In Contemporary Rhythm: The Art of Ernest L. Blumenschein, by Peter H. Hassrick and Elizabeth J. Cunningham, $55 cloth, $34.95 paper. In 1898, two artists on their way to Taos broke a wagon wheel and flipped a coin to see which one of them would walk to town to take the wheel to a blacksmith. Ernest L. Blumenschein lost (or won, as the case may be) and was the first of a long list of artists to use Taos as a base.
Blumenschein, a founder of the Taos Society of Artists, became the best known and perhaps the most accomplished of all the Taos artists, although his lifetime production was not large — 400 paintings, 50 of them major.
But what paintings they were, as Peter H. Hassrick and Elizabeth J. Cunningham show in “In Contemporary Rhythm,” which is being published in connection with a Blumenschein show at the Denver Art Museum. The full-color reproductions show the richness and emotion of the artist’s work.
Born in the Midwest, Blumenschein was destined for a career as a violinist until he discovered art and became an illustrator. But he wanted more, and after attending art school in New York, he moved to Paris to study. He was already an established artist when he discovered Taos in 1898.
“In Contemporary Rhythm” is both a biography of Blumenschein and an appraisal of his work.
A Place of Refuge: Maynard Dixon’s Arizona, by Thomas Brent Smith with Donald J. Hagerty, $40. Arizona was to Maynard Dixon what New Mexico was to Ernest Blumenschein. Dixon, like Blumenschein, was a successful illustrator, first sketching Arizona in 1900. The Navajo reservation was a remote area then, accessible only by wagon or horseback. In fact, Kayenta was considered to be farther from a railroad depot than any other spot in America.
Over the years, Dixon watched as the Navajo and Hopi lands became more accessible, as movies were filmed in Monument Valley and tourists descended on the reservations. In the more than 40 years that he painted in Arizona, Dixon did his best to preserve the Indian way of life. And if not preserve it, then record it, as he did with hundreds of paintings of Indians and the desert landscape.
An iconic depiction of a Navajo wrapped in a red blanket, standing against an Arizona butte, was used on the cover of Sunset magazine in 1902. Sunset reproduced the painting as a poster in 1907, and has sold more than 200,000 copies of it. The poster is still for sale.
“A Place of Refuge” is primarily a collection of Dixon’s Arizona work, mostly Indians and landscapes, although there are some surprises. In 1934, Dixon painted “Law and Order,” a picture of three union thugs attacking a cop. It’s done in the style of the Ashcan School.
The short biography gives the highlights of the artist’s life but goes into little detail about his personal life. He was married three times, once to famed photographer Dorothea Lange.
Aurora: An American Experience in Quilt, Community and Craft, by Jane Kirkpatrick, $17.99. We think of 19th-century religious colonization as an Eastern phenomenon. But the West had its share of colonies. Among them was Oregon’s Aurora Colony, which existed from 1856 to 1883. The founder’s Diamond Rule was to make another’s life better than one’s own. And the colonists did that, not only by helping each other but by interacting with their Oregon neighbors. At the same time, they pursued crafts, primarily quilting, and left behind a wealth of folk art.
Jane Kirkpatrick, who is better known for her award-winning novels, tells the history of this little-known colony. This nicely illustrated book tells why the colonists gave up their homes to settle the wilderness, and why the experiment ultimately failed.
The Wild West Catalogue, by Bruce Wexler, $19.95. The West, we like to say, is an idea. It’s also stuff — guns, wagons, Indian relics. “The Wild West Catalogue” is part legend, part cherry-picked history, part oddments.
Bruce Wexler writes about cowboys and outlaws, homesteaders and hookers, guns and radio show premiums. He combines the real West and the popular West in a book illustrated with historic photos as well as photographs of things — old dice, a pair of buffalo-skin gloves, a pistol from the TV show “Maverick.”
While there is nothing new here, there are a couple of interesting chapters on radio and TV shows as well as on Western writers and books. The heyday of the Western book was the 1940s, and most of the books were pulps, selling for a quarter. It’s amazing to think that “Shane,” “The Ox-Bow Incident” and “The Big Sky” were originally published in paperback.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist who writes regularly about new regional nonfiction releases.
