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Taos Painters: Louis Benton Akin (1868-1913)
Louis Akin grew up in Portland, Oregon, the grandson of pioneers who had come to the West by way of the Oregon Trail. Akin studied art in New York with Merritt Chase and Frank Dumond before traveling to Arizona to paint the Hopi in 1903. The Hopi pieces were commercially successful and were reproduced as postcards and travel posters.
The appeal of Arizona had been its climate, which helped Akin to recover from tuberculosis, but the land grew on him so much, he spent most of the rest of his life there. He lived in Flagstaff, on the Hopi reservation in Oraibi and in the El Tovar Hotel on the south rim of the Grand Canyon while in Arizona, and was inducted into the Hopi's secret society and given the name
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Taos Painters: Norma Bassett Hall (1889 - 1957)
Norma Bassett Hall is best known as a color printmaker of Great Plains, Southwestern, and European landscapes.
Born in Halsey, Oregon, Bassett Hall took three years of study at the Portland Art Association. After teaching for several years she enrolled at the Chicago Art Institute in 1915 and graduated in 1918. She returned to Portland in 1920, opened a studio, and taught art in high school. In 1922 she married Arthur Hall, who had been a fellow student at the Art Institute. The couple settled in El Dorado, Kansas where Arthur had been working.
The Halls became active in a group of central Kansas artists which included several well-known printmaker including Birger Sandzen, C.A. Seward, and Charles Capps. It was during these early years in Kansas that Bassett Hall explored the artistic possibilities of woodblock printing using opaque, oil-based inks.
The Halls spent two years in Europe, from 1925 to 1927, sketching and studying, primarily in France and Britain. In Scotland, they met the noted etcher E.S. Lumsden and his wife, Mabie Royds, a woodblock printmaker. Royds taught Bassett Hall the Japanese techniques of block printing with transparent, water-based inks. Norma and Arthur both studied in Lumsden and Royds' studio for about a year.
Returning to El Dorado, the Halls resumed their friendships with the circle of artists that had formed around Sandzen. In 1930, ten of these artists formally launched an artists' cooperative, the Prairie Print Makers, with Bassett Hall as the only female founding member.
In the late nineteen-thirties, the Halls moved to Virginia to be close to Arthur's family. During World War II they briefly returned to Kansas before settling in Santa Fe where they lived and worked in the Canyon Road home once owned by Gerald Cassidy. In 1950 they moved to Alcalde, New Mexico, about forty miles north of Santa Fe, and operated an art school on their property named Rancho del Rio.
In addition to printmaking, Bassett Hall painted with watercolor and, to a small extent, in oil. She worked in a simplified, representational style reminiscent of Anglo/American printmaking of the Arts and Crafts period. She employed strong color and color contrasts, using up to seven blocks for each print. During her years in New Mexico, Bassett Hall learned the art of serigraphy or screen-printing, and many of her Southwestern scenes were made with this technique.
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Taos Painters: William Joseph Schaldach (1896 - 1982)
William Schaldach is known as a prolific illustrator and author of books and articles on fishing and fowl hunting.
Born in Elkhart, Indiana, Schaldach was passionate about angling and wildfowling from a young age. His family moved to Michigan in 1908, and during his high school years he wrote and drew about outdoor sporting, publishing his first article at age 19. After a stint in the Navy, Schaldach moved to New York in 1919 selling fishing tackle during the day and attending the Art Students League in the evening. He studied under John Sloan and George Bridgman from whom he learned drypoint, etching, and aquatint.
Schaldach began writing and illustrating for Forest and Stream magazine in the early 1920s. He was made associate editor when the magazine merged with Field & Stream in 1930, and soon became managing editor, working there until the late 1930s. Schaldach also contributed over the years to such magazines as Esquire, American Forests, and Outdoor Life.
Beginning in 1937, Schaldach wrote and illustrated a series of books on hunting and fishing. The first was a compilation of his prints, drawings, and watercolors, entitled Fish by Schaldach. It was followed by Coverts & Casts (1943), Currents & Eddies (1944), Upland Gunning (1946), and The Wind on Your Cheek (1972.) He also illustrated the books of several other outdoors writers.
Schaldach produced two books on art. The first was a biography, Carl Rungius Big Game Painter, published in 1945. The second was a reflection on his love of painting in Arizona entitled, Path to Enchantment: An Artist in the Sonoran Desert which appeared in 1963. Schaldach first became acquainted with the desert in 1937 when he and his family visited artist friend, Ray Strang, on his ranch near Tucson. Beginning in 1948, the Schaldachs made annual winter visits to the border town of Sasabe, and they moved permanently to Arizona in 1956, settling in Tubac.
Schaldach was a member of the Salmagundi Club, Society of American Etchers, and the Independent Society of Printmakers. He participated in various exhibitions including the National Academy of Design, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Chicago Society of Etchers, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1939 New York Worlds Fair, and the American Watercolor Society. A book on Schaldach's life and work, William J Schaldach: Artist, Author, Sportsman, and a second compilation of his art, Schaldach Etchings were published several years after his death.
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Taos Painters: William Robinson Leigh (1866-1955)
William R. Leigh was born in Berkeley County, West Virginia in 1866. Deciding upon a career in art quite early, Leigh enrolled in classes at the Maryland Institute, Baltimore, in 1880, spending three years there before moving to Munich, where he studied at the Royal Academy for over a decade, leaving in 1895. While at the Academy, he won the annual medal for painting six times in a row.
Returning to the United States, Leigh settled in New York City, where he made illustrations for Scribner's and Collier's magazines. He became well-established as an illustrator, but both the nature of the work and the limited subject matter made him anxious for new challenges. In 1906, an opportunity to expand the scope of his work came about when the Sante Fe Railroad offered him free passage into the West in exchange for a painting of the Grand Canyon. Leigh accepted the offer and, at age forty, set off through New Mexico and Arizona on a trip that yielded not just the Grand Canyon piece he had been commissioned to do, but five more canvases that were purchased by the railroad.
His focus was on the changing light of the Southwest, the pinks and purples that come into being when the sun sets over the mountain ranges of Arizona and New Mexico. Half-jokingly referred to as
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Fine Art Taos,203 Fine Art Taos, Contemporary, Modern,&
Abstract paintings,and sculpture,Taos Artists.
Fine Art Taos, Contemporary, Abstract, Taos Modernist style & Early Modernist art works, Historic Ledoux Street
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Taos Painters: Lillian Wilhelm Smith (1882 - 1971)
Lillian Wilhelm Smith was an illustrator and easel painter known for her Arizona landscapes and portraits.
Born to a prosperous family in New York City, Wilhelm Smith studied at the National Academy of Design, the Art Students League, Columbia University, and the Leonia School of Art in New Jersey.
In 1907, Wilhelm Smith took in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show at Madison Square Gardens, sparking a lifelong fascination with the West. She was particularly impressed with the Native American performers and painted more than 100 portraits of the show's Sioux and Arapaho participants and their children.
Lillian Wilhelm Smith Hohyana Kachina or Hair Dance Oil on Canvas on Board painting
Lillian Wilhelm Smith, Hohyana Kachina or Hair Dance, Oil on Canvas on Board, circa 1925, 14
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