Ralph Meyers and the Taos Founders by Art Gallery Publication

Out of the Shadows Ralph Meyers and the Taos Founders

July 27 - September 29, 2018

1005 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 Tel 505-954-5700 | www.gpgallery.com

Ralph Meyers Standing Next to an Archway, courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Acknowledgements Ralph Meyers was a well-known and respected craftsman and trader whose career as an artist was stifled in part because of his responsibility to his curio shop and because of his lack of education. As a fourth grade dropout and self-taught artist, Meyers was unable to be nominated to the foremost Taos Society of Artists although he could count nearly all of the members as both friends and customers. Because Meyers was never officially associated with the group, his work failed to earn its rightful place next to his peers and contemporaries whose names are subsequently more familiar to us today: W. Herbert Dunton, Joseph Sharp and Bert Phillips among them. When, like Meyers, art collector, James Gerken moved from Denver to Taos, he ended up as neighbor to Meyers’s son Ouray. Soon fascinated by the stories of Meyers and enamored with his paintings, Gerken spent the last two decades compiling the largest known private collection of Ralph Meyers’s work. Gerken brought this treasure trove of paintings to the gallery’s attention in 2016, and we have had the pleasure of preparing for this exhibition since then. In an effort to help bring Meyers’s art out of the shadows and to re-establish him as an important member of the early Taos artists, this gallery is happy to present the first major exhibition of his work in the retail sector. Many thanks go, first and foremost to James Gerken for his enthusiasm and willingness to help advocate for Meyers’s overlooked body of work. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Catherine Whitney, Chief Curator, Curator of American Art, Philbrook Museum of Art for contributing the essay and to Julie Anderies, curator of the Taos Art Museum’s landmark exhibition “A Taos Original: Ralph Meyers, and the Taos Society of Artists” for providing valuable research. It is my hope that visitors to the exhibition will enjoy and learn from Meyers’s colorful and vibrant vision and that they will come to recognize him in his earned place within the cultural history of New Mexico.

Gerald P. Peters

Out of the Shadows: Ralph Meyers and the Taos Founders During World War I, while much of America focused on rationing supplies and supporting the troops abroad, Ralph Meyers (1885-1948) eked out a humble living in remote Taos, New Mexico, collecting Native American arts and artifacts as one of the first Anglo traders in the region. Art critic Evelyn Marie Stuart described Taos of 1917 as a place far away “from the influence of Europe,” and “under the thrall of Native American… vitality and color.”1 A Denver transplant turned Taoseño, Meyers was likely lured there by this regional, old-world charm to which Stuart eludes. Once there, he ran in social circles that included German-American artists, Pueblo Indians, Hispano craftsmen, and Anglo influencers like D.H. Lawrence and Mabel Dodge Luhan. (Fig. 1). Upon arriving in Taos in 1909, Meyers worked for the Forest Service near Blue Lake, a sacred site in the Taos mountain range that was seized from the Pueblo in 1906 and incorporated into federally owned lands. Meyers’s familiarity with the wilderness, as well as the region’s ongoing racial and political struggles, may have fueled his sympathies for the landscape and Native community of Taos. Both would become the frequent subjects of his rare oil studies, a handful of which are on view in the current exhibition, Out of the Shadows: Ralph Meyers and the Taos Founders. Meyers was invited to exhibit with Taos Society of Artists (TSA), a distinguished group of academically trained painters in 1915, and had a solo show at the Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe in 1916.2 He also showed three of his paintings at the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe in 1917. Such opportunities likely led Stuart to mention Meyers as one of the “old-timers” of the Taos art colony alongside more established painters like Bert Phillips, Joseph Henry Sharp, and Chicago transplants Walter Ufer and Victor Higgins.3 Yet, despite his integration into the cultural scene of wartime Taos, Meyers’s name has been largely forgotten in artistic circles. His reputation as a somewhat naïve, romantic painter of colorful landscapes and Native subjects has also been eclipsed by his better-documented careers as a photographer, arts dealer, and craftsman of reconstruction-style Spanish colonial furniture. The objects of his art dealings now form parts of various museum collections nationwide, while his murals and furniture decorate the Southwestern period rooms at Villa Philbrook and Philmont Ranch, part of larger museum complexes at Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, and the National Scouting Museum, Cimarron, New Mexico, both founded by Oklahoma oil tycoon Waite Phillips in the 1920s. The current exhibition and catalogue downplay Meyers’s legacy as a decoratordealer in favor of his lesser-known exploits as a painter, further aiming to relocate his artistic production in the context of early twentieth-century Taos, alongside the work of his more famous peers of the first Taos School. The literature on Meyers tends to mythologize various aspects of his story—from his Michigan beginnings to his various moves throughout Colorado as a youngster. Fellow

