The northern New Mexico village of Taos, shaped through the centuries by American Indian and Hispanic Catholic cultures, is an unusual setting for a study of art patronage. Yet nowhere did relationships between artists and patrons play a more pivotal role in American artists' survival during the first half of the twentieth century. Why did artists go to Taos? What held them there? How did they attract patrons? What unusual challenges faced artists who lived and worked in Taos, and how did they respond to these challenges? 
Taos Artists and Their Patrons examines age-old dilemmas facing artists in the early years of the Taos art colony: how to make art and still manage to pay the bills, and how to attract emotional support that often made the difference between success and failure; and discusses how patrons in many guises,from corporate and governmental programs, to wealthy collectors and loyal family members, offered innovative solutions to these predicaments. 
In addition to art colony founders and the academically- trained artists who joined them, the book includes later arrivals, such as modernists Andrew Dasburg, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Dorothy Brett, who followed Mabel Dodge Luhan to Taos. This is an essential reference work for scholars and collectors of New Mexico art.

Taos Artists and Their Patrons, 1898-1950

Arts & Photography

Porter, Dean A.

Ebie, Teresa Hayes

Campbell, Suzan

History & Criticism

Snite Museum of Art

"This exhaustive monograph establishes Victor Higgins's place in the greater pantheon of American art. With Georgia O'Keefe, Higgins can be seen as one of the two best painters of the people and places in the American Southwest."

Victor Higgins: An American Master

Individual Artists

Gibbs-Smith

Walter Ufer’s artistic legacy, like that of other Taos Society artists, went largely unappreciated for several decades following World War II. A few discerning patrons acquired Ufer’s artwork for private holdings and prospective museums collections. However, art critics and scholars paid little heed to him or the Southwest genre of art until the 1980s, when a series of major scholarly publications regarding the Taos Society of Artists begin to stimulate interest.  Walter Ufer: Rise, Fall, Resurrection examines the life and artistic career of one of America’s most talented artists, relatively unknown outside a small circle of collectors and scholars. Born in Germany to parents who had immigrated to Louisville, Kentucky, Ufer became a founding member of the Taos Society of Artists. His career, spanning nearly forty years, was filled with success, failure, and adversity. Between 1916 and 1926, Ufer earned several prestigious awards including membership in the National Academy of Design in New York and recognition by the Art Institute of Chicago. During that time, his paintings were added to permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. During this period, the support of William Henry Klauer, a wealthy businessman, provided him with the critical financial support he needed to continue his career. Ufer was highly political and concerned with social injustice. His artistic expression and social concerns often came together on canvases depicting Pueblo Indians in the harsh realities of their everyday life. Unfortunately, his personal life was also troubled by chronic alcoholism and constant indebtedness during this period.

Walter Ufer: Rise, Fall, Resurrection

National Cowboy & Western History Museum

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