The three primary hallmarks of his painting are vivid colors, highly structured compositions and dynamic brushwork. He no doubt drew on a range of influences in establishing his vibrant palette, including Matisse and the other Fauvists.
A bold use of color can be seen across his output, from the penetrating aqua shadings of the abstracted trees in the background of “White Robe and Blue Spruce” (1922) to the golden, late-day hues of “Downtown Albuquerque” (1952).
Equally important to Blumenschein was the organization or design of his paintings, which always trumped faithful representation. “Imitating nature is not art,” he said. “Art is beyond nature.”
Examples include “Moon, Morning Star, and Evening Star” (1923, reworked 1931), with its emphatic oval arrangement of dancers and spectators, and the compressed, closed-in perspectives of “Jury for the Trial of a Sheepherder for Murder” (1936).
If there is one painting in this exhibition that fully encapsulates Blumenschein’s unique marriage of the new and old, it would be “Superstition” (1921). Nearly nine decades after its realization, it still has the power to startle and intrigue.
Cezanne styling
In this 41 1/4-by-45-inch oil on canvas, a Pueblo sitter (a friend of the artist, Jim Romero) glowers confrontationally at the viewer. He holds a black Tewa wedding vase in his hands, and other pottery rests on tables next to him.
The background consists of shifting Navajo and Hispanic Rio Grande blanket designs, rendered in a kind of refracted fashion reminiscent of Cezanne’s depictions of Mont Sainte-Victoire. And, indeed, the highly colorful, undulating patterns morph into the shape of mountains.
The perspective is so compressed that the foreground and background nearly fuse. That, combined with an array of competing compositional elements, creates an electrifying visual panorama that accosts and nearly overloads the eye.
But this painting is about more than mere visual impact. In what seems extremely contemporary, Blumenschein intended this piece to be a biting commentary on government efforts underway at the time to assimilate the Pueblo people and strip away their religion and customs.
The understanding and appreciation of Western art has come a long way in the past few decades, with many of its deserving artists, such as Frederic Remington, finally gaining their rightful place in the full context of American art history.
This overdue retrospective provides another key step in that transformation, boosting appreciation of an artist who in significant ways has been underappreciated.
But this process is far from over. The show’s organizers tried to find venues outside the region, especially one on the East Coast, but, in the end, there were no takers.
While scheduling conflicts and other factors inevitably figure into to such decisions, it is clear that Western art has still not managed to cast off all the stigmas attached to it.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
“In Contemporary Rhythm: The Art of Ernest L. Blumenschein”
Art. Denver Art Museum, West 13th Avenue between Broadway and Bannock Street. The largest and most comprehensive retrospective ever devoted to the famed Southwestern painter. Through Feb. 8. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays; 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Fridays and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. Free with regular museum admission. 720-865-5000 or .