Taos painter Rebecca Salsbury James romanticized Meyers’s youthful encounters with famous artists and passers-through, describing his coterie of Old West friends and influencers as “ageing [sic] dance hall girls, old prospectors, brokendown trappers, adventurers (and) bums,” some of whom likely inspired his escape to Taos.4 Arguably, and as others have noted, the clearest picture of Meyers comes not from repeated biographies but from his fictionalized portrayal as the odd Anglo trader, Rodolfo Byers, in novelist Frank Waters’s Taos tale, The Man Who Killed the Deer (1942).

Fig. 1 Mable Dodge Luhan with Ralph Meyers, Alice Corbin, Milli Henderson and Witter Bynner, courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

In the story, Waters sets the stage of early twentieth-century Taos as an enigmatic land that time forgot. He describes an earthly and biblical place ripe with dirt roads and cultural clashes between Anglo artists, Hispanic sheepherders, anthropologists, government agents, and Pueblo Indians.5 To Waters, Taos was a conflicted place where a cast of many fought for cultural and political hegemony, yet called each other friend. The fictionalized character Byers, based upon Meyers, is strewn throughout this cultural stage to emerge as an irascible, mysterious, but well-liked trader of sturdy build who collected “symbols of America’s vanishing past (for) nearly forty years of his own life.”6 While this characterization likely trivializes Meyers’s real-life knowledge of the traditional arts of the region as mere nostalgia, it does paint an intriguing picture of his likely disposition and the complex community where many, like Meyers himself, fought to preserve Native American culture while unwittingly helping to exploit it. Interestingly, Waters’s somewhat dated, biased descriptions of “edgeless and phantasmal” Pueblo figures moving through the Taos environs as if submerged “deep in water,” resonates with similar atmospheric overtones in some of Meyers’s heavily impastoed paintings.7 A painting titled Indian Scouting Plains, 1918 (plate 5) for example, shows a trace Native equestrian merged with his horse. Both stare silently over a dreamy, snowcovered valley, oddly evocative of a watery harbor, despite the high-desert locale. Few facial or anatomical details emerge below the heavily textured, softened surface. Instead, Meyers lends greater emphasis to the scintillating airscape and the rider’s buckskin clothing, erect head feather, and colorful moccasins—perhaps in nod to the artist’s

Fig. 2 Ralph Meyers, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Candido Romero on Horseback in Front of a Teepee, courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

knowledge of Native apparel. The palette and feathery tone, as well as the contemplative posture of the rider, beg a loose comparison with another romantic painter with whom Meyers had friendly relations and real estate dealings in Taos—Oscar Berninghaus. Unlike Berninghaus—his acquaintance and likely painting influence who characteristically painted fine, multicolored borders around centrally placed equestrians overlooking vistas— Meyers, by comparison, painted sketchy figures that became part of a larger, colorful nature. For instance, in Untitled (Winter at Taos Mountain), 1921 (Plate 10), blanketed riders trudge through snowy fields, barely distinguishable from the landscape itself save for their brightly colored robes. In both Ranchos Church, 1900 (Plate 9), and Two Riders at Shiprock, n.d. (Plate 11), diminutive, mysterious figures appear as human footnotes in colorfully expansive natural or architectural environments. In all of these examples, a grander, more glorious setting is prioritized over human hints, suggested by Meyers’s rich dabs of paint. Narrative and individual specificity are also obscured by the poetic and the general. “It was the substance of life he loved, not form,” Waters wrote of his character Byers, perhaps extending an analysis to the essence-over-form painted approach of Meyers.8 In a 1948 letter to Meyers’s widow, Rowena, Waters expressed his dismay over Meyers’s death, which caused the author to lose a “fragment of my own character—a vision of life (seen) through his eyes, a gentleness and strength…”9 This gentle and strong vision Waters describes is subtly reinforced in the quiet tone of Meyers’s 1919 painting, A Day in Santa Clara, NM, 1919 (Plate 14 ) where hornos mounded with snow stand silent against fortress-like, adobe backdrops. This composition is evocative of the works of art by another Taos painter and friend, Leon Gaspard. Richly robed Pueblo women softly tiptoe toward the viewer along the melting, foreground path in jewel-like clusters of thickly applied pigment, illustrating why Gaspard purportedly described Meyers as one of the region’s great colorists.10 The figures’ walking movements are untethered; they appear to flow silently through exposed areas of barren ground. In spots where the painting’s brown panel appears through uneven paint layers, the seasonal scene of melting snow and the painter’s approach appear to be mutually

