Robert M. Ellis

Robert M. Ellis (April 14, 1922 – September 13, 2014) was an American artist. His professional career spanned six decades as an artist, educator, and museum director, including eight years as Curator of Education at the Pasadena Art Museum in California, twenty-three years on the art faculty of University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, and ten years as director of UNM's Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico. His work is in numerous museum collections, including the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, and Roswell Museum and Art Center. Apart from his distinguished career as a painter, Ellis left an indelible mark on the art world in both southern California and northern New Mexico.

Biography Ellis was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1922. According to art writer MaLin Wilson-Powell in her essay "Bob Ellis: Navigating Portals of Perception, from Aegean Temples to Woodcuts, 2004 - 2011", the trajectory of Ellis's professional career began with his All-American Midwestern roots, "opening day at the Cleveland Indians, nickel ice cream cones, the Cleveland Museum's Classical and Medieval Armor Court and their free Saturday classes . . ."

After three years of architectural studies at Case Western, his comfortable circumstances came to an abrupt end in 1942 with the death of his father. At age twenty, faced with the prospect of being drafted into the military, Ellis enlisted in the Seabees, as the Navy Construction Division is known, and served in U.S. Navy in WWII from 1942 to 1946. During his military service, Ellis became a navigator and third in command of a huge transport ship in the Pacific Theater. In 2008, Ellis was one of 12 artists honored by the Albuquerque Art Business Association with their annual Local Treasures Award.

Career As an artist A retrospective of Ellis's work from the 1950s through 2009 was presented by 203 Fine Art in Taos (September 12 – October 12, 2009). The earliest works in the exhibition from the 1950s were abstractions. Beginning in the 1960s and continuing through the 1970s, however, the work becomes increasingly representational, often incorporating photographic images and architectural elements such as floorboards. According to an interview in a review of the retrospective, Louise Lewis, professor emeritus of art history at California State University at Northridge, says: “The counterpoint between minimalist and detailed, painted and photographed elements of the image — subtle at first glance and then quite overt — stimulates the viewer to resolve these visual incongruencies.” The review goes on to quote Ellis himself about the next development in his career, the San Cristóbal paintings, done during the 1980s. According to Ellis, these works were inspired when he was teaching a class called "Painting In the Landscape" at the D.H. Lawrence Ranch in Taos: “When I first moved to New Mexico (in 1964) I was so awed by the landscape I couldn’t paint it,” he says, “but, one day, when I looked at the San Cristóbal Valley, the fields became like floorboards — they had that perspective and angle to them. I could see the horizontal and vertical and it got me excited about painting landscapes.”

Two years after his retirement, in 2003, and several months after the death of his beloved wife, Caroline Lee, Ellis embarked on a trip to Greece, a trip they had planned to take together. As Ellis described the experience: “What interested me most was between the columns you could see blue sky or another column in shadow. So, I ended up with paintings with blue and black peeking through, but abstractly arranged”.

Thus began the final chapters in Ellis's artistic career, described by Wilson-Powell in her essay

The Harwood Museum (1987–2001) In one of the crowning achievements of his museum career, as director of the Harwood Museum in Taos from 1990–2001, Ellis spearheaded its expansion from a two-room gallery and public library to seven galleries and a world class destination for contemporary art enthusiasts. He was responsible for the acquisition of a collection of seven paintings by the pre-eminent contemporary American artist, Agnes Martin, a longtime Taos resident and Ellis's close friend, and oversaw the construction of the gallery where they are on permanent display. Today, the Agnes Martin Gallery attracts visitors from all over the world and has helped put the Harwood Museum on the map as a major contemporary art destination in New Mexico, on par with The Lightning Field, 1997, the environment installation by artist Walter De Maria. In a review entitled "Worth a Pilgrimage: A journey to the Agnes Martin Gallery in Taos, N.M., offers a stunning, even spiritual, place for viewing contemporary art", (April 12, 1998), Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight gives credit to Ellis for acquiring the gift and creating the gallery.

After the opening of the renovated museum and Agnes Martin Gallery, Ellis embarked on one final push to affirm the place of the Taos art colony in the development of American modernism. From 1999–2000, Ellis and Harwood board president Gus Foster, teamed up on a proposal to the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation that a selection of works by the two artists for whom the foundation was named—Beatrice Mandelman (1912–1998) and Louis Ribak (1902–1979)—be given to the museum's permanent collection along with a gift of funds for a new gallery to be named for them. Ten years in the making, by which time Ellis had retired from the museum and joined the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation board, an agreement was reached between the parties. The multifaceted gift included the transfer of a significant collection of artworks by the two artists, as well as funds for the new gallery, exhibitions and scholarship, and a permanent endowment and plan for care for the artworks. Mandelman] and Ribak were contemporaries of New York artists Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and Jackson Pollock. They moved from New York to Taos in 1944 and became seminal figures in a group known as the Taos Moderns, that included such artists as Edward Corbett, Andrew Dasburg, Agnes Martin, Oli Sihvonen, Clay Spohn, and Charles Stewart.

Ellis's dedication to arts education carried over from the Pasadena Art Museum Junior Art Workshop to the Harwood's Art in the Schools Program, developed during his tenure as director. Today the program serves over 2,000 children annually through free monthly visits to the museum for grade school students, including opportunities for them to create their own art in the Harwood's Fern Hogue Mitchell Education Center, a children's art studio. In 2010, the Harwood Museum inaugurated the Caroline Lee and Bob Ellis Gallery to honor their dedication to the museum and its education program.

Personal life Ellis's marriage to Hazel Taylor Ellis in 1948 ended in divorce. In 1958, he married Barbara Shannon Ellis. After that marriage too ended in divorce, Ellis got married for the final time to Caroline Lee, to whom he remained wed until her death in 2003. Ellis died on September 13, 2014, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at age 92.