Andrew Dasburg

Biography

Andrew Dasburg, Lucifer, c. 1913, plaster of Paris, exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show, n. 647 of the catalogue. Dasburg extensively reworked by carving directly into a sculpture of a life-size plaster head by Arthur Lee.

Dasburg was born in 1887 in Paris. He emigrated from Germany to New York City with his widowed mother in 1892. After a severe injury, he passed the time in convalescence by sketching. In 1902 he joined the Art Students League of New York on a scholarship, where he was taught by Kenyon Cox. At the league's summer school in Woodstock, New York, he studied landscapes under L. Birge Harrison. He soon became an ardent promoter of the Cubist style. The three Cubist-oriented oils displayed at the 1913 show were considered "daringly experimental".

At the Armory Show, Dasburg exhibited the only sculpture he had ever made. Prior to the show, he extensively reworked a sculpture, originally a life-size cast plaster head by Arthur Lee, by carving facets directly into the plaster of Paris.

Dasburg and Johnson lived apart for most of their marriage. By 1917 they had separated and Dasburg began teaching painting in Woodstock and in New York City. In 1918 he was invited to Taos, New Mexico, by Mabel Dodge Luhan, and returning in 1919, Johnson joined him there for a period of time.

In 1924, Dasburg collaborated with a group of other artists and writers to form the Spanish and Indian Trading Company, a cooperative "curio shop" located on East San Francisco across from Santa Fe's La Fonda. In its inaugural year, the store sold Dasburg's own collection of Native American and Mexican blankets, and Witter Bynner's Navajo silver.

In both New York and Taos, he was part of the social milieu that included Georgia O'Keeffe and Gertrude Stein, and a close friend of Mabel Dodge Luhan. The elderly Dasburg appeared posthumously as himself in the movie about Reed and Bryant, Reds, although he "curiously ... does not speak of his intimacy with either". He was also involved for some time with Ida Rauh, a co-founder of the Provincetown Players, and the two of them were friends with D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda von Richthofen, and helped Lawrence recover from a bout of tuberculosis that nearly got him refused entry to the U.S. at the border with Mexico.

In 1933, he married poet Mary Channing "Marina" Wister, the daughter of Owen Wister.

Dasburg died in his home in Taos, New Mexico, on August 13, 1979, at age 92. Following his death, the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe held a 96-work retrospective exhibition funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts which traveled to four other Western states. His works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Mexico Museum of Art and the Denver Art Museum, among others.

Awards and honors Tulips, Second Prize, First Pan-American Exhibition of Oil Paintings at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1925) Poppies, Third Prize, 16th International Exhibition of Art, Carnegie Institute of Technology (1927) Guggenheim Fellowship (1932)

Exhibitions 'Quest for the New: Modernism in the Southwest', Lewallen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM, 2018 'Mabel Dodge Luhan & Company: American Moderns and the West', The Harwood Museum of Art, University of New Mexico, Taos, NM, 2016 'An American Modernism: Painting and Photography', New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM, 2015 - 2016 'Modernism Made in New Mexico', Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, 2015 'Southwestern Allure: The Art of the Santa Fe Art Colony', Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL, 2013 'The Cubist Impulse in American Art', Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, 2009 'Andrew Dasburg, 1887-1979 : a retrospective exhibition', Art Museum, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1979

Publications 'Spirited Visions: The Art of Andrew Dasburg (1887–1979)', by Catherine Whitney (Author), Rebecca Friedman (Editor), Gerald P. Peters Gallery (Publisher), Santa Fe, New Mexico, December 2011, 'Andrew Dasburg: His Life and Art', by Sheldon Reich, 1989, Bucknell University Press, PA, 'Modernist Painting in New Mexico 1913 - 1935', by Sharin Rohlfsen Udall, University of New Mexico Press, 1984, 'Andrew Dasburg', by Van Deren Coke, University of New Mexico Press, 1979,