reinforced. Whether intentional or just the happy accident of an amateur artist, Meyers’s poetic and seasonal effects are the same. In more rare instances, Meyers tried his hand at facial veracity in portraiture, likely emulating the style of better-known TSA painters and friends whom he led on hikes and sketching trips through the Taos wilderness. The subject of the painting, Candido (Romero), n.d. (Plate 20)—Taos moccasin maker, friend, and longtime craftsman in Meyers’s Mission Shop—is likely the same horse-riding Pueblo man pictured on the far right of the historic photograph with Mabel Dodge (Fig. 2). The portrait’s likeness and sense of depth is not striking; it may be a master copy based upon E. Martin Hennings’s or Walter Ufer’s own native portraits or may be painted from a photograph. Ufer was a German-American colleague in Taos whose sharp, light-infused realism owes much to his academic training in Munich; he earned prestigious painting awards from the National Academy of Design in New York, as well as a mixed reputation in Taos as a volatile alcoholic. Meyers, too, had battles with the bottle and even suffered a tragic loss of his manuscript and twenty paintings during a drunken rage and fire mishap at his studio, according to his son Ouray.11 In contrast to Ufer and Hennings, whose crisp, lifelike approach to the figure stemmed from their advanced life drawing studies at European art academies, Meyers had no formal art training. He did, however, self-identify as an artist on his draft card and showed his own photographic postcards, as well as the work of other Taos painters, in segments of his shop beginning around 1910. Perhaps his confidence failed him at times, for in Waters’s fictionalized account, the artist-trader curtained off his own easel and paintings from public view in his shop, being “practical… enough to know that it merely developed his eye for the values of the best work offered him by others.”12 Despite his efforts, early exhibition opportunities, and social standing in Taos, Meyers’s painting legacy has been relegated to the shadows of his more academically trained and famous contemporaries. Perhaps in an era of canonical collapse and wider perspectives, it is time to reconsider his paintings with a more expansive yardstick than one that simply measures realistic verisimilitude. At the same time, the “accuracy” of Meyers’s peaceable Native sitters and poetic settings should be questioned as they may belie the social and racial realities of the era. While the details of Meyers’s story remain vague, it is clear that he was much more than a trader of Native curios and painter of imperfect form; he was an active sampler, a self-taught naïve, and an on-the-ground supporter of multicultural arts in the region. Regardless of the accuracy of his lens, Meyers painted a modest slice of early twentieth-century Taos from the quiet, and colorful, margins.

Catherine Whitney Chief Curator, Curator of American Art Philbrook Museum of Art

COLOR PLATES

PLATE 1

PLATE 2

PLATE 3

PLATE 4

PLATE 5

PLATE 6

PLATE 7

PLATE 8

PLATE 9

PLATE 10

PLATE 11

PLATE 12

PLATE 13

It was the substance of life he loved

PLATE 14

PLATE 15

PLATE 16

PLATE 17

Ralph Meyers, Mabel Doge Luhan, and Candido Romero on Horseback in Front of a Teepee, courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

PLATE 18

PLATE 19

PLATE 20

PLATE 21

PLATE 22

PLATE 23

PLATE 24

INDEX

PLATE 1 Untitled (Taos Pueblo) 1908 oil on canvas 14 x 18 inches

PLATE 9 Ranchos Church 1900 oil on board 12 x 16 inches

PLATE 17 Studio of the Copper Bell ca. 1900 oil on canvas 8 x 10 inches

PLATE 2 Untitled (Spanish Peaks) oil on board 9 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches

PLATE 10 Untitled (Winter at Taos Mountain) 1921 oil on board 12 3/4 x 17 inches

PLATE 18 Untitled (Sunset Taos) oil on board 12 x 16 inches

PLATE 3 Untitled (Wheeler Peak) ca. 1925 oil on board 16 x 12 inches

PLATE 11 Two Riders at Shiprock oil on canvasboard 9 x 12 inches

PLATE 4 Evening in Lucero Canyon, NM 1914 oil on canvas 12 x 10 inches

PLATE 12 Summer Storm ca. 1930 oil on canvas 10 1/4 x 12 inches

PLATE 5 Indian Scouting Plains 1918 oil on canvas 12 x 16 inches

PLATE 13 Untitled (Arroyo Seco Adobes) oil on board 10 x 13 3/4 inches

PLATE 6 Untitled (Cottonwoods) 1915 oil on canvas 10 x 12 inches PLATE 7 Untitled ca. 1915 oil on canvas 11 x 15 1/8 inches PLATE 8 A Winter Day at Santa Clara Indian Pueblo 1919 oil on board 10 x 13 1/2 inches

PLATE 14 A Day in Santa Clara, NM 1919 oil on panel 10 x 13 1/2 inches PLATE 15 Untitled (Taos Mountain, Late Fall) ca. 1925 oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches PLATE 16 Adobes in Spring ca. 1920 oil on canvas on board 11 5/8 x 15 1/2 inches

PLATE 19 Kiowa Camp 1927 oil on board 7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches PLATE 20 Candido oil on canvasboard 14 x 10 inches PLATE 21 War Cloud ca. 1930 oil on board 7 3/8 x 5 1/2 inches PLATE 22 Untitled (Sunset #6) oil on board 15 1/4 x 11 7/8 inches PLATE 23 Untitled (Looking Towards Abiquiu) 1906 oil on canvasboard 12 x 9 inches PLATE 24 Untitled (Taos Pueblo Dance) ca. 1925 oil on canvasboard 15 x 20 inches

Endnotes 1 Evelyn Marie Stuart, “Taos and the Indian in Art,” Fine Arts Journal, Vol. 25, no. 5 (May 1917): 346. 2 “Events at the Old Palace Since New Year, January, Art Exhibit by Ralph W. Meyers,” El Palacio, Vol. III, no. 3 (April 1916) and Dedication Exhibition of Southwestern Art (November 24 –December 24, 1917), courtesy New Mexico Museum of Art Library and Archives. While Meyers was invited to exhibit in the first TSA exhibition, he was never invited to join the Society nor exhibit after August 1916 due to a motion raised in a TSA special session meeting to allow “amateur artists,” to exhibit with the group, which failed to pass. Dean Porter, Teresa Hayes Ebie and Suzan Campbell, Taos Artists and Their Patrons, 1898-1950 (Notre Dame, Ind.: Snite Museum of Art, 1999), 254, footnote 35. 3 Evelyn Marie Stuart, “Taos and The Indian in Art,” 344. 4 Rebecca Salsbury James, “Ralph Meyers, 1885-1948” in Allow Me to Present 18 Ladies and Gentlemen and Taos, NM 1885-1939 (Taos, NM: El Crepusculo, 1953), 27. 5 Lawrence Clark Powell, “Foreword,” in Frank Waters, The Man Who Killed the Deer, (Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Press, 1965), ix. 6 Ibid., 39. 7 Ibid., 49. 8 Ibid., 44. 9 Frank Waters to Rowena Meyers, July 24, 1948 reproduced in James, Allow Me to Present, 29. 10 James, Allow Me to Present, 29. “Rowena (Meyers’s wife) says Leon Gaspard will tell you that in his opinion, Ralph was one of the finest colorists he knew of that period.” 11 Ouray Meyers quoted in Steve Winston, “Perspective: Ralph Meyers [1885-1948],” in Western Art & Architecture, Vol. 5, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2001): 108. 12 Waters, The Man Who Killed the Deer, 43-44.

Out of the Shadows: Ralph Meyers and the Taos Founders July 27 - September 29, 2018 Gerald Peters Gallery 1005 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM 87501 Essay by: Catherine Whitney Catalogue Direction: Evan Feldman Photography: Molly Wagoner Graphic Design: Shane Mieske © 2018 Gerald Peters Gallery. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, including photocopying, recording or information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

1005 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 Tel 505-954-5700 | www.gpgallery.